Full Transcript: Halle Tecco, founder of Rock Health, interviewed by Lydia Ramsey of Business Insider
On this episode of Sequenced, Halle Tecco, founder of Rock Health and Angel Investor at Techammer, sits down with Business Insider’s Lydia Ramsey to discuss the digital health landscape, the recent JP Morgan, Amazon, and Berkshire Hathaway news, and achieving gender parity in healthcare.
Curious to learn more about gender diversity in the healthcare industry? You can find Rock Health’s report, “Women in Healthcare 2017: How does our industry stack up?”, here.
We’ve posted complete transcript of the podcast below. You can subscribe to Sequenced on Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, Stitcher, and Google Play.
Lydia: Hi, everyone. My name is Lydia Ramsey, I’m a reporter at Business Insider covering biotech, pharma, health care, etc. I’m here today chatting with Halle Tecco, she is an Angel investor and founder of Rock Health. Halle, great to meet you.
Halle: Hi. Nice meeting you, too.
Lydia: So I’ve been covering healthcare for about two years, covering things like health tech and other times covering things like big pharma. But one of the companies and one of the groups that always comes up in conversations is Rock Health, so it sounds like it’s become a huge part of the digital health world and conversation. I would love to learn more about how it came to be.
Halle: If you’ve been covering this space for two years, you’ve seen the current stage of Rock Health and where we are today. So why don’t we kind of dial back to 2010 when we were really getting started. Back in the day in 2010, the digital health space looked so different from today. There were fewer companies obviously, fewer investors that were putting money into the space. A lot of the large companies today that are partnering and acquiring these young startups just weren’t interested in digital. But you could sense that something was brewing and that there was an opportunity to apply some of the same technologies that we’ve been seeing in other industries and really bring that to digitize health care.
This was really the beginning of meaningful use and incentives for turning paper records into electronic records. That was really where we came in. We saw that some activity was happening behind the scenes. Hospitals were starting to get interested but there really wasn’t a mass exodus from tech into health care. Our goal from day one was to really bring more people to the table with different backgrounds to work together on solutions to some of the biggest problems that we’re facing in health care. Really the idea came from when I spent a summer working at Apple and I covered the health care and medical segment.
The apps that I was seeing that were coming in at that time just weren’t that impressive especially compared to the apps in the gaming segment that were really utilizing all the native features of the app and really pushing the boundaries of creativity and innovation. What we wanted to do is really support founders that had more technical backgrounds, more business backgrounds that didn’t really have the health care experience. And bring them together with the folks that do have that health care experience, whether it’s individuals that can join the company and become medical directors, operators, or the larger organizations that can serve as partners and initial sounding boards for these companies.
When we started Rock Health we started as an accelerator and that at the time we thought was kind of the best format for supporting these companies was a very rigid six-month program where there’s certain content about learning different dynamics of the health care system and surrounding founders with mentors. That really evolved throughout the years and we recognized that we continue to support companies beyond the six months. In fact, sometimes we were most helpful when they were a little bit further along than in the ideation stage. So we would fund the company with 25K and two years later we’d still be spending a significant amount of time with them.
We really transitioned to become a seed fund because that’s really what we were doing is we were viewing ourselves as long-term investors in these companies and so we increased the check size from 25K to 250K, and started treating our portfolio companies as lifelong relationships with the founders and their companies as they evolve and grow. That’s been consistent now for the past couple of years. But really over the last four years, and it was really because of a couple of really, key employees that helped kind of grow the organization, Rock Health started putting together really awesome research on the digital health space. Really think through some data sets whether it’s funding data or we do some first-person research around collecting sentiments on digital health from the consumer standpoint.
We do a 4,000 person survey every year of consumers. We content specific reports whether it’s on women and health, wearables and biosensing, etc. The research part has really grown and now we have this awesome research director who joined us from Advisory Group and she’s really helping us think through how we can put out better research for the community at large. I would say Rock Health is now equally a seed fund and a research group.
Lydia: When I’m looking for research to support one article or another about a startup I’m writing about, I always end up on Rock Health’s website. So it’s great that that research is there and available. I remember that there was a table of all the pharmacy startups that are out there. There’s just like such a wide array of what people do and what they don’t do. I’ve had a hard time wrapping my head around it, so it was helpful to see it like all laid out on one page.
Halle: Well, I’m personally obsessed with spreadsheets. I have a spreadsheet for everything in my personal life as well as my professional life, my academic life. What you’re talking about is actually something I made that would help me think through just like this slew of startups in that space that I was really seeing, all these companies that were tackling the drugstore market per se. Whether it’s, Uber for delivering medication to searching for medication information, dispensing, discount cards, etc. There’s so many great companies in the space I wanted to have a way to like document how they are different from one another.
That was like my own personal market map and then I was like I should just share this. There’s no harm in sharing it. So that one wasn’t Rock Health related but hopefully that helped Rock Health’s investment thesis as well.
I have like probably a dozen that are like in progress and then this one, and then I did one on like the women’s health market, market map. Just because I’ve been looking deeply into the women’s health space for the past two or three years
The hardest part is keeping them updated. Startups are changing every day so it’s kind of hard. You put something out, I think I did that one last summer. I’m sure it’s already so outdated and there are tons of companies that are missing from it and companies that have folded or pivoted so it’s definitely fleeting, the market maps.
Lydia: Going back to something you were saying earlier about how the digital health space has changed, you mentioned bringing more people to the table. Now that we’re eight years in, it seems like there’s a lot of different players out there and the lens are starting to change around what defines a health care company. Who do you see as still missing from the conversation? Or in another way, who’s come to the table and who needs to get there next?
Halle: Every stakeholder at some point has showed up at the table and been involved in the conversation but some are putting dollars and strategies behind some sort of thesis that they have about how technology will transform their industry. And then I think there are some players within health care that in my opinion and others might disagree have been less friendly or more of a build versus buy mentality.
I think pharma has been founded on the premise of innovation and research and it’s been in their DNA. When they work with startups and they’re building technology infrastructure whether it’s to accelerate clinical trials, to manage patient outcomes. It’s in their DNA so it’s not a stretch to get them to work with emerging companies. Whether that’s through a partnership, a customer relationship, or something else. We’ve had great experiences with the pharma world.
Another stakeholder that really touches the majority of digital health companies would be payers. And I think there’s been kind of mixed experiences with the payer world. They’ve certainly shored up their conversations, they’ve certainly put out their own initiatives, some successful, some not. But I’ve seen cases where health plans have led companies down a road where they are gathering information about the company. The startup thinks that there could be a customer engagement at the end of the road and the insurance company decides, “Oh, we’ll just build it ourselves.” And there’s not that “I’m going to collaborate to build this technology.” It’s kind of like this do-it-yourself mentality. And I’ve seen that happen a couple of times and it’s really frustrated entrepreneurs. I think there’s room to grow for health plans to be more positively viewed within the digital health world.
Finally, hospitals are an interesting bunch and I’ve worked with a bunch of hospitals and I’m on some advisory groups with different hospitals. I’ve really enjoyed working with providers, especially the non-profit hospitals where they are genuinely in it for patient impact and patient outcomes. For example, Boston Children we’ve done a ton of work with and they’re all amazing and they’re very forward-thinking in what’s possible. And the biggest setback for hospitals and digital health startups is where is that funding come from? You need to prove that you’re saving the money in some way. They don’t just have excess budget to spend on these nice to have applications. They really need to align their bottom line with the value proposition of startups. I see a lot of interest and enthusiasm but sometimes it’s a little bit harder to get tools into the hospital based on their budget, and just the complexity of their legacy infrastructure.
One more health company that has done very well within the hospital setting is a company in D.C., called Kit Check. They put RFID tags on medications within the hospital and they’re basically an inventory management tool for hospitals to know when medications are expired or recalled, and missing. They’re actually able to show their ROI and their value proposition is very clear to the head of pharmacy within the hospital. They have a specific location within the hospital where they operate and so that just makes it a little bit cleaner to execute.
Another example: I don’t know how well they’re doing but AirStrip has been around for years and years but they have a tool for clinicians.
I know AirStrip OB is one for high-risk pregnancies to manage it in the hospital in real time. There is a slew of companies that are building, piecemeal like offerings on top of the EMR which makes it easier to execute across the hospital, especially when it’s seamless. But the challenge is getting physicians to change their workflow. They already are at capacity. They’re seeing too many patients in too little time. If you ask any physician, they don’t get enough time with their patient and they’re spending so much time with documentation that it’s really reducing their experience and their employee morale. So getting them to have another log in and another process, and another workflow to learn on the job is very, very tough.
There’s a great company called Augmedix. They’re actually helping offload that documentation process and they’re using Google Glass. The doctor is wearing Google Glass within the patient setting and all of that is recorded and transcribed somewhere else. And that reduces the documentation burden for the physicians which saves them time and agony.
In summary, solutions that are really focusing on a measurable pain point within the hospital are far more likely to be deployed than just like a nice to have tool.
Lydia: I was reading about and covering the news from Apple a couple weeks ago talking to that point of interoperability and being able to share data. I thought it was fascinating that they’re getting into the space of personal health records where a lot of companies have failed or not really seen the success that they want to see. I’m curious to watch it play out. I have no idea how it’s going to pan out but this idea that you can beta test in certain university hospitals and other places and get your health records immediately updated to your phone or uploaded. It’s going to be interesting to watch.
Halle: It’s going to be very interesting to watch and think we’re all cheering them on. We want Apple to succeed. My only concern is that Apple is so much better at hardware than software. We’ve all had frustrations with the software that they build and that they force you to have on your home screen. Their bread and butter is hardware, it’s the device that sells. And now they the ones to own the software layer of that? I hope they can achieve this.
Lydia: The big news coming out two weeks ago that JP Morgan, Amazon, and Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett’s company were going to start a new non-profit venture aiming at tackling health care cost. Something Buffett decided to call the hungry tapeworm on the American economy. But we didn’t get a lot of details right off the bat. Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan said, said this idea is going to start within the employer groups for now. But this might have an impact potentially on all Americans one day. I was curious what your thoughts were, how did you react to the news?
Halle: I wanted to know more. How much have they determined on what they’re going do? Is this something that’s like been in the works for a while and they have a thought-out plan. There weren’t enough details. It really made me hungry to know more because it could be huge, right? They have over a million employees between the three companies. So thinking of that as like a pilot population for new ideas and how to pay for and provide care could be really huge. I mean it’s a great starting population plus just the demographics between those three companies.
I imagine that the Amazon warehouse manager is different from the JP Morgan banker in terms of age and health and location. Just being able to have that sort of demographic that might be more representative of the U.S. is very exciting. If I just looked at JP Morgan, I imagine that their employees tend to be healthier and more educated. So having the three companies is exciting. I think that collaboration is great, it’s wonderful to see companies kind of working together to kind of say, “Hey, let’s put our expertise together,” because we have Amazon with logistics and technology. You have JP Morgan with the finance and risk expertise, and then Berkshire Hathaway with the insurance. Of course, Warren Buffett just being a pure genius.
I think it’s exciting to think about how they can bring their strengths together to come up with a system that is going to be nationalized, right? All these million-plus employees are not just in New York City. I mean they are across the U.S., and so the solution is going to have to have a virtual component. It’s going need to be mobile, it’s going have to be text-based, it’s going have to be available for these employees across the U.S. And so, to me, they’re breaking through some challenges that we current face. And I travel between states all the time and I’ve had insurance in California, New York, Massachusetts and health plans are bound by the state.
There are challenges to kind of scaling and companies that have employees across the nation have dozens of plans. You don’t necessarily benefit from having that cohesive experience for all the employees. So it’s exciting but as I’ve said, I want to know more, fill us in.
Lydia: If you were the one of them, what would you propose that they do?
Halle: I’m kind of a firm believer that health plans should be non-profit or public. I’m not a huge fan of for-profit. I don’t like the fact that health plans are making a black hole of money in the health care system, right? They make more money than they spend on our health care services. That’s just a fact. Obviously, there is a purpose to having them, to sharing that risk and helping patients when their expenses are beyond what they could pay on their own. But health plans with a for-profit goal of making money will take in more money than they give back to their patients, that’s just how they end up in business.
What I do think could be interesting for them is thinking about their health benefits and improving the health of their employees as the measure versus maximizing profits on the health plan as the measure. So becoming fully insured at a much larger scale than we’ve ever seen before. Really incentivizes prevention and managing health upfront versus focusing on just denying claims.
Lydia: It seems like initiatives like the JP Morgan, Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway Venture are born out of frustrations with the U.S. health care system. What are the challenges to the system as you see it today? What are the biggest things I guess keeping you up at night?
Halle: By far the largest issue and I think most of us can agree on this is really the cost of care and the rising cost of care especially as wages and inflation aren’t keeping up. Just being covered as an individual or as a family has become such a burden for Americans that there is anger amongst every in every corner of the U.S. No one is immune to the cost of care whether it’s services, procedures, premiums for health plans, or drug costs. For me the number one thing that keeps me up at night is really health care cost. I think we’ve come a long way in health care quality and outcomes and we’ve had tremendous strides in diagnostics and treatments, especially for cancers. But the cost of care is still rising with really no end in sight.
Lydia: Really speaking to that issue of cost. I feel like from what I’ve been covering the past couple months, there’s been some very interesting trends going on within healthcare as a whole. We’ve seen CVS getting into the insurance business with its merger with Aetna. Hospitals are thinking about like distributing and making generic drugs to get around shortages and higher costs. It just seems like there are a lot of different approaches out there to tackling this cost question. Since you’ve been focused on digital health and watching the whole world of startups unfold for the past couple years, what role do you see tech playing in these transitions?
Halle: I think there are a lot of startups and technology companies that are trying to carve off a piece of a larger cost issue. But the overarching goal would be to automate what we can and free up the physician time to focus on what they do best. Any technology that is helping to avoid unnecessary hospital visits, free up that capacity so that the patients who need the care the most are there and the physicians can focus on them. Routine things that can brought down the stack, whether it is contact lens renewal, prescription renewal every year. Minor things that don’t require the cost and effort that we currently have to use to obtain them. That’s the overarching goal.
But then everybody is kind of picking off a piece of that. Whether it’s, I’m going to start a company and focus on readmissions, create telehealth that’s focusing on contact lens. Why make it so hard to get contact lenses? That should be a lot easier and cheaper. There’s no one catch all fix for the cost problem from a digital perspective but I do believe that there are dozens of companies that are working on real problems that if they all go well, then I do think we can make a huge dent in this problem.
Lydia: The tele portion of all of this and keeping people out of the doctor’s office has been very interesting. I feel like there’s a lot of talk about it and a lot of excitement but a lot of folks still haven’t used it or interacted with it yet. I wonder what that tipping point is going be when we can really get it into widespread use and the way that we all use our phones. Why shouldn’t we all be interacting with our doctors on our phones?
Halle: Right. I think we think of video as telemedicine but actually telemedicine could be text-based, email-based, and it can be synchronous or asynchronous. We need to redefine what we mean and explain what we mean when we say telemedicine. It can be really helpful for understanding, when will we hit that tipping point?
Lydia:I’ve done a little bit of texting with one of my doctors as a follow up to an appointment. And it’s really handy, it was just an easy way to not have to sit on hold for a long time with the receptionist at the office. And it was really nice even if it was pretty basic.
Halle:I actually recently had a really pleasant experience. My doctor at the hospital I’ve been going to is using the MyChart from EPIC. I feel like I’ve had kind of like a long disrespect for EPIC based on what you hear from providers and the stories, and just how kind of a closed system they’ve created. But I have to give it to them. The MyChart experience for me has been great because I can have the record from my primary care physician, my OB-GYN, my allergist all in one place. I’m pleasantly surprised. Recently I went into the MyChart website renew my inhaler which I just needed a new inhaler and there was no need for me to go see the physician.
I really only need to see my allergist or my asthma doctor once or twice a year or if something is uncontrolled. But for controlled I was just like, “Hey, I needed a new inhaler. Can you send the script over?” And they did and I was able to get it the same day and I was like, “Oh, I didn’t have to go into a doctor’s office. This is amazing.” If hospitals can make this happen for consumers then I think startups certainly can as well.
The initial visit I get and having a face to face relationship with you physician especially with something like asthma which can be deadly. Having that personal relationship with the physician that does get to know you and is able to take those metrics on site I think is really important. But absolutely for routine just refills of a script. Being able to just like get that same day without having to take off work and drive somewhere is huge. In terms of medication adherence there was a great article like a few months ago that was just like the best medication adherence tool is lowering cost and increasing access to medications. Just getting that script and being able to get to the store and pay for it, that’s the biggest barrier.
Lydia: I know it’s deterred me in the past from picking up a prescription that was like optional. If we’re talking about these dramatic shifts that are happening in health care especially over cost but taking it in a kind of different angle I’d be remissed to not bring up women as you brought up the topic of women and women’s health startups earlier. But even just from watching the industry in 2017, it seemed like a big year to me with GSK putting Emma Walmsley as their CEO, the first woman to ever lead a big pharma company. That was pretty huge from what I could tell and I was just really curious to get your take of what’s kind of the state of the union here for women in healthcare in 2018 now.
Halle: We encourage everyone to check out the diversity reports on the Rock Health website. We do this every year. The last one was last summer or last fall was kind of the women in health care update. And what we do is we look at the number of women CEOs, board members of all the Fortune 500 health care companies as well as the largest 100 hospitals, as well as all of the digital health startups that have been funded in the U.S., over $2 million. And so we look at the numbers and how they change year over year. And unfortunately they just aren’t moving fast enough and at this rate it’s going to be many, many years until we achieve parity if not at all, if ever.
And one of the things that we did last year was we surveyed 300 women and asked them kind of their sentiments and how they feel, and their thoughts on gender parity in health care. Unfortunately, there’s just a lot of pessimism which I think reflects where we’re at. Nearly half of our respondents said it would take 25 or more years to achieve parity in the workplace and like 16% said we’ll never achieve parity in health care, which is really depressing. The fact that health care is an industry where women’s voices are so critical, where the chief medical officer of the home are making majority of the health care decisions on behalf of our families.
To be kind of left out of the boardrooms and the leadership decisions is pretty sad. I think the one illustration of that was when Apple first came out with their health app and it was like tracking vitals and all these health tracking. And the internet, the women on the internet were just outraged that they missed a very, very important thing that has been tracked since the dawn of time which is our menstrual cycles. This would be such a obvious thing to put into this app and the fact that it was missing outraged the internet.
That goes on every single day in health care where because women aren’t at the table designing solutions and making big decisions. We’re not as representative in those decision-making and conversations as we are as consumers. And so that’s really unfortunate for the health care system. I think outcomes would be a lot better and apps would be a lot better if women were there. So just in terms of women being represented in leadership positions, it just hasn’t changed a lot since we’ve been tracking this data for, gosh, six or seven years. This summer, we’ll do another update and see if things change this year.
But as of last year, there wasn’t a single woman that was a CEO of a Fortune 500 health care company. There was the CEO of Mylan, she was on the list and then got ousted. It was a couple of years that we went with no women as CEOs and we’re on par for other industries in terms of the board composition. But you would think that in health care, women should be equally representative or more so than other industries at least because women are such critical stakeholders in health care. So that’s just in terms of our representation as leaders in health care. It is still a boy’s club. Whether we like it or not, it’s still a boy’s club.
From the women we surveyed, there’s a lot of pessimism whether that will change or not. And then just the whole me-too phenomenon, which there’s been an unbelievable wave of allegations and cases of sexual harassment in other industries. We’d like to think that we’re above that in health care and we’re more professional. And everybody goes into health care because they’re good people and they want to change the world but unfortunately, we’re not immune to these cases.
There was a case a few years ago where women employees sued Novartis and won. One woman who testified and I was reading her testimony for some research on the space and she had reported to her bosses about being raped by a doctor during a company outing. After she reported it, her manager started questioning her work performance. And another like manager blamed her from what happened. It was an insane story that it sounded like the stories you hear in the entertainment space. Unfortunately, that is the reality for women in every industry and we’re just, we’re not immune to it.
There have been cases that have been brought in front of jurors and there will be more. And then let’s not forget like the physician-patient sexual assault issues and the recent gymnastics case with Nassar. And, he’s a doctor, right, I mean he took the Hippocratic oath. That’s our industry and it’s a huge black mark and it’s a huge shame for us in this industry. We’re not immune and we need to be very cautious of blinding ourselves to the reality that this exists in every industry, including ours.
Lydia: The power of dynamics that exists in entertainment world, the media world, it certainly exists to the same extent or even more in the health care space.
Halle: I know, and it’s funny because I think people think health care is nerdier and more professional. Like entertainment they’re just partying and it happens when they’re partying. These power dynamics exist and people take advantage of that. There was another case of that physician assistant from Dignity Health, Mercy now, and she was sexually harassed by male co-workers. And she was rewarded like $100 million, more than $100 million in damages, and it was the largest single plaintiff employment verdict in U.S. history at the time. I mean, it happened in health care.
Lydia: I’ve certainly heard my fair share of crazy. Partying is always true from, you know, like sales departments or different things, or even the JP Morgan health care conference. They are the same kind of stories of hiring women models that you see there as you see in the tech world for instance.
Halle: Absolutely.
Lydia: Yeah, clear but there’s no exception here.
Halle: There was at HIMSS last year. They didn’t have booth babes but they had like patient babes. I don’t even know what company it was but I had to take a picture and tweet it. They were showing their software that was some sort of like connected real-time monitoring of patients and they had like very beautiful, scantily clad women like in the hospital beds, hooked up to these monitors, and they were all women. This is so tone deaf of this company really. You expect that at CES but not HIMSS, but it does happen.
Lydia: Along the lines of thinking about where the industry is and how slow it’s moving into terms of getting to parity, I thought a lot about this recently about how many men’s health startups I’ve seen come out over the last couple months. There’s been a lot to do with balding treatments and something to do with Viagra, and it’s been an interesting movement. And I guess kind of warranted because men tend to go to the doctor’s office a little bit less than women. But I was curious where this wave of women’s health companies is. When will that happen? Is that something that’s on the horizon? What are your thoughts?
Halle: I actually have this data somewhere. Rock Health tracks every company that’s funded and we’ll tag if it’s a women’s health company. There are some really impressive women’s health companies especially around specific areas like fertility that are women-specific issues. So I would say there are a good number of women’s health companies. I know women in general have a harder time fundraising. There are a fewer women investors. And often times, you hear stories of women pitching women’s health companies and if the investor is a man and he just doesn’t understand.
He’s not gonna click with that founder if he really can’t resonate with the problem. So that’s an issue that, women and women running women’s health companies face that is unique. But these companies do exist and they’re around and I’m part of the Facebook group that’s all women founders focused on, you know, women-oriented products and services.
Lydia: That sounds like a great Facebook group to have.
Halle: Yeah. We’ll invite you to it. It’s called “Women Innovating in Women’s Health.” You can just search for it and ask to join. Any of you out there too if you’re a woman working in women’s health we’d love to have you in our conversations.
Lydia: In those conversations too, I mean thinking of me too and all the different conversations that are happening now with Times Up. What needs to happen? Have you been able to assess out the big important steps are or the initiatives people can take that that will bring us toward more parity and more equality for women in health care?
Halle: I think they don’t have to be industry specific. I think there are like general guidelines that companies should take regardless of industry and regardless of size. Recently I heard one that I love, Sheryl Sandberg was saying if you’re going to do the Mike Pence rule, which is, don’t take a woman colleague out to dinner. Then you should say no, don’t take any colleague out to dinner because if you’re just taking male colleagues out to dinner that gives them an advantage because you’re leaving women out of it. And I thought that was a great example and plus like I don’t want to work at dinner. I want to go home and have dinner with my family.
And I don’t want to be asked to dinner by anyone, whether it’s a male colleague or women colleagues. That’s just creating better work-life balance within organizations. That has nothing to do with just health care. So that’s just one example but I think there are a lot of resources out there for companies that are committed to creating a more balanced leadership team. It starts at the top so having a CEO that’s committed, that will surround themselves with people with different backgrounds and experiences. Whether they have different experiences because they are a woman or what industry they worked in. I think that’s really important that it’s a commitment that starts from the top.
We see a lot of investors that are now looking to fund more women companies. And I’ve seen a lot of dinners that VCs are putting together for women founders. They can connect with women founders or mentoring opportunities. But I’m not really seeing the reverse so VCs that are looking to fund more women but I’m not seeing startup founders that are looking for women who are members or investors. And maybe it’s because fundraising is already hard enough and you just want to take money from whoever can give it to you. But as an investor myself,
I sometimes will look at a deal and just see the investor list and it’s like just the same boy’s club and it’s like, “Hey, I wanted to see that deal. That looks like a really interesting company. I would have loved to learn more.”
I think founders need to be aware not just of the team that they’re building but the investors that they bring on. And don’t take money from a VC that just a boy’s club that doesn’t have any women partners, not women associates, women partners. Focus on making sure that you have representative board members and investors. And that kind of going both ways will reinforce it for investors and the more women investors we have the more women founders we have. And I think it’s a positive cycle once you get into that but we really need to see commitment from those who are in power and have the resources to make change.
Lydia: What would be your advice to either women looking to found a company or looking to become investors? What’s the advice you’d share with them?
Halle: It’s so hard. Becoming founders I don’t think there’s any advice that’s like unique to women but I would say talk to other women so you will realize that your experiences aren’t a reflection of a bad idea or a bad company but there is bias that exists in the venture world. And be prepared for it. Connect with other women founders and find out what investors are good and fair. So you don’t waste your time with assholes, and people will tell you. People absolutely will tell you. People are like really open with their experiences so you’re not alone on this journey. It’s really hard to start a company but you’re not alone and others can share their experiences. It makes you realize that the things that you face are faced by many women and are overcome by women, and you can overcome them too.
And then becoming an investor. I don’t have good advice for that. Being an Angel investor is a very different role than being a venture investor, right? When I angel invest, I don’t have a boss, I don’t have someone, I don’t have LPs that I need to report to. So in a lot of ways, being an angel investor is very freeing. If you have some capital to invest in companies but if you can meet that threshold I think it’s one of the most empowering things you can do as someone who wants to support companies.
And you can be autonomous to make the decision and evaluate the companies based on your experiences and your expertise. We need more women angel investors. If you have the capital and you are passionate about a certain space within health care, consider becoming an angel investor. Anyone that meets the threshold for being an accredited investor can do it. Being a VC is a completely different job and you have to interview a VC to hear about best tips for getting into that field.
Lydia: I’d love to hear about your philanthropic work. It sounds like there’s some recent news on that front.
Halle: Yeah. The news I think you’re talking about is the Bitcoin donation. My husband and I bought Bitcoin in 2013 through the Bitcoin, the GBT like trust. It wasn’t directly in Bitcoin but it was a vehicle in Bitcoin. We watched it go up and down and it was a wild, crazy ride. We just decided that it would be better put to some good use in the world so we just donated it to a cancer hospital a few months ago. I think they got more coverage than we expected and it was surprisingly cover which we weren’t expecting. It wasn’t a ton of money. We initially invested 25K and then you can kinda guess how high that went.
It wasn’t like a million dollar investment but it was a substantial amount. For us, we really just hope that other people that got lucky off Bitcoin will follow and do the same. I think there’s a lot of extra wealth now because of Bitcoin and if you can do something good with it, why not. It felt like play money anyways, it wasn’t real.
But I think in general, stepping back just kind of your question, I’m thinking for philanthropy. I’m actually doing my MPH right now. I’m very much committed to shifting my lens as an investor to impact. If you look at kind of the last deals that I’ve done, they’ve all been in companies that will have I believe can have a significant impact on main street America. Americans that are facing issues that are pervasive, widespread, and not necessarily some of the cool industries. Stuff that I am still passionate about but that might not touch as many lives. As part of that I just wanted to have a better public health lens on evaluating companies and their potential for impact. Pursuing that MPH will hopefully give me kind of better understanding of the key determinants of health.
So it can make better investments and think about investing as impact investing and not just a return on money but also like what’s the return on society? How will this create a better health care system for as many people as possible?
Lydia: I think we may be running low in time here so it was so great talking to you and it was great hearing about all the initiatives women can take and all the areas where health care is falling apart but there seems to be some cool solutions ahead. So I’m certainly excited to keep tracking the space.
