I think my liberal arts education has helped me a lot as an entrepreneur because it taught me critical thinking. Of course, I also had a tremendous amount of fun and Michigan really broadened me in a way that also kept me down to earth to be able to be a good leader and motivate people.

As I look today at many of my friends from college: one is a chef in Michigan, another is in the band Wild Belle, one works for a bank, and another is a teacher out in Montana. My husband went to Harvard and a lot of time it feels like most of his classmates are working in business or finance. With Michigan, thankfully that’s not the case.

I began my career as a journalist, first at The New Yorker and then at The Economist. To get your stories published, you have to be self-starting and persistent, and those qualities definitely translated to entrepreneurship. 

I also spent a really fascinating year helping Hank Paulson with his memoir, in 2009.

I got that job because I was trying to get hired at the Wall Street Journal, but the editor recommended me to Hank’s writer instead.

Hank was raring to get started, and his writer was like, “If you can read this book on J.P. Morgan’s takeover of Bear Stearns in a day, then you have the job.” I was like, “Okay, I’ll go buy some Red Bull!”

I co-founded my first company in Singapore, while I was still working for The Economist, and it was a total failure.

It was an online travel business, geared towards group travel for the Chinese market.

I still think the idea was great, but we were pretty clueless when it came to operations.

My dad was like, “I know you don’t like to listen to me, but if I can give you one piece of advice: Go get other experience before starting a business.” So that was my next step.

Transitioning to venture capital was really tough. I knew I wanted to change careers, but it was sort of a nightmare scenario.

My husband got a job in London, so we moved there, and I didn’t have a network at all.

I had maybe 120 meetings. I was very scared that I was facing the beginning of the end of my career.

Then I met a partner at a venture capital firm, he was looking for an associate, and he had a soft spot for journalists, so he hired me in two days. It was partly luck, but also a game of numbers—I worked really hard to meet a lot of people, and it took time.

I didn’t know at the time what company I wanted to start, but I knew I wanted to start something.

During the interview, I made it clear that I didn’t necessarily want to climb the ladder to become a VC.

I wanted to get up close and learn about starting a company, and I was willing to do whatever job they needed in the meantime while I learned the ropes.

At Index, I saw that digital health was really in its first inning. In 2013 telehealth was beginning to gain a little bit of traction. But women’s health and family planning were still largely underserved.

When one of my best friends first started the family building journey, she got really bad postpartum depression. The next friend couldn't conceive and it took her three IVF rounds.

I was working in venture capital at the time… Sitting across the table looking at all these entrepreneurs starting digital health businesses, I thought, “Wait a second, why are there no women coming into these rooms? And why isn't anyone focused on this moment of building a family, because it's so central to a functional healthcare system?”

And so, very boldly and brashly I thought, “Well, we're going to figure it out and do it.”

I asked tons of questions about how they related to their health care. A key theme that arose was access — whether it was problems around lack of access to specialists through insurance, limited time to access mental health care for postpartum depression with a newborn at home, or financial barriers to fertility treatments.

You’d hear stories about a woman needing to see a pelvic floor specialist after giving birth, but no appointments were open for three months with a doctor in their network. It was clear through these conversations that this was a much wider problem than just my group of friends.

One of the big questions I was asking them is, “So, all of this telemedicine is starting, why aren't you guys doing telemedicine? Why is it only primary care?” And everyone was like, "Well, I don't know. Because that doesn't make any sense."

The first wave of digital health companies seemed to over-index on regulatory compliance and speaking to providers. They weren’t tech companies building delightful customer experiences. That’s when I knew there was a huge opportunity.

In December 2013 I went to lunch with Kevin Johnson, an Index partner who was focused on biotech and softly pitched him my idea for a women’s virtual health clinic. He bought in and wrote a $50,000 check.

We didn’t look like a traditional founding team. I see other founders who obsess over getting folks on board with dazzling resumes. But I wanted people who would run through walls to achieve our goal.

The first person I called was my friend Sally Law Errico, who I used to work with at The New Yorker. 

A couple of years back she had pitched me an idea for a mocktail for pregnant women, so I knew she was interested in working in a similar space. She agreed to be our first employee on a part-time basis as our Director of Editorial and Community.

I basically walked up to everyone there and asked if they were an engineer and whether they were interested in healthcare and Suzie Grange was the first person who said yes. We went and had lunch together and I told her about the company and the mission, and she agreed to do some work on the side.

I was attending my best friend’s wedding and knew Zach was going to be in attendance, and that he was a top-notch engineer. I switched the seating cards so that I ended up sitting next to Zach and basically pitched him on the idea of joining Maven for the entire wedding.

That two week trip to San Francisco, quickly turned into three months — the entire duration of my visa.

I attended every single engineering conference that I could. I reached out to people on LinkedIn. I cold-called people. I set up my ‘office’ in the food court at the Nordstrom shopping center as I had a table, I felt safe, had space to work and a little portable WI-FI connection. Oh, and it was free!”

Getting the first couple dozen providers to sign on was pretty easy. Women’s health is so underserved — we have the highest maternal death rate in the developed world. The believers were excited to join our mission.

I wanted to create a digital community where women could continue to have these conversations, ask questions and help one another tackle the tangled web of our healthcare system.

This approach would also help us continue to prove out our concept as we were thinking about raising money.

Yeah, we were two weeks out of cash at one point. But I think in the early days of talking to investors, again, it was 2013/2014 and women's health was considered nich, no one was talking about fertility. No one was talking about miscarriage. No one was talking about postpartum depression or even just how hard it is to be parents of young kids at a time when your career is ramping and all of the trade-offs that come with that.

We started in London and there was not as much stigma in women's health in Europe. So, a lot of the friends and family rounds that we pulled together very early on, which was about a million dollars, was pretty straightforward. It was just like a "Hey, I want to see more traction," or "Sure, I'll give you $50,000. It sounds like a good idea." And I had had a network, obviously, from working in venture capital.

Then we moved to the US to try to raise an institutional seed round and it was just like a blood bath.

So now there's a term for how we went to market, which is called B2C2B. Our thesis at the time was that the most important thing that you can do in any kind of technology company or any kind of industry where we're trying to change how things are done through new products is to build a great product.

And to build a great product, you need lots of feedback. You need to have a rapid iterative process to make changes and to pivot based on what kind of feedback you're getting from your consumers.

You always have very limited resources in the beginning. So we put all of that into making a great product. We launched in April 2015, knowing that the real business model opportunity was in selling to employers, payers, and the government. Those are the big payers of healthcare.

We would stand in a park and try to sign consumers up with field marketing. We’d hire a bunch of interns to go canvas the city and try to get eight appointments. We set up a table at the New York Marathon. It was a grind.

A community member asked a simple question, and we had four different provider types answering to add their input — an OB-GYN, a doula, a midwife and a nutritionist.

Oftentimes, the answers to fertility and parenting questions aren’t black and white. It was incredible to see so many different perspectives represented in a community forum.

Employers are in the best position to buy — they want happy and healthy employees and they want women to come back to work after having babies.

So I was going around to different employers and speaking their language about how Maven could help them cut their high healthcare costs and provide a compelling benefit that stands out from competitors.

Maven connects patients and providers over video or private message. Women can get prescriptions—we help provide a lot of scripts for birth control and UTIs—or they can get support on whatever specific issue they’re going through, whether it’s breastfeeding or mental health. We offer weight loss support with our nutritionists and injury support with our physical therapists.

We’re basically a one-stop shop: You don’t have to go to all these different places to get digital care. We now have providers to cover anything a healthy woman would need over her journey from college to menopause.

A lot of people didn't think this was a big market and that women's health was this niche, side thing.

I spoke to individual female angels, but in those early institutional rounds what would happen is I would meet a wonderful man, a male investor, who would see it. He was a dad. He got the problems that we were solving.

Then he would take it to his partnership and there wouldn't be a single female in the partnership. And so, we would get rejected because someone would be like, "There's no problem here. Women have doctors. There's no problem here."

Our series A after 40 rejections, was led by a mom of three who was pregnant at the time, and she had a very small partnership. It was a very small B2B fund here in New York. Spring Mountain Capital.

She was like, "Guys, this is a big market. Look at their pipeline. Look at the rest of the trends in digital health. We should take a bet here." And she convinced them.

The one thing that I think was really important for me in the early days, having not come from a sales background, and quite frankly not even a corporate background or an MBA, was I surrounded myself with advisors across a lot of different areas. Sales was one of them.

There's this wonderful woman, Michelle Shepard, who was a Chief Revenue Officer of a lot of different companies and she worked with PE firms and would come in and transform that sales team and then move out.

Someone introduced me to Michelle and she really cared a lot about female founders and so I made her an advisor and I just had monthly calls with her.

She was actually really instrumental in helping me understand how to build a sales org, what metrics we should be looking at, how to hire great people, and I was a newbie so I didn't always get it right in the early days, but she was certainly very helpful in helping me understand what best in class looked like.

We will use the capital today to double down on Maven’s Family Benefits platform, to support more women in the workforce, more women in leadership positions, more diverse families, and more confident working parents.

Today we’re launching our latest feature, breastmilk shipping, which is an important component of our return-to-work program as it equips working parents to travel.

This investment will not only engender change — it is itself a sign of change.

Jess Lee, who is leading the investment from Sequoia, is the firm’s first female investment partner in the US. Oak, which is led by Annie Lamont, is the only female-led venture capital firm in healthcare — and Nancy Brown, a female partner who spent more than two decades at leading healthcare companies, is leading their investment.

This is what happens when we create change from within — when women start to drive capital allocation decisions — which they didn’t in 1972, and are only starting to today.

The market is not just listening, but acting. We’ve grown 14x in the last 12 months and now serve some of the world’s largest multinationals.

The transaction is between [women] ourselves and the doctor, not layers of insurance companies and hospitals and clinics.

The State of Massachusetts was like, "Maven, can you do our pediatrics and our OB virtual care appointments for our Medicaid population?"

And they were like, "Can you launch in two weeks?" Okay.

That was actually one of the most vivid moments where we had all shifted to remote work and we just had an incredible team that stayed up like every night for two weeks and we launched it on time, and everything went well.

The overturn of Roe v. Wade is something that is completely devastating in women's health because so many people are suffering.

This is a very black-and-white story of restricting access to care during one of the most vulnerable times in a woman's life, which is going through that family-building process and pregnancy.

All the major medical associations have come out and they have said, "This is restricting access. We're going to have adverse patient outcomes. This is not good." Almost one out of four women by the time they're 45 have had an abortion— it is just such a core part of prenatal care.

When we knew it was coming, we started building a pregnancy options counseling program as part of our core maternity program. We’re helping people understand their options, the implications, and the law around all of that.

What we're seeing in that product is people who are living in states with restricted access, they might not even be pregnant, they might be wanting to have a baby in a year, but they're so anxious now about their reproductive health that they're thinking about delaying their families until this is figured out.

Then we have a travel reimbursement product through our payments platform, Maven Wallet. Our clients, both payers and employers, are able to support employees who need to travel across state lines to get support and we power that reimbursement process.

Approaching healthcare as a bit of an outsider has allowed us to innovate a lot.

Knowing what I know now, I probably wouldn’t have gone in like a bull in a china shop, but it also meant that we had a fresh take.

The industry is complicated and heavily regulated, so before we launched, I dedicated more than a year to making sure we were building good products, getting the right lawyers, and checking all the boxes. We now deliver care nationally over a HIPAA compliant system, so it’s really happening.

We’ve also built a number of specific products, such as Maven Campus, which is for college students, and Maven Maternity, which provides support for women from the moment they start trying to get pregnant to when they re-enter the workplace after maternity leave. We’re starting to re-invent the support they can receive.

There are actually more similarities to journalism and entrepreneurship than you would think. Working as a journalist definitely helped me learn how to operate in unstructured environments and inspire others to get excited about bigger ideas.

I’ve also made sure to have a network of really smart advisers to help me grow Maven—kind of like my sources when I was a journalist—who guide me toward the right answers across the different parts of the business.

Now that we have a baby, what keeps me from burnout is playing with him, uninterrupted. He’s my zen time.

During the week, I try to get home at 6:30pm and be with him for two hours, not online, not checking my phone.

And then after he goes to bed I go back online and finish working. I might be spending a little less time on email, but I’m much more focused, and whipping through stuff.

Fundamentally, raising money is a sales pitch. If you’re making a sales pitch, you need to know why a buyer is going to buy. It’s having an intimate knowledge of how VC funds work, how they make money, and how they make decisions—these all equip you as an entrepreneur to better speak that language.