Kate Ryder, Maven Clinic, on revolutionizing women’s and family health

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In this episode of The Pulse Podcast, we interview Kate Ryder, Founder & CEO at Maven Clinic, the largest telemedicine provider for family health and women, who control 80% of healthcare decisions in a $3.5 trillion healthcare industry. Besides the market dollar potential, Maven Clinic addresses critical gaps in maternity care. The U.S. maternal mortality rate has steadily increased since 2000, while declining in other countries, and its national C-section rate is 20% higher than what the WHO recommends. Today, more than a third of women and nearly half of women with children take a break from their careers, primarily because of the pull of family. Maven Clinic connects workers with OB-GYNs, nutritionists, lactation consultants, and other specialists via video chat or messaging to empower women to advocate for themselves in a broken system. With Maven Clinic, employers and health plans can see improved maternal outcomes, lower costs, and attract and retain more parents in the workforce. Maven Clinic has raised $90M as of its Series C closed February 2020, and its backers include Spring Mountain Capital, Sequoia Capital, Oak HC/FT, Female Founders Fund, Anne Wojcicki, Reese Witherspoon, Natalie Portman and Mindy Kaling. Maven Clinic was named among the world’s top 50 most innovative companies in 2020 by Fast Company, and has more than tripled the number of companies it serves in 2019 alone.

Kate Ryder, Founder and CEO, Maven Clinic

Kate founded Maven in 2014, reimagining healthcare for women and families from the ground up after seeing first hand how the lack of access to care impacted those starting a family and returning to work as new parents. Prior to founding Maven, Kate worked in venture capital and as a journalist, writing for the Economist from Southeast Asia, New York and London and for the New Yorker. In 2009, she worked with former U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, helping him write his memoirs about the financial crisis. Kate has been named to Crain’s New York Business 40 under 40 and to Fast Company’s “Most Creative People.” She has spoken on stage at industry events including the Forbes Healthcare Summit, Fortune Brainstorm Health, the Oliver Wyman Health Innovation Summit and HLTH. Kate received her B.A. from the University of Michigan and her MSc from the London School of Economics. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, son and daughter.

Start — 7:00: Kate’s background

• Quarantine hobbies: more exercise! Kate left New York City at the beginning of the pandemic to her parents’ house in Connecticut, so she’s running around cul-de-sacs, not riverside running paths. Kate’s two young kids are loving the space of the suburbs, especially as they’re missing out on NYC staple kid experiences like playing in the playgrounds of Brooklyn. We even received a special guest star appearance from her kids to start!
• From childhood restauranteur to journalism: Kate’s dream as a child was to open a restaurant. In college, she decided to pursue journalism instead. Her journalism career kicked off when she helped Hank Paulson (previously Chairman & CEO of Goldman Sachs, then U.S. Treasury Secretary during the Great Recession) write his memoir about the financial crisis. Kate then spent 6 years working for storied publications like The Economist, The Wall Street Journal and The New Yorker ranging from topics like science, finance, international markets, the arts, travel, and so forth.
• Transition to entrepreneurship: Kate worked in venture capital for a few years, after which Maven was born. Her journalistic prowess helped her look for companies and founders with powerful narratives and solid businesses to back. Reshaping the women’s health category checked off all of those boxes. In Kate’s mind, she knew she wanted to have children but she had seen so many women sacrifice their careers after entering motherhood, so she was unclear how these goals would all fit together. Eventually, as many of her peers and friends started having their own children, Kate witnessed how little support these women were getting in their maternity journeys. She realized this could be a big business and took her ideas on a roadshow with providers, women, and moms. The rest is history.

“Women drive 80% of healthcare decisions in the U.S. and disproportionately control household spending. So I thought, wouldn’t it be great to build a more equitable healthcare model for women and families while creating a huge business in the process?”

7:00–20:00 Coronavirus and shifting B2C > B2B > back to B2C

• Impacts to users: Maven has seen a 300% increase in mental health utilization on their telemedicine platform since the pandemic hit. Family planning and pregnancy are already very uncomfortable and anxiety-inducing, and the community is starting to see studies of the impacts of coronavirus on women who are pregnant or undergoing fertility treatments. But in the early months, the correlation data were sparse and the mandate to pregnant women was “you’re a high risk group — watch out.” On the parenting front, Maven is seeing a lot of exhausted members who might be starting to suffer from depression, especially for members who already have a predisposition to depression and anxiety. Maven is also seeing a trend of families in crisis situations, like changing planned birthing locations since hospitals may be overwhelmed with COVID-19 cases, being told partners will be allowed in the room during birth, or witnessing their OBGYN standing appointments dwindle. So, Maven (traditionally partnering with employers to offer employee benefits) is expanding to market to consumers directly, once again tapping into the direct-to-consumer distribution channel.
• Shifts in insurance coverage and telemedicine: There is both an acceleration in telemedicine adoption and, for distressed industries, furloughed employees and slashed benefits. One of the biggest reasons telemedicine never took off pre-COVID-19 was that these platforms were very transactional. Telemedicine was only used for a quick prescription or answer, without building a longitudinal patient-provider relationship. Maven’s platform is designed around this relationship. Kate hopes the shift to telemedicine will herald using virtual care for ongoing, longitudinal care versus one-off needs. Maven Clinic has seen a 6x increase in overall telemedicine utilization on Maven’s platforms compared with pre-pandemic. An added bonus: providers love the shift to telemedicine, too. Providers who were previously resistant to telemedicine are realizing how much can be done virtually.

“In talking to our providers, they love telemedicine. 98% of Maven’s providers are women. Most of them are working part-time, and use the remaining flex schedules to provide virtual care. They get to manage their social and family lives, solving for provider shortages across OB-GYN on their own terms and time. March through April [2020], we saw a huge surge in provider applications and accepted 10x the number we normally do in a month.”

• Shift from B2C to B2B: In the early days of Maven Clinic, because of the perception of women’s health as a niche category, Kate decided to take the direct-to-consumer path despite knowing that a B2B sales model was the longer-term path to scale. To get the momentum to raise money to achieve that long-term vision, Maven Clinic needed to demonstrate consumer stickiness with telehealth adoption, then leverage those learnings to build Maven Clinic’s core pregnancy product today. Maven sold their first pregnancy program 6 months after launch, which undeniably demonstrated the platform’s momentum to potential investors. It’s been important to be incremental — one of Kate’s close friends is the CEO of PillPack, which was acquired by Amazon in 2018. They, too, started with a direct-to-consumer model to build traction and gain investor confidence, then invested in partnerships with health plans, PBMs, and so forth.

“Raise money off the back of a great consumer product, while knowing that in the long-run, you need to pivot into some of the bigger distribution channels like health plans, employers and providers.”

• Building relationships with employer partners during the pandemic: For pregnant women and new parents, there are massive disruptions to care and support right now. Maven Clinic is now offering a six-month COVID-19 product where employers clients can easily implement a six-month product — it’s the best deal the company can get next to doing a pilot, which Maven does not do — to bridge these employers’ higher risk populations through the end of the year.

20:00–27:30: Maven Clinic

• What is the core problem Maven is trying to solve?: Maven Clinic is trying to build an equitable and inclusive system for women and families by filling care gaps along family planning, family support, and early parenting processes. Maven Clinic has digital programs for IVF, egg freezing, adoption, surrogacy, pregnancy, partners, postpartum, return to work, and pediatrics. Maven sells these programs to self-insured employers.
• Death by a thousand point solutions: HR benefits buyers are overwhelmed with the number of digital health companies selling into self-insured employers. Maven is lucky because it created this category. In the early days, it was difficult to benchmark Maven against blank space, but now companies frequently put out RFPs for maternity, fertility, and family benefits. Even as recently as 2016, Kate would attend benefits conferences and feel so overwhelmed, without any money for a booth, trying to meet as many HR teams as possible to put a stake in the ground. One of Maven Clinic’s flagship clients, a Fortune 50 company they’ve been working with since 2017, has helped champion Maven Clinic with other partners.
• Vulnerable populations and MassHealth: Coronavirus has painfully highlighted disparities in maternal mortality across communities of color, but also how vulnerable populations are bearing the brunt of economic dislocation. Telemedicine is a great, low-cost way to scale care across these populations. Maven Clinic got their MassHealth partnership up-and-running in a week and a half, and leveraged MassHealth as a channel partner to educate beneficiaries on this new benefit.

Editor’s note: The MassHealth-Maven Clinic partnership was announced in March 2020 to provide 24/7 on-demand access to women’s and family health services to 1.8 million residents in Massachusetts at no additional cost to members. This will help vulnerable moms who may be facing a myriad of chronic conditions and high-risk pregnancies access necessary care in real-time. The partnership further extends Maven’s consumer-centric platform to address the stark contrast in outcomes across communities of color — Black women have a maternal mortality rate that is 2.5x that of white women in the U.S., according to the National Center for Health Statistics. While it’s too soon to report out on utilization data, Maven is excited about translating its MassHealth playbook to other maternity care initiatives for vulnerable populations.

• Expanding downstream to midlife women’s health: Right now, Maven Clinic is just following the journey of the user. This year, Maven is launching a parenting product that addresses childhood care through preadolescence (age 8). Maven Clinic is fielding lots of requests across all of their clients, and is making sure those are aligned to what users want. There is no dearth of need — everyone wants everything, but the company remains diligent on being user-centric and building for members. HR teams spend so much time on rolling out benefits programs and too frequently, employees don’t use them, so Maven tries to orient around driving utilization and engagement to realize value. When partners say, “Thank you for rolling this out, this is great,” that is the best feedback Maven Clinic could receive.

Editor’s note: After this episode was recorded, Maven announced the acquisition of Bright Parenting to bring their vision of integrated parenting and pediatrics to life. Bright Parenting was founded in 2018 to help parents develop strong relationships with their kids through personalized activities, tips and practices. According to Ryder, “Neuroscience, nutrition and early childhood development research has established that ‘the first 1,000 days’ between pregnancy and a child’s second birthday is the most critical period in someone’s life for future health outcomes. Bright’s practical, fun and non-judgmental advice reduces anxiety in parents, which of course is also great for the kids.” Bright’s content will be embedded within Maven’s upcoming pediatrics and parenting program, scheduled to launch in Q4 2020, and will include Maven’s core telemedicine network access and personalized working parent groups. View more: Forbes, June 2020.

• Remote work culture: Kate, as an extrovert, isn’t thrilled about WFH culture, but notes the company is managing the transition better than expected. Many of Maven’s team members have had to onboard remotely, though Kate notes after spending a lot of time with people over video calls, the awkwardness fades. Maven’s executive team never would have guessed in March that come December, their teams would still be working virtually. The team is hyperfocused on solutions to maintain momentum and culture remotely. Maven Clinic is also offering several mental health benefits to employees and is encouraging team members to take vacation days, maintain flexible work schedules, etc. Maven Clinic is still a small company — 125 employees strong — so it’s easier to maintain a tight-knit work culture.
• Virtualizing watercooler conversations: Kate advises leaders to be deliberate about creating space for team members to iterate ideas in a semi-organic forum, as they might in a chance encounter with teammates on the elevator or at the lunch table in-person. This could take the form of virtual meditations, lunch and learns with facilitated discussion, or the email series above. One example is an email series featuring a different team member at Maven Clinic daily. It’s an opportunity to highlight a team member’s struggles, wins, hopes, fears, backgrounds, and passions — almost like that person’s platform to journal with a welcoming audience. This has built a lot of camaraderie across the team and instilled an attitude that everyone on the team is working through this period together. Maven is actively reworking their new internal communications strategy and defining what remote WFH culture will look like through the end of the year.

27:30–35:00: Personal Growth: on being a female founder, a mother of two, a wife

• Kate’s advice for balancing entrepreneurship and being a mom of two: Find the right partner or support systems — it takes a village to raise a family. Also, it helps to be able to survive on 6–7 hours of sleep daily.

“Despite Maven occupying the biggest industry in the U.S. and serving a massive spend category full of unmet needs and underserved communities, VCs didn’t take the pitch seriously. At one point, someone called me ‘cute’. Even on panels, the male founders never get asked about home life, kids, etc. The female founders always do. What makes me so excited to grow Maven into a big company, looking back at some of the VCs I pitched to, is that at this point, Maven is way out of their league.”

• Experiencing sexism during the leap to entrepreneurship: Kate was used to interviewing CEOs, very senior policymakers, and perhaps because of reputable brands behind her name she feels that she didn’t personally experience too much sexism during her journalism career. That changed drastically as she transitioned to being an entrepreneur. Seeing how VCs treated Kate and the Maven pitch was eye opening. Many VCs didn’t take her or her pitch seriously because it was so unfamiliar to them. Growing Maven successfully has become the best revenge for people who put Kate down early in her entrepreneurial journey. The other stark difference was that Kate and her husband were always asked different questions as they became parents. Her husband’s colleagues never assumed he needed to do things for the family and leave work early. With Kate, there was always an assumption from others to get home on time to take care of the kids.
• Female support networks: Particularly for young women and moms that are already incurring so much stress as a result of the environment we live in today, it’s important to have a network of female friends who share this lens. Group texts are cathartic! Women are bearing so much, and they truly are heroes. On a more serious note, rates of domestic violence and unintended at-risk pregnancies are rising, so women need to band together and support each other right now.

“My advice for young founders is not to lose your sense of humor or take yourself too seriously. You’re going to mess up. It happens to everyone. It’s a very intense journey to become a successful entrepreneur — and add on a layer of raising kids and being a woman on top of that. If you have fun while you do it, and balance driving a vision forward while laughing at yourself, it’s a lot easier to be on that journey. At the end of the day, it’s just business.”