Jessica Schaefer
speaker
49 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Jessica Schaefer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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I stopped traveling, which is very rare for me. I was supposed to speak at all these conferences and travel on the weekends or even I decreased the amount of movement and kept my mornings open so that it wasn't as stressful. But I The doctors were like, oh, you can still travel and do all this stuff. But I'm like, it's just not worth it.
I think if you're going to do this, you really need to focus on it and invest the time and do it the right way. So you don't have to do multiple cycles.
So it's the much larger companies and those in the healthcare industries. I actually haven't seen many smaller tech companies. So late stage companies where they have the ability to, but I also think it's not that much more. to add it on to your employment policies. So I think we'll start to see a lot more employers offer this and the younger generation, they're expecting it.
One other thing that people can do is you can actually take your HSA and your savings and you can contribute a rollover Let's say you're 21 and you're getting your first job in tech. I would just recommend that women start to contribute to that and think about it almost as their family planning and not just focusing on your 401k. And then it's not as cost prohibitive as many people think.
And we are starting to see that. I've spoken with a lot of doctors who have left some of the players you might be thinking about. And the reason is they're seeing 30 to 50 patients a day, which is just insane. You don't have enough time with your doctor. And then right now the process is you take the shots at night, you have to call. Let's say you have a question. Your doctor is not available.
There's no one to speak to at night. And so I think the process is fundamentally flawed right now. And to your point, there are some VC backed fertility companies that are cutting corners basically to reach their growth targets. And You'll see in their success outcomes and what has led to a live birth. They're just not hitting where they need to be.
Yeah, I think there are opportunities to use technology to help. There is no reason that someone like myself should have taken the trigger shot accidentally. You could get updates on your app or you could get basically be meeting with a nurse or a fertility specialist more often. often via telehealth, which is not happening right now. I think there's also ways to incorporate AI into the process.
There are so many questions that you have just because you're anxious, right? You said you were suffering from a lot of anxiety. I was suffering from a lot of anxiety during this process. And I would want to know just answers to the most basic things to make sure I was doing it correctly. So you can actually program
AI based on the doctor's responses so that at night, if you have questions, they can be answered. And so there are ways where we could provide a concierge really custom high level model to this industry without cutting corners and make it so that it's profitable. And I don't think that a lot of the fertility companies out there right now are doing that. So most of them are started by doctors.
And I think doctors, they're used to being around needles. They're used to being around these like ugly red bins with the crazy, you know, danger sign on them. We're not.
And so I think if someone were to come in from outside of the industry who has gone through the process, who was a patient, who has a focus on marketing technology and can apply some of those resources, we could provide a much different experience.
Yeah, so I'm investing in this space and I'm also working on a company in stealth in this area. But we're basically investing in AI, a technology platform that will transform the industry in the way that is being done now so that... Someone like me never has the experience that I had before.
But at this point, I've spoken to close to 200 women just through customer research to make sure we get the product right. And every single person has the same experience. I have not met one person who had done the cycle one time, who didn't experience anxiety, who didn't feel alone. Not one person.
On the VC funding, I come from a different seat, mostly because the PR firm I built, we worked with a lot of venture capital funds, but we were primarily focused in fintech. It wasn't until the last two years of the company that we started to see this shift. And there was so much more capital flowing into healthcare, flowing into femtech.
And from my perspective, it made sense to transfer into this industry. I really believe that you need to be able to spot waves and know when to get off. And so Bevel was always focused in fintech and crypto. And then we just started to see the doors open here. On the funding, specifically for women healthcare companies, even this year, women's rights are certainly top of mind on the ballot.
And so I think that it's not just... our issue. It's everyone's issue. And so I think communicating to VCs in the way that they would understand that, hey, listen, the U.S. growth rate and birth rate is the lowest it has ever been. And third world countries are outpacing our growth rates faster than ever. That's a conversation that anyone can digest because it'll have huge economic impacts.
And so it's not just a woman's issue. I think it's an issue for everyone.
It's a population issue. Yeah, we're not having enough babies.
I think most people don't know because one in 4 billion people get egg yolk sac tumors. When I had it, there wasn't a cure, but an egg yolk sac tumor, it reached stage four, and I was treated at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester. And one of the graduates, a new graduate from medical school, Dr. Korones, he actually was able to find a cure and treat it very aggressively through chemotherapy.
But my fertility was always like From a very young age, I was two and a half years old and then I was in the hospital for two years. Because I had chemo and because I had radiation, they were like, you're probably not going to be able to have kids.
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