Health Tech: Amanda Calabrese & Greta Meyer On How Sequel’s Technology Can Make An Important Impact On Our Overall Wellness
An Interview With Luke Kervin
… Understand the need you are solving. When we started digging into the women’s health space, we spent weeks talking to users to make sure we were fully defining a pain point and making sure that we understood the need before we jumped to solutions.
In recent years, Big Tech has gotten a bad rep. But of course many tech companies are doing important work making monumental positive changes to society, health, and the environment. To highlight these, we started a new interview series about “Technology Making An Important Positive Social Impact”. We are interviewing leaders of tech companies who are creating or have created a tech product that is helping to make a positive change in people’s lives or the environment. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Amanda Calabrese & Greta Meyer of Sequel.
Sequel is engineering better health and wellness experiences for women starting with a leakage-preventing tampon that relies on a proprietary, fluid-mechanically-efficient design. Founded by two high-level athletes and Stanford engineers, Greta Meyer and Amanda Calabrese are building the products they wish they had on game day, and elevating the standards for products long left behind.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory and how you grew up?
Greta and I both grew up on the East Coast with strong female figures (Greta’s mom is a lawyer, my mother helps run the family business) and family businesses. Greta’s dad is a goldsmith and mine is an optometrist. Both have their own practices and both of our families have been in the goldsmith and optometry businesses for generations. We’ve been around entrepreneurs our whole life — we’ve also been athletes our whole life. Greta was a D1 recruited lacrosse player to Stanford and I raced for the United States in the sport of Lifesaving. We both have the intense drive of lifelong athletes, paired with the wonderful example our parents gave us as smart small-business owners.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
Our favorite story happened quite recently — we had the opportunity to run an at-scale trial of our product with the machine we invented. But we had to get all the pieces across the world for the trial. The shipping company never came to pick up the machine to transport it overseas, so we had to put our heads together to come up with a solution the day before! We happened to have a layover in New York, so we ended up putting our machine in a suitcase, having Greta’s incredible dad bring us the machine to the airport during our layover, and we brought it on the plane! It was a chaotic few days of organization but truly a testament to us being able to overcome anything and such a funny memory to look back on.
None of us can achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
We are incredibly grateful for our mentors at the Stanford Design School. Our education in design thinking empowered us with the framework to deeply understand needs and be able to take complex problems and break them down to ensure we are solving for the right things. Bill Burnett, our academic advisor, professor and fiercest champion spent hours with us talking through every aspect of the business. David Kelley inspired us to take risks and pursue Sequel post-graduation. Erin MacDonald led us through countless discussions about data, study design and human factors research even after we graduated. Perry Klebahn and Jeremy Utley were the first to really push us in the direction of a startup, as opposed to a class project, and make us begin to feel comfortable with the uncomfortable.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
One of Greta’s favorite quotes is Roosevelt’s ‘The Man in The Arena’
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
…at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
This quote is resonant of our risk-filled, high intensity life working on our startup. We take risks to solve hard problems, knowing that there is a chance that we do not succeed. We know there will be hurdles and failures along the way, but we know these are problems worth working hard for.
You are a successful business leader. Which three-character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
Asking questions — Greta has a knack for asking questions I could never even think of, and that’s why our partnership works so well! We have similar academic training, which allows us to both break down problems similarly but the way we approach problems and context we draw from in order to solve them is different too. She is very technical and process-oriented, whereas my process can be more fluid and winding — it’s a perfect complement!
Accepting feedback — This is something we learned very early on. When someone says “no,” we take that as an opportunity to ask for feedback and grow from the rejection. Checking your ego and recognizing that great feedback can come out of any failure, or every rejection is critical to being a good leader.
Being creative problem solvers — The ability to be flexible and think outside the box to solve problems will prove to be our superpower over and over again. The story we shared above about getting the machine overseas. A perfect example of thinking creatively and flexibly, on-the-fly and in a critical moment.
Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about the tech tools that you are helping to create that can make a positive impact on our wellness. To begin, which particular problems are you aiming to solve?
Sequel is elevating the standards of women’s health products starting with a reengineered tampon. We believe that by demanding better for people that menstruate and raising products to the standard that they should be, we are taking on a small, but impactful piece of the rampant inequity in women’s healthcare. We are very clear with our vision of not just being a tampon company or solely focused on menstruation. Our emphasis on education and transparency for consumers and pairing that with an innovative approach to many widely accepted (though poorly performing) medical devices and healthcare products allows us to drive change in a space that is often only in focus because of childbirth or fertility. A woman’s life is about so much more than just her reproductive years and we want to reflect that with our products and services.
How do you think your technology can address this?
We are creating simple solutions and explaining them well. We are pulling in research and being able to translate it to consumers, because we are the consumers! The tampon innovation (a spiral design to lengthen the flow path and allow for more even absorption) empowers women with such an “aha moment” when they see it — why can’t all these products that are so impactful to our everyday lives and our bodies make that much sense? The simplicity in our work is what advances the education goals we have for our vision and mission.
Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about this cause?
We experienced tampon leakage and accidents as high-level athletes. Greta played lacrosse at Stanford and was constantly distracted by her failing products in her white, home-team uniform. I was a lifeguard and remember sitting on the white lifeguard chair with a fear of a red stain and an inability to focus on the lives in the water I was there to protect! We are both also deeply passionate about equity in women’s sports (and now women’s health) based on our own experiences of gender bias. We see Sequel as a way to break off a bite sized piece of a larger gender inequity issue and provide menstruators with better, equitable options.
How do you think this might change the world?
Sequel is raising the standard of care for half of the population that menstruates, and we are demanding better. It’s about time.
Keeping “Black Mirror” and the “Law of Unintended Consequences” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?
It can be confusing when every company says they are telling you the truth. A core value of ours is transparency, and thus, all our claims are backed by research and data. We do not want to add to the mess of confusion already plaguing women’s health, and so we spend a lot of time and energy making sure that everything we put out into the word is carefully and concisely explained. Women are not stupid, and we need to explain things to them operating on that assumption, especially when the information is about their bodies and their healthcare choices!
Here is the main question for our discussion. Based on your experience and success, can you please share “Five things you need to know to successfully create technology that can make a positive social impact”? (Please share a story or an example, for each.)
1) Understand the need you are solving. When we started digging into the women’s health space, we spent weeks talking to users to make sure we were fully defining a pain point and making sure that we understood the need before we jumped to solutions.
2) Who you are solving it for. When we mapped out who our ideal user was going to be, we made the persona as specific as possible so that we could best determine what features and benefits needed to be included and required in our design. We started with the “who” being female athletes because that is what we were (and are) but have expanded that over time to include an active, on-the-go woman who doesn’t have time to think about her period.
3) Why solving that need matters. Make sure what you’re solving even has a purpose. With so many products on the market and so many private label brands coming out every day, we needed to make sure that there was space in this market for an innovation, and that a new, better performing, tampon is what is truly needed.
4) Low fidelity prototyping. Show consumers something you aren’t proud of. Don’t invest much at all in development and get direct feedback on a concept. You will learn a lot! We made a ton of “looks like” prototypes to see if people resonated with our spirals and if the innovation was even understood by consumers conceptually, we learned so much in the early days from this!
5) Focusing on the extreme user can often offer insights that will help everyone. We were athletes who needed a better product for ourselves, but the truth is, every woman deserves products at the standard they should be. Designing for athletes, a user that will be testing the performance of our products every day, has helped us focus on performance above all, rather than become distracted by trying to design for everything.
If you could tell other young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?
We’d tell them to make sure that they are working on a problem they deeply understand and that their solution truly solves the need. We don’t need more tech for the sake of tech these days. Rather, we need thoughtful solutions that passionate people are willing to devote themselves to, and that improve quality of life.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. :-)
Surbhi Sarna, who is currently a healthcare partner at YC, but before that she was a young woman building a medical device that would deeply impact the way women detect ovarian cancer. She successfully exited her device to Boston Scientific and was one of the first medical device changemakers in women’s health.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
@trysequel
@apcalabrese
@greta_meyer
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success in your important work.
