Episode #13
Beware the Red Herring: A Founder’s Balancing Act
What do you do when you've built the ideal care model and realize it won't scale? Tara Raffi is the founder and CEO of Almond OB-GYN, a functional OB-GYN practice built on the belief that women should be living more healthy years, and that much of the solution to our health problems is found in lifestyle: sleep, stress, diet, exercise, metabolism, gut, and pelvic and vaginal health. Tara’s mission was to build a hybrid in person and virtual functional clinic for the $200 billion OB-GYN market in the United States. In this conversation, Tara talks about running clinical operations with a ruthless focus on profitability, reaching sustainable margins on a hybrid insurance-plus-membership model, and why she believes you need both a strategic vision and the discipline to watch every dollar. She opens up about the brick-and-mortar "red herring" that distracted her: she was crushing build-out efficiency, but the real problems were inefficiency of marketing dollars and the partnerships a single location couldn't unlock. She walks through the excruciating decision to shut the clinic, the early-2025 shift to a telehealth-only subscription that opened new horizons, and what she'd do differently. She digs into building a better filter as a founder, reading a venture-funded market where growth can mask what's really happening under the hood, and building the muscle to absorb the constant sting of setbacks without buying into the "die trying" mythology. Finally, she shares where Almond is headed: unlocking one of the largest functional women's health data sets. About Tara Tara Raffi is the Founder & CEO of Almond OB-GYN, reimagining women's health as proactive and personalized. A UC Berkeley, McKinsey, and Y Combinator alum, Tara believes in a world where women's bodies are studied and understood, and where they get true healthcare before cues become crises. Presented by Aytza
