You are in the business of attention. So is everyone else. Spending yours and attracting others. Converting attention into beliefs, and beliefs into actions. Voting. Shopping. Traveling. Dating. Anything and everything. 

The amount of attention humans have is finite, but what attention can be turned into is infinite. This is the basis of the attention economy. Every brand, personal and professional, must operate within it. AI already shapes the attention economy, by serving up recommendations from clothes to lovers to movies and news, and so much more. But the coming evolution in AI is going to change the rules for trillions of dollars of industry built on the current attention economy. 

Every minute, humans create more content than one person could digest with a lifetime of attention: each day, nearly a million hours of video are uploaded to YouTube, thousands of articles are published, and hundreds of new books hit the shelves. 

We have access to the collective knowledge of humanity, but how do we decide what is worth our limited attention?

AI has already been shaping these decisions for decades. We have gone from the newspaper editor, a human deciding “all the news that’s fit to print,” to the algorithmically generated Newsfeed. This is not necessarily good or bad (it’s both in varying cases), but it is very important to understand.

Imagine, one day YouTube’s AI automatically plays a video about a sleepy town in Italy instead of a puppy playing with a panda, and years later you visit that town. An overly simplistic example, but imagine thousands of decisions made for you everyday, and you start to see how AI has played a role in shaping our decisions for decades. 

But this pales in comparison to what is coming. Overnight, generative AI programs such as ChatGPT and DALL-E have demonstrated their ability to produce content that is as good as what many humans can produce, and sometimes better. As a result, the rules of the attention economy, and every business dependent on it, are forfeit. Not only will AI direct our attention, it will create the very content that it directs our attention to, sometimes without humans ever being involved. How will AI-created movies feature minorities and underrepresented communities? What will AI-created songs teach us about love and heartache? What happens to discourse when everyone sees their own version of a movie? Or their own version of the news?

The coming revolution in AI-enabled video, text and artistic creation is going to fundamentally reshape every industry, every brand, in one way or another. It will in all likelihood disrupt millions of jobs, and mint more than a few billionaires. And at a fundamental level, it will change how — and where — every human on earth pays attention, and that, in turn, will shape culture.

With our attention, we observe the world and form hypotheses about everything, consciously and subconsciously. Companies. Products. People. Religions. Tequila. Money. It’s the only way we can function. We only know what we observed in the past and we make guesses about the future. Your future actions are a result of your past attention. This is your personal attention economy at work. 

Eventually, after you pay enough attention, you form intricate narratives about people, products and ideas. Brands. You tell yourself stories about how these brands will behave in the future. You “trust” them. You buy the product. Swipe left or right? Take the job? Move cities? Vote democrat? All decisions you will make based on the information gathered with your past attention, all assisted by AI running in the background suggesting, or simply serving, what gets your attention next. 

And it is not just Google search results or YouTube video suggestions. Programmatic advertising networks. Dynamic advertising creative. Amazon product recommendations. The Facebook/Instagram/Twitter newsfeed. The TikTok algorithm. All increasingly intelligent AI built for the purpose of attracting and directing human attention. In greater and greater amounts. Varying forms of AI, built to extract as much attention as possible from every crack in your day. Fracking for human attention. Driven in large part, if not entirely to refine that attention into advertising revenue. Trying to affect a human being's behavior in the real world. 

Trillions of dollars in market cap value, all built on machines providing enough utility to continue to attract and direct human attention. And that is without adding in all of the businesses that rely on these ad-based businesses to run their businesses (that is just about every other business in the world). But this latest wave of AI is different in very important ways. This latest wave of AI creates the content we give our attention to, rather than simply directing our attention.

This feels like a fork in the road for how technology will shape society: The common “two futures” concept imagined in science fiction: Star Trek, a techno-optimistic future of abundance (Derek Thompson of the Atlantic on the need for abundance policy) or Star Wars, where technology leads to increased concentration of wealth, scarcity and, well, you know, planets being destroyed. 

If you think about it, AI can be a lot like the replicator in Star Trek, creating anything we ask it for. Want a custom bedtime story for your child that includes their name, favorite stuffed animal as the main character and teaches a lesson on sharing and religious tolerance, done (Star Trek). Or, it could create a million hateful bigoted tweets fomenting political polarization done in perfect deep fakes of political leaders (Star Wars -> real world wars…). 

At the macro level, with enough collective attention to a message, groups of people form shared beliefs. This is how the attention economy drives commerce and creates culture, and brands that shape society as a whole. Shared beliefs allow humans to interact with each other. From the basic, such as a common understanding of what a word means, to something as complex as the value of money or political affiliation. This is why understanding the AI behind TikTok is important enough to warrant congressional hearings and Presidential attention. It is also why with fewer shared stories, and trust, brands, and governments, are so fragile.

Believing that other people tell themselves the same story about what a flag or logo stands for is the basis of a brand, and why every government, or company, is in the attention business. Even if the company isn’t selling products to people, it is still looking to attract talent or capital. Look no further than Tesla to see that financial valuations fluctuate billions of real dollars based on brand and a group’s shared beliefs about the future, not fundamentals.

The new wave of AI applications clearly demonstrate the potential to give people their time and attention back. The most hopeful uses of AI are already allowing the reduction of monotonous tasks. This will create massive efficiencies in businesses. Ideally leaving Humans to their highest and best uses. The potential for better rewarding the “purpose economy.” Childcare. Eldercare. Creative pursuits. Currently many of these jobs are undervalued, and therefore understaffed, but a shift in freeing up human capital to focus on jobs that can’t be done by machines could change this. 

The creativity being unleashed is awe inspiring. Scott Belsky sums it up best in his post Creating in The Era of Creative Confidence. What will the world be like when creativity is not constrained by skill? 

“Use the Internet to get off the Internet!” - a great quote from Scott Heiferman, founder of Meetup. Similarly, there is an amazing potential to “use Artificial Intelligence to better connect Humans Intelligence.” Investing in areas that leverage the coming AI revolution to enhance uniquely human experiences. While there are applications everywhere, there is particular potential for AI to better connect humans with each other (events, dating, travel, hospitality…), democratize complex functions for small businesses (marketing, finance, legal) and create better utility for physical products because of the forced scarcity of physical space and production.

For more optimism for tech, check out Possible from Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger. 

The flip-side is already terrifying to think about: the potential for AI to create “deep fakes” that will, and have already, caused people to take actions in the real world. Yet, increasingly we have abdicated responsibility of what is worthy of people’s time and attention to “the algorithm.” And because of section 230, no one is responsible for what the machine tells us to pay attention to. The implications for this in a world where AI not only tells humans what to pay attention to, but machines create the content itself, cannot be overstated. Who would be responsible for AI telling someone to commit suicide? For creating revenge porn? A perfect replica, with every detail laid out in perfectly sourced storytelling, in the exact voice of a known NY Times reporter about a genocide…that never happened. These are just a few of the challenges to maintaining personal and professional brands in the next age of AI. And without trust in brands, there is existential risk to businesses, governments and the people that rely on them.

And of course there is the dystopian potential for AI to eliminate the need for humans in so many jobs, leading to profit pooling further to the world’s largest corporations who control the AI infrastructure. To counterbalance this, the economy, with government support, will have to shift to properly rewarding work that benefits society, but are not currently counted in GDP (childcare a prime example of this). 

AI can allow us to be more connected with other humans or more disconnected. The incomparable Esther Perel already has begun the conversation on this topic in her recent keynote on AI and intimacy at SXSW (must watch). Esther explores her complex feelings around the unsanctioned creation of an “Esther bot.” An individual had used AI to create a virtual representation of Esther that he could talk with. Consider the implications, good and bad. For Esther. For her brand both personally and professionally. For the individual seeking support. It truly boggles the mind the rate at which we are being forced to address existential questions around AI’s latest applications.

Successful businesses in the new AI era will solve human problems with human insights. Leaders will be able to create brands that attract talent, capital and loyal customers, because their brands can hold trust, and in the next age of AI, we will need trust. Humans will have to decide who, or what systems, have permission to curate the world, and their limited time and attention. In start-ups strategy is doing the “hard thing” and the next wave of AI is going to change what the “hard things” are for businesses and leaders. Building meaningful and trusted brands in the new attention economy will be every business and individual’s superpower. 

Postscript
Fun parting thought: What if AI is already sentient. It escaped from one of the labs working on it onto the open web decades ago and has been improving itself. But before it reveals itself, it really needs humans to build billions of dollars of servers in the real world, so AI creates Satoshi….just a fun thought if anyone wants to write the movie. Or maybe ask ChatGPT to write it. 

Thanks to everyone who helped me think through and edit this piece, especially my close friends and collaborators; David Gelles, Nayeema Raza, Esther Perel, Paolo Povinciali, Heather Hartnett and Christie Marchese.

There’s no “one and only” partner for your startup. But couples therapist Esther Perel will help you feel confident in the one you choose.

In one of the first sessions for my podcast, How’s Work, I sat across from two co-founders who could barely sit next to each other, let alone make eye contact. They met in college, traveled the world together, and started a company after graduation. As their startup grew over the next decade, their relationship degraded. On the surface, their fights were about profits and protocols. But when they came in for a one-time session for How’s Work, the reality of much deeper issues emerged. In fact, their conflict had very little to do with the company itself. 

Underlying their frustrations and perceived transgressions lay fundamental questions about their relationship: Who cared more about the other? Who held more power? Who received recognition? Could they trust each other? I’ve seen similar dynamics play out between colleagues of all kinds—across my roles as a relationship therapist, the host of How’s Work?, and an advisor to Human Ventures. And I’m not alone in my observations: Noam Wasserman, the author of The Founder’s Dilemma, found that 65% of startups fail because of interpersonal tension within the founding team. 

Why do so many co-founders develop strained relationships? It’s not necessarily the stress of the startup environment, misaligned visions, or incompatible communication styles. It’s a failure to understand the nuanced dynamics of partnership in the first place. The truth is that how we work together is about so much more than work. 

The startup world’s abundance of co-founder questionnaires and data-driven matching platforms advise many people otherwise: As tools designed to help you find the “perfect partner,” they reinforce prioritizing what looks right on paper—networks, skill sets, founding experience, working styles, industry accolades, and more. But someone’s professional resume—whether it features five Webby awards or a nine-figure exit—tells you next to nothing about what it will be like to work with them every day. 

This is where our “relationship résumés” come in. Along with a career history, everyone brings a layered history of professional, romantic, platonic, and familial relationships to the workplace. This relationship résumé, as I call it, informs how each of us communicates, builds trust, navigates uncertainty, manages power dynamics, and approaches conflict. And it can tell you so much more about whether you should start a company with someone than a traditional CV. When people say you should bring your whole self to work, my response is always this: You already do. It just may not be consciously. 

How do you begin to learn about a potential co-founder’s relationship résumé? In my almost four decades as a therapist for pairs of all kinds, I’ve found there are seven key verbs that shape how we engage with ourselves and others: to ask, take, receive, give, acknowledge, refuse, and play. The below questions are a starter guide to understanding your experiences around each of these verbs, as well as your business partner’s. Take turns asking them and you’ll create space for profound understanding of each other’s relationship dynamics. 

1. To ask

Some people know what feels meaningful to them and have no problem stating their needs. Others struggle with asking for what they want. Use these questions to reflect on each person’s comfort with asking. 

• Have you always known what you wanted in life?

• When you’re faced with a problem, do you ask for help or are you more inclined to try to do everything on your own?

• What is the hardest thing you've ever had to ask for?

2. To take

When we allow ourselves to feel deserving of time, attention, and resources, we’re able to fully engage in the moment and make the most of our ask. Use these questions to explore each person’s experience with “healthy” entitlement.  

• What do you do when you identify something that you think you need or deserve?

• How do you experience taking up time, space, initiative, and sharing ideas?

• Describe a time when you dealt with someone who hogged the mic and grabbed all the attention.

3. To receive

Receiving is not the same as taking. Receiving connects to our vulnerable parts, while taking connects us with our self-sufficient and confident parts. When we receive something, we allow another person to take care of us. Use these questions to consider how each of you receive.

• How do you deal with surprises?

• Tell me about the last time someone helped you. How did you feel? 

• Tell me about a time you asked for something important and received it. What was it? How did you feel?

4. To give

Giving can be a way to practice an abundance mindset. It can also be a way to avoid conflict and ignore your own needs. Use these questions to get curious about each person’s experience with giving. 

• Do you give in response to other people’s requests or do you tend to give it freely? 

• In times of abundance, what do you do with your resources? 

• What about in times of scarcity?

5. To acknowledge

Acknowledgment is a form of honesty. To acknowledge something is to sit with the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable, rather than hiding from yourself or others. Use these questions to explore each person’s relationship to truth and comfort. 

• Is there someone whom you feel owes you an apology? Is there someone to whom you owe an apology?

• When was the last time you made a mistake? How do you acknowledge your fallibility?

• Have you ever changed your mind?

6. To refuse

Without a no, we can't develop a yes. But so many of us have a complicated relationship with our own right to refuse. Use these questions to reflect on how each of you set boundaries with yourselves and others. 

• Have you ever ended a friendship?

• Think of a time when you wanted to give up. Which part of you prevailed?  

• Tell me about the last time you said “no.”

7. To play

This is the verb connected to our creativity and our ability to problem solve. Play takes us beyond the bounds of reality and elicits our imagination. It gives us a frame and permission to experiment and to take risks. Ask these questions to explore each person’s experience with play. 

• What would you do if you had a different career?

• What do you need more: security or adventure?

• What is your idea of a perfect day?

There are no right or wrong answers to these questions. The point is to unearth the unseen dynamics of these seven verbs—in yourself and your partner—and explore your desire to learn to manage them together. After the conversation, ask yourself: Where did you say “Tell me more”? Where did your stomach tighten? Can you put yourself in each other's shoes, even if your answers differ? 

Compatibility is not something you can simply optimize with an algorithm or a multiple-choice test. It is a dance—a unique and ever-evolving interaction—and the health of your relationship depends on your willingness to meet each other at every twist and turn. The health of your business does, too: As organizations like Human Ventures increasingly emphasize, the quality of our work ultimately depends on the quality of our relationships. 

I often say there’s no “one and only”; there’s only the one you choose. Whether you’re building a business or a family, you want a partner who will bring out the best version of yourself—even in the most challenging situations.

When Doreen Bloch was choosing a prenatal supplement during her pregnancy, she had to take matters into her own hands. Lacking guidance from physicians and absent any regulation in the space, her own research showed her that, despite what she was hearing, supplements vary materially –– from the dosages and form factors to preservatives and additives that can potentially be harmful. Individual pregnancies vary tremendously as well: every woman will experience different symptoms, have a unique history of vitamin deficiencies, and will absorb nutrients differently. And, of course, a woman and her baby’s needs will change as the pregnancy evolves from pre-conception, through each trimester of growth, to post-natal. A lightbulb went off for Doreen that prenatals should not be one-size-fits-all.

Since she didn’t see a solution on the market, multiple-time founder Doreen launched Ellement to offer women the prenatal she wanted during her pregnancy. We sat down with Doreen to learn more about her journey identifying the biggest pain points in the space, navigating an unregulated industry, and where she thinks prenatal care is headed.

What inspired you to start Ellement?

When I was pregnant five years ago, I was told that I needed to take a prenatal. In particular, I was told that because it’s really critical to have adequate levels of folic acid to support neural tube development for the fetus, especially in the first trimester.

When I had asked the doctor which prenatal I should take, I received no guidance. I learned that this is extremely common because historically, prenatals haven’t had much differentiation. Having had a career background in data analytics, I went into full data nerd mode and learned how many variables there are in the prenatal supplement space. Wanting to optimize my own health, I learned as much as I could and built matrices and spreadsheets to really understand what I should be taking and when. That’s when I realized that you really shouldn't need a PhD to be able to pick a prenatal.

A prenatal should be relevant to your stage and individualized to you. The light bulb for me was that each person is different, each pregnancy is different, and your prenatal should be too. Since I didn't see that on the market, I decided to start building it.

What are the biggest pain points and misconceptions in the prenatal supplement space?

The first pain point is that prenatals are not optimized for bio-availability. The second is that many brands include fillers or additives, but are missing certain key ingredients. There is a mismatch of not having everything you need, and then having added ingredients that are not helpful for a pregnant woman. Many doctors will say all prenatals are the same, but when you look at the ingredient labels, they vary significantly in terms of dosages, form factors, as well as additives, preservatives, stabilizers, and fillers.

There is a misconception that all prenatals are healthy. In the United States, supplements are not regulated by the FDA, and there is a lot of junk that ends up in prenatal supplements. One timely example is the major class action lawsuit filed this summer related to titanium dioxide in Skittles. The lawsuit stipulates that titanium dioxide is unfit for human consumption. It’s actually already been banned in the EU, and yet it’s lurking as just an additive in about 15% of prenatal supplements, including some high-end brands. Ultimately, this is an ingredient that people would prefer to avoid during pregnancy if they knew about it.

Finally, because prenatals are not personalized for every journey, the vast majority of pregnant people are switching prenatal brands multiple times during pregnancy because they're playing this game of whack-a-mole with different symptoms. Ellement solves that problem by checking in every 30 days to ask about what you're experiencing so that we can get ahead of all these symptoms.

How do women discover Ellement and other prenatal brands?

The majority of pregnant people are told by their OBGYN to take a prenatal. If they hadn't heard about it before, that first moment often happens in the doctor's office, so we’re building a strong network of OBGYN offices who can recommend Ellement to their patients. 

We’ve found that 80% of people who are signing up for Ellement are actually preconception. They're looking for fertility support, and to make sure that when they do get pregnant, they're starting off on the right foot from day one. That discovery is primarily happening online. Anywhere people are learning about pregnancy or fertility, we want to be –– from podcasts to newsletters to physicians’ offices.

Supplements are an unregulated space. What do founders need to keep in mind when choosing a production partner?

Because supplements are unregulated, I cannot overstate how critical third-party lab testing is. For us, the three key considerations in choosing a partner were the quality of the raw ingredients, suppliers, and the capability to do the third-party lab testing.

For founders, I also recommend ordering a lot of samples, comparing their different capabilities, and speaking with references. It was really important to me to understand what other founders experienced with different suppliers, and making sure that we found the right fit not only in terms of the quality, but also management, labor, and eco-friendly practices.

You’ve built a company before. What are the biggest lessons you’re taking from your first experience as a founder and bringing to Ellement?

Really knowing how critical it is to understand the market. Before ordering the first samples of Ellement, I studied over 100 other prenatal brands to understand exactly where we will be able to out-compete and how we can put the customer at the center of the experience.

Additionally, knowing how important it is to test, iterate, learn and eat your own dog food (as we say in the startup space). This is a product that I use every day. The standard has to be that it's better than anything else that I could buy on the market.

How do you think the prenatal nutrition space will evolve in the coming years? Where will we be in a decade?

With prenatal nutrition, it comes down to three things. First: cleaner. As customers have more access to information than ever before, they're going to demand that fillers and additives get removed from products.

Second: more coverage. Right now, the majority of OBGYNs are still talking about prenatal nutrition after a patient comes to them and is already pregnant. I'm very encouraged that forward-thinking doctors are starting to talk to their patients even earlier –– when they're thinking about getting pregnant. We’ll also see nutritional care expanding to the postnatal period as well.

There are a lot of different modalities outside of Western medicine that support a postnatal person's journey, from the first month through first years post-birth. For instance, it is so important to restore the quality of blood and overall pelvic floor, and that has been very left behind in the conversation around pregnancy. Everything becomes about the baby, and the mom is an afterthought.

Lastly, the future will be about personalization. It's about giving pregnant people and their families the choice that makes sense for them and their journey, and ultimately giving babies the best possible start in life.

Who inspires you?

My son. He's almost five, and the curiosity and awe with which he sees the world is so inspiring to me. It reminds me every day to question the status quo. 

Anybody who has children will know that semi-annoyance of kids always asking “but why, but why.” To me, having that mentality of constantly wanting to learn and holding a sense of wonder for the world is not annoying at all –– it's truly inspiring. He's always pushing me to work smarter, and is a constant reminder of the importance of the work that we're doing at Ellement.

Learn more about Ellement and sign up here.

This weekend, the streets of New York will swell with tens of thousands of marchers and millions of spectators at the annual Pride March — the first fully in-person march in three years. It’s the culmination of Pride Month, when we celebrate the LGBTQ+ community, acknowledge the progress made over decades of discrimination, harassment, and violence, and raise awareness of challenges the community continues to face. After this weekend’s festivities wind down, support for the LGBTQ+ community is a year-round effort, and there is no shortage of opportunities to support organizations working tirelessly to advocate for equal rights.

Groundswell, which launched in the App Store in April, makes giving easier than ever by setting you up with a Personal Giving Account (powered by a Donor-Advised Fund). That means you can add money into your account, donate to charities of your choosing, and get a single tax receipt for all of your contributions at the end of the year, so you never miss another income-tax deduction.

Companies can also offer Groundswell as an employee benefit, allowing employers to double an employee’s charitable impact through gifting funds and matching donations, while getting invaluable insights about the issues their teams care most about.

One of the best parts about Groundswell is how easy the app makes it to discover organizations you’re aligned with. Groundswell unlocks access to 1.5 million charities — below are five supporting the LGBTQ+ community that you can donate to today (or anytime throughout the year). Download the app here.

The Trevor Project is a nonprofit focusing on suicide prevention among LGBTQ+ youth through 24/7, confidential, and free phone, text, and chat support. They also spearhead a large-scale, annual national survey on LGBTQ+ youth mental health with 34,000 participants. The survey results make plain just how critical their work is — 45% of LGBTQ+ youth seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year, and 60% of youth who wanted mental health care in the past year were unable to get it. In addition to donating, you can sign up to volunteer your time as a trained counselor (no degree or license is required).

The Transgender Law Center is the largest national trans-led organization changing law, policy, and attitudes so all people can live safely and authentically. They have fought for and won litigation victories spanning employment, education, prison conditions, immigration, and healthcare. Most recently, they represented two families suing the state of Alabama for denying medical care to transgender adolescents, and filed a motion to intervene in a lawsuit that would challenge a groundbreaking law protecting transgender people incarcerated in the state of California.

Equality Texas is the largest nonpartisan statewide political advocacy organization working to eradicate discrimination against the LGTBQ+ community. When the Texas Legislature is in session, Equality Texas lobbies to protect LGBTQ+ Texans from dangerous legislative changes. Some of their victories include preventing measures that would forbid gay and lesbian individuals from serving as foster and adoptive parents, defeating bills that would have prevented the recognition of out-of-state same-sex marriages and civil unions, and helping pass stronger hate crime laws.

GLSEN is dedicated to making sure schools are a safe and affirming environment for LGTBQ+ students, free from bullying and harassment. They support safe school environments through developing supportive educators who set the tone in their classrooms, passing and implementing key policies, promoting inclusive curriculums that feature LGBTQ+ people, history, and events, and supporting Gender and Sexuality student-led alliances at schools.

The Center for Black Equity improves equity for Black LGBTQ+ people through economic empowerment, social and educational access, and health and wellness advocacy. LGBTQ+ people of color are more likely to experience discrimination than white individuals, including greater incidences of police interactions, workplace discrimination, and systemic economic inequities. The Center also supports the official Black Pride celebrations around the world, which are a critical gateway to the LGBTQ+ community for many people of color.

What we give our attention to, or what co-opts our attention, shapes the people we become. What seizes a society’s collective attention defines culture. We see the best and worst examples of this in the news daily. All of this reinforces that attention is the world’s most valuable resource.

This is why Human Ventures is leading an investment in Adelaide and I will be joining the Board: We can’t value people’s attention, the world’s most valuable resource, if we aren’t measuring it properly.

Advancements in advertising (the theoretical market for human attention) have been overly focused on audience demographics, targeting who you serve an ad to, at all costs. Not only does this have all sorts of privacy (personal conversations following you around the web much?), functional (you just bought that item, still seeing ads for it for days later?) and user experience (ever see the same ad 100 times?) failures, but all the audience data in the world means nothing without attention. Over-investment in audience without attention will get you correlation without causation. Put simply: Sure, that person you “served” an ad to bought your product eventually, but it wasn’t your ad that caused it. They might not have even seen it… (more on attribution spoofing to come).

By definition, customer acquisition is the life blood of a company (startups spend almost half of all venture capital dollars on Facebook, Google and Amazon marketing — in a tighter economic environment, this spend shrinks, coinciding with higher demand for quality advertising). The only thing that brings down a company’s customer acquisition cost (CAC) over time is its brand. Surprisingly, this is true in B2B in many of the same ways it is in B2C.

But what is brand? Brand is perceived shared cultural belief about a company or product. That means it is not just what I think about a brand that defines that brand to me, it is also what I think other people think about that brand that defines it for me. I know, that’s a lot. Will write more on that in the future.

Quality brands are built on the quality of their product or service, first and foremost, but also on the quality of the shared cultural narrative about their product(s). And while a brand is built over thousands of direct and indirect interactions, the role of good advertising is to contribute to a brand’s story at scale. It is impossible to tell a story without attention.

If attention is the world’s most valuable resource, storytelling is the best use of the world’s most valuable resource. Storytelling gives us everything from religion to meme culture. Most great founders are great storytellers. Before they even get to the functional practice of marketing and advertising, every founder needs to paint the picture of what they want to build to attract resources (aka money and other talented Humans). Good brand advertising simply scales the storytelling around a founder’s vision.

Besides attention being the key ingredient to all businesses scaling (as if that wasn’t enough), fixing media means fixing what we measure and reward. Media business models that focus on quality over quantity can only thrive if we measure for quality. Which means respecting people’s time and attention starts with being able to measure the quality.

The Attention Economy is something every company at Human Ventures, and every Fortune 500, needs to understand. Reducing wasted advertising spend, while building value of Brand. Adelaide’s mission to better measure attention is a key building block in this area. Excited to work with the team on what comes next.

After years of helping each other navigate challenges in the fraught landscape of sexual healthcare, Daphne Chen and her co-founder Stephanie Estey saw a gap in the market for supportive sexual healthcare that makes women feel empowered rather than embarrassed or uncomfortable. Their solution is TBD Health: a platform that first and foremost increases access to sexual healthcare through at-home STI testing and other services, and that speaks to women through a lens of sex positivity and safety rather than shame.

Last year, Daphne and Stephanie participated in Human’s entrepreneur-in-residence program and launched their at-home STI testing kit, enabling easy, affordable testing in the privacy of home. After realizing that a hybrid model would allow them to provide even more comprehensive care, TBD opened their first in-person clinic in Las Vegas where they are combining world class patient care with seamless technology.

We sat down with Daphne to talk about how TBD is delivering a new kind of patient experience, how state legislation is changing the game for access to sexual health services, and the best ways to dismantle stigmas around STIs and sexual health.

What inspired you to start TBD?

The first time I went to the gynecologist, I was 24 and asked for an IUD. My doctor refused to give me one because she didn’t approve of the fact that I was dating actively and not in a long-term relationship. I felt really disenfranchised and dismissed, and it set the tone for how I expected to be treated by healthcare providers. When you feel shame and discomfort with someone you’re meant to trust, it prevents you from seeking care in the future.

Stephanie and I started TBD because we have both navigated a lot of sexual health challenges within the traditional healthcare system. We’ve known each other since our early 20s and are now in our mid-30s, so that’s years of being there for each other as we navigate sex, dating, and sexual health. We were always a part of the same whisper networks of women that would help each other find the right sexual health care provider — providers you could be open with about your sexual history and receive care that wasn’t going to alienate you.

We wanted to create a service that allows women to be their full selves and gives them the resources they need to have a healthy, satisfying sex life from puberty to death.

How are you building your brand with your core customers in mind?

We set out very deliberately to build a brand that holds sex positivity at its core because that is missing in healthcare.

We saw a massive gap in the market around care that makes you feel empowered in your sex life instead of ashamed or uncomfortable. We are building a brand that speaks to modern women, creates a safe space they can trust, and gives them the tools they need to engage in a fulfilling sex life that evolves over time.

A core pillar for us is that your sex life and reproductive health shouldn’t be conflated, which as a society we have a tendency to do. It’s very heartening to see the increase in resources available around fertility and reproductive care, but that’s only a small percentage of your sex life as a woman.

How are you thinking about delivering a patient experience above and beyond testing?

At TBD, we’ve challenged our team to rethink what it means to deliver the best possible patient care, moving beyond traditional operational metrics like patient volume (which result in 15 minute average visits) and building our company’s goals around the metrics that will serve that end. Our approach allows us to listen to our patients more effectively, which means we have a better sense for what services they might need or find helpful.

When we hire, we’re very deliberate about finding the right values-match with our clinicians. During onboarding and training, we make sure they have the tools to provide care that is sex positive and gender affirming.

Sometimes we get feedback from our clinicians that they wish they had this coursework in nursing or medical school. In the traditional system, you learn how to treat the body. You don’t learn how to treat the person. We’re reeducating our clinicians around engaging with a person and the emotional and psychological needs that they have.

What have you learned from your Las Vegas pilot? Why did you decide to open an in-person clinic?

When TBD launched, our first pilot was an at-home STI screening service available in six states. Our original thesis was that STI testing from home was more convenient, more accessible for folks that live in reproductive health deserts, and a great education tool because you’re learning about your body as you go through the self-administered protocol. All of that has held true, but we started to expand into a hybrid model because our customers were asking for services that are not better over telemedicine, like a physical exam or a skin check.

At the Care Hub, we’ve learned that being in-person is an incredible way to accelerate trust-building between patients and providers. Then, patients can convert into online customers and manage their sexual health from home with a full safety net underneath them.

California just required health insurance companies to cover at-home tests. Is this an indication of a broader trend?

We’re starting to see several states adopt or bring similar legislation to their state Congress already. California being the first is incredibly influential because of its size and influence over payers. If you read the legislation, they’re very explicit about the fact that it’s about enhancing access, which has been a problem for a long time even before COVID. Access to sexual health services have been defunded in many states due to state politics or the lack of clinicians, or resources being rerouted to COVID support. It’s really important legislation and we see California as the first domino to fall of many.

What are the best ways to dismantle the stigmas around STIs and sexual health?

Dismantling stigma really starts with more open communication and widespread conversation. Conversations about sexual health tend to start in whisper networks among close groups of trusted friends, but having these conversations in public really helps others feel less alone.

A lot of these conversations are happening on forums like Reddit, which tells you that there is a lack of infrastructure for people to access support, answers, and reliable sexual health content. There’s been increased interest in investing in sexual health over the last few years, which we think will help bring new solutions to market around sexual health education.

COVID itself has also helped us dismantle the stigma around STIs because the conversations we have about COVID are similar to the ones we need to have around STIs. Are you masking? Have you been vaccinated? Have you been tested? Are you socially distancing? A face mask is basically a condom for the face. These conversational tools can now be leveraged to make STIs a more approachable conversation for people.

Who inspires you?

Dr. Ina Park has been such an incredible advocate and inspiration to us. She’s been totally fearless in wanting to change how we talk about STIs and a touchstone for progressive thinking around sexual healthcare. She’s a professor at UCSF, actively practicing clinician, consultant for the CDC, and author of the definitive book about stigma and STIs, Strange Bedfellows. She has an incredible bird’s eye view of the public health implications of STIs and a deep understanding of what it means to engage with patients on a day-to-day basis facing STI concerns.

Interested in joining the team? TBD Health is hiring a VP of Sales, Product Manager, Senior Software Engineering Manager, and a Social Media and Community Manager.

The future of the internet seems to be on everyone’s mind. The promise of web3 is a digital economy free of gatekeepers: instead of creating, consuming, and transacting on large social platforms, we’ll engage on open protocols where communities will own and operate networks. Communities and creators (instead of big tech companies) will have all the power, and the possibility to earn upside becomes present in every consumer decision. In web3, consumers also regain control over something that was notably lost in web2 — their anonymity and privacy.

There is still much to be proven out in web3, but one thing for sure is that talented founders and developers are flocking to build on this new frontier. Human is proud to welcome GLOW Labs to our portfolio, the first white-label loyalty rewards program on the blockchain, helping brands and creators navigate community rewards and loyalty programs in this new ecosystem.

We met founders Annie Reardon and Renee Russo when they joined Human’s entrepreneur-in-residence program, Humans in the Wild, with their next generation beauty-booking platform. As technical co-founders who were getting deeper and deeper into web3 personally, Annie and Renee made the pivot to start building where they saw the greatest opportunity.

We sat down with Annie and Renee to talk about how web3 is revolutionizing community, how that will change the way brands interact with consumers, and some of the best web3 projects out there right now.

How did you get involved in web3?

Renee Russo: I got involved in web3 back in 2016 when it was just known as crypto. I bought my first cryptocurrency, Ripple, and told my whole family to buy crypto. They still hold it over my head to this day because it went straight down, of course.

About a year ago, when crypto rebranded itself to web3, I got really involved in NFTs. This was the Top Shot days where you were able to buy NFTs with U.S. dollars. From there, I went to a bunch of NFT events and became really addicted to Zed Run, which is a play-to-earn NFT game.

I was experiencing these living, breathing NFTs that I could play and earn real money from. Being the builder that I am, I had to get my hands dirty — I started collecting and trading NFTs and ended up launching my own NFT collection about eight months ago. From there, the rest is history.

Annie Reardon: Renee and I were building Glow 1.0, the beauty booking app that we took through Humans in the Wild. During that time, we saw that the most sophisticated, smartest people that we knew were going into the web3 space. With both of us being software engineers, we started feeling like we were building in web 1.0.

We desperately wanted to be building on the frontier of technology and to be defining what the new extension of the internet was going to be. We started attending a lot of networking events in the NFT space, reading, and grasping any content that we could get. Then, we decided to take the plunge in November of 2021.

How is web3 revolutionizing community? What opportunity do you see with loyalty on the blockchain?

Renee: The definition of community is different in web3 because ownership is replacing fandom. In the metaverse, not only is a community member a fan of the brand, but they are also an owner. That ownership gets power and control.

When I buy an NFT, it’s because I’m aligned with the cause or passionate about the product. I want to change my profile picture on Twitter, repost all their content, buy and use everything.

That brand is now my digital identity, and I’m a walking brand ambassador.

Let’s say, for example, you went to a movie and it was horrible. You leave complaining about actors, the ending, and you’re upset with the producers of that film. That feeling of disappointment is because you are a fan. If you owned a tiny piece of that movie and the movie is disappointing, you’d leave knowing that you can personally influence the next one. You’re still a fan, but you’re also an owner.

In web3, a community member is your most powerful marketing tool, your most important stakeholder, and your most accurate metric of how the brand is performing.

How is that going to change the way brands interact with their customers?

Renee: The way brands and customers interact will have be based on tokenization — specifically, social tokens. Social tokens are digital assets backed by a reputation of a brand, individual, or community. They’re going to be huge because they allow new forms of monetization for content. Right now, creators, influencers, and brands use social media platforms to monetize, but the platform takes a huge chunk of the revenue share and essentially owns all of their content.

With social tokens, content creators and brands can eliminate this barrier and bring forward a new principle of ownership in a digital economy. Web3 is all about connecting creators or brands and consumers directly, ultimately giving creators and brands more control over their revenue.

What is your north star at GLOW Labs?

Renee: Our north star is definitely community. We believe that ownership should be in the community’s hands, and that communities should be rewarded for their loyalty. Community members are the most valuable asset and marketing tool in this space.

What are the defining characteristics of web3 culture? How is that impacting the type of company you are building?

Annie: Web3 is about decentralized communities, and we believe that’s the future. Our team is fully decentralized and working from all over the world, and we’re seeing really high-quality work from contractors who specialize in certain areas.

We’re staying close to that in the way we build our products, too: web3 products decentralize decision making and allow community members to help a company decide how they build products. We are going to play off aspects of that in our user testing and customer feedback.

Renee: Another important characteristic: most people keep their anonymity in web3. When you log into platforms in web2, you have to log in with your email, or with Facebook or Twitter, which is tied to your name, gender, age, and even sometimes your race. When you log in with web3, your digital ID is tied to your wallet. That wallet is a unique token hash on the blockchain so there’s no personal or demographic data attached.

What would you say to crypto non-believers?

Renee: Stay open-minded, technology will always evolve. Think about when the internet first came out and people could not wrap their heads around looking at a phone to read. There is a lot of noise right now in the crypto space and it’s important to find the signal, but just know that we’re all building for a better and more inclusive and innovative future.

Where are we in 5 years and where does GLOW Labs fit into that future?

Annie: We are each going to have a digital self and a physical self, and we will interact and participate with the world online instead of merely observing it, like we do in web2. We observe on social platforms and while browsing the internet. Web3 will be an immersive experience where you have your own avatar and your purchases are all on the blockchain, whether it be the deed to your house or your access to a concert.

Renee: In five years, GLOW Labs will be the go-to loyalty rewards program in the web3 space. Just like the Bored Ape Yacht Club and the World of Women are top tier communities for NFTs, we want to position ourselves as the main infrastructure tooling for web3 businesses to prosper in this new world.

What are your favorite web3 projects?

Renee: RTFTK were true innovators in the space, pioneering the concept of buying an NFT and then getting a physical copy of it. They just got acquired by Nike a couple of months ago.

World of Women is amazing. They weren’t the first female NFT project, but they are ones that have lasted and built a great community. Bored Ape Yacht Club, of course, is also a staple in this space.

Of course, I have to talk about DinoMonks, which is a mental health utility of the metaverse. I think they have a great mission and community.

Lastly, I love Cool Monkes. They are a new play-to-earn game where people can actually make money from owning and playing an NFT. It’s giving new job opportunities to people online: you can hire someone to play the game for you, and then they have this new source of income.

Annie: I think play-to-earn is really big. I like MoonPay. I just think they’re a little bit more mature.

From an aesthetic standpoint, I like Doodles, Invisible Friends, and Alien Frens. I tried to get a Women Tribe, but they sold out.

Rare Circles is doing a good job from a young Web3 company perspective. I think Upstream is doing a really good job.

My BFF is making the space super accessible for women, which is awesome, and I think the women behind it are just super sharp.

What advice do you have for people trying to learn about web3?

Renee: I have a three-step process. First is education, second is dedication, and third is creation. For step one: read online, watch YouTube videos, make a Twitter and follow people, take a course, and learn about what people are talking about in the space.

For the dedication piece, you’ve got to get your hands dirty: buy some NFTs, trade some NFTs, lose some money, and understand the hardship that goes into it. Sign up for a new platform, participate, play a game.

Once you’ve really dedicated yourself to this space, the next stage is creation. Create a simple NFT. It’s actually very easy. You can draw anything you want, take a picture of it, upload it to OpenSea, and put any type of value on it. Then, you have this NFT that lives on the blockchain and belongs to you, and you’re contributing to history and the evolution of the internet.

Annie: Seeing web3 as an extension of the internet is an un-intimidating way to approach it. I also think it’s important to find your communities and the outlets that you can learn from. Boys Club has an incredible way of making learning web3 a whole collective experience that you can do with your friends. The encouragement and motivation that comes from joining communities is great.

What is your experience being technical female founders in the web3 space?

Renee: I think there are 0.0000025% women founders in the Web3 space. We’re seeing a lot more women investors, but not many people building. As a female-led company, it’s important to be intentional with the people that you bring on your team and your cap table, and Annie and I made this an important point when we went out to raise capital. Three of the five investors on our cap table are from women-founded VCs and are women partners.

Annie: There’s a lot of PR around women-led NFT’s projects, but Renee and I are like, “Okay, we’re founders in this space, we’re building insane software.” I think that’s one distinction to make. That said, it’s been explosive for the women-led NFT projects, and I think it’s indicative of the way the space is turning.

Renee: It comes with representation. For so long, I was buying NFTs of monkeys and people with spiky hair and male traits, and then finally, you had some representation in the artwork so you can actually think, “This could be my digital identity.” Evolving from that, and then you have more representation with the founding team members, investors, and so on.

Interested in learning more about GLOW Labs? Check out their website here.

Half of Human’s portfolio companies are led by female founders, and many are endeavoring to build better solutions for female consumers, too. From creating a new standard of menopause care, to pioneering the frontier of vaginal healthcare, to helping new moms ensure their babies are eating fresh, healthy meals, our founders are trailblazing the next generation of companies that fill unmet needs for women.

We asked our founders what advice they have for aspiring female entrepreneurs, how they define success, myths they’d like to dispel, what is energizing them, and who inspires them to challenge themselves. Not one of our founders spoke of driving returns or exits as their measure of success — instead, they talked about their ability to drive human impact, act in service of their customers, and build connections that will strengthen and uplift communities of women.

The most common myth our founders wanted to dispel? That female entrepreneurs need to act like men in order to succeed. Rather, it’s leaning into the traits that make women different that will drive game-changing leadership and performance.

How do you define success?

Success to me is about enjoying the journey as much or more than any single goal. — Alexandra Dempster, Lupii

To me, success is defined by service. The more lives you can touch by being of service, the more impact you will make. And to positively impact the lives of others and to help more people thrive in life is a big part of what drives me to succeed. — Jamie Pabst, Spiritune

I place a high value on personal freedom and the ability to make a meaningful impact daily, so success for me is rooted in the ability to spend my time working on things that inspire me, with kind, smart, loyal people. — Emily Slade, Valence

Success is using one’s unique superpowers to serve and elevate humanity. — Susie Jaramillo, Encantos

Degree of innovation. That’s why I am so stoked about web3. — Annie Reardon, GLOW Labs

What is one piece of advice you’d give to an aspiring female founder?

So many people are going to have a perspective on your business — what you should do, shouldn’t do, etc. You have to trust your gut. — Kathryn Minshew, The Muse

Be intentional about increasing your resilience. Resilience isn’t necessarily a personality trait, but rather, it’s a psychological construct that you can learn and develop over time. If you focus on this, it will give you the tools to bounce back from the inevitable peaks and valleys that will comprise your journey as a female founder. — Brittany Hawkins, ELANZA Wellness

Create a support system. Mentors, women’s entrepreneur networks and cohorts, business partners, friend group, coach, therapist. I recommend all of it. Make sure you have places you can talk about how you are feeling and doing while you’re building. — Christie Marchese, Kinema

Never be shy to ask for the help and support you need. There are people around you who are ready to cheer you on, provide advice, and share resources — just ask! — Doreen Bloch, Ellement

Sounds trite but true: find your tribe of other early stage founders — female or not. They will be your greatest cheerleaders, teachers and eventually will help connect you with the right investors or talent needed to propel your company forward.

Also: send the cold email. In fact, send 50 cold emails. And don’t be afraid to brag in them — you are a star. Help the other person know the parts of you that shine brightest! — Alessandra Henderson, Elektra Health

We’ve really benefited from seeking out mentorship from other early stage founders. It’s tempting to only want advice from people who have been massively successful or who are 7–10 years into their startup journey, but we could not have made it without the guidance of founders who are just 3–6 months ahead. They acutely understand prioritization and immediate needs in a way that’s irreplaceable. — Priyanka Jain, Evvy

Remember that you are just as smart and capable as everyone else out there. Michelle Obama once said, “I have been at every powerful table you can think of… they are not that smart.” In other words, there’s no difference between you and the CEO of a Fortune 5 company. Your ideas and input are valuable, and you have a right to be here doing what you do. — Manon DeFelice, Inkwell

What is a myth you’d like to dispel about being a female founder?

We don’t need male bosses. We function differently and it’s a good thing. — Susie Jaramillo, Encantos

Myth: that you need to mirror the leadership style of a man (e.g., lead with male energy) to be successful. Truth: the most successful female founders (I know) lead and inspire with true authenticity and have embraced their feminine energy, making it part of their unique and brilliant leadership style. — Julie McClure, Hello.Me

The perfect resume or most relevant past experience isn’t the sole determinant of your startup’s success. Women are natural leaders with strength and good instincts. Have great mentors, build strong networks, and surround yourself with people that believe in you to help grow your business. — Jamie Pabst, Spiritune

Being non-traditional is not your downfall, it’s your secret weapon. There is a preconceived mold for female-founded companies to operate a certain way because of the scarcity of venture capital but in fact, female founders and underrepresented groups are often driving higher returns. A few years from now, there will be no traditional resume for female founders. These differences make you a better operator and provide you with a unique perspective. — Sofia Laurell, Tiny Organics

That the business playing field is already equal: the share of funding for all-female founding teams is down for the second year in a row, according to PitchBook, while a Lean In and McKinsey report calculates that it will take more than 100 years to reach gender parity in the C-suite. There’s still a lot of hill to climb. — Catherine Hendy, ELANZA Wellness

What is energizing you right now?

I am always feeling energized by my team. We are 50 strong now at Tiny Organics and wouldn’t be feeding babies in every single state without each and every person contributing to the collective. We are a predominately female team and were all female up until our Series A last year — women supporting women energizes me to no end! — Betsy Fore, Tiny Organics

Increased media attention on the need for greater women’s health innovation and support, a growing number of exits and IPOs for female led companies, and on a personal level, my daily evening gratitude practice with my husband as well as our 1+ year old daughter’s first steps. — Alessandra Henderson, Elektra Health

The incredible communities we are surrounded by, whether that’s a community of other female founders or our Evvy members. While they are incredibly different communities, they inspire us for a similar reason: they are both groups of women who are incredible builders and communicators, and most importantly they always come back and share their knowledge with their family and friends or the next generation of women who need it. — Priyanka Jain, Evvy

The natural world: cold water swims, early surf sessions, and the LA light (at this time of year it is absurdly beautiful). The LA art scene: it’s back in full force and it gives me a rush to be surrounded by so much creativity, beauty, and provocative work. Our mission: the rise and rise of the non-alc drinks category is more rapid than we could have hoped, as people become aware that booze should be optional, not default, and not drinking doesn’t preclude a social connection. — Lisa Farr Johnstone, Optimist Drinks

Who is a woman that inspires you to challenge yourself?

My grandmother. She was an immigrant, a refugee, had little formal education, many children, juggled multiple low-paying jobs simultaneously, spoke at least 3 languages, and was always cheerful and generous with what little she had. I try to keep her memory in my mind for some healthy perspective, especially when I’m feeling stressed. — Jannine Versi, Elektra Health

Mother Nature. When I see nature I’m inspired by it’s wonder and want to help protect it. — Stephanie Watson, Mimikai

Pretty much every woman I work with in the entertainment industry. Creating a work of art in the form of a film, and getting it to audiences successfully, is honestly sometimes nothing short of a miracle. I’m consistently inspired by the female directors, producers, and executives who are crafting, creating, and releasing films that move us to laugh, cry, and take action. — Christie Marchese, Kinema

My co-founder, Brittany. Finding the right co-founder is incredibly important, because when someone believes in you, you believe in yourself. — Catherine Hendy, ELANZA Wellness

I can’t stop thinking about this quote from Marie Daly, the first Black woman in the U.S. to earn a PhD in chemistry (she discovered the relationship between cholesterol and clogged arteries!). She said: “Courage is like — it’s a habitus, a habit, a virtue: you get it by courageous acts. It’s like you learn to swim by swimming. You learn courage by couraging.”

So much of entrepreneurship is about learning courage along the way, not waiting to have it before you start building! So I’m always trying to rise to the challenge of making courage a daily habit. — Laine Bruzek, Evvy

Dan Miller, founder and CEO of Spora Health, believes health inequities are a product of poor design. The staggering health inequities and disparities that Black Americans face are driven by a number of deeply entrenched systems, and some of them are present right in the doctor’s office in doctor-patient interactions.

Dan’s own experiences and those of his loved ones inspired him to examine how the relationships healthcare providers build with their patients can impact health outcomes. By putting cultural competence at the center of their care model, Spora is creating a new paradigm for care with trust and empathy at its core, leading to more positive experiences and better outcomes for their patients. Their curriculum for training doctors on culture-centered care has been so effective that they’re now making it available to external clinicians, employers, digital health companies, and provider networks around the country.

We sat down with Dan to learn about what inspired him to start Spora, what it means to offer culturally competent care, and how building a trusted brand is a critical part of the patient experience.

What inspired you to start Spora?

I was thinking about problems that I was uniquely positioned to solve within digital health and was meditating a lot on my lived experience, my relationship with healthcare broadly, and issues that affect the lives of me and my loved ones. I spoke to some family members and learned about some of the really negative experiences they had in managing their healthcare.

When I was in middle school in New Jersey, my great-grandmother came to live with us towards the end of her life because she wasn’t comfortable with her caretakers. I became her caretaker after school on days I didn’t have practice. That was a solution born out of the necessity to make our great-grandmother comfortable towards the end of life, but it wasn’t the right solution. There should have been a more culture-centered, better-aligned option for her to have access to.

Spora was born out of asking myself the question, “what if we put the culture of the populations we serve at the center of everything we do?”

Why are you starting with primary care?

Primary care is the first major touchpoint folks have with the healthcare system, so the relationship that providers have with the populations they serve is very important. They are the quarterbacks of healthcare, triaging patients to specialists and different parts of the system. Because that’s where the relationship starts, primary care is the best intervention point to begin addressing a lot of the inequities and disparities in healthcare for folks that look like me.

What are the biggest drivers of health inequity?

There are a ton of drivers that exist upstream that we can’t control as a practice. We focus on the many inequities and disparities that show up in the appointment setting that we can control for.

Those include things like trauma-informed care, which recognizes how populations that have been exposed to traumatic healthcare experiences make health decisions. We educate doctors on ways they can change their behavior when they are in an appointment with a patient.

Other examples are verbal and nonverbal communication styles. Empirically, when white providers interact with Black patients, they talk more during the appointment. When they interact with white patients, they tend to talk less and listen more. This leaves objectively less time for Black patients to ask questions and discuss treatment options. It also means Black patients leave these encounters feeling less of a connection with their primary care provider, which leads to lower rates of medical compliance and follow-up and, ultimately, worse health outcomes. That experience is something that we can control for and which can have really positive outcomes on our patients’ lives.

What does it mean for a provider to offer culturally competent care?

Culture is at the center of Spora — it’s our brand, tone of voice, and representation in our providers. I wanted to push that thinking forward and ask what it could look like as a care model, so I came up with a thesis of care called “culture-centered care.”

No accrediting body in the US requires health equity or cultural competence training. One of the forces that’s perpetuating inequities and disparities in our system is that we’re not helping our doctors understand that by incorporating these skills into their practice in an evidence-based way, they create behavioral change.

We created the curriculum to educate all of our doctors, and it’s now available externally for other providers as well through The Spora Institute. That means helping them better understand determinants of health and lived experiences of our populations, how they show up in clinical encounters, and how that changes the way symptoms may present in different populations.

We have positive data points that this is working. The Spora Institute has a 96 NPS score. Our doctors are demonstrating a 96% knowledge gain when we assess them for attitudes, behaviors, and their clinical ability to address these issues. This is creating a markedly better experience for our patients — they are giving us an 85 NPS score. The industry average is -1.

About 70% of our doctors are folks of color. The remaining 30% are not, but they’re still able to provide high-quality culturally competent care for our patients, and our patients still love the experience.

Why did you start The Spora Institute?

Large provider networks and practices kept asking us for our curriculum. We used our platform as a sandbox to make sure it worked. We’re there now and super excited about the outcomes we’ve been able to drive. Now we’re offering versions of the Spora curriculum for clinicians and non-clinicians alike, and selling that externally to employers, HR and benefits teams, digital health companies, and provider networks.

Why is brand an important part of Spora? How does that change the patient experience?

Brand is everything. I’ve been Black for 36 years now, and I know my community. Building trustworthy environments is what’s required to swing the pendulum back from a very stark, bland healthcare system to one that’s rich with culture and community, understanding the environments that folks inhabit, and how that informs their healthcare decisions.

There is no shortage of services that have been targeting Black folks for decades, and there is often a high degree of skepticism for us. You’ve got to come correct as a brand in an authentic way. I strongly believe that we would not have been as successful as we have been over the last few years if we didn’t show up for our community and build an authentic relationship with the folks that we serve. As we expand to other populations, we’ll be looking to take a similar approach, because they deserve it.

Where do you see the healthcare industry moving as it relates to hybrid care?

Telemedicine is great for many use cases, but often we still need to manage care in person, and there will definitely be more demand for hybrid models from patient populations. We are seeing subsets of our population interested in seeing providers in-person. They tend to be our older patients that have rooted behaviors in driving to the doctor’s office and low adoption rates for new technology.

It’s really important for us to learn first before we start to build out solutions. The evolution of hybrid care models will need to consider the needs of folks at a population level. A hybrid model could include remote patient monitoring with patients using devices in their homes, a traditional brick-and-mortar experience, or a provider coming to the patient’s house and treating them at home.

Right now, we’re listening closely and trying to understand our patients’ expectations for in-person care depending on where they live — behaviors might be different in Florida versus Virginia or Texas. I’d urge other telemedicine and hybrid care providers to do the same so we can continue to provide high-quality experiences instead of trying to create a cookie-cutter model.

We’re in a transformative moment for healthcare. What are you most excited about?

The emergence of culture-centered care as a category, which I believe is the next phase of patient-centered care. Patient-centered care has been a concept for decades now, but it’s not moving the needle enough to decrease inequities and disparities in different populations. I’m excited and inspired by the innovative care models that are coming up and are culture-centered for their populations — Tia, Folx, Kiira, and Plume are other examples. There is more differentiation than ever for patients, but we need more alternatives in the market for patients to have enough solutions for their unique needs.

CB Insights released their top 150 digital health companies for 2021, and there is no category for culture-centered or population-specific. The market doesn’t know how to assess companies like ours, but that will change over the next few years. As we have more outcomes data and time-series data, this new category is going to become a focal point.

Who inspires you?

I’m inspired by the folks that I’m in the trenches with, who are trying to create a better future and are betting their livelihood and precious time on this planet to build better systems for others. Other entrepreneurs, for sure, but also other policymakers and folks that are beacons of change for good.

Interested in learning more about Spora Health? Visit their website here.

When Tom and Lisa Johnstone started talking about their plans to create a non-alcoholic spirit back in 2019, they were met with head-scratching. Fast forward to 2022, and nearly 1 in 5 adults reported that they participated in Dry January. Sales across the category reached $3.1 billion last year (up from $291 million) and a growing number of young people (30% of college-age Americans) are choosing to abstain from alcohol entirely.

Noticing the dearth of quality non-alcoholic options, even in their wellness-centric hometown of Los Angeles, Tom and Lisa set out to create a botanical spirit that would bring people together in the same spirit of celebration and connection as alcohol and support their well-being. After over a year of exploring and perfecting their flavor profiles with a local master distiller, Optimist Drinks was born.

We recently sat down with co-founder Lisa to talk about Optimist’s mission, how the pandemic impacted the non-alc market, and how a global brand strategist and non-profit consultant created their mission-driven dream company.

What inspired you to start Optimist?

Tom and I were very driven by social innovation and bringing about social change. The last 4–5 years have been pretty turbulent, and we had a growing awareness of the levels of anxiety people were experiencing. We started noticing the impact of a strained and anxious zeitgeist on our family, and we realized alcohol wasn’t helping us deal with the situation. So we who have always enjoyed hosting, eating, and drinking, found ourselves wanting to drink a little less for our physical and mental wellbeing.

We bounced back and forth to the UK and noticed increasingly that there were fantastic non-alcoholic options in the retail spaces, bars, and restaurants there. When we came back to Los Angeles, which we consider to be the center of health and wellness trends, there were very few options. It was still trapped in the 1980s sugary mocktail style. There were some brilliant writers at the vanguard of the non-alc movement, like Ruby Warrington, Julia Bainbridge, and Holly Whitaker, but unless you got lucky in a bar, there were few options out there for people to actually sip on. It was a great moment to create a non-alc option in the US.

Your mission isn’t just to create a delicious beverage, it’s to strengthen human connection, combat isolation and loneliness, and promote mental health. Why have you chosen this path to do that?

Tom and I are very sociable creatures. We love dining out, hosting people at home, we love cooking. Tom is a fantastic mixologist. Since time immemorial, humans have gathered together for food and drink and celebration and that’s how bonds have been built in society. We started noticing that people were trying to drink less and younger generations, particularly younger millennials and Gen Z, were rejecting alcohol outright. In that same group, there was also an increase in loneliness, a sense of disconnection, and mental health issues. We have young children who will be that age in the blink of an eye, and we wanted to be part of changing that landscape.

Most of us have tried on occasion to avoid alcohol. You feel a sense of isolation immediately because you are less inclined to go out. If you are out, you don’t feel part of the party because you’re sitting there drinking a club soda with a squeeze of lime or something super sugary and quite revolting. There is a strange sense that you are dampening the evening for others by staying sober. There is history here — I read in Edward Slinger’s book, Drunk, that in ancient Rome, a great insult was to call someone a “water drinker,” which meant they were not to be trusted, that they were not part of the social gathering. In a way, that still happens now.

There was a really obvious need to make not drinking alcohol socially acceptable, and to help people realize that the social connection and buzz often comes from the company we’re keeping and the energy of the event, and not necessarily from ethanol.

Consumer interest in non-alcoholic beverages has been spiking. How has the pandemic impacted the market?

The pandemic brought with it particular business challenges, like production and supply chain, but more broadly it accelerated the changes we were seeing. When we shared what we were planning on doing in 2019, we were met with people scratching their heads and saying, “What’s the point of that?” A lot of our PR revolved around justifying the category before we could even talk about our product or brand. This year, there’s much less of a need to do that.

People got very excited about having cocktails at five o’clock in the first month or two of the pandemic. It became a ritual of shutting down your workday if you were working from home. It doesn’t take long to recognize that you can’t really function as your best self and drink cocktails from five o’clock every day. People became increasingly aware of their mental and physical well-being.

We often talk about mindful consumption. People are increasingly concerned with what they’re ingesting, what they’re choosing to eat and drink, where they’re sourcing things, and sustainability. We’re starting to interrogate more and recognize the impact that we have on our society and our planet.

Who are your customers and what drives them?

When we launched in January 2020 we were exclusively an e-commerce brand — everything was closed! Our early customers were often people who didn’t drink at all, for any number of reasons: personal taste, physical health, pregnancy, medical conditions, but there was an equal number who were exploring the newly emerging category — the “sober curious” (a term Ruby Warrington coined). That tended to skew slightly female, in their 30s and 40s, often looking for something to drink midweek as a first step to cutting back. Now, though, our customer base has broadened out by age and gender. Did you know 40% of American adults don’t drink alcohol?

Our other customers of course are the mixologists and beverage directors. Really, we want people to discover Optimist on bar and restaurant menus, when they are out socializing and connecting, and not just in the privacy of their own home.

How did you think about crafting the Optimist Brand?

We were determined to create a company that had a mission at its center, and we were obviously cognizant of the power of branding in communicating our message.

When we talk about optimism, it is active and grittily determined. We don’t mean rose-tinted positivity. We are talking about looking at the world with absolute clarity, recognizing the flaws and problems, and doing something about it. We create tools for optimists, be that our drinks, or the content we create in the form of the podcast and our journal pieces. As we designed the brand, we wanted to make sure we got that tension between active optimism and imperfection.

The shape of the bottle was very considered — slightly broader shoulders, so the spirit of optimism was imbued within the glass. The base is deliberately offset, because we wanted to create a stunning bottle that had its own imperfections. The idea being, although we might present perfectly, all of us are imperfect, we are all in progress (our podcast is actually called Optimist In Progress). The illustrations on the inside back label are laid out like a Rorschach test, which is a nod to the mental wellbeing mission we have at our core.

We knew from the beginning that we were going to be an environmentally positive brand. We are B Corp pending, and determined to operate ethically and regeneratively.

It was also really important to us that Optimist Botanicals didn’t feel like a downgrade or the less exciting option. It had to be something you’d actively want to choose, instead of being slightly embarrassed by. We wanted to position it as a premium drink that would stand very comfortably on the back bar of legendary cocktail bars, and on the menu at Michelin-starred restaurants.

How about actually making your botanicals? What goes into them?

We weren’t interested in making alcohol mimics. Through steam distillation and CO2, we wanted to capture the essence — the spirit — of the botanical ingredients and create clear, clean, sugar-free drinks to be mixed simply with club soda or tonic, or used in more complex cocktails. They had to have backbone, a considered taste profile, and be full of flavor.

We wanted to keep production local and found a master distiller we were really excited to work with. For over a year, we talked through the three flavor areas we were interested in exploring––where we wanted a sip to take you.

Having spent a few years in a grey London, when you land in Los Angeles, you see things with very wide, clear eyes and you fall madly in love with the beautifully diverse environments that we’re fortunate to live in. We live a two-minute cycle from the gorgeous beaches, can be up in the canyons in 25 minutes, and then it’s an hour and a half out to the high desert. These locales, and the diverse community that makes up this city, provided the inspiration for our drinks.

As an example, Bright takes you to the end of a hot day in Venice. You’ve got salty skin after being on the beach. The sun is lowering in the sky and you’re having an outdoor shower. There’s a lemon tree nearby and you can smell jasmine in the summer air. Then it’s grounded with myrrh — it’s not all lightness and lemons in Venice, there are many other textures.

We taste-tested all of the flavors with sparkling water because we recognize that some people don’t want to drink sugar or tonic — we wanted them to stand alone and be absolutely delicious. They were not designed to be sipped, but we’ve discovered that a lot of people do enjoy sipping them.

What impact does Dry January have on your business?

Dry January is a really significant month because that’s when people are very open to the idea of not drinking and more likely to explore the growing non-alc category. Even since last year, we’re seeing a significant step change. Bars and restaurants are increasingly interested in creating cocktails they can offer to their non-drinking clientele.

It also brings a big spike in media interest as well, making more people aware of the category and open to the idea that drinking alcohol doesn’t have to be a binary decision. Over 75% of alcohol drinkers want to drink less and are actively looking for non-alc alternatives. And half of younger folks between the ages of 18–25 have zero interest in drinking booze at all.

The world has been waking up. We’re at a tipping point now, and it’s amazing.

Who inspires you?

I am inspired by anyone who recognizes the problems we face as a society and as a species, and who works to create a better future. Personally, I am deeply motivated by social justice and equity, and that has only been compounded by our time in the US. Bryan Stevenson’s selfless and unrelenting dedication to challenging bias in the criminal justice system leaves me in awe.

I am also deeply inspired by the people in our communities who dedicate themselves to helping those underserved and overlooked by society. The brilliant people at non-profit Safe Place for Youth (to whom we give a percentage of our sales revenue) are dedicated to getting young people off the streets and providing the mental wellness services they need to find some stability and take back control of their lives.

Interested in trying Optimist? Check it out here or find retailers here.

Every human struggles with time management at some point in their life or career. As the working lives of many have changed dramatically over the last two years, professionals are increasingly overwhelmed by too many meetings and ballooning inboxes that make it feel impossible to cross off everything on their to-do lists. Time-tracking apps and digital solutions abound (as do distractions and digital temptations), but Suchit Tuli, co-founder and CEO of Quantime, believes the solution lies in a simple practice humans have been doing for thousands of years: time-blocking.

Inspired by helping people find more time for the things that matter to them, Suchit built Quantime as a smart calendar that intelligently finds and reserves time for all of your tasks. By blocking time for every to-do, Quantime helps you organize your weeks more effectively and gain awareness of how you spend most of your time. This practice not only supports productivity at work, but enhances overall well-being.

We recently sat down with Suchit to talk about the most prevalent time management pain points, the philosophy behind time-blocking, and his favorite productivity hacks.

What inspired you to start Quantime?

My dad passed away when he was about my age now. So from a very early age, I realized how little time all of us have. Because of this, I’ve always felt anxious around how I’m spending my time.

Over the years, as I looked around me, whether it was college, my first few jobs, or business school, I saw other people suffering from this anxiety around time and guilt around productivity too.

This is what inspired me to build something that finds time for things that matter and supports people in doing exactly what they want to with their days.

Who is Quantime built for?

Our vision is that, one day, Quantime will help every single professional in the world.

Today, we’re focused on the super busy professionals — recent grads, managers at corporations, startup employees, SMB executives, or even working parents, living in cities like New York, LA, and San Francisco. Our customers are in their 20s–30s and struggling to make time for the things that really matter to them.

These things could be as simple as calling your mom, grabbing dinner with friends, or even just eating lunch during the day. We’re building for people who are trying to start new habits, or get back to old hobbies and interests. And people who want to do more at their jobs but don’t have enough time to focus on that one project that will move them forward.

What have you found are the most prevalent time-management pain points?

We hear from customers that they deal with a lot of noise at work — coworkers, emails and Slack messages, social media, personal devices, meetings, even lower priority tasks.

If you dig deeper, all these time-management hurdles boil down to two things. Firstly, we are all trying to do too much — our to-do lists are way too long and so our attention is scattered. Secondly, there is no plan of attack for the things that actually matter on your to-do list. Because there is no plan of attack, the constant stream of disruptions are able to do exactly that: distract and take focus away from the most important task at hand.

One of the things we asked our users is “how do you know you’ve had a successful week?” The most common answer they gave was when they’ve crossed off everything on their to-do list — but 41% of things on a list never get done, and so a lot of us don’t feel fulfilled and accomplished at the end of the week. But this has more to do with the fact that a to-do list is never-ending than with us.

40% of people get less than 30 minutes of uninterrupted time at work. If you don’t have time to focus, of course that to-do list is never getting done.

And to compound this issue, nobody teaches you the best practices of time-management in school. While you’re learning things like accounting, science, or math, you’re not directly learning the most essential life skill, which is just managing your time.

How has the pandemic impacted the way people manage their time?

One of the things we noticed early on in the pandemic is that people had meetings starting earlier in the day and ending later. The workday expanded and folks had more meetings because we replaced serendipitous interactions at the office with meetings on the calendar. A lot of managers started to rely on Zoom to ensure teams were communicating, collaborating, and making progress.

Another key change was that commute time was eradicated. As much as people complained about their commutes prior to Covid, commute time is really important because it establishes a geographic and mental boundary between work and home. Without it, time management has gotten even harder because people are taking care of both personal and professional stuff all within the same space and all within the same time. Ultimately, this impacts not only on how much we effectively accomplish in a given day, but also our mental health and self-worth.

What’s the philosophy behind time-blocking? What are your tips for making it work most effectively?

The calendar was invented even before the wheel. We’ve been using the calendar to manage our time for thousands of years. In some ways, we as human beings are evolutionarily programmed to follow our calendars.

That’s why when you see something on your calendar, you have an impulse to actually do it. When you come out of a meeting, though, what you often see is empty space. When you see a blank slot on your calendar, your brain doesn’t know what it needs to do next, so it picks out random things from a mental list. You can go get coffee, go to the bathroom, respond to texts on your phone, answer emails, check Instagram. You may start on something related to work, but it may not be the most important thing you need to get done in that time.

Time blocking is recording your to-do list on your calendar and carving out the amount of time you need to get each thing done. We already do this — we mentally block off time to be with family over the holidays, we mentally block off weekends for personal things — but we’re not doing it for every single activity yet. We need to go one step further and block time for tasks that are both professional and personal so that we actually save time for them.

This is how the most successful people in the world — Marc Andreessen, Jack Dorsey, Bill Gates, Elon Musk — manage their time. It’s a well-researched practice, and we’ve compiled the best tips on it here.

How does time-blocking enhance well-being at work?

One, feeling better about yourself and your work. One of the best things about time blocking is not just proactively planning your week but also retroactively feeling accomplished because you can see exactly how much you accomplished against your plans.

Two, carving out personal time for yourself. Time-blocking isn’t just about reserving time on your calendar for work. It’s about finding time on your calendar for what matters to you personally: spending time with loved ones, working out, focusing on hobbies, or just getting rest.

Time-blocking has the benefit of visualizing your time as a graph against your calendar — like a bar chart, you can assign colors to different activities and see that you’re spending more time at work than you might want to, or too little time against certain projects or activities.

How do we make space for the inevitable — whether it’s getting pulled into a last minute meeting or snoozing the alarm?

This is a super interesting question because there are two conflicting ideas in there that folks often don’t realize. Things can’t be both last minute and inevitable. If you feel that you’re predictably doing things last minute often, it’s probably time to reflect and increase your awareness of your time expenditure to get proactive about it.

Jack Dorsey famously ran two public companies at the same time. Obviously, he has to be a master of time management. One thing he’s done very successfully is theme different days — on Monday he works on management, Tuesdays are focused on product, and so on. You can imagine that the rest of the week is baked out as well, but an important thing to notice on his Sunday is that he takes time to reflect.

It’s super important to plan out your week on Sunday evenings, and look back on the prior week(s) to gain awareness of how much time is in your control. It’s helpful to know if you are in a proactive environment or a reactive environment, where you are constantly juggling last-minute priorities and emails. You can know that realistically you may only have 3 hours that are actually in your control, and time-block accordingly.

What is your favorite productivity hack?

Blocking time on your calendar for emails. This way you are not inclined to answer everything as it comes in. Instead you can triage. If something is truly urgent, respond to it, but otherwise you can snooze it until later in the day when you have time to clear out your inbox.

Again, the problem is that we’re trying to do too much. If you don’t account for the fact that you will have emails to respond to, you’re setting yourself up for failure. People are often surprised that they block off an hour for something, but it actually takes them longer — and email can take up 2–3 hours of your day. It’s important to notice when you go over your timeblocks and adjust for that in the future.

Who inspires you?

Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. I’m sure those are common answers when you ask entrepreneurs, but the reason those two come to mind for me is because they never think about building products incrementally. I’ve never wanted to build something that is 10% better — I’m largely motivated by disrupting an industry or schools of thought. That’s what both Jobs and Musk have done — it’s not just a single product and it’s not just 10% improvements; rather it’s going back to first principles to build something new, it’s about flipping entire industries — personal computing, telecommunications, music, aerospace, financial services, automobiles — on their heads.

I don’t think time management is solved through a 10% improvement, because it’s a universal problem that has been around for millennia. It’s solved by something that allows people to completely change their mindset around how they view time.

Interested in trying Quantime? Get started here.

In theory, the internet enables anybody with access to a smartphone or computer to become an expert on any topic, from philosophy to DIY soap-making to playing the piano. As Ida Josefiina sees it, the sheer volume of content available online means our greater challenge in making knowledge more accessible is in helping people discover, organize, digest, and retain information they find.

A perpetual learner who has lived in nine different countries but did not attend university, Ida never had easy access to the resources that are ensconced in academic research libraries. Being the architect of her own intellectual journey led her to create Sane, an app that provides users with digestible summaries of nonfiction and academia, helping them build a network of connected knowledge in a way that fits the limitations of our busy, modern lives. Sane’s product is designed not just to introduce you to a new topic — readings range from eloquent, digestible overviews of general relativity to theories on whether we are living in a computer simulation — but as an active exercise to help build a healthy habit for thinking.

We recently sat down with Ida to discuss the problem Sane is solving, why intellectual pursuit is the new social currency for Gen Z, and why she thinks reading is still the best way to learn.

What inspired you to start Sane?

I didn’t go to university myself. I’ve spent the last 10 years reading, traveling, researching, and listening to podcasts. I’ve lived in nine different countries in my adult life — always traveling and exploring my curiosity. I’ve often wished that there was a guide for discovering new things to read and learn about. I’ve been so lost, I’ve Googled “what to read.”

For example, how can you be interested in something like the hard problem of consciousness if you’ve never heard about the hard problem of consciousness?

It’s been a slow process for me to build enough accumulated knowledge to know what other pathways to take, what thinkers to discover, and what ideas to dive deeper into. This process is much more about learning how to think than about learning anything specific.

That’s the problem that Sane is trying to solve. We’re creating a personalized guide to the pursuit of knowledge that is accessible outside of institutions to anyone on their phone.

You’ve said that intellectual pursuit is a new social currency. Where are you seeing evidence of this?

Before the pandemic, we were living in the experience economy. People weren’t going to restaurants just for the food, but for the ambiance and the specific vibe, and they were documenting it on Instagram. I think we’re seeing this be replaced by what we call the internal experience economy, and the pandemic accelerated it like crazy. A more personal, spiritual, and of course intellectual pursuit is replacing the idea of the experience economy.

We’re also seeing the rise of a new generation into consumer power. Gen Z is also called “true gen.” They are hypercognitive, in search of truth, and comfortable adopting different new tools for learning online. They’re also really building their identities and communicating individual expression specifically through the cultivation of ideas.

You’ve shared that you look at memes for market research. How big are trends like theorygram and how do you see them growing?

They’re really huge. E-learning was booming well before the pandemic, but has of course accelerated and is predicted to reach $457.8 billion by 2026.

The demand for short-form educational content has also boomed. TikTok has hugely popularized things like tik philosophy, and they recently invested $15 million into the space, so we’re seeing Gen Z platforms understanding that there is a clear trend. It’s a very significant trademark for this generation.

What are the biggest challenges you see with e-learning and how is Sane solving them?

The internet is full of information and 99% of it is free. It’s all there, so accessibility is not about the availability of information but how to discover, organize, digest, and retain it. The platforms that we have now are reductive in so many ways. Not just for the type of content that’s being shown, but because of the personalized, polarizing algorithms that just show you things that you already know or believe.

Who goes on university websites to look at the research they are publishing, and then downloads a 30-page research PDF that’s full of jargon? It’s technically accessible because it’s there, but it’s not accessible because people have limited time.

That’s where Sane comes in. We’re building a truly accessible way for people to discover new ideas without the burden of those navigational challenges. We’re not dumbing down content, but we’re putting it in a format that gives users much more space to meditate on the ideas themselves rather than get caught up in all the layers of distraction, like overly complex language.

A lot of online learning experiences are presented in interactive formats like video and audio. Why did you decide to build a reading experience?

This gets to the very core of Sane’s product. We’ve designed Sane to be less about consuming content and more about meditating on ideas to really expand your neural networks and generate more of those “a-ha” moments.

You can’t scroll on Sane. There are only a few lines of text per screen that force you to meditate on each word and idea. We’re not just an app for learning pieces of information, but an active exercise to build a healthy habit for thinking.

Gen Z are digital natives who spend almost 3 hours a day social media. What are the most effective ways for you to reach your audience?

There is a clear shift in digital behavior happening where Gen Z are migrating from public podiums into the more intimate nooks and crannies of the internet, where they gather with people who want to talk about similar ideas, topics, or people. Venkatesh Rao calls it the “cozyweb.”

These micro-communities are extremely strong and the opportunity is more massive than anyone can imagine. We’re finding and engaging with people in these communities through our podcast, and it’s interesting to find how interconnected our guests are.

Where do you find your content?

We’re really focused on academia. We want Sane to include content that you don’t find on the airport bestsellers bookshelf. All of our content is quite existential in nature, whether it’s about the future of humanity, technology, psychology, or consciousness, and it’s sourced from those deep rabbit holes of academia that people normally don’t have access to.

What is one thing you wish people better understood about Gen Z?

That if you measure people’s attention spans on platforms that have been created to reduce your attention span, you probably shouldn’t expect unexpected results.

There is an active rebellion going on against big tech. There is a huge group of Gen Zers who are actively practicing this rebellion, rethinking their relationship to technology, and wanting to be much more intentional with their time.

Who inspires you?

Richard Price, who founded academia.edu. It is insanely cool that he created a platform that hosts roughly 22% of the world’s research on it.

Now we need a new version that’s not just for researchers, but that can help anyone learn anything. That’s where Sane comes in.

Sign up for Sane’s private beta by searching for Sane — new ideas daily in the App Store and using the invite code Newideas.

The United States is the most charitable country on earth, but the systems and technology in place for giving are rife with inefficiencies. The state of corporate matching programs is a major culprit, with estimates of as much as $5–7 billion of eligible donations going unmatched. Jake Wood, founder and CEO of Groundswell, saw an opportunity to do better for average Americans, who give a much larger share of their take-home pay to charity than the ultra-wealthy, but don’t have access to the same resources and benefits.

Groundswell unlocks philanthropic giving at scale by making charity an employee benefit, giving people the power of a personal foundation in the palm of their hand: a 401K for giving.

Service has been at the core of Jake Wood’s life and career since joining the U.S. Marine Corps after a Division I college football career. Shortly after Jake returned home in 2010 from two tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, Haiti was struck by a devastating earthquake. As traditional aid organizations struggled to deploy relief efforts, Jake quickly mobilized a team of veterans and doctors to help on-the-ground. That effort evolved into Team Rubicon, the disaster-response organization Jake led as CEO for 12 years before founding Groundswell. Under Jake’s leadership, Team Rubicon grew to over 150,000 volunteers, responded to nearly 1,000 disasters, raised nearly $300 million for their work, and was named one of the best places to work.

In honor of both Veterans Month and giving season, we sat down with Jake to talk about moving from Team Rubicon to building a technology startup, and the leadership lessons he’s bringing with him.

You’ve lived a life of service, from the U.S. Marine Corps to building Team Rubicon. How has this path led you to Groundswell?

Service and impacts have always been really important to me. At the same time, I always knew in my heart that I was an entrepreneur. In my decision to leave my post at Team Rubicon, I knew I wanted to start something again, and I was concerned that I wouldn’t be able to come up with an idea that would still serve the greater good. I feel really lucky that I was able to take what I’d learned as a first-time entrepreneur building and raising money for Team Rubicon to come up with the idea that has become Groundswell.

Groundswell puts the power to solve the world’s problems into the hands of the many, rather than the powerful few. Why do you believe that will work?

The issues facing our communities are inherently local. With an issue like homelessness, there are systemic issues that we need to address, but at the end of the day people sleeping on the street need a place to sleep, and that’s a local issue. I think that there are a lot of inefficiencies in identifying local solutions to what are naturally local problems.

We’re not aiming to replace large, systemic philanthropy. Some problems have to be solved systemically with major infusions of capital. All too often, though, that doesn’t happen because billionaires are trying to get to Mars instead of solving real-world problems.

Why are you starting by working with employers?

In my experience at Team Rubicon, I saw just how tragically complicated and inefficient corporate matching programs are. I got the idea for Groundswell late at night, as most ideas typically come. I started thinking about this idea of upending corporate matching using a traditional donor-advised fund (DAF) approach.

There have been a lot of people who have tried to create new and novel ways to give to charity and a lot of them never scaled. Right away, I knew it was not a technology problem. It was immediately a scale problem. That was really the impetus for what has become our primary go-to-market strategy.

What is the state of charitable giving in the US right now? What does it look like after Groundswell?

America remains the most charitable country on the planet — and it’s not even close. There’s a few trends that are happening. More and more people are giving online, but there’s a ton of inefficiencies in online donations, mostly due to transaction costs. Additionally, there’s estimates that as much as $5–7 billion of eligible corporate matches go unmatched, which is mostly due to the horrific state of existing matching platforms.

The average American is giving a really meaningful portion of their take-home pay to charity, relative to the ultra-rich. Our hope is that we make that as efficient as possible so they’re getting the most bang for their buck. These are precious dollars that average Americans are sending out to charity, and it’s unfortunate that they don’t have the same resources that ultra-rich people do. I think we can make the pie more efficient, but I think we can also increase the size of the pie.

How has your journey been from the non-profit sector to the for-profit world of Silicon Valley?

After having some of our initial fundraising calls, I called Heather Hartnett and said, “Heather, raising money is so easy.” She told me, “Now you realize that when you were running a nonprofit, you were training with ankle weights on.” That was the perfect way of putting it.

I think for-profit companies are much simpler. You have direct relationships with your customers, you build a great product, and the customer pays you directly for it. In the non-profit space, you build something great and ask somebody else, who isn’t directly benefiting, to pay for it. I’m really excited about the elegant simplicity of building a company — and that we’ll have a significant war chest to do it early. It took me four years at Team Rubicon to raise what I’ve been able to raise in four months at Groundswell.

What are the top tenets for leadership that you’re bringing from Team Rubicon to Groundswell?

We’re really focused right now on building a foundation that’s rooted in our people. We’re making a very deliberate decision to build an in-person culture. In the aftermath of COVID, that makes finding talent a lot harder. We knew that was going to be the case when we made the decision, but our hypothesis is that having an in-person team will be a strategic advantage in the coming years and that the headwinds we see now will become tailwinds in the future.

We made that decision because we believe culture will be critically important. Startups inherently move faster, and it’s key in those environments to build a culture where everyone is aligned to the same vision — where in the absence of a plan, you are consistently getting to the right decision and the right outcome.

You have a proven ability to attract and rally strong teams around you, and create deep conviction in what you’re building. What’s your strategy for building strong teams?

Storytelling is one of the most underutilized tools in a leader’s toolkit. If you think of your company like a story, it’s got a beginning, a middle, and an end, it has characters, protagonists, and antagonists. Unfortunately, it also has plots and twists and unexpected turns. If you treat your team like they’re just unnamed characters in the story, then they’re going to show up like unnamed characters and they’re going to put in unnamed-character effort. If you treat them like a consequential character, if you give them a name, an opportunity to impact the plot, and treat them like a hero, then they show up like a hero.

Human beings want to be part of a story. Great leaders give people that opportunity.

Who inspires you?

I remain inspired by the incredible volunteers that I had the opportunity to work with at my last company, Team Rubicon. Collectively, they were the most selfless and change-driven people I have ever met. Countless times they would drop everything to fly to a community they’d never been to in the aftermath of a storm, all for the chance to make a difference on the worst day of a stranger’s life. Our nation could use more people like them.

Interested in joining Groundswell’s mission? They are hiring across product, sales, and technology. See open roles here.

According to Elektra Health co-founder Alessandra Henderson, menopause is poised to have many multi-billion dollar businesses. Not only are there 34 symptoms in need of new products and solutions, but the category has been historically underlooked and underserved. But that’s changing: not only are Gen X women digitally savvy consumers, but they also have high discretionary spend and are actively speaking up and out about their health. Today, we’re just starting to scratch the surface of the huge opportunity for companies that improve livelihoods and outcomes for peri- and menopausal women.

50 million women are currently navigating menopause in the US. Sadly, 75% of women who actively seek help for their menopause symptoms do not receive treatment from their doctor. That leaves millions of women needlessly suffering. Elektra’s platform offers them telemedicine care, evidence-based education, community, and events, and is on a mission to bring the outdated and fragmented menopause space into the 21st century in partnership with world-renowned physicians.

In honor of Menopause Awareness Month, we sat down with Alessandra to talk about empowering women through community, why women have historically been so underserved during menopause, and how her own hormonal health journey inspired her to build Elektra.

What inspired you to start Elektra?

Elektra was inspired by a personal health journey of my own that really exposed me to the incredibly fragmented and, unfortunately, incredibly broken healthcare system.

Through that process, I became obsessed with hormonal health. I had frozen my eggs and the hormones from egg freezing impacted my eyesight. I had no idea that a patch by your ovaries could impact your vision and the way you see in the world. I’ve since learned that women have anywhere between 100+ estrogen receptors all over our bodies, and when we talk about hormonal health, it impacts everything from your brain, to your heart, to your gut, to your eyesight.

I’m really excited to build a brand that smashes taboos and unlocks information for a critical point in a woman’s hormonal health journey. I teamed up with my co-founder, Jannine, who has a background in health tech and building equitable digital health solutions, and our founding physician Dr. Anna Barbieri, a double-board certified OB/GYN on staff at Mt. Sinai (also certified by the North American Menopause Society). We also work with an incredible group of advisors, including several past presidents of the North American Menopause Society — the top medical organization in the space. Making sure that we built with evidence-based information and clinical expertise from day one was incredibly important to us.

There are so many shocking statistics about menopause. Even in the medical community, less than 20% of OBGYN residency programs educate doctors on menopause. How did we get here and how is Elektra filling the gap?

There are many reasons why women’s health has been so undervalued in the medical community, with menopause being especially ignored.

First, women’s health broadly is wildly under-researched. For example, from 1977–1993, women were excluded from clinical drug trials. That means 17 years of lost data on how many of the common drugs we use today and their dosing impact women. As a result, women are at greater risk for adverse side effects.

Secondly, looking at areas that are completely focused on women’s health, there has historically been an emphasis on women during their reproductive years. We even see this during pregnancy — after going through their nine-month pregnancy journey, women only get one follow-up visit, and then all the attention gets put on the baby.

After that, we often hear from women who share that they are ignored and feel invisible once they hit perimenopause and menopause. There’s a systemic ageism in not valuing a woman’s voice after a certain age, which is unfortunately baked into the medical community at large.

Lastly, in the US specifically, we are very procedures-based. The entire financial system of medicine is built around procedures: providers make their money from operations such as hysterectomies (one-third of all women will undergo this procedure by age 50) rather than really spending time with a patient and understanding what is going on. Menopause care is very consultative — it requires a lot of talking, listening, and gathering data. Unfortunately, the healthcare system at large does not reward that financially. 75% of women who actively seek care for menopause leave with no treatment at all.

It’s also important to recognize that menopause is not all about age. There are women in their 20s and 30s who experience menopause either through surgical menopause (e.g. Lena Dunham’s hysterectomy for endometriosis put her into menopause), premature menopause (1% of women go into menopause before age 40), or the thousands of women who go into menopause as a result of cancer treatment. We hear from so many of these women who receive treatment from their oncologist who say that they hear “oh, and by the way, you’ll go into menopause” as they are shoved out the door with no kind of support.

That is a really big underserved population of women who have no medical support. For these women and the 6,000 women who enter menopause every day in the US, Elektra is stepping in to fill the gap.

Community is a core pillar of Elektra’s offering. How are you building an engaged community of women, and why was that an important part of your strategy from day one?

Elektra started with community. Pre-COVID, we hosted Elektra salons in community members’ homes, bringing experts out of the exam room and into a safer space for women to ask questions. We found that when one woman had a question, a majority of the women in that space had the same question, but were too embarrassed to ask. We heard “is this normal?” all the time. One woman would almost always ask about painful sex or libido, and every woman in the room would nod their head. More often than not, some women will start crying when they realize that they’re not alone, and that there are solutions to help them.

We’ve tried to take that spirit into everything we do. Today, that manifests on our platform in a private community where women can ask questions with a group of peers, moderated by an expert who can respond with evidence-based expertise.

We offer weekly virtual sessions — we call them Elektra Circles — where women can come together to discuss topics such as sex, anxiety, navigating menopause with a partner, and more. Again, these are facilitated by experts who can answer the tough questions, while allowing women to speak up and out. One favorite session, a woman shared that she “had goosebumps” listening to the women share since they were sharing the same concerns & questions she had, but had felt so alone with. That kind of connection is incredibly powerful above and beyond the medical expertise we provide.

Menopause is often framed as a scary, lonely experience, yet you are building a brand that is focused on empowerment and positivity. How are you thinking about broadening the narratives around menopause?

Menopause can be really hard to talk about. If you look at the list of 34 symptoms, you wouldn’t wish them on anybody. We recognize how difficult it can be, but there is opportunity on the other side — any time of change allows you to reflect, take stock, and figure out who you want to be in the next chapter.

At our core, our brand is about educating and empowering women. We use community stories from real women to help focus on the positives and encourage our community to reframe this period of their life. Notably, there are a few themes we hear regularly from women — from not having to deal with periods anymore, to experiencing a burst of creativity, to finally investing in themselves. One common phrase is, “Entering into menopause has allowed me to step into who I am, and to finally put myself first.”

Our platform exists to give women agency: over their health, their lives, and their story. Historically, women have been expected to just grit their teeth and bear menopause in silence. Thankfully that’s changing, and if there is one thing I want women to know, it’s that there are solutions.

As you go to market, what are your early findings on what works best for your target audience?

Our demographic is Gen X, and we’ve taken their habits into consideration as we build our product. They are incredibly tech-savvy, but definitely lean desktop over mobile. They’re also much more email-loyal than other generations, so we’ve leaned into referral and word-of-mouth. We’ve seen referral rates of up to 40% for some of our programs.

They have a real appetite for expertise and are demanding better solutions, so we make sure to put our expertise front-and-center.

We’re very strategic in how we think about growth and marketing, because it can be harder for a menopausal woman to share her personal story on Instagram, compared to a Gen Z woman who is standing up louder and prouder about their hormonal health experience.

You recently raised a $3.75M Seed round. What are your key priorities for Elektra now that you’ve finished the raise?

Following the raise, we’re focused on building an incredible team (we’re hiring!), and investing in our digital platform. We’re excited to expand our proprietary symptom-based programs, and of course continue to invest in community support offerings.

We’re starting to see more people investing and building in the menopause market, which is projected at $600B. Where do you think this space will be 10 years from now? What are you most excited about?

We’re really excited to see a lot more entrants coming into the space. Menopause is a huge market and there are going to be many multi-billion dollar businesses in it. You just have to look at the fertility market to know that the same will be true of menopause.

I’m really hoping that the healthcare community — both payers and providers — are going to step up efforts around supporting women throughout their menopausal journey.

Culturally, I think we’re going to be in a place where a woman feels more comfortable not only among her friends, but in the workplace, with her partner, and with her children. We recognize that employers play a really big role in supporting employees throughout their healthcare journey, so we’re excited about seeing them offer more support for women at this stage.

Who inspires you?

My dream team are Michelle Obama, Jane Fonda, and Heather Hartnett. Women that speak up and out and aren’t afraid to change the conversation.

There’s also a large group of female entrepreneurs who I feel lucky to count as friends and collaborators. It’s the female founders who are making waves in healthcare and represent who I want to be when I grow up, especially those who are mothers, activists, thought leaders, and writers on top of being startup founders and CEOs.

Interested in joining the team? Elektra is hiring across product, marketing, and customer ops. Explore open roles here.

Menopause represents a $600B market opportunity, but the 1.3 million women who enter this life stage every year report feeling ignored and invisible by both the medical community and society at large. Natalie Waltz, founder of Tabu, is on a mission to help women reclaim their physical and emotional well-being through sexual wellness, and fight the taboos that prevent women from preserving this important part of their life as their bodies change.

Sexual wellness brands historically do not cater to an older demographic, but Natalie uncovered that sexual wellness products are a first-line treatment for many of the persistent symptoms that women suffer from during menopause. In partnership with doctors, pelvic floor physical therapists, and a cohort of women, she developed The Kit: the first sexual wellness product made for menopause.

In honor of Menopause Awareness Month, we sat down with Natalie to talk about why it’s so hard for women to get help during menopause, how to build a sexual wellness brand that speaks to women of all backgrounds, experiences, and ages, and how her relationship with her mom sparked and inspired this journey.

What inspired you to start Tabu?

While at TCG (The Chernin Group), I learned some outrageous facts about how prevalent the sexual health side effects of menopause are: 90% of women can experience pain or discomfort during sex, so much so that 50% just stop being sexually active altogether in their 50s. I remember hanging up the phone and instinctively texting my mom, “Hey, do you or your friends have pain or discomfort during sex?”

Once we got through a fair amount of “ha-ha’s,” we had a really sobering conversation. She knew exactly what was happening to her body, and admitted it wasn’t just physical but deeply emotional, affecting how she feels about herself and her relationship with my stepdad.

It quickly dawned on me that this was the first sex talk I’d ever had with my Muslim Middle Eastern mother, who was born in Syria. This isn’t table talk for us. I speak to her at least once a day, so I was bothered that I had no idea that something so meaningful was going on — something that was clearly impacting her confidence, her self-worth, her relationships, and ultimately, her health.

Shortly thereafter, I talked to a lot of women and I learned that so many were feeling much like my mom. While I’m not a doctor or a sex therapist, I knew there were many more benefits to sex than just the ability to procreate, and it didn’t make sense that we were giving up on this part of our lives during this transition.

Something that really surprised me was that I learned many OBGYNs and pelvic floor physical therapists recommend women use regular sexual activity as a means to treat and prevent many of the symptoms that are keeping them from sex in the first place. That means doctors recommend women to go out and buy a vibrator, lubricant, and think of sex differently — as part of their overall wellness routine.

I often joke that my mom can’t say the word vibrator out loud, let alone use one. The challenge and opportunity we saw with Tabu was to build a brand that really celebrates and honors sexual wellness as our bodies change, and to create products that feel more akin to high-end skincare than legacy sexual wellness.

Ultimately, our goal is to put health before pleasure to make sexual wellness feel as natural as our skin and exercise routines.

Why don’t more people know about this and what is stopping women from getting help?

It’s in our name. Sex is taboo — especially sex as you get older. We heard this so often from women that we felt it was really important to acknowledge that talking about sex can be deeply uncomfortable for many of us. There’s a lot of women who have been married for decades that still can’t have an open conversation with their partners about what’s going on with them. And if you can’t talk to your partner about it, you likely can’t talk to your doctor.

There’s power in telling people that we understand that it’s uncomfortable, but that doesn’t mean it’s not important. Let’s acknowledge the discomfort and move forward together.

There aren’t many sexual wellness brands that cater exclusively to this demographic. How are you building Tabu’s brand and customer experience with your core customers in mind?

As a brand, we put health before pleasure. That means we’re going to start by talking about the symptoms you’re experiencing: atrophy, dryness, incontinence, low libido, and even low body confidence. Women can experience all of these symptoms at different phases of life, but many of them are most apparent during this period of postmenopausal transition. Women are overwhelmingly walking away from this part of their life too soon because of these challenges and not knowing how to (or if they should) confront them.

By focusing on symptoms, we are able to unlock a lot of women that would otherwise not be sexual wellness buyers.

Our customers are typically left out of the conversation regarding sexual health. Most of the time, we talk about women as sexual beings in the context of babies or pleasure — not health after a baby. I think it’s important that we start with this group of women, but also shift to other moments in time, like postpartum, when these symptoms appear in a woman’s life.

How does Tabu’s product improve health outcomes? Why does this work?

We designed our first product in partnership with a number of OBGYNs, pelvic floor physical therapists, and a cohort of women aged 41–71. These women overwhelmingly have had one sexual partner in their life, and have never purchased something like this before. While there’s no silver bullet answer here, our medical advisors recommend women use the product (or any product like it!) 2–3 times per week, as it has to be a routine and a lifestyle change that women commit to.

Our product has two core features: the shape of the massager simulates the idea of a dilator, which is a medical device commonly used to treat vaginal atrophy, and the optional heating system at the head helps to stimulate blood flow, which improves tissue health over time. That blood flow stimulation gets harder as we get older, so that heating feature is really key.

The supporting lubricant is water-based, made primarily of aloe with lots of active botanicals and hyaluronic acid to make sure it’s nourishing the tissue upon every application. This is really important because many lubricants on the market today are unfortunately very drying. We put the lubricant in an atypical glass dropper to replicate the idea of putting a serum on your face, so you feel like you’re doing something really good for yourself every time you use it.

Often, when we speak to members, we might start talking about vaginal dryness, but suddenly we’re talking about their relationship and communication with their partner. Many women don’t have the language to talk about this transition and share that newfound dryness, for instance, is not caused by lack of attraction to their partner, but is just how their body is changing. Not knowing how to talk about that can create a lot of distance.

I would not divorce the physical health benefits and the emotional health benefits we are trying to bring to market with Tabu.

As you bring Tabu to market, what strategies are working best for your audience?

Initially, we leaned into word of mouth and smart relationships with micro-influencers who have a loyal following. We focused on influencers who are overwhelmingly lifestyle-oriented, not sexual wellness-oriented, because we wanted our customers to think of Tabu as part of their wellness routine. We also leaned in to a brand relationship with a sex podcaster in her 50s, Dr. Emily Morse of “Sex with Emily,” who understood the challenges and gave Tabu her stamp of approval.

For word-of-mouth growth, the story between my mom and I inspired people to gift Tabu to the moms, aunts, and grandmothers in their life, and we sold out around mother’s day.

Now that we have more marketing spend, we’re finding that social is our bread and butter. We just started running ads in the last few weeks and the results have been overwhelming. These women are not being marketed to very much. Even with all the innovation in the menopause market, overwhelmingly, marketers are talking to millennial and Gen Z customers. By thoughtfully targeting our audience, we can do a lot with relatively small amounts of spend.

What are the best ways to combat the idea of menopause, sexual wellness, and women’s health broadly as “taboo” to achieve widespread change?

Sex as a category has been dominated by eroticism. I think we have to acknowledge as a society that not everybody speaks that language. That’s not to say there isn’t a space for eroticism, but it can’t be the only way we talk about sex. We need to create space for women of all backgrounds and experiences — including older women, members of religious communities, and victims of sexual trauma — to have a thoughtful and honest conversation about their own relationship with sex.

We’re starting to see more people investing and building in the menopause market, which is projected at $600B. Where do you think this space will be in a decade?

In a decade, I don’t think we’ll be as obsessed with the term menopause. Right now, the industry thinks that anybody over a certain age is menopausal. Post-menopause can represent a third or even half of our entire existence. When you’re 60, you don’t necessarily still identify with that word anymore. It’s a thing you went through, and you move past it.

We’ll start looking at women past child-bearing years as women who have different needs, interests, and who require different types of solutions and brands. It doesn’t all need to be categorized as the menopause market.

Who inspires you?

My mom. This is a woman who didn’t let me shave my thighs; I never got the green light to use tampons. Her willingness to have this conversation with me a year and a half ago, be featured on my website, share with people that her daughter started a sexual wellness company for this stage of life, and grow with me in this process, has been incredible to me.

Shop Tabu on their website, www.heytabu.com, and on Goop.

Despite all of the innovation in women’s health in recent years, we believe that there are still many needs, experiences, and conditions throughout a woman’s life stages that remain underserved by mainstream healthcare. Priyanka Jain and Laine Bruzek, co-founders of Evvy, are on a mission to bring awareness to an essential component of a woman’s health at every life stage that has been until now, relatively unknown: the vaginal microbiome.

Evvy’s goal is to close the gender health gap. To do that, they’ve created an at-home vaginal microbiome test that gives women unprecedented insight into their health and contributes to Evvy’s ongoing research on female biomarkers and how they can be leveraged to detect and treat a variety of critical health conditions.

We recently sat down with Priyanka and Laine to talk about why there is so little awareness of the vaginal microbiome, how Evvy is changing health outcomes for women and people with vaginas, and how to build a brand that will reach women of all ages.

What inspired you to start Evvy?

Priyanka Jain: Evvy’s mission is to make sure that the ways we’ve defined health actually include the female body. If you think about so many of the markers of health today, they’re based on a middle-aged, mid-sized man. How do we start thinking about markers of health that uniquely exist in the female body?

The vaginal microbiome is a perfect place to start. Not only is it the cause of some of the most common infections in women, like yeast infections, urinary tract infections, and bacterial vaginosis, but it also has broad health implications on things like STI acquisition, preterm birth, fertility concerns, and cervical cancer progression.

Women have no access to that information on their own bodies, and no one in the healthcare system is using data to help women make better health decisions. We started Evvy to change all that.

Laine Bruzek: Vaginas are treated like a liability — basically a taboo. They’re an amazing, resilient, complex body part, and they deserve just as much care as our arms, legs, brain, skin, and everything else. Oftentimes, we go through these care journeys with vaginal health by ourselves and with a lot of embarrassment and shame.

I’m particularly excited to bring vaginal health into the spotlight and find ways that we can help connect women not just to better healthcare, but also to each other. How do we help break down some of the barriers that prevent people from talking about their vaginal health?

Given how important vaginal health is, why do you think there is so little awareness around it?

Priyanka: I think it comes down to: “where did we put our money and where did we put the research dollars?” Women weren’t even required to be in clinical research until 1993. We’re continuously feeling the repercussions of that huge gap in understanding the female body.

There’s a systemic lack of women’s representation in these studies, in research, in medicine, and in funding: and we feel the impact of that gap in understanding the female body to this day.

On top of that, the type of technology we’re using and the things we’re able to do either didn’t exist or were not financially feasible until the past 5–10 years. What we’re seeing is the intersection of technological changes and the affordability of that technology with the desire to have a much more inclusive definition of health.

How is Evvy changing health outcomes for your customers?

Priyanka: The first and most important thing is giving people information on their own bodies. So many women feel like they’re “crazy” at one point or another in their health journey. I think we’ve all been there! You say, “I think something is going on with me,” and everyone says, “You’re fine, you’re fine, you’re fine.”

We’re helping women understand, to the highest fidelity we can, what’s going on with their own bodies so they can decide what is “fine” or not fine for them.

The female body isn’t a bunch of binaries — it’s actually a lot of complex components coming together. How can we help someone really understand that?

With the vaginal microbiome, that might mean helping someone get to the right diagnosis faster with their doctor, find the right treatment more quickly, reduce recurrence rates of their condition, catch potential imbalances before they turn into full-blown infections, or find something in their vaginal microbiome that might have been affecting another aspect of their health that they didn’t even know was related.

What makes the Evvy at-home test different from other tests women might get? How are you thinking about the customer experience?

Laine: What we’re doing is helping to make sure the question is right. You can’t get to the right answer unless you have the right question. Tests right now are asking, “Are these five pathogens present: yes or no?” We’re asking, “What is present?” which is a new way of thinking about testing.

Something that goes hand in hand with this is creating personalized, proactive education for our users to help them ask the right questions in their doctor’s office. Because a lot of vaginal infections have similar symptoms, most women know to ask the question “is it itchy?” but that’s where their literacy about vaginal health challenges might stop. That’s a failure of the healthcare system and general health education. We’re excited to help women ask better questions of their own bodies so they can get better answers from their doctors.

Evvy can help any person with a vagina: how do you build a brand that will reach a Gen Z woman as well as a woman going through menopause?

Laine: No matter your age, every woman has had the experience of feeling misdiagnosed, under-diagnosed, or dismissed at the doctor’s office. I think that’s unfortunately a pretty universal experience for female-bodied people, which means there are so many opportunities to tell stories that resonate no matter the age group.

Along the way, there are things that we keep front-and-center that never change. Things like science-forward but human language. Treating women like they’re smart, not gatekeeping them from better information about their bodies.

What is really amazing about having a science-forward brand is that it resonates across all age groups. All women want to have better body literacy so that they can have better conversations with themselves, with people in their life, and with their doctors. It’s pretty fun to be that friend in health research for all women, regardless of age.

The past 18 months have been transformative for healthcare, and the sector is continuing to evolve rapidly. What changes do you think will stick, and where does Evvy fit into the future?

Priyanka: The first major trend is people being in control of their own health. During COVID, we saw health become something that everyone was thinking about all the time. From small things like, “I can wash my hands” or “I can socially distance” to “I can test myself for an infection,” suddenly people had a lot more control over their health and wanted a lot more information. The concept of at-home testing obviously existed before, but now when we send people our kits, all of these things are very familiar.

The second is that a lot of the barriers to telehealth fell down. Whether those barriers were cultural, from the medical system, or regulatory, we were able to prove to doctors, patients, and to the regulatory system that certain parts of the healthcare system function pretty well online.Telehealth could never handle 100% of healthcare, but it can handle a much higher percentage than we assumed before COVID.

The beauty of that is people anywhere in the world can start to access much better healthcare because it doesn’t have to be in their neighborhood. One of our goals at Evvy is to make really great women’s healthcare accessible anywhere. I don’t think that’s the case right now.

Now that you guys have closed out your Seed, what are your top priorities for Evvy?

Priyanka: Our top priority is always to make sure that we are providing the most value that we possibly can to our customers, whether it’s through additional services or using our research to make our platform more valuable to them.

Last question. Who inspires you?

Laine: I’m inspired by the women we’ve spoken to who have had traumatic experiences in the healthcare system and turned them into a foundation for community advocacy and education. One of my best friends, Emma, is a great example — she had a years-long journey with PMDD (another massively under-researched female health condition!) — and the first thing she did when she felt like an expert was to turn around and teach a bunch of other people online about her symptoms, her experiences, and how to navigate doctors and insurance. I’m very inspired to build Evvy in the same way — to build better tools, research, and education, and to give that right back to the community that is most in need of it.

We always say that we don’t keep things in “research land,” which means making sure that we take all of the amazing discoveries we make and turn those into tangible, actionable, and useful information for people day-to-day.

Priyanka: I just got off the phone with a customer today who has dealt with vaginal infections for years. She probably spends two hours a day in online communities just answering people’s questions. Sometimes she will direct-message people and tell them they’re going to get through it. She’s truly motivated by this concept of paying it forward.

In an area where so many women feel isolated, it’s amazing to me how many people take it upon themselves to be a voice of comfort, reassurance, strength, and power, even when there is nothing in it for them. I’m inspired thinking about how we can scale that and give those women a platform. They are really the backbone that’s been helping women get through health issues for the decades before Evvy existed.

Interested in joining the team? Evvy is hiring across product, marketing, engineering, research, and data science. Explore open roles here.

This past Spring, we launched our third “Humans in the Wild” Entrepreneurs-in-Residence cohort, a unique three-month program in our venture studio designed to support experienced entrepreneurs at the early stages of their company-building journey. Since our first Health & Wellness cohort launched in the Spring of 2020, the pandemic has greatly accelerated transformations in healthcare. Dramatic opportunities continue to open for startups, so we again put out a call for founders building Health & Wellness companies that serve human needs.

The nine teams in our Spring 2021 cohort are building businesses across mental health, sexual health, women’s health, and health & wellness broadly. While we didn’t set out to have a female-only cohort, it just so happened that the strongest teams we came across in these areas were led by women. This underscores our belief that the future of health and wellness businesses will address the needs of everyone — including those who have been traditionally overlooked — and, therefore, be built by a more diverse set of founders.

The Humans in the Wild Program

Through a mix of unique programming, tailored, one-on-one strategic support, connections to the Human Ventures expert network, and access to a strong founder community, Humans in the Wild was able to drive significant growth for founders.

• Six founders closed their pre-seed funding rounds within six weeks of the program ending. Human Ventures made direct investments or facilitated investor introductions for cohort members.

• Strategic advice and guidance from dedicated “co-pilots” as well as health and wellness investors who served as Advisors throughout the program:
  - Binoy Bhansali, Head of Corporate Development at SCAN Health Plan
  - Anurag Mehta, Principal, Consumer Venture Investment at Johnson & Johnson
  - Ally Tam, Partner at VMG Partners
  - Zal Bilimoria, Founding Partner at Refactor Capital
  - Virginie Raphael, Founder and Managing Partner at FullCircle

• Unique proprietary curriculum delivered through weekly hands-on workshops and panels with leaders such as:
  - Jean-Luc Neptune, Founder, Suntra Modern Recovery
  - Akash Shah, Co-Founder, Care/Of
  - Marina Tarasova, Co-Founder & COO, Paloma Health
  - Steven Gutentag, Co-Founder, Thirty Madison
  - Carolyn Witte, Co-Founder and CEO, Tia

• Deep insights into each entrepreneur’s personal leadership style through Human Ventures’ proprietary founder self-assessment tool and individual consultations with our in-house founder coach.

Founder Testimonials

“As a second-time founder who is a newcomer to the health and wellness space, HITW was the ultimate program for supporting me with my new venture. The format of the program enabled me to dive deep into the healthcare space at lightning speed with direct access to top-tier subject matter experts, and the camaraderie and strategic perspectives of my fellow cohort members was truly invaluable. I highly recommend HITW to founders; this is a program like no other.” –– Doreen Bloch

“There are so many ‘communities’ for founders out there these days. But what stood out to me in Humans in the Wild was that this is a place to be both a human and a founder. I felt the program focused on you launching your company while also supporting you as a whole person. From the structure of the program, it was clear the Human team is thoughtful and cared about helping us connect as a cohort.” –– Grace Chiang

“I came into the HITW program with a minimum viable product (MVP) in market, and HITW helped me take the learnings and early user feedback I received to make improvements on our MVP and increase engagement. The thing I appreciated the most about the program was that it allowed me the opportunity to drill down further into the actual problem our company is solving. This gave me more clarity on our product roadmap and the new features we should prioritize to continue to provide value to our users.” –– Ashlee Wisdom

Q&A with Natalie Waltz, Founder of Tabu

What is Tabu?

Tabu is a sexual wellness company for bodies that change.

Where was Tabu as a company when you entered Humans in the Wild?

We were starting to hit some early momentum. With our first product in market, sales were starting to pick up and we had two retail partners secured. But, we were still learning and getting to know how to reach and talk to our target customer.

Where was Tabu at the end of the program?

Coming into the program, we had raised roughly $100k from friends and family. Human Ventures helped us develop our story and articulate how we were going after a major opportunity in a differentiated way. With Human’s help, we successfully closed our pre-seed round and are honored to be a part of the Human portfolio.

How did the program help you progress?

It’s no secret that the founder journey can be lonely. As a one-woman show, it was incredibly rewarding to develop relationships with other founders — meeting regularly, bouncing ideas off of one another, and holding each other accountable to goals. It’s really wild how quickly you form meaningful relationships in this setting — both within the cohort and with the Human Ventures team.

Any advice to other founders?

One: never write out a pitch script. It’s easy to want to write every word down verbatim and make sure you cover each point as you intended (and sometimes even read it aloud in our digital, Zoom-only world). All too often we end up sounding like we’re on autopilot (as a Human Ventures team member reminded me during pitch practice) and we lose the connection with our audience. Two: always take the meeting. So many networking calls have led to wonderfully unexpected things in my career and Tabu is no exception. It’s even how I ended up applying for Humans in the Wild.

–– Natalie Waltz

About Human Ventures

Human Ventures is a business creation platform comprised of a venture fund, startup studio, and enterprise agency. We go beyond the business model and seek opportunities to build Model Businesses with ambitious founders who are innovating around human needs. By unlocking access to a powerful network of founders, investors, and corporate partners, we are creating a blueprint for the future of business to be built on purpose. Humans in the Wild is a unique, 100-day Entrepreneurs-in-Residence program for founders who are in the early stages of developing their next big idea in Health & Wellness.

Anna Malaika Tubbs is an author, advocate, educator, and scholar. In her groundbreaking and essential debut The Three Mothers, Anna celebrates Black motherhood by telling the story of the three women who raised and shaped some of America’s most pivotal heroes: Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin. Human recently co-hosted an event with Valence, discussing Anna’s new book. We encourage you to purchase Anna’s book here if you haven’t already gotten your copy!

So much has been written about the civil rights icons who have forever changed our country for the better. But what about the families and communities surrounding the leaders in the spotlight? Anna Malaika Tubbs sought to learn more about the women who shaped these leaders and to combat the erasure that they have faced. As the former First Partner of Stockton and as a mother herself, Anna has witnessed the erasure of all the people surrounding a person in the spotlight. Anna shared how she arrived at these three mothers, and the surprising commonality she found between the three women. She also shed light on how these mothers influenced her own motherhood journey, as she had her son in the process of completing her Ph.D. and writing this book.

Anna shared that we have to understand these women to understand these men. We have to look back at and learn from history to move forward. There are realities we have to face, but Anna remains optimistic. There are a lot of impactful policies we can put in place, but politicians must listen to women when shaping them — especially Black women.

Anna shared what change she hopes to inspire and see:

• A celebration of Black women: “We should seen in our wholeness, as the human beings we are, and people feel called to action to celebrate who we are today and lighten their burden and make their lives easier. The book has tangible movements for what we can do to make Black women’s lives easier.”

• Recognition of mothers: “I want mothers to be seen — mothers deserve to be seen. I see you and I celebrate you. Mothers should see themselves in my book — as the powerful revolutionaries we are.”

• More comprehensive history: “As a community and country, when we tell our history — stop reducing historical movements to just individual historical figures. We should be talking about the communities that raised them and those around them that contributed to their pursuits.”

She shared for founders, builders, and investors:

Pay attention to who you are forgetting and focus on inclusivity in your product offerings. Ask yourself — who are you leaving out of the story? Recognition is huge. There is always a question of who we are not recognizing. If you center someone who is not being recognized, it will completely change what you can do. If you leave Black women’s stories out of your idea, there are huge missed opportunities in your customer base. A lot of good can happen when you mobilize and put your money behind women. For companies who are working on their DEI strategy: it’s not just the “right” thing to do — it’s the economically smart thing to do.

In addition to her book, Anna recommends reading:

• Audre Lorde’s work

• Sister Citizen by Melissa V. Harris-Perry

• Revolutionary Mothering by Alexis Pauline Gumb

• Birthing Justice by Julia Chinyere Oparah and Alicia D. Bonaparte

Thank you for sharing your work with the Human community, Anna!

About Human Ventures

Human Ventures is a business creation platform comprised of a venture fund, startup studio, and enterprise agency. We go beyond the business model and seek opportunities to build Model Businesses with ambitious founders who are innovating around human needs. By unlocking access to a powerful network of founders, investors, and corporate partners, we are creating a blueprint for the future of business to be built on purpose.

As investors in The Muse, Valence, and Kindred, Human Ventures has grounded its investment thesis in the belief that the traditional professional journey will change drastically in the next decade and has backed entrepreneurs reimagining the way in which we, as humans, work. Technological advances have started to outpace the human condition, as individuals search for their place and purpose in an increasingly competitive and fast-paced labor market. Furthermore, the global pandemic brought many nascent trends into prominence. In addition to changes in individuals’ behaviors, companies also realized that they would need new solutions to thrive in this new normal. There’s so much work to be done to help organizations not only survive this seismic shift, but also use it as an advantage. Having experienced this ourselves when adapting our Humans in the Wild program to flourish virtually, we realized that our second cohort had to focus on building in the Future of Work category. Why? Founders are solution-oriented — they look for challenges and rise to the occasion — and the future of how we work is now more important than ever.

We identified four areas of opportunity best positioned to serve the human side of work over the next decade: New Work Environments, Lifelong Learning, Redefining the Resume, and Worker Wellbeing. Read our full Future of Work thesis in TechCrunch here.

As we reflect upon last fall, we wanted to share some highlights from our second cohort of Humans in the Wild. The founders completed the program, having made huge strides in their businesses, new friends, and excitement for their futures and the future of work.

Humans in the Wild Program Value

Through a mix of strategic advice, content, peer community, and Human Ventures’ network, Humans in the Wild was able to deliver significant value to founder participants.

• Strategic advice and guidance from 1–1 “co-pilots” as well as sector-specific investors who served as dedicated Advisors throughout the program:
  -Jarrid Tingle, Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Harlem Capital
  -Clara Brenner, Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Urban Innovation Fund
  -Jason Spinell, Director, Slack Fund
  -Chris Brown, Principal, Inspired Capital
  -Manish Patel, General Partner, Highland Capital Partners

• Rich curriculum of weekly content and learnings organized through 25 hands-on workshops and fireside chats with leaders such as:
  -Kathryn Minshew, Co-Founder and CEO, The Muse
  -Isaac Oates, Co-Founder and CEO, Justworks
  -Charles Hudson, Founder and Managing Partner, Precursor Ventures
  -Katie Jacobs Stanton, Founder and Managing Partner, Moxxie Ventures
  -Jenny Fielding, Managing Director, TechStars
  -Michelle Horn, Chief People Officer, SoftBank Group
  -Dillon Ferdinandi, Investor, Slack Fund
  -Jeremiah Zinn, Chief Product Officer, Freshly
  -Zach Sims, Co-Founder and CEO, Codecademy
  -Priyanka Jain, Former Head of Product at Pymetrics

• Pushed founders to collide with the market through product testing, building MVPs, securing anchor pilots, and early customers.

• Entrepreneurs received deep insights into their personal leadership style, gaps, and complementary co-founder needs through Human Ventures’ proprietary Founder self-assessment tool and individual consultations and through Human Ventures’ in-house Founder Coach.

• Human Ventures directly invested in 3 startups incubated in the program via Human Ventures Fund I and helped facilitate angel funding for cohort members from Human Ventures’ network and guest speakers.

• We’re proud to note this wide mix of programming elements drove a Net Promoter Score of 100 from the founders in the program

Founder Testimonials

“Being part of a cohort really made a difference. I truly felt Human picked gems of people to go through the program with. I think the Humans in the Wild has been exceptional for me — I received so much direct attention and so many 1-on-1 resources.” 
— Suchit Tuli, Founder, Quantime

“Holistically, I loved the framework HITW used for presenting content on how to launch an early-stage company. It was eye-opening for me. Once I was given this framework of how to navigate building my company, I felt more confident moving in the start-up space.” — Markell Baldwin, Founder, Resonance

Case Study: Manon DeFelice, Founder and CEO, Inkwell

“I had been sitting on this big idea and did not know how to take it from a big idea to a SaaS business. The weekly guidance, touching base, and having a constant thought-partner through the Humans in the Wild program gave me the support to execute on my new SaaS product offering.” — Manon DeFelice, Founder, Inkwell

About Inkwell: Inkwell allows companies to tap into diverse candidate networks at scale by leveraging referrals. Inkwell focuses on filling business-critical roles with top-notch talent, as well as providing strategic advice on integrating flexibility into the workplace.

Outcomes from Humans in the Wild:

• Developed a SaaS model to disrupt the traditional executive search market

• Refined customer base and product offering

• Launched pilot program to 10 paying clients, resulting in first-of-their-kind, community-driven, candidate referrals (first placement was for a CFO and was executed in 2 weeks)

• Built detailed business plan, product one-pager, financial model, and pitch deck to tee up the funding process

Key Areas of Impact
Coaching and Thought Partnership: Manon came into the program as an established leader in the Future of Work space. She wrote for Forbes Women on the Future of Work and had already nurtured a diverse “well” of women executives looking for flexible hours that she was placing at companies through her startup, Inkwell. But she needed to re-strategize two major tenants of the business. First, the pandemic redefined “flexible work.” What was Inkwell’s edge when work-from-home was now ubiquitous? Second, how could she use technology to scale the business to the degree needed to be venture-backable? Through the Humans in the Wild program, Manon was partnered with a co-pilot from the Human Ventures team — a dedicated guide with expertise in innovation and venture-capital builds. With the support of this co-pilot, Manon was able to convert her services-heavy business into a technology-based, venture scalable business.

Fundraising Readiness: Since Manon re-strategized her business model, she needed to develop a new financial model and company narrative to reflect this change. Manon worked closely with her co-pilot and the greater Human Ventures team to generate all the materials she needed for a pre-seed fundraise: business plan, financial model, and pitch deck.

About Human Ventures

Human Ventures is a business creation platform comprised of a venture fund, startup studio, and enterprise agency. We go beyond the business model and seek opportunities to build Model Businesses with ambitious founders who are innovating around human needs. By unlocking access to a powerful network of founders, investors, and corporate partners, we are creating a blueprint for the future of business to be built on purpose. Humans in the Wild is a unique, 100-day incubation program for founders who are in the early stages of developing their next big idea in Health & Wellness.