Mary Ray, COO and co-founder of MyHealthTeam, has a deep understanding of consumers, contributing to her success in growing innovative companies from incubated new ventures at public companies to ‘traditional’ start-ups. Drawing from her personal experience with friends and family living with chronic conditions, she empathizes with the loneliness of these experiences, leading her to co-found MyHealthTeam with Eric Peacock, to promote social connectedness and support for those in similar circumstances. With MyHealthTeam they hope to shift healthcare from physician- and pharmaceutical driven to a consumer-driven industry. Previously, Mary has held executive positions at Sony and other innovative start ups in the field of mobile, digital media, and consumer technology.

Mary has received accolades for her leadership in health tech including the 2019 DTC Innovator Award, the 2021 PM360 ELITE Covid Hero Award, and she was a 2021 MM+M Hall of Femme Honoree. In 2021, she was honored by Inc. Magazine’s Female Founders 100 (the top 100 Women Entrepreneurs). She is a graduate of the College of William & Mary School of Business and George Mason University, and she lives in San Francisco, CA with her family.

Today we will be talking with Alessandra Henderson, the Co-Founder and CEO of Elektra Health, the next-gen healthcare platform to smash the taboo surrounding menopause. Elektra health offers evidence-based education, care, and community for women going through various stages of menopause. Elektra Health has been featured in leading publications including Fast Company, Forbes, Techcrunch, and more with endorsements from prominent women like Katie Couric and Maria Shriver. Alessandra began her career at Artsy, building the content partner business. She then went on to found and serve as Executive Director of the MIT NYC Startup Studio and as VP of Network at Human Ventures.

She has a B.A. from Vanderbilt University and a MBA from Sloan MIT, where she received the Martin Trust Community Fellow Award '16 and the Patrick J. McGovern, Jr Entrepreneurship Award '16.

We have an exciting episode ahead. We are joined by Jessica Bell van der Wal, co-founder and CEO of Frame Fertility, as well as with one of her seed investors, Margaret Malone from Flare Capital. They will each share their perspective on the fundraising process and the relationship between entrepreneur and investor after the round closes.

Jessica Bell van der Wal has ~20 years of experience as a cross-functional executive, team leader and operator and has sold digital health products to patients, payers and employers at companies such as Genentech, Nike and Castlight Health. She serves as an advisor and Board Member for various early stage digital health / private companies and nonprofits, and she loves supporting women as a mentor especially through her role as a Co-Chair of 50/50 Women on Boards. Jessica holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a bachelor's in public health from UNC Chapel Hill. In 2020, Jessica founded her own digital health venture, Frame Fertility, which helps individuals and couples plan ahead for expanding their family and know their risk factors early to avoid a downstream and often costly fertility crisis. She is also the proud mom of 2 year old Parker, who inspired her work at Frame, which she started with her partner, Corey, following their own tough fertility experience.

Margaret Malone is a principal at Flare Capital. She was a member of the deal team for Flare’s investment into BeMe Health, Cayaba Care, Eden Health, Elektra Health, and Oshi Health. In addition, she led the firm’s Flare Scholar Ventures investments into Darby, Docent, Frame Fertility, and Visana Health. Before joining Flare Capital, Margaret partnered with entrepreneurs and investors to build executive teams and create the foundational human capital strategy for early-stage healthcare companies while at Oxeon Partners. Margaret also brings experience in healthcare-focused venture capital through her prior roles at 7wire Ventures and B Capital Group. She began her career as a clinical operations consultant with Huron Consulting Group’s healthcare practice. Margaret is also a co-founder of Dropping Claims, a content platform powered by the HealthTech Grind, a community of 300+ women entrepreneurs, operators, and investors passionate about health tech.

Dr. Nina Vasan is a psychiatrist, entrepreneur, and pioneer in digital mental health innovation. Dr. Nina Vasan is the Chief Medical Officer at Real, a mental health care company building a new therapy model. Through a monthly membership model, Real helps members access high quality mental health care through a suite of on-demand tools including their core product, Pathways. Each therapist designed and leads multi-session Pathways focuses on a specific issue, ranging across topics like body image, navigating adult friendships, and managing anxiety or depression. Real recently raise $37 million during their Series B round.

Outside of her work at Real, Dr. Vasan is a psychiatrist and professor at Stanford, where she is the founder and Executive Director of Brainstorm: The Stanford Lab for Mental Health and Innovation. Brainstorm is the world’s first academic laboratory dedicated to transforming mental health at scale through clinically-informed consumer tech products. Brainstorm’s experts worked with Pinterest to design the “compassionate search” experience which provides treatments for anxiety, depression, and self-harm for Pinterest's 450 million users. This work was named by Fast Company as the “Most Innovative Wellness Projects” and “Best Designs for Social Good”.

Dr. Vasan has worked as a healthcare advisor to the UN, the WHO Director-General’s Office, and the Obama and Biden presidential campaigns. She majored in Government at Harvard, graduating as one of Glamour Magazine's Top 10 College Women, and received an MD from Harvard Medical School, where she was voted by classmates as a commencement speaker. She graduated from Stanford's Adult Psychiatry Residency Training Program, where she was a Chief Resident, and received an MBA from Stanford's Graduate School of Business. She co-authored the #1 Amazon Best Selling book "Do Good Well: Your Guide to Leadership, Action, and Social Innovation" and was named by Business Insider as one of their 30 Under 40 in Healthcare in 2021.

Today we get to talk to an innovator who is changing the field of female sexual health. Daphne Chen is the cofounder of tbd health, an at-home screening platform for sexually transmitted infections made for women. Chen pursued her undergraduate degree at Princeton and received her MBA from the University of Pennsylvania. Daphne Chen is utilizing her skillset from her previous strategy consultant and product management experiences at Mckinsey and Amazon, applying them to encourage women to take care of their own health. TBD Health provides seamless, user-friendly at home STI testing while also destigmatizing STIs and empowering women with knowledge to take care of their sexual wellness. The focus on TBD health is to provide an inclusive, engaging, and empowering care and to bust myths about STIs and sexual wellness.

Tia Lyles-Williams is founder and CEO of LucasPye Bio, the first large-scale biotechnology/biopharmaceutical company to be led by an African American woman. As a contract development manufacturing organization (or CDMO), LucasPye Bio currently offers a wide range of services to its clients, including proprietary cell line development, bioprocess development, consulting, and cGLP small scale bioprocessing, in turn fast-tracking the clinical development of companies’ biologics for regulatory approval, manufacturing the biologic below market price, and accelerating the drug products into the global commercial market for sale. Tia also founded HelaPlex, LucasPye Bio’s sister company, which is a commercial co-working space for life science startups and virtual biotechs. In this episode, Tia touches on her journey to starting LucasPye Bio, the hurdles BIPOC and LGBTQ+ face in entrepreneurship, and how CDMOs can play a role in influencing policy on drug pricing.

Jaye Goldstein is the head of program at Petri. Before coming to Petri, she founded the MIT Communication Lab along with the Department of Biological Engineering. This lab was created in an effort to teach scientists and engineers to communicate effectively. Jaye created the bridge between the School of Engineering and the Communication lab, making it a resource for emerging scientists and engineers. After joining the MIT, she worked as the Director of Strategic Projects and Innovation Grants at Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching. Now, she is the Head of Programs at Pillar VC and Petri which creates a new approach to funding formation-stage biology and engineering startups. It is cofounded by entrepreneurs and academics who have a deep understanding of human health and sustainability. Petri is specifically tailored for entrepreneurs in the biology and engineering fields.

Liya Shuster-Bier is the founder and CEO of Alula, the radically honest resource making cancer less lonely.

On January 11, 2018, on the cusp of her 30th birthday, six months after graduating from Wharton, Liya was diagnosed with a rare form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Taking the knowledge gained from her experience, Liya built Alula to support people, families, and friends through the entire lifecycle of cancer, from diagnosis and treatment to recovery and (sometimes) bereavement.

Prior to Alula, Liya built a career in community development and impact investing, partnering with mayors and governors across the country to create innovative financing solutions that improved community outcomes. She started her career at Goldman Sachs, on the corporate currency derivatives team. In addition to receiving her MBA in Entrepreneurial Management from The Wharton School, Liya is a proud Dartmouth alum, native Queens girl, and an immigrant from Baku.

On this episode we discuss Liya's personal experiences with cancer, her career path to entrepreneurship, and how she built Alula.

Maria Luisa Pineda is the Co-founder and CEO of Envisagenics, which was founded in 2014 as a spinout of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Given that there are over 30 million people in the United States who suffer from genetic diseases or cancer, which could be caused by mutations affecting RNA splicing, Envisagenics aims to accelerate the development of innovative therapeutic solutions for RNA splicing variants with the help of its AI platform.

Dr. Pineda has over a decade of experience as a biologist. She was awarded an endowment of $2 million dollars from the Goizueta Foundation and an NIH fellowship with the Minority Access to Research Careers  program during her undergraduate training. She then went on to obtain her Ph.D. from the Watson School of Biological Sciences at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory as an Arnold and Mabel Beckman graduate student and a William Randolph Hearst foundation scholar. On this episode, we discuss her experience in navigating the science startup world.

Dawn Barry is the president and co-founder of LunaPBC, which is the public benefit corporation that launched LunaDNA, the first DNA and health research platform owned by its community of data donors. LunaDNA's member-owned digital data-sharing community makes discovery representative of the real world and aligned with people’s true goals by giving all individuals a role in research. Previously, Dawn joined Illumina in 2005 and served as the Vice President of Applied Genomics. Prior to Illumina, Dawn worked at Genaissance Pharmaceuticals, one of the first genomics startups focused on personalized medicine. In this episode, Dawn shares lessons learned in her career in biotech, how she built LunaDNA with its innovative shared ownership structure, and her perspectives on the future of data sharing and the applications of genomics in medicine.