Elliot Moss
Welcome to Jazz Shapers with me Elliot Moss, bringing the shapers of the business world together with the musicians shaping jazz, soul and blues. My guest today is Deirdre O’Neill, Co-Founder of Hertility, what a great name, the at-home hormone and fertility test and clinical service provider, that’s a mouthful. While working in an international law firm, Deirdre saw the need for improved education on women’s reproductive health as she postponed having children to focus on her career and long hours were disrupting her menstrual cycle. Around the same time, her twin sister, Helen, a university lecturer in reproduction science noticed that despite all her connections within the embryology, medical and fertility worlds, she still didn’t have easy access to her own fertility. Together with ovarian biologist, Dr Natalie Getreu, the trio co-founded Hertility in 2019 aiming to revolutionise reproductive healthcare from menstruation to the menopause and give women absolute clarity into what’s going inside their bodies from the comfort of their own homes. It’s very nice to have you here, welcome.
Deirdre O’Neill
It’s a pleasure, thank you.
Elliot Moss
Why did you stop being a lawyer to go and found a business? Surely the allure of the law was too strong?
Deirdre O’Neill
Well, the allure of the law is still there because I still very much play an active role as being a lawyer, I just sort of merged that with being an entrepreneur and dealing with every aspect of the business in terms of the commercials, the regulatory landscape, the legals, venture, so it’s very much an active role as a lawyer still.
Elliot Moss
And how do you access the bit, going back to 2019 when you go with your sister, your twin sister, so I hope I’m talking to the right one, we don’t know, I’ll never know.
Deirdre O’Neill
You’ll never know.
Elliot Moss
I will actually and you will never know either as you are listening here. How did you access that sparky part because to set up a business up, as much as lawyers and I, I know lawyers rather well, have worked with them for many, many, many years, most lawyers are brilliant at spotting problems and addressing them before they happen, some lawyers are brilliant at spotting opportunities and then managing that but the opportunity thing is where you went, and did you access that part?
Deirdre O’Neill
I was working with a lot of startups and helping them to raise capital and I never saw any company that had even half the acumen or ability as my own twin sister and with what she was doing in the lab with molecular genetics, prenatal genetics and foetal medicine and assessing the root causes of infertility, it was one of the things that we used to discuss a lot, the fact that there was all of this access to scientific detail, scientific information about reproductive health and fertility but no actual access to answers about your own body so, it was something that I also similarly saw within a law firm, I had access to private medical insurance and yet I couldn’t just check in on my reproductive health and so there were so many barriers to entry both from a private medical insurance, from a scientific perspective and barriers to entry on the National Health system meant that we just saw that there was this massive opportunity that women needed to have access to answers so we wanted to provide something that was proactive to wellness rather than reactive to illness, which is the current state of play. So I guess the kind of the moment wasn’t much of a moment but it was more of a continuum of thoughts and frustration with the current system and the current barriers to entry.
Elliot Moss
Now, what you’ve just, the exposition you’ve just given me, which I completely, makes completely rational sense. You went there and there’s a problem and you addressed the problem and your sister is a highly educated and expert in this particular area and now you are because that’s what lawyers are brilliant at doing, they deep dive and they become expert because you need to, you need to do that.
Deirdre O’Neill
Exactly.
Elliot Moss
The moment though that you and your sister decided to go into business, the moment you were saying goodbye to that legal career, which was going rather well, how did you manage to get over that hump? Was it a hump or was it like you know what, I’ve got to do this?
Deirdre O’Neill
It was, it was and I’ve got to do this and it was a, it was the best thing I ever did. I think when you’re, you are very much, you become submerged in the world of the long hours and the repetition and deal after deal and I think you sometimes forget or you lose sight of normality. You lose sight of the trends of like going out and finishing work at, I remember leaving work one time and I was like where are all these people going? And I was going out to get something to eat to go back into work and I then I looked and I was like oh right, it’s half five but it felt like the middle of the day for me, it literally was like my little jaunt out for a, for a coffee to keep me going through till 2.00am and I thought, oh right, I’m so kind of separated from the reality of the normal working day that I think it becomes a bit difficult to sustain things like normal friendships or a normal social life or even family relations and I actually, I definitely saw this with Helen, she would be asking me for help on things and advice and I simply didn’t have the time and you know there was one time when I was at her house and we were sitting on her bed and she said well we should set up a company and I was like well I can do that right now so I had my laptop sitting and there’s this great photograph of the two of us in our pyjamas on her bed and I’ve got my laptop setting up the company and it was, it just went from there.
Elliot Moss
So, I’ve got this picture of the pyjamas and you’ve gone and set up the company because of course lawyers know how to do these things and us mere mortals learn but it is a thing, I mean people take it for granted, you know you can navigate your way through all sorts of stuff that then you learn and you feel very, you feel very grown up when you’re not a lawyer and you learn how to do legal things. For you and your sister, obviously twins are generally close, in my experience of twins, as you began that business was it easy or were there unexpected challenges of being related or was it actually exactly how you thought it would be?
Deirdre O’Neill
I don’t think having a startup is exactly how anyone thinks it’s going to be, you know I thought that hours were long working in law but actually the hours were so much longer because it’s weekends, it’s every single moment you’re consumed by this thought process but the, the reality is, is I think people look to say oh, there’s going to be a conflict or you’re going to be competing with each other because you’re twins and we’re actually not in any way competitive because our skillsets are so distinct and so separate that actually where my weaknesses lie are her strengths and vice versa and so it works really well because she can focus 100% on the science and the vision and as CEO, we call her the Chief Enthusiastic Officer and that helps propel the business because she’s the ideas behind the clinicians, behind the science, all of that aspect that needs to propel in terms of reproductive health and then I can focus on all the commercial aspects and the legal aspects and the regulatory aspects and she doesn’t have to and particularly when we raising capital, it's very few Founders and CEOs can just go hey, am I good to sign and know that they’re okay to sign because I’ve got her back in every capacity, whereas most, most of the time Founders get completely consumed by the raise process, the fear and worry that they’re going to be taken advantage of within the fine print. It was great for her to not have that distraction and similarly with Natalie, she didn’t have that distraction either so it was a, it’s very helpful, it’s very symbiotic.
Elliot Moss
And in terms of the raise, I talk to lots of people about the difficulty and especially women because what is it, 2p in the pound, maybe even less, goes to female Founders. Was it easier because there were three of you? Was it easier because you knew, you know how to navigate that and you’ve done it many, many, many times for other businesses?
Deirdre O’Neill
The process was definitely easier because it’s a different world and the idea of talking about vesting and liquidation preferences and all of this terminology for most Founders, it’s a very, very new concept so I think it was, it was easier from the perspective of getting to negotiate and walk through deal terms and them not having to be distracted by it. The funding world is definitely not in any way easy, I think it helps us profoundly that we are each experts in our own field and that credibility now is something that I think you can’t really mess with but I definitely think that there is a huge way to go for Founders, for female Founders, in terms of getting the attention that they deserve.
Elliot Moss
The story though, just thinking about lawyers and doctors, the story is often pumped up. The story is, we will sell two billion ba booms of whatever it might be and what I’ve read about, and in talking to all the people I’ve met, there’s a, there’s a sort of a baked in humility into the projections because you go excuse me, I’m not going to lie to you, I’m going to tell the, and actually you get some investors saying no, no, no, just three x that. Where were you on the story piece?
Deirdre O’Neill
Yeah. So that’s, that’s really, really well said because we actually, between the two of us, everything has to be accurate, everything has to be precise…
Elliot Moss
What a shock.
Deirdre O’Neill
…and there’s a, there’s a level of sort of hyperbole or exaggeration where you think, if you go to an investor and say that the total addressable market is, the service is amenable or the obtainable market is this and we think we can capture this percentage, we’ve already gone down and then down and then be realistic and then an investor comes in goes well actually it’s probably going to be even a fraction of that because you’re going to be exaggerating it and it’s actually one of things I still find to be a problem is that we don’t talk about the reach or the potential in terms of big US numbers, so like if we were in America, everything’s the biggest and the best. It's one of those things that we automatically are running the numbers and saying hang on, well let’s be conservative and that’s one of the things we hear a lot is let’s be conservative and actually, we should go the other way because if you’re approaching investors, they want to see the 10x, they want to see that this is, and with 32% of the planet having this problem, it’s definitely a trillion dollar industry that we’re just tapping into.
Elliot Moss
So be precise but also be truthful. There you go. Try and get that right. Stay with me for much more from Business Shaper, it’s Deirdre O'Neill and she’s the Co-Founder of Hertility. Right now though, we’re going to hear a taster from the Mishcon Innovation Sessions, which can be found on all the major podcast platforms. Lydia Kellett invites business Founders to share their industry insights and practical advice for those of you who are thinking about getting into an industry and starting your very own thing. In this clip, focussed on the femtech sector, we hear from Elena Rueda, Co-Founder of Dama Health, advancing the field of personalised and precision medicine with a focus on contraception fit.
You can of course find all our former Business Shapers on the Jazz Shapers podcast and you can hear this very programme again if you pop Jazz Shapers into your podcast platform of choice. My guest today is Deirdre O’Neill, Co-Founder of Hertility, the at-home hormone and fertility test and clinical service provider. At the core of what you offer is a truth about the ability for women to know what’s going on for them, whether they want to have kids or they don’t and I think that’s a really interesting part of your whole proposition. Even if you don’t want to have children, it’s really important that you know about how the health of your reproductive organs is because that affects your health generally, hormone levels and so on and obviously I’m not a doctor but I’ve read about it. The question I have is, there is a lot of fear it sounds like to me about women actually knowing this. Why? Why wouldn’t a woman want to know what’s going on, from obviously from your perspective as a female Founder in this business?
Deirdre O’Neill
I think every woman irrespective of whether or not she thinks she wants to know or doesn’t, she would know because it isn’t about just fertility, this is about reproductive health conditions that affect one in three women, so gynae, gynae conditions affect one in three women, hormonal health impacts 100% of women with 100% of women going through menopause and so the seismic change of our hormones throughout your lifespan whether it’s sort of menstrual health or symptom related or pre-pregnancy, pregnancy post, perimenopause, menopause, like this is the entire lifespan so I think the reality of it being something that people might coin as scaremongering is actually false, there is a very powerful factor in knowing about your own reproductive health and knowing about your ovarian reserve and the rate and pace that you are going to enter into perimenopause and menopause because it varies for every single woman so, I think when people hear scaremongering it’s because there’s an innate defensiveness about that and I think that the reality is there’s a lot of propagation of false information about women’s health, the false hope about egg freezing, the false hope about people like Naomi Campbell having babies in their fifties and no-one actually knows how she had the baby or if she actually had the baby and I think we’re not here to scaremonger, we are here to set the record straight and to help people realise that this is a much more profound thing than fertility and you know the stats are scary but they’re true. If all women new that 88% or up to 88% of your egg reserve is gone by the age of thirty, I think there’d be a lot of different life choices but it seems to be that, particularly in London, age 30, people are very much still YOLO and that’s, that’s great of course, YOLO, but it is something that you need to be aware of and I think that’s where we’re trying to change the whole status quo.
Elliot Moss
So, it’s if you get beyond the media headlines, there’s a truth just simply if you were talking to friends of yours in their thirties, women, you’d be saying you need to know. You need to know for lots of reasons. But is there is a fear at that level or is the fear coming from some extraneous source where it’s also being, that as you said, propagated, that’s the bit I’m trying to get my head round because I, my sense is that my wife is either perimenopausal or menopausal, no matter what the label is but there’s definitely some stuff going on, her and her group of friends want to know, I’m not sure that at thirty, her and her group of friends wanted to know even if they wanted to have children or not and that’s the bit I’m trying to unlock.
Deirdre O’Neill
So there’s going to be a huge range of people and a range of thoughts and that’s one of the things that we’re very sensitive to. The women that we’re looking to help can be anything from those who are just curious, those who have symptoms or are struggling, those who are actively trying to conceive or those who are planning for the future and as a range of people and emotions because you could be speaking to one person who’s just assessing why they’ve got hormonal acne and then you could be speaking to someone who has had multiple miscarriages and tragedy within their life and I think that where we’re trying to help people is to avoid those tragedies, we’re avoid the people who think that it doesn’t affect them, the one in six people who are infertile, nobody thinks that it’s them, the one in a hundred women who go into early menopause within their twenties, nobody thinks it’s going to be them and I think the reality is that we’re doing an awful lot to help people say thank god I knew, thank god I found out and prevent people saying I wish someone just told me.
Elliot Moss
Let’s talk about men for a moment, you’ve got a pretty dominantly female team…
Deirdre O’Neill
We do.
Elliot Moss
…and female founded business and we’ve talked about the challenges to raising money for a female led business. Where do the men fit in in this because obviously you need investors and there’s lots of men who are still investing and you need people that are great. Tell me about why the business happens to have evolved into a kind of a mostly female focussed team for now.
Deirdre O’Neill
Female focussed. I think the…
Elliot Moss
Are they just better for what you’re doing?
Deirdre O’Neill
Women are better all round you know, women are more driven, more determined, they haven’t had the limelight so they work really hard and we obviously get a lot of people, we actually had thirty, in the last year we’ve had 30,000 people, over 30,000 apply to work at Hertility.
Elliot Moss
Wow.
Deirdre O’Neill
That’s, in one year for an early stage company, that’s amazing.
Elliot Moss
Why do you think that is Deidre? Where’s that come from?
Deirdre O’Neill
Everyone says that it’s because of the mission. We’re so mission led, we’re so determined, we’re trying to change the status quo everywhere, we’re not just trying to have conversations, we’re trying to knock down buildings and I think that’s visible from our kind of, maybe our advertising and our billboard campaign and the things that we’ve done that are… we’re deliberately outspoken on this stuff and it’s a fun place to work so.
Elliot Moss
And how, again, the lawyer and the doctor, you don’t normally put those two professions in the space of knocking down buildings and smashing up conventions and inventing a future. How have you managed to tap into that revolutionary part of you?
Deirdre O’Neill
I think it was always there. I think we’ve come from a family of doctors. We…
Elliot Moss
Were you the only lawyer?
Deirdre O’Neill
Yeah.
Elliot Moss
Six of you.
Deirdre O’Neill
Yeah.
Elliot Moss
And the only lawyer.
Deirdre O’Neill
Yeah.
Elliot Moss
Not lonely.
Deirdre O’Neill
Well, it’s like my dad is a doctor and my aunts, uncles, cousins, everyone, it was a strong force so that’s why I did my masters in medical law because I kind of felt that at least it would have something to do with medicine and it sort of, it’s leaned in well very nicely to what we’re doing because I did it on the global regulation of biosciences with particular regard to embryo research, so it kind of…
Elliot Moss
Oh wow. But most people fit inside this system and that’s the two of you just aren’t. And there are three of you including your third Founder. That I find interesting. Where is that from if, even your family background is pretty…
Deirdre O’Neill
Actually, I think I know exactly where it comes from, it’s when you are detail orientated, you have a true knowledge of the system, it’s only when you have a true knowledge of the system that you can truly understand how broken it is and I think that when people that have some peripheral knowledge or they think that they have an idea, they assume that you know there must be someone smarter who’s thought about this or there must be someone better and actually when you are in the depths of it in terms of the science and in terms of knowing the laws around this and the practices, it’s then when you can see actually every aspect of it is broken so we have to fix it, there is no data and most people I think assume that there’s something else that’s working that means that it isn’t just broken as it may seem and that’s maybe where the kind of the expertise lies with the ability to break things up.
Elliot Moss
No, no that’s important and is this basically the most fun you’ve had or is the most driven from a purpose point of view you’ve ever been in your life?
Deirdre O’Neill
Definitely. Definitely. I think it, sure it’s a lot of fun but it is a lot of work, it’s um, it is day in day out there is constantly new, new mountains to climb and I think that we’ve had to overcome a huge amount, much more than most startups because if you think about the regulatory landscape of a medical product that provides end to end care, we have to be regulated in a multifaceted way and so I think the hurdles from that are one perspective but the hurdles in relation to the clinical trials and the accuracy and the medicine and science, that’s something that you can’t fudge, you have to know that you’re doing it absolutely correctly from the beginning. So it’s been difficult, really difficult.
Elliot Moss
I think you like difficult so you’re alright. Final chat coming up with Deirdre, my Business Shaper today and we’ve got some Marcus Miller for you, that’s in just a moment.
I just have a few more minutes with Deirdre O’Neill and we’ve been talking about all sorts of really important issues around women’s health, basically. When will your job be done? I know you’re a young person, I know the business is young but when would you be able to say thank you very much, I’ll be exiting stage left.
Deirdre O’Neill
That’s a great question. We get asked that quite a lot. Helen and I have a running joke that it’s IP ovary because…
Elliot Moss
That’s quite good.
Deirdre O’Neill
Or IP O’Neill but the reality is that I think that we are so far from where we need to get to because it isn’t just about what the company’s mission is and how many countries that we can launch in and how big, fast we can scale. This is about changing societal attitudes, about changing the way women think about their reproductive health, this is about the shift away from people being reactive about their health and I spoke about that before to one where people are conscious and that’s why we want to create something where women are tracking their reproductive health, we say track your ovaries over your calories and they’re monitoring their own rate of ovarian reserve decline so I think the methodology we want to move towards will take a long time so we talk about 10,000 steps and now for some reason people aim to get to 10,000 steps a day and it’s come of you know, almost nowhere but actually we’re, where we see it as that you should be tracking your reproductive health in the same way instead of tracking something that fundamentally doesn’t really change how you are, whereas if you can track your hormonal health throughout your lifespan, you can make some serious changes in relation to your health and so the outcomes will be very, very big and we always say internally we want to solve global infertility and that’s not, not entirely possible but we could, we could potentially make it from being one in six couples are infertile to one in a hundred.
Elliot Moss
And does that take, does that take the IP ovary, does that take money? I mean, you look at the big technologies that have happened in the last few years globally with MRNA, you know the vaccine stuff, I mean these things have been hundreds of millions, if not billions of pounds of investment over decades, this hasn’t just come about. If it is big money, is that a place that you would go to?
Deirdre O’Neill
We always need big money because what we’re doing is expensive, both in terms of the clinical trials and the scientific side but also in terms of the reach, building an app, the regulations are expensive, everything to do with what we’re doing is expensive and so it will be a constant requirement for capital but my hopes are that we are self-sufficient in ways because of the partnerships that we’ll make and hopefully some of the collaborations that we’ll make so, yeah, who knows.
Elliot Moss
Keep going that way. Just before I ask you your song choice, and it’s been great talking to you, the 5.30 getting out of the office to go and get your food, you said the hours are totally different and it’s probably an obsession in a positive way, would you ever go back to working for someone else?
Deirdre O’Neill
Never. Never. And I think that’s largely because I now have two small babies and the idea that I would miss bedtime because of someone else’s deal or that I wouldn’t get to spend mornings with them, I just, I wouldn’t do it for anyone, I think family is the number one thing and I think having the ability to have children and spend time with them is one of the biggest reckonings that we’ll need to see and changes we’ll need to see within the workplace.
Elliot Moss
It’s been great talking to you Deirdre, thank you for your time. Just before I do say goodbye, what’s your song choice and why have you chosen it?
Deirdre O’Neill
My song choice is Stevie Ray Vaughan, it’s Life by the Drop and I grew up listening to Stevie Ray Vaughan, we’re a big family for the Jazz Festival in Cork is like Thanksgiving and this one in particular I think I love it because it’s an epic song but I also just love the fact that our life is very much like it is a life by the drop and one minute you’re riding high and the next it’s who know.
Elliot Moss
Stevie Ray Vaughan there with Life by the Drop, the song choice of my Business Shaper today, Deirdre O’Neill. She talked importantly about living life by the drop and how she has pushed things as an entrepreneur and how they will continue to do so as a business. She talked about needing to have true knowledge of the system in order to work out it’s broken and then being able to bring a solution to it. And really importantly for me, she combined this massive ambition for trying to fix a global problem with the precision that it takes of knowing your substance, of knowing your facts and of the work that they do together as both sisters and as partners in the business. Fantastic stuff. That’s it from Jazz Shapers, have a lovely weekend.
We hope you enjoyed that edition of Jazz Shapers. You’ll find hundreds more guests available for you to listen to in our archive, to find out more just search Jazz Shapers in iTunes or your favourite podcast platform or head over to mishcon.com/jazzshapers.