20VC: Why Entrepreneurs Should Let Everyone Rip Apart Their Business Idea, How To Construct Frameworks for Success & Why You Should Not Always Test Your MVP with Afton Vechery, Founder & CEO @ Modern Fertility

Afton Vechery is the Co-Founder & CEO @ Modern Fertility, the startup that guides you through your fertility hormones now so you have options later. To date they have raised over 7m in funding from some of the leading players in venture including USV, First Round Capital, Maveron, SV Angel and Y Combinator. As for Afton, prior to Modern Fertility, Afton was a Product Manager @ 23andMe where she was the sole product manager responsible for all consumer-facing genetic tools. Before 23andMe, Afton was a Strategy and Finance Consultant @ Willow Pump where she participated in fundraising that led to successful $15M fundraise. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Afton made her way into the world of startups with 23andMe and then came to change the way we think about fertility with Modern Fertility? 2.) Afton has previously emphasised the importance of having "frameworks for success". What does that mean? How do those frameworks break down? How does Afton think about the decision-making process around prioritisation? How does Afton think about the difference between being customer informed and customer driven? 3.) Why does Afton believe that there are times when you should not test the MVP? Why is this? What would Afton do differently in the MVP process if she had her time again? How does Afton think about and respond to the statement "move fast and break things"? 4.) Why does Afton believe it is important to let everyone "rip apart your business"? What are the fundamental benefits of this? From the ripping aparts, Afton has experienced, what have been the biggest takeaways? What was their argument? How did Afton respond? How did her thinking and mentality change as a result? 5.) Why does Phin Barnes @ First Round say Afton is "hard as nails"? What were some of Afton's biggest learnings from her early engineering role? How does Afton think about entrepreneurial resilience today? What advice does Afton give to emerging entrepreneurs and first-time founders? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Afton’s Fave Book: Motherhood Rescheduled As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Afton on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  We are back for another episode in the world of the 20 minute VC and Founders Friday with me, Harry Stebbings, and I'd love to see you on Instagram at H Stebbings 1996 with two Bs, and I'd love to see you there. But to the show today, and if you listened to our episode on Monday with Rebecca Caden at USV, you'll remember she discussed her most recent investment being in Modern Fertility. Well, today, I'm thrilled to welcome Afton Vikuri, co-founder and CEO at Modern Fertility, the startup that guides you through your fertility hormones now so you have options later. To date, they've raised over $7 million in funding from some of the leading players in venturing, including USV, First Round Capital, Maveron, SV Angel, and Y Combinator. As for Afton, prior to Modern Fertility, she was a product manager at 23andMe, where she was

• 0:41Harry Stebbings?

  the sole product manager responsible for all consumer-facing genetic tools. And before 23andMe, Afton was a strategy and finance consultant at Willow Pump, where she participated in fundraising that led to a successful $15 million fundraise. And I'd also want to say a huge thank you both to Rebecca Caden at USV and Finn Barnes at First Round for the intro to Afton today. I really do so appreciate that. But before we dive into the show with Afton, I want to spend a minute to talk about Brex, the first corporate card for startups. Brex founders Henrique and Pedro built a payments business in Brazil, but found themselves rejected for a corporate card when they were in Y Combinator. They decided to build Brex with instant online signup, no founder liability, and limits 10 to 20 times higher than standard cards. Pretty incredible, I know,

• 1:24Harry Stebbings?

  and you can sign up for Brex and get card fees waived by entering the code HARRY during signup. Honestly, it truly is a special service. And with Brex in place, we now need a team to really use them, and that's where Terminal comes in. Terminal is a startup that appreciates hiring amazing developers is hard. Plus, it's much harder if you're looking only in a 25-mile radius of your office. So Terminal is your dedicated partner in rapidly standing up world-class remote technical teams. How do they deliver both speed and quality? Well, Terminal does this by focusing on everything necessary to successfully source, set up, and support these teams. From physical elements like beautiful workspaces and equipment, to ongoing resources like HR, payroll, legal, professional learning and development. But don't take my word for this, take the word of Eventbrite, former 20 VC guest, Hims, and DialPad, all customers and lovers of

• 2:10Harry Stebbings?

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• 2:54Harry Stebbings?

  That's L A T T I C E dot com forward slash two zero VC. Build an award winning culture with Lattice, the number one people management solution. But now it's time for the show and I'm very, very excited to hand over to Afton Vikuri, founder and CEO at Modern Fertility.

• 3:14Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 3:17Harry Stebbings?

  Afton, it's such a pleasure to have you on the show today. I've heard so many wonderful things, both from Rebecca at USV and Finn at First Round. So thank you so much for joining me today.

• 3:26Speaker 02

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 3:27Harry Stebbings?

  Not at all, but I'd love to get started though today by discussing a little bit about you. So tell me, how did you move from the world of private equity, always fascinating, to revolutionizing the fertility world with Modern Fertility?

• 3:39Speaker 02

  Yes, great question. So my introduction to the infertility space was actually back when I was working in private equity. So my job was to look at different areas of healthcare that were interesting, growing, had some consolidation potential. And I was actually just really interested in women's health. And I was looking at these trends of women waiting till later in life to start their families, the growth of the infertility space. And I ended up leading the diligence for an investment in a network of IVF clinics and labs. And so it was through that process that I learned the business side, I learned the science side. But it was really the emotional aspect that stuck with me. I was talking to so many women who just kept saying, you know, I wish. Someone would have told me that fertility declined with age,

• 4:22Speaker 02

  or I wish someone would have told me that IVF didn't work for every single person. And it wasn't something that, you know, you could just pay more money and it would work out. And so that kind of human element in those conversations really stuck with me. And I ended up leaving private equity and really following my passion to dive deeper into personalized medicine, women's health, ended up moving out to the Bay Area and had a hand in helping launch for separate companies. And most recently had worked at 23andMe, the direct-to-consumer genetic testing company, running their consumer tools division. And it was while I was at 23andMe that I realized that I wanted to wait until later in life to start my own family.

• 5:02Speaker 02

  And I remember this type of baseline blood testing that I learned about back when I was in private equity. And I started to do my research. So I went to my OB-GYN and I asked if they could run these labs. And my OB-GYN said, no, they were, why are you thinking about fertility? You're not 35 yet, you're fine. But I knew there was more to it. So I actually went into an infertility clinic and had a consult, got my test ordered. Had to wait, the testing has to be done in some cases on day three of a woman's menstrual cycle. So I had to wait till the next month, go into a laboratory location, get the testing done, bring it back to the doctor to have an appointment to sit down and interpret it. And when I went through that whole process, the results that I got were just incredibly impactful.

• 5:47Speaker 02

  I was able to learn about my own body and my own timeline, just really think through my own plan. But the kicker was I got a bill in the mail a few weeks later for $1,500. And so while the, yeah, so while the information was impactful, the process, the price, there were just a lot of pain points. But through that entire procedure, I was pretty vocal about just what I was doing and the research that I was doing in the fertility space. And I at first had friends and friends of friends, then eventually hundreds of women that I was talking to just about fertility and how they were thinking about fertility. And the fact that there were so many questions about fertility decline, egg freezing, success rates, just how all of this mapped together. And that was the real aha moment. I realized that Every woman was thinking about fertility.

• 6:32Speaker 02

  It was something that was top of mind. It was something that she was discussing with friends. But there were no tools and there was no education to help women think about and learn about their own bodies. And so Modern Fertility really was born as a fertility education company. But we knew that there were better predictors of future fertility than just age. And so we wanted to take all of that information, combine it together and make it as easy as possible for women to access. So what Modern Fertility is today is we take those same laboratory tests that are done in an infertility clinic. Typically, when a female, our couple, is having trouble getting pregnant, we take those same tests out of the clinic and make them available to women earlier in life.

• 7:16Speaker 02

  And so the idea is we can start to educate women, no matter where they are, and their reproductive career or reproductive planning cycle, and help them understand what's going in their body and have the toolkit to just think through some of these decisions. So fertility can turn into something that is more proactive rather than reactive. And that is our first product. It is our home hormone test that can actually be done at home or by screening by a local laboratory. And it involves physician-reviewed results on key fertility hormones, a one-on-one consult with a fertility nurse, access to join our weekly webinar, which we call an EGONAR, and all of that for $199.

• 7:59Harry Stebbings?

  I absolutely love the name of that, EGONAR. But I do want to start today with the early days of the company there. You mentioned product launching recently in the consumer products, but I want to start with the early days. And we chatted before about the importance of frameworks for success. So, Afton, I'd love to start with that. And what does frameworks for success break down into and look like in reality of operations?

• 8:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a great question. So going from zero to one, from just an idea to creating a company, is really hard. And we had a very rigorous approach for getting Modern Fertility off the ground. So we went through, my co-founder, Carly Leahy, and myself, and built a three-month GAN chart. And we essentially... Tagged all of the things that we needed to do. We had line items for every single task that we had to get done. And we went through every single day and coded the day. We color coded who was responsible, who was the owner for the task. And then every single day, we would, we had this document, which we called A dash C. And it was two columns and we would go through and rank prioritize everything that we were doing in the day.

• 9:03Speaker 02

  And we basically just wouldn't go to sleep until it was done. And then we'd go back to our Gantt chart and we'd put a smiley face in every single cell once we had actually gotten through it. And so I think that what we were able to do in the early days and going from zero to one is we knew exactly what we needed to do and spent the time executing and then balancing that with finding the people that were smarter than we were to ask very specific questions. And then we would weigh their input and figure out how that would meld in for us to go about achieving our goals.

• 9:34Harry Stebbings?

  I love the element there of rank prioritization, but it's always a tough one for me prioritizing. So help me out here. How do you think about the decision-making framework over what to fundamentally prioritize?

• 9:44Speaker 02

  So things always come up. For my job specifically, I order my to-do list around eliminating the top things that are going to kill the company. And as the company grows, that changes. But this really extended, that philosophy really extended into overall company prioritization. But we have a slightly broader lens, which really focuses on the consumer. And so that's something where we really think about every single decision through the eyes of the value that we're delivering to them. And so that mentality combined with, you know, really thinking through what's going to scale and create a defensible company creates this really specific framework that we put every single action through.

• 10:23Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, how does prioritization and that kind of discipline around prioritization? How does that scale with the scaling of the team one? I know you're hiring now. And how do you look to gain consensus around that kind of list of priorities as you come up with them?

• 10:36Speaker 02

  So what we've done is we have separate initiatives that we tie to broader company goals. And so every single initiative has a point person and an owner. And then they're responsible for defining success metrics, which we agree on with. Their manager and this allows every single person to understand what they're working on specifically and be empowered to make those trade offs within their own vertical as long as it maps to the very clearly defined mission of the company and key metrics that matter at that time. So we've really just tried to give a lot of autonomy to every member of the team, but make sure that as you know, a leadership team, we've articulated exactly what the goals are, such that those trade offs and decisions can be made in a day to day basis and keep everything moving quickly.

• 11:21Harry Stebbings?

  I love the autonomy you mentioned there, but with such kind of a goal driven culture and kind of rigor of measurement around so much of what you do, can I ask, how do you prevent drops in morale when these weekly frameworks maybe don't show what you want to see or don't meet the targets that one sets?

• 11:36Speaker 02

  So I think what's really important there is really celebrating failure just as much as you celebrate success. And when we do a weekly meeting every Monday and we go through, we talk about the goal for every specific initiative and then did we hit that goal, where is the data and then you know, a few bullet points on the things that we're doing this week to continue to scale and innovate and experiment. And within that framework, and this is obviously on top of all of the core responsibilities of each function. And within that framework, we make it something as long as we're pushing towards these goals, understanding what doesn't work is just as important as understanding what works. We're a mission driven company and every single person is here every day and in building what we're building

• 12:18Speaker 02

  because we fundamentally believe that women deserve this information. And so we're able to have these very passionate discussions about what should happen next or what we should push towards or why we should meet our goals. And everything is tied back to women getting this information. We look at every single customer as a win and we communicate success over our Slack channels. We share positive customer feedback, we share customer feedback that involves things that we need to change and we listen to it all and really create a culture that encompasses paying attention to that.

• 12:50Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, and this is so unfair of me because it's off schedule, but I'm just too interested in what to ask, so I'll ask it anyway. You said there about kind of celebrating failure. I had someone on the show the other day, founder of HashiCorp, and he said that the first time founding a company is learning through a thousand paper cuts. I'm intrigued. What's been the most challenging element for you when you review the founding of Bonfertility? What's been the most foundationally challenging element for you as a first time founder?

• 13:14Speaker 02

  I've been super fortunate to be in a lot of zero to one environments over the course of my life and career. But I think doing something that you believe in this much, you want to put so much of yourself into it every day. And so I think as a founder, really approaching every single day with that rigor and passion, but also being super conscious of what that's doing. And I think that for me, it's that balance of, you know, just excitement and passion for what we're doing and keeping everything in check.

• 13:46Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, no, I completely understand the challenge there. We mentioned zero to one quite a few times. Part of that, if we attach it to kind of the physical product process, is the MVP process. In the world of the lean startup, there's the overriding notion that it's about getting the MVP and testing as fast and as much as possible and iterating. But you've said to me before that there's a time when you shouldn't test the MVP. Can you unpack this for me, Afton? Why should one not test the MVP?

• 14:11Speaker 02

  So I think that it is different for companies in different spaces. And so when you are operating a healthcare startup or a company that touches healthcare in some way, you need to understand what is an MVP, what you can just put out there in the world and get people to react to, and what is not. You can always get something out there, but you really need to think through the impact to every single person. So if you are a B2B company and selling something that, you know, if there's a bug, it's going to impact a business process in a certain way, that's still really bad and it could be really detrimental for your company. But when you're innovating in the digital health and health space, there's no room for a 10% error. There's not even room for an error that would impact one customer.

• 14:56Speaker 02

  And so I think that it's just so important that companies that... Are in the digital health space that touch customers in that way have just a very regimented approach and just passion and empathy that extends to every single customer that's a user of the process. And I think that you can still move quickly, but you have to do so in a very compassionate way that is tied to every single person that will be touched by the change or product that you're implementing.

• 15:23Harry Stebbings?

  In terms of touching the customer with that product, I always think back to Henry Ford's quote being, if I created what they wanted, I would have built a faster horse. I'm really intrigued. How do you think about kind of that balance between being customer driven versus customer informed, especially in the product process?

• 15:39Speaker 02

  I love that quote.

• 15:41Harry Stebbings?

  It's my favorite.

• 15:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think that there's an interesting blend of having a vision and building to that vision and then incorporating what customers think along the way. So we're super fortunate to be in this space and be running this company and be able to spend 24/7 getting exposed to the latest and greatest science and having this very unique perspective on what is possible. But if you just ask a customer off the bat what they want, they might not know what they want. An example of this is before I started Modern Fertility, women told me that they wanted egg freezing to be cheaper. And then if it was cheaper, great, they would do it. But then when some clinics started experimenting a little bit with price and lowering it, the spike in number of procedures wasn't as huge as some folks were expecting.

• 16:26Speaker 02

  And our insight was that there are so many steps around women understanding what's going on in their own bodies that occur well before egg freezing. And so it's really understanding the customer, empathizing, understanding her journey, and then being able to really balance her insights, her feedback, her feelings with what is possible. And it's really the combination of that, your own expertise by being a subject matter expert and what you're spending all of your time doing, and then combining that with the customer insight, the customer empathy, combining the two to just make and build a really impactful product.

• 17:01Harry Stebbings?

  I mean, for me, it's very much a market expansion play with kind of educating the consumer on the need and maybe the benefits of doing it earlier and monitoring earlier. Was that very much the conversation? With VCs when they are analyzing markets and your desire to show that actually it was so much bigger than initially the TAM suggested from the Gartner report.

• 17:18Speaker 02

  Exactly. So when you look at the amount of fertility testing that's done today, there's only 500 infertility clinics in the US and only about 2,000 reproductive endocrinologists, which are IVF doctors. So when you look at and do the math of the the number of women that that could even enter the doors of those clinics to get this type of testing done, it's a relatively small number. And so the idea for Modern Fertility was we could take this type of testing and open it up to half the population. And so our view is that this type of testing, this information should be as routine as a pap smear and women should test with us and retest with us every year because fertility unfortunately declines with age. And just as every woman has a different metabolism, she has a different fertility curve,

• 18:02Speaker 02

  which is just really impactful and helpful information that a woman should have the option to access.

• 18:08Harry Stebbings?

  I do though, before we move into the quickfire round, as you know, I spoke to Finn before the episode and he informed me that you're incredible at gathering feedback on everything in capital letters in his email. Likewise, you said to me, you should let everyone rip apart your business. I love the differing takes there. I think his was more elegant than yours, to be fair. However, I would love to hear your thoughts. Why should you let everyone rip apart your business?

• 18:30Speaker 02

  I love those conversations. If I can get in a room with someone that just has an issue with a part of our business or thinks that something isn't going to work, those are my favorite types of conversations. And I think it really comes down to you need to identify every single weak point in your business and be working as hard as possible to close those gaps as you scale. And so I think the broader framework that I use on top of that is you need to know when to listen to people and when not to. And so when I get advice from experts on different topics, I appreciate the frameworks that they use to dive into problems. I appreciate all of their life experiences that have tied into the perspective that they're giving. And if you're able to kind of label all of those

• 19:15Speaker 02

  different thought processes, frameworks, advice and perspective across a couple people and then you. Know your own business better than anyone. And if you truly trust that, you're able to really weigh that feedback in the right way. And that to me makes your business stronger.

• 19:29Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, if you think back to all the different ripings apart that you've had of your business, which again, as I know from Finn, has been many. Tell me, has there been someone who ripped apart your business more poignantly than kind of anyone else? And what did you kind of learn and think about hardest from that ripping apart, so to speak?

• 19:46Speaker 02

  Oh, I love that. That's a great question. So in thinking back to our fundraising process, that is literally the definition of fundraising. And I don't like fundraising because I'd rather be running our company. But I actually really enjoy the process of just being able to talk to venture capitalists that understand and look at companies for a living every day and have that perspective and are really able to hone in on these specific parts. And for us, one of the biggest issues at first in fundraising was that most of the VCs that we talked to, the question was really around women even knowing about or thinking about this information. And at first, it was just Carly and myself are the target customer. We are millennials that wanted access to this information.

• 20:31Speaker 02

  And we had broader insights from our beta that we were running, but we didn't have much more than that. And so it was these initial conversations that made me go back and run a bunch of surveys and actually get mass market data on how women were thinking about this information, how much anxiety they have over this information, their likelihood to purchase this type of product. And by taking all of that information and incorporating it back into our fundraising process and just starting out with that information, it really made the process a lot stronger for us. And so I think that that lesson can be applied to everything. It's when someone brings something up that you're not aware of or that you haven't thought of or that you've thought of, but you need to be pushed further.

• 21:13Speaker 02

  You just have to do the work. You have to work really, really hard to understand that insight and then fix it. And so I found it very, very helpful.

• 21:22Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, what was the biggest and most common pushback from the investor base during the fundraise? Was there one that was a real commonality, be it scalability of customer act, be it margins? What were the real pushbacks?

• 21:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, I think that when you're building a healthcare company that, you know, we were running a multi-site clinical study that was IRB approved to show that finger prick could perform the same as a traditional vein of puncture draw. We were running a beta. We were doing this type of testing that involved background checks. And there was just a lot of infrastructure that we had to create to get this off the ground. And so as a result, when we were raising in the early days, we had to raise fairly early on in the process. And so it was my goal as a founder to get the company as far as I could with my personal savings, but also realize the point that I had to go and raise institutional capital if I wanted

• 22:15Speaker 02

  to get it further. And so I think that with this very clear plan of, you know, what we wanted to do, it was also just early. And there were still a lot of questions that we started to get data on, but we still had to go further. And so I think that a lot of the pushback, especially around a product that a lot of investors, whether they were male or female, it's a specific demographic that would be using them, or a specific age that would be using them. And our test is approved for women that are 21 to 45 years old. And for us, it was just, how do we answer all of these questions without having a fully launched product in the market? And I do think that that rigorous research approach to every question was the right step for us.

• 22:59Harry Stebbings?

  In terms of that kind of rigorous research and the rigorous feedback and the ripping apart of the business, it takes a lot of resilience. And Finn told me, and these were his words, you were hard as nails. Now, I hope this isn't too personal, but where do you think this internal strength and resilience really comes from?

• 23:15Speaker 02

  Oh, wow. That's very nice of Finn. You know, I learned at a very early age that I could build things and that if I worked really, really hard, I could make progress. So I grew up in a small town in Maryland and I knew that I needed an internship. And so I heard that like engineering was this cool thing and it was kind of hard and fun. So I was like, okay, I need an engineering internship. And so I found this local company that said that I could come on as an intern. Intern, but it was unpaid. And so I was like, okay, so I need gas money to get there. And then, you know, I still needed money for all of the other parts of my life. And so sixteen, I had been working my whole childhood, but I got a job at Pizza Hut,

• 23:59Speaker 02

  which was the highest wage I could get at the time. I was a great waitress and was always on top of everything. So always tried to get that 20% tip, but I got enough gas money to drive to the internship. I was doing data entry on top of that. So I just, I made it happen. And I think the other memory I have was I had to do a science fair project, just as part of our public school system. And I noticed that we had to start drinking from bottled water in our public school. And I was told that this was because public facilities had to be routinely tested and we failed our water test. And so I went home and I asked my parents when the last time we had gotten our well water checked. And they said, you know, when we moved in, you know, 15 years ago.

• 24:40Speaker 02

  And so as a science fair project, I just decided to go around and test wells in my community. And I discovered that a large percentage of them were completely contaminated. And I scaled this to a bigger project and eventually was was able to discover this issue with the legislation, the closeness of houses within my community and compete at the International Science and Engineering Fair, which was just this amazing experience. But I wanted to do something about it. So I started a water quality testing company and set up this whole infrastructure where residents of the community could bring their water in and we would test it every single day on Wednesdays after school.

• 25:20Speaker 02

  And so it was this whole process of just having this idea, knowing the change that you wanted to see in the world and then just doing it. And I think that that philosophy has served me well over my subsequent career.

• 25:31Harry Stebbings?

  Finn told me that there was a great story behind it, but that would be one of the best stories I've heard. What a precocious, curious child. But that's amazing. I would love, though, to dive into a quickfire round. So I say a short statement after and you give me your immediate thoughts. About 60 seconds per one. Are you strapped in and ready?

• 25:48Speaker 02

  I'm ready. Let's do this.

• 25:49Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, so next time on my way to San Francisco, what book should I be reading on the plane?

• 25:54Speaker 02

  I'm gonna push you a little bit. I think you should read Motherhood Rescheduled. It's this amazing book.

• 26:02Speaker 02

  It's this ethnographic research style that just follows women thinking about fertility, going through some of the early phases of egg freezing, and just how they think about their fertility, their lives, their relationships. And it's beautifully written and I think just a really interesting perspective into how women are thinking about this information.

• 26:21Harry Stebbings?

  Well, that was a little bit different to Ben Horowitz's suggestion, but I love it. Tell me, the biggest productivity tip or hack, what would you suggest?

• 26:30Speaker 02

  So I learned to speed read by accident as a kid. I'm a little bit dyslexic and I think just the combination of all of that just really allowed me to consume a lot of content on a day-to-day basis. And so I think you need to decipher when you're speed reading versus not, but it has really just helped me absorb a lot of information.

• 26:49Harry Stebbings?

  What does the morning routine look like?

• 26:51Speaker 02

  It depends on the mornings. I read emails in bed, then eventually get up, come into the office early. That's kind of the majority of the mornings. But I go on a bike ride with a really good friend every Wednesday morning between, you know, 6:30, 7:00 a.m. And we go up to Twin Peaks and back down in San Francisco. And those are my favorite mornings. It really just lets me reflect, catch up, and start the morning off right.

• 27:14Harry Stebbings?

  I just love the San Franciscan, like, 6 o'clock, go hiking and... Tell me, the biggest preconceived idea or misconception about fertility or infertility that you'd like to change?

• 27:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, so most women today hear that fertility declines with age, but it just goes off a cliff at 35. And I think the biggest shift that we want to make is that, you know, every single woman, just like she has a different metabolism, has a different fertility curve. And fertility is something that can go down slightly earlier, slightly later. And by understanding the hormones and what's going on in your own body, it's the first step in making the decisions that are right for you. So changing just that one-size-fits-all healthcare approach as we think about fertility.

• 27:58Harry Stebbings?

  Tell me, the most challenging element of the modern fertility journey?

• 28:02Speaker 02

  No, and I was thinking about this... Looking back, every day your tolerance increases. So today, you know, what a hiccup would have been would have caused an all-nighter back in the early days. And so I think with every phase of the business, your level of resilience increases, your ability to have frameworks to solve problems quickly and move on. It increases with time. And so I think the honest answer is every day you're climbing a hill and the scale of the problems and fires change. But you're constantly going up.

• 28:35Harry Stebbings?

  Listen, I think your tolerance must be incredible to put up with a bit of that some like mine. So I totally commend you for that. But I do want to finish today. On the next five years for you and for Bond fertility, what's the exciting roadmap ahead?

• 28:46Speaker 02

  So we see a world where every single woman has access to her fertility information and fertility testing is as routine as a pap smear. And so over the next five years, we're just really excited about our first product, our fertility hormone test. And just giving women insight to this information and the impact that it can have on their lives.

• 29:08Harry Stebbings?

  Afton, it's been such a pleasure to have you on the show. As I said, I heard so many great things, both from Rebecca and from Finn. So thank you so much for joining me today.

• 29:15Speaker 02

  Thank you so much for having me. This was great.

• 29:19Harry Stebbings?

  Such an incredible guest. And I want to say a huge thank you to Afton for giving up the time today to be on the show. I mean, wow, getting a job at Pizza Hut to pay for the gas money for an engineering internship. That really is an entrepreneur. Again, you can follow her on Twitter at Aftoon. And I do want to say a huge thank you again to Rebecca Caden at USV and Finn Barnes at First Round for the intro to Afton today. I really do so appreciate that. Likewise, I'd love to see you on Instagram at H Stubbings nineteen ninety six with two Bs. It'd be great to see you there. But before we leave you today, I want to spend a minute to talk about Brex, the first corporate card for startups. Brex founders Enrique and Pedro built a payments business in Brazil, but found themselves rejected for a corporate card when they were in Y Combinator.

• 29:57Harry Stebbings?

  They decided to build Brex with instant online signup, no founder liability and limits ten to twenty times higher than standard cards. Pretty incredible, I know. And you can sign up for Brex and get card fees waived by entering the code Harry during signup. Honestly, it truly is a special service. And with Brex. We now need a team to really use them and that's where Terminal comes in. Terminal is a startup that appreciates hiring amazing developers is hard. Plus it's much harder if you're looking only in a 25 mile radius of your office. So Terminal is your dedicated partner in rapidly standing up world-class remote technical teams. How do they deliver both speed and quality? Well, Terminal does this by focusing on everything necessary to successfully source, set up and support these teams. From physical elements like beautiful workspaces and equipment,

• 30:40Harry Stebbings?

  to ongoing resources like HR, payroll, legal, professional learning and development. But don't take my word for this. Take the word of Eventbrite, former 20 VC guest Hims and Dialpad, all customers and lovers of Terminal and you can find out more today at terminal.io. Finally, now we have the team in place as a founder or operator. Your next crucial job is people operations. It could be hiring execs, developing managers, retaining top talent and building a high performing culture. And that's why you need Lattice. Lattice is the number one people management solution for growing companies, helping companies like Asana, Reddit and Cruise build a strong company culture. And with Lattice, it's easy to launch 360 reviews, share ongoing feedback, facilitate one-on-one, set up goal tracking and even run employee engagement surveys. And Lattice is the only solution that combines both performance management

• 31:25Harry Stebbings?

  and employee engagement, so operators can really make sure their top performers are happy. And Lattice is giving away three months of Lattice free to 20 VC listeners. Just go to lattice.com/20vc. That's L A T T I C E dot com forward slash two zero V C. Build an award-winning culture with Lattice, the number one people management solution. As always, I so appreciate all your support for the show and I cannot wait to bring you an incredible episode with Spotify board member Woody at TCV.