S1EP11 - We Need More Magical Thinking with Alison Greenberg

This is The Capital Flex. I'm Naseem Sayani. This show codifies the capital playbook because no founder should have to learn the hard way. We talk about what really happens behind closed doors, the bias, the breakthroughs, and the things no one says out loud. If you've ever walked into a room and felt the system wasn't built for you, you're in the right place. Hi, welcome to The Capital Flex. My guest today is Allison Greenberg. Uh, she is on a mission to empower people through health equity, literacy, and access. She's currently a senior director of growth and partnerships at Ember Health in New York City. I know Allison from her role as CEO and co-founder of Ruth Health, a maternity telehealth clinic founded in 2020. She raised $3.2 million there when I knew her. And, and prior to that, she worked as a strategy consultant for the likes of CVS Health, Summit Health, Stryker, and Pfizer. Ruth Health and Allison have a quite a special place in my investment journey because Ruth Health was one of the first checks, uh, that my team at our pilot fund wrote quite a few years ago. And that pilot fund was the precursor to the full VC fund that we launched in a few years later. So in our history of getting deeper into the venture space, Ruth Health and Allison hold quite a special place. So I'm very excited to have you on today. Thanks for being here, Allison.

Thank you, Naseem Sayani. And likewise, you, you guys hold a special place in my heart and in the whole team's heart behind Ruth Health. And I will say you were doing the group of powerhouse female investors thing before it was cool.

Oh, I appreciate that so much. I would love for everyone listening for you to introduce yourself a little bit more and give us a bit of background on your journey into launching Ruth Health?

Yeah, absolutely. So I often tell people that my journey with Ruth Health really started when I was born. I grew up talking about vaginas at the dinner table, and that's because my mom is an OB-GYN. She ran a 2-office practice in the Philly area where I grew up, and she was the primary breadwinner for my family. Uh, she was a really outspoken advocate of women's health and women's health equity, and just kind of an unabashed feminist at a time when— I won't reveal my age, but you know, it wasn't very fashionable to be a feminist. So yeah, I, I grew up in her practice, filing charts, answering phones, and also spending a lot of time understanding the female reproductive system, but passively. And then fast forward after college, I wound up working actually in pharmaceutical advertising on high science bio-oncology drugs. Kind of moved from advertising into branding and brand strategy and got to work with these Fortune 500 companies only to make my way into entrepreneurship by way of being what I've often said is unemployable. And I think that's something that a lot of women like you and I feel is, you know, we, we cut our teeth working on teams and I'm so grateful for the experience I had working for those you know, the CVS Health of the world and the Strykers and Edwards Life Sciences of the world. But I always wanted to build something of my own. And so Ruth Health was actually technically my third company, but the one that I think built the most traction. We started— my then co-founder and I started Ruth Health because we were sort of radicalized by finding out that the US had the highest maternal mortality rate of any nation in the developed world.

It's incredible that that is still true.

Yeah. Yeah. We haven't made much progress.

No, we haven't. Not one bit.

But my journey over the 5 years of building Ruth Health, so much learning along the way. We got to take care of a couple thousand patients and their families providing wraparound care, uh, that supplemented the OB-GYN during the maternity care journey. So pelvic floor training, C-section recovery, lactation support, and virtual access to doulas. And we did it thanks to an incredible community of female angels, VCs, and institutional investors like Naseem Sayani and her colleagues who believed in us at a very early time before I would say like femtech was becoming this super hot topic. And we really rode that wave all the way through the 5 years of building the business, a lot of peaks and falls. And then eventually at the end of last year of 2024, I sold off some assets and sunsetted the rest of the business.

Yeah, it was, I remember when I first read the description of Ruth Health and it was in an angel investing channel that I was part of and I remember sharing it with my colleagues and we immediately wanted to meet and we're now saying AI and longitudinal datasets all the time because so many companies are building those things. But this was 2020 and we weren't hearing those words as often in those days. And it was in the business description of what Ruth Health was doing and that was where we got excited. And wanted to understand more closely what the team was building and we, and we had to meet you. So it was, it was a lot of fun. So you and I over the years have had lots of conversations about your, your fundraising journey. You know, the intent with these conversations is really to dig in a little bit on the hardest of those journeys, uh, and really surface the insights and talk about the learnings and help other founders walk into their fundraising experiences in better ways. And When you and I talked before, there are some really, a handful of hard experiences, and then you also have a handful of just observations, things that you've seen, things of really learnings and guidance that could be really helpful for other founders as they're jumping into the space. So I would love to start with, with the stories, one or two of the experiences that for you were not traumatic, but really interesting and telling, uh, of, of what fundraising for a female founder feels like.

Yeah, absolutely. Naseem Sayani. Well, I, I often tell other founders, especially female founders, our our journey with Ruth Health was not typical. There are certain things that I think are typical for almost all female founders, which is just at some point banging your head against the wall and saying, why is this so easy for my male counterparts? But we did get extremely lucky. We worked hard and got lucky by making our way into the summer '21 batch of Y Combinator. And Y Combinator is rocket fuel for your investment journey. It is rocket fuel for getting a business funded, and it's a really powerful cohort of founders and mentors and group partners. It's an ecosystem that thrives and that is legendary for a reason. So I will say our experience was, was quite different from those of my female founder counterparts who don't go through something like YC. It's truly the mafia. And as soon as we wrapped Demo Day That was when we raised a $2.4 million seed round in about 3 weeks. So we were very lucky, and I always want to acknowledge that privilege and the fact that that changes things. But before Y Combinator, we were— we got in the summer '21, but we in earnest kind of started building Ruth Health in mid to late 2019. We were building a virtual care business right before the pandemonium started. So, you know, we were— we— our timing was great. We, we were also in many ways lucky, but we knew that we had to raise in order to build this kind of telehealth clinic or wraparound set of services because we knew that compliance was going to be expensive. And so we started raising a pre-seed round. During that raise, it took us about 8, 9 months to raise that very small pre-seed round, less than $1 million, and we talked to everyone and anyone who would listen. So during that piece of our fundraising experience, we had so little traction. We started raising on a viral video when that first iteration of Ruth Health was— yeah, you'll remember, it was an at-home ultrasound.

Oh, I remember this. That's right. Yeah.

So proof of the many pivots that come along the way. And I think we were onto something, but actually that, that picked up traction because during COVID people couldn't bring their partners in to, to the ultrasound to see the baby. And so we had solved for that by bringing point-of-care ultrasounds to people's homes. We did it with this B-list celebrity in Brooklyn, and then they posted a TikTok and it got over a million views. Before that, we were just dragging our feet and we were meeting primarily with female angels, female institutional investors, because we, we could barely find comps, right? There weren't a lot of maternity care solutions out there, and the platforms in women's health that had historically raised capital were typically in the fertility space. And they were companies like Progeny and Kindbody, Maven, which many of which were, were very focused on fertility, IVF. Less so on the actual maternity care experience, and even less so on the postpartum journey, which was a focus for us. So the story that I shared with you, and that I think will be instructive hopefully for some founders, I hesitate to tell it because it is about a female angel investor. It's, it's something that I don't like to propagate in the sense that we need more female investors, more people like you. We need more women who are bold, with their, with their wealth and that don't see that money as best going to a charity, but maybe equally well invested in an entrepreneur.

Yeah. And really thinking about both vehicles, right, for where their capital can go.

Absolutely. But I think what we learned in the first kind of 7, 8 months of raising that pre-seed was we met a lot of female angel investors who were very early in their journey. And to be fair, when, when you're just starting something, you don't know. There's a lot you don't know. So we met one particular female angel who shall not be named, but she was brand new to the investment game. Um, she had worked in a massive media empire, and we were connected to her by a very well-connected Google executive and told, you know, she's the person. She's an angel investor. She is super savvy with media and can help you when you want to share your message with the world. And so we met with her and we, we really loved her. She had great stories to tell. She had great experience as an executive herself, and we set our sights on her. We said we want her at our cap table, and it wasn't just for, for her connections. It was because she had great questions and she was clearly curious and interested and a mom herself. Fast forward about 6 months, and we were still meeting with this woman.

What was her, what was her target check size?

Oh man, I mean, maybe $50K. Okay. Yeah, I, I can't remember exactly, but I think it was probably $20K to $50K. We were not asking this person for hundreds of thousands of dollars, but we did want her at the cap table. And we had no idea that taking 7, 8 meetings— I mean, truly over months and months of time, every time we met with her, we had updates, we had new traction, we had another investor at the table, and she would ask more questions, she would send us more competitors. I had never even spoken to angel investors before this process with Ruth Health. So I didn't know that that meant no, right? Like, like a maybe for months is a no, right?

Yeah, it's tough and it's a, it's a muscle that isn't developed for a lot of angel investors, in particular with first-time female investors, because it, there's so many questions and so much learning to be had, uh, that there, this would happen on the fund level Also, I spent months with women who were noodling a $25K check, and I had male investors who converted $250K checks over a weekend. I, and it's, it's just the muscle is built and we have to, we have to build the muscle. Like women have to build, they have, we have to build this muscle, uh, but we also have to know when it's a no and we'll have to just talk to them the next time and be able to move on.

With the raise.

It's, we just can't spend that much time converting a check.

Absolutely. Yeah. And I can't imagine when it comes to LPs, like you're raising a much larger fund. We were just trying to raise like $750K and clawing our way to get there and, and telling our story to anyone who would listen. Um, trying to find the influencers in the space, the physicians who matter in maternity care. Ultimately, we met with this woman, I, I think 7, 8, maybe 9 times, and every time it was a maybe, it was let me know what happens next. It was just answer. I mean, she would send us lists of questions and we would spend hours answering her questions with all of the evidence, with peer-reviewed studies, with answers from experts in the field. When I look back, I think actually it did help us get sharper and smarter to be grilled like that. But now when I speak with you know, fresh female founders, I always encourage them, just move on. Like, it's sort of like in, in hiring how they say hire fast and fire faster. Like, meet investors fast and move on faster because we spent a lot of time spinning our wheels. And so the real story here actually lands when we decided to close that pre-seed round. And pretty soon after that, we actually got into Y Combinator. And so we decided that's it. We don't wanna raise more than we need. So we went back to this investor, we scheduled a call, we actually discussed it internally, my co-founder and I, and we said, you know, we're not gonna just email her a no thank you. She spent all this time with us. The least we can do is set up time with her and let her know that the round is closed and, and thank her for her time. So we get on a Zoom call. I mean, this is mid-COVID. We have never met this person. We get on the Zoom call and we share what is really good news, that we've closed that round, we've raised $725K, and we're no longer taking checks. And we've also gotten into Y Combinator, which we knew would help us raise more capital once we were done. And we let her know there was no longer room in the round. She opened fire. Like, like we're talking ballistics, verbal missiles. She dropped F-bombs at us. Oh no, she was so angry. And not only, not only was she angry at us for closing the round, and I think from her perspective we wasted her time, which is interesting because from our perspective she wasted our time, she started to throw epithets and really, really tried to cut us down, telling us that we were anti-female, that we were cutting out a female investor because she asked us point blank, were there any male investors at the table? And we said yes, like we did accept checks from some male investors, although our cap table had always been primarily women. Yeah, she said we were anti-feminist, anti-female. She also attacked us for discriminating against women of a certain age.

Oh no, everything.

Like none of this could be further from the truth.

Absolutely.

And I think that story just, yeah, it just illustrates how tense and how much emotion can be tied up in investing and in the relationship between founder and investor. But just the fact that that tension shouldn't have been able to build for that long.

Yeah. No, no, at all. And And she had a, she knew deadlines, had a sense of timeline, like their transparency on when you were closing, all of that was there. There was no like lack of information, right? No.

I mean, every time we talked to her, we were closing the round tomorrow. Right, right. Of course. So to be fair, yeah, we kept it open for longer than we wanted, but she knew there was a sense of urgency.

Yeah. It's incredible cuz that it's a combination of, I mean, analysis paralysis, uh, lack of experience investing, and then that, that's that combination of emotions and just the transactional decision-making. Uh, it's also something female investors who are new to this space also have to learn a little bit to separate the emotion from the financial action because right now they're so deeply tied that it, it does, it lands in reactions like that, which are tough. So for other female founders, it is Knowing when to cut loose the conversations that are taking too long, right?

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I liken it to, you know, investors, it's always like you're dating and yeah, if you, if you ask someone to marry you and it took them 6, 7 months to even come up with an answer, the answer is no.

That's incredible.

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So if we go back to YC for a minute, uh, we've also talked about the, the gender disparities in YC, uh, and just the, the low percentage of female founders. Uh, and that percentage hasn't, hasn't changed. Uh, and I haven't seen it move at least. And so there, one, there's the challenge that we've talked about giving to YC and we've talked about how do you take a 300-company demo day and flip it on its head. And say, let's do one that has 13% male founders and let's have that Demo Day. And that hasn't happened yet, but I would love for them to do that. But there was a reunion event that we talked about and there were some fun things that happened there that I would love, I would love for you to share.

Yeah, absolutely. I love that idea, by the way. I've never thought about the full round.

Wouldn't that be incredible? Like that, that event would be amazing. Let's, let's do that.

YC, it would Statistically, it would make investors more money. But yeah, it's— I know that the investor pool of investors who join YC Demo Days, that has diversified a lot. The founder pool in, in aspects other than gender has diversified a lot. My batch, for example, it was one of the first remote batches, and so 300 companies around the world— there were unprecedented numbers of companies from Africa, from Vietnam, just more founders of color than had historically been seen at YC. But like you said, YC has historically only ever had between 9 and 12, I think, percent female founders. Even if 12, 13% is on the high end, that's abysmal. It's unacceptable. And I've, I've said that publicly in forums of my fellow YC founders. I've said that to Michael Seibel. I've said it on Twitter to Gary Tan, not that he's listening, But like, I, I love YC and it has given me an incredible community. And I often tell people that one of my favorite things about being a YC founder was going to YC reunions. And so the story you're talking about, Naseem Sayani, is this was about 2 years ago. And sadly, I don't think YC is doing these reunions in SF anymore, but they would set up at this huge outdoor venue in the Dogpatch. It was all YC founders from all batches since the beginning invited and incredible programming like food trucks and opportunities to network and socialize. And then conversations from Alex Huang, who was formerly of Scale AI, from Justin Voigt of Cruise, Gary and, and Michael Seibel themselves would speak and other group partners would speak. And, and it was really inspiring. But what I didn't expect was midday through this, this excitement and all these festivities, I would leave to go to the bathroom and I saw just one of the longest bathroom lines for an event of that size snaking around the venue. And something didn't feel right. And I realized it was for the men's room.

Oh, it turns it on its head, right?

The first time in my adult life that the men's room line was longer than the women's room line.

I actually, I took a video of it.

I posted it on Twitter. It got a, a bunch of, of hilarious reactions. So there are some benefits to being a minority female founder in this male founder's world.

Oh my goodness. That it, and for those men in that line, it must have felt really strange to watch all the women go in and out of the bathroom without any trouble. When typically it's them going in and outta the bathroom without any trouble. That must have been fun for them to watch.

Oh my gosh, we were, we were just making fun of them at that point. We were like, finally, you pay a tax.

That's awesome. One other, one other interesting, you've had a number of just observations on how male founders operate during fundraising or during different events for their companies versus how female founders might operate in the same instance, whether it's an acquihire opportunity or it's a negotiation opportunity. And I would love to hear from you what you've seen as those differences and what you think the takeaways are for female founders and what we can learn from those experiences.

Oh yeah. This kind of set of observations really became clear to me towards the end of my experience with Ruth Health and, you know, coming to the realization that I'm so proud of what my team built. We never quite got to that kind of Series A milestone. We never quite achieved product-market fit. Profit, but we did have content properties and, and various forms of IP that were really valuable. And so as it became clear that I needed to sunset the business, it also became clear that I had certain assets that I could sell. And so how could I make the most of what we had built? It was very painful, but at that point it was kind of like, how do I sell this business for parts? How do I harvest what's meaningful and what's useful and actually give that new life with somebody else's company? In the process of researching that, I was kind of asking everyone I know, how did you exit? How did you exit? What did you sell? And it was stunning to me to speak with a gentleman who had sold his company to a very large player in the healthcare technology space. He had come in with a very solid user base. Like a post-Series A, pre-Series B company, um, that was kind of ripe for the selling. But also he was a first-time founder and he wasn't sure how much this direct-to-consumer healthcare brand would sell for. And so he looked into hiring an investment banking firm. It was gonna be like $90,000 and he said, okay, I guess that's what it costs. I'm just gonna do it. And he went into a negotiation with this absolute giant, like let's say a subsidiary of one of the biggest health insurance companies in America. And he had an investment banker due diligence for him, but he found it almost like not even that useful. Once he had entered into the negotiations, he got to the table and one of the execs at this big subsidiary said, well, name your number. Like they'd done all the calculations, there was a range, but then there was a question, name your number. and if I had to name a number for my company, I would do math. I would add it up. I would take assets, I would take market value, I, I would look at comps. Ultimately what this guy did was brilliant and he picked a number out of thin air that was higher than what the comps said. And he didn't get that, but he got really close to it.

Yeah.

So that's just not something that I thought you could do. I thought when you sell a company, you sell it based on evaluation, based on what these investment bankers tell you. And so I actually chatted with him for advice about what I should do with the assets I wanted to sell, and I almost died. I mean, he said like, don't spend $90,000, don't hire an investment banker, do some back-of-the-napkin math, and then pick a value way higher than that. I'm just like, what woman would do that?

Do we— and do you think that's a— is it just core confidence? Is it permission? Like, what is What makes that possible for him and is it possible for us? Do we just have to be that confident or is there something else? Are we just not doing it or do we have to do something else before we can walk in with a number?

I mean, that's a great question and I think it's different based on like industry, business, like what actually does your value creation structure look like? But in his case, I think it was raw confidence. I think it was also benchmarking and being able to anchor to a number that was a real number, but doing magical thinking. And one of my favorite female founders that I know who really helped me early in the fundraising process, Marcella Sapone, she's the founder of Alfred. And I, I remember so vividly Marcella saying, you need to figure out this thing called magical thinking. You need to figure out how to imagine what's possible. Like you still have to have your feet on the ground, but you have to imagine what's possible and you have to think as though it already has happened. And the gentleman that I, I spoke about, I truly think he did some magical thinking grounded in reality. He wasn't, you know, like $10 million off with his valuation, but he was several million off of where the numbers sat. And he got pretty close.

Yeah, I, I do, I agree. I do very much believe in the magical thinking and I think we as women aren't versed in it. We're versed in it, we don't use it. I'm gonna separate those two things because again, my fundraising experience at the fund, and I learned this over time, uh, 'cause our minimum check was $25K and if I started someone at $25K, they would come in at $25K. I started to test with some people. I would just, I would start them at $50K. They would come in at $50K. With some people, if I had a sense of their appetite, their ability, their excitement, I would throw out $100K. They would come in at $100K, right? And, and so it just, we, we end up lowballing ourselves because we're just not asking. For more. And then with some people who I knew had invested before, had more of a muscle built, start them at $250K, they come in at $250K. And that, as soon as I saw that starting to work, the whole fundraising experience was different because you start not lowballing yourself. I was like, this is, this is up to me what number they come in at, right? And if they decide they need something lower, great, I can get them there, but if I start them lower, no one's gonna come in higher. And that, that's my fault. Absolutely. Right? It's just, we, we just have to learn to do it. The magical thinking is real. It is. It is.

And, and what you don't ask for, you don't get. And I think that's something that women have unfortunately, maybe up until now, I don't know about, you know, the, the young women of, of your son's age, right? Like there is this next generation where they might actually be conditioned to ask for what they want. But yeah, I think you told me once a great story. I don't know if you've told her on this podcast yet, but a great story about, you know, just magical experiencing magic of like investment coming from nothing. A person that you met in passing, I think there was a compliment exchanged and then they ended up investing in your fund.

I don't remember the story. You have to give me a little more.

Oh my goodness. I'm trying to recall where it was, but you told me a story of somebody, you were on a trip and, and either they complimented you on something you were wearing, or you said something about it, like maybe a piece of jewelry that they were wearing, and you just felt some sort of connection. Oh, and then they turned around, this person, they ended up investing.

Oh yeah, no, absolutely.

Yeah.

And it was, I think it was a piece of jewelry, and it was a very short conversation. Yeah, I mean, the thing was on a flight, and it was a very short conversation, and then I followed up. We had two conversations and they invested. And, but it was, it was such a quick connection. Uh, and you just, sometimes you just jive. And, and in that instance, I could have not followed up and said, oh, who knows? It was a flight. Uh, but I followed up, 2 calls and she was in. And sometimes it's that also, it's also the follow-up, right? It's also the follow-up. Just do the follow-up. You don't know. You, the answer is no unless you ask, right? And so we, we undo ourselves if we don't do it. And sometimes the follow-up doesn't work, sure. But the follow-up matters because I, I have also learned that 51% of the game is showing up. And for me, it's worked every single time. Yeah.

And you do, you show up as an investor. I think that principle actually goes both ways. It's often the people who show up for their portcos, for their founders, you know, as an investor, it, it's typically that you show up for others. And then so when you show up for the people that you need something from, it gets paid forward. It really is incredible how much paying it forward is required in this game if you want to remain a part of the ecosystem. And so for every woman who introduced me to an investor, who helped me find an advisor, who's helped me source an accountant when we were not happy with our original one, you know, like those networks are so tight. And I think that it really does beget more good. And so it's, it's, it always gets me excited to hear the good people, good things happen to good people sometimes.

Yeah, always. So two last questions and then we'll do some quickfire. Uh, where are you seeing some goodness happen in the ecosystem and things starting to change for female founders? And where, where are you seeing that happen?

I am, I am actually seeing some goodness in the ways that I guess I, I guess I would call it like institutional healthcare traction. That was really hard to come by in, you know, 2020, 2021 when we first went to market. And we actually launched Ruth Health direct to consumer because we were so worried about starting the business B2B. As you know, like pilots kill deals, life cycles, extremely long sales cycles kill deals. It's very hard to do business with health systems and hospitals and payers, any of these large, slow, traditional entities in healthcare. Like they hold the power, but they move very intentionally and sometimes without any interest in change. And so it can be difficult to make progress. It can be difficult to push innovation forward. But I will say, I look at some of the companies that persist in the maternity care space. May, for example, in the breast cancer space, a company called Gabby. I look at my friend Jess's company, Frame, and fertility. These are companies that have sort of slowly but surely closed enterprise-level deals. And it's, it's not magic. In that case, there is no magical thinking. I know that those founders are persistent and they don't back down And so Maya at May and Jess at Frame and, and Caitlin at Gabby, these are, these are founders who have been in the trenches, and I was in trenches with them. And I have now pivoted into a new field in mental health that I love working on at Ember Health, but I still advise at the maternity care space. I still feel very connected to that world. I still, you know, work as an advocate in that space and, and take trips to DC to do advocacy work. But I love seeing those people who push forward because those deals, you have to know that those deals took 1 to 3 even years to close. And I love seeing it. I love seeing that those large institutions are finally putting their money where their mouth is.

Oh yeah, I know. I love seeing that too. And it's fantastic that those companies have been able to close those contracts and get that revenue in because it's a different, feeling to have that kind of contract revenue in, in a reliable way versus anything else. So it is, I agree, it's tremendous to see that happen. Couple of quickfire questions and then we will, we will wrap up. What was the quickest check that you closed?

Oh man, I will never forget. Shout out to Christian Dionier. He was a very early employee at Airbnb, an incredible business thinker, design thinker. He was a member of the YC Angel Network, and we sat down with Christian. I think it was actually just me, my co-founder was not present. I spoke with him for 25 minutes, and there was immediately a check at the end of that call.

No kidding, really? One call and he was in?

He wired it the same day.

That's fantastic, I love that.

And that was a— that was not a small check, I will say. That wasn't like a $10K, So yeah, I, that actually restored my faith in, in venture humanity because I didn't know that was possible until it happened.

Oh, that's fantastic. I love that. Who's your most, who was your most unlikely investor?

Oh, that's a great question. Oh, I've got a good one. You just don't start your freshman year of college thinking that your roommate is gonna invest in your business.

How interesting.

15 years later.

That's amazing. And you're still friends with that person 15 years later, which is also kind of remarkable.

Yeah, I am. Shout— and that's a shout out to Yamila Bukhai. She's an incredible journalist and now mom of 3.

Amazing.

And I think she had just given birth to her first and been through just, just like most American women, the challenges of becoming a new mom in this world. And she had also grown up around medicine and her angel check just meant the world to me. But it's really proof that you never know who you will meet along the way, who will believe in you and who will support you. And for me, that check could have been $1. It was the vote of confidence and of support from somebody I'd known for years and years. Meant the world to me.

Oh, that's incredible. I love that. That's from 15 years ago. That's amazing that it comes back around that way. Uh, and how can people help you now? How can everyone support the company you're at now and the work you're doing now?

Yeah, well, I would welcome anyone who's interested to learn more about Ember Health. After I closed business at Ruth, I just cast a really wide net and was very slow to explore what my next step would be, but I knew that it had to be somewhere at the intersection of women's health, digital health, evidence-based medicine, and I was always interested in integrating mental health. And so interestingly, at Ruth, we didn't do mental health. We didn't provide therapy or mental healthcare services, but perinatal depression, especially postpartum depression and anxiety, it was, it was a constant presence in pelvic floor care, in the conversations our lactation consultants would have with their patients. So mental health kind of snuck in as something that was also really important to me. And eventually the team at Ember Health found me and I learned all about the power of ketamine as an interventional psychiatric medication. And so at Ember, we provide IV ketamine to treat depression. We have 5 clinics across New York City and we actually have an incredible kind of center of excellence at exploring the perinatal applications of ketamine. So we do treat very rarely pregnant and, but sometimes postpartum individuals. We have a full set of breastfeeding guidelines for those who receive ketamine to treat their PMADs or perinatal mood and anxiety disorders. And I would encourage you to, to check us out at emberhealth.co or email me at Allison with one L at emberhealth.co and learn more. This is, you know, I think for some people it's kind of new and interesting and innovative, but Ketamine is the most studied drug for depression in the last 30 years. It's over 2 times more effective than SSRIs, and it's something that I hope in the years to come every single American has access to.

Oh, that's incredible. Well, congratulations on the new role, and I'm really glad you landed somewhere really great and that you enjoy. Well, thank you for being on the podcast today. I think your insights are tremendous, and I really appreciate you joining us.

Thanks for doing this, Naseem Sayani.

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