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Building the AI Flower Framework as the Roadmap for AI Transformation | Show notes for episode 169 with Juliette van der Laarse
When ChatGPT and other models came out, Juliette van der Laarse started wondering: how will AI impact my job? While searching for answers, she found grand visions and very specific how-tos, but nothing in between. Even though she’d been there so long colleagues joked she was part of the furniture, ongoing reorganizations made her wary of the consequences that AI could have.
So, next to a busy day job as an engineering manager at a large corporate, she started to build the AI Flower, a framework that would help her determine the impact of AI on her job and the people she managed, and that would guide her in learning if AI was the right solution for the engineering problems she was supposed to solve.
In episode 169, she shares her open-source AI framework that maps 152 IT activities against 25 levels of AI capability to show what evolves, fossilizes, or stays human work. The AI Flower is designed as a roadmap to help small and mid-sized companies be part of the AI transformation without having to spend thousands of Euros on training and consultancies.
We talk about:
- What makes AI not overhyped, but often misused
- What her own redundancy taught her about staying in control of her career
- Why she kept the framework open source instead of charging for it
Plus, find out what happens when your systems and data are not ready for the AI transformation. Spoiler: bias is not the only problem.
Start listening by pressing play below.
Building the AI Flower Framework as the Roadmap for AI Transformation | Show notes for episode 169 with Juliette van der Laarse
- Juliette van der Laarse Founding Director, AI Flower Foundation
- Dirkjan Hupkes Host
- License: All rights reserved
Or keep reading for practical takeaways, highlights, and trends from the episode.
Practical Takeaways for Founders
Even though her background and the word ‘framework’ may suggest a more theoretical conversation for a corporate audience, you shouldn’t let that fool you. Juliette, a former founder herself, shares some highly practical insights that just as easily apply to startups and small companies. Here are three examples.
Don’t be blinded by AI
Many startups are saying they’re AI native and building with AI for the sake of it. But Juliette warns founders to first investigate what problem they’re trying to solve and then make sure that AI is the best solution. Because sometimes, automation or even a simple system fix may work better.
Coaching and mentoring are key to scaling
Many startups already have knowledge-sharing practices in place to ensure that activities are not dependent on a single or a few employees. Juliette takes this one step further. As coaching and mentoring are key to personal and professional growth, she recommends that leaders allow senior employees to spend 40% or more of their time on those activities.
Design AI so it does not self-contaminate
We know that AI models have their own biases and that they can hallucinate. But AI can also contaminate the models with these errors and biases through reinforcement. When we talk about her tips for FundingCoach, Juliette says that awareness of biases is not enough; she tells me to design the tool in such a way that it does not reinforce its own past outputs.
The through-line of these items isn’t about AI as a topic. It’s that in each case, doing the responsible thing costs something (restraint, time, and deliberate design) that the easier path skips, in favor of the long-term result.
🤗 Know a founder who aspires to build an AI-native startup? Put them on the right track to becoming AI native and share these learnings with them.
Or scroll down for magic moments.
Highlights and timestamps
Time Highlight 00:00 Introducing Juliette van der Laarse and the AI Flower framework 05:19 From childhood programming to AI research and corporate engineering leadership 08:17 Why Juliette started the framework: clarity, career impact, and AI transformation 10:05 Why pilot-first AI strategies often stall at the business case stage 13:35 Why pilots are useful but not enough for enterprise-wide change 16:35 How the framework addresses fear, trust, and job stability 19:11 Juliette’s redundancy experience and what it taught her about career resilience 27:33 Will AI take all jobs, and what has to happen before that becomes realistic 29:51 System readiness, regulation, and why some work may stay human 32:06 AI overhype versus useful automation 33:50 Why shallow IT training can lead teams to overuse AI 36:57 How mentoring and senior coaching could scale knowledge better 41:10 The structure of the AI Flower: activities, standards, and excellence 48:02 AI capability as 25 levels of maturity and scope 51:49 Mapping AI capability to IT activities and fossilization of tasks 54:57 How the model shows role evolution across DevOps, test, and infrastructure work 59:27 Capturing undocumented knowledge and local context in companies 1:03:06 Building internal knowledge gathering and documentation workflows with AI 1:09:21 Peer review, critique, and building a board of naysayers 1:15:46 How the framework changes over time while keeping a stable structure 1:18:41 Why the framework is open source instead of monetized 1:25:40 Using the model to map AI risk and suggest controls 1:30:06 Where companies should start, and the biggest mistake to avoid 1:35:23 Why Juliette is setting up a foundation around the framework 1:37:35 Safeguards for an AI funding coach and avoiding self-reinforcing bias 1:41:15 Where to follow Juliette as the foundation and framework grow
The Episode In an Infographic
3 Magic Moments In The Episode
When you need a thermometer for your house, would you buy a €300 AI-driven one if you knew that a €10 non-AI-related device could do the same? This comparison comes up when I ask Juliette if AI is overhyped. It’s a funny moment as it magically captures the core of overhyped versus misused. Here are three more magic moments from the episode.
Reflecting while speaking in front of 2000 people
Earlier this year, Juliette presented her framework at DevWorld in Amsterdam to a room filled with 2000 people. Most people on stage would be busy giving the crowd answers to their questions. Juliette recalls asking herself how many people in the audience had the answer she wanted to hear about. It shows her deep desire to make the framework something that people use and contribute to.
The board of naysayers
It’s easy to fall in love with your own creation and go looking for fans; it is more powerful to ask feedback from haters. In fact, Juliette sees it as a smart way to help her identify her own blind spots. But the invitation is limited to the people who bring a respectful attitude and substantiated arguments why an element of the framework will not work as expected. She’s not only showing the vulnerability to invite feedback, but also the strength to use it to improve her creation.
Talent has choices
When she heard that she would be redundant, it would have been easy to use the company’s social plan and take time to find another position. But Juliette had prepared. She had been calling out the reorganization for a while. So by the time she posted about her redundancy, recruiters from other companies were already lining up. It’s a message to other talents that preparation gives choices, and to companies that talent can be gone if you don’t take care of them.
These magic moments show what happens when you start checking how things really work instead of just trusting them to work as planned.
🗣 What was your magic moment of the episode? Was it one of these or another moment entirely? Let me know by sharing your favorite moment in the comments.
Or scroll down for my favorite quote from the episode.
The Quote from the Episode
“I think the genie is out of the bottle. We cannot put AI back. So let’s see how we can get the most out of it and work toward a better future instead of ruining it along the way.”
— Juliette van der Laarse, founding director of the AI Flower FoundationWhen we talk about the magic feeling of creating something that coding can have, Juliette shares this to show what is really at stake here.
Feeling inspired to create a better future? The blog is public, so feel free to share the quote with someone who needs to join as well.
3 Trends I’m Seeing Across Conversations
Like most episodes, this conversation has overlaps with other guests. Sometimes, I see the overlap up front; other times I find out after the fact. This episode is a mixed bag.
Implementing AI is about people
Why would you contribute to something that will make you redundant? It’s a simple question that underlines the importance of bringing people along in transformations like the one we’re going through with AI. Juliette mentions that often there is a pilot and a request for a business case for more, but that often no attention is given to the impact on people, their work and their lives. We heard about the importance of bringing people along in episode 136, where Sophia Zitman mentioned that most initiatives stumble over internal politics and resistance, not because the technology wasn’t working.
Solutions don’t come to those who wait
Juliette was looking for external advice to discover the impact AI would have on her job and that of the people in her team. When she could not find a good answer, she decided to build something herself. We heard this before in episode 163 with Dr. Robin Blackstone, who was waiting for disciples to come down to fix the healthcare reimbursement system. When they didn’t arrive, she decided to take matters into her own hands.
Doing the research first is fundamental
As part of developing research, Juliette spent a year collecting information about activities and standards in IT, automation and transformations. She did so in addition to a demanding day job in service of ensuring that her framework would be as complete as possible. In episode 164, we heard from Mirjam Weemhoff, who did 15 years of research with MRIs to find how the pelvic floor rotates and functions in different positions, before building a new, adaptable pessary that the industry wouldn’t build.
What connects these trends is that it takes ownership and accountability to go for the best possible outcome, whether that is bringing people along on the AI transformation, taking action because no one else does, or doing the research needed to succeed.
🗣️ What was the value you got from listening to this episode? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
Leave a Reply
Coming Up On Women Disrupting Tech
More than half the people in the Netherlands live with a chronic disease, and most of that is preventable through diet. That statistic is what pushed Anke Kuik, co-founder and CEO of FLTRD, to leave a career in media and advertising and build something in food and health instead.
Episode 170 covers how Anke turned a personal interest in nutrition into FLTRD, an app that scans supermarket products for how ultra-processed they are and points people toward healthier alternatives. She walks through the years spent developing the Pure Score behind the app, the decision to rebuild the product in-house after outsourcing it first, and what she’s looking for in FLTRD’s next round of investors.
The clip below is Anke explaining why she started the company: the health statistics that caught her attention, and her observation that supermarkets are full of ultra-processed products while healthy food has become harder to find than it should be.
It’s a small piece of a much longer conversation about food, health and entrepreneurship. To catch the rest when the full episode drops on Thursday 17 September at 16:00 hours CEST, leave your email address below.
Until then, as always, keep being awesome,
Dirkjan
What I Want to Leave You With
This episode starts on a terrace near Amsterdam where Juliette first explained the AI Flower Framework to me. We had met at a conference years before, where I asked her and a colleague to come on the podcast to talk about practical allyship for women in IT. That episode never happened, but we always kept in contact.
What fascinated me was how Juliette manages to combine deep knowledge of industry standards and frameworks with the practical, day-to-day impact that a complex technology brings. Add to that the effort she put into building this framework, and you understand why I jumped on the opportunity to have her explain the AI Flower on the podcast.
While listening, I also noticed her humility about the AI Flower. She does not present the framework as the only framework you’ll ever need to implement AI. Instead, she admits that there may be flaws in it and opens it to the public via an open-source construction. What’s more, through the open-source construction, she makes her knowledge accessible to the many small and mid-sized companies that cannot pay for the expensive consultants and €2000 training sessions that come with transformative technology like AI.
So when she mentioned she wanted to learn from Linux, I could not resist linking her with Nithya Ruff the next day. As a result, she will have an opportunity to share the AI Flower at the Linux global conference in Prague in October.
Listen to the full conversation with Juliette van der Laarse on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. And if you are a female founder navigating a funding conversation, take a look at FundingCoach.ai.
About Juliette van der Laarse
Juliette van der Laarse is a Senior Engineering Manager at the largest online retail and e-commerce platform in the Netherlands and Belgium, Founding Director of the AI Flower Foundation, and an O'Reilly author.
She started programming around age eleven, guided by an uncle who worked in IT. That early spark led her to study game technology, where she took her first AI course, and from there into freelance work, an AR/VR startup, and a year as a researcher at the Asimov Institute studying AI's impact on society. She then spent five and a half years at a major international financial services company, first shaping workforce strategy for thousands of engineers, then leading engineering teams across cloud, testing, security, and reliability platforms — and along the way founded and chaired a women-in-IT community of more than 250 members.
It was there, alongside a demanding day job, that she built the AI Flower: an open framework that maps 152 IT activities against 25 levels of AI capability, giving companies and engineers a concrete way to see where AI actually helps, where it doesn't, and how roles change along the way. She introduced the framework on O'Reilly Radar, presented it to 2,000 people at DevWorld in Amsterdam, and will deliver a featured keynote about it at the Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit Europe in Prague this October.
She is now establishing the AI Flower Foundation to keep the framework open and community-governed, so that companies without enterprise consulting budgets can be part of the AI transformation too.
Juliette was recognized as a technology role model by the European Parliament and named to the VIVA400 list of the most inspiring women in the Netherlands, and she is a regular keynote speaker and industry-award jury member.
You can connect with Juliette on LinkedIn.
About the AI Flower Foundation
The AI Flower Foundation is Juliette's effort to turn the AI Flower Framework into something more than a personal project. As of this recording, it doesn't fully exist yet, she's in the process of registering it, working through the Chamber of Commerce and a notary to put the structure in place as an official non-profit. Once that's done, the framework itself will also be published on GitHub under an open-source license.
She's leaning the foundation's governance loosely toward the style of the Linux Foundation, not copying it directly, but taking cues from how an open, community-run project like that operates. A registered non-profit structure gives the work more credibility, makes it easier for outside organizations to collaborate with it directly, and opens the door to sponsorship, without needing companies to fund what would otherwise look like one person's side project.
Central to how the foundation runs are what Juliette calls dialogue tables: structured sessions where people with genuinely opposing views on a specific IT activity are deliberately brought together. The goal isn't quick agreement; she treats disagreement itself as the best safeguard against bias creeping into the framework, since the more people are involved, the more they bring their own assumptions with them. Long term, she'd like other universities and companies to host their own dialogue tables independently, contributing directly to the model rather than routing every addition through her.
For companies that sponsor the foundation, the relationship she's aiming for runs both ways: sponsors would get a say in which capabilities get developed next, and the chance to be first to pilot new work as it's built.
To learn more, visit the website or follow the AI Flower Foundation on LinkedIn.
Listen to Episode 169 on Spotify, Apple or YouTube
Listen on Apple Podcasts Featured Event: TEDx Coolhaven Women
The TEDx Coolhaven Women event takes place on 9 October from 6:30 to 11:30 in the evening at HAL4 aan de Maas in Rotterdam. This year’s theme is The New Builders, a theme that seamlessly aligns with the content on this podcast.
Throughout the evening, you’ll hear powerful TEDx talks from women who are redesigning the systems that shape our lives—from leadership and parenting to women’s health, mental healthcare, and access to investment capital. Together, they’ll explore what it really takes to build a better future.
As a proud media sponsor, I am happy to offer you a chance to be there in person, to listen to groundbreaking talks and meet and network with like-minded people. As a listener to the podcast, you’ll get a 25% discount when you use the code WDT25 at checkout. And even though this is a TEDx Women event, men are very welcome to join.
- 🗓️ 9 October 2026, from 18:30 - 23:30
- 📍 HAL4 aan de Maas in Rotterdam
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How Female Endurance Athletes Keep Performing During the Hormonal Transition | Show notes for episode 168 with Karianne Kraaijestein
Karianne Kraaijestein had always been interested in sports. It started with gymnastics, followed by snowboarding, wakeboarding and other explosive, edge-seeking activities. And her professional career successfully followed along as she did marketing for outdoor brands and athletes.
Then came the setbacks: she suffered a broken kneecap and had to undergo appendix surgery. As part of the recovery, she started swimming. And because she needed a goal, ended up trying triathlons.
A couple of injuries and a torn ACL later, she had learned that training and recovery schedules are more or less the same for everyone. Because historically, only about six percent of sports science research funding has gone toward women in sports science.
The problem: the schedules did not work for her. And not for a lot of other women either.
That was the start of Adaptive, a company that helps female endurance athletes perform throughout their hormonal transition through a coaching layer that is driven by athletes’ input and research-backed performance insights.
In episode 168, Karianne joins me to share what she learned about endurance sports, entrepreneurship, and her own body. We talk about
- Why standard training plans, built for a generic body, fail women in the hormonal transition
- Why tracking sleep, heat regulation, and training load matters more than tracking hormones directly
- Why she considers a scientific advisory board the biggest de-risking factor for investors in a trust-dependent product
Plus, you’ll learn how Karianne finished part of the S’GRAIL in Girona on a torn ACL, and what that taught her about risk.ps need to create markets too. So community building is a core component of building a company. medicine, and, towards the end, a full set of takeaways for founders who are fundraising.
Start listening by pressing play below.
Or keep reading for practical takeaways, highlights, and trends from the episode.
Practical Takeaways for Founders
Part of our conversation is about what she learned as an entrepreneur before starting Adaptive. The result is a wealth of tips for founders. Here are three of the most important takeaways:
Design for people’s personal context
Adaptive is built on the learning that the women going through hormonal transition need training schedules that take into account their unique context. Karianne does this by talking to cohorts of athletes and by ensuring she stays up to date on what is happening in science. It’s her way to ensure that her community gets the personalized advice that supports their performance in the long run.
Understand what data you need
From her personal experience and from interviewing other women, Karianne found out that understanding sleep patterns, heat regulation and how the athlete subjectively experiences training load provides far better outcomes than tracking hormonal data. It also reduces the tracking burden on the user. Not overasking, and being clear about what you use the data for, are examples of how trust can be built into the business from the start.
Make sure your heart does not overrule your mind
Before starting Adaptive, Karianne went through a bankruptcy of her yoga studio. Looking back, she says it was a case of “too much heart and not enough mind”. She built the studio around her love for the space, without testing whether the cost structure could survive. For Adaptive, she is testing things like price points prior to building anything. This way she does not fall in love with her product again without knowing that it has a chance to survive.
These three takeaways all build on the same principle: don’t assume you already know the answer. Rather, verify needs and wants, only collect data that is demonstrably better for your customer, and make sure to pressure-test your business case before starting.
When you know a founder who could use some help with testing assumptions, feel free to share this post with them.
Or scroll down for magic moments.
Highlights and timestamps
Time Highlight 00:00 Introduction 04:45 Introduction to Karianne and Adaptive 07:33 The Journey into Endurance Sports 10:28 Mental Challenges in Endurance Sports 13:29 The Importance of Goal Setting 16:22 Navigating Individuality in Triathlons 19:14 Overcoming Physical Setbacks 22:20 The Recovery Process and Age Factors 25:01 Building Adaptive for Women 28:13 Understanding Hormonal Transitions 31:05 Energy Management and Training Adjustments 34:11 The Role of Data in Training 36:43 Adaptive’s Unique Approach 39:49 Integrating Research into Adaptive 41:33 The Power of Athlete Data 42:47 Research Collaborations and Insights 44:17 Understanding Amateur vs. Professional Athletes 45:30 Adaptive vs. Competitors in Women’s Fitness 46:38 Building a Community for Endurance Athletes 47:55 Coaching Integration with Adaptive 49:23 Business Model and Pricing Strategy 52:56 Proving the Business Case for Adaptive 55:41 Data Privacy and Trust Issues 1:00:10 The Role of Community in Data Sharing 1:01:34 Building Trust with Scientific Validation 1:03:20 Future Expansion and Market Opportunities 1:04:46 Navigating Burnout and Performance 1:09:22 Lessons from Past Experiences 1:12:50 Design Principles for Personalized Solutions 1:15:01 Connecting with Adaptive and Future Plans
The Episode In an Infographic
3 Magic Moments In The Episode
If there is one thing this episode will teach you, it’s that mid-life can be a period of significant growth rather than decline. Karianne used a combination of curiosity, perseverance and being mindful of her body’s changing physical needs to discover new personal and business limits. Here are three magic moments from her story.
The “Pay-it-Forward” Movement
While interviewing the women in her research cohort, Karianne discovered that they were eager to share their personal data. When she asked why, they mentioned that it was because they felt a responsibility to make sure future generations of women in their thirties wouldn’t have to navigate the same lack of research and support. It is a magical way of paying it forward, something that is a trait of founders too.
Coaches Asking “How Can I Help”
Like the women in the cohort, the coaches Karianne spoke with one-on-one didn’t need to be pitched. They immediately offered to carve out time to help bring Adaptive to life. They recognized the problem as they had seen women struggling. When the people who risk being displaced by your solution start contributing to it, it’s a sign of traction that is difficult to ignore.
Finishing two legs of a triathlon on a torn ACL
For most people, including top athletes, tearing their ACL would be a sign to visit a hospital. Karianne tore hers an hour before the S’Grail in Girona and decided to start anyway. Fueled by adrenaline, she had her knee taped by medics, took painkillers, completed the sea swim using only her arms and finished a grueling 90-kilometer gravel bike ride by only focusing on getting to the next resting place. The magic of this is not in that she competed, but in looking for what she could do given the circumstances.
These moments show what is possible if you start with the opportunity instead of the obstacles. Whether that’s a group of women handing over data, coaches volunteering their time and knowledge, or an athlete looking for what is possible within her own body’s limits.
🗣 What was your magic moment in the episode? Was it one of the three I mentioned, or was it my “wait-what?-moment” about the need for hormonal data? Drop your magic moment below or slide into the DMs on LinkedIn or Instagram!
Leave a Reply
Or scroll down for my favorite quote from the episode.
The Quote from the Episode
“It's the curiosity of exploring what's still possible, at an age where people usually think that's the start of your decline.”
— Karianne Kraaijestein, founder of AdaptiveWhen asked what drew her to triathlon at 47, Karianne traced it back through a life of "looking for edges." From gymnastics to indoor climbing, snowboarding, and ashtanga yoga, each one a different edge to find. Triathlon was the next one, and what she learned along the way was the upramp to building Adaptive.
Know a founder who needs to hear that life isn’t over when you reach 45? Be a real supporter and use the share buttons to let your crowd know about the episode.
3 Trends I’m Seeing Across Conversations
While this episode covers sports as its main topic, there are quite a few topics that cross over to other episodes. Here are three, with the links to the other episodes:
The Data and Funding Gap Extends to Sports
One of the stats from this episode that I remember is that historically only 6% of sports science funding goes to science on women’s sports. This stat is in line with the funding stats in venture capital (2% of VC goes to female-led teams) that we remember from recent conversations with Beata Wandachowicz-Krason, Nithya Ruff, Maaike Steinebach and Sophie van Dijk. The gap has real consequences, because it means that women’s health and sports remain underresearched, keeping the data gap in place.
The Stigma of Women’s Health is real
In this episode, you’ll hear Karianne say that she talks about hormonal shifts rather than perimenopause and post menopause because these terms don’t give positive connotations with her own audience. Her remark took me back to the conversation with Maaike Steinebach from FemTech NL in episode 159, who shared that women asked her not to talk about these topics as they were afraid it would hurt their career opportunities. The stigma on terminology from women’s health is not helping the funding and data gaps.
Scientific validation helps to build trust and de-risk the value proposition
Karianne mentions that she sees the scientific validation from research and her scientific advisory board as a way to build trust with both customers and investors. As she puts it, “If trust is part of the success of the product, you want to have experts.” This echoes what investor Karen Berg mentioned back in episode 161 when she talked about clinical validation as the moat of a startup. And in episode 151, Carmen van Vilsteren even mentions explicitly that having a scientific advisory board with ‘Key Opinion Leaders’ derisks startup investments significantly for investors.
What connects these items is the bigger picture. Besides the direct pay-off in building trust with customers and investors, scientific validation and the associated clinical research support founders in using data to present a fundable business case. With that, it helps close both the data and funding gaps.
🗣️ What was the value you got from listening to this episode? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
Leave a Reply
Coming Up On Women Disrupting Tech
"We have the answer for 2,000 euros. We will teach you how to be AI ready." Juliette van der Laarse kept running into that pitch while researching how companies and individual engineers were handling AI transformation, and it's part of why she decided against putting a price tag on her own work.
Juliette is the author of the AI Flower framework, a roadmap for AI transformation built over a year of research on top of her day job as an engineering manager at a financial corporate. The framework maps out the activities, roles, and decisions involved in adopting AI across an organization, aimed at engineers and companies who can't afford to hire an EY, a Deloitte, or a Cap Gemini to figure it out for them.
In this clip, Juliette explains the moment she chose to keep the AI Flower open source instead of monetizing it, even with people around her telling her it was her chance to go big.
Curious how she built the framework, what it maps out, and why she's betting on a five-year window to get it right? Leave your email below to find the episode in your inbox on 3 September 2026 at 8:00 hours CEST.
Until then, as always, keep being awesome,
Dirkjan
What I Want to Leave You With
One of the reasons I love this conversation is that it is a story about reinvention. Karianne used her knowledge and experience as an athlete and sports marketer to reinvent herself and build a solution for a problem she experienced. She then used the experience from her bankruptcy of her Yoga Studio to build a solid company around it. Whether that will be enough for long-term success remains to be seen. But it sure makes for an inspiring conversation.
Another reason is this. While we talk about sports, there are quite some learnings for founders and investors. One I want to mention here specifically is this: her story about the bankruptcy of her yoga studio is proof that passion alone doesn't carry a business. It’s also proof that failure is never final if you try again.
What I wish for you to take away from the episode is this: we often see the middle of our lives as the beginning of the end. I do not believe that to be true. Like Karianne, I ran my first marathon at age 47. And unlike Karianne, I started building a new life as an entrepreneur at age 45 and have grown significantly as a person since. So, rather than seeing it as the start of decline, I encourage you to see it as a learning experience. One that continues for a very long time.
You can listen to our conversation on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube. And if it resonates, feel free to drop me a line in the comments or slide into my DMs.
PS. Given my background in financial services, I could not help but wonder if Adaptive carries a sort of insurance aspect. Because improving training schedules, sleep, etc. should have the result that you’re also more fit and less likely to have an injury that blocks you from participating in events that you already paid for. By extension, Adaptive could be a useful offering for Occupational Health insurance companies who want to help people protect against the income loss that comes with sports injuries by helping them prevent getting injured in the first place. Curious if you think that could work.
Listen to the full conversation with Kraaijestein on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. And if you are a female founder navigating a funding conversation, take a look at FundingCoach.ai.
About Karianne Kraaijestein
Karianne Kraaijestein started her career at McCann Erickson before founding her own advertising agency, Fresh Communications, which she ran for thirteen years, working with sports brands including Quicksilver, Helly Hansen, and Arc'teryx, and guiding Dutch athletes through media and sponsorship. She later founded a yoga studio in Amsterdam, which went bankrupt. She spent the following years working as an interim managing director, including for Stuart Own through the Zebra network.
Sport has run through all of it. At 47, after a series of injuries and surgeries, she took up swimming as part of her recovery and found triathlon soon after. Along the way, she noticed that the training schedules built around her were built on male physiology. While recovering from a torn ACL, her physiotherapist told her that recovery takes longer for women at her stage of life, "but we don't know exactly why, there isn't enough data." That gap, and her own experience starting hormone therapy without being told what training effects to expect, became the founding insight behind Adaptive.
You can connect with Karianne on LinkedIn.
About Adaptive
Adaptive is an intelligent training platform for female endurance athletes navigating the hormonal transition. Hormonal fluctuations and the menopause transition are rarely factored into training plans, even by coaches, and a significant number of female endurance athletes over 40 drop out due to injuries that better data could have prevented.
Adaptive is built for serious amateur female endurance athletes roughly between 40 and 60, training seriously for triathlon, marathon, or ultra trail running. The platform integrates female physiology and hormonal transition directly into training recommendations, on a subscription model, positioned as an intelligent layer on top of the tools athletes already use.
Karianne is building Adaptive's credibility deliberately: talking directly to athletes and the coaches who guide them, assembling a scientific advisory board, and pursuing academic partnerships to validate the platform's approach. She is currently raising €450,000 to build the MVP and fund the core team. Connect with Karianne for more information.
Listen to Episode 168 on Spotify, Apple or YouTube
Listen on Apple Podcasts Featured Event: TEDx Coolhaven Women
The TEDx Coolhaven Women event takes place on 9 October from 6:30 to 11:30 in the evening at HAL4 aan de Maas in Rotterdam. This year’s theme is The New Builders, a theme that seamlessly aligns with the content on this podcast.
Throughout the evening, you’ll hear powerful TEDx talks from women who are redesigning the systems that shape our lives—from leadership and parenting to women’s health, mental healthcare, and access to investment capital. Together, they’ll explore what it really takes to build a better future.
As a proud media sponsor, I am happy to offer you a chance to be there in person, to listen to groundbreaking talks and meet and network with like-minded people. As a listener to the podcast, you’ll get a 25% discount when you use the code WDT25 at checkout. And even though this is a TEDx Women event, men are very welcome to join.
- 🗓️ 9 October 2026, from 18:30 - 23:30
- 📍 HAL4 aan de Maas in Rotterdam
- 🎟️ You can buy your ticket here.
-
Turning Early Fans Into a Marketing Engine | Show notes for episode 167 with Elise Mol
About 18 minutes into our conversation, Elise Mol mentions a fun stat: “ninety-seven percent of people go to an event because someone else is going.” It captures the heart of what she is passionate about: making sure the other 3% start being ambassadors. Spoiler: that is not about the ad spend either.
Elise is co-founder of BASH, a company that helps event organizers sell out their event by helping them create and activate a community of visitors.
In episode 167, she takes us on her journey as a co-founder of an event marketing business that started as a replacement for Facebook Events. We talk about
- What it meant to gear up only to go back to zero as COVID lockdowns were lifted and then reinstated,
- Why BASH sells to the organizers who get their concept, not the ones having problems selling out.
- How BASH founders use investors who have been builders to ensure they get the advice they need to make the right decisions.
In the end, the conversation with Elise Mol is about how community is central to building a loyal following base and selling out an event. But I think the main takeaway extends beyond the event space: startups need to create markets too. So community building is a core component of building a company. medicine, and, towards the end, a full set of takeaways for founders who are fundraising.
Start listening by pressing play below.
Or keep reading for practical takeaways, highlights, and trends from the episode.
Practical Takeaways for Founders
In order to be successful, founders, like event organizers, have to find early fans who can turn into ambassadors. So even though a big part of our conversation is about events, there are a few learnings from this episode that apply to founders too. Here are three.
Sell to your early fans
Elise is very clear on the target audience for BASH: we sell to the ones who already get it. For events, that is the 3% discoverers and super fans who follow a specific artist anywhere. For founders, it’s usually the 2,5% of innovators. It’s a way to avoid having to convince the skeptics, and you’re more likely to activate the early buyers as ambassadors for your product and your growth.
Partner with “Founder-Investors”
So far, BASH raised €2 million. It did so from angel investors who had built startups themselves. That wasn’t by accident. It was a way to work with people who shared their entrepreneurial mindset so the pitches land more naturally. These investors also bring invaluable lessons that help BASH founders avoid costly operational mistakes. Both are characteristics that all founders can benefit from.
Schedule time for thinking
If there is one thing founders are short on, it is time to think. Elise shares that she actively blocks out time in her calendar to think. She also recommends writing down the specific problem or question to contemplate, as this allows the brain to process it subconsciously during routine, daily tasks like cycling or doing the dishes.
What connects these takeaways is that they’re all about consciously putting your attention and effort on one specific thing, rather than doing everything at the same time.
Know a founder who could benefit from some focused energy? Use the share buttons below to share the episode with them.
Or scroll down for magic moments.
Highlights and timestamps
Time Highlight 00:00 Introduction 04:50 BASH and Its Origins 07:04 The Impact of COVID-19 on Event Planning 10:05 Transitioning from User to Organizer Focus 12:53 Challenges Faced by Event Organizers Post-COVID 16:08 The Importance of Early Ticket Sales 18:51 Building Community and FOMO in Event Marketing 21:46 BASH’s Role in Supporting Event Organizers 26:43 The Art of Event Organization 32:46 Building Community Through Events 38:39 Scaling and Cultural Considerations 42:38 Goal Setting and Company Growth 46:09 Design Principles for Trust and Belonging
The Episode In an Infographic
3 Magic Moments In The Episode
Startups face constant pressure to take the easier path, the quicker pivot, the shortcut that gets results faster. Across this conversation, Elise shares examples of how BASH founders kept choosing not to. Here are three magic moments that show what that looked like in practice.
Staying True to Real-Life Connection
When lockdowns hit in 2020, BASH had an easy way out: go fully digital, as plenty of community platforms did at the time. Elise and her co-founders didn’t take it. As the team really flows on the belief that real-life connection is what they should be building toward, they decided not to pivot to “a Discord setting”.
The magic of an amazing event
Elise co-founded a company that helps event organizers sell more tickets through marketing and community. Yet when asked what actually makes an event succeed, she puts the credit elsewhere: “the most valuable thing you can do as an organizer is just create an amazing event… that is ninety percent of the work.” BASH, in her own accounting, is the other ten.
The “Pay-It-Forward” Female Founder Design Principle
When asked what would make a trust-and-belonging tool actually work, Elise didn’t hesitate: turn your biggest fans into advocates. It’s the same loop BASH runs on, and she sees the female founder ecosystem as built for exactly this, people who’ve made it, pulling others up behind them.
In an industry that rewards speed and constant pivoting, Elise’s magic is holding her ground: on real-life connection, on what actually sells out an event, and on who gets to benefit when something works.
🗣 What was your magic moment from the episode? Was it one of the moments above, or maybe a totally different moment? Drop your magic moment below or slide into the DMs on LinkedIn or Instagram!
Leave a Reply
Or scroll down for my favorite quote from the episode.
The Quote from the Episode
Selling tickets is becoming more difficult as event visitors have less to spend and more options competing for it. Elise's advice: sell some tickets early, then let those buyers help you fill the room. In her own words:
“Getting those first people on board is really like its own marketing channel.”
— Elise Mol, co-founder of BASHWant to try what being an ambassador feels like? Use the share button to let your crowd know about the episode.
3 Trends I’m Seeing Across Conversations
Elise and the other founders skipped the shortcuts when building BASH, choosing instead to focus on what stayed close to their own core beliefs. In our conversation, three trends surfaced that have touchpoints with other episodes.
Preferring Real-Life Connection Over Digital Isolation
BASH founders decided not to go digital when almost everyone else did. They knew that humans are social creatures who would prefer real-life connections over digital ones. We saw this before in episode 149, where Marsha Goei built a dating app that sent matches off on their first date rather than keeping them chatting in the app. Earlier on, in episode 118, Anouk Vlietman talked about the “epidemic of disconnection” and the absolute necessity of prioritizing human connection, empathy, and curiosity as technologies like AI advance.
Preferring investors with startup experience
Elise and her co-founders specifically focused on attracting investors who have built startups themselves. This preference is not new if you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while. Back in episode 124, Anieke Lamers mentioned how having experience as both founder and investor helps her do her work as partner at the Borski Fund. And in episode 146, Faviola Dadis emphasized the importance of shared operational wisdom when looking for investors.
Preferring to focus on the thing you do best
BASH is not a one-size-fits-all solution for event organizers. They rely on ticketing platforms like Paylogic and Weeztix to do the ticketing part so BASH can focus on the community activation. In episode 152, interestingly also about events, Izzy Sayers described the importance for founders to focus on what they’re good at and getting external input from experts on other topics. Along those same lines, Eliza Moore shared in episode 148 how operators can play a key role in bringing the vision of founders to life.
The pattern that holds across all three: founders who resist the shortcut, in connection, in capital, in what they build themselves, tend to end up with something that lasts longer than the easier version would have.
🗣️ What was the value you got from listening to this episode? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
Leave a Reply
Coming Up On Women Disrupting Tech
For female endurance athletes, the real challenge isn’t only the hormonal transition they go through during menopause; it’s how to keep performing through it, without the support of a training plan that is tailored to their situation.
That’s the subject of episode 168, where Karianne Kraaijestein, founder of Adaptive, joins me to talk about coaching female endurance athletes through this transition using the data their bodies actually need, instead of training plans built for someone else’s.
In the clip below, she explains why this shift can feel like falling off a cliff, start as early as the mid-thirties for some women and the mid-forties for others, and why so many women notice something changing in their bodies and their performance without being able to name what it is.
Curious why women are more suited for endurance sports, also at a later stage and how Adaptive helps them sustain their athletic performance while going through hormonal changes? Simply leave your email below to find the episode in your inbox on 3 September 2026 at 8:00 hours CEST.
Until then, as always, keep being awesome,
Dirkjan
What I Want to Leave You With
This episode started when I connected with Elise through Marsha Goei at an AtVenture Event. And a few weeks later, at the Culture Code organized by House of Inclusion, I heard about how community and early ticket sales play into the success of an event. Call it serendipity, but it helped me prepare.
At its core, this episode highlights that in an increasingly crowded event space, having a community of ambassadors can be the difference between being able to grow and scrambling to sell enough tickets to break even.
What I specifically remember is that discount codes and early bird discounts could soon be replaced by exclusive offers and ambassadors. That is in line with a broader societal longing for real human connection.
Another thing that I keep from this episode is Elise’s advice to treat the early supporters of FundingCoach as ambassadors who can help me build a thriving community.
Finally, by the time you listen to this episode, Elise has decided to leave BASH to pursue other opportunities. She continues to support the remaining founders in making BASH a success.
Listen to the full conversation with Elise Mol on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. And if you are a female founder navigating a funding conversation, take a look at FundingCoach.ai.
About Elise Mol
Elise Mol is co-founder of BASH, a platform that helps event organizers turn ticket buyers into a community-driven marketing engine. She has been building BASH from the ground up since 2020, when she and her co-founders started the company at the height of the pandemic.
Her role has shifted with what the company needed most, from designing the data architecture and building the financial models that helped BASH raise €2 million in its early days, to leading sales and customer success as the team works toward product-market fit.
You can connect with her on LinkedIn.
About BASH
BASH helps event organizers sell tickets earlier by turning their existing community into a presale engine. Organizers give their community exclusive, personal access to tickets through WhatsApp and email, before a wider public sale opens, rather than relying on public early-bird discounts that don't distinguish loyal fans from anyone else. BASH works alongside existing ticket providers like Paylogic and Weeztix rather than replacing them, adding a community and presale layer on top of the ticketing systems organizers already use.
BASH was founded in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, and has worked with organizers including Audio Obscura, Lofi, and Korsakov.
You can learn more on the website, or connect with BASH on LinkedIn or Instagram.
Listen to Episode 167 on Spotify, Apple or YouTube
Listen on Apple Podcasts Featured Event: TEDx Coolhaven Women
The TEDx Coolhaven Women event takes place on 9 October from 6:30 to 11:30 in the evening at HAL4 aan de Maas in Rotterdam. This year’s theme is The New Builders, a theme that seamlessly aligns with the content on this podcast.
Throughout the evening, you’ll hear powerful TEDx talks from women who are redesigning the systems that shape our lives—from leadership and parenting to women’s health, mental healthcare, and access to investment capital. Together, they’ll explore what it really takes to build a better future.
As a proud media sponsor, I am happy to offer you a chance to be there in person, to listen to groundbreaking talks and meet and network with like-minded people. As a listener to the podcast, you’ll get a 25% discount when you use the code WDT25 at checkout. And even though this is a TEDx Women event, men are very welcome to join.
- 🗓️ 9 October 2026, from 18:30 - 23:30
- 📍 HAL4 aan de Maas in Rotterdam
- 🎟️ You can buy your ticket here.
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Using Technology To Bring the Human Side Back To Medicine | Show notes for episode 166 with Dr. Hannah Allen
Many clinicians and patients are skeptical about the use of AI in medicine. Yet, according to some research, 75-80% of clinicians use AI to support them in operating at the top of their license. As a result, they enjoy being a doctor again, a feeling that was absent in medicine for some time.
Their patients feel the positive effects, too. Many feel that clinicians actually hear them and make them part of the decision-making process. In that sense, technology is humanizing medicine.
So how can we deploy technology in such a way that it supports both clinicians and patients, while putting humans back in control? That is what Dr. Hannah Allen and I discuss in episode 166.
Dr. Hannah Allen is the Chief Medical Officer at Heidi, a technology company that is building an AI Care Partner that helps clinicians focus on patients again by automating the administrative work.
Here are some of the highlights:
- How the administrative burden in medicine contributes to 42% of UK doctors thinking about leaving medicine in the next 5 years
- What health data from pregnant women can show us about their health later in life, and how it can predict conditions.
- Why software vendors, like Heidi, should do everything they can to educate clinicians about the upside, but also the risks of using AI.
Plus, you’ll hear the story of a pediatrician who used Heidi’s AI to write a patient explainer for a seven-year-old “in the style of Taylor Swift”.
While this episode is relatively short, it is filled with anecdotes of building a tech company in a regulated industry, a debate around the role of AI in medicine, and, towards the end, a full set of takeaways for founders who are fundraising.
Start listening by pressing play below.
Using Technology To Bring the Human Side Back To Medicine with Dr. Hannah Allen | Ep. 166 – Women Disrupting Tech
Or keep reading for practical takeaways, highlights, and trends from the episode.
Practical Takeaways for Founders
Heidi is not Dr. Hannah Allen’s first healthtech company. She previously worked at Babylon, a telemedicine company, where she headed up the team that launched the UK’s first digital-first primary care service. After that, she founded her own women’s health startup in the pregnancy and postnatal space. That means she has lots of learnings that founders can benefit from. Here are three:
Counter the bias with data.
Hannah experienced first-hand the stark and persistent biases in venture capital. Even female VCs typically ask female founders questions about risk and safety. Male founders more often get questions about growth and opportunity instead. Founders can counter this gap by remaining highly data-driven throughout the process.
Don’t raise just for the sake of raising.
She advises that founders shouldn’t be raising capital for the sake of it. According to her, it is often far better to achieve product-market fit in a non-VC environment first, and then raise capital with highly specific, strategic operational goals.
Look for VCs who have run companies themselves.
Founders should also look for investors with experience running a company themselves. These “operator VCs” understand the struggles of building firsthand, and they can connect founders with a network of peers going through the same experience.
These lessons clearly come from a woman who has experienced the healthtech ecosystem. And while they apply to all founders, they particularly benefit female founders.
So when you know a female founder in healthtech who could benefit from these lessons, use the share buttons below to share the episode with them.
Or scroll down for magic moments.
Highlights and timestamps
Time Highlight 00:00 Introduction 04:35 Introduction to Dr. Hannah Allen 07:32 Transitioning from Medicine to Tech 10:31 The Role of Technology in Healthcare 13:43 Global Healthcare Challenges 17:15 Predicting Women’s Health Issues 21:20 AI in Healthcare: Opportunities and Concerns 25:18 Heidi: Revolutionizing Clinical Workflows 27:14 The Rise of Heidi: Word of Mouth Success 28:50 Measuring Impact: Time Savings and Burnout Reduction 30:01 Expanding Horizons: Beyond Documentation 32:03 The Role of AI in Clinical Practice 35:18 Transforming Patient Interactions with AI 39:01 Patient Feedback and Trust in AI 43:50 The Human Element in Healthcare 45:04 Future Vision: A Seamless Healthcare Experience 47:18 Advice for Founders: Building for Real Problems 50:44 Closing Thoughts and Resources
The Episode In an Infographic
3 Magic Moments In The Episode
Dr. Hannah Allen was jaded from a bruising VC fundraising experience when a friend told her to try Heidi. She calls what happened next ‘seeing magic’. Here are three more moments when magic shows up in the episode.
Her wow moment at a tennis match.
Dr. Allen knows from experience that clinicians are historically hard-to-impress. So overhearing two local doctors recommending Heidi to each other while she was watching her daughter’s tennis match was a magic moment. The word-of-mouth validation among clinicians showed her how rapidly the tool’s impact was scaling.
The pediatrician’s Taylor Swift explainer.
How do you explain a medical condition to a seven-year-old? One pediatrician decided to ask Heidi to generate a Taylor Swift-style patient explainer. It’s a wonderful example of how AI can be used to help explain difficult problems in language people can understand. Oh, and the girl loved it.
Making the patient part of the medical decision process
Information from patients is critical in deciding the right diagnosis and treatment. Hannah gives the example of a respiratory doctor who shows his patients the AI-generated note and asks, “Is anything missing?” So patients can add or correct details on the spot. This moment shows how AI can be used to make patients part of the decision-making process around their health.
These moments matter because, at a time when many of us are wary of AI’s mistakes and skeptical of its place in medicine, they show the tool making things better in small, specific ways: a scaling business, a comforted child, a more equal conversation.
🗣 What was your magic moment from the episode? Was it the comment at her daughter’s tennis match, the patient explainer in Taylor Swift style, or the patient being included in the decision process? Drop your magic moment below or slide into the DMs on LinkedIn or Instagram!
Leave a Reply
Or scroll down for my favorite quote from the episode.
The Quote from the Episode
"Let's use technology to allow medicine to become more human again and allow us to focus on that really nice human side of healthcare."
— Dr. Hannah Allen, Chief Medical Officer at HeidiDr. Allen has seen what the stress and administrative burden can do to doctors and nurses and the quality of their decisions. AI can free doctors from turning their backs to type on a keyboard. Instead, they can look the patient in the eye, offer non-verbal empathy, and explain their clinical thoughts out loud.
Research from external evaluations shows that over 90% of patients surveyed felt more listened to when their doctor used the AI scribe.
Know a founder who is skeptical about using AI in medicine? Use the buttons to share it with them.
3 Trends I’m Seeing Across Conversations
There are many overlapping threads to be found in this episode. One of the reasons for that is what Heidi does: use AI in the context of medicine. The other, of course, is that women’s health and health in general are topics that have been featured regularly on this podcast. So here are three topics from this episode that have appeared in previous episodes as well.
The women’s health data gap
If you’ve listened regularly, you’ll know that capturing and understanding women’s hormonal data is the master key to unlocking a lot of cures, treatments and solutions to women’s health conditions. Dr. Allen mentions that real-time hormone tracking products represent the next frontier in personalized wellness. We’ve talked about this topic in many recent episodes, starting with episode 140 with Ida Tin.
The role of AI in reducing the admin for clinicians
It is clear that it can help clinicians in taking care of the administrative burden. Heidi is a great example of that. We saw another example in episode 56 where Jacqueline Kazmaier shared how her company, Autoscriber, is supporting medical specialists with their clinical note-taking. And in episode 112, Raju Joshi talks about how her company, Cogensus, uses AI to surface early signals of cognitive decline, information that gives clinicians something to act on sooner.
The ‘Left Shift” to preventative health
At the start of the episode, Dr. Allen talks about pregnancy as a predictor of women’s later health. It fits the broader trend she sees: the “left shift” away overall from reactive, episodic medicine to continuous, proactive, and preventative care. From Dr Robin Blackstone, we heard in episode 163 that this shift is needed for healthcare to move to a state where it keeps people healthy.
🗣️ How do you feel about the role of AI in medicine? Can it support the trend towards more preventative health? Or do we need more or better data? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
Leave a Reply
Coming Up On Women Disrupting Tech
Only 3% of people who show up to an event went looking for it. The other 97% came because someone they trust was already going. In episode 167, Elise Mol, founder of BASH, breaks down what that means for how event organizers should be selling tickets, and why an industry many assume is booming post-COVID is actually under more pressure than ever.
In this clip, Elise walks through what happens when an event sells a meaningful share of its tickets right when they go live. The early buyers become advocates in the lead-up, pulling friends in because, as she puts it, we're social creatures who want to be where the people we like are going. Two hundred early buyers today means two hundred people spending the next twelve weeks doing your marketing for you.
Curious how BASH builds exclusivity into ticket access to make that pull even stronger? Leave your email address below to find new episodes in your inbox every Thursday.
What I Want to Leave You With
If this episode shows one thing, it's this: the role of AI in healthcare is not just about saving GPs an hour a day in admin. It's about enabling medical professionals (doctors, surgeons, specialists, nurses) to perform at the top of their license.
When we remove the cognitive overwhelm of paperwork and the "Swiss cheese" hazard of documentation errors, we give doctors their headspace back. With that, we improve decision-making and bring back the "fun" in practicing medicine.
There is also another lesson from the Heidi story: AI should not replace humans. Instead, it's about making sure it operates alongside humans as a support. In that way, AI is about allowing medicine to become human again.
PS. During the episode, Dr Allen also mentions a company pioneering real-time hormone monitoring (she refers to it as the ZOE for hormone monitoring). The UK company that is doing that is Level Zero Health. You can take a look at their website here.
Listen to the full conversation with Sophie Haccou on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. And if you are a female founder navigating a funding conversation, take a look at FundingCoach.ai.
About Dr. Hannah Allen
Dr. Hannah Allen is the Chief Medical Officer at Heidi. She focuses on how technology can reduce cognitive load for clinicians and improve the experience of care, without losing the human side of medicine.
She is a practicing GP who has spent the last decade working in health technology. She practiced for 14 years across rural, inner-city, and hospital settings in the UK before moving into tech at Babylon Health, where she built out the women's health vertical and later headed the team that launched the UK's first digital-first primary care service. She went on to found her own women's health startup in the pregnancy and postnatal space, building a longitudinal data pipeline to help predict disease risk earlier in a woman's life.
You can connect with her on LinkedIn.
About Heidi
Heidi is building an AI Care Partner to expand clinical capacity by automating administrative work (documentation, form filling, and task management) so clinicians can focus on patients. Used across emergency departments, general practice, and specialist clinics, Heidi supports more than 2 million consults each week in 110 languages from 116 countries.
Founded in Melbourne, Australia, Heidi has raised $96.6M USD from global investors including Point72 Private Investments, Blackbird, Headline, Phoenix Court's growth fund - Latitude, Possible Ventures, and Archangel. Heidi adheres to international standards including the NHS, HIPAA, GDPR, and Australian Privacy Principles, and has obtained enterprise-grade security certifications such as SOC2 and ISO27001.
You can learn more on the website or follow Heidi on LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube.
Listen to Episode 166 on Spotify, Apple or YouTube
Listen on Apple Podcasts Featured Event: TEDx Coolhaven Women
The TEDx Coolhaven Women event takes place on 9 October from 6:30 to 11:30 in the evening at HAL4 aan de Maas in Rotterdam. This year’s theme is The New Builders, a theme that seamlessly aligns with the content on this podcast.
Throughout the evening, you’ll hear powerful TEDx talks from women who are redesigning the systems that shape our lives—from leadership and parenting to women’s health, mental healthcare, and access to investment capital. Together, they’ll explore what it really takes to build a better future.
As a proud media sponsor, I am happy to offer you a chance to be there in person, to listen to groundbreaking talks and meet and network with like-minded people. As a listener to the podcast, you’ll get a 25% discount when you use the code WDT25 at checkout. And even though this is a TEDx Women event, men are very welcome to join.
- 🗓️ 9 October 2026, from 18:30 - 23:30
- 📍 HAL4 aan de Maas in Rotterdam
- 🎟️ You can buy your ticket here.
-
Tackling Menstrual Cup Hygiene and Period Poverty | Show notes for episode 165 with Sophie Haccou
When Sophie Haccou was asked in university what was bad about public toilets in the Netherlands, she could think of one thing: menstruation. She started doing a deep dive with interviews, focused on the menstrual cup specifically.
Along the way, she learned about period poverty, not being able to afford to buy both food and menstrual products. With CupHub, she is on a mission to tackle both. And not just in the Netherlands.
In episode 165 of Women Disrupting Tech, Sophie shares how she moved from fixing public toilets to developing Casey, a portable menstrual cup rinser that women can use anywhere there’s a toilet and clean water. Here’s what you’ll learn by listening.
- How Casey makes menstrual cups more practical and hygienic.
- Why affordability is just one aspect of addressing period poverty, and what the other parts of the puzzle are.
- What the role of community and education is in breaking taboos around menstruation.
Plus, you’ll learn why CupHub is crowdfunding to build and scale their menstrual health solutions.
In the end, our conversation is about creating agency for women, the ability to go and do whatever they want when they’re having their period.
Start listening by pressing play below.
Tackling Menstrual Cup Hygiene and Period Poverty with Sophie Haccou | Ep. 165 – Women Disrupting Tech
Or keep reading for practical takeaways, highlights, and trends from the episode.
Practical Takeaways for Founders
Towards the end of our conversation, we talk about Sophie’s fundraising experiences so far. For hardware startups, like CupHub, the early part of this journey is extra difficult: they often lack early traction needed to get investors on board that can help them build prototypes so they can start pilots. Here are three takeaways from our conversation that can benefit other founders as well.
Crowdfunding to stay out of the valley of death
Sophie mentions one of the squeezes that startups can end up in when they don’t get investments: the upfront cost of hardware is significant. So if you don’t get investments, you get stuck. Crowdfunding can be a way to stay out of what is known as the valley of death. The proceeds can be used for prototyping and getting pilots to build the proof points that are needed to convince VCs at a later stage.
Crowdfunding as community building
There are more advantages to crowdfunding than bridging the gap between ideas and early traction. For early-stage startups, crowdfunding as a first step can be valuable because it creates a network of ambassadors. It also allows investors with smaller contributions to join, feel a sense of ownership and become vocal supporters of the brand. And crowdfunding is a way to market a company, a way to get publicity.
Filtering advice is a founder’s job
Sophie received a lot of advice from investors early on. All well-intended, but also overwhelming. Her lesson was to not implement all the advice you receive. While talking to people is a good way to learn from other people’s successes and failures, the founder must remain the one “steering the wheel” and check the advice against their own read of the business.
These lessons combined can help founders stay in control, choose the funding and the community that can support them best, while choosing what advice to act on.
Know a founder building in FemTech who could benefit from these insights? Use the share buttons below.
Or scroll down for magic moments.
Highlights and timestamps
Time Highlight 00:00 Introduction 04:50 Introduction to Sophie Haccou and CupHub 08:47 Development of Casey, the portable menstrual cup rinser 12:51 Designing user-friendly and sustainable menstrual products 16:51 Business model: crowdfunding and social impact partnerships 18:50 Material safety and standards for menstrual cups 20:42 Future prospects: diagnostics and FemTech innovations 22:41 Global expansion and impact in developing countries 24:49 The role of community in breaking taboos 26:51 Crowdfunding strategy and investor engagement 28:50 Partnerships with food banks and NGOs 30:58 Access to clean water and sterilization in different regions 32:50 The importance of education in schools about menstruation 34:56 The social and health impact of menstrual products 36:57 The future of FemTech and diagnostics 38:43 Advice for female founders and entrepreneurs 40:49 Building a community and sharing experiences 42:43 Expanding internationally and future goals 44:52 Funding strategies and business sustainability 46:43 The role of men in menstrual health awareness 48:52 Closing thoughts and how to support CupHub
The Episode In an Infographic
3 Magic Moments In The Episode
One of the humorous parts of the episode is when Sophie mentions her co-founder Aart being on stage at the Philips Innovation Awards and getting a question around the materials used in the product and if they’re fit for use inside the vagina. Sophie recalls him dryly mentioning that ‘we put many things inside it on a sort of daily basis.’ (referring to sex). Here are three more magic moments to enjoy.
Her co-founder was sent out of the menstruation class in high school
When we talk about the taboo that surrounds menstruation, Sophie mentions that her co-founder Aart was once sent out of a biology class in high school, because menstruation was a topic that was ‘only for girls’. As a co-founder, he is now an expert when it comes to how period products work and the materials used in them. It’s a 180-degree turn that not many men will make in their lives.
Supporting her mother-in-law in biology class
Sophie’s mother-in-law is a biology teacher. And until Sophie and Aart started building Casey, she knew about menstruation cups but could not explain how they work and how to clean them. Eventually, Sophie joined her to answer the questions from pupils. It’s invaluable knowledge that gives the pupils an option to really choose the menstrual product that is right for them.
Casey as a cocktail shaker
When I ask Sophie to describe how Casey works, she comes up with the cocktail shaker analogy. It makes a seemingly complex medical-grade hygiene product easy to understand and to operate. Simply shake it like a cocktail shaker.
These moments show three magic traits that any founder should have: being curious, being able to make a complex product easy to understand, and sharing knowledge.
🗣 What was your magic moment from the episode? Was it the turnaround her co-founder made, the guest lesson about menstruation, or the analogy of a cocktail shaker? Drop your magic moment below or slide into the DMs on LinkedIn or Instagram!
Leave a Reply
Or scroll down for my favorite quote from the episode.
The Quote from the Episode
When we discuss expansion plans, Sophie says that she is currently in talks with a foundation in Kenya that builds schools and has established relationships with local communities, about testing CupHub's cup and rinser, Casey, in that context. It leads her to say this:
"It's the dream to tackle period poverty, not just in the Netherlands but hopefully in the whole world.”
— Sophie HaccouThe Kenya conversation is still early - a foundation contact, not a signed pilot - but it shows the ambition isn't abstract. It's already attached to a specific place and a specific set of people willing to test it.
Know a founder who could use an inspiring quote like this for their own journey? Use the buttons to share it with them.
3 Trends I’m Seeing Across Conversations
Over the past few weeks, we’ve had quite a few episodes about women’s health and specific products in that space. When we compare this episode with the recent ones, three major themes and trends emerge:
Agency as a driver for women’s health products
CupHub's design is focused on giving "the choice back to women" and providing the autonomy to manage their periods on their own terms. In earlier episodes, we heard from founders who build tools that reduce clinical or doctor dependency, giving users the agency and education to manage their conditions independently. We saw this in episode 162, about the valve that Leonie van de Kamer is building with Certain, and in episode 164 about the adaptable pessary from Mirjam Weemhoff and Bart van Diepenbeek. These medical devices do pretty much the same in terms of agency. And in episode 153, the central idea behind Cyclisity is to educate women so they can take control of their own fertility.
Breaking the taboo through community and education
A core philosophy in this episode is that "a taboo is created when you don't know anything about something". Sophie argues that taboo subjects, whether they involve menstruation, sexual misconduct, or personal health, can only be dismantled through active education, knowledge-sharing, and (digital) spaces where users can openly discuss their lived experiences. Besides episodes 162 and 164, this topic comes back as early as episode 66 with Mamamoon (now 3mbrace) founder Kasia Pokrop. She uses education on her platform to guide women through the 3 Ms of women’s health (Menstruation, Motherhood, Menopause).
The funding gap between hardware and software
Sophie highlights a major structural barrier for hardware startups: the upfront development and manufacturing costs (such as physical molds for CupHub's Casey rinsing device) are incredibly high. She also highlights that the investors she spoke to remain heavily biased toward software and AI. This forces physical health tech and MedTech founders to rely on alternative pathways like bootstrapping and crowdfunding to build community ambassadors first. We heard something similar from Leonie van de Kamer (episode 162) and Karen Berg (in episode 161). Leonie van de Kamer talks about the friction in getting funding to build a physical medical device that does not exist yet. Karen noted that FemTech settles for building easy wellness products because they're fundable instead of looking at more complex solutions that address the core of the problem.
What connects these three trends is that the products giving women the most control are also the hardest to talk about and the hardest to fund; taboo keeps them out of the conversation, and the higher cost of building something real, not just an app, keeps them out of the investment case.
🗣️ How do you look at these trends? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
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Coming Up On Women Disrupting Tech
What does it actually take for AI to make healthcare more human? In episode 166, I speak with Dr. Hannah Allen, Chief Medical Officer at Heidi, about what happens when clinicians get back the time and headspace that administration has taken away from them.
In this short preview, Hannah makes a simple point: the best use of AI is to give clinicians more space for exactly that, the human side of medicine.
Curious how Heidi is creating more space for that human side? Leave your email address below to find new episodes in your inbox every Thursday.
What I Want to Leave You With
A statistic in Sophie’s story that shocked me was that 1 in 8 women in the Netherlands needs to choose between food and menstrual products. You’d think that has nothing to do with taboo, until you realize how poverty impacts women in their health and their wallet. It’s a sort of self-reinforcing system of a lack of education, a lack of money that results in a lack of safe options, health damage, loss of income, and so on. This is why the true magic is in CupHub’s collaboration with the foodbank (Voedselbank) because it addresses period poverty at its core.
But there is no taboo without a lack of education, and canceling a taboo therefore requires sharing knowledge. Well, especially for men, this episode is full of knowledge about a woman’s personal hygiene and the mental load that comes with menstruation. That’s important, because I doubt that Aart was the only boy who was ever told that menstruation is a woman’s affair.
But even for women, considering Sophie’s words that you’re lucky as a woman to be taught about menstruation at school, there is a lot to learn in this episode, like how long you can have a tampon in.
I want to close with a learning that may be strange, but also a good example of my own biases: Thanks to Sophie’s story about the problems with public toilets, I started to notice that the toilets at my coffee shop have a sink inside the toilet. I always wondered why, but as it turns out, it is not a coincidence. The place is run by women. They understand how important it is for their business that women are able to go for coffee even when they menstruate.
PS At the time of writing the blog, the crowdfunding has already reached 100% of its target amount. But since there is a stretch goal, that should not keep you from donating.
Listen to the full conversation with Sophie Haccou on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. And if you are a female founder navigating a funding conversation, take a look at FundingCoach.ai.
About Sophie Haccou
Sophie Haccou is co-founder of CupHub, the Dutch startup building Casey, a portable rinsing device for menstrual cups.
She studied industrial design engineering at TU Delft, focusing on strategic product design, what the market wants and needs, while active in pushing back on sexual misconduct during her studies. It was her bachelor's end project, tasked with improving the public toilet, that led her to menstruation as the answer and into a deep dive of interviews focused specifically on the menstrual cup.
She met co-founder Aart in the Build Your Startup elective at TU Delft, where the two of them decided to turn the idea into a real company. Sophie handles the market and strategic side of CupHub, while Aart focuses on the technical, materials, and production side.
You can connect with Sophie Haccou on LinkedIn.
About CupHub
CupHub is a Dutch startup building Casey, a portable rinsing device that makes menstrual cups practical to use anywhere, not just at home. Casey solves the problem of nowhere to rinse a cup once you're out the door, since almost no public toilet stall has a sink inside it.
The company also takes on the affordability side of periods. Even in the Netherlands, one in eight menstruators has to choose between food and period products. Through a partnership with the Voedselbank (food bank), CupHub works to close that gap alongside the practicality problem Casey solves.
CupHub has been built by co-founders Sophie Haccou and Aart while bootstrapped, working other jobs to fund the company's early development. The team is now raising through crowdfunding rather than VCs, with a goal of €100,000 and a stretch goal of €200,000 to go full-time and scale production.
You can support CupHub's crowdfunding campaign on CrowdAboutNow, or follow along on LinkedIn and Instagram, or visit CupHub.net.
Listen to Episode 165 on Spotify, Apple or YouTube
Listen on Apple Podcasts Featured Event: TEDx Coolhaven Women
The TEDx Coolhaven Women event takes place on 9 October from 6:30 to 11:30 in the evening at HAL4 aan de Maas in Rotterdam. This year’s theme is The New Builders, a theme that seamlessly aligns with the content on this podcast.
Throughout the evening, you’ll hear powerful TEDx talks from women who are redesigning the systems that shape our lives—from leadership and parenting to women’s health, mental healthcare, and access to investment capital. Together, they’ll explore what it really takes to build a better future.
As a proud media sponsor, I am happy to offer you a chance to be there in person, to listen to groundbreaking talks and meet and network with like-minded people. As a listener to the podcast, you’ll get a 25% discount when you use the code WDT25 at checkout. And even though this is a TEDx Women event, men are very welcome to join.
- 🗓️ 9 October 2026, from 18:30 - 23:30
- 📍 HAL4 aan de Maas in Rotterdam
- 🎟️ You can buy your ticket here.
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Building an Adaptable Pessary To Restore Women’s Autonomy | Show notes for episode 164 with Mirjam Weemhoff and Bart van Diepenbeek
Half of the women over 40 will experience some form of Pelvic Organ Prolapse in their lives. Yet, it’s a topic that is never talked about. So, it’s no surprise that Saturn Pelvic Health co-founder Mirjam Weemhoff sees relief in the eyes of the women she speaks with as a urogynecologist.
The women who suffer from it currently have two choices: surgery or a pessary. Both solutions are suboptimal in their own way. Surgery comes with possible complications and rarely provides durable pelvic support. Pessaries, when they fit well, do a better job at supporting the pelvic floor, but they come with physical irritation and other side effects. Plus, they need to be cleaned by a healthcare professional.
In this episode of Women Disrupting Tech, Mirjam and her co-founder Bart van Diepenbeek share their story of building Flexsupp, an adaptable pessary that provides the right support and allows women to use it when they need it and clean it in the privacy of their home.
You’ll learn:
- What the impact of Pelvic Organ Prolapse is on women’s quality of life, and why existing options fall short.
- Why the industry has no incentive to innovate, leaving women without a good solution and healthcare workers with large storage rooms of one-size-fits-all pessaries.
- How Flexsupp is a patented, medically developed device that is individually adaptable to match the complex, unique anatomy of the pelvic floor.
Plus, you’ll discover how taboo plays a role in solving the problem and in fundraising, including how Bart uses being a man to normalize the conversation.
Ultimately, you’ll hear a tale about how innovation is as much about building a new product as it is about giving back agency to millions of women.
Start listening by pressing play below.
Building an Adaptable Pessary To Restore Women's Autonomy with Mirjam Weemhoff & Bart van Diepenbeek | Ep 164 – Women Disrupting Tech
Or keep reading for practical takeaways, highlights, and trends from the episode.
Practical Takeaways for Founders
Innovation is rarely a straight line in any domain. Founders need to be able to deal with setbacks, roadblocks and pushback from directions where you’d least expect it. Here are three takeaways around these themes.
The Last Mile Challenge is real; a diverse team gets you through
It’s common for MedTech founders to underestimate how much it takes to turn a clinical idea into a manufactured product. As Mirjam admits, the last 10% took significantly longer than expected. Having a diverse team helped both in talking through setbacks and in celebrating the small wins. The extra time is something founders have to accept, but the Saturn story shows that they can choose to make the journey less hard on themselves.
The nearest market entry may not be where you think.
Many MedTech startups explore growth in the US. Saturn Pelvic Health chooses to take a different path for their go-to-market and grow in the EU before going to the US. When asked why, the answer is simple: the EU is where their existing clinical network is, so it’s easier to get good-quality feedback fast. They accept that it may take longer, but that good-quality feedback will benefit them in the end. The takeaway: choosing your entry market wisely will help you achieve the growth you aim for.
Normalize the conversation to break the taboo
Pelvic health is a topic that is surrounded by taboo. So we spend quite some time discussing how the Saturn team is working to break it. Mirjam mentions that they landed on hiring a male CEO because they understood that men can serve as a bridge in bringing a taboo topic to male investors. The team also supports artists who create projects that allow people to talk about their condition more openly. It underscores how building in FemTech is as much about innovation as it is about breaking the taboo.
What links these three moments is that founders get better outcomes by deliberately seeking out perspectives unlike their own, whether that’s team composition, market assumptions, or how they approach the taboo.
Know a founder building in FemTech who could benefit from these insights? Use the share buttons below.
Or scroll down for magic moments.
Highlights and timestamps
Time Highlight 00:00 Introduction 04:30 Introduction to Saturn Pelvic Health and the team 04:54 Mirjam Weemhoff shares her background and motivation 06:30 The clinical problem of pelvic organ prolapse 07:39 The founding story and team formation 09:31 Bart van Diepenbeek joins the team and his motivation 12:33 The importance of team diversity and gender balance 14:11 Prevalence and impact of pelvic prolapse 16:22 How prolapse affects organ function and daily life 18:37 Limitations of current pessaries and surgeries 21:40 Advantages of the new adaptable pessary design 26:26 The development process of FlexSupp and research insights 39:48 Research and MRI studies informing product design 41:52 Current stage and remaining risks in product development 45:18 Lessons learned and unexpected challenges 48:56 Market entry strategy and regulatory considerations 53:57 Convincing stakeholders and overcoming barriers 58:34 Addressing gender and cultural aspects in healthcare 1:03:28 Why start in Europe before expanding globally 1:04:33 Closing thoughts and contact information
The Episode In an Infographic
3 Magic Moments In The Episode
What makes making this podcast magical is that every company and founder has their own unique origin story. That of Bart joining Saturn Pelvic Health is typically Dutch: it started with a conversation while watching a hockey game, followed by a kitchen table brainstorm and ‘a good night’s sleep’. Here are three more moments from the episode that are worth remembering.
Bart’s motivation to join
While the team may have been convinced that Bart was the right man for the job, Bart had to think it over. He was convinced about the sheer brilliance of the idea, the unmet need, and the ability to help millions of women. But what won him over in the end was being able to truly build this almost from scratch. It goes to show that a good founder story takes self-awareness, a good business case and a clear personal win to fly.
Building quality of life on 15 years of research
Another part of the origin story is the amount of research behind Flexsupp. It took 15 years of MRIs, scans, etc. to develop a good understanding of the pelvic area. All this is translated into an adaptable product design that provides women with real pelvic floor support. The benefits are bigger than ‘just’ a better product. The true magic is that all this research, over time, will translate into a much better quality of life for millions of women.
Serving millions of women, not just in the home markets
Many startups have a go-to-market plan for their first and second markets. The Saturn Pelvic Health team has a longer view. They understand that Pelvic Organ Prolapse is a condition that is not limited by geography. So they hope to serve the Asian and African markets, too. Especially Africa is a continent that is often overlooked as a market for MedTech startups. It’s also full of opportunities when you’re willing to look for partners that can get you there, like NGOs.
What connects these three moments is scale: a personal decision, fifteen years of research, and a market strategy that all ultimately point past the founders themselves toward the millions of women the product is meant to reach.
🗣 What was your magic moment from the episode? Was it Bart’s motivation, the research that Flexsupp is built on or the plans to help people in Africa too? Drop your magic moment below or slide into the DMs on LinkedIn or Instagram!
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Or scroll down for my favorite quote from the episode.
The Quote from the Episode
We concluded that if we really wanted this better pessary to become available, that we would have to develop it ourselves.”
— Mirjam WeemhoffWhen we talk about the current market players for pessaries, Mirjam mentions that when she showed them the need for a better solution, they were not interested in building one. With that, building it themselves became the only option left for a team already committed to getting this into patients' hands.
What was your quote from the episode? Was it this or perhaps Bart’s remark that a diverse team helps early-stage MedTech companies deal with the ups and downs of product development? Share your quote with a fellow founder. Or scroll down for three trends across recent episodes.
3 Trends I’m Seeing Across Conversations
This episode is about a topic that is hardly talked about and is underresearched when it comes to solutions. This is not new. The taboo on many topics around women’s health blocks many FemTech companies from getting adequate funding. Here are three trends that link into this.
The taboo is real, even when there’s money to be earned.
The fundraising problem that FemTech companies have is probably best described when Bart mentions having to remove “explicit” pictures from his deck, as this was deemed not suitable for the investor audience. This taboo has been mentioned before. In episode 108, Jo Sarah Garcia highlights that until recently, the female anatomy was largely absent in medical education. And in episode 155, Beata Wandachowicz-Krason mentions the relatability gap outright and highlights strategies to overcome it. It’s this gap in lived experience between men and women that leads investors to think of women’s health products as niche and creates the need to normalize the conversation around women’s health.
Personalization is coming, also to women’s health
The adaptable pessary is a clear example of a product where personalization plays a key role. We’ve seen this before. In episode 146, Faviola Dadis talks about how BrainBoostXR builds personalized rehabilitation for patients with brain injuries. And in episode 103, Anna Christie highlights how Flouria Health connects women to specialized support in fertility and health. And in episode 163, we heard from Robin Blackstone, MD how her Health 4.0 uses AI to provide personalized medical care at scale.
Diversity as the key to innovation
Flexsupp is in part the result of the diversity within the founding team. Mirjam and Bart highlight the 50/50 male-female team and the combination of scientific, technical, and business backgrounds as the reason they can overcome setbacks. This theme previously came up in episode 98 where Sara Okhuijsen and Nima Salami attribute their ability to build inclusive technology for personalized medicine to the inherent diversity within their own founding team. And in episode 125, Mews’ Magali Elhage and Matthijs Welle describe how diversity brings more psychological safety, personal growth and better business results.
🗣️ How do you look at these trends? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
Leave a Reply
Coming Up On Women Disrupting Tech
One in eight menstruators in the Netherlands has to choose between food and tampons because they cannot afford both, according to Sophie Haccou, co-founder of CupHub. In episode 165 of Women Disrupting Tech, we hear from Sophie how period poverty forces that kind of trade-off, and how her company is building Casey, a portable rinsing device that makes menstrual cups practical to use outside the home.
Below is a short clip from the conversation where Sophie breaks down why the cheapest period product is not the same thing as a real choice. She explains why cups cost more upfront but save money over time, while people with less money at any given moment can only afford the option that keeps costing them month after month.
Listen to the full episode when it drops on 13 August at 8:00 CEST to hear how Sophie and her co-founder Aart built CupHub from a university design project into a company tackling period poverty at scale.
And if you’re not already subscribed, leave your email address below to find new episodes in your inbox every Thursday.
What I Want to Leave You With
The one thing that surprised me the most in the episode is that incumbents in the pessary industry seem to have no incentive to change their product. Bart offers a clear explanation why that is.
You could argue that they let MedTech startups do the dirty work, but the flip side is that it provides MedTech companies with a huge opportunity to build something without being hindered by corporate overhead and office politics.
Also worth remembering: it provides for a natural exit for founders as the same incumbents will be banging on the door once the product is approved and the business case is completely derisked. The extra money they need to pay is worth avoiding the headache of doing the work themselves.
What stays with me is that Saturn Pelvic Health exists because Mirjam and Bart chose to do the years of regulatory and research work that incumbents were unwilling to take on themselves. That choice is also what makes the company worth something: what keeps incumbents on the sidelines now is what will eventually make them willing to pay for it.
Listen to the full conversation with Mirjam Weemhoff and Bart van Diepenbeek on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. And if you are a female founder navigating a funding conversation, take a look at FundingCoach.ai.
About Mirjam Weemhoff
Dr. Mirjam Weemhoff is co-founder and Chief Quality Officer of Saturn Pelvic Health, and a practicing urogynecologist.
She treats women with pelvic organ prolapse every day at the Zuyderland Medical Centre, and has spent her career watching patients navigate the same two limited options: surgery or a pessary, neither of which reliably solves the problem.
A collaboration with now co-founders Kim Notten led to fifteen years of MRI-based research into why pessaries fail in the first place, work that reshaped some long-held assumptions about how a pessary is actually supported in the body, and directly informed the design of Flexsupp, the adaptable pessary Saturn is now bringing through clinical validation.
You can connect with Mirjam on LinkedIn.
About Bart van Diepenbeek
Bart van Diepenbeek, MSc., is co-founder and CEO of Saturn Pelvic Health.
Before joining Saturn Pelvic Health, Bart had a career in various large corporations (Philips, Rabobank) translating innovation into large-scale organizational change.
A conversation with co-founder Kim Notten, sparked at his son's field hockey game, led him to join Saturn as the team's business co-founder, bringing that corporate experience to help build the company around the clinical and technical groundwork Mirjam, Kim, and Lars had already spent years developing.
You can connect with Bart on LinkedIn.
About Saturn Pelvic Health
Saturn Pelvic Health is a Dutch FemTech company developing Flexsupp, a personalized pessary for women with pelvic organ prolapse (POP). The device is developed by urogynecologists and researchers at Radboud University Medical Center, in collaboration with Zuyderland Medical Centre.
Flexsupp is built to fit the unique length, width, and type of prolapse of each patient, informed by fifteen years of MRI research into why current pessaries fail.
The company is currently finalizing its design freeze and entering verification and validation, including the clinical trial needed to bring Flexsupp to market. In 2025, Saturn Pelvic Health was named Innovatiebelofte (Innovation Promise) in the Health & Nutrition category of the KVK Innovatie Top 100.
You can learn more about Saturn Pelvic Health on their website or follow them on LinkedIn.
Listen to Episode 164 on Spotify, Apple or YouTube
Listen on Apple Podcasts Featured Event: TEDx Coolhaven Women
The TEDx Coolhaven Women event takes place on 9 October from 6:30 to 11:30 in the evening at HAL4 aan de Maas in Rotterdam. This year’s theme is The New Builders, a theme that seamlessly aligns with the content on this podcast.
Throughout the evening, you’ll hear powerful TEDx talks from women who are redesigning the systems that shape our lives—from leadership and parenting to women’s health, mental healthcare, and access to investment capital. Together, they’ll explore what it really takes to build a better future.
As a proud media sponsor, I am happy to offer you a chance to be there in person, to listen to groundbreaking talks and meet and network with like-minded people. As a listener to the podcast, you’ll get a 25% discount when you use the code WDT25 at checkout. And even though this is a TEDx Women event, men are very welcome to join.
- 🗓️ 9 October 2026, from 18:30 - 23:30
- 📍 HAL4 aan de Maas in Rotterdam
- 🎟️ You can buy your ticket here.
-
Health 4.0: Transforming Healthcare For Real Health Equity | Show notes for episode 163 with Robin Blackstone, MD
What would a healthcare system look like where individuals and organizations are rewarded for keeping people well, rather than being compensated for treating them after they have already become sick?
That’s the question behind Dr. Robin Blackstone’s Health 4.0 framework. She spent decades in healthcare as a surgeon, was the first woman elected President of the American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery, and is Professor Emeritus of Medicine and Surgery at the University of Arizona. Somewhere along that path, she started wondering why the system keeps failing people, and what it would take to fix it.
In episode 163, we dive into how her Health 4.0 framework changes healthcare from episodic disease treatment to a proactive, personalized model. You’ll discover:
- What the current incentives actually reward, and what would have to change for that to shift.
- Why housing, social class, and trust in the system together account for roughly 80% of health outcomes.
- How technologies like artificial intelligence can be a catalyst for change.
You’ll also learn how she plans to get hospital CEOs, insurers, and the healthcare minister on board, and why she structured Health 4.0 as a public benefit corporation, with no shareholders to answer to.
If you’re interested in hearing about a well-thought-through framework that allows healthcare to transform itself into a system that promotes health instead of curing diseases, this episode is worth a listen.
Start listening by pressing play below.
Health 4.0: Transforming Healthcare For Real Health Equity with Robin Blackstone, MD | Ep. 163 – Women Disrupting Tech
Or keep reading for practical takeaways, highlights, and trends from the episode.
Practical Takeaways for Founders
This episode is more systemic in nature, but that system is the starting point for many healthtech and medtech founders. Therefore, there is a lot of very useful information in there. Here are three bits of wisdom from the conversation:
Learn What You Don’t Know
Dr. Blackstone emphasizes the importance of deep training before building. She pursued master’s-level training in governance, digital technology at MIT, and AI at Oxford to build the necessary framework for her vision. The lesson founders can take here is that understanding the complete ecosystem that you need to operate in is crucial for success.
Mind the Fragmentation
EU founders are often told that the US market is less fragmented than the EU market. Dr. Blackstone provides some important nuance to that. There is no single US healthcare system: every state runs its own insurance environment, and the costs involved are significant enough that even a company like JP Morgan Chase lists healthcare as the second-largest line item on its P&L. That fragmentation makes the system costly and complex to operate in.
Creating Aligned Incentives
For many founders, the big challenge is translating clinical insights into investor language: market size, evidence, reimbursement, the things that come easily to other founders but not always to physicians stepping into the role. Dr. Blackstone makes the same kind of reframe herself elsewhere in the conversation, describing how she’d tell a hospital CEO to shift the institution’s mission from “beds filled” to “lives stabilized.” The lesson for founders: value gets recognized faster once you can show it in outcome terms, not just activity terms.
Between the governance training, the state-by-state fragmentation, and the investor-language gap, the common thread is the same: founders who understand a system’s actual mechanics before they pitch into it have a real edge over ones who assume it works like any other market.
When you know a founder who is building in healthcare, share these lessons with them using the buttons below.
Or scroll down for magic moments.
Highlights and timestamps
Time Highlight 00:00 Introduction 03:45 Introduction to Healthcare Innovation 06:35 The Journey of a Female Surgeon 09:33 Challenges in the U.S. Healthcare System 12:19 The Need for Systemic Change 15:27 Aligning Incentives in Healthcare 18:17 The Role of Technology in Health 21:18 Social Determinants of Health 24:15 The Impact of Environment on Health 27:05 AI’s Role in Personalized Medicine 30:09 Overcoming Barriers to Technology Adoption 33:01 Addressing Loneliness with Technology 35:41 The Role of AI in Human Connection 36:58 Understanding Health 4.0 41:16 Shifting from Crisis Management to Prevention 46:31 Incentive Changes in Healthcare 53:02 The Importance of Data in Healthcare 57:10 Monetizing Data and Equity in Healthcare 1:00:11 AI’s Role in Decision Making 1:02:16 Transforming Healthcare: A Personal Journey 1:05:46 Strategies for Healthcare Leaders 1:08:25 Reimagining Insurance and Payment Systems 1:10:44 Building a New Health System 1:11:50 The Human Element in Healthcare 1:16:18 Introducing Dr. AI: A New Frontier 1:21:23 Empowering Female Founders in Health Tech 1:27:17 How to Learn More and Connect with Dr. Blackstone
The Episode In an Infographic
3 Magic Moments In The Episode
A pivotal moment in her career was performing a bariatric surgery that unexpectedly cured a patient’s diabetes, sparking her interest in the hormonal mechanisms that eventually led to GLP-1 medications. That instinct to look for a better answer runs through the rest of her career too. And when nobody takes action, she’s not afraid to stick her neck out either. As she puts it: “I was waiting for one of the disciples to come down and start doing something.” But when nobody came, she decided to start by herself. Below are three more magic moments to enjoy:
The Empathy Flame
When she reflects on her career as a surgeon, a field historically dominated by men, she mentions that being a woman brought definite positives. She mentions empathy as her core strength, describing it as a “little flame” that can be nurtured in any junior resident, regardless of gender, transforming them into extraordinary surgeons.
Working with AI is like doing improv
A lighthearted moment occurs when Dr. Blackstone notes that AI lacks a sense of humor. When she asks it for a joke, it responds by asking, “from which comedian?” She then compares working with AI to doing improv.
The “Where Do I Sign?” Conversion
A powerful moment involves a pregnant woman giving Dr. Blackstone “an earful” about what is wrong with healthcare. But when she hears the Health 4.0 vision, she immediately wants to join. The moment highlights the deep public desire for a better system.
These moments show that nothing changes on its own. Things change because a specific person decided to supply the missing input, whether that’s teaching empathy, adding humor, or building an Alliance nobody asked her to build.
🗣 Which of these moments did you find truly magical? Was it how she mentions empathy as a key strength? Or was it the humor around using AI? Or perhaps the moment she converted a healthcare skeptic into a true fan? Drop your magic moment below or slide into the DMs on LinkedIn or Instagram!
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The Quote from the Episode
Toward the end of our conversation, Dr. Blackstone said something that captures why she's building Health 4.0 in the first place:
“I really want this to be for people, a much better answer, a more fair answer for health than we've ever had.”
— Robin Blackstone, MDIt's a simple sentence, but it's also the clearest statement of what the rest of this episode builds toward.
If you know a founder (or investor) needs to hear this quote, use the buttons below to tell her about the episode.
3 Trends I’m Seeing Across Conversations
My conversation with Dr. Blackstone contains many trends and data points about the system she wants to change. These three overlap with what we’ve heard before on the podcast.
AI as a Catalyst for Change
Sophia Zitman, Wafa M'Ribah, Melissa Solis and many others have indicated how AI can be a force for good, also for women. Specifically for health, Dr. Blackstone expands this by envisioning a "Dr. AI" layer that connects individuals to the system 24/7 to manage health in the hours between doctor visits.
The Missing Dataset
Ida Tin mentioned it in episode 140, and it's a recurring theme in episodes about health: the missing dataset. Dr. Blackstone adds another layer to it. Because of the fragmented insurance landscape, US health data is "flawed" and "non-representative," as datasets often exclude diverse populations.
Making the Business Case for Health
Carmen van Vilsteren, Maaike Steinebach, and Sophie van Dijk have each argued that women's health deserves to be treated as an economic and societal imperative, backed by real data. Dr. Blackstone applies that same instinct to the entire healthcare system: prevention gets funded once it's shown to be the stronger economic bet.
What connects these trends is how technology and data play a key role in changing complex systems, and how each depends on the one before it: AI is only as useful as the data behind it, and that data only improves once health stops being treated as a niche product and starts being treated as infrastructure everyone relies on.
🗣️ How do you look at these trends? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
Leave a Reply
Coming Up On Women Disrupting Tech
Three to four doctor visits just to find the right size. Then three to four more a year to have it cleaned and put back in. That's the standard process today for women fitted with a pessary, the primary non-surgical treatment for pelvic organ prolapse. In this episode, Bart van Diepenbeek and Mirjam Weemhoff of Saturn Pelvic Health explain why that process still looks this way, and what led them to build Flexsupp, an individually adaptable pessary.
In the clip you're about to hear, Bart walks through the current pessary journey step by step: the repeat visits to find a size, the side effects patients live with once they have one, and the recurring visits just to keep it clean. He sums up the whole process in one line: "the customer journey is a disaster." It's the moment that sets up why Saturn built something different.
If you're curious how Mirjam, Bart and their two co-founders plan to improve this, subscribe to Women Disrupting Tech below to find the full conversation in your inbox on 6 August at 8am CET.
What I Want to Leave You With
Every founder knows the difference between painkiller and vitamin products. Essentially, it is the difference between success and a pivot. The interesting thing about this episode is that the Health 4.0 framework is both.
Health 4.0 focuses on prevention (vitamin) rather than curing people (painkiller), yet the underlying pain (a dysfunctional healthcare system) is also very real, and Health 4.0 can serve as a cure for that. The precondition for the implementation to work is what Dr. Blackstone refers to as the Overton Window: moving prevention as a healthcare reform strategy from impossible to inevitable.
Doing that will take a lot of talking, convincing and funding. But if Dr. Blackstone and her allies manage to align all stakeholders from healthcare worker to hospital CEO and from healthcare minister to the people using the new system, the US might actually be a country where health is the expectation in 10 years.
PS. All of this is not intended as an indictment against health workers and healthcare practitioners. As Dr. Blackstone emphasizes a number of times, everyone works hard to give people the right treatment. As long as the system gives them the wrong input, though, we will keep getting the wrong results.
Listen to the full conversation with Leonie van de Kamer on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. And if you are a female founder navigating a funding conversation, take a look at FundingCoach.ai.
About Robin Blackstone, MD
Dr. Robin Blackstone, MD, FACS, FASMBS, is a surgeon, author, and the founder of Blackstone Health. She was the first woman elected President of the American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery, and her work on surgical quality helped establish the Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery Accreditation and Quality Improvement Program. She held the Ira A. Fulton Endowed Chair at Banner Health, served as Senior Vice President of Clinical and Medical Affairs at Ethicon, part of Johnson & Johnson, and is Professor Emeritus of Medicine and Surgery at the University of Arizona — Phoenix.
She later studied AI at Oxford Saïd, alongside training at MIT and Harvard Business School, and holds a Financial Times Board Diploma. Her earlier education includes a degree in Philosophy and Economics from the University of Arizona, medical training at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, and surgical training at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio.
That combination of clinical, academic, and governance training is what she's since put toward Health 4.0. Her book, Doctor AI, and a set of research papers on SSRN lay out the full blueprint, alongside Trajectory Engineering, an effort to make the path toward or away from disease measurable earlier, and The Right to Health, a constitutional argument for treating health as foundational to freedom and dignity.
You can connect with Robin Blackstone on LinkedIn and Substack and find her Dr. AI podcast on her website.
About the Book: Doctor AI
Dr. Blackstone's book, Doctor AI: Reimagining Healthcare, Rebuilding Trust, Delivering Health 4.0, lays out the full architecture behind the framework discussed in this episode. It introduces the Triangle of Trust binding the person, the clinician, and an accountable AI system, and walks through ideas like Trajectory Engineering and the Health Trajectory Benefit, both aimed at turning prevention into something that can actually be measured and paid for rather than treated as an afterthought to acute care.
The book is the first release under Blackstone Press. It's also the opening title in a wider project: the American Health series, which continues with Who Gets Paid, tracing where money in the US healthcare system actually goes, with a second book on GLP-1s and metabolic surgery already announced.
Health leaders who reviewed Doctor AI have pointed to its clarity of thought and its people-first approach to AI in medicine, at a moment when trust in the healthcare system is part of what she's trying to rebuild.
You can order the book via Dr. Blackstone’s website and on Amazon, Barnes&Nobles, and Audible.
Listen to Episode 163 on Spotify, Apple or YouTube
Listen on Apple Podcasts -
Rethinking Incontinence: Building the Certain Valve | Show notes for episode 162 with Leonie van de Kamer
One in three women will develop some form of incontinence.
It usually starts with pregnancy, childbirth, or menopause: events that happen to women.
Incontinence ranks as the second most disruptive chronic condition on quality of life, behind epilepsy, and 65% of the women who have it report a real impact on how they live.
Yet, most of what the public sees about any of this is the commercials for the pads everyone knows by name.
That gap, between how common the problem is and how little gets said about it, is where Leonie van de Kamer is building Certain.
She is the CEO and co-founder of this Dutch MedTech startup, which is developing a patient-controlled valve placed in the female urethra for stress urinary incontinence. Her solution fills the space between the two options women are usually given: disposable pads that manage the symptom, or the surgery many will avoid if possible.
In this episode, we trace how the technology behind it started as something else entirely, why Certain became its own company, and what it takes to fund a medical device that doesn’t exist yet.
Start listening by pressing play below.
Rethinking Incontinence: Building the Certain Valve with Leonie van de Kamer | Ep. 162 – Women Disrupting Tech
Or keep reading for practical takeaways, highlights, and trends from the episode.
Practical Takeaways for Founders
Prior to building Certain, Leonie had a career in clinical trials. It taught her what successful Go-To-Market strategies for MedTech products look like. Her rich experience shows up in the lessons founders can take from this episode.
How one valve became part of two companies
The idea behind Certain did not start with incontinence. The valve was built at Choice as a hormone-free contraceptive that could be placed in the fallopian tubes. When contraception proved a difficult sell to US investors, an investor suggested a second use for the same technology, one with a faster route to market. Incontinence was the answer. What matters is the option they chose instead of pivoting: Certain was spun out as a separate company with a license to the shared valve. When your core technology solves more than one problem, a spin-out lets both stories stay alive, each with its own market and investors.
Directing the company like an orchestra
Leonie is a generalist and describes her CEO role as directing an orchestra. But that doesn’t mean she hired specialists to help her build everything. She prides herself on keeping a lean core team with deep technical expertise and contracting missing expertise if needed. As Leonie puts it, no early-stage medtech startup can afford to hire every discipline a medical device demands. A founder’s job is to direct the right expertise at the right moment, not to hold all of it personally.
Getting funding for the unsexy: market validation
Leonie points to a step founders skip too often: market validation. Without it, she says, teams end up building something clinicians won’t use, and insurers won’t reimburse. Part of Certain’s pre-seed round is earmarked for a validation study, testing the design with clinicians and patients and checking with insurers whether the device would be paid for. She is already working with the largest insurer in the Netherlands, which has shared real data on current incontinence costs. Validating demand and reimbursement early is unglamorous, and it is what stops you from building something no one will buy.
These takeaways separate what a founder controls from what they don’t: how you structure the venture, who you rely on, and what you verify before the build.
When you know a founder who is building in MedTech, share these lessons with them using the buttons below.
Or scroll down for magic moments.
Highlights and timestamps
Time Highlight 00:00 Introduction 03:20 Introduction and background of Leonie van de Kamer 05:17 Leonie’s journey from medicine and entrepreneurship 08:13 Inspiration behind Certain’s incontinence device 13:22 Technical challenges and design considerations 18:26 Market strategy and spin-out process 23:15 Societal impact and addressing taboo in women’s health 28:20 Regulatory classification and approval pathway 33:21 Funding strategies and investor relations 43:23 Building a lean team and quality management 53:20 Market opportunities in the UK and Europe 1:03:15 Future milestones and strategic partnerships 1:13:10 Closing thoughts and connecting with Leonie van de Kamer
The Episode In an Infographic
3 Magic Moments In The Episode
The most magical thing about the valve is, of course, that it gives agency and quality of life back to women with incontinence. And then there are these moments from the episode.
The audacious question that redirected her career
At the end of her work in clinical trials, Leonie found herself in a job that had become too corporate. And then she met Peter, an innovator with an idea that caught her. Rather than wish him luck and leave, she asked him a blunt question: was he looking for someone with her skills to join him? He was. That question gave her a second career in building medical technology.
Reframing incontinence as a life event
Leonie reframes what incontinence actually is. It is not a personal failure or an illness someone catches. It is the result of the events a female body goes through: pregnancy, childbirth, menopause. Naming these as major life events rather than medical faults does something special. It moves the conversation away from shame, and it frames what millions of women live with as a natural need for better support.
Giving back the control women lost
The clearest description of what the device does is her own: it gives back the sphincter that no longer closes on its own. What that means is easier to feel when you picture life without it: a woman avoiding social situations, managing smell, planning her day around something she can’t control. What Certain aims to hand back is discreet, carried in a handbag, and it lets her take part in the world again.
These moments matter because each one turns on agency: her decision to change direction, the refusal to treat a female body as defective, and the return of a control that incontinence takes away.
🗣 Which of these moments did you find truly magical? Was it how she dared to ask the question that redirected her career? Or how Certain aims to give women back control over their urine and improve their quality of life? Or was it perhaps the reframe of incontinence as a life event? Drop your magic moment below or slide into the DMs on LinkedIn or Instagram!
Leave a Reply
The Quote from the Episode
"The most important job for us is to break open the taboo."
— Leonie van de KamerIt would be easy to read this as a line about stigma, and it is. But Leonie means it as a business point too. Certain is building a product for a problem most people won't say out loud, in a category where many women don't know a solution is possible. In that situation, getting people to talk about the problem is not separate from building the company but part of the job.
Leonie puts education alongside developing the technology itself, one of the core tasks of a women's health company right now, because a market that doesn't know it has options is a market that can't buy from you yet.
For founders in any underserved or taboo space, that reframes what looks like advocacy into something closer to demand generation: talk about the problem openly, and you build the market you will later sell to.
If you know a founder (or investor) needs to hear this quote, use the buttons below to tell her about the episode.
3 Trends I’m Seeing Across Conversations
Certain sits at the intersection of three patterns that keep coming up on the podcast. Each one shows up in a different guest's work, which is what makes them worth naming.
Wellness apps are giving way to regulated medical devices
Certain is not a tracker or a symptom app. It is a medical device going through the full MDR and FDA regulatory path, the slow and expensive route that a wellness product avoids. Leonie treats that regulatory burden as the point, not the obstacle: clearing it is what separates a real treatment from the pads and diapers she calls symptom maskers. That connects directly to Karen Berg in episode 161, who argued that clinical validation is a moat. A product that has done the hard regulatory work is far harder for a fast follower to copy, and far easier for a serious investor to back. One founder, one investor, the same conclusion: in health, the regulatory pathway is a competitive advantage, not just a cost.
The data gap in women's health is as much about taboo as technology
When Certain's team worked on the contraceptive valve, they found the fallopian tubes had barely been studied. On the incontinence side, the silence runs the other way: women accept pads and say nothing, so their experience never reaches medical records or research. The taboo and the data gap are the same problem seen from two angles. Beata Wandachowicz-Krason made this explicit in episode 155, arguing that the barrier to better women's health data is more cultural than technical. The tools to collect and share it responsibly exist; what is missing is the cultural safety for women to speak, and a system that stops treating their suffering as normal. Leonie is describing the front end of exactly that gap: a condition so unspoken that the people living with it never become data.
Women are taught to negotiate against themselves
Leonie points out how easily women accept incontinence as something to manage quietly, reaching for pads rather than asking whether a real solution exists. Lowered expectations, absorbed early, become the default. She runs counter to it in her own founder behavior, telling investors plainly that she is aiming for FDA approval and a strategic exit within five years rather than shrinking the ask to what feels safe. That pattern is what Ana Herrero-Wallace named in episode 157: girls raised to be cautious enter the system already negotiating against themselves. The same conditioning that teaches a woman to stay quiet about her body teaches a founder to ask for less than she needs. Naming it is the first step to refusing it.
Across these three episodes, the same lesson appears in different forms: regulation is the moat, the taboo is the data gap, and the lower expectations women absorb reach all the way into the funding ask. Certain is being built against all three at once.
🗣️ How do you look at these trends? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
Leave a Reply
Coming Up On Women Disrupting Tech
Healthcare has never been more advanced. We know more about the human body than ever before. AI is transforming medicine. Yet healthcare costs continue to rise, chronic disease is increasing, and many people are no healthier than they were decades ago.
In episode 163, Dr. Robin Blackstone argues that technology is not the real problem. The healthcare system was designed more than a century ago to rescue people once they become ill, not to keep them healthy. We explore why prevention is still undervalued, how today's financial incentives reward disease rather than health, and what a fundamentally different healthcare system could look like.
In this preview, Robin explains why we spend just 30 minutes a year with a doctor while our health is shaped during the other 5,700 waking hours. It is a powerful illustration of why today's healthcare system still rewards treatment over prevention.
If you're building the future of healthcare, this conversation will challenge how you think about innovation, prevention, and the role of AI.
So subscribe to Women Disrupting Tech below to find the full conversation in your inbox on 30 July at 8am CET.
What I Want to Leave You With
Incontinence is common, but rarely seen as a health problem. One in three women experiences some form of it, and the market's answer is a pad that masks the leakage and a commercial that pretends the problem is charming. Certain exists because Leonie looked at that gap and saw room for an actual device.
What makes the story of Certain interesting is that the valve she is building was built to prevent pregnancy. It was only later that an investor connected it to a problem no one was rushing to solve. That is also the lesson for founders: a technology you already have may answer a question you never thought to ask, and the largest openings often sit exactly where a subject stays unspoken.
Underneath all of it is female agency. A valve a woman opens and closes herself. A founder who aims to have FDA approval in five years. A condition she can treat rather than hide. Certain gives women back a measure of control, and it is built by a woman who took the same control over her own path.
Listen to the full conversation with Leonie van de Kamer on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. And if you are a female founder navigating a funding conversation, take a look at FundingCoach.ai.
About Leonie van de Kamer
Leonie van de Kamer is the CEO and co-founder of Certain, a Dutch medtech startup developing a patient-controlled valve for female stress urinary incontinence.
She joined Choice, the company Certain spun out of, after meeting its founder, Peter van de Graaf, drawn in by the idea and the energy behind his valve technology.
Before joining Choice, Leonie spent more than seven years in clinical research for medical devices, across project management, clinical trial management, regulatory affairs, business development, and quality assurance. Over eight projects and more than twenty clients, she advised on the strategic decisions behind bringing a device to market, ending up as a business developer for Europe working with clients on their regulatory strategy. That mix of practical, networking, and leadership experience is what she now brings to running a company of her own.
You can connect with Leonie on LinkedIn.
About Certain
Certain is an Amsterdam-based medtech startup developing a device for female stress urinary incontinence. It is a physician-placed, patient-controlled valve worn in the urethra, designed for long-term, reversible use, and it sits in the space between the two options women are usually given: disposable pads that manage the symptom, or the surgery many prefer to avoid.
Female urinary incontinence affects tens of millions of women, and the existing options force a trade-off between disposables that mask symptoms and invasive surgery. Certain does not aim to replace surgery. It aims to widen the range of treatments available, giving women a durable option that keeps their own control over when the valve opens and closes.
The valve technology behind Certain began at Choice, where it was developed as a hormone-free contraceptive, before being adapted for incontinence and spun out into a separate company. Certain is currently raising a €600k pre-seed round to finalize its prototype, run market validation with clinicians, patients, and insurers, and begin its regulatory path.
You can learn more about Certain on their website or by following them on LinkedIn.
Listen to Episode 162 on Spotify, Apple or YouTube
Listen on Apple Podcasts Further Reading About This Episode
For more on the broader trends behind this episode:
Why the UK halted surgery with meshes
This House of Commons briefing sets out the scope of the restriction and where it stands now, and this NHS page shows what women are told about their options today.
Why Europe probably will not follow the UK
The British Society of Urogynaecologists argued the suspension contradicted the evidence base, pointing to the mid-urethral tape as the most researched incontinence procedure available and to data suggesting 95% of women remain free of complications. Read more about their argumentation.
Innovation in battling stress urinary incontinence
This 2025 review covers newer approaches including stem cell and laser therapy, alongside the case for more personalized diagnosis.
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Why FemTech Needs to Move Beyond Wellness Apps | Show notes for episode 161 with Karen Berg
Here is a question almost no one in venture capital asks: what if the products everyone loves, the ones that are easy to build, easy to fund, are easy to copy, and exactly the wrong ones to invest in?
Karen Berg thinks so.
As a partner at Healthy.Capital, she looks for the opposite: startups tangled up in FDA approvals and clinical trials, the kind of regulatory mess most investors run from.
Healthy.Capital tracks its portfolio companies on a six-part framework measuring cost savings, capacity, clinical quality, environment, patient satisfaction, and employee satisfaction. And she treats regulatory approval (FDA, MDR, CE marking) as evidence that a product actually works.
In episode 161 of Women Disrupting Tech, Karen breaks down the specific criteria her fund uses to decide which healthcare startups are investable, why data scarcity is limiting what AI can currently do for women’s health, and why she thinks FemTech has settled for wellness when the underlying problems demand real diagnostics.
Hit play below to listen to the full conversation with Karen.
Why FemTech Needs to Move Beyond Wellness Apps with Karen Berg | Ep. 161 – Women Disrupting Tech
Or keep reading for practical takeaways, highlights, and trends from the episode.
Practical Takeaways for Founders
Karen has a specific complaint about FemTech: too many founders build a wellness app because it’s easier than proving something actually works. She points to three things that turn a great health idea into something Healthy.Capital could actually fund.
Clinical validation is a moat.
Securing a CE marking and pursuing FDA and MDR approvals takes time, lots of hard work and testing. Karen argues that putting this kind of work in separates a company from “easy to build” AI software, since competitors who want to copy the product have to spend years catching up first. Looked at it this way, the long timeline works in a founder’s favor.
Impact needs a number attached to it.
Healthy.Capital tracks its own portfolio against six dimensions: cost, quality, capacity, environment, patient satisfaction, and employee satisfaction. It also reports the results publicly: more than 300 million euros in healthcare costs saved since 2018. Karen suggests that founders use a framework like this from the start, as a way to base product decisions on measurable outcomes, so it becomes easier to produce the numbers that come as a result.
Respect is part of the pitch.
Karen once walked away from a deal with an experienced founding team. During negotiations, the founders treated Healthy.Capital as “a pot of money” and dismissed the fund’s input. Technical skill got them in the room, respect could have kept them there.
Put together, these three takeaways do the same thing: they help founders build a company that can survive a regulator, an investor’s due diligence, and a hard negotiation.
Know a founder who wants to build something in healthcare that goes beyond wellness? Share the episode with them using the buttons below.
Or scroll down for magic moments.
Highlights and timestamps
Time Highlight 00:00 Introduction 02:47 Karen Berg’s background 03:44 Karen’s transition from finance to healthcare 04:56 Impact of personal loss and career change 06:12 Attraction to complex, regulated markets 08:38 Experience with her brother’s illness and sabbatical 11:38 Why healthcare and impact matter to Karen 14:37 Investing in digital health and early-stage companies 16:09 The role of AI and data in women’s health 21:48 Bias, representation, and funding disparities 29:42 Defining impact and measurement frameworks 38:58 Women’s health as a serious, underserved market 47:17 Impact of societal awareness and education 52:29 The importance of diversity in investment teams 56:33 The debate: FemTech vs. HealthTech branding 1:02:02 AI funding coach for female founders 1:03:33 Closing remarks and where to connect
The Episode In an Infographic
3 Magic Moments In The Episode
Karen’s mindset for complexity carries into how she talks, too. In the same conversation, she moves from systemic observations about bias and funding down to specific, very personal moments, sometimes within a few sentences of each other.
The sabbatical reflection.
After her brother died, Karen took time away from work. Rather than treat that loss as something to simply get through, she describes it as a turning point: “It’s a bit of a cliche but if you lose someone you always realize what is really important in life and what’s not.” That reflection is part of why she left finance for a fund built around impact.
A lesson in privilege.
Karen also talks candidly about her own blind spots, describing a moment where listening to the lived experiences of people of color and the LGBTQ+ community made her recognize her own privilege. It’s a rare instance in the episode where the systemic point and the personal admission arrive in the same breath.
Why women ask fewer “stupid” questions than men.
In a training session, Karen learned something specific about gendered communication: “women will never ask a question because they think that their question is stupid while men are just asking the question.” She connects that pattern directly to who gets heard, and funded, in a room.
What makes these moments magical is not only the self-reflection but also the hidden insights they provide to explain the funding gap from a different angle.
🗣 Which of these moments did you find truly magical? Was it what Karen learned from taking a sabbatical? How she reflects on her own biases? Or maybe the fact that women should be less afraid of asking “stupid” questions? Drop your magic moment below or slide into the DMs on LinkedIn or Instagram!
Leave a Reply
The Quote from the Episode
"There are a lot of women dealing with male related healthcare items, so why not the other way around?"
— Karen BergKaren said this right after admitting her own gut reaction to seeing a man on a FemTech panel presenting a solution for a woman's health problem: why is he here? Is he just here to make money? Then she caught herself.
It's a small observation that goes against a bias that runs through a lot of FemTech, including her own. If men are allowed to build for men's health without anyone questioning their motives, the same should hold true in reverse.
If you know a founder (or investor) needs to hear this quote, use the buttons below to tell her about the episode.
3 Trends I’m Seeing Across Conversations
Karen's episode doesn't stand on its own. What we discuss connects to patterns that show up across other episodes of this podcast. These three trends stood out.
AI keeps running into the same missing data set
Karen puts it plainly: "AI only works when there's data. And when it comes to women's health there's not so much data. So that's a really big and serious issue." That's the same gap Ida Tin named directly in episode 140: the missing continuous data set on hormones, and the same one Sophie van Dijk pointed to in episode 159, where she named FemHealthData at UMCG as one attempt to close it.
Wellness framing costs FemTech founders funding
Karen challenges herself and the audience directly on this: "when I think about wellness it's like, how many solutions are there for people who have problems sleeping, want to relax more, meditation, exercise, food, diet, mood tracking?" Her point is that stopping there costs founders the chance to solve, and get funded for, a real medical problem. Beata Wandachowicz-Krason made close to the same argument in episode 155: investors who might pass on a "women's issue" engage once the pitch is built on hard numbers and clinical data instead of a wellness or social-cause frame. Two guests, working in different corners of FemTech, landing on the same fix for the same funding problem.
What gets measured gets funded
Karen's answer to that funding problem is a number: Healthy.Capital has saved more than 300 million euros in healthcare costs since 2018, tracked across six dimensions including cost, quality, and capacity. Dr. Christine Miller raised the flip side of this in episode 144, arguing that many systemic problems, women's health included, stay unfunded because they're harder to measure. Karen's framework reads like a direct answer to that gap, an attempt to make women's health impact measurable enough for investors.
Looked at together, these three trends point to the same block: systems only act on what's legible to them. So, underfunding of women’s health may not be a matter of importance, but of the availability of evidence.
🗣️ How do you look at these trends? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
Leave a Reply
Coming Up On Women Disrupting Tech
Next week, we’ll follow the lead Karen gave us and explore a MedTech solution that goes way beyond wellness: treating incontinence.
One in three women will experience some type of incontinence during her life. It mostly starts around pregnancy, childbirth, or menopause: regular events in a woman’s body. Still, the topic rarely gets discussed beyond commercials for pads.
In episode 162, I speak with Leonie van de Kamer, CEO and co-founder of Certain, a Dutch MedTech startup developing a tiny valve, placed in the urethra, that takes over the job of a sphincter that no longer closes.
In the clip below, Leonie takes apart the image that the pad commercials sell: smiling women doing yoga, living their lives while wearing a pad, every single day. Her answer to what those commercials leave out is the sharpest 40 seconds of the episode.
Listen to the clip, and if you'd like to hear more, subscribe below to find the full episode in your inbox on 23 July 2026 at 8:00 CET.
What I Want to Leave You With
In the end, our conversation is about how we can make FemTech investable. Karen’s answer is that to get there, FemTech needs to move beyond building just for wellness, and she lays out what that actually takes.
Solving a distinctive problem, associated with real data, using regulatory approval as a moat, and a quantifiable impact that turns ‘we help women’ into ‘we saved €300 million on healthcare cost’, gives investors a reason to write checks.
A founder who can supply that kind of proof, a moat that holds up and impact numbers that survive scrutiny, closes the funding gap one deal at a time.
Listen to the full conversation with Karen Berg on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. And if you are a female founder navigating a funding conversation, take a look at FundingCoach.ai.
About Karen Berg
Karen Berg is a partner at Healthy.Capital, a venture fund that invests in digital health companies built around patient and consumer needs. Before moving into venture capital, she spent years advising corporates and financial institutions at board level, in roles spanning law, investment banking, company secretary, investor relations, and legal, on strategic projects, governance, and regulatory matters. At Healthy.Capital, she focuses on making healthcare more accessible and affordable through the startups the fund backs.
You can connect with Karen on LinkedIn.
About Healthy.Capital
Healthy.Capital is a Dutch venture capital fund that invests in early-stage companies that fundamentally reshape how healthcare is organized and delivered, with the goal to make healthcare more accessible and affordable.
The fund evaluates its portfolio using the Live Impact Framework, tracking outcomes like cost savings, quality, and capacity. In the episode, Karen references the fund's own impact report, which found that with every euro invested, it prevented €5.19 in costs elsewhere in the system. You can read the full impact report here.
Want to know more? Visit healthy.capital or follow Healthy.Capital on LinkedIn.
Listen to Episode 161 on Spotify, Apple or YouTube
Listen on Apple Podcasts Further Reading
For more on the broader trends behind this episode:
The women's health investment gap, quantified
The World Economic Forum's 2026 Women's Health Investment Outlook found that women's health receives just 6% of private healthcare investment, with 90% of that limited funding concentrated in only three areas. Read the report
AI's promise in women's health, and its data problem
Silicon Valley Bank's 2026 women's health investment report shows AI-powered startups in this space commanding valuations nearly three times the sector median, even as the underlying data scarcity Karen describes remains unresolved. Read the report
Why regulatory complexity in medtech is under review
The EU's proposed MDR and IVDR revision, still working through the legislative process, was prompted by rising compliance costs and certification timelines that stretched to 13 to 18 months for most Notified Bodies. Read the analysis
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Why the Funding Gap Starts Before Female Founders Ever Pitch | Show notes for episode 160 with Nithya Ruff
In 1981, Nithya Ruff left Bangalore for Fargo, North Dakota, to study computer science. She traded 40°C heat for winters that hit -30°C, and she had never cooked a meal or dressed for cold weather in her life. There was no internet, no cell phone. International calls cost three or four dollars a minute. It forced her to build a new support system and helped her discover a level of independence she didn’t know she had.
She is now chair of the Linux Foundation board, after three decades running open source offices at Amazon, Comcast, and Wind River. Her father is a big part of why she got there. He talked to her about business as an equal from the time she was a child. And before she left for the US, he gave her one condition: she needed her own income and her own financial standing so she would not have to rely on a husband.
This advice shaped how she built a long career in tech and how she reads the 2% funding gap. She believes that closing the gap starts with getting more women into the room where funding decisions get made.
In our conversation, we talked about how her upbringing gave her the confidence she needed to enter rooms where she was the only woman. We also covered why the open source model is producing female leaders faster than the rest of tech, what AI is doing to coding that kept non-technical founders out, and what early-stage founders underestimate about the emotional side of building a company.
Hit play below to listen to the full conversation with Maaike and Sophie. Or keep reading for practical takeaways, highlights, and trends from the episode.
Practical Takeaways for Founders
Nithya Ruff spent three decades running open source offices, where every contribution and decision was documented and visible by default. That habit shows up directly in how she advises founders to build.
Document principles, not rules.
At Amazon, Ruff worked with leadership principles, not fixed rules. They’re tenets you test decisions against as circumstances change. She points to a live example: whether to prioritize humans or AI agents in a workflow isn’t settled once. You check the decision against the principle, and if the principle no longer holds, you revise it.
Treat peer support as a requirement, not a nice-to-have.
She is direct that founding is lonely, and that investors can’t fill that gap alone. Your investors should support and invest in you, she says, but you also need a system of peer founders alongside them. Community isn’t a soft add-on to the business. It’s part of how you stay in it long enough to build something.
Use AI as a debate partner, not just a task tool.
You’ll probably use AI to automate things. But Nithya points out that you can do so much more, particularly for solo founders. She does her own research and synthesis on Claude, using it to stress-test her thinking the way a colleague would. The value is in the pushback: a tool willing to challenge an idea catches what she’d have missed reasoning alone.
Each of these comes back to the same habit: writing your reasoning down and exposing it to challenge, instead of carrying it in your head alone.
Know a founder in FemTech who could benefit from these takeaways? Share the episode with them using the buttons below.
Or scroll down for magic moments.
Highlights and timestamps
Time Highlight 00:00 Introduction 02:43 Nithya’s Journey to the US 11:17 The Influence of Family on Confidence 18:06 Navigating Cultural Differences in Parenting 27:24 Challenging Gender Norms in Family Dynamics 27:40 The Funding Gap for Female Founders 33:00 The Need for More Female Investors 36:31 Empowering Women in Investment 41:53 The Startup Path for Women 47:04 Integrating Work and Life in Startups 50:16 The Open Source Model and Its Impact 56:35 AI: A Tool for Empowerment 1:01:57 Building Community and Support Systems 1:06:38 Underestimating the Go-to-Market Strategy 1:11:58 Governance and Flexibility in Startups 1:18:19 The Balance of AI and Human Connection
The Episode In an Infographic
3 Magic Moments In The Episode
This episode runs on one underlying question: what changes when an old boundary stops holding. For Nithya, that shows up twice. Once in how she was raised, and the choices it gave her. And once in what she’s watching happen across her industry, as AI opens the door to people who were kept out of building before.
How her father set her up for success.
Growing up, Nithya’s father included her in conversations most parents kept for adults: what she thought the moon landing meant, what she thought was happening in India’s economy. He paid attention to her answers. She says that kind of attention from the first adult man in her life instilled a confidence that carried into every room she walked into afterward. It’s the rule that built her financial independence, and the one she now uses to answer a bigger question: what happens if more girls are raised this way?
“Parenting is gender neutral.”
When Nithya and her husband had to decide who would stay home with their daughters, they treated it like a business decision: they compared strengths and weaknesses, built it as a shared portfolio. He ran the household on a schedule and started introducing himself as “the founder of two startups called Alex and Tara.” Her line for it: parenting is gender neutral, even though the burden rarely falls that way in practice.
Breaking the priesthood of software.
Nithya calls traditional coding skills a “priesthood,” a specialized barrier that decided who got to build. She says AI is dissolving that barrier, letting people with domain expertise but no engineering background build and test their own ideas.
The pattern that ties these moments together is this question: What changes when the old boundary stops holding?
🗣 Which of these moments resonated most with you? Was it Nithya’s early life lessons, how she raised her daughters, or how AI democratizes building businesses? Or was there another magic moment for you in the episode? Drop it below or slide into the DMs on LinkedIn or Instagram!
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The Quote from the Episode
"AI is a tool for women to express their ideas like no other tool in history."
— Nithya RuffNithya said this about why women need to get into AI now, not later. She sees fewer women participating in AI than men. She's pointing to a closing window: a way to build and articulate an idea without needing anyone else's permission or skillset first.
If you know a founder who could use Nithya's inspiring words, use the buttons below to tell her about the episode.
3 Trends I’m Seeing Across Conversations
If there is one pattern that keeps coming back through the episodes, it is this: what looks like an individual choice or gap is usually downstream of a choice they made earlier. Three trends across previous episodes point to that as well.
How girls are conditioned around risk, before they ever pitch anything.
In episode 114, Catrine Rehnberg traces how childhood praise shapes women’s relationship with risk: girls are more often praised for being careful and getting things right, not for taking a swing and missing. Her framing: women aren’t risk-averse, they’re risk-conscious, because that’s what got rewarded early. It’s the same mechanism Nithya’s father used in reverse. He praised her opinions and pushed her toward independence, and she built a career that reflects it.
The funding gap is an investor problem, not a founder problem.
The funding gap comes down to mispricing risk, because women are underrepresented among the people making investment decisions. Azin Radsan van Alebeek put it plainly in episode 123: “Capital fuels ideas. And if we’re not fueling a cross section of ideas, we’re building a future that does not allow all of us to be our best self.” Episode 119, with Erica van Eeghen and Maud Vermeulen, made the same point: closing that gap means changing who holds the capital and how they assess risk, not asking founders to pitch differently.
The image of who gets to build is already out of date.
Victoria Lawson, founder of Wholepal, named this directly in episode 90: “If somebody says ‘developer,’ ‘engineer,’ or ‘CTO,’ immediately the image in my mind is masculine.” She built an AI-driven platform without fitting that image herself. Nithya makes the same point about open source leadership and AI: the skill that used to gatekeep who could build is no longer the barrier it was.
Three trends from different episodes with the same underlying question: who gets to hold the pen, whether that’s raising a child, allocating capital, or writing code, and what happens when that starts to change.
🗣️ How do you look at these trends? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
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Coming Up On Women Disrupting Tech
Karen Berg has heard this pitch many times: sleep better, try a meditation app, exercise more, and your health problems will sort themselves out. In this episode, she explains why that advice falls apart when it comes to women's health.
Karen is a partner at Healthy Capital, a venture fund that invests in digital health solutions. In episode 161, Karen and I talk about her path from law and investment banking into impact investing, why she's drawn to highly regulated markets, and why she thinks femtech needs to move past wellness apps and into real diagnosis and treatment.
In the clip above, Karen makes the case that treating women's health as a wellness problem lets serious, undiagnosed medical issues go unaddressed. Want to hear the rest of the conversation? Follow Women Disrupting Tech to get it in your feed.
Listen to the clip, and if you'd like to hear more, subscribe below to find the full episode in your inbox on 16 July 2026 at 8:00 CET.
What I Want to Leave You With
The 2% funding number gets discussed in almost every conversation about female founders, and it hasn't moved in 25 years.
But Nithya's answer isn't really about the number. She traces it back to a father who insisted on her financial independence before she ever needed it, and forward to a boardroom where the people deciding on funding still look mostly the same as they did decades ago.
Neither of those gets fixed by asking founders to try harder. One is a parenting choice made long before a pitch deck exists. The other is about who sits in the room when the money gets allocated. Founders can't pitch their way around either.
The clearest example of what changes when that starts to shift: the current president of the Apache Software Foundation came up through it doing marketing and event organizing, not code. Nithya's own path through the Linux Foundation followed the same route. The rule that used to decide who could lead a technical organization is already broken. Most people just haven't noticed yet.
Listen to the full conversation with Nithya Ruff on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. And if you are a female founder navigating a funding conversation, take a look at FundingCoach.ai.
About Nithya Ruff
Nithya Ruff has spent 30+ years building open source programs inside some of the largest technology companies in the world.
She ran Amazon's Open Source Program Office across AWS, Amazon.com, and its device teams, work she previously did at Comcast, where she advised more than 200 open source projects and set the company's overall open source strategy.
She currently chairs the Linux Foundation board. Before that, she drove over 100 percent year-over-year growth in Wind River's Linux product line and led the open source strategy work around Ceph, OCP, and OpenStack storage architecture at SanDisk.
She’s passionate about advancing open technologies, particularly in the AI space, and her goal is to break down the barriers that keep underrepresented groups, especially women, from contributing. She is actively mentoring women in tech and has been angel investing through Neythri Futures Fund and NEO for the past 10 to 15 years.
You can connect with Nithya on LinkedIn and via her Substack or her website.
Listen to Episode 160 on Spotify, Apple or YouTube
Why the Funding Gap Starts Before Female Founders Ever Pitch with Nithya Ruff | Ep. 160 - Women Disrupting Tech
Listen on Apple Podcasts Events that Women Disrupting Tech Must-Attend
Some great events take place this spring. Below are some that you definitely want to check out. For a full overview of all events, including links to buy tickets, please check the events page.
AI Summer School for Women Entrepreneurs
If you're an entrepreneurial woman sitting on an idea, wondering if you could build it with AI, this is for you.
On 13 July, the first 4-week online cohort of the AI Summer School for Women starts. It's organized by learning & development specialist Ilkem Kayican Dipcin with the goal to help women build real products and businesses using AI.
Here’s how it works:
→ Thursday evenings (20:00–22:00 CET): Live sessions: new content, demos, hands-on practice
→ Saturday mornings (10:00–11:00 CET): Group check-ins: weekly deliverables, peer feedback, Q&AWhat you’ll build over 4 weeks:
• Week 1: Validate your idea with AI-powered market research
• Week 2: Build your brand voice, visuals & content strategy
• Week 3: Write proposals that convert + automate your first task
• Week 4: Demo Day pitch + 30-day personalised action planBy the end of the summer:
You've built confidence that you can build with AI.
You'll graduate with a certificate as proof of what you've achieved.
You'll have an actual business asset that you can start to monetize.Ilkem has space for max 12 women, and you can enroll here: https://ilkemkayican.com/summer-school
Women Disrupting Tech | The Podcast
The Podcast Closing the Funding Gap for Women in Tech.
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