Episode #1
Can you Monitor your Hormones?
Dr. Lara Zibners spent two decades as an emergency pediatrician before, in her words, accidentally co-founding a women's health startup. Trained in the US and based in the UK for 20 years, she went back to school at 50 for an MBA and is now co-founder of Calla Lily Clinical Care, a British B Corp building a leak-free vaginal drug delivery platform. The idea grew out of her own experience of seven rounds of IVF and months of painful progesterone injections. In this episode, we discuss: The real difference between "wellness" and "medical," and why some founders choose the wellness label to avoid regulation and reach revenue faster Why the traditional VC model clashes with the slow, evidence-heavy path of women's health innovation, and who is filling the gap Why continuous hormone monitoring can't yet tell your doctor anything useful, why it isn't the same as continuous glucose monitoring, and what would need to exist first What it takes to build a women's health company, from getting "punched in the face 99 days in a row" to choosing the right co-founder Whether women's health companies should be led only by women, and why Lara thinks the answer is "everybody pull up a chair" Why the next phase of women's health has to come back to science and evidence Lara's message to women, founders, and investors is to look past the hype and ask for what changes outcomes.
