Most OBGYNs are not specifically trained in menopause, which means that women are left to suffer through their symptoms on their own. This week’s guest on Found is looking to change that. Joanna Strober is the CEO and founder of Midi, a virtual healthcare platform built specifically for women in midlife staffed with healthcare providers specifically trained to care for people going through perimenopause and menopause.
Most OBGYNs are not specifically trained in menopause, which means that women are left to suffer through their symptoms on their own. This week’s guest on Found is looking to change that. Joanna Strober is the CEO and founder of Midi, a virtual healthcare platform built specifically for women in midlife staffed with healthcare providers specifically trained to care for people going through perimenopause and menopause.
In this conversation they cover:
(0:00) Introduction
(1:27) Midi and Joanna’s background
(4:38) The care gap
(7:12) Building out research-based care protocols
(10:00) Demand for menopause care
(13:28) Joanna’s previous founder experience
(17:04) Learnings from starting in VC
(19:33) Building out the Midi team
(22:56) Working with employers and insurance companies
(24:50) Launching in 50 states
(28:59) Fundraising experience
Becca Szkutak 0:02
80% of OB GYN are not specifically trained in menopause, despite it being a biological process that all women go through. Women have traditionally been underserved by the medical industry for this period in their life, but that's starting to change. You're listening to found TechCrunch this podcast that brings you the stories behind the startups and today I'm talking to Joanna Strober. From MIDI, which is a virtual healthcare platform built specifically for women in midlife staffed with healthcare providers specifically trained to care for people going through perimenopause and menopause. I'm Becca scatec. And sadly, for this conversation, I'm flying solo, while my lovely co host DOM is at TechCrunch is early stage event in Boston. But before we dive into the conversation with Joanna, one quick note, listeners, if you wouldn't mind rating and reviewing the show anywhere, you are already listening to the podcast, that would be a big help. On our end, we would greatly appreciate it. But without further ado, here's our conversation with Joanna.
Hi, Joanna, how are you? I'm good. How are you? I am good. I'm excited to dive in today. I've been really looking forward to this conversation because it is both a really interesting company. And we rarely have founders on who have like just announced something huge within the last 24 hours. So seems like the timing aligns. The topic is interesting. I am very excited. So we should dive right in. Why don't you start by telling us a little bit about MIDI. So MIDI
Speaker 1 1:27
is a midlife care company. And we are building the premier brand in women's health care really for women 35 to 65 to take care of all the issues that they go through during that time of their life all on telehealth. So we've built out a 50 state solution to provide expert care to women covered by insurance for all the things that they need help with during this fairly long period of their life. And
Becca Szkutak 1:53
definitely I want to kind of dive into how you got interested in this space to begin with. So I know you're not a stranger to being an entrepreneur in the healthcare space. But this is quite different than your first company, which I'm sure we'll talk about quite a lot on this call as well. But how did you get interested in starting MIDI to begin with,
Speaker 1 2:11
it really was a personal story. When I was around 47, I stopped sleeping. And I was waking up in the middle the night every single night at four o'clock in the morning or two o'clock in the morning and unable to go back to sleep. And it turns out that sleep is really important. And then when you don't sleep, you start having aggregate brain fog, you start to eat more during the day, you start getting more irritable, and I couldn't figure out what was going on with my body and I went to a number of providers, I went to my primary care doctor and they actually gave me sleeping pills but said I could only take them once in a while they told me to go to a therapist because I needed maybe I needed my anxiety taken care of I just went down this rabbit hole of going to the wrong providers. I was forgetting things and I thought maybe I was getting early Alzheimer's. And so I was getting an Alzheimer's test turned out that all of these were symptoms of perimenopause. But no one was trained in that. And so none of the providers that I went to were trained in. If you have a 47 year old woman coming to you, let's start looking at her. She's a woman. Maybe this is related to perimenopause. So actually I got the right doctor, I went to San Francisco, I drove 45 minutes, I've had to pay cash $750. And I got the right prescription. And two weeks later, I was feeling better. And that feeling of Wow. Like I've really been suffering unnecessarily for the past year really stuck with me. And so I started talking to all my friends and trying to understand what's going on with them. And what became clear is that perimenopause and menopause is this big thing. And it kind of hits women like it, you know, it's pile of bricks, and there's lots of different symptoms to it. And they're very few providers who are trained to take care of this population. So we just don't get good health care. So I started thinking about it pre COVID, and really thinking about this problem, but I didn't know how to build a solution, the COVID laws changing so that you could offer this via telehealth really created an opportunity to create a company that could solve this problem. Because prior to COVID, all healthcare was placed based. So you would have had to start a chain of in person clinics, which is hard to do and hard to scale. But what we realized over COVID Is that we could go to the best doctors in the world for women's health, and we could ask them to create us protocols. And then we could take those protocols and use that to deliver care nationally. And so understanding that this problem that had been around for a long time could finally be addressed using telehealth was a very exciting revelation. And that's why I wanted to start this company.
Becca Szkutak 4:38
And I think before we dive too much into the company, I do want to ask you because I know we've definitely seen the rise of women's health companies in the startup space as well. It's just bigger attention being paid to the sector in general. And it's always so interesting to me. And I want to be like it's not just because I'm a woman as well, but it's everyone goes through menopause. All women go through menopause. Why do you think they're wasn't this real knowledge base? Or why do you think you were having so much trouble finding a provider who could actually get you those answers when it is something that you could argue is like, should be kind of standard. It's not some niche thing that happens to some people and not others. It's like it literally happens to essentially half the population. You're
Speaker 1 5:16
exactly right. So there was a study called the Women's Health Initiative that came out in 2001. That study at the time indicated that women shouldn't take hormones. Prior to that study, 40% of women were taking hormones. After that study, it went down to fewer than 5%. That study was wrong. That study was misinterpreted. It was on a different type of hormone than most people take. It was on a different population of women much older, that were much unhealthier. It was also just the data was misinterpreted. But if you ask doctors, they remember the day that study came out. And what happened was, at that point, not only did all women stop taking hormones, all research on hormone stopped, because they decided that it was too dangerous. So we basically have had the last 20 years where no one in medical school has had any training on how women are going through menopause, because the best treatment for it has been these hormones, which honestly, about 90% of women should be taken. And that really is transformational to their lives. But because of this study this misinformation, we have an entire generation of women who have been mis served. And so the opportunity, in part was created by that misunderstanding. But now we have to train a whole new generation of providers who have better information and can give women better care, those
Becca Szkutak 6:37
huge studies that have big shifts in sort of how everyone thinks about something is always so interesting to me, like the people who still hang on to that study that I think about about the same time that drinking red wine everyday was good for you. And it's like, no, like, yeah, like, if you really think about it, that doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 1 6:57
That's exactly right. And it's why you know, the Biden money that's going into research is really important, if we'd have to make sure that the research is high quality research, and that it's interpreted appropriately. So research on its own isn't help us if we don't make sure that the right message is get out. Exactly.
Becca Szkutak 7:12
And with that, looking through that lens of there being this long period of time where a lot of medical professionals just weren't really being trained in this area or wasn't really paying attention to sort of how you would treat this, what was it like going from having the idea for the company and then actually building it out to get that correct information and make sure you were working with these different providers that did have that actual knowledge base.
Speaker 1 7:33
So we started with the research, we spent a year looking at the research on all the women's symptoms of perimenopause and menopause and building out care protocols for them. And so we started with the basics of hot flashes. And everyone talks about hot flashes and night sweats and anxiety and depression and joint pain. But then there's also actually hair thinning and there's face issues. And there's there's a lot of other symptoms that are all related to perimenopause and menopause. So we started with the basics. And we went out to the researchers and we said, Okay, we want a hormone solution. We want non hormonal medications, we want supplements, and we want lifestyle for all of these issues. We don't want to be a hormone shop, we don't want to be the place you have to come just to buy a hormone. We want to know care, and what is the best high quality care for every one of these symptoms. So we started with that it took us about a year to create all these care protocols. At the same time, we started doing some pilots with different women and getting their feedback, how would you like this care to be developed? How would you like to experience it as a patient. So we spent a long time kind of understanding that as well to make sure that women felt like we were at alternative to their standard doctor that they would trust. And we've learned a lot about what women are looking for. They really want someone to listen to them. They want someone to understand them to care about them to take the time to understand their symptoms. And what we saw is that a lot of the other companies were going the opposite direction, they were having you fill out forms and giving you products, they were trying to make things more efficient by eliminating the conversations. But what we learned is that women wanted to have these conversations and they wanted to have a place to go to have longer than the six minute visits, you might get it your primary care. So what we essentially did was a pair the knowledge that we created through these protocols and are learning about what women were looking for in terms of their care, and we put those together and that's really what we do with me is we give you expertise covered by insurance by providers who are trained and they're trained to listen to you and give you the right medical care. And
Becca Szkutak 9:30
you're so right especially with the rise of digital healthcare companies you are seeing people I don't want to say cut corners because that's not necessarily that could be too loaded of a term. But they are kind of looking to like streamline, streamline, streamline and like make everything go from you sign up to you get whatever the treatments gonna look like as fast as possible. And I've always thought that was interesting because I agree it's like you go and see your doctor in person and sometimes it's like 10 minutes and you're like, oh really like that's it like I'm happy to be here longer like I came out here I only see you so often. And, or whatever. So I'm curious, like when you guys were building out that approach, and of course, you guys got feedback prior, but what was demand, like when you actually went out there and put the product out there, and how is feedback been from women on what this approach looks like?
Speaker 1 10:13
I mean, honestly, that's the most rewarding part of this. It's just that women really like what we're doing. That's really what is motivating, to me is we're growing insanely fast. But we're growing because women really want this type of care, and they don't have any place else to go to get it. So from the very early days, we saw that women were just excited to have someone to understand them and to take care of them. And that's why we're growing fast is that we, we've just found an area that people are really interested in, in getting their care.
Becca Szkutak 10:40
And I know you've talked a little bit already about how the regulations around digital health care companies and what you can and can't do online in the healthcare space changing due to COVID is obviously a big factor in sort of how you guys were able to grow and scale. But I'm also curious, because we saw so many digital health companies come to market between like 2020 to 2020, to an investor interest and just the space in general, it kind of went really high, it dropped really low, of course, I mean, you guys just closed around yesterday. So it's not like totally gone by any means. But what has it been like kind of riding that wave where things were really pandemic driven? For a while people were really, really interested in the space who worked traditionally. And then there was a lot of pullback, did that affect you guys? Or did you feel like you guys got the right investors from the start where that didn't matter as much, but like, what has it been like writing the changes in that space?
Speaker 1 11:27
So honestly, despite the fact that we raised money in 2021, wasn't like it was easy. I think there was a sense that like, money was just flowing, and it was really easy to get capital. When we started pitching people on a perimenopause and menopause clinic, there was not a lot of interest. So it was hard to get that first financing round. We've really worked incredibly hard to get that money. And then we worked incredibly hard to prove out our platform and that there was demand. And then we raised a little bit more money and a little bit more money. But we didn't like go raise a whole lot of money before we had anything we've been raising as we've been growing. I think a lot of the companies have the wrong model. Honestly, I think what telehealth is is just a facilitator. It's a technology, right? It's just a technology, right? So what are people looking for, they are not looking for one off doctor appointments for most things. I mean, yes, if you have a sore throat and you want to get an antibiotic or something telehealth is perfect for that. But that's not about building a long term brand with your customers. And I think too few telehealth companies didn't think about that long term customer relationship. So we view ourselves as building a healthcare trusted brand. So our brand is expert care for women. And we need to give you that amazing care. So you come back to us over and over and over again, that is what women are doing. But that is a different model than most of the telehealth companies that got started earlier, a lot of them were very transactional, they just had this idea that all care is gonna go online, but almost no one, for example, did longitudinal care, they were all just offering one off visits with whatever provider was available, or they were offering, you know, a form that you'd fill out, and then you'd get care like that. And honestly, that's not really a differentiator, the companies that are doing well are the therapy companies, right? They're doing incredibly well. And they're scaling. And they're very similar to us. It's a long term relationship with a provider, I think that healthcare is going to change. And I think we just got a little ahead of ourselves about what type of companies were going to be the long term sustainable companies.
Becca Szkutak 13:25
And speaking of that, I definitely wanted to ask you a bit about the company you started prior, because I know this is not your first startup. And as I mentioned a little bit earlier, you were first company was also in the healthcare space, but obviously targeting something very, very different. So maybe if you want to talk a little bit about what's changed in building a healthcare startup, since you started that first company, what learnings were you able to bring with you and starting midea? And what were you like, okay, that's not relevant anymore.
Speaker 1 13:50
So Kirbo was a childhood obesity company. We started it in 2014, we were looking at the fact that a lot of weight loss companies were starting digitally, which made a ton of sense, and they were all doing adults. So we were like, ah, kids, kids are a big audience, we need to serve childhood obesity, and that actually, we can prevent all these kids from becoming obese adults. That's kind of naive. To be honest, here's what we found out, we found out that we absolutely could help kids lose weight. What I feel most proud of is that we could help kids learn healthy habits, we could give them a coach who gave them support along their weight loss journey. And we had published results that showed that we were getting kids to lose weight. There are a few fundamental things we didn't deal with well, and one is that weight is a really complicated issue in our society. And the moms didn't want to tell their kids they were overweight. And I can't tell you how painful it was because we did so many website tests and people would come and they look at it and go, Oh, I really want this for my child. But I really do not want to tell my child that they need it. So that was an incredibly hard marketing challenge and one that was hard to overcome. So it became the CAC big ain't very high because of that. So that was number one. And then number two, for the people who didn't do it, they did it for three months, four months, and then they actually had a good experience, and they learned some healthy habits, and then they didn't need us anymore. So we were not developed to be a long term solution, we were developed to be a short term solution that would help kids learn healthier habits, and and then they wouldn't need us anymore. After that experience, my son who's actually now 17, used to stomp around the house saying recurring revenue recurring revenue, he heard me complain so much about about that problem. So with this company, what I love is that we have, we have women for 30 years plus, right, this is a long term relationship that we're developing with the women that we are talking to, it's not a short term transaction, you don't end needing this, instead, you know, we give you medication, it might be two or three times of titrating. But then you come back the following year, or you have new symptoms. So what we are excited about is the fact that we can build a long term relationship with these patients. That is a very different business model.
Becca Szkutak 16:03
And I know you guys were able to exit that first company. And I know you talked a little bit about how, of course the problem with your own personal experience and sort of like what led you to start this company. But based on some of the challenges that you did have with starting that first company and sort of figuring things out in that way. What was it like making the actual decision to kind of jump in to starting a company, again, going through the journey, again, obviously, with more years of experience, but being an entrepreneur is hard, what pushed you to dig
Speaker 1 16:30
believe it was just such an exciting opportunity. Quite honestly, the goal was not that I wanted to start a company just for the sake of starting a company, I think the goal should be to try to solve a problem. And I was incredibly excited about this problem that needed to be solved and felt like I had unique insight into the problem that could help us solve it. That's really for me what it was about, you're right, starting a company is hard, every part of it is hard. But it's also incredibly exhilarating. And so when you feel like you have something that you can create, that can help people and can make a big difference on society, it's hard to turn that opportunity down.
Becca Szkutak 17:04
And one last question on the experience front, we often talk to not on this podcast is fairly, but I often talk to venture capitalists who were startup founders prior or operators high up in companies joined really early, etc. And I know looking from your background, you kind of did the reverse. And you worked on the venture side for a while before kind of making the leap and coming over to becoming a founder. And I'm curious, what you would say is like a benefit of doing it in that order, as opposed to the other way around. And maybe why you've built your company the way you have with that investor knowledge that you did gain from those first few roles.
Speaker 1 17:39
So what's great about being investor is the UC, there's lots of ways that companies can succeed. And there's lots of ways that companies can fail. And I saw both, I invested in companies early in my career, like Baby Center, and Blue Nile, that are still around today, not in their exact form. But many 20 plus years later, they're still around and they're sustaining companies. And then we invested in companies that didn't make it or honestly I invest in a company called the E toys that went public was worth $10 billion, and then went bankrupt. There are lots of ways that companies can both succeed and fail. And having that experience and seeing both is incredibly valuable. I think it gives me a really good perspective on what mistakes you make also on you know, where I have control and where I don't have control. You know, people always ask me about the risks of our company. And I always try to divide it into the risks that I can control, and then the risks that are just out of my control. And I think that's very helpful for our team. And then we focus on the ones we can control. And we don't spend too much time on the others. But they were great companies, I started doing investing in 1998, we had the 2001 crash. And at that time, great companies went out of business and other great companies survived. And then I saw that again in 2008. And so I know that like their cycles, and that there are certain things you can control. And you should focus a lot on that. And then there are other things, you know, the telehealth laws could change again, right? That is the fundamental rest of my company. But it's just not something I spend a lot of time thinking about, because I can't do a lot to fix it. So and then I you know, I just saw that resiliency was really important to entrepreneurs. And I've seen that over and over again, like, it's going to be hard, you're going to have a lot of ups and downs. And I remind myself that there's a quote that I read someplace that it said, you know, if you get tired, rest, don't quit. And I think about that, you know, this is a lot of work, and it's a great opportunity. And then you just kind of keep going and I don't know, I think that having that long term perspective has been very helpful to me,
Becca Szkutak 19:33
definitely thinking about building MIDI into what it is today. Of course you have that first startup experience and the VC experience as well. How did you go about approaching building out the team and hiring and shaping that side of the business and to what it has become?
Speaker 1 19:47
So you know, I wouldn't say it's based on anything other than the fact I wanted to have the most amazing team of women who cared about this. That was our initial team. We do have some men, so it's not just women, but we really started off by putting together a team of women Who are extremely senior. So they have long careers already, but they weren't looking to manage teams. Instead, they were looking to really build it themselves. So we have a very different team than most other companies. But we have a team of very experienced, mostly women who are just incredibly motivated by the opportunity to solve this problem, and are just excited to spend their life basically trying to figure out how do you scale expert women's care to women nationwide. So it is a different kind of team that build then you may have in some other companies, but we have a very passionate group of people working on this. And
Becca Szkutak 20:35
I'm definitely want to dive further into that the concept of like this just being a very different team, like how do you structure it then if it is this group of people? I'm imagining you're getting a lot of people who are not only knowledgeable about the space, but maybe have lived experience in it as well? How do you kind of set that up? What made sense to kind of structure it the way you guys did? Who
Speaker 1 20:51
knows if it made sense, right? We just did it. We have just a really great, you know, we have a team of equals, we have a team of incredible, incredible women who are working here and who started this early with us and who are just working really hard. And people move around a little bit in terms of their tasks, but it's a very collaborative environment. And we're hiring fast. And so we're putting in structures to make sure we hire the right people, and that we continue the culture building of people who really care about fixing the problem, that we have a very low ego environment, it is not about building your career, necessarily. It's not about building a team that's really big under you and said we're very focused on that pretty low ego environment, and people who were quite focused on building out our mission.
Becca Szkutak 21:37
more from this conversation right after a quick break. And since you mentioned company culture, we like to ask founders about that a lot on the show. And you'd be surprised, or maybe one fee surprise, actually of how some people either have like a really good locked in answer or some people it's like they've never thought about it before. They've never actively tried to make any changes with the company culture, which is always a little jarring. But I am curious, like, how do you guys think about fostering that culture to make sure that you can move in that right direction with everyone's still remaining passionate about getting to the same goal,
Speaker 1 22:09
right? It starts with hiring and making sure that we really do hire people who are aligned on our mission. And then we talk a lot about our mission and vision and values all the time and try to live those. And that I think is really important. Everything is focused around patient care and making sure that we are giving the best patient care, I will say that creates issues recently, we also do sell through employers, for example, and the employer might want a different type of care than what our providers want to provide. And we're really clear, our North Star is the best care for our patients. Everything goes around that everything goes around what is the best thing for our patients, if we focus on that, and we really focus on making sure that is what we are providing, then that really unifies everyone and helps us to stay focused. And
Becca Szkutak 22:56
with you mentioning working with different like enterprise customers to Why did you guys decide to do that? I know it's covered by insurance. But do you have like a side where maybe I decided to I want to find that kind of car, I can just go off and find it myself and link it to insurance? Or I can find it through work? Like why did you guys decide to set it up in that way, where you have multiple ways people can kind of find you.
Speaker 1 23:18
So there are a few components to that. The first is that in the end, large employers actually do control healthcare spending. So in the end, they're the payer, right. So you have to work with employers, in order to get the insurance covered care that you that you want to provide, you can't just do it through the insurance companies, you need to actually work with employers and the employers have a vested interest in women thriving and performing well at work. And we enable them to do that. So there are a lot of employers that have started to work with us to provide this type of care to their female population. And then we're also collaborating with healthcare systems, because we believe that in order to build a great virtual care company, right, to build this national virtual care layer, we need to have partners so that we can make sure women get the appropriate in person care when appropriate. So it doesn't do us any good to tell you that you need a mammogram or a colonoscopy or an endometrial biopsy, if we don't have a place to send, you ought to know where might be appropriate for you to get the right in person care. So what we need to do is collaborate with health care systems around the country so that we can do this collaborative care. And we can make sure that women get access to the best care both in person and virtually, we provide the virtual care, and then we make sure that they have access to great in person care when appropriate. And then we also found that it's really helpful to integrate records, for example, so people don't have to constantly re upload their records every time they go to a new provider. So we also will work with integrating on health information exchanges, so we can share data across providers,
Becca Szkutak 24:50
and that's I wanted to ask this earlier. So we I've talked to a lot of digital health companies over the last couple of years, and the majority of them are like, well, we launched we've raised couple rounds of Funding, we're in these five states, and we're expanding, but like we're in six states. Now we're working to go to 50. And I'm curious, because you guys have been around probably the same amount of time as a lot of these companies that I'm thinking of, why did you guys decide to sort of expand to all 50? States right away? How much of a challenge was that, especially with the in person care piece of this, too, that requires obviously a lot more than just like, Okay, we got the regulation for this digital therapist in Wyoming or in Nebraska, etc. What was it like building that out?
Speaker 1 25:27
It's a lot of work. Yes, a lot of work. Building a national 50 state insurance covered care company is a lot of money and a lot of work. It is a moat. For others, it has created a moat because it is hard to replicate. But it does take a lot of resources to build this. The reason we had to do it is that we are starting to work with large 50 state employers, and they needed us to cover their employees in all 50 states. So we couldn't be their solution if we didn't have care in all 50 states. So it was actually a business imperative for us to make that leap and to get our providers credentialed in all of the states. No,
Becca Szkutak 26:03
and that makes sense. And something I wanted to ask you about also just watching what's been happening in both the digital health space, but also just women's health in the startup space as well. There's so much emphasis on specific aspects of women's health, which I'm sure you've definitely noticed things surrounding pregnancy, things surrounding very millennial heavy, very younger skewing. And it's like, it's great. I'm sure that people are getting into the space and maybe weren't before. But you guys in looking at your message and stuff. What has it been like both watching that trend take place in the women's health space? And sort of why do you think that is? Well,
Speaker 1 26:39
I'm excited that so many people are starting companies to address their own needs, right? First and foremost, there are a lot of needs men and women we have a lot of healthcare needs. And it's exciting to get companies started to address those. So I want to say that I think one concern is that a lot of them are addressing to smaller markets. So it's hard to get funding for things that are really addressing not large enough markets, I do think you have to think big in order to build venture funded companies, it's great if you don't care about having a venture funded company. But for the venture funded companies, you have to address really big markets. So I think that it is quite important to figure out who you are serving and why they're going to use you and why you're a better solution than anything else out there. And who you're replacing. Those are all important questions. Honestly, I watched my daughter, and we are not designed to serve her. But she doesn't have a place to get good health care right now. Because she moved from DC to New York to California, like she doesn't have a doctor. So I actually feel very strongly that we need to figure out how to address that population. And we need to figure out what you do when people are moving around the country, and they don't have primary care providers. And we one thing that we've seen 40% of the women who come to us 40% haven't gone to a doctor in four to 10 years. Oh, yeah, yeah. So what's happened is they have their babies, they have a pediatrician for their baby, but they don't have care for themselves. And they've moved and they've changed jobs, and they don't have anyone to take care of them. So part of what we've seen is that a lot of the women just don't have care at all. And we are tying them back into medical care. That's not what we expected when we started the company. So we'd been surprised what a large population of women don't have care and can use telehealth as a way to get back into getting medical care.
Becca Szkutak 28:22
That's so interesting to think about. Because even like thinking about other companies building in the women's healthcare space, the concept of people moving around not having a doctor, as someone who moved back and forth to New York to Boston, New York, Boston for four years, I totally understand why that would, you'd get into that situation. But it has never occurred to me that really no one is talking about that problem. Or like I have friends here who still go to their healthcare providers at home. And I'm always like, well, what if something happens to you here? Right? What do you do?
Speaker 1 28:48
That's right, they don't have anywhere to go. No, that's exactly right. I mean, I think our healthcare system, like you have a local doctor. And by the way, it's like a nine month waiting list in a lot of places to get a primary care physician. And then you move,
Becca Szkutak 28:59
you move in that nine months, and then it never even adds up metric. But since as I mentioned, it's off the call we are having you on right after you guys have closed your recent raise. So maybe if you want to talk about that, especially based off of what you said earlier that even though you guys raised in 2021, where everyone was pretending money was flying everywhere, it of course was not as easy as people made it seem now a couple years later, Mark, it's not as bad as it was, say last year, but things are a little iffy, like, how was it actually raising this latest round? And sort of how did that all go?
Speaker 1 29:29
So one thing I've learned is that fundraising is a journey. And it is about relationship building. So the relationships that I've formed over the past few years that enabled me to raise this round did not just start when we needed to raise money. So people who invested in us Emerson Collective led this round. We've been talking to them since 2021. So they've seen our growth and they've seen how every time we told people that we would do something, we did it and exceeded those expectations. And they saw how many women were excited about our care. So They were able to see our growth a lot before they invested in us. So I think one thing that I've learned is that fundraising is definitely about relationship building. It is not like I'm gonna go raise money, I'm gonna go meet all these new people, and they're all gonna get really excited about investing in me, it is much more about building a relationship with investors who trust you and then over time want to work with you. So this fundraise was actually it was definitely oversubscribed, there was a lot of interest all from people that we've been talking to for a really long time. I think there's a lot of excitement about what we're doing. There's a lot of energy around women's health. And there's just a lot of energy around the fact that we're growing incredibly quickly. I was very privileged this time that the fundraising was was not hard and that we have expert, really great people who are participating
Becca Szkutak 30:42
in cert. My last question would be is now that you have raised this next round, you guys have made the progress that you have so far. What's next? What are you thinking about taking this new financing looking ahead the next couple of years where you guys headed? This
Speaker 1 30:55
is a really big market. And so people keep on asking, you know, when are you leaving perimenopause, and menopause, but perimenopause and menopause is a big market. So we are working a lot on understanding what are the health needs of women during this period of their life? And how do we appropriately rise to meet those concerns? One thing that we're working on is testosterone. There's increasing interest among women in testosterone, it's actually difficult to start a 50 state had DEA license in all 50 states, but our goal is to have that so we can offer women testosterone in all 50 states, we are looking at what other areas like that sexual wellness is a big one for us that we're focusing on. We're looking at one or the other, oh, hair and skin as another one. So we're looking at other areas that women in this age category are interested in getting care for. And that's really where we are focused. So our goal is to be the expert care platform for this population of women and grow to serve millions of women. That's our goal. And we're, we're very clear that that's where we want to focus our efforts and that we can get there.
Becca Szkutak 31:55
Well that feels like the perfect place to wrap so thank you so much for coming on the show. This has been super interesting. Thank
Unknown Speaker 32:01
you. i This is a great conversation.
Becca Szkutak 32:05
Found is hosted by myself. TechCrunch Senior Reporter Becca Skuta. Alongside Senior Reporter Dominic Midori Davis founders produced by Maggie Stamets with editing by Cal our Illustrator is Bryce Durbin funds audience development and social media is managed by Morgan Liddell Alisa stringer and Natalie Kreisman TechCrunch is audio products are managed by Henry pic of it. Thanks for listening, and we'll be back next week.
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