Tiny Little Victories podcast host Jennifer Kite Powell and Femovate founder Theresa Neil discuss major femtech challenges and opportunities, and how collaboration and compassion break down taboos around women’s health.
The Tiny Little Victories podcast, hosted by Jennifer Kite Powell, features inspiring stories and conversations with leaders making significant strides in their industries. In this episode, Jennifer speaks with Theresa Neil, founder of Guidea and Femovate, to explore the journey and impact of Guidea and its Femovate program, discussing fascinating topics such as:
You can listen to the podcast or read the full transcript below.
Want more? You can learn more about the Tiny Little Victories podcast and Femovate. If you have any questions or comments, email Theresa at theresa@guidea.com
Jennifer:
Hey friends, it's Jennifer Kite Powell, the host of Tiny Little Victories, and before I get into this next episode called For the Love of femtech, I want to introduce our guest because she has a resume/CV that's like three living rooms long. Now, it's not just a CV that has a bunch of stuff on it. She's been building up towards the moment where she started this company in Silicon Valley doing a lot of things at the very beginning of a market called UX Design. It's User Experience design. And we're going to read off a little bit of her street cred because it's mind-boggling to me. She has created a company from all of these years of being at the very beginning of the user experience on the web. And so let's just shout out a little bit about all the things she's done.
Maybe you'll guess who she is. I don't know. She's pretty popular. She's a digital health innovator. We love digital health. She's a top designer in technology. She's the founder of a company called Guidea and the accelerator called Femovate, which by the way sort of happened by accident. And she's also a femtech angel investor. Now, I'm hearing a lot of Fem words in there, and I know sometimes if you think of fem stuff, maybe we think of fembots from the Austin Powers series, but it's not like that. It's not fembots that are shooting bullets out of their pretty pink lacy bras. This is about technology that affects women's health. This is about technology that helps with endometriosis or technology that looks at the pelvic wall, so anything related to females and the technology around that. Now, femtech is a very big industry. It's growing quickly.
However, only 3% of femtech companies get funding. So there's a huge disparity where it's growing like mad fast and it's just not getting the funding that it needs. So this woman, Theresa Neil, has decided to use her expertise in user design from her very successful company called Guidea to donate $1 million worth of user design experience to femtech companies in the accelerator that she started called Femovate.
So we're going to get into that, but I just want you to listen for a minute to some of the things that she's been doing for the past 20 years in Silicon Valley before user experience was even a thing. Okay, let's stop for a minute. Listen to this. She's from Texas, so we're going to give her a big clap for that.
She was a UX research and design partner at Johnson & Johnson. She was a UX research and design partner at MasterCard. She's been a UX research and strategy partner at Intel. She was a UX design and strategy partner at IBM. She has been a UX and strategy partner at Walmart, at Nestle Purina North America, at Humana, at Dell Technologies, at eBay, at Bloomberg, at PayPal for nine years back in 2008, at Honeywell, at Pearson, at Cloudera, at a ton of other places like AT&T and the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society at Johns Hopkins. I mean, the list can go on and on. So here's this woman, by the way, also Adobe, that has created a company Guidea that takes UX design and helps other companies create better experiences for their customers and their products and has created an accelerator. Okay, that's a lot, right? That's a lot of stuff that she's been doing. And what she's going to tell us today that she had no idea that by opening up and creating this accelerator called Femovate, that it would have been so popular so fast, and so full of amazing companies from all over the world that were coming there to look for expertise.
Now, one of the things that underpins the tech companies that Theresa is talking about is the fact that they are all very busy women who have careers all in their own. They're doctors, they're scientists, they're academics, and they had come up with solutions to some of these issues for women's health. And while they're being a doctor delivering babies or being an academic teaching classes, they're like, oh, I have this great idea to solve this problem. So we're going to talk about how these companies are being led by some very top minds from around the world, female minds from around the world, and at the same time, they're creating companies that will potentially change women's health issues. So on that note, stay tuned for a very exciting conversation with Theresa Neil, the founder of Guidea and the founder of Femovate.
Jennifer:
Hey everybody, welcome to this next episode of Tiny Little Victories with your host, me, Jennifer Kite Powell. I am here today with a very interesting woman. Now, before I say her name, I'm going to give her a lot of send up and she's going to sit there and take all the compliments quietly. Maybe not, maybe she'd be giggling in the background. I don't know. Her name is Theresa Neil. She is a digital health innovator. She's a top designer in tech. She founded a company called Guidea, am I saying that correctly?
Theresa:
Yep.
Jennifer:
Cool. And Femovate, which is an interesting concept we're going to talk about today. And she's also a femtech angel investor. Welcome to the show, Theresa.
Theresa:
Thank you for having me. Excited to be here.
Jennifer:
Yeah, I'm really happy that you're here because you are a modern-day hero of mine. After I met you through Forbes and wrote a story about what you were doing because you have been donating about a million dollars worth of UX design to femtech companies, and that is so fascinating to me. So I wanted to start with that because why? What was your motivation for doing this?
Theresa:
It's a really good question, and I have to admit that it was not planned at all. It was kind of, so in 2022, in May of 2022, I had this idea that after 17, 18 years of designing tech for large enterprise companies and startups, that we were traditionally working with male founders and all-male-led companies, and I wanted to create a program to support women in tech. And so I thought we would create this baby bitty teeny program where we would do a call for applicants. At first, we were thinking just female founders, and then we decided we would tighten that up a little bit to be predominantly female founders who innovate in women's health. We're like, okay, that'll be good. So I was like, well, we'll do a call for applications and we'll take a couple of early-stage startups and provide them with cost, or deeply discounted services, or pro bono services to help them get their products to market, get them commercialized, get them in front of patients and providers, or get them out into the app store.
And so we did a call for applications and we had almost a hundred founders around the globe apply. So this is early-stage seed series, pre-seed series A companies apply. And once we started interviewing all these applicants, we realized the caliber of these founders was just...
Jennifer:
Off the...
Theresa:
Off the charts. And I have mentored for many accelerators, Stars, MassChallenge, Capital Factory, they're in Texas, all these different ones, they get candidates. I was really surprised with these candidates, but...
"We couldn't pick just two or three companies. We ended up picking 30 companies."
Jennifer:
Why were you surprised? What surprised you? Because you're a woman in tech, so was it that there were so many of them or that they were so outstanding with their street cred in terms of who they were, that they had been flying under the radar for a while? Is that why you were surprised?
Theresa:
I think we were surprised mostly at what so many of these founders were juggling. So many of them were practitioners, so they're actively delivering babies every week or doing physical therapy.
Jennifer:
Oh, I see.
Theresa:
Or they're really well-respected academic researchers or they're biotech engineers who are creating their own pharmaceuticals, and that's not enough.
Jennifer:
You ever hear about these stories though? I mean, this is so amazing. You just went from somebody delivering babies to academic researchers to creating their own pharmaceuticals. That's pretty impressive—sort of off the charts impressive.
"There's been no innovation in endometriosis screening, postpartum hemorrhage detection or any of these really important things, incontinence exams during labor. There's been no innovation in hundreds of years."
Theresa:
But they don't stop with that. And I realized there was a problem. So I've created a tech company, remember, these aren't technical, these are people, and they're not all of them, but...
Jennifer:
In general...
Theresa:
I've made this amazing thing, and I'm getting literally no support for it. And that, combined with my brand-new understanding of how bad women's health is, at least in the US...
Jennifer:
I mean, I'm laughing because I'm laughing at how bad it is with the state of it, not laughing at you.
Theresa:
Yeah, it's truly depressing. So it was this combination of talking to almost a hundred founders where you had these moments of elation of like, oh my gosh, you're just such an amazing entrepreneur and pioneer in this space. And then you're hearing sort of what they're trying to solve and you're like, you're kidding me. There's been no innovation in endometriosis screening, postpartum hemorrhage detection or any of these really important things, incontinence exams during labor. There's been no innovation in hundreds of years. So we were super inspired by that, and we couldn't pick just two or three companies. We ended up picking 30 companies.
Jennifer:
So you opened for the first time this itty bitty little thing you wanted to do, and then these companies just kept pouring in and you ended up with 30 the first time that you guys had decided were worthy of this, of the support. Is that right? 30 companies? What...
Theresa:
Exactly. So quite a huge number. And like I said, this was kind of a surprise to us too, as it was to them, I think, all of those early teams for their patients, because we were not planning on taking in 30 companies at once. We didn't have the setup yet, so it was a little bit of fly by the seat of our pants and started slotting in the teams and figuring out exactly what each team needed. So we had to create kind of bespoke projects for each one. And because our early-stage startups, none of them really followed, well, actually all of them follow kind of the normal startup model, which is pivot, pivot, pivot.
Jennifer:
Yeah. Yeah. Also, I think that early startup models also, and I'll say this and you don't have to say it, but is also heavily guided by the male-dominated, I think, investor industry, the startup industry. And I think, how would you, I mean, statistically only 3% of the 2,728, yes, that's an exact number from an article, of the health deals since 2011 were actually focused on women's health. And a majority of that funding went to reproductive health, but not even to femtech, not even to companies run or developed or created by women. So yet here you have, like you said, these brilliant women, oh, by the way, we're starting a company and 80% of the healthcare decisions are made by women in the US, and yet this industry is not getting the funding, let alone the women creating these startups aren't getting the funding. To me, it's a huge, no wonder why you had 30 people applying, 30 companies in there more than 30.
Theresa:
Yeah, I wish we could have helped everybody. It's dramatically underfunded.
Jennifer:
Yeah, it's crazy.
Theresa:
I do want to cast a little bit of light onto those numbers when we think about the amount of money or the amount of investment going into digital health, going into women's health. Not to say that 97% is going into men's health.
Jennifer:
True, true, true, true. Yeah.
Theresa:
A lot of solutions, digital health solutions that are being invested in and that are in the market are all genders. However, I think it's starting to come to light that because women have not been included in research or just more recently have been in past 30 years, been included in research that when you're designing for all genders, what you're really mostly doing is designing for generally...
Jennifer:
Just generally. Okay.
Theresa:
That makes sense. So it is good to keep your eye on the number of it is such a small percent going into women's health. And when we're looking at women's health, it's generally around maternal health. We really, really need to show numbers, and that's where we thought we could help. We're like, we can bring our expertise in MedTech, HealthTech, and Digital Health, help these companies move farther faster, and get in front of, or when they get in front of investors or are put forward for...
Jennifer:
Grants, they're already got to step ahead. They're already a little more prepared.
Theresa:
That they look like they already know what they're doing from the subject matter expertise side. If you don't have somebody polishing or putting best practices around, this is how you design a healthcare provider portal, or this is how you design something for a patient. Their good ideas weren't necessarily always shining through the way that they need to in order to get those investments or the grants. And so that's where we could accelerate them and basically get them there faster, get them there for less investment, mitigate some of the risk around going down the wrong path because there's already a bunch of best practices that we've established in this space. So just getting folks on board with that and rapidly putting that forward and helping them get into clinical trials or pilot programs or MVP.
Jennifer:
Yeah, you're putting the gas pedal down on the industry, and after this first year with these 30 companies that were in, you've moved on to year two. So you're in year two, and this program is still going. Now that you got the word out with those first 30, what was the second batch? The second group of people that came into Femovate?
Theresa:
Oh my gosh, this was so exciting. So I had a moment of trepidation where I'm like, there's only two, not even 2,000 companies in femtech. What if they all applied the first time?
Jennifer:
Right?
Theresa:
And we don't get any applicants, but then what we learned is there's 18, I dunno, 20 sub-verticals in femtech. And what I mean by that...
Jennifer:
That's a lot.
Theresa:
Vaginal health, breast health, menstrual health. So all these different categories. I was like, no, there's got to be more people innovating out there. So we opened up applications this year and we got 130 new applications.
"Their good ideas weren't necessarily always shining through the way that they need to in order to get those investments or the grants. And so that's where we could accelerate them and basically get them there faster, get them there for less investment, mitigate some of the risk around going down the wrong path..."
Jennifer:
Wow. Wow. So, I mean, do you feel like you've created a monster in a way, in a good way, that you can't control? Or do you feel like this is year two and you're already achieving numbers that most young accelerators can't even get to at the time? And sometimes I see even larger accelerators just sort of lip-syncing their way through some of this "how we help startups," but literally you've just have them coming in and you're giving them, donating these services that helps 'em, like you said, maybe get to a clinical trial. That's really unique in the world of, can we call you an accelerator or an incubator? I mean, what are you actually calling yourself here? Because I feel like it's more like you guys are seriously action-oriented where I feel like a lot of other accelerators are like, "here, here's a space, do your thing. Bye."
Theresa:
Yeah, we've kind of gone back and forth on this because we are different. Well, frankly, we haven't had a lot of time to think about it. It's just...
Jennifer:
Run with scissors, run with some golden goose sneakers. We're out of here.
Theresa:
I mean, we're working with the scale of companies at a time, and it's not just the 30 that we pull into the program. People reach out all the time asking for help. We're constantly fielding questions throughout the year from people who missed the application or they're coming from another accelerator program like femtech Lab or Techstars. Those folks need help too. And if they have an innovative solution, we want to provide support. So sometimes it's even more than 30 teams that we're helping, but we gave it five whole minutes of thought. And unlike an accelerator or incubator, we're not providing all the services. We can't help you pick a lawyer and we can't do all of your branding work, and we can't do accounting or teach you how to be a good manager, how to make...right? We're not doing all the things, but we're also not sourcing a bunch of unpaid mentors and building our program.
Jennifer:
Yes. I wish, where's my clap sound? Because I definitely feel... I love, you know what? I'll save my clap sound for another time, but yes, yes, yes, yes. What you're saying...
Theresa:
Yeah, we're actually using our paid team members, so our Guidea researchers and designers to do work that the startups would otherwise not be able to do, or they would be paying a firm or agency or grad student or somebody from...
Jennifer:
But that's part of the specialty in a way because why do you have to do all the things? I think that's part of the problem these days is everyone's doing all the things, so other things are suffering.
Theresa:
And it turns out we actually have a lot more to offer than I initially thought we did.
Jennifer:
I love this. "We didn't know it was going to work. We didn't know it was going to be this big. Oh, we have so much more to offer." I love that.
Theresa:
Yeah. We've been able to connect these startup founders, even ones that maybe weren't selected this year for the program. We've been able to connect people with potential investors, with grant writers...
Jennifer:
Oh, that's amazing.
Theresa:
Development teams who we know and trust for their actual software development or their product design, their physical product design, like they're making devices. We've also been able to connect multiple startups with each other.
"This is a beautiful time in femtech because so many of the people, so many of these founders and advocates and investors at this early stage are here because they're passionate about health equity and they're passionate about women's health innovation, and they have these lived experiences..."
Jennifer:
Oh, that's probably a big thing. Creating the true ecosystem to share and to bounce ideas off. And if you're stuck, having someone to unstuck you in a way.
Theresa:
And I think that's one of the big values. Karin Dahlstrom, who's our program manager for Femovate, has been advocating for quite a while now that we build out a community of the teams that are participating, and we just haven't had the opportunity yet, but we do make connections and introductions between the different teams so they can support each other or even partner together. But this is a beautiful time in femtech because so many of the people, so many of these founders and advocates and investors at this early stage are here because they're passionate about health equity and they're passionate about women's health innovation, and they have these lived experiences and that's driving… and by lived experiences, I mean maybe they've had endometriosis and struggled...
Jennifer:
For 10...
Theresa:
Years before getting a diagnosis or they've lost a loved one to ovarian cancer, and it's really fueling this growth. But also when I say it's a lovely time, people are so kind to each other and so...
Jennifer:
That's really nice.
Theresa:
And they're really open to working with each other. And so I don't hear a lot of the competition that you might hear of in FinTech, right?
Jennifer:
Oh yeah. Totally.
Theresa:
Yeah. It's more like, but...
Jennifer:
Is that because it's more... okay, I'm just going to say it. Is that because it's more female because females are driving it, or is it because this industry, Health Tech, femtech, health equity, lends itself to more compassion in the business, so to speak?
Theresa:
I don't know. It could be either one of those. I really feel like it's a stage in the growth of the industry where everybody's kind of fighting the same fight and...
Jennifer:
Solidarity.
Theresa:
A little solidarity. And also it's kind of hard to hang out in a silo and be like, "I'm the only one who's figured out how to deal with hormones."
Jennifer:
No, it's so true. All these...
Theresa:
Early stage innovators.
Jennifer:
And also I think one of the things you mentioned before was that you talked a lot about taboos as well, taboos around femtech, and do you think that this idea of collaborating, being supportive, is this part of eliminating some of those taboos where people feel that they're more comfortable if they understand that it's okay to talk about menopause, menstruation, pelvic health, that sort of thing, because is that just outside of the taboos or is creating a supportive environment helping to sort of eliminate down some of those barriers?
Theresa:
That's a really good question. As soon as you fall into femtech, or at least my experience and what I'm seeing from people who fall into femtech, all of a sudden you go from not really... unless you're coming from the medical field, you go from not talking about some things which are traditionally...
Jennifer:
Considered, yeah, politically as well. You have people in the Senate and the House floor that are 83-year-old white guys. They don't even probably know – sorry, but what a bleepin' dildo looks like. So how can you talk about women's health and reproductive rights if you can't get a body of people to actually feel comfortable talking about women's health issues like hormone health and that sort of thing?
Theresa:
Exactly. But once you fall in, then all of a sudden it's like you're talking about vaginas all day long.
Jennifer:
Yeah.
Theresa:
I will note that, although I am much more comfortable with that now...
Jennifer:
You weren't when you first started this?
Theresa:
Oh, yeah. Wasn't a women's health advocate before we started this program.
Jennifer:
Okay. I'm going to have to put on some, I need some sounds of brakes, like slamming on the brakes here. But how did you make the pivot? I'm making a little fake white line to a whole nother story over here, but yeah, we're going to stop for a sec. Why? What?
"I was 45... I've had three kids... but I had no idea how little I knew about my body."
Theresa:
Well, okay, so go back to 2022. When we first opened up the program, Karin and I spent three weeks interviewing all of the founders who were applying or the vast majority of the founders who were applying. And so we were on the phone with founders from 5:00 AM to sometimes eight or nine o'clock at night because we had applicants from around the globe, and we were trying to work with them. I was 45 at the time. I've had three kids and I had no... so...
Jennifer:
You had a lot of stuff with menstruation and pelvic health.
Theresa:
You would think, but I had no idea how little I knew about my body.
Jennifer:
What? Really?
Theresa:
I was like, "There's three holes?" No.
Jennifer:
Exactly. You know what though? I love that you're saying this because I believe this is really very true. We know so little about our bodies. I think that this is a really salient conversation to have. Like, yes, you've had three kids, so you've been through that whole process of being pregnant, of all the things that can happen, which is a miracle in a way that people actually give birth. And yet you didn't have that tie to what was really going on. I find that fascinating, Theresa.
Theresa:
Yeah, it was huge. It was like a crash course in female anatomy. I mean really, I did not know anything about the pelvic floor in June of 2022. I'm not even...
Jennifer:
Sure the term pelvic...
Theresa:
I'm not even sure the term pelvic floor was in existence 10 years ago. I'm not even sure.
Jennifer:
So once I started to learn, I was like, oh my goodness, this is really, really underrepresented. But once you fall in and you start talking about it all the time, you actually… or at least I have to sometimes remember to roll back to normal business speak when I'm working with our day-to-day clients who aren't in women's health, they may not be in health at all. So if we're talking about network security, they really don't… yeah, they don't want to hear about the pelvic floor.
Theresa:
They don't want to hear my analogy about a really compelling AI product that we built in this space that had something to do with uterine health. You can see the people on the call like visibly...
Jennifer:
Shaking.
Theresa:
When I try to pull up that analogy, whereas I have to say, a lot of folks in the health field love to hear analogous stories from other industries where we've been able to...
Jennifer:
In many ways, I think the more you talk about it, the more commonplace it becomes because I do think that women's issues are often shoved under the table. Menopause is one great place where you weren't allowed to talk about it. There's really no medication for it. Just get these hormones. And I think the more people come sort of out of the closet on these issues that affect so many that are just part of being a woman, just how the body is composed hopefully could reduce some of those uncomfortable grimaces in the boardroom by these people.
Theresa:
I agree. I think there's a long way to go. And one of the things that I ran into with the launch in 2022 was I reached out to my existing network in the tech field, which is predominantly male, a predominantly male industry, and asked for help. So hey, share this with other people in your network if you know of anybody that's innovating in this space. And it might just be that they didn't have a lot of folks in, a lot of female tech founders in women's health in their network. But this network I have, we spent 20 years developing it. These are folks we wrote books at the same time. We had O'Reilly as a publisher at the same time. We've gone to conferences and been speakers together in some cases. I've employed their kids as interns when they graduate. And man, I got to tell you, it was crickets from almost everyone.
Jennifer:
It's so sad.
Theresa:
Now there are a few folks that really hopped in and helped and have...
Jennifer:
What about now? What about now since you've started the company and had Femovate, are these people coming out of the woodwork saying, "Oh, by the way, Theresa, I meant to introduce you to this person?"
Theresa:
We have a few advocates and champions, but still it's not... if I had started a thing for FinTech or EdTech...
Jennifer:
It'd be a whole different...
Theresa:
I'm unrelated to, or not specific to women's health.
Jennifer:
So this comes back to again, the taboo we were talking about. How is it that we can talk about adult tech, sex toys, and we cannot talk about women's health issues, femtech?
Theresa:
I have theories on this. One of them is...
Jennifer:
I'm ready, I'm ready. Give me all your theories.
Theresa:
If I didn't know my body very well, pretty educated, have an MBA, like I said, maybe a lot of people don't know their body or about women's bodies enough to talk about it. If you don't have a high degree of confidence around the terminology and the anatomy, then it'd be kind of awkward to talk about it. You might look dumb if you're not using the right words. What's the difference between pelvic health and vaginal health? What if I say the wrong thing even though I'm trying to help? So maybe there's an education, maybe a terminology gap. I also wonder specifically on the topic of menopause or anything about our bodies degrading, so incontinence... and to anybody who's suffering from incontinence, I'm not saying your body's degrading. This is just a, it's...
Jennifer:
Breaking down. It is breaking down. Your body is breaking down. That's a fact.
Theresa:
We don't… anything that has that aging component to it or could be… Yeah.
Jennifer:
We don't like that. We get uncomfortable.
Theresa:
I think that might be part of it too. And it's not just about women's bodies. I don't think a lot of people are super comfortable talking about aging.
Jennifer:
Yeah, no, I agree. I think that's part of it. People are... we're not comfortable talking about aging, and I think you can see that in how women and men to a large extent are looking at how to augment their bodies to prevent aging. So you see there's so many more med spas and sculpting and cool sculpting and all of these things to augment the body, the corporeal sleeve, so to speak. And yet so little introspective look in ways that incontinence is part of aging, but there are things that you can do to address part of that incontinence. Instead of talking about it, we just sort of sweep it under the carpet, I think. But that's still part of the taboo. Then the taboo is that we are uncomfortable talking about bodily fluids or things that are happening inside of our bodies. Partially you think because we don't understand or it's still a taboo.
Theresa:
Yeah, I think women's bodies are taboo. Aging is taboo. Bodily fluids are not really something that everybody's comfortable talking about.
Jennifer:
No, unless it's on a porn channel and then they're all okay with it. This is like the balance between...yeah, I mean we could go down that rabbit hole, but I'll save that for another episode. And so do you think femtech is a part of HealthTech? Because is that also part of...how are you defining femtech?
Theresa:
I'm defining femtech as MedTech, HealthTech, or digital health solutions that are centered around women's health or for the health of women. And so I've noticed that people are starting to make a distinction there. So if we talk about...
Jennifer:
Yeah, me too.
Theresa:
Yeah, if we talk about uterine health, okay, well, women or people who are assigned female at birth have uteruses, but cancer is not women's health, but women can have cancer. And so when we think about femtech, we might be saying, okay, this may be technology that's used for removing uterine fibroids, which would be specific to women or people assigned female at birth. However, an oncology solution can also be femtech if they're looking at how to customize that solution with women in mind. So there may be a solution for… and not even cancers that are exclusive to women.
Jennifer:
That makes sense.
Theresa:
So I think that umbrella works for our program for Femovate, in our definition of femtech. When companies apply, in order for them to get into the program, they have to have a tech component. And their tech component cannot be their website where they're selling things. To us, that's not a tech. We're not helping people... no shade on all the companies who are doing this, but we're not...
Jennifer:
Yeah, totally.
Theresa:
These successful marketplaces or shops to sell services... we're really wanting to work...
Jennifer:
You're talking about foundational technology. Okay, so I love it that we're getting to the bottom of this. I love your true confessions here about how little you knew. So basically since 2022 now, you have really become this women's health equity, femtech forward advocate, and that's only two years. You have really been making the rounds. If you look at all the places you've been speaking, the podcasts you've been on, the things you've been saying and doing, two years is a very short time to have risen to be such a voice that you are Theresa in this field. And is that at all shocking to you or is that possibly part of a very proud moment? Maybe both.
Theresa:
It's part of a very proud moment. I will say I'm not shocked because I put effort into it and built off of the portfolio we already had. And the connection... I'm not new to technology.
Jennifer:
But you're new to this health side. This is the HealthTech side...
Theresa:
And Guidea has a substantial HealthTech portfolio. We have many BioPharma companies in our portfolio and Humana and Johnson & Johnson, Cigna, all these great partners that we've worked with for years. So basically we could build off of that. If I'd been starting from scratch as a new UX designer or a young agency, I mean, I just don't think we would...
Jennifer:
Yeah, we'd still be built… and I think we could take a little U-turn here because we haven't really talked about Guidea, but this is almost a 20-year-old company now, and you guys are made up of 20 designers and researchers, and you work on innovating with just using UX research about launching products with UX to audiences and activating internal teams to become UX leaders. You're really, like you said, you've been doing this for a while, so I love that Guidea was founded almost 20 years ago by women, women-led teams, and you've made some very huge inroads and success into some, like you said, some very big health brands I guess I would call them. And how, in your opinion, do you feel like if you were to do that today, do you think you would be where you are or do you think you hit this sweet spot almost 20 years ago in creating Guidea? Because it was really enlightening to me and very inspiring to see such a strong female-led company in this space. Because usually it's always like rah, rah, rah, men and UX, and this is just the Wonder Woman force of UX design. So do you think that things would've been different for you 18 to 20 years ago starting this company than they would be today?
Theresa:
Totally. Before I started Guidea, it was very early in the UX space...
Jennifer:
I see that from your background. Yeah.
Theresa:
Really early. I just happened to be working as a Java developer. I met my good friend and mentor, Bill Scott, who had a background in design and was also a brilliant engineer and he built out the UX team at Sabre, the airline company that we were working at.
Jennifer:
Oh, okay.
Theresa:
So I learned all of these different things from him at the time that UX was being coined. And so having a developer background...
Jennifer:
Yeah, that's like back in 2001.
Theresa:
Yeah, I think it was 2001. It really allowed...
Jennifer:
2001.
Theresa:
Yeah. It really gave me the opportunity to get my fingers in all the important things that were going to be coming up. So working for the airline, I got to work on mobile apps before we had the smartphone, to work on these things that did like high scanning and optical character recognition. I got the design for big mounted displays up on the wall. I got to do all of the early days web work before Web 2.0.
Jennifer:
I love that. The early days web work. You were there at the beginning, before the beginning.
Theresa:
Wait, not that far back. No. I guess I was. I...
Jennifer:
But that's really some people do. Go back. You were… sorry, just face it. You were at that timeline I'm talking about when we were all considering about coming online and nobody knew what the F to do, right? Because nobody knew how you took something that you just could… user experience. So you were at the beginning of that term, and I'm going to let you finish, but going through your experience, you're right, you worked for PBS being a user experience consultant, the amount of consultancy you were in at the beginning of the advent of UX and how it changed our experiences online from Adobe to IBM, to Audi, to, let's see, Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. You literally have been in every single market. Every single market.
Theresa:
Yeah.
Jennifer:
We have PayPal, Bloomberg, come on, Dell, come on you guys. Are you hearing this? Humana, Purina, I mean Walmart. That's everybody...
Theresa:
I will share a proud moment is a couple years ago I looked and I realized that we had worked for 20 of the Fortune 100.
Jennifer:
Yeah, I'd be putting that on my LinkedIn profile.
Theresa:
Many of those for numerous years, and it was entirely based off of happy client referrals. We didn't have...
Jennifer:
That's amazing.
Theresa:
So that's one of the really, really proud moments, and I thought about that a lot in creating the Femovate program because one of the reasons Guidea has been successful is the timing of the creation of the company getting in UX really early, but also I had a bunch of really strong champions. So my mentor Bill Scott, yay champions, Luke Wroblewski, who's a writer and great designer. Some people know him as LukeW, Jared Spool, lots of different folks out there in the early days, introduced me to companies, helped us secure early projects. One of the things that catapulted us towards success when the iPhone came out, we were engaged by a previous manager of mine from Sabre, Damon Hoagland, to design, code, and launch the first PayPal iPhone experience, which we did in 30 days.
Jennifer:
Woohoo.
Theresa:
That led to, I think, an eight-year, maybe 10-year relationship working with PayPal. And that was a long time ago. And all those folks that we worked with in the early years have branched out, built their own companies, called us back, brought us in for more work.
Jennifer:
But that's what I mean when you're at the beginning of something, you're all together and then you march off to other places and then you all come back and help each other and keep adding branches to the Guidea tree and then here you are.
Theresa:
My hope for femtech is that the same thing happens. It's like these 2,000 female founders, these early femtech companies do the same thing, right? We're all in this early days together building. I'm not as early as Ida Tin and the folks that since she coined the term and did the very earliest apps, but this next round I hope all of us are going to learn together. We're going to make mistakes. Some of these companies are going to sink, some of them are going to swim, and then there'll be that next wave
Jennifer:
I love that. I think that's a great way to end the show. When you talk about we're all in this together, it's sort of that Halt and Catch Fire moment. That moment where you were at the beginning of something and then now you're at the beginning of something again and you're creating this ecosystem that will continue to grow over time in the next 20 years. So big... I'm not going to use the cheer again, but very big applause for you. And is there anything before we go, is there anything that off the top of your head you want, any advice you want to give to anybody out there who's thinking of starting something in femtech? There must be maybe somebody listening or somebody that knows somebody. What's your Theresa Neil advice for someone starting out in this field?
Theresa:
This... we have a lot of people reach out saying, I have an idea and I want to do some design. And I am super excited for everybody out there. I have an idea. The next step after having an idea is not going and doing design. If you're pondering an idea, if you're excited about it, you're seeing something that's broken in the system, you went into your provider and had a terrible experience and you're like, this needs to be fixed, and you read online and you hear other people complaining, what I'd love for you to do is go out and do a competitive analysis and see who else is already trying to fix this or who else may already be fixing it and help them. If your idea is not unique and doesn't have a clear competitive differentiation from other groups that are already perhaps doing it, reach out to them and see how you can help them. Because a lot of these early-stage femtech companies need help because they're not funded yet. And so...
Jennifer:
Yeah, I love that. Go help. See something and go help.
Theresa:
Because you're going to learn so much...
Jennifer:
About a startup.
Theresa:
About the domain you're interested in and want to make a difference in. And then you might walk away from that in a year and be like, yeah, I actually do have a differentiated idea. I want to tackle this from a different angle. But a lot of folks do reach out and they're like, I'm ready to do this design work. I was like, there's 28 other companies doing this...
Jennifer:
Right? Get in line, take a number.
Theresa:
I don't mean that to sound harsh. I'm again, really glad we're generating ideas, but go do a little bit of legwork. It's kind of part of thinking about a company or is really doing some research on, there's all types of great places to do research. FemHealth Insights has a list of the 2,000 companies. You can go to the FDA site and see if there's anything up for approval or under review.
Jennifer:
Oh, that's a great idea. Well, we can put all those links in the notes as well for resources, for Theresa's resources for people to go and check out. I love that. Thank you so much for taking all the time to share your journey and your stories, and we're going to keep an eye out for this second class that's coming through your, "I didn't realize it was going to be successful," idea and thank you. I appreciate it.
Theresa:
Thank you so much. It was great talking with you.
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