Seth Sternberg, who once sold his startup Meebo to Google for nearly $100 million, has shifted from social tech to one of the world's most pressing challenges: eldercare.
The entrepreneur, known for helping build the "sign in with Google" technology, is now the CEO of Honor Technology, a company that delivers AI-powered in-home senior care across the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., according to Inc.
From Silicon Valley Exit to Societal Purpose
Sternberg admitted that despite Meebo's success, he became disengaged long before the Google acquisition.
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"Meebo was a seven-year run," he told Inc. "At year five, I basically stopped caring about what we were doing because it just wasn't having enough world impact." His mother's minor health issue brought the realities of aging into focus, leading him to wonder how society could better care for older adults at home.
"My parents are aging," he said. "I was starting to get gray hair. We said, ‘How could we change the way society cares for older adults?' That was the big vision."
That question became the foundation of Honor, which now provides monthly in-home support to more than 70,000 households under the Home Instead brand.
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Building a Narrow Product to Solve a Massive Problem
Sternberg said that entrepreneurs who want to tackle world-changing problems should begin with a focused entry point rather than chasing a grand vision too early.
"Someday, you want to solve a big problem," he told Inc. "The way you do that is you find a first product that is narrow but can be used as a springboard into something deeper."
For Honor, that product was non-medical home care, a sector he described as "very large" and "very broken." He added that by applying technology to make it more efficient, Honor could create the foundation to eventually transform how society cares for older adults.
The need is accelerating due to demographics. "We are aging so quickly that we are going to basically triple the over-80 population in the next 25 years," Sternberg told Inc. He pointed out that senior facilities already operate at 85% capacity, while 93% of older adults would prefer to stay in their homes, particularly those with dementia who benefit from familiar environments.
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Honor uses AI to match caregivers with clients, optimizing schedules and enabling care professionals to serve more families effectively, according to Inc. This technological backbone helped scale Honor's reach and secure its acquisition of Home Instead, giving it a network at least twice the size of its nearest competitor.
Human-Device Fusion: The Next Stage of Eldercare Innovation
While Honor has succeeded in scaling eldercare delivery, Sternberg acknowledged that affordability remains a major obstacle.
"The way you can solve that is by taking some of the human portion out and replacing that with device portion," he told Inc. Sternberg envisions combining an AI‑managed caregiver network with home-installed devices that augment human oversight and safety.
"To get price points down, you really need this deep fusion between a human-driven network that can be in your home and help you when you need it, and a kind of device-driven network that can help you accomplish things, either remotely or just by safety monitoring you when the humans are not," Sternberg said.
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