S2EP12: Even Taboo Can Get Acquired with Maria Molland

A New York City subway agency called Thinx’s period underwear ads too inappropriate. The same stations were running ads for erectile dysfunction pills.

In this episode of The Capital Flex, I sit down with Maria Molland, former CEO of Thinx, who fought that double standard, still built a globally recognized health brand, and then sold the company to Kimberly-Clark in 2022.

Maria spent 25 years scaling businesses across consumer tech and healthcare, including 15 years running divisions at eBay and Yahoo. Today she’s an executive-in-residence at Frazier Healthcare Partners and an advisor to funds like Overwater Ventures and Goddess Gaia Ventures, where she helps build the next generation of women’s health companies.

We get into what it took to raise when investors have decided a market for half the planet was too small, how Maria turned a censorship fight into a trajectory-changing press moment, and the questions about kids that no male CEO ever fields. We talk about strategic money that hands one investor the right to block other buyers, building for profit when securing funding hits walls, and why hard numbers are the data even bias can't argue with.

Key Takeaways:

• Why, when investors wouldn't fund the vision, Maria stopped selling it and instead built the organic revenue and margins they couldn't argue with.
• How Maria turned censorship and taboo into earned press, building Thinx’ brand and sales on outrage and word of mouth instead of an ad budget she didn't have.
• How she handled a board member who questioned whether Maria could run the company with a baby at home. 
• Which leadership skills have been her anchor through scandal, a revenue collapse, and rebuilding the supply chain on a deadline, ensuring Maria remained steady and kept the team moving forward.

My Reflection & Challenge:

Maria ranked profitability as her number one value at Thinx. Above the mission. Above breaking taboos. Above everything, the brand stood for publicly.

When you build in a space where the stakes are personal, the mission is the fuel. It's what makes the rejection bearable. So often being told to put profit first can feel like a betrayal of the reason you started.

But Maria didn't see it that way - and it's a lesson every founder can learn. She understood that purpose without profit doesn’t secure longevity. Profit isn't the enemy of purpose. It's actually THE lever needed to keep it alive, no matter what.

This Week's Challenge:

1. If investors won't fund your vision, start building the proof. What is the one metric in your business that, if undeniable, would change the conversation?
2. Write down your cultural values and rank them in order. Maria put profitability first, ahead of the mission, because she knew the mission needed profit to survive. If profitability isn't near the top of your list, ask yourself why.
3. To ensure an M&A outcome, start learning how your ideal buyer operates right now. The founders who get acquired are the ones who build with their target buyer in mind.

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

Links and Resources: 

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

https://www.frazierhealthcare.com/ 

https://www.overwater.vc/ 

https://www.ggventuresgroup.com/ 

https://www.kimberly-clark.com/en-us/ 

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_01 0:02

This is the Capital Flex. I'm Naseem Sayani. 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 Maria Molland. She is an investor, operator, and board director with more than 25 years of experience building and scaling businesses at the intersection of consumer technology and healthcare. Previously, she was the CEO and board member of Thinks, where she transformed the company into a globally recognized women's health brand known for product innovation, clinical credibility, and advocacy around menstrual and preproductive health. During her tenure there, she led significant growth across digital, retail, and international markets and ultimately orchestrated the company's successful acquisition by Kimberly Clark in 2022. We're going to talk a lot about that because there's so much embedded in the fundraising, the growth, and that acquisition experience. She currently serves as an executive in residence at Frasier Healthcare Partners, where she focuses on identifying and supporting investments in digital health, consumer, and women's health. And she's also an advisor to several early stage venture funds and companies in the consumer and women's health ecosystem, including Overwater Ventures and Goddess Gaia Ventures, which is based in Europe. She supports founders and investors in both those places, building the next generation of women's health companies. So we have lots of overlap and lots of common things in what we do. And we met just a little while ago in New York at a fantastic dinner and became fast friends. And I immediately wanted to get her on the pod. So thank you so much for joining me. It is great to be here. Thank you for having me. If there's anything else you want to add to your intro, please, please do.

SPEAKER_00 1:52

No, I mean, I think you hit the highlights that are probably most relevant for your audience. I did spend, gosh, I must be 15 years running divisions of pretty large corporates, including Yahoo and eBay. So I have a lot of experience scaling platforms that already have a pretty big head start and also a lot of experience internationally as well.

SPEAKER_01 2:12

Okay, great. That's awesome. I love all of that. It's good to round out uh where all the experience comes from. So, as you know, the podcast is focused on the fundraising stories of female founders and both, you know, when things go really well and and more so when they're really hard, because a lot of what women go through is so dramatically different, right? Than what our male counterparts go through. And and the intention really to surface those problems and really leave the audience with the insights and the learnings so that as anyone who listens to this goes to market, they have a better toolkit in hand on how to walk into so many. I wish I had something like this when I was when I was being. I know. I I get so many phone calls that I finally said we have to, we've got to talk about it out loud and add some texture around this from people that have been through it so that we're not all building our own wheels. So if we could start with, if you think back to your fundraising experience, whether it was at Thinks or in previous roles, if you could use three words to characterize that experience, what words would you use?

SPEAKER_00 3:10

Gosh, probably clarifying, educational, and not very linear.

SPEAKER_01 3:18

So tell us, tell us more about that.

SPEAKER_00 3:20

Yeah, so clarifying, I would say like within 10 minutes of walking into a meeting with a venture capital firm, I would know whether they were interested or not interested in in my case, building in a category that was pretty unknown. There was a lot of no's. So in most cases, it was it was a no. And then in terms of educational, again, going back to the category piece, a lot of what I was doing was not just talking about the business and how we're gonna build it. It was talking about the category and why it was important and why innovation was going to be happening, why behavior change was gonna happen. So I spent probably more time doing that than I was actually talking about the business itself. And then third non-linear nonlinear is, you know, I went through two fundraising processes and there were a lot of fits and starts, things you can't control. And I'm sure we're gonna be talking about a lot of those things. I just didn't expect it to be so hard.

SPEAKER_01 4:17

Yeah, because you were creating this category as you were fundraising for it, right? We didn't period underwear was not a thing we had talked about as women before things put it in front of us, right? So the balance between education and selling was a whole different beast, but so familiar because so many women in women's health are doing so much of that pretty consistently. 100%.

SPEAKER_00 4:39

Yeah. I I do think there's challenges because there's a lot of pattern recognition in venture capital. And it's an understatement. You're used to like a certain type of founder and a certain type of category. And I think if you fall outside of that, either being a woman or developing a business in women's health, I think it just makes it, they feel like there's probably more risk. And I think, you know, the reality is with venture capital, it's still vastly men that are making decisions. I think it's like 10% women at this stage. We're making slow inroads, but it's very slow. And I think because they don't necessarily understand the problem, it just takes a lot of conversation around what the product is doing, what the problem is, and how it's going to be solved via your product or service. Right.

SPEAKER_01 5:32

Yeah, it's really far outside their lived experience. Yes. Before they can even get to what the solution is. So when you joined things, what was the fundraising status of the company when you joined? Put us in context of where it was when you walked in.

SPEAKER_00 5:46

Yes. So the company was actually in a bit of a crisis. The CEO had stepped down based on some allegations of sexual harassment. There was a lot of challenges with employees and trust associated with leadership. And I'd also say with, you know, partners, the board, our manufacturer who happened to be an investor. The company had raised about 800K via Kickstarter campaign. The vast majority of that had actually come from the manufacturer that was based in Sri Lanka. And so it took a while for me to get on board because as you can imagine, I thought this might be a situation that was untenable and it would not be easy to rebuild it. But I also saw the opportunity. There were about eight, it had 85% gross margins. And I owned, I owned the product. I loved the brand and I love the product. And so after I met the small team, I just got convinced that we could do something here. And so I had said to the board, if I'm going to join, they'll stabilize the business first. But then within about nine months, I wanted to go out and raise venture capital. And so I went out to a few firms in late 2017. And what I quickly learned is that they didn't think the category was venture backable. I had a few people tell me that it that the period market was just too small, which is funny now, right? But as you can imagine then I was I was pretty distraught, especially because half of the population gets periods. So we quickly stopped that effort. I I felt like I was just going to be, you know, on a, it was going to be something that was not going to end up in a great solution. And I was going to be spending a lot of time when the business really needed me running the business. And so what we did is we pivoted and really focused on how do we build a business with really strong unit economics, primarily organic revenue. We spent a lot of time with earned media and PR and trying to take our brand efforts and really make stories out of them that the PR and folks would pick up and word of mouth, right? And so that was able to build a business that was very profitable. And we had when we went out the second time, a little over a year later, we had a business that was pretty undeniable in terms of financials, right? And then the story became less about vision and more about the numbers. We did have challenges when we first went out because Facebook changed its algorithm. Oh yeah. Yeah. You know, vast all of our paid revenue was based on Meta. And so quickly our revenue fell. And so again, we had to pivot, stable, stabilize the business, and then wait before going out again. But once we did figure out that algorithm, you know, we were humming again. And so it made for a much easier sell because the numbers were quite strong.

SPEAKER_01 8:42

Right. Yeah. You didn't need them to believe in the experience. You would now have the proof, right? And there are sales, there is margin, there is profitability. And you don't just just look. We've already got the receipts for it, right?

SPEAKER_00 8:55

And I think to your question, like in categories that are kind of unknown, not talked about, you know, we definitely had in periods at that time was quite a taboo. You need to do that, I think. So I say to all founders, try to build a very, you know, profitable business with strong unit economics. And then once you prove it out with real numbers, it makes the story and the time that you're investing in it so much more worthwhile.

SPEAKER_01 9:22

Yeah. Yeah. It becomes a little undeniable, right? You can't really argue with it once the numbers show up. What were maybe one or two of the more gendered things that happened along the way in those in those or maybe early on? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:36

You know, I didn't in the fundraising process, I didn't have a lot of bias directed at me. I'm I'm lucky that way. I do think there was bias directed towards the category, right? Because it was unknown, because it was, you know, even if I was pitching to a male VC and they would oftentimes say, Oh, I'll have my wife try out the product. And yet that's not even back back then, that was really not a comfortable subject for even, you know, married people probably to have. So I think when there's taboos, it it just makes it a lot harder. I will say the the gender piece, I think, came up more around my being a CEO and having young kids. I had my two kids when I was, well, my daughter was six months old when I joined a CEO, and my son was born right before the sales process actually kicked off. And so I I did have a lot of, well, can she do this while raising young kids? And in particular the second one on my own. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:40

Oh my goodness. It's it's amazing that those questions come up. Like how did you navigate that? How did that make it back to you? How do you navigate something like that?

SPEAKER_00 10:49

The first time was it was I didn't find this out until later. It was I was well into my, well, I was a few months into my C the CEO gig. And I found out that a board member had basically said no to me. Luckily, the other ones had said yes. So I got into the role, but had said no to me, not because of my skill set, but 100% because I had a six-month-old. And yeah, that was it was something I think just lit in me that I have to prove this person wrong. And I also think it made me feel like I need to redefine leadership, especially for the vast majority of women that were on my team, right? That some of them did have aspirations to be a CEO one day. And so how I did that and how I was effective was primarily just by like having outstanding numbers and you know, killing it, right?

SPEAKER_01 11:40

Just getting the work done.

SPEAKER_00 11:42

Yeah. And I I will say I did spend a lot of time thinking about like my communication style, making sure that I was, I think a lot of things that happen in the in the boardroom is not really where the true conversations happen. They happen well in, you know, in front of a board meeting. And so I spent a lot of time like pre-reads, one-on-ones, a really strong 90-day plan. So everyone on the board knew what to expect and when to expect it. And I think if you do those things and the numbers are kind of mapping to that, they can't really complain, right? And so yeah, I ended up with, you know, a great relationship with with the board. And I, yeah, I think it it really ended up being a much more positive relationship, probably than it would have been if I not had that kind of desire to really turn it around. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:31

Yeah. Yeah. The urgency becomes completely different when you feel like the somehow the bar is different just because uh there's this added dynamic that that you know are a dad doesn't get asked those questions, nor does his ability to execute get questioned because his wife might be pregnant, right? It just it doesn't even come up in conversation.

SPEAKER_00 12:50

Yeah, and the interesting thing about it is that I think being a mom has made me actually a much better CEO. First of all, I I become much more purpose-oriented, right? So I'm my grit and perseverance has just like gotten even stronger because I just do it so much, especially for my my daughter, in the in the case of things. And I think too, it's like you know this, all moms know this. You become so you have clarity as to like really how to spend your time in the most effective way. And I think that makes me a much more effective communicator, good at like OKRs, good at like commun communicating with my team as to like what the important things to do need to be in order for us to achieve, you know, the vision that we've laid out.

SPEAKER_01 13:33

Right. Yeah, I know they say if you want to get something done, you give it to a mom because she's already multitasking the heck out of everything. So, you know, it'll get it'll get executed no matter what. When your business was growing organically, a lot of women's health companies deal with censorship problems and and communication marketing problems on on the platforms. Did things deal with that? How did you navigate things like that? Because it it persists, right? We're still dealing with algorithm problems for almost every part of women's health right now. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:04

Yeah. We, I mean, I think we were the poster child for this at the very beginning. So I guess the the net of it is I always figure out how to turn like lemons into lemonade. This is really what put things on the map. And because we didn't have that much money, we were always being crafty about how to use our marketing dollars. And in the the big marketing campaign that we became known for was a subway campaign in New York City, in which we were trying to represent how periods should not be taboo. So we had our underwear next to images of models in our underwear, but also with you know, fruit, egg yolks. You know, we got a lot of pushback from the agency that represented the New York City subway. And ultimately they said we can't have these images up in the subway. Think about what employees would think. I'm like, have an ad for breast augmentation surgery, literally with images of the different sizes, right? Of lemon.

SPEAKER_01 15:05

Right, right. Or the banana for erectile dysfunction, which everyone has seen. Right.

SPEAKER_00 15:09

And they said, well, we don't care. And no, clearly they thought we were a small startup and didn't have a lot of clout. So we took that story to the media. So the media really picked it up in in big ways, and that's why the brand awareness like really popped after that campaign. So we continued to do things like that where we really tried to focus on how we got the story about breaking taboos. This was right after the Me Too movement. So women really wanted to talk about the things that were formerly taboo like periods, like fertility issues, like menopause. And so we really leveraged that as much as we could because, and also it was helpful, it was really helpful because we had such little money.

SPEAKER_01 15:54

Yeah, I know it's such a testament to really kind of strategically working the system that we're in, rather than we might want to throw our hands up and say, oh, it doesn't work and I can't do it. But to leverage that for a PR moment is is brilliant, right? And there's, you know, and then also the macro moments, right? The Me Too movement and having these other macro moments happen in the same window. There's a couple of other founders I've spoken to that have really been able to lean in to these macro moments uh in a way that accelerate a fundraiser, accelerate PR, or really shift the conversation in their favor without a lot of money and without needing, you know, an algorithm to work properly in the moment. It's just a matter of like cultural zeitgeist that hit perfectly. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 16:42

And social media, right? So consumers play a huge role. I mean, consumers were a big chunk of the reason why we got media exposure as well. Like they were driving it, right? And that happened actually when we we went into retail in the UK. I don't think they really realized that our what our product was. And I walked in as they were setting it up, and the manager came over to me and was like, oh no, we're gonna have to, we're gonna have to pull this product. And you know, I couldn't say much except for talk to our customers in the UK. And the UK customers went to Selfridges and said, no, you have to carry this, right? And then smelled some emergency.

SPEAKER_01 17:20

You can't question it because that's revenue, right? And they don't want revenue to walk out the door. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 17:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:25

Yeah, that's incredible. When you were getting close to, or rather, I should ask, how did the conversation around the acquisition start to come together? Where did that start? Where did the relationship with Kimberly Clark first birth itself? Where did where did that germinate?

SPEAKER_00 17:41

So, I mean, we always knew that we would likely sell to a large CPG company. We weren't gonna go public, et cetera. And so we built the business with that in mind. And you know, we spent a lot of time with the various big corporates out there to like what do they need? And I say that to founders all the time now as well. And so we started, you know, really building, you know, strong unit economics, working to be an omni-channel business. We first went D2C, then Amazon, then specialty retail, then big box retail. We knew that CPG would want all of that. We started, you know, with uh moving it globally as well. That was important in particular to PG and KC. And we built really strong supply chain. There was multiple manufacturers, there's multiple folks where we were able to get our different materials from. And we were also class one medical device. So we had strong processes run out of the FDA as well. And I think that in that was actually before we raised our series A, and we ultimately ended up running raising a series A from Kimberly Clark. And so I think that they saw this category starting to really explode. They saw us being the leader in it, they saw the amount of direct consumer data that we had that they did not be really liked as well. We also managed Amazon very well. And I think that some of the learnings there was interesting. Okay, yeah, they could use it for other parts of our catalog. Yeah. But I will say, I don't think when they made that Series A investment, they were thinking about buying us. I think it was just we've got to kind of get in here and understand, you know, this new part of the market. And they were, you know, they were, they were not falling behind in the period market. PG is actually the market leader in there. So I think they thought this might be a really interesting way of starting to like get more share from some of the other players. So they made the Series A investment. There was one term associated with the Series A investment that I really disliked when we did it. I got a lot of pressure to take this deal. That was a right of first refusal. And so that's pretty typical for strategic. So it's not unusual. So that's the challenge of taking strategic money, but it did make the sale process. So they came to us about a year and a half after the sale. I remember it was in the middle of COVID and I got the call and I was like up in Tahoe, you know, working from a house up there. And just being like, oh boy, we have a lot of work to do to make sure that we professionalize this business, you know, to the to the standard that KCs in order to acquire us. And so for a year and a half, we like jumped over so many hoops to make sure that we were doing all the things they asked and and including kind of getting out of China our supply chain. And we were able to do that in three months. And we did a lot of, we did a lot of really interesting strategic and work as well as execution in order to get the deal done. And I think the lesson I take from it is like, listen, it all worked out for us with this rover. If you're gonna take if strategic money, it usually comes with that. Not always, but usually. And so, you know, you really got to balance that with the other options that in this case were financial sponsors. So that's something I really, you know, tell founders that they just need to be, it's not just about raising capital, it's about making sure that you're building businesses that have a lot of optionality.

SPEAKER_01 21:14

Right. So keeping it competitive almost, right? More so yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:17

If you ever wrote for like, you know, they knew there's no real competitors that are gonna counter a KC proposal in this case. So that's one. And you know, I think the other thing is like building businesses is if you want to be acquired, you shouldn't be talking them right a day one. But once you have a big enough business, KC didn't just want to buy a brand. They wanted to buy a business that was enough of a platform that they could scale globally.

SPEAKER_01 21:44

Yeah. Yeah. So meeting understanding how Kimberly Clark works and how this would fit into their operations while also giving them room to scale it. Like that, the whole team has to understand that really well to engineer this exit. Yeah. Did a lot of the teams. Go over with the acquisition? Some of them.

SPEAKER_00 22:02

So those there were a lot of us that had been there for a long period of time. So, you know, we had most of our equity had been had vested. So the folks that were, I would say, you know, had been there for four plus years, usually they they decided to leave. The people that were newer to the organization stayed. And that was it, it was an interesting transition, right? To go from being this crappy startup to being, and they did leave the company pretty independent. But I think a lot there was a lot of worry, right, from the people that were there about what is this new culture going to look like. And a lot of a lot of the employees were really mission and purpose oriented. And I think they felt like we were somewhat selling out. But I re and I I said this to him and I really do believe it. What an incredible opportunity, right? Like you've been at a business that has scaled and but the startup, and now you're gonna work on integration and you're gonna like understand how to operate within a larger company. Yeah, that is that is the dream. It might be a little bit painful at times, but it is the dream in terms of learning.

SPEAKER_01 23:10

Yeah. Usually the dream to be able, and also I know there's frustration around quote unquote selling out to those you're trying to disrupt, but but they have the cash to infuse into a business and to help it scale, which is what you what you want to have happen. Uh and they can't do it themselves.

SPEAKER_00 23:27

Exactly. Like that, I was so excited about it, mostly because I was like, this is going to achieve our vision of getting in more underwear drawers globally, right? They can do that like that. So it did achieve that. And also I think it really gave a great experience for the employees that end up going over there and experiencing that transition.

SPEAKER_01 23:45

Oh, yeah, absolutely. What what is your if you think back to when you were building culture at things and you have lots of different personalities in the room and building culture as a as a female leader versus maybe what you had seen in your past experience at the other companies you'd been at? Were there are there any lessons learned, takeaways, things that you think are really important for other founders to keep in mind?

SPEAKER_00 24:07

You know, I I don't know if it's a male-female thing. I think in general, I've actually mostly worked with men. It's probably also my age, right? There aren't as many women, given the fact that I'm 52, turning 52, gosh. So I, but I will say I just believe that culture is super important. So, to use a specific example, when I came into Thinks, it was obviously a very tumultuous time, there was a lack of trust. And I'm the type of person that likes to immediately put together a strategy, think about the growth, articulate that and get going, right? And what I really realized was that in order for me to grow that business, it was going to be like, how do you create a platform that you can grow from? And I would say the number one thing we did was what are the cultural values that are most important? So there would be like clarity as to where we were going. People had trusted who the leadership was and how we were gonna make decisions. And later on, this was, and I by the way, we changed our cultural values over time too, because what gets you to 50 million is not necessarily what's gonna get you to 500 million. We also prioritize them. So I often find sometimes the values would conflict. And so if you like within the after we raise the money, I actually kept this value and is with profitability, and we put that as number one. Because the reality is if you can't build a business profitably in a category where you can't raise money, no, you're not gonna achieve your mission. It won't move, right? It won't grow. Exactly. So we can't, we even, you know, even though the mission and breaking taboos and talking about all types of uh people that have periods was important, we had to first focus on profitability because otherwise we wouldn't be able to really grow and achieve what we all wanted to do in terms of get our getting our product out there and getting our brand out there. So I I think I think culture is important for every business, but I think it's in particular important for startups, right? Because you have to be able to have like just these values that you can go back to in terms of who you're gonna hire, how you're gonna handle performance management, and how you're gonna make decisions, which is really based on kind of your values as well.

SPEAKER_01 26:39

Yeah, yeah. No, absolutely, absolutely makes sense. What skills for you were do you think were most important to your, to your success, to your growth, or what evolved with you over time?

SPEAKER_00 26:49

I think I'm always somebody who's been very focused on like grit and perseverance and keep trying and think about, you know, the obstacles and how you're gonna get around them. And I definitely think that was probably the number one thing that I've always had kind of consistently as a through line throughout my career. I think it's changed and evolved, especially I would say, with startups, because you I also tend to be stronger at strategy than I am like on the operational side. So I think really understanding who you are and what value you add and getting people around you that can really compliment you and having those things, you know, change obviously as you grow and and move into other stages. Like for example, we went to retail, suddenly retail became super important, right? Yeah. So I think that's really important. And then I will say I will early in my career, I was always trying to be very composed and always has the right answer and not necessarily showing vulnerability or weakness. And that has really changed. Like life is a series of ups and downs, as we all know, as we get older. And I become much more vulnerable about the things in my life that have made me who I am. And like I I lost a baby at 24 weeks. It's part of the reason I went into women's health. I talk about it a lot because by the way, lots of other women do too. And it makes you make them feel human and it makes them more inspired to follow somebody, right? And I I never want to be and I won't, I never wanted to follow somebody who's much more like a robot. You want to follow somebody who you see yourself in, right? And so that I think is the vulnerability, the empathy. I think it also came with being a mom for sure. And then the one thing I didn't realize until probably things, because there were so many different crises that kind of happened during the course of the five and a half years I was there is when things are rough, you can't freak out. You have to be calm and steady. And even if you're like on the inside freaking out, I think that's really important to show clarity, to show decision making that you can make so the team stays steady with you. And being patient as well. And like in explaining the data, the reasons why you're staying patient, all that is important. But yeah, I think that's a really strong characteristic for all types of leaders, but I think in particular for businesses that aren't just up and to the right.

SPEAKER_01 29:30

There's a lot of right, right. If you're gonna move around that chart a little bit, it's it's going to take a few twists and turns to get there, right? So my two-part question to wrap us up. You're in a position now looking at deals, you're evaluating companies, you're you're thinking about investments. What do you look for? What are the signals for you that that a founder has it right, that a business is on the right path? And and the other half of that is what is your guidance for founders as what are the two or three things that they have to think about as they put their decks together, as they tell stories, as they go to market to fundraise? What do you want them to keep in mind?

SPEAKER_00 30:08

So I influence investment decisions at two in two areas now, right? In private equity, so much larger scale businesses, and in venture capital. I think your audience is probably more in the bench. It means more venture. Yeah. So the first thing I look for is strong unit economics, strong margins, right? And so that's super important to get right. The second part I look for is a team that is well versed in solving the problem. And it's not just one person, it's usually, you know, it's a it's a group, right? And in healthcare, my guess is a lot of people that listen to your podcast are in healthcare. You need to have somebody who's really, I see all these pitches with like advisors of some very, you know, interesting doctor that has a big name. But when I do a little digging, I discover that they're pretty much just a name, you know, a picture in a deck and they're not like necessarily spending a lot of time. So I think it's really important to get that medical know-how if you're building in healthcare. It's a very challenging and complex space. The third thing I look for is clarity on who you're selling to and why they're gonna pay attention, right? So this goes to outcomes, it goes to how much I always say in healthcare, if you're selling to payers or to employers or to hospital systems, you need to keep the outcomes at least the same and lower cost, right? Ideally, you're doing both. Ideally, you're improving outcomes and reducing costs. But at a minimum, you have to be doing the first. And then I also in the age of AI, I look for data that is uh proprietary or at least has a flywheel that you're compounding your proprietary unique point of view in a way that your competitors don't necessarily have. And ideally, you're embedding yourself into the clinical workflow of some sort if you're selling into healthcare as well.

SPEAKER_01 32:15

Yeah, no, absolutely. It's all very similar things that I look for also. That clinical integration, it's so interesting to the market has moved pretty dramatically towards that being a necessary checkpoint, right? Checkbox on how we evaluate success. And that's and it's really hard too, right? And it's really hard. Yeah. Doctors to change is and clinicians to change is very difficult. No, absolutely. Well, thank you so much for being here, Maria. This has been a brilliant conversation. There's so much learnings and all the experience that you've had. And I know I a lot of the conversations have not been with CPG based companies or growth paths. And so there's there's so much here that a lot of those founders can learn from. So I appreciate it so much. Thank you. I loved it. Thank you. 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.