The HBS Women’s Association of Greater New York (HBSWANY), and the HBS Association of Northern California (HBSANC) each hosted a virtual panel discussion last month exploring the overlooked investment opportunities in FemTech, the segment of the health care and life sciences industry focused on women’s health.

A combined 175 alumni attended the discussions which featured alumni panelists who are investing in, or leading, companies in the FemTech space. The virtual conversations focused on the unmet needs in women's health care, inequities in female-specific disease areas, and the role of FemTech startups in disrupting women's health care and empowering women.

Linda Greub (MBA 1987)

Stasia Obremskey (MBA 1987)

Alice Zheng (MBA 2014)

Linda Greub (MBA 1987)

Stasia Obremskey (MBA 1987)

Alice Zheng (MBA 2014)

“Every disease affects women differently than men. In the health care industry, a 155-pound male is considered the average patient, but women are not just smaller men,” says Linda Greub (MBA 1987), cofounder of Avestria Ventures, and a featured panelist for both discussions. She shared her perspective as an investor, who launched Avestria specifically to focus on early-stage women's health and female-led life science ventures. “We need to rethink our approach to women’s health.”

That will require investment, she says.

“There’s a blaring gap in investment for women’s health, and for women founders,” says Greub.

“We see outsized returns in female founders and women’s health companies, but the two are being ignored, or overlooked, or misunderstood.”

For the HBSANC panel, Greub was joined by Stasia Obremskey (MBA 1987), Directing Partner for RHIA Ventures, while Alice Zheng (MBA 2014), Women’s Health Consultant at McKinsey & Co., served as moderator.

The panel pointed out that only 2.7% of venture capital money goes to female founders.

“People cannot believe the percentage is so low,” says Greub, adding that the predominantly male VC space is “not comfortable” discussing women’s health and uninformed about the opportunities.

For the HBSWANY panel, Greub was joined by classmates Rachel Brannan (MBA 1987), a former investment banker, and Corinne Nevinny (MBA 1987), a General Partner with Avestria.

“Many in our audience were surprised to learn how very few VC firms are investing in the FemTech space,” says HBSWANY board member Heather Myers (MBA 1992). “And many of them are in finance and health industries.”

Avestria was launched in 2019 to seize the “huge opportunities to focus on women founders,” Greub says, adding that it’s not an impact fund. “We expect to be measured by financial terms.”

Obremskey’s firm, RHIA, on the other hand, is a social impact fund focusing on reproductive health to improve maternal care and combat rising maternal mortality in the U.S. Avestria invested with RHIA to develop a fetal oximeter that better measures fetal health.

Greub says there is no shortage of FemTech companies, but there’s “a funding issue. “We need institutional money. We need the people who control capital to make it a priority. We want to see universities set aside some investing capital for more risk, for first-time fund managers, and focus on FemTech. This is not asking them to forgo returns at all.”

As the US and the UK raced to develop a COVID vaccine this year, two HBS alums found themselves at the forefront of the effort. How they grappled with managing this unprecedented challenge was the focus of the HBS Healthcare Alumni Association’s (HBSHAA) first trans-Atlantic Virtual Roundtable, “At Warp Speed: HBS Grads Discuss Leading the UK and US COVID Responses,” on January 7.

Nearly 150 HBS alumni joined featured guests Paul Mango (MBA 1988), HHS Deputy Chief of Staff and HHS liaison to Operation Warp Speed, and Kate Bingham (MBA 1991), Managing Partner, SV Health Investors, and Former Chair of the UK Vaccine Taskforce, as they described their roles in the COVID response and the lessons they learned.

Paul Mango (MBA 1988), Kate Bingham (MBA 1991), and Professor William Sahlman

Moderated by HBS Professor emeritus, William A. Sahlman, the conversation covered the range of leadership challenges that Mango and Bingham faced while managing both private sector and government partners on an expedited timeline, while searching for an effective vaccine.

The two guests opened the conversation by sharing how they were tapped to confront the COVID crisis.

“On the sixth of May, I got a call from the Prime Minister asking me to take on this role,” said Bingham, who leads biotech investments as Managing Partner at SV Health Investors. “He had three goals for the Vaccine Task Force. The first was to secure vaccines for the UK as soon as possible. The second was to ensure equitable and fair distribution internationally, and the third was to put plans in place to make sure the UK was better set up for next time. In seven months, we’ve met our goals.”

Mango was working on policy in the Health and Human Services (HHS) department last year when the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) first alerted officials about the coming pandemic.

“All of our roles changed that day,” said Mango. “By March, we had taken the lead on finding what we call medical counter-measures—vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics. Then we organized along functional lines, for development, manufacturing, and distribution. It was a complex matrix.”

In terms of having the right people on board, Bingham said she recruited people from both the private sector and government.

“As always, you recruit the people you know who have the skills that you don’t,” she said. In the end that included experts and officials in clinical development, manufacturing, and delivery. “I also added people from government with defense procurement and defense delivery capability,

to deal with a highly complex project with relentless testing and challenges. It was one of the best teams I’ve ever worked with.”

In the US, Mango said the Operation Warp Speed team was “spectacular. They were focused on a single mission which was to save lives. That’s very motivating,” he said. “All we did was enable the private sector be successful.”

The guests also talked about the leadership challenges of finding vaccine candidates, expediting clinical trials, and the need to invest billions without a clear sense of outcomes. Mango described it as a “portfolio strategy to manage probability and risk in a way which we’d have at least one good vaccine manufactured at scale.”

The unique circumstances of the vaccine effort, and the need to apply leadership and management skills from the private sector to public service made for an engaging conversation between the guests and the attendees, says HBSHAA board member Peter Stebbins (MBA 1991). “This is the kind of discussion and perspective you could only get as part of HBS community.”

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