Maya Frai: Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Carly Leahy: I am originally from the Boston and started my career working at creative agencies. I then moved in house at Google where I worked on a program to help small businesses succeed online and get websites. I then moved over to the experiments team at Uber where we built Uber eats, Uber Rush, and Uber Health from the ground up. I learned a ton about building products from scratch and working in really smart product organizations.

MF: What’s the driving concept and main motivation behind Modern Fertility?

CL: Modern Fertility is an at-home fertility test women can take before they’re ready for kids. I met my co-founder Afton and we began to talk about fertility. I had a very interesting take that was a little bit different from how she came into the space. But to make a long story short, I was focused on my career and didn't think I needed to be bothered whatsoever by fertility information. I was kind of avoiding the whole thing, but once I started digging into the fertility science, there was so much that I couldn't believe that I wasn't prepared for. It really blew my mind. I started talking to my friends and I realized I was definitely not alone in that. I mean how do we spend so much of our lives preventing pregnancy and then when it comes to planning for it, it's just this sort of mysterious black box? So I made it my personal mission to show my former self the value in proactively understanding your body so that you really have the power to make the future choices that are right for you. So here we are. And coming from a creative brand and marketing background, I have found my way in this tech world. I have found that creative people are really necessary as things become more and more automated. I’ve definitely come a long way from majoring in English, but I'm here to say that if you're a creative woman, you are needed in the tech world to solve so many problems that have been strewn by the wayside for too long.

MF: Coming from being an English major, how did you get into the business / tech / creative industry?

CL: Coming from Amherst, a liberal arts school, we actually didn't even have a core curriculum and you could take whatever you wanted. I always loved writing and reading and I became an English major because I could take all of the cool literature classes. People would always ask me “do you want to be an English teacher” and I would say “I want to find a creative application of business.” I thought that there's got to be one out there and at the time, it was sort of the beginnings of the Mad Men craze. I narrowed in on advertising, because it’s a field where you could be a storyteller, an artist, and where you can work with really creative people and solve creative problems. So that's where I went right off the bat. I got into advertising at a really interesting time because all of the more traditional, old-school ways of doing things were really being turned on their head. Ad firms really needed these “digital natives” to come in and help bridge this gap between what was going on with social media and the “always on” kind of advertising like the TV campaign rollouts. I worked on a handful of projects and really got to understand how big companies have been operating, then tried to help infiltrate some of that with quicker-moving, social-based digital activations. Being in that world, I had no idea what the tech world had in store. And my then director at Google reached out to me via LinkedIn where she had seen me in a “creative people” article. I knew she needed some sort of creativity on her team and I remember thinking when she reached out to me like what would I do at Google? Code? But what I didn’t know was that there were these unbelievable pockets of people building products and solving creative problems,trying to humanize technology for the world. So I moved out to San Francisco about seven years ago and started working at Google. I learned the ins and outs of this tech world and became more and more confident that creative people need to tell a story around the products and services that companies are building.

MF: From working at Google and then Uber, what lessons did you learn from your experiences that you apply to Modern Fertility?

CL: I think the number one thing that I learned, and I don't think is unique to the tech industry, is that you want to be the kind of person people want to work with. That is the number one criteria for success. You want to support people and you want to follow through when you say you're going to do something. You want to be someone that people love to work with and have people say that you’re someone who gets things done. Because these types of things are going to carry you through the rest of your career. It’s a small world in the Bay Area and people talk. It’s better to be paying it forward and be someone who's reliable, dependable, and a great teammate. I think this is the number one thing that you can do. And if you can do that and you have a growth mindset to get better at areas you need to work on, then people will want to work with you and make things happen.

MF: You met Afton when you were at Uber. When did you both start thinking about forming a company together?

MF: By that point, so you had a lot of research on the idea. Did you also have a prototype of what you guys envisioned? What did you really have to show them that this idea is going to be great in the long term?

CL: Yeah, we had a lot of conviction! We set the wheels in motion by really showing how we were uniquely positioned to do this. Afton and I always talk about how we don't know how people can start companies when they're 18 years old or 20 years old, because we had called in every single favor from every single person that we learned from –– people from Google, Uber to 23andMe helped us get going. We had the power of all of these connections - and it proved crucial. That kind of goes back to what I said before, we really worked on maintaining good relationships with people so they were happy to help us later. I think more than anything we had the conviction and the grit. We were basically signing away our lives and we were going to do nothing else but work on this idea because this is what we really believe in. I think so often, it's just deciding to do something that can be the biggest and the trickiest part. People always ask, “well how did you do it? How do you build a company?” And I have the most boring answer in the world — a list. We literally had a document where every day we would just have a list of a few of the things that needed to get done. We’d cross off the list so we'd know what the other person is doing and we’d just keep going from there. So it doesn't sound super romantic or sexy, but it was all lists and they were awesome.

MF: What can you tell us about the process of getting a fertility test? What is the information asymmetry you guys are trying to solve where women don't know where to go or what to do for a fertility test?

MF: How are you managing to shift consumer behavior in taking an at-home fertility test with a finger prick versus going to doctor in person?

CL: I think whenever you introduce a new behavior, you’re not exactly sure how it will come across to consumers. We were actually unbelievably blown away by the number of women who raised their hand and said “oh my god finally I can do this. I can have information and I don't have to just rush into freezing my eggs.” That said, convincing women is not something that has been part of the puzzle. It's been showing women exactly what they will get and making sure that they know they have the option to get it if they want it. We're here for them to answer any questions and help them understand the science behind it and really service as a clinical, neutral resource that they can always trust. Another thing is that we always say to go and talk to your doctor about these results. You are the one who decides what to do with your results It's really amazing that egg freezing exists as an option for women, but it's still largely an invasive and expensive process. To be able to give women an option to see what's going on before they feel like they have to make a big jump like that is really important to us right now.

MF: Do you see the MF product as something to encourage women to be more proactive in going to the doctor post-viewing the results or an individual experience all on its own?

CL: It’s absolutely meant to be a conversation starter with your doctor. We're seeing more and more women standing up and saying that they want to be her own best health advocate in the same way that they want to be their own best financial, career, and dating advocate. There are all of these tools now that women are taking in stride to make it happen. So if I can walk into the doctor's office with all of these valuable data points along with a doctor discussion guide from Modern Fertility, I’ll be much more well-informed and able to get my questions answered.

MF: How did you determine this process in taking this test at home and setting the price at $159 for the test?

CL: Modern Fertility uses the same exact science that reproductive endocrinologists use. The differentiator is the price and it being more accessible. So when I say the same science, I mean the exact same panel of hormone tests you would get tested if you walked into an infertility clinic. It’s not new science, it is based on dozens and dozens of clinical papers and work with our Medical Advisory Board. It’s super important to us that we work really closely with these experts to make sure every word that we put into the product is not just clinically sound, but also very easily understood.

MF: When you were developing the idea for MF, you said you applied YC. What were some things that you did to fundraise for the company? What are some key tactics you have for other female founders?

CL: One of the biggest things with fundraising is the reality of who we were talking to — a lot of people who would not be our end user. That was just the fact of the matter, so we had to prove that women wanted this information and that women wanted this test. We did a lot of surveying and actually went out ourselves and held events, talked about reproductive health and walked women through our reports to get their feedback. We prioritized the education for potential investors,as it’s definitely not their fault in not knowing this information. We just had to do the work to make sure that they were able to understand our company’s mission. And one funny thing that would happen is we would have potential investors say “okay you know, I talked to my wife and talked to my daughter.” So, they were trying to do an ad-hoc focus group to try and understand how this sort of thing works. And that’s their job - to do the research and understand what the market looks like. We were just incredibly fortunate to have investors who immediately understood the value and the implications of women owning their personal health information. Overall, we had an extremely positive experience.

MF: Does infertility affect men and women equally? Does MF plan to also include fertility tests for men?

CL: Great question and everyone asks this. It absolutely takes two to tango and fertility is by no means just a women's thing. Right now, we’re focused on women and making sure they have the information they need. Female fertility is incredibly complicated and deserves our laser focus. We’re committed to listening to our customers and making we're doing a really good job of achieving what we promised from the outset. But, we’re also definitely talking to our customers every day about what they want next.

MF: What do you see as the next step for MF? Where do you see your business model going?

MF: There is definitely a lack of education for young women on reproductive health. How do you think this is changing?

MF: What is your perception of other healthcare start-ups in the tech industry like Oscar Health, Hims, 23AndMe, etc? How do you think tech is changing health care?

MF: Anything else you’d like to add?

CL: I just want to say thank you for being open to chat about our work. We’re so excited when anyone wants to talk about proactive fertility because it is so important that we're all becoming more aware that it's an option for us. We really appreciate the part you're playing in helping us spread the word.