S2EP11: The Behaviors I Can't Unsee with Karen Drexler

She had already made this investor a lot of money. When she came back to pitch her own company, he told her he doesn't back founders who look like her, then asked how many kids she was planning to have. Making investors' money is supposed to earn you a real shot the next time around - maybe just not for women.

In this episode of The Capital Flex, I sit down with Karen Drexler, a serial med tech founder, operator, and board director who has spent 25 years building, scaling, and selling healthcare companies. Karen worked with a team at LifeScan to make it possible for people with diabetes to test their own blood at home, before the company was sold to Johnson & Johnson. Then she built her own company and sold it to Roche, one of the biggest names in global healthcare.

Now she sits on public and early-stage boards, advises founders through Springboard and Astia, and recently co-founded a new women's health company.

We get into the moments nobody puts in a pitch deck. Karen had already sold companies to two of the biggest names in global healthcare and still had to bring a man into the room to close the deal. We talk about founders who scrubbed words like "breast" and "fallopian tubes" from their pitch decks because the male investors couldn't hear them without giggling. And we name the pattern underneath it all - women get asked what could go wrong, men get asked how big the opportunity could get. It turns out prevention versus promotion dynamics have been at play for quite a long time.

Key Takeaways:

• Creating exceptional returns should expand opportunity. For many women, it still doesn't. 
• Sometimes the only thing standing between a woman and a ‘yes’ is a well-credentialed man sitting on her side of the table. We can take offense, or we can lean into strategy
• Investors can often let immaturity get in the way of saving lives. How we respond matters.
• Before you pitch, study what an investor has already backed. If nothing in their portfolio looks like your deal, they’re probably not your investor. Move on.
• Your team and board are more than advisors—they're signal. Choose them like it matters.
• Women’s health companies have been producing big wins for decades. Investors who keep overlooking it are not being cautious. They’re mispricing and underestimating it.
• Improving your fundraising process starts with investor fit. Study what they've already backed. Their portfolio will tell you far more than their website ever will. 

My Reflection & Challenge:

What I keep coming back to is this: Karen is still giving advice to founders today that echoes her own experience 20+ years ago. That is how little has changed.

She had the track record, the technology, and the exits. And she still had to bring on a board chair whose job was simply to be the man in the room. Her experience alone was not enough.

Your job is to see the system for what it is and learn to navigate. Finding the rooms that will back your business on its own merits is critical.

This Week's Challenge:

Before your next raise, do the work before you walk in:

1. Research every investor you’re targeting. If nothing in their portfolio looks like your deal, take them off the list and redirect your energy where it can pay off.
2. Do not walk into a pitch without a champion already in the room. One believer who speaks before you do can shift the dynamic in the room before you say a word.
3. Look at your team and your board. Do their credentials reinforce your foundation and future potential? If not, make adjustments.

Capital is not just money. It’s a long-term relationship. Choose wisely.

Links and Resources: 

https://sb.co/ 

https://www.astia.org/ 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/karendrexler/ 

If you enjoyed this conversation, follow The Capital Flex, leave a rating, and share this episode with a founder who needs it.

And if you’re looking for a more candid space to talk fundraising, power, and building inside systems not designed for you, stay close. The conversation continues.

Production and Administration work completed by Smart Podcast Solutions and Elevate Business Solutions. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

This is the Capital Foot. I'm Nassime Saani. This show codifies the Capital Playbook because no founder should have to learn the hard way. We talk about what really happens behind closed doors. The bias, the breakthroughs, and the things no one says out loud. If you've ever walked into a room and felt the system wasn't built for you, you're in the right place. Hello and welcome to the Capital Flex. My guest today is Karen Drexler. She brings 25 years of board governance and leadership experience, a track record of leading and growing medtech companies, and a passion for using data to drive improvements in healthcare outcomes and costs to the boardroom. Karen and I met a few years ago and have had multiple interactions in the ecosystem via both common friends and founders that we have both worked with. We're both advisors with Springboard as well and are always in the same room for events, which I find to be a lot of fun. So I'm so excited to have you here with me today. Thank you so much for joining. Thank you. I'm sure we'll have a fun conversation. I'm sure it's going to be great. I would love for everyone listening, if you could introduce yourself a little bit more and give everyone just a little bit more context on who you are and more about your experience.

SPEAKER_01 1:12

Sure. Happy to do that. So I started my career as a chemical engineer, thinking I would work in alternate energy, but the funding for alternate energy went away just as I was graduating from college. Around the same time, my father was diagnosed with diabetes. He was diagnosed as a type two because of his age, but he almost certainly had type one and went through a series of comas and major issues until he had a fatal heart attack and died a few years later. So that got me really interested in the medical space. And I've spent my whole career ever since focused in healthcare. I started my career in diabetes. I was actively looking for something that could be done. When my father was diagnosed, he was only using urine testing to try to measure. That's incredible. Yeah. I know it was a long time ago, but urine testing was a really bad way to determine how much insulin your body needs, which is why he kept getting overdosed. So I was very fortunate to meet the founders of Life Scan in the very early days. And this is when I was out in California and at graduate school at Stanford at the business school, and was able to meet up with the CEO of the company. It was a company that had been around for only a year or two at that point, and was really founded to be the first company to develop at-home blood testing for people with diabetes in order to allow them to have much more flexibility in their lives. That's incredible. So this really resonated with me. So I met with uh the CEO. This was during the spring of my first year of business school, and we really hit it off. This was before cell phones. By the time I got home, after interviewing with him, I had a job offer waiting on my answering machine.

SPEAKER_00 2:57

Amazing.

SPEAKER_01 2:58

Again, dating myself. But yeah, it was fabulous. So I worked there for the summer and they had a product manager job open. I had another year of business school, but I convinced them somehow that I could complete my second year at Stanford and be the initial product manager. Oh, that's good. It it just worked out so well. I loved the company. I ended up staying for about 11 years and started out in marketing and sales, but did some finance. I actually wrote the company offering document and executed the sale of the business to Johnson and Johnson. Oh, incredible.

SPEAKER_00 3:32

That's such a trajectory. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:34

For a young person, the lawyer on the deal was Larry Sansini. So what a great guy to learn from. Oh, incredible. Yeah, that's great. I just was really lucky early on to have those experiences. And actually, my longest tenure was running manufacturing, which I loved. It brought me back to my engineering roots. My last role there, I was running an RD project on some new technology. And it got me really thinking about what else could be done for people with diabetes. Came up with some ideas that JJ didn't want to pursue because the technology was going to require a different, whole different manufacturing infrastructure and a lot of investment. So I decided to start a company in Silicon Valley. That's what you do, right? So I started the company along with one of my other life scan colleagues. By that time, the guy who hired me, the life scan CEO, had left and I brought him on as my board chair. We may go back to that when we talk about women and financing. And it was really essential for me to have him on board for me to get funded. But ended up building that company over the course of six years, had products on the market. We were the first team that brought blood sample sizes down from 25 microliters. Basically, a hanging drop of blood is 25 or 30 microliters of blood down under one microliter, which really set the stage for all the testing technology that's out there now. Yeah, it's transformational. Absolutely. Yeah, amazing. And ended up selling that business to Roche. So that was fantastic. And then got involved with a number of other startup companies over time. The first one was in the lung inflammation space, where we were trying to measure exhaled nitric oxide in breath, part per billion levels of trace gas in breath. And the technology worked. The idea was to apply the same kinds of principles as we did in diabetes, not with the same frequency. But if you look at exhaled nitric oxide, which is a measure of lower airway inflammation, it gives you an indication that you may be approaching an exacerbation of asthma or COPD. And you could change your meds in order to avoid going to an emergency room. So applying those principles, we were able to build another company in the in the asthma space. And that CEO, that founder of that, who became the CEO, is somebody who's been a lifelong friend. And we've started multiple companies together, the latest of which was just incorporated last month in the women's health space. Oh, incredible. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of a lot of fun things. But over time, so my my board work, which is primarily what I do now, came out of my work as a CEO of a number of startup companies. By default, I was on the board. It wasn't something I thought about, but being CEO, you're on the board. So I got interested in the role that the board can play. I saw how good board members could help and how bad board members could hinder. Just got really interested in the governance process. So that's what kind of started me on my journey toward more board and advisory work.

SPEAKER_00 6:38

Oh, it's incredible. So multiple companies, multiple exits, transition from CEO roles to board roles. You have fundraised yourself. You have seen other founders fundraise. You've been in all kinds of rooms and seen all kinds of things. So this is going to be quite a good conversation. So I appreciate you being here quite a lot. It's it's an incredible experience for other founders to hear from because so many feel like they're doing it. Well, and they are. They're doing it for the first time, but they feel like they're pushing this rock up the hill that nobody else has been up before. But it's not always the case, right? Someone has, there's at least a handful of women who have been down this path before. So it's incredible to have that kind of experience. We're really all pushing a huge rock uphill, but having other women ahead of us like you is a real benefit. So it's it's great to hear from from folks like you. So, you know, the the premise of the podcast is to dig into the fundraising stories and and a lot of what women go through when they're raising capital. And I have spent so many years hearing just the most insane experiences that women have. And I get the phone calls at you know, 10 p.m. on a Sunday on something just ridiculous that happened. And I wanted to start to surface those stories and really talk about them out loud and and get to the insights and the takeaways so that other women don't feel like they're going through it for the first time or all or all on their own. And that's that's why the podcast was necessary, so we could talk about it and learn from it and leave some breadcrumbs and insights for other other women to listen to. So if we start with your own fundraising experience, what are some of the what are some of the things that happened? What are some of the most egregious stories or things that you went through uh that that you learned a lot from?

SPEAKER_01 8:25

Yeah, well, I mentioned that when I started my first company with technology that Life Scan J and J didn't want to pursue, started with a male co-founder, chief technology officer, who was not at all interested in being part of pitching for funding. So I was going in my on my own to these meetings. At that point in time, I don't think I saw a single female venture partner. It was all male. And that's obviously changed a bit, not enough. Not enough, right? But I started out with firms that had made money at Life Scout. And because I was working on the merger with JJ, I got to know a lot of our investors, board members, and not. So I figured I would have credibility walking in, wanting to have to talk with these folks. And the one that I wanted, that I I knew I got to know the best, and I really wanted to get involved, basically said to me when I was pitching him on the idea, he said, I don't invest in founders that look like you. Oh my gosh. Just straight out like that. And I kind of didn't know what to do. And it became clear as we talked a little bit more, he meant women. And we started talking about things that he might be concerned about. At that point, I didn't yet have children. It isn't legal to ask someone if they're planning to have kids. Even 25, 30 years ago, that was not legal. But I was asked, are you gonna have kids? Are you gonna step out of the workplace? Who's gonna run the company? How many kids are you gonna have? Oh my goodness. So it it was really startling because it wasn't something that I expected. Again, this was someone I'd known for a number of years. Ultimately, after a number, no the not all the investors were that blunt, but I wasn't making a lot of traction.

SPEAKER_00 10:13

Right. And they knew they knew what you were capable of. They had worked with you, they had seen you in action, right?

SPEAKER_01 10:18

And that's supposed to be the golden ticket, right? You make somebody money and they want to invest in you again. It seems to work better for men than for women, at least in my case. That was that was certainly true. So finally it dawned on me I needed uh I needed a white guy with gray hair in the room with me. And so I went back to the guy who was who had hired me, who was the CEO for the first whatever, six years that I was with Life Scan. We had stayed friendly, and he agreed to come on as a as a chair. So he came on in a day or two a week kind of capacity. I gave him a lot of equity. In hindsight, I gave him way too much equity for the role that he was playing. But I I needed his resume, I needed his image to have these guys be confident. And he was great when we were in the room with investors. They would ask him questions and he would always refer them back to me. It was absolutely clear who was going to be running the company and just incredibly supportive. This is a guy, he's probably the most supportive man I've ever worked with. At one point in his tenure, he was the chair of a company that had an all-female management team. And when that happened, like the day it happened, I don't remember if it was the CEO being promoted from marketing or some other role change, but kind of all of a sudden it was an all-female management team. And he called me up and told me how excited he was. Oh, that's incredible. And over time, as we talked, he he reflected very, very carefully on the differences in decision-making style, having even one man in the group versus having all women, he really felt there was a significant difference in the level of collaboration and the form of decision making. So, anyway, that's who I had as my early mentor. And I was so lucky to have him in my corner and have him willing to come into these meetings with me, be the figurehead that the investors needed to see. Well, at the same time saying to them, it's not me, it's her. She's the one who's going to be running this. But still, having him there was enough for for me to get the company.

SPEAKER_00 12:32

And it changed the outcomes. It changed the fundering. Yeah, the funding. You know, what's interesting is that it's incredible that even 25, 35 years ago, it makes sense that many years ago that that was necessary. And it it is in so many instances, even necessary now. And I'll have conversations with founders. I know at least two or three Series A stage founders who have quite deliberately hired a very nice white male CFO because they know it's going to completely change their fundraising outcomes. And it's it is not it is strategic. It is not even a matter of it's not that they're not fully capable. It is the system that we're in. And it's just playing the game that we're in rather than trying to prove a point. They're just being strategic.

SPEAKER_01 13:19

Yeah, you have to make the investors comfortable. If they're not comfortable, they're not going to fund. So even in companies, companies that I advise that maybe it's Springboard or through other mechanisms, if they're bringing on advisors, even if they don't have a senior male on their team, recommend that they have advisors around the table who can help open doors, help show up at a at a key meeting if that's needful, because it does make a difference, even if they don't say anything.

SPEAKER_00 13:45

Just adds credibility. It's just optics. Yeah. That's incredible. How what have you seen in your board roles now as you as you've now come to in the roles you're in now? What what other things have you seen happen in current state?

SPEAKER_01 13:58

Yeah, so my board roles are split. I'm on a number of public company boards where the situation is very different. We're dealing with larger companies, later stage, but three are early stage, including the one that just launched. And over time, I should count it up. I think I've been on 15 or 20 boards at early stage companies through introductions from groups like Springboard and Astia and other organizations that focus on supporting female founders. And some of the stories are pretty incredible. Astia was an early investor in a company that had developed a novel breast pump, a virtually silent breast pump. So women who were sitting and taking conference calls could be pumping. Anybody who's listening to this who's used a breast pump knows that the normal sound of a breast pump is a kind of rah, rah, and it's very loud. You can't take calls. It's everybody looks at you if you're on an airplane, and it's even with airplane noise, right? They're they're loud. And there's some improvements that have come along in the last few years that certainly have made that better. Some of the wearables, et cetera, are really exciting. But this was before the where the wearables were available. And this is a a team with a female CEO, a woman who had four kids, and was a biotech executive and wanted to be able to work while she was continuing to breastfeed her kids. And anyway, so really lovely premise for this for this.

SPEAKER_00 15:31

Very real use case. Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 15:33

Yeah. And as I have found, and we can talk about many examples here, in the women's health space, you're often talking about body body parts that make men uncomfortable or make them giggle.

SPEAKER_00 15:46

Or maybe they giggle or they snicker or they yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:49

Yeah. So that's what happened here. So in order to demonstrate that this quiet breast pump was actually creating suction, the demonstration that the CEO had worked up was to use a silicon insert that is used on women, like if they've had mastectomies and they're having reconstruction, they'll put silicon silicone in. So it's basically a bag of silicone. And you could put the breast pump up to this bag of silicone, which is like tissue, and you could see the suction that was happening. It was a good way to demonstrate that even though it was silent, it was working. And I just remember one meeting we were in with the entire, and this was a pretty big room. It was an angel group, actually. An entire group might have been 12 or 15 people in the room and a big around a big kind of U-shaped table set up. And she was passing around the device and the silicon form. And every time the guys would touch this, I mean, literally, they would start giggling or snickering. Oh, goodness. And you just couldn't even continue talking. It's like, you know, this no, you you lose all seriousness in the meeting. Yeah. So that that didn't go well. And in some of the meetings, we had to forego letting people kind of touch the technology. The EO sometimes would would show it, but she didn't describe what this bag of silicone was because it would make the men uncomfortable. It's hard when you're talking about things that make people uncomfortable. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:20

Did she have to find a different way to tell the story? Was what was what was the fix to that problem?

SPEAKER_01 17:26

Well, it basically was not allowing people to handle the product and not describe what the material was. Okay. Just say, here's here's some material, you'll be able to see the suction happening. Okay. And you know, really take it at a at a high level because any more detail than that. And sometimes even just saying breast as part of breast pump would make the man snicker or look down or I don't know, whatever. This is a medical device. Right. It's covered by insurance.

SPEAKER_00 17:56

This is it's so much of it is we just have language that still has such stigma attached to it. And so much of that is we just have to say all these words out loud and make it more commonplace so that it doesn't get giggles anymore. And that's just it's a language thing, right? We just, it's it's in society that way, and we haven't resolved it yet.

SPEAKER_01 18:17

Another example, um, an incredibly important and successful company that was working on diagnostics for early stage ovarian cancer. The device that was being developed was being deployed through the working channel of a histoscope into the fallopian tubes to be able to capture cells to look for early evidence of ovarian cancer. And it was new at that time, the knowledge that ovarian cancer almost uh almost always starts in the fallopian tubes as opposed to the ovarian. So being able to sample cells in the fallopian tubes is a is a big deal. And talking about going through the uterus into the this working channel of the histoscope and into the fallopian tubes was just a non-starter. So again, guys looking down, they wouldn't look at the female, very talented, bright female CEO. And she had to completely change her pitch to she had to mention fallopian tubes because that's where the stones were coming from, but she didn't talk about the path anymore, about how the device was going to be inserting. You can't say vagina out loud because they would lose their minds. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So anyway, ended up being very successful return for for investors. Still an unsolved problem that more people are are working on, but uh it's unfortunate with that big an issue. You know, ovarian cancer is almost always caught at late stage. And anything with the hope of doing earlier diagnosis is huge for saving lives. So again, very serious topic, not something that you should snicker about, but it it's it's just body parts, right?

SPEAKER_00 20:05

It's uh I've said on stages a few times if we can say elbow, we can save vagina, it should be okay. But I know rooms have trouble with it when it's not in their their common semantics, right? Or their lexicon.

SPEAKER_01 20:17

So at one point, I was on the board of a company that was working on a male fertility test. And the CEO decided he wanted to step back. And I was asked to step up and become CEO of the of the company. And I thought, okay, being a female CEO talking about male anatomy, male body parts, talking about sperm, this should be easier, right? Because men are they that they have sperm, they should be comfortable having me. If anything, it was worse. My God, really? Uncomfortable about me talking about male infertility and talking about again, they couldn't look at me, they would look down. And the funny thing that happened, and it was over and over and over, is that somebody in the room would jump up and say, This product isn't needed. I got my wife pregnant on the first shot.

SPEAKER_00 21:13

Oh, it's emasculating for them. They can't even consider the possibility. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:17

So it in almost every meeting, there was some guy who stood up and said, Oh, I I know I don't need this. I got my wife pregnant. Like, okay, I'm not talking about you. There are a lot of statistics that one in five, one in seven couples struggle with inequality, and half the time there's a contribution from the male. This is a major global health issue with dropping fertility rates. But again, it was really that was a really hard company to raise money for.

SPEAKER_00 21:48

It's incredible how so much of this is it is just about like social dynamics and where ego comes from and definitions of masculine and feminine, and and it has nothing to Do with business potential. It has nothing to do with revenue or structure or whether the org can be successful or not. It comes down to ego and it and it can change whether a company gets funded or not. It's unbelievable.

SPEAKER_01 22:14

Yeah. It was quite a surprise. Again, I was I was not expecting that it would be hard to talk to men about male fertility.

SPEAKER_00 22:22

What kind of guidance do you give founders, women that you work with as they head into fundraising now? What are, given what you've seen, are there any kind of top-line things you always tell them before they start fundraising?

SPEAKER_01 22:34

Yeah, it depends what the kind of business is. So whether we're dealing with a female who has to deal with the dynamics of potentially being the only female in the room and other examples of things that I could talk you through that have happened when it's not women's health, but still a woman pitching to a room full of men. But if it is women's health, then it really helps to understand if the team that you're pitching to has had any experience in the field. Ideally, if there are women on the team. And I say women, that's important because a single woman on the team doesn't actually help. If there's one woman on a venture team, then if you're pitching women's health and the whole group of men turn to that woman, what do you think? It really puts her on the spot. She's not likely to stand up and be a champion. And she doesn't want to be pitch and told as the go-to person for women's health. So I have found that unless there are multiple women in the room, it's it's not that helpful, honestly. But if there are women who have led deals before, I mean, this is not just women. If there are people that you know who've led deals like your deal, and you can get to know them and try to create a champion before you even walk into the room to pitch to a larger group, that's always a great idea. And I encourage people to make those connections and try to have those one-on-one meetings and find somebody who will be a champion. But I find it's especially important in women's health where there's still a lot of firms that haven't placed a bet in this gigantic space. Right, right. With a lot of fun and needs. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:11

Have you seen women have to change how they show up in the room or definitely appearance or anything like that as well? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:20

Another situation with a young woman, very attractive. She walked into a pitch meeting wearing a very professional-looking shift dress, sleeveless shift dress. She went through her pitch and the room seemed quite attentive. Yeah, she just did a she did a great job. And when she asked at the end if there were any questions, because she hadn't been interrupted along the way, or not not interrupted in a bad way that she hadn't been questioned along the way. It was silent for a while. And finally, one of the men piped up and said, Your bra strap was showing. I didn't really hear anything you said. Oh my goodness. Are you kidding? Yeah, I'm not kidding. Legitimately. Who is it? And she was so freaked out. She kind of looked at me and I was like, close up your notes, we're leaving. We're leaving.

SPEAKER_00 25:09

Yeah, you can't even finish that conversation. No, it's inappropriate.

SPEAKER_01 25:13

No, you can't. And so I mean, she had been dressed in a beautiful dress with pearl earrings and with her hair down. And for her future meetings, she wore her hair back. She put on glasses, even though she didn't need them. Oh gosh. Because she wanted to look more studious and less attractive. And she went really dressed down. Like sometimes literally jeans and sweatshirts. Because those guys are getting funny. She was really freaked out about what her appearance.

SPEAKER_00 25:45

It's so frustrating. They didn't hear a word she said. At least that guy didn't. That guy didn't. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's incredible how much thought women have to put into not just the pitch and like the quantity, the quality of the pitch itself, and and the content of it, but also what we wear and how we look in the room and whether the the men in the room or the people in the room are going to be thinking about other things rather than listening to the content of the pitch. Yeah, which is too bad.

SPEAKER_01 26:16

So that's unfortunate. That was fairly, no, fairly recent. These things still are still happening. So yes, women have to think about what they say, how they show up, how they present their material, yeah, how they talk about body parts. All those things.

SPEAKER_00 26:33

Are you are you seeing something as getting better in the system? Are there structural things or systemic systemic things that are changing that are making it easier or smoother for female founders to raise capital?

SPEAKER_01 26:46

Yes, with the caveat that right now I don't think it's a very good time. Unfortunately, I think we've regressed a bit. It's a time when with capital being tight, without there being a lot of exits, a lot of public offerings, things are just slow. And there are exceptions. I know some women who have done really well and repeat founders who've gone out and have been able to leverage their successes and get and get money in. But the the thing that's changed the most is there are a lot of small funds out there now. So early stage investment isn't only angel investing. There are lots of funds that have 10 million under management, 25 million under management that are doing these early stage kind of seed, pre-seed deals. And that's really nice. And a lot of them have one or more women on their team. Some of them are teams of women. And so that's incredibly helpful. And women's health is an area that they think about because it applies to them directly. So there's a lot more early capital that is available in this space. You may be aware in January at JP Morgan, there was a report that was rolled out that talked about the state of finance in women's health. And the basic message is that this is a big category. This isn't an up-and-coming category. This is a big company that's been a big category that's been around for a long time. If you include things like cancer diagnostics, cancer therapeutics, other things that are clearly women's health, but have been called cancer companies or diagnostics companies and not women's health companies, the world is a lot bigger.

SPEAKER_00 28:24

Right. And we've already returned $100 billion if we look at it by condition rather than trying to prove a horizontal, right? That is women's health. Yeah. Right.

SPEAKER_01 28:35

And I think it's giving founders new ammunition because previously founders, so this is not my observation. This is well documented. Women are more likely to get defensive questions.

SPEAKER_00 28:49

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 28:49

Why do you think you can meet those goals? Kind of challenging their assumptions. Men are more likely to get aspirational questions. And when women were asked in the past, or often that it was just a statement that was made, I don't see exits in this space. How am I going to exit if I invest in women's health? Now there's a lot more information about what those things have looked like, who the players are in the field. And the big players kind of roll in and roll out. They're not consistent in women's health. Sometimes it's in vogue, sometimes it's not. But if you look across this whole broad category, there are more players than people had realized, and more money that has come to the table, including late-stage money, private equity, even public, public company funding. So I think that's all very positive for the field.

SPEAKER_00 29:40

Yeah, there's there's more proof points that now founders can point to and say there is value, there is proven value, there have been deals that have capitalized and and returned money to investors, which is great. My my one continued issue with that is that having to prove it all the time is something that's still a hurdle for the category. And and and I always I say this all the time because it drives me crazy is that when Google and Facebook and Amazon, right, came to market and were raising money and these things, there were no proof points for search or social or e-commerce, right? They didn't have to prove it. They raised money and they got capital because there were behaviors and there were market trends and there was demand. And those are the things we should be investing on, and that's how ventures should move. So some of this is it's yes, we have it and I love it, and it's great, but we're we're still kind of living in what is a prevention mindset with this category. And it will shift if we keep kind of saying the bullet points out loud, but it it's it's frustrating nonetheless.

SPEAKER_01 30:44

It is, and honestly, the funding that is most available now is this early stage funding. Right. Yeah. Angels, small VCs, a lot of these companies still hit a wall when they try to reach out.

SPEAKER_00 30:56

The later stage capital is still very hard.

SPEAKER_01 30:58

Yep. So it's not like this is a solved problem. There's a lot more to do here, but at least there's some glimmers. Yeah, I agree. There also are very credible sources, including Dow Jones and other national publications that have talked about women leaders and how successful women leaders have been. The basic premise on which Astia was funded. I think to some degree, Springboard as well. They had a founder in common. And the idea is that if you invest a dollar in a woman and a dollar in a man, you're likely to get a higher return, investing it in in women. There's now an all-female CEO fund for public companies. That's a instrument that is doing well. And there's growing awareness that female CEOs can be very successful, can return capital. They do great. They do really well. Yeah. Yeah. And it's not a matter of, oh, she doesn't look like the CEOs I use I usually invest in. Look at performance. And again, it's not any one of us saying, trust me, this is gonna work. Yeah, there's data. Yeah. The massive amounts of data now over decades that show that women are worth interesting are worth investing in, women's health is worth investing in.

SPEAKER_00 32:18

We just have to trust a larger set of data than we've been willing to trust before and shift our pattern recognition and and be more open-minded about where we're willing to place some butts. I did that that has to expand. So do we just have to keep saying it out loud in rooms that are well beyond the echo chamber, right? And uh hopefully move more capital.

SPEAKER_01 32:38

So and helping each other. Because honestly, early on in my career, when I I did run into the occasional woman who would be in the same room, maybe pitching for money or whatever, there was this sense from a lot of the women I encountered that I have to put you down because most are gonna fund one of us. Yeah, right. It's you or me, or maybe neither of us, but it's not gonna be both of us.

SPEAKER_00 33:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 33:03

And fortunately, that has largely gone by the wayside. Scarcity is breaking. But certainly, my perspective, your perspective, the women that I interact with, we're all here to help each other because we recognize that we're gonna succeed better together than by trying to put anybody down. Let's all make this a bigger pie.

SPEAKER_00 33:22

Right. Right. No, community, we're realizing community is a real superpower and that we can all move forward in much bigger ways together. And and building our own tables and pulling up more chairs and doing this all as a collective rather than trying to push one or the other out of the way. And I we're all realizing that a lot, which I think is incredibly powerful. It is. If you could leave everyone listening with two or three insights from your experience or things to know as they head into their own fundraising, what what would those be? Well, the first, I mentioned it a bit, but really do your research.

SPEAKER_01 34:00

Don't just blast out email introductions to a hundred different firms. Number one, if you can get a personal intro, it's always better. You're more likely to get, to get recognized, to get a meeting, to at least get a review. But you talked about pattern recognition. The investors have patterns. If you take the time and you look at what they've already invested in, you can get an idea of what's going to play well to them. And even if they haven't invested, for example, in women's health, but they've had a lot of medical devices or they've done a lot of digital health, you can play up on things that they know about. So it doesn't seem like you're coming in as something that's just completely out in left field to them. If you can't find any of those linkages, it's probably not the right firm. You're going to waste your time and theirs. So really doing your homework on the investors is incredibly important. And the other, again, I alluded to it, but when you build your team, both internally and with advisors, board members, et cetera, you want to have people who are going to help you look bigger and more important and more strategic. It can make a huge difference to a small early stage team to have experience around you. And it makes a big difference to the people who are evaluating you to know that those people think enough of you to be willing to put their name on what you're doing. That means something. Yeah, that's a great one. So yeah, it's uh certainly important.

SPEAKER_00 35:22

Great, right. Well, thank you so much for joining me. Your experience and the things you've seen are so there's so much richness there. And I think it's such a great perspective for everyone listening to here.

SPEAKER_01 35:32

So I appreciate it so much that you were that you joined. Well, thank you for the invite. And if there's even one tidbit that helps one female founder, I'm delighted.

SPEAKER_00 35:41

Thanks for listening to the Capital Flex. If today's episode hit home, share it with the founder you love and follow me on LinkedIn for more.