This Next Billion-Dollar Startup Founder Wants To Revolutionize Women's Healthcare
Forbes Talks
Forbes Media LLC
5 • 4 Ratings
🗓️ 14 April 2025
⏱️ 25 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
ForbesWomen Editor, Maggie McGrath, sits down with Joanna Strober, a seasoned entrepreneur and healthcare pioneer, who has dedicated her career to addressing gaps in healthcare.
After successfully scaling her previous company focused on childhood obesity prevention, Strober pivoted her attention to what she saw as an even bigger challenge she herself lived firsthand: the lack of specialized care for women in midlife.
Under her leadership, Midi Health has grown to serve over 12,000 women per week with their menopause journey, via a network of 250 specialized clinicians. Having closed a $63M Series B round in September, the companies mission is ambitiously moving the dial towards making tailored midlife care accessible to women via insurance coverage and telehealth services.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hi, everyone. I'm Maggie McGrath, editor of Forbes Women. Menopause has become one of the most |
| 0:09.2 | interesting areas of women health startups. Investors are awakening to the financial opportunity, |
| 0:15.0 | as women are demanding more from their doctors and their care. Within this space is Joanna Strober. She is the founder |
| 0:22.3 | and CEO of Midi Health, a women's health company that she started in 2021 and now sits on the |
| 0:29.2 | Forbes list of the next billion-dollar startups. Joanna, thanks so much for being here. |
| 0:33.9 | Thank you. So take us back to the early days of Midi. You have prior health care experience in |
| 0:40.2 | your business life, but why start a company that in the earliest days was really focused on menopause? |
| 0:45.7 | So it really was a personal experience for me. I was in my late 40s and experiencing a lot of issues of |
| 0:52.8 | peri menopause. |
| 0:56.4 | And I had a really hard time getting care. |
| 1:02.9 | Essentially, I was having all the symptoms, the hot flashes, the anxiety, the mood swings, painful sex. |
| 1:10.5 | But because I was still menstruating, I kept on being told I was not in menopause and none of these things were treatable. And so eventually, |
| 1:12.8 | I found a private doctor that I had to pay $1,500 to and drive an hour. And in, you know, |
| 1:20.4 | in one hour, she gave me all the right medications and within two weeks I was back to my old self. |
| 1:26.2 | And it just became really clear to me that all |
| 1:29.0 | women deserved access to this type of care. And it shouldn't just be something from concierge |
| 1:33.2 | doctors. And at the same time, I was working at a digital health company. And I had learned that |
| 1:39.8 | the laws were changing because of COVID. So we could now make all women have access to this type of care covered by insurance. |
| 1:47.0 | So that was really the basis of it is understanding there was this huge opportunity to fill this gap of care and to create an expert care company that would be actually covered by insurance. |
| 1:56.0 | What's so interesting to me about menopause is you can look at other areas of women's health. |
| 2:00.0 | And there are certain things that affect some of us, but not everyone. |
| 2:03.1 | Not everyone has allergies. |
... |
Transcript will be available on the free plan in 3 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Forbes Media LLC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Forbes Media LLC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.