Care Shift, hosted by Sathvik Bilakanti, takes you inside the real world of healthtech innovation, venture capital, and company-building. Each episode features unfiltered conversations with the founders and investors shaping the future of care—breaking down how they raised capital, found product-market fit, navigated failure, and built companies that endure. Listeners learn exactly what top VCs are looking for in healthtech startups, along with tactical, step-by-step insight that early builders can immediately apply. The Care Shift also opens the doors to the venture ecosystem itself, with lea
Honor CEO Seth Sternberg on Buying Home Instead and Building the Biggest Home Care Network
Seth Sternberg co-founded Meebo (acquired by Google), then started Honor to change how society cares for older adults. Today Honor owns Home Instead and runs the largest home care network in the Western Hemisphere.
In this episode of Care Shift, Seth explains why he launched a home care agency before building any technology, what the Home Instead acquisition taught him about "M&A AI," and why most AI tools being sold to home care agencies are built in a vacuum. We also get into the caregiver shortage, his case for a time-limited caregiving visa, why he has zero desire to take Honor public, and his warning to founders: use AI to move faster, but never outsource your judgment.
Timestamps
00:00 Intro
00:53 Welcome Seth Sternberg
00:59 From IBM and Meebo to home care
02:56 Why pick a hard market the second time around
04:43 Treating care pros as customers
06:03 Why Honor started as an agency, not a tech layer
09:30 Buying Home Instead and the M&A AI trend
11:00 Stories vs. data after an acquisition
13:21 What the Honor Care Network taught them
14:39 Winning over franchisees: the 10/80/10 rule
16:48 State-by-state regulation
18:33 From vendor to franchisor
21:46 What AI startups in home care get wrong
27:36 Advice for a 23-year-old founder in care
29:06 The case for a caregiving visa
34:14 Raising caregiver pay through stability
35:33 What a caregiving visa should look like
38:11 Robotics, devices, and human care
42:04 Why Honor isn't going public
44:03 Home care in 2040
45:56 Would he start in home care today?
47:12 Where AI helps founders and where it hurts
49:25 Rapid fire
52:19 Outro
More about Seth & Honor
Seth Sternberg
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sethjs/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/sethjs/)
X: https://x.com/sethjs (https://x.com/sethjs)
Honor
Website: https://www.honorcare.com (https://www.honorcare.com)
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/joinhonor (https://www.linkedin.com/company/joinhonor)
More about Vik & Care Shift
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sathvik-bilakanti-8b5344169/?isSelfProfile=true
X: https://x.com/vikbilakanti1
30 Sept 2026
Adam Besvinick of Looking Glass Capital: Why Raising Too Much, Too Early Is a Mistake
Adam Besvinick, founder and managing partner of Looking Glass Capital, joins Care Shift to talk about being the first yes at pre-seed, and why raising too much, too early is a mistake.
Looking Glass is a solo GP pre-seed fund investing across health, climate, and economic drivers. Before starting the firm in 2019, Adam invested from pre-seed through Series C at Deep Fork Capital and Anchorage Capital Group, backing companies like Transfix, BigID, One Concern, and Carrot.
In this episode, we cover the moats that still matter in the AI era, the risks of selling healthcare data to frontier labs, whether Epic is really a threat to healthcare startups, how Adam built a solo GP fund starting right before COVID, and why capital constraints often produce better companies.
00:00 Intro
02:25 Building conviction when others pass
07:01 The moats that still matter in 2026
09:59 Selling healthcare data to AI labs
13:48 Can Epic replicate your startup?
17:37 Starting Looking Glass Capital
24:08 Earning LP trust as a solo GP
30:12 Why health, climate, and economic drivers
41:01 Oversized rounds and bloated financial models
46:22 The biggest fundraising mistake founders make
49:07 Rapid fire
Looking Glass Capital: https://lookingglass.vc
Adam on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/besvinick
Care Shift newsletter: https://careshift.substack.com/
Vik's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sathvik-bilakanti-8b5344169/
23 Sept 2026
From Burger King to MDLIVE: The Playbook for Scaling Healthcare
Mahmud Samad has spent 20 years scaling companies across Johnson & Johnson, Burger King through its Bain Capital and TPG years, Wellpath, and MDLIVE. Today he is Founder and Principal of Interconnext Consulting, working with founders, boards, and private equity teams as a strategic CFO and operator.
We cover why healthcare startups stall after their first three pilots, what a repeatable process actually means, and why he calls domain expertise the most overrated thing in business. Mahmud also explains the difference between growth and scale, what he looks at first on a P&L, who to hire before your Series A, when a company should not raise VC money, and what franchising can teach healthcare about removing friction for patients.
A conversation for early-stage founders, operators, and anyone trying to build something that holds up past the first few customers.
Connect with Mahmud & Learn More About Interconnext Consulting
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mahmudsamad/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mahmudsamad/)
Interconnext Consulting: https://interconnextconsulting.com (https://interconnextconsulting.com)
Interconnext on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/interconnext-consulting/ (https://www.linkedin.com/company/interconnext-consulting/)
More on Vik & Care Shift
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sathvik-bilakanti-8b5344169/
Care Shift on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/care-shift/?viewAsMember=true
Care Shift Website: https://careshift.vc/
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6 ratings
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