Andrea Ippolito is the founder and CEO of Simplifed, the first independent tele-lactation consulting and nutrition support platform connecting new mothers with resources in the first weeks of becoming a parent. She is currently a Lecturer in the Engineering Management Program at Cornell University. Prior to this, she served as Director of the Department of Veterans Affairs Innovators Network within the VA Innovation Center. There she led the creation of a $10.5m program that provides the tools and resources to VA employees to develop innovations that improve the experience of our Veterans. In 2012, she co-founded health IT company SmartScheduling which was sold to athenahealth in 2016. In our interview with Andrea, we learned about her journey to entrepreneurship and how her work with organizations like the VA has impacted her path within healthcare. She emphasized the importance of not just being an entrepreneur, but giving back to the entrepreneurial ecosystem in the process. How can we create buy-in and ensure durable change in healthcare? She says, “follow the money.”

Pooja Chandrashekar is a second year medical student at Harvard Medical School and founder of the COVID-19 Health Literacy Project, which aims to create and translate accessible COVID-19 information into different languages to help all patients know when and how to seek care. We talk about her ability to mobilize hundreds of health professional students to work towards tackling language barriers to health literacy. She shares her vision for more equitable and patient-centered healthcare delivery.

Sara Nayeem is a Partner at Avoro Ventures (former Partner at NEA) where she focuses on investments in biopharmaceutical companies. We discuss with Sara what it means to “fail fast”, the importance of that “killer experiment” and other key considerations for building a biopharma company. As one of Fierce Biotech’s “Fiercest Women in Life Sciences”, she provides suggestions for how we can promote gender equity in life sciences.

Dr. Sejal Hathi is a physician, public health advocate, and serial entrepreneur, who has dedicated her career to serving vulnerable communities in the United States and globally — with a special attention to women and girls. She has founded two non-profit organizations, Girls Helping Girls and girltank, that have mobilized over 30,000 young women to create sustainable social change in over 100 countries. Presently, she serves as a primary care resident at Massachusetts General Hospital and a Clinical Fellow at Harvard Medical School. She shares with us her motivation behind her social entrepreneurial pursuits, her involvement in Pete Buttigieg’s campaign, and her strategies for success as a leader and entrepreneur (hint: vogue-ish company creation is not the way to go).

Bunny Ellerin is co-founder and president of New York City Health Business Leaders, a community of over 4,000 healthcare executives, entrepreneurs, innovators, and investors. She’s an award-winning leader, thinker, writer, and speaker who has helped transform New York City into a thriving hub of healthcare innovation. We talk to her about effective strategies for networking and how men need to serve as allies to really help build women presence in entrepreneurship and healthcare leadership.

3Derm is a medical technology company offering a skin imaging system that allows users to take clinical-quality 3D skin images remotely. Dermatologists can use the uploaded images to efficiently monitor high volumes of patients' lesions while reserving in-clinic appointment times for patients whose images indicate a more alarming condition. A week after the interview in August 2020, 3Derm was acquired by autonomous AI platform Digital Diagnostics. 3Derm co-founder and CEO Liz Asai shares how she and her team gained payor buy-in for their product as well as 3Derm’s progress on autonomous and assistive AI with a particular focus on inclusivity in diagnosing skin conditions.

Wellinks is a wearable health technology company that focuses on building software and hardware to improve treatment and outcomes for patients with musculoskeletal conditions. Coming from a non-traditional background with training in product design at Yale and Design for America, co-founder Ellen Su recounts her experience channeling the motivation to help young patients with scoliosis to develop a digital health solution to track brace usage and enhance feedback between patients and physicians.

BELKIN Laser is an Israeli ophthalmology device company disrupting the glaucoma care space. Their technology is an automated one-second laser device aimed at addressing the growing disparity between the enormous number of glaucoma patients (80M) and the limited number of ophthalmologists (212,000) by enabling the doctor to treat many more patients. In our conversation with BELKIN Laser CEO, Daria Lemann-Blumenthal, we explore the landscape of glaucoma treatment, Israel’s medtech scene, and being a woman and mother in medtech while building a global company.

Dr. Nimmi Ramanujam is the Director of the Center for Women's Global Health Technologies at Duke University and co-founder at Calla Health. Calla Health strives to sustainably improve women's access to cancer prevention through women-inspired technologies for cervical cancer screening for low-resource settings. With the Callascope, their innovative device for cervical imaging, Nimmi and her team are re-imagining the gynecological exam and bringing cervical cancer screening to women's doorsteps. We discuss with Dr. Ramanujam the design process of the Callascope, how to engage global health partners, and what it means to build a scalable and sustainable enterprise.

BioAdvance is a venture capital firm investing in early-stage life sciences companies and technologies in the mid-Atlantic region. BioAdvance CEO Barbara Schilberg expands on her over three decade career in biotech from serving as general counsel and running clinical trials at several biotech companies to now being a life sciences investor. During her tenure, BioAdvance has invested over $49 million in 93 companies and academic technologies, which have attracted $3 billion in capital. In our conversation, Barbara outlines qualities vital for a successful entrepreneur and encourages women to challenge the assumption that entrepreneurship is only for young folks.