Jon Miller, Former CEO at AOL and IAC, Joins StartUp Health’s Board of Directors
Digital media executive and long-time StartUp Health investor Jon Miller has joined StartUp Health’s board of directors to help scale the firm’s strategy and support a global army of Health Transformers.
Digital media executive and long-time StartUp Health investor Jon Miller has joined StartUp Health’s board of directors to help scale the firm’s strategy and support a global army of health innovation startups. Miller is currently CEO of Integrated Media Co. and Partner at Advancit Capital. Previously he served as CEO of Digital Media at News Corp and CEO of AOL. Prior to these roles Miller served as CEO at IAC. Miller brings to StartUp Health a deep understanding of digital media and the powerful role that communication and storytelling plays in the advancement of health moonshots. On the board, Miller joins healthcare luminary Dr. Toby Cosgrove, former head of Cleveland Clinic, and becomes part of a larger impact community of cross-disciplinary healthcare leaders.
We caught up with Miller for a candid conversation about the evolution of media, how companies can utilize new technology to have a greater impact on health, and why he’s focused on creating collaborative spaces in order to improve healthcare globally.
Q&A
How did you come to StartUp Health and get introduced to supporting health innovators globally?
Jon Miller: I’ve been in digital media for quite some time. I’m also an investor keenly interested in innovation, collaboration, and how you grow and scale companies. All those things became applicable when I met the folks at StartUp Health, whom I was introduced to by Esther Dyson. I was talking to her about my interest in this area some time ago, around health innovation and lessons I thought were generally permeating much of the world but which were not yet evident in the health sector. Esther agreed and said there was a place where that might occur. It’s called StartUp Health.
Could you give an example of a way you’ve seen technology applied in media that could be carried over to the health sector?
Miller: One principle is simply making people aware of what’s happening. Often, as the expression goes, the right hand is unaware of what the left hand is doing. In this case, something different can be happening in India than in Mexico or the United States. Media is historically very good at surfacing these things and putting them together in a common place where they can be understood and accessed. That’s really one of the parallels that I would draw. In a collaborative world, the first underlying question is who’s doing what. Some of the more traditional ways — a medical journal, for example — are too slow. While extraordinarily helpful overall, the journal will not increase the pace at which these developments occur when the media, in my belief, can.
You’ve been in digital media most of your career. What have you seen as a throughline of your professional life?
Miller: We’re probably in the third wave of the industry right now. One of the big things that has changed is the democratization of media. We now have a creator economy and the ability for anybody to be an influencer who chooses to be — and can get a following. We’ve also seen the rise of video and how video has become a dominant form of consumption.
What elements of today’s trends in digital media excite you, and what makes you optimistic for the future?
Miller: One of the things that excites me, and which I have spent a lot of time on, is the interaction of community and content, which relates very much to StartUp Health. It’s where there’s collaborative innovation, where there’s community underneath everything, and the community is active in what is produced as opposed to being passive consumers. That is an evolution that continues to grow. It’s about community engagement, involvement, and ownership in what’s produced.
Is there a health moonshot that you’re particularly passionate about?
Miller: I’m passionate about the idea of moonshots more broadly, and that’s one of the things that attracted me to StartUp Health. I was an investor in StartUp Health quite early on, and even though we didn’t articulate it in the way we do now, we talked about these kinds of moonshots as the real future of what we’re trying to accomplish. There are many different people in organizations working on pieces of a puzzle. The truly exciting thing is how you take these things that matter so much to the world at large and organize a concerted modern effort around it, which is what we’re talking about.
StartUp Health has put a lot of emphasis on using the tools of media to spread the word about health moonshot progress and the Health Transformers making moves. But we’re still just in the early innings. How could we double down on using media to speed up health innovation?
Miller: The tools and the platforms continue to evolve rapidly in the media and collaboration sector, as well as the hard science areas. We’ve seen the rise of new platforms, such as TikTok, for consumer use at an extraordinarily fast pace. If you look at the adoption curve of the layers of technology that have happened at a consumer level, it’s increasing. The ability to introduce and have people adopt relevant tech for collaboration is greater than ever, and that’s something that we should foster.
StartUp Health has invested in more than 420 companies and we continue to scale. What are you most excited about concerning your work on the impact board at StartUp Health?
Miller: At StartUp Health, we have a platform that is built to operate at scale, impacting every single company in the portfolio and many more. I’m looking at it at the system level, which is how do we do that? How do I work with the team to help make the platform and information processing as effective and impactful as possible because we now have a certain scale that allows us to think in those terms.
In my experience, media systems are designed to scale. That’s what I’m always looking for and thinking about. That’s what we want to see with StartUp Health — operating at scale in order to dramatically reduce time to effectiveness in key areas of health.
Listen to the full interview on the StartUp Health NOW Podcast
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