Season 4, #7 - Abundance in the Startup Ecosystem

Episode Summary: Abundance in the Startup Ecosystem with Naseem Sayani

In this episode of The Founder's Sandbox, Brenda McCabe sits down with investor, ecosystem builder, and female founder advocate Naseem Sayani to explore how capital, community, and visibility can create a more abundant and equitable startup ecosystem.

Naseem shares her journey from management consulting and digital innovation to venture investing, where she became increasingly aware of the disparities women founders face when raising capital. After leaving a successful consulting partnership, she dedicated her career to supporting female entrepreneurs, investing in overlooked founders, and helping reshape how venture capital recognizes opportunity.

The conversation dives into practical fundraising advice for women founders, including why founders should "lead with the money, not the empathy," how gender bias shows up in investor questioning, and how pitch decks can be strategically designed to guide investor conversations. Naseem also discusses the research-backed differences between the questions male and female founders receive during fundraising and offers actionable strategies for reframing those interactions.

Brenda and Naseem explore several of Naseem's current initiatives, including her podcast The Capital Flex, which amplifies real fundraising stories from women founders, and the newly launched SoCal Women's Health Collective, a community focused on advancing innovation and collaboration in women's health.

The discussion also examines the future of healthcare investing, where Naseem advocates for shifting the conversation from "women's health" to precision health—a broader framework that highlights the enormous market opportunities in personalized care, diagnostics, and health solutions that have historically been overlooked.

Naseem emphasizes the power of abundance over scarcity, encouraging women to share networks, knowledge, and opportunities rather than competing for limited seats at the table. She argues that true progress will come when more capital flows from traditional funding sources into diverse founder communities, creating better outcomes for investors, founders, and society alike.

 

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00:09
All  right, welcome back to the Founder's Sandbox. I'm Brenda McCabe, your host, now in this fourth season  of the Founder's Sandbox. And  my mission is quite simple.  With the Founder's Sandbox, I have guests that are business owners, service providers, VCs, and corporate directors.

00:36
who like me want to use the power of the enterprise to make change for a better world.  And with stories in the sandbox  on resilience, scalability, and purpose-driven experiences of my guest, um we have  an origin story and we get to really understand what's under the hood  of the businesses that my guest, um our owners have. So I'm absolutely delighted to have Naseem Sayani as my guest this month. Welcome, Naseem.

01:06
Thank you. I'm so excited to be here. Yeah. So Naseem and I go back um many, many years. She touches, um checks many, many boxes.  Our first encounter was while I was m leading a women's corporate,  a women's investment fund. So we invested in women owned companies with a minimum 33 % equity holding of uh the woman uh founder  or m C-suite.

01:34
member and Nassim at that time was within Emily Ventures. She's since moved on to other firms and we've we're she's my first port of call when there is a  very talented woman founder, particularly in the life science or digital health area. So I was absolutely delighted when the same also launched her own podcast  podcast. So we'll get into that in a minute. So let me just make a uh bit more proper. uh

02:04
Introduction to you, Naseem. You're an investor, ecosystem builder, and speaker, as you guys are going to see here.  Currently, the operating umbrella for all of the different ventures um that Naseem is  orchestrating is Game Changers, World Changers. I love the title of your umbrella. You lead,  and I've seen it  in real life, commitment to empowering female founders. um

02:34
Her  network across the United States and elsewhere is uh has no paragon. She is amazing.  She's largely focused in health tech and fintech. And there's something that you've been doing recently, which is really giving a voice to women founders and what's it like raising capital. So with that, we're going to jump into uh our podcast today, abundance in the startup ecosystem.  how, why are you doing what you do today?

03:04
Tell us about your origin story. Oh goodness. Yeah. No, back in time, back in time. Back in time. You were a consultant. all. I was. Yeah, we all grew up somewhere. So I like, I like to say I'm a recovering consultant. So I spent many, many, many years in core management consulting. So really problem solving.

03:27
at various strategic levels with Fortune 100s. I was working across healthcare, financial services, consumer, little bits of energy and other things along the way. But it was really those three sectors that I spent most of my time in. And this is early, early 2000s. So digital was a thing, but it wasn't. And we had Facebook that was happening already, you know, early 2000s. But it was in 2007 that we got iPhones in our hands and something shifted.

03:56
Right? It dramatically changed what  the words digital strategy might mean.  And that's when I started doing  very continuously, very core digital strategy work with all of those same clients.  And to put this in context, they  didn't know what those words meant. Those words didn't mean anything. Like, what is digital strategy? What does it mean to my business? How does it change how I organize? How does it change how I go to market?

04:26
personalization  moving from a one to many advertising model to a one to one ad model. That was a, it was a whole new paradigm, right? Of how we might interact and talk to the market as a brand or as a business.  And  that was all of the work I was doing  in mid 2000s. And so it was fascinating to be in the center  of, of that much problem solving. Well, that's what it feels like now.

04:54
That's what it feels like now, but at the time we didn't know that we were on the front end of what was this massive transformation, right? We were just doing the work and having fun and a bunch of young people straight out of MBA programs,  problem solving.  But it was great because you learn so much so quickly when you do that kind of work. And then a couple of years into it, we realized that our clients  couldn't really execute against the strategies that we had built because they don't have

05:21
product and tech and UX and UI and scrums don't mean anything. Like this language that we take for granted now  was just getting established  mid late 2000s. And so we launched a product studio inside of the consulting firm  to help them  build product and launch experiences. And we, I was living in New York at a time. We launched this product studio out of Los Angeles.  And in that same window, I moved back to LA. So I ended up being  the person who ran the studio.

05:51
for about two and a half, three years. And so I was doing core strategy work. I was running the product studio and for about three years, every single digital proposal for the firm went through my inbox. Oh my gosh. Globally. it was every single project, every single client, we were tacking on the studio effort onto the back of that proposal. And so I didn't sleep for three years. I worked harder than I've ever worked in those three years.

06:20
But it was tremendous because I got to see so many different things so quickly.  And we built a really great studio team. We were doing really great work in that team. And then the firm that I was at got acquired. There was lots of transformation things that happened. And then that product studio went and got acquired by a different management consulting firm and grew up into a full venture incubator. So the products we were building

06:47
ultimately needed different governance, different KPIs, different growth models, different leadership than what the corporate owner was able to do.  So now we were, it was a different business. was a spin out turned into a spin out. So the value proposition turned into, we're not just building products. We're actually helping you build the startup that would otherwise put you out of business. That became the thing that we were doing. So now,  now we're building startups and we're doing it at scale and we're doing with our clients and we're doing it. Now it's early.

07:17
2010s, 2011, 2012, and we're building startups and in parallel, right? Things like Uber and other things are happening in parallel and we're watching all kinds of change happen in how we engage and what kind of tools we're using across the marketplaces and what's broadly from a digital perspective. And it was great. I got to learn a lot really, really quickly. But in these...

07:43
Rooms right and you can imagine because you've been in these rooms also uh There's not enough women.  There's not enough diversity We're building great product, but we don't really cover all the use cases because we're missing women and because we're missing diversity and so  I was in parallel  trying to meet as much of the  I was trying to more founders I wanted to just see what else was out there. So I gravitated towards a lot of the the events that had more women  and I was also

08:12
I'd led the diversity efforts inside of the incubator. was always protecting the careers of the women behind me. I held the diversity flag. I was one of three female partners in the incubator of like 50, right? So we were already standing on top of a pretty, on top of pretty small The token women, right? Right, right, exactly. So I was meeting a lot of women outside the building and building great products, building incredible businesses, but like,

08:41
fighting to the nail to raise capital for the companies that they're building. Meanwhile,  my day job has capital. We're pouring money into building startups, but I'm surrounded by men all day. So this contrast between  my day job and the struggle of what was happening for the female founders outside of the building, this  contrast became... just this cognitive dissonance was too much.

09:09
stick too much to handle, right? It just doesn't work. And so I ultimately decided that I had to shift all of my energy,  all of my focus. I know how to do things. I know how to build businesses. I know how to think strategically. I know how to problem solve. I can look at a market and hopefully figure it out.  So let me just redirect all the energy to actually helping the  whole other half of the ecosystem raise some capital and move some money and build some businesses because  the boys have all the help that they need, right?

09:39
But the women don't. You left a partner position.  I did.  Yeah. No, my husband is super excited about that. I left my partner job at the consultancy  to go  full venture and decide to move some capital. Absolutely. And  I started investing. This was 2019-ish  and started writing some angel checks, larger angel checks,  got deeper in the ecosystem. It was in that window that I met the two women.

10:08
that I launched Emmeline Ventures with.  We raised  about six and a half, seven million seats, stage focus, healthcare, fintech, sustainability, wrote some fantastic checks. I got some great capital out the door. And then I jumped, as you mentioned, to go do a whole host of other things.  Now much more embedded, almost an ecosystem level, so more horizontal than  just the vertical of the fund.  And it's been great. It's, it's...

10:35
serendipitous that I got involved in the ecosystem  in a moment where the female founder ecosystem was growing up the way that it was the women's health ecosystem was growing up the way that it was. And so  the notion that I'm a pioneer comes up a lot because people like you've been in this for a while. Like you, you were one of the few people who built this thing. uh

10:57
But it doesn't feel that way to me. But  there's a few of us who have been here since the beginning, really crafting this. And so it's really kind of fun to have been in it since the beginning, it feels like.  So one of the things that we did with you uh from Ty last year  is  you did a master class with  a cohort of women-owned businesses on how to pitch. Oh, yeah.  And  granted, I don't want to steal your thunder.

11:27
You're tagline with this, but  we go into  a room with  VC,  Rangel Investors. It's largely male. So  what  are your two or three core messages from that training? I used to it a lot.  I  attribute it to Naseem Sayani, but it is when women hear this, they're like, oh, I've got to go back and redo my text.

11:54
Yes. Yeah. So there's a couple of things I tell that I coach, I should say, female founders on all the time. One is you need to lead with the money and not the empathy. What we have been conditioned to do as women, and it's not conditioned, it actually comes from a lot of where our core empathy and how women move in the world is. We lead with the emotion. It's how we engage, it's how we build relationships.

12:21
But  when you are in a money driven ecosystem,  such as venture, you cannot lead with empathy.  You have to lead with money. You have to tell me and tell who you're talking to how much this thing is worth. And you have to tell them that quickly. What typically happens with a pitch deck from a female founder is that there are four or five pages on pain.

12:46
pain and stress and how hard it is and just all this stuff that is so, so hard and you don't get to the size of the market until page seven.  And that's too far, right? Because by then the people are bored and they don't care.  you have do it in a page. Fine. But it's not five pages. Pull the market up sooner. Talk about the size of the opportunity sooner. I don't want any personal stories at the front of that deck.

13:14
The place where I want you to put the personal story  is in how you're going to win. Because if you understand the market so closely and this pain point so closely because it happened to you,  that is why your hustle is so much stronger. That's why you're after it so much more that your founder market fit comes from that. So put it there.  Don't put it into product market fit. That's the wrong place. Right. Founder market fit.

13:42
Put it into founder market fit because that's the reason you're going to win is because you care about it in a way that other people don't care about it. So it's in the wrong place in the story. So put the empathy in the appendix. Nobody cares. I love you, but nobody cares. Lead with the money. That's point number one. Point number two is that there is data. It is validated that women get different questions in pitch meetings than men do. Yes. Harvard research.

14:08
Harvard research proves it. Two out of every three questions that a male founder gets will be about growth and vision and opportunity and how big this market can be. Two out of three questions that a woman gets will be  risk related. So, oh my gosh, that CAC number is so high. And oh my goodness, what if you can't find the customers? And oh my goodness, what if somebody else does this? It is  prevention. Yeah, it is prevention minded questions.  Men get promotion minded questions. And if you're not...

14:37
prepared for that. You will be on the defense of the entire time in that meeting. So you have to practice. You have to spend a weekend with your camuja or your glass of wine or whatever it is and write down all  of the prevention questions you might get on your deck, whether it's a main page or a footnote or something on the bottom of page 10.  Write down everything. Be horribly brutal.

15:03
and then let it sit for a day, come back and write down your answers. And your intention with the answers is not to answer the question, but to flip that question into a promotion-based response. Excellent.  Shift the power dynamic back. As an example, you have a revenue page that has the chart, revenue goes up from zero, year one to year five, and then you've got three bullets, you've got three data points on the right-hand side.  Everyone should have a page that looks like this. You've got CAC, you've got AOV, you might have LTV as well.

15:33
More than likely, as a female founder, they're going to ask you about CAC. They're say, oh my God, CAC is $28. That's so high. How are you going to manage that? A male founder is going to get a question on AOV. AOV is $1,200. That's incredible. Can it get to $1,500? That's the difference in the questions. If you get that CAC question, your natural response might be, yeah, it's $28. We're going to work on it. We're going to run some tests. We really think we can get it to $25.

16:03
That might be how we naturally respond. What you should say is, it's $28, but our AOV is $1,200. So we actually think it's performing pretty well.

16:16
Very, very  convincing. And that's it. Yes. Yeah. You don't respond to the defensiveness. You redirect them to the data point that actually matters.  And you take back the power in that conversation. And it may also be that you have to reformat your deck. Yes. Yes. Yes.  100%. Yeah. So that's the third. That's the third thing is that  your deck is a strategic asset.

16:44
Okay. And you should be very thoughtful  about what you put in the deck so that you are teeing up the questions that you want to answer. Okay. There's a thing is too much information and there's a thing is too little information. The line in the middle  is that if you're putting data on that same page on the right hand side, yes, put AOV at the top, put LTV next, put CAC at the bottom. Don't put CAC at the top because everyone's going look on the top right. It's natural.

17:14
Eyelines go to the top right of a page.  Don't put CAC at the top. Put AOV at the top. Is that the biggest number? Put that one at the top. Be very deliberate about where you put data on the page so that you can tee up the questions that you want to get.  You can bait the document with the things that you want to answer and set up the conversation that you want to have at least halfway. Right. It takes practice though. It takes practice.  It takes practice.  Yes.

17:42
And where are you now dedicating a lot of your uh time? We are fellow podcasters. And I know it was  some time in the making.  So you launched,  was it six months ago, the Capital Flex podcast? Yes.  Yes. And this is where you hear  real stories, right? So to share a bit with my little. Yeah, absolutely. So I launched.

18:08
I launched the Capital Flex in January. I've been working on it since mid last year. It's been living on a post-it on my desk for the last two years,  maybe more.  So I get a lot of inbound from founders on the crazy things that happen when they're fundraising. A weird conversation, uh a offhand comment, an unfortunate behavior.  Just the things that we know happen to women when they're out fundraising.

18:37
So I do a lot of, call myself, I've become this like de facto therapist for the female founder side of the ecosystem.  And so I've been making notes  on just the crazy that happens. And what I started,  what happens is that there's founder, founder in New York and founder in California who are dealing with the same problem, but they don't know each other. So  I'm, I'm sharing information across these two women when they should just know each other. So I'll bridge the connect, but you can't, I can't scale that.

19:04
quickly, right?  And so instead I said, what if we just talked about it out loud on a podcast and just shared the stories and made it real and not just stories for the sake of, you know, kind of the victim hood that might come with that. That's not the intent. That's not my stance in any case, but I want to share the story so that we know that they're real.  And then I want to share the learnings from that experience so that when another founder listens to any one of these episodes, you go, Oh my God,

19:34
Yes, that happens to  maybe that's happened to me too. So I'm not alone. It's not just me and it's not personal and three  That's a great way to deal with it because that founder dealt with it that way. Maybe I can do that too So it's really the toolkit that comes out of each episode. That was that was the end game  And so episode, uh, sorry season one has just wrapped about a week ago 12

20:00
Great conversations, 12 fantastic founders. Each story is just tremendous. You learn a lot. They're very candid. It's very raw.  And  it's great.  it's on Spotify and everywhere you can find it. called the Capital Flex. Everyone should go listen. It's tremendous. And then season two is going to drop in just a few weeks. And we've got another slate of 12 great founders. And  we're running. Yeah, that's great. um

20:26
the impulse to actually launch a podcast, and the scene, if I hear you correctly, is you really wanted to amplify and scale these lessons that and experiences that other women founders have lived in their own skin. Yes. And not so much. It's not in a private way, but you really what do you think you're going to get out of this in terms of effectuating change in how people write checks?

20:55
It's  visibility  on  really what's different about the rooms that women walk into versus the rooms that men walk into.  It's awareness and accountability  on behavior. Because if we know what's happening  and we see it happen, we can call it out.  Because now there's proof, right? And we go, oh, it's not her being sensitive. These things are really happening.

21:23
And then three,  there's a pattern recognition problem in the ecosystem.  And there's been so much money has moved in certain ways.  there's indicators of success that a lot of the money moves on. But a lot of that is based on a very historical founder profile.  And that profile doesn't include women. And it doesn't include people of color.  And those  levers of success look different in women. And they look different.

21:53
in  founders of color. And unless we are understanding  the impact of not seeing that we're never going to move capital in bigger ways. And ultimately we're just missing huge opportunities. We are missing massive opportunities spaces because we, our pattern recognition is stopping us from writing checks into spaces that we don't know enough about. So if you were to pitch yourself, right?  Or, um,

22:22
game changers, world changers in front of investors. What would be your top line? Do you want to effectuate change over x million of women founders? Are you going international? mean, do a pitch here if you want. I don't know if I'll do that, but I can. So what would be your key guys, right? And yeah, yes. Yeah. So it's how much capital do we shift from?

22:51
from kind of the core buckets, the capital goes to, to founders that they haven't written checks before. Okay. That's, and so that's a big one. Uh, and, and how that, and what's the profile of the check writer? Because we have, there's been a increase in women who run funds in the last 10 years. So there's a lot more diversity in who's running funds, which is great. There's also a lot more diversity in who's building companies. So there's a lot more women, a lot more people of color.

23:20
building companies, but the bulk of the money  is still sitting  in traditional hands going to traditional profiles of builders.  I want both of those things to move. So if we have better awareness of who's building and how they're building and what they look like and how they move in rooms and how they might show up in rooms, then the people writing the profile of who writes the check should also shift, right?  It's not just women who should be writing checks to women.  Men should be writing checks to women as well.

23:50
So how do we cross the social and gender circles better?  capturing that metric, like that's the KPI that I want, is how much capital is going from  male-led funds into female-founded teams. That's the metric that I want to be able to track. Because right now what's happening  is that all the women-led and diverse funds are who's funding the women-led and diverse founded companies. Say that again.

24:19
for my listeners, because this is important.  Women-led and diverse-led funds are the bulk of the money that's funding women-led and diverse founded companies.

24:30
And  that cannot persist  because  we need big capital to go into these companies because they are building fantastic game changing businesses and everybody should make money from what they're doing.  And they're going to hit a series a, a series B, a series C, and they're going to need bigger checks. You heard it here on the founder sandbox. Let's, let's, let's change to  sectors. largely health tech, fintech.

24:59
Where do you see um greater, where are you focusing your initiatives in terms of um getting more check writers, right? uh Into the ecosystem and where have there been the greatest deficiency in,  you you talk about these big product or these  sectors, right? That have not addressed women's needs. So,  so the answer is the same for both of those.  I'm,  I'm calling.

25:27
This will come out. This is a semantic problem, but I'm causing I'm calling it precision health. This is a place where I'm spending  where I'm spending all of my time where I want to be investing in where the biggest opportunity is  is our ability to  leverage precision health. This is insight driven  health care, whether it's in care delivery, whether it's in diagnostics, whether it's in  understanding cancer, whether it's in

25:56
delivering smarter insights based on the type of human we're talking to, that  is where we're going to change the game in healthcare. And that's where I want  more capital to go and where it should go. Now, we've historically called this women's health,  right? You've flipped the term use. So  we've called this women's health for a long time. We're still calling it women's health. The problem that we've now uncovered is

26:24
Women's health carries stigma. The language carries stigma.  You hear women's health and still I'll have people that say,  oh my gosh, no, yeah, we've one or two things. We've made our women's health investment this year. Check the box. We're good. Yeah. Or they'll say, oh, but it's, it's, it's just so niche. We're half of the population.  Yeah. Half of the population is not niche.  just, I can't even, I have to just look at them and say I'm half the population.

26:55
And then the third thing you'll hear is, there just haven't, we just haven't seen the exit. So we're just not sure that the value is there. And so on the third one, have my, I hope there's two responses. One is, you know, when Google and Facebook and Amazon  came to market and we're raising capital, there were no  exits for search  and e-commerce and social. No, we didn't know what it was. These things were brand new.

27:22
The reason the money went there was because there were behaviors and there was demand and there was money that was moving towards these categories. That was the reason we invested was there was a behavior trend that was shifting. There was a market trend that was shifting. There was something we were after because there was going there was a value pool that we could get after. That's why the money moved. This is what's happening with women's health right now. There is demand. There's behavior. There's money moving there right now.  Menopause is a 60 billion dollar category.

27:52
When it comes down to it, women will spend money on their health care and they'll do it out of pocket. They're doing it right now. Right. We have no interest in our grandma's health care. We're absolutely going to go get what we need to solve for the hot flashes and the brain fog and whatever it is. And that's we have the proof now. Now, in January of this year, 2026 at JPMorgan, there was a report that was launched. There's a fantastic team that spent the last year doing the work to reanalyze all of the health care exits for the last 20 years.

28:21
The report is called follow the exits. Okay. And what they did was reclassify all of the exits in healthcare for the last 20 years into  three different buckets,  assuming that they qualified.  If those exits were aligned to conditions that exclusively  differently or disproportionately affected women, they bucketed them that way  to  recast the exits against conditions that affected women. When they're not

28:50
They weren't talked about that way in the market already. But when they did that, they were able to quantify $100 billion of returns that have already made its way back to investors from exits related to companies that built and exited because they were in conditions that exclusively, differently, or disproportionately affected women.

29:13
So people have made money from women's health already. But we don't know how to talk about it. They weren't calling it women's health. They were calling it diagnostics in oncology.  It didn't matter that it was breast cancer. It was diagnostics and oncology. So this is why the semantics problem has to get solved and addressed is that when we call it women's health, we're trying to prove a horizontal over and over again, or saying people to believe in this horizontal that has value. And it's not.

29:43
semantics aren't landing. What has been working is just the proof of value  in  cardiology  or in cardiovascular or an autoimmune or in diagnostics where you go, there's money there. Let's go invest because there's money there. And that's the shift that we have to have. And this is why precision health is  how I'm phrasing it now is that we need to get after precision health  because if I can prove value in precision health because I can solve for cardiovascular disease.

30:11
for women differently than men and there's value  in that and I can deliver better services, better care.  I can access reimbursement codes. I can do all of these things differently because I understand what a heart attack looks like in a man versus the woman.  And that means that they'll end up at their doctor's office and not in the ER, which is more expensive. That's a place we can invest.  it's a semantic change, but that's why I'm now calling it precision. I hope it doesn't.

30:38
take another 20 years after the... I  don't think it will. I think there's more and more of us talking about it now and actively talking about the semantics differently.  And  from this Follow the Exits report, what I'm working on, and this is through my role at Women's Health Access Matters with WAM, is that we're taking the data from that report and we're creating assets that founders can use in their pitch decks to actually showcase the exits that line up with the category that they're in. Amazing.

31:07
So here's the market. Here's three exits. I'm good. I have proof. Yeah.  So I think we can get there faster. Excellent. So that's a great segue um to yet another initiative that um is near and dear to your heart, which is  it's still in a seed stage. Talk to us about the SoCal Women's Collector.  Oh, yeah. Yeah. This is brand new.  Me and five other fantastic women here in Southern California.

31:37
decided that we wanted to better connect the ecosystem here in SoCal. So from LA to Orange County to San Diego, there  are  fragmented groups of wonderful humans, all building, researching, investing, et cetera, into women's health, whether they are at universities or at accelerators or independently investing or they're founders, et cetera. So we launched what's called the SoCal Women's Health Collective.

32:04
And we are actively focused on connecting community. So  it's budding, it's growing. We're organizing and still setting full strategy. But at the  very least, we are bringing people together at events. We're hosting virtual and live events, whether it's happy hours or panels. We're doing things virtually where we're doing coaching sessions with founders. And we're building a mailing list so that we can get this community connected and talking to each other and at least know who else

32:33
is in Southern California touching this category and building in this category. And it's been really incredible because we were just sitting around dinner one night going, my God, couldn't we do this? And now we have a mailing list that's more than 500 people long. And we meet people everywhere that want to be part of it, want to join, want to come to events. And it's really grown. And we're only within a year. It's really only 10 or 11 months old.

33:00
But it's really taken off. It's great. So we can do a lot with it. I love it. And are you at all working with, is it GLG or the Women's Collective? It's an advocacy group in Washington, DC. Yes, the policy group. Yes, the policy group. Yes. So there's a parallel group called Women's Held Advocates, which is the policy and lobbying organization that's focused in Washington.

33:29
that is entirely organized around uh supporting policy initiatives focused on women's health. So across breast cancer, menopause, we now have recently added bone health, fertility, et cetera. We have sub teams under the women's health advocates umbrella that are focused on policy initiatives  to get  budget lines  or policy lines into different things in Congress to make sure there's a tension on women's health across, again, aligned by conditions.

33:58
so that we can get things done in Congress. So,  Women's Health Collective  and Women's Health Advocates, at least in SoCal, there's high overlap in  the leadership across these two groups.  So, we can do a lot of good things together because the women on the steering committee for Women's Health Advocates who are in LA are the same women who launched the SoCal Women's Health Collective.  It's symbiotic uh and I've attended...

34:26
sessions with both groups and it's a very exciting moment. It's there's bipartisan bills going to Congress  on just why  are  knee replacements for men being birthed at a higher rate than for women? We all have the same.  So it's like really just providing the transparency.  pulled that thread.  It's a whole different podcast. I know. know. know. So anyway, so you heard it here.

34:55
What else? I could go on and on, Naseem, but we have a certain time here. And I just wanted to give you this moment to share with my listeners how to contact you, how to get involved in your multiple initiatives. These will be in the show notes.

35:16
Yeah, no, absolutely. So I love that the so find the podcast. It's on Spotify and Apple and all the places where you listen to your podcast. It's called the Capital Flex. So all the subscribers would be amazing. Come and listen. I love feedback. Tell me what you think.  Season two will drop on May 6th and season one is tremendous. So start from the top.  The second thing is I also host something called a Founders Coven, which is a monthly meetup for female founders.  And it's a virtual session.  It's an hour.

35:45
uh once a month and the entire intent is to infuse expertise, insight, education into the female founder half of the ecosystem. So we've had three sessions so far  and I was doing these in a previous life and I've now rebooted it this year. We've talked about vibe coding. We've talked about healthcare reimbursement. uh Our next session is in two weeks. We have a exited founder coming to talk about how she built her business and then led to the exit. So

36:12
You can join the coven. It's on my LinkedIn. You can find the sign up sheet so you can join the coven and join us when you can each month. And then I also I do a lot. I'm very active on LinkedIn. I'm always writing and posting. I'm speaking at lots of events so you can find me out in the wild pretty easily also because I tend to be around a lot. So that's the easiest. as a pioneer, this is a question that just came to my mind.  You were so  in the early stages of social media, right? um

36:42
Would you  dare to give an opinion on what is the best type of platform to get your voice out there as a,  as a leader, a change leader like you, is it LinkedIn? Is it how  it. I believe it's LinkedIn.  I tell a lot of founders this, that if you want to build credibility and thought leadership  in parallel to building your company,  start to build a platform on LinkedIn. Got it. Build a point of view.

37:13
have a point of view on what the future looks like when your company wins and start to talk about it. And it doesn't have to be long. It's a couple of it's like blog posts type things and use headlines, right? Use what's going on in the news and in healthcare to express a point of view and to talk about what it means and what are the implications and what are the so what's of what's going on and how does that tie back to what you're building and why you're building it? Because when investors go out to research a company and to research the founder,

37:40
If they, will look at your data room with a look at financials, a look at what you're building. All of that has to be up to snuff. And then they're going to go research the founder. And if they go on LinkedIn and they see that you're writing and publishing and that you've built an audience and that you're somewhat prolific in terms of communicating a point of view, those things are important. They pay off, right? You go, well, she, she's talking about what she wants and she has a perspective that's valuable because it means that you're really committed to the thing that you're after. And

38:09
And women don't spend enough time building platforms. We don't spend enough time standing on soap boxes talking about the things we care about. And we should be doing it more. And all of your friends should like comment and share every single thing that you post. And so I also tell everyone once you share it, send it to all your friends and tell them they have to comment and post on it.  We have to keep building the flywheel. A flywheel. You heard it here on the Founder's Sand.

38:38
All right, we're going to go to the sandbox. I like to close out asking my guests, um what is the meaning to you for the following three terms, which I am passionate about and how I work with my founder clients. What does scalability mean to you?  Oh, scalability means an ability to  grow and navigate the market.

39:03
in line with market trends and market behaviors.  knowing, having a good perspective on what's going on, dynamics  in the sector that you're in,  and having built enough mobility in how you navigate your organization so that you can turn left, turn right, etc.  in line with what's going on outside the business. That's scalability. Perfect. How about resilience?

39:32
Resilience.  one is  it's that. So one, it's a necessary skill. We'll start there.  And  two, it's an ability to take in  what's going on in the market, not take it personally,  reflect and keep going. uh Feedback can come from everywhere. A lot of it from places that maybe aren't relevant and not that useful.  So knowing how to filter and listen  and then really be able to be open minded and take the good feedback when you get it.

40:02
And  I had one founder on my podcast say that she spent a lot of time on the floor while she was fundraising, like curled up in a ball because it was so hard.  But she got up again every single time and she raised the capital and she built a business and she can use to do that. And that's resilience. Right. I'm after something big and it matters. So I'm going to get it done. Amazing. Amazing.  And I heard you when we were talking about  the subtitle for the episode. uh

40:32
Abundance. What's abundant? Why is abundance so important for you? Abundance is really important for me because we have been, we women have been conditioned so badly in scarcity where there's not enough. There's only one, only one of us can win. We can't all win. And so we don't share our networks easily. We don't share our relationship easily. We, we feel like we have to keep things really close because if I share it, then I lose it.

41:02
It's a mentality I hear em from founders and it's a bit generational as well. And I don't want us to do that.  I have found more than once that the more I put into the ecosystem, the more I get back. Comes back to me in spades.  so opening up our networks,  sharing what we know,  being open about the learnings,  pulling everyone forward with us.  All of that is going to...

41:29
it's going to benefit all ships rise.  it's how our male counterparts have been doing it for years. The golf course is the golf course for a reason. Right. And so we don't have a golf course, but we do have our networks and we do have our relationships and women are very innate relationship builders. It is superpower territory and we should be using it. And that means abundance. That means not worrying  about

41:57
being the only one because you know what? We're building our own tables and we're pulling up more chairs  and that's how we're gonna get this done. I love it. have goosebumps just listening to this last part about bandits. Thank you, Naseem. Final question. What does purpose,  purpose driven mean to you? No, purpose driven means  that

42:21
your the things you are doing  and the things that bring you joy are lined up. Amazing. Yeah. And you can make money from it. Yeah. Without the joy, right?  Yeah. Make money better. Yeah. Final question to Jeff on here in the sandbox. This was great. Yes. Thank you. Amazing. I really enjoyed  listening. Just I enjoy our friendship, our working together  on

42:50
Common theme, which is getting more  money into the female.  This is 100%. Yep. So to my listeners, if you like this episode with the same, so Yanny sign up for the monthly release  of the founder sandbox, you can find it on  any major streaming platform. You've got to find founders, business owners, corporate directors and service providers that are building resilience, scalable and purpose driven companies with great corporate.

43:19
uh governance. So thank you for joining us today and see you next month. Thank you.