FemTech funding founder story

“I don’t do bikini medicine” said the investor. If you think FemTech doesn’t get sufficient investment levels today, spare a thought for Surbhi Sarna raising money in 2012.

“Like it took me a second to get it. Oh, anything that a bikini touches, I get it, you know? Okay, so first of all, a lot of the other engineers I worked with early in my career were men and women’s health was not a category at that point. You know, it’s just we’re living in a very different world now. It wasn’t like this category that had a lot of focus. And if there was ever like a women’s health company, it did poorly. So all of the comps were bad, right? And this is why I’m always really careful about too much pattern matching.”

You can listen to her on The Social Radars episode https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-social-radars/id1677066062?i=1000680853551&r=2095 

The end of the episode – a happy and well-deserved ending – in my opinion shows the problem of overfunding in US healthcare. Having started living at home with her parents she now travels on jets:

“So I headed up the commercialization effort. And for a medical device, because it’s a physical device, what you do is you pre-sell to different hospitals. And a lot of these hospitals, they’re on yearly contracting cycles. So what you want to do is while they’re in the contracting phase is when you want to sell them. So we’d have salespeople on the ground. And then when we got close to someone saying yes or signing on, they would send me in to close a deal. And I’ve never traveled on a private jet for fun, like just for personal stuff. But the very first time I did, and just like the shift, I’m eating the same sandwich every day to save like $3. To being on this jet where they’re flying me to five different cities a day to tell, go close this $5 million deal, go close this $10 million.”

Surbhi has written a very enjoyable autobiography: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Without-a-Doubt/Surbhi-Sarna/9781982147914