Introducing Teal Health, the MIT 100K 2021 Pitch Competition Winner!
Written by: Jack Sweeney
Teal Health is a MIT start up founded by three MBA students looking to fill the gap in the healthcare system for polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) with a digital health solution. They are focused on addressing the full lifecycle of care, taking a holistic approach to the often-neglected disease. The team recently competed at the MIT 100K Pitch, and won first place. You can watch the competition recording here!
Learn more about PCOS here.
About the Team
Rachel Ruha
Rachel started her career at KPMG in economic valuation and services. She then moved into small business customer marketing at American Express, eventually transitioning to market research. She is currently pursuing her MBA at MIT Sloan with a focus on entrepreneurship. A PCOS patient herself, Rachel understands firsthand the struggles of finding effective PCOS care.
Olivia Elsaid
Olivia started her career at Deloitte in management consulting with a focus on healthcare. She knew she wanted to explore the intersection of entrepreneurship and healthcare during her MBA experience, and worked part-time at a digestive health start up during her time at Sloan before starting Teal Health. Olivia is passionate about the roles that lifestyle change, such as in nutrition, exercise and stress management, can have on health outcomes.
Michelle Feole
Michelle was a Process Design Engineer in the energy industry, focusing on refinery and chemical processes. She is currently pursuing her MBA and Master’s in Civil and Environmental Engineering as part of the LGO (Leaders for Global Operations) program. Michelle has focused on expanding her knowledge of machine learning and its intersection with personalized care.
What is Teal Health?
R: Teal Health is the solution to the gaps in care traditionally delivered to PCOS patients by the healthcare system at large. Traditionally, the medical system has treated PCOS like it is only a reproductive disorder, while the reality is that it is a far more complex endocrine disorder. It affects a patient’s day-to-day life from the time someone who is assigned female at birth is an adolescent through menopause and beyond.
Teal Health leverages the technology and tools we have available to us today to scale care that treats PCOS as what it is — a complex endocrine disorder that requires a multifaceted approach to maintain and control symptoms. It is the intersection of the ubiquity of the internet, technology and machine learning, allowing us to deliver this multi-faceted approach that the traditional healthcare system doesn’t have the time to provide in a fifteen-minute appointment.
How did you meet, and how did Teal Health come to be?
R: We all met in the “New Enterprises” course, and it was very serendipitous the way that we complemented each other’s skill sets. One challenge of finding the right founding team is ensuring skillsets do not overlap too much. The second battle is finding individuals you have an effective working chemistry with. We were lucky to have been able to check both of these boxes.
The fast pace of “New Enterprises” tested that working chemistry and allowed for candid discussions to determine if we wanted to continue pursuing this idea outside of class. We all worked so well together and really enjoyed the process; it was actually some feedback from one of the 100K judges — they could see the unique nature of our working relationship. We felt like we had something special at the close of New Enterprises and wanted to keep pushing it forward and that was additional confirmation for us.
How did Pitch help develop Teal Health?
O: Preparing for Pitch helped us to be more concise and clear in articulating what Teal Health brings to market, especially within such a short 90 second time frame. We practiced over and over and iterated on our pitch to ensure we were including as much detail about our company as we could, as well as preparing for what we expected in the Q&A pitch. Overall, Pitch really helped us get clear on so many parts of our business.
On the tactical side, the competition also accelerated some steps of building Teal Health that we wanted to complete beforehand, in addition to helping us plan for later stages of 100K (Accelerate and Launch) having the stage gates of 100K where you have to have something ready for each part of the competition helps us ensure we are staying on track in addition to our other priorities for our business.
What other steps did you take to prepare for the 100K?
O: In addition to preparing the pitch itself, we also heavily focused on preparing the Q&A. We had a list of topics we knew we wanted to cover and made sure to practice that with trusted professors in the communications department. They were helpful in many ways, but one important area was in helping us make sure that we really tied the problems of PCOS to our solution in a way that makes it almost obvious to the audience. That took it a step further in how we were able to articulate what we do.
R: It was very much a team effort. We have created a safe working environment, so all of us feel comfortable expressing dissent even if the other two agree on an idea. That’s the approach that we take with everything, and is what we did with the Pitch.
Our final pitch had all of our fingerprints on it, and the same with the Q&A. We came up with it together and sourced feedback from others, but it was all three of our brains coming together to prepare us for that moment. Even though Michelle wasn’t up on stage with us, she was right there in the audience, in the pitch, and in the Q&A.
O: Practicing it all together was also extremely helpful. Rachel did the pitch live for us and we were able to give feedback on delivery. I practiced the Q&A with them as well, getting feedback on what more I could cover given Rachel’s experience as a patient and Michelle’s understanding of the technical lens for the product. This ensured everything we said was truly a team effort, not just one person, and was really a product of each of our skillets.
What is next on the roadmap for Teal?
R: We plan on participating in MIT Fuse in January and hope to pitch in 100K Accelerate in March. Our goals for the next couple of months are to get an MVP up and running for Teal with a focus on starting our pilot program.
We’re in a stage of outreach to determine who the right providers and patients are for our pilot, with the hope that we can use that research as groundwork for MIT Fuse during IAP this January. We want to make sure we’ve laid the groundwork to have a solid prototype to iterate on, and with the hope to launch our pilot early next semester.
What kind of considerations do you take into account when considering providers for your pilot?
R: Something that is really important to us is making sure the providers are aligned to the mission of Teal Health — care for PCOS has to be this multifaceted approach. We are not looking for providers who want to just write a prescription for birth control and then be on their way. These people have been missing out on comprehensive care for their entire lives, so it is about taking that holistic approach. We want partners who have a perspective of using food and lifestyle as a tool to improve symptoms, in a mindful way that is not obsessed with just weight loss or calorie restriction.
We are looking for providers who have similar values that we do, in the way that we believe is effective to treating and caring for this condition. Having empathy and good bedside manner for these people who have been neglected and gaslit for a long time by the existing medical system is paramount.
O: Ideally, they would be someone who has treated PCOS in the past. Many of the providers we’ve spoken to do have that experience and can bring a lot to light for us, because of how complex a condition it is. The providers that have treated it in the past and have seen a lot of PCOS patients, definitely have a better understanding of what works for other patients. They can help us, especially while we build out the machine learning component in our recommendation engine.
Being a fully female-founder team, what advice do you have for other women looking to get into the startup space?
R: I love that we are an all-female founded team, it creates a great dynamic for the three of us. This is obviously a health issue that is impacting those who are assigned female at birth, and so I think it is important to have three different brains who are all females thinking through these things.
As female founders, I think we feel a sense of responsibility to fellow women. The more women we see in positions of founding roles and starting companies, the more it will motivate other women to start companies.
That can be more motivating for me than anything else; Not only is Teal Health increasing people’s odds of living with this condition and achieving their full potential in life once they feel optimal, but it is also serving as inspiration to other women to start their own companies.
Sometimes being a minority or the only woman in a room can empower you, and you can recognize that, try to harness it and push the norms forward. Even though we are frequently surrounded by men in entrepreneurship conferences or classes, I have always felt within the MIT ecosystem everyone is very excited to learn about what we are doing. Everyone recognizes it is a really big deal and is impacting a lot of people.
For women who may be questioning “should I start a company? Do I have what it takes?” — you do have what it takes, so go out and tackle it. Know that people want to hear from women. Women are often very successful founders –people recognize that and want to hear our voices.
O: I totally agree, and to Rachel’s point it is so important that we are a fully female founded team. As we build Teal Health, it stems from Rachel’s patient perspective as well as all of our perspectives as women, especially given many women’s health conditions like PCOS are so understudied. I think there’s a lot of power in what we can do by bringing attention to a condition that has been ignored and affects such a large percentage of our population. This also got the judges attention — PCOS impacts 1 in 5 women, and most people don’t talk about it or hear about it. I think our opportunity to bring that story to life and help these patients is very powerful.
We were also excited to see such a well-balanced judging panel with regards to gender at Pitch, and hope to continue to see that in the future. That being said, it is really exciting when we talk to so many men who have women in their lives with PCOS and do understand it as well. Closing that knowledge and awareness gap is important and so great to see progress on.
With regards to MIT’s entrepreneurship ecosystem, it is so great to see other women taking on risks in things like Pitch2Match or the E&I track pro-seminar and using these platforms to pitch their ideas. A great example of this is that if Rachel never pitched the problem of PCOS in New Enterprises, we wouldn’t be working together right now. Having women take those risks and put their voice out there is really important to find others that want to work on something similar, whether that’s in women’s health or elsewhere.
Follow Teal Health here, and stay tuned for 100K events beginning again in early 2022!
