From Oxford MBA to Startup CEO with Lily Elsner, Co-Founder of Jack Fertility

Introduction to Male Infertility

[00:00:00] Lily Elsner: The number one reason why women have IVF in the UK, 37%, is due to male infertility. It's just that the sperm quality is not high enough and usually that is incredibly treatable.

[00:00:12] Susannah de Jager: Welcome to Oxford Plus, the podcast series that takes you deep into the myths and truths of the Oxford investing landscape. I'm your host, Susannah de Jager and I've spent over 16 years in UK asset management.

Meet Lily Elsner: CEO and Co-Founder of Jack Fertility

[00:00:26] Susannah de Jager: My guest today is Lily Elsner, CEO and Co Founder of Jack Fertility. Jack Fertility is the first postal sperm kit offering lab grade semen analysis results without ever needing to set foot in a clinic. Lily has a background in science herself, having studied biological sciences and philosophy at Wellesley College. She then co founded Jack Fertility after her MBA in Oxford and a stint as a head of strategy at a UK growth drug discovery company after starting her career in global M& A. I'm so pleased to have Lily here today because Jack Fertility is a consumer facing proposition that is very different from what people think of as a typical Oxford startup. She also has a wealth of experience in Oxford from different perspectives. Mishcon de Reya have been an amazing partner to Jack Fertility through their startup journey, helping them with an Innovate UK IP audit and as a personal mentor, Nicola McConville, who is one of the partners here in Oxford, also helping as a mentor.

Lily, thank you so much for joining today.

[00:01:26] Lily Elsner: My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

[00:01:28] Susannah de Jager: So you've got a really useful for listeners journey because, you've done Oxford from many different perspectives. So you've been a student, an employee here, and now you're a founder. I'd love to hear from you just a little bit more about those different lenses and how it brought you to where you are now founding Jack Fertility.

Lily's Journey to Oxford and Career Path

[00:01:52] Lily Elsner: It was an interesting journey, especially being an American doing an MBA. I had been recruited by Oxford through that MBA process, so originally from North Carolina and lived in New York and D. C. prior to coming over, and so it was really interesting as an American. So came in2019, had six normal months and then got locked down in Pembroke College. So quite a wild experience of, yeah, it felt like me and the ghosts, during the pandemic. But it really solidified my bond with the city in a lot of ways, both through living there in such an extreme situation, but also at the time I was working with Creative Destruction Lab. I was a strategy consultant for a local AI drug discovery company and rediscovered my scientific roots. I had originally started out in science, so I really adored being able to translate corporate speak and investment speak into translate that to scientists and vice versa and found that was actually a really interesting and useful skill, particularly in Oxford and I was delighted to be hired by that company and stay in Oxford to help them grow the company. So, we then went from 2020 to 2021 raising some investment as well as doing a U. S. expansion where I was able to bring my American background and have this delightful surprise of something that I didn't know would be useful, coming back as I became an employee in the Oxford ecosystem, I got to know some of the incredible support that we have here.

The Oxford Ecosystem and Its Opportunities

[00:03:21] Lily Elsner: Everything from professional services to some of the ecosystem support. I'm thinking, of course, of everything from the Council to the OxLEPs, to the Oxford Trust, Advanced Oxford. I mean, name drop. But, really seeing everything outside of the university that I think when you're a student, you almost have these blinkers or blinders on, to just what's available in the University of Oxford, completely forgetting that there's a university up Headington Hill and that there are so many amazing resources and so I'm happy to get into more of the story of Jack Fertility, which is the company that we've now built, but I found it a really empowering experience, to be able to sort of see how this ecosystem works and then choose to build my business here. So hopefully that's a little bit of a helpful overview.

[00:04:06] Susannah de Jager: It's super helpful and actually you've drawn on some really important themes there, which is Oxford has so much here, but it can sometimes be operating adjacent without crossover and you have this amazing seat where you've been able to sit across various areas of it and benefit from them.

Challenges and Opportunities in Oxford

[00:04:26] Susannah de Jager: Do you feel with that perspective that you bring that more could be done to educate people within each sphere or to run co events or do you think it's an area that's evolving pretty well?

[00:04:40] Lily Elsner: I wish I could say that it's evolving well, and I will say that I think there's been so much incredible movement and there's so many people who care so much about this that I've been impressed in the five years that I've been here to see so much progress. However, I mean, on every front, there could be improvements, most particularly, even just the fact that I'm so rare, that I come as an MBA. I get hired by a local company in Oxfordshire and am retained to the point that I would be able to start a business with a high growth trajectory in town. I'm one of a very few people over the last ten years who have been able to do that

So to bring that to life a little bit, what what was really significant for me was going into, I was head of strategy for this company, and that opened my eyes, especially when you're an early stage company trying to keep budget down, and you're trying to do so many amazing things. You start networking and understanding the ecosystem, and I was, I just opened my eyes massively to all of the opportunities that were literally, I mean, streets away from where I sat, like I lived on Walton Street and I was like, Oh my gosh, I wasn't even aware of some of the things that, for example, the library's doing and some of the resources there. Similarly, some of the incredible ecosystem work that's happening, I mean, among OSC and the uni, and I found so many myths, as well as things that just need to be explored more. So, for example, there's a perception that MBAs in particular wouldn't want to stay in Oxford and that couldn't be further from the truth in so many cases because, one, Oxford's a great place to live and so I think a lot of, I mean, there's 69 nationalities that come to the MBA from Saiid and they've been intentionally recruited for their extraordinary backgrounds, yet it's so rare that you would ever have someone say, Oh, I'm working with a company in Oxford, full stop and it's such a missed opportunity because the university is actually already recruited so many extraordinary, I mean, talk about thinking now about recruitment fees and how difficult it is to find talent. The university has kindly hand picked 330 extraordinary people from all over the world with incredibly niche skillsets, like usually often many medical doctors, like people who've worked in similar industries, venture capital, all of these different things that would be so beneficial to move the needle. For so many companies that are just even in central Oxford, not to mention the greater area and they aren't retained and people don't even recruit from the MBA. There's a sort of endemic perception in Oxford that I've found and have spoken to other folks that have been on this podcast about where we need to change that narrative that Oxford is a great place to start a business, it is a great place to settle down and raise a family or to even just have a great time and have a base. For example, I go to London once a week. I go to Bristol once a month. I mean, it's an extraordinary place to be able to take advantage of a lot of the UK and I say that even as an American.

[00:07:38] Susannah de Jager: Well thank you firstly, for saying all the things that I agree with. So let's call, let's call that, you're a great guest, Lily, but it's really interesting hearing, as you're talking, I'm thinking about Sarah Hayward from Advanced Oxford, who I know you know, but absolutely talked about this same thing from, their perspective of just not very good at retaining both our undergrads and obviously our MBAs from the business school and what a loss that is because we've got all these brilliant people and how can we retain more of them? And then equally, a slightly different point, but Irene Tracy spoke about it, but also it's in the spin out review that she co authored that point around getting business schools to work really closely with excellent universities because, and you drew it up brilliantly, but you have amazing academics who quite often have operated within an academic setting for, if not the majority, possibly all of their career and it's very different to go and commercialise something to sit in a strategic seat, how do you grow a business? But of course, MBAs will classically be from purely business backgrounds. Anyway, it's such a natural, join up and so there's both an amazing opportunity and I suppose I'm a bit saddened to hear that you still think there's so far to go, but thank you for drawing upon it.

Founding Jack Fertility: The Inspiration and Journey

[00:08:57] Susannah de Jager: Coming back to Jack Fertility, I'd love to hear how you went from your drug discovery journey and being head of strategy there to then deciding you are going to do something yourself and co founding the amazing Jack Fertility. So tell me a bit about that.

[00:09:13] Lily Elsner: Yeah, it was an incredible journey once again facilitated by COVID, which is sort of a bizarre thing to say, but for myself and my co founder, Nick Shipley, we met on the NBA, first day, he was such a polite and still is.

[00:09:28] Susannah de Jager: Like a cute meet.

[00:09:29] Lily Elsner: Such a, it is so cute, it really is, poor thing. So we're polar opposites in so many ways yet we're so values aligned. So I'm the extrovert as you can tell from being on the podcast. He is the introvert who's currently recovering from a speaking engagement I forced him to do yesterday at SIFTED Summit. But, truly, I love to do wide stretching strategy work and he's has the eye for details, very content based. I mean, on every front we're perfectly complementary and we saw that actually working together. So on the MBA course, you have a study group and we did all of our different assessments too. We were randomly assignedand then meanwhile also share the same British sense of humour. So I grew up watching British television and absolutely loved all of the comedy and he also had seen some rather esoteric shows, and we truly bonded over that and then actually in March 2020, he and his wife had their first baby. So they had to go to the hospital in the, that first day of, we're locked down, do we wear masks? We don't know. Follow the rules. and then they had to take this baby home and navigate becoming parents while locked down. So for quite obvious reasons, he ended up deferring to the following year of the MBA.

So at the time, we weren't really thinking about what ultimately would become Jack. Instead, we, like everyone else, were contending with the evolving testing measures, started getting used to doing PCR tests through the post and that's how this initially came up, is that when Nick was returning to Oxford to finish the MBA, he very vulnerably shared that he wanted to get his fertility tested because they had had some issues with the first, and also wanted to ensure that especially in the, headlines that are happening at the moment of sperm count is down almost 60 percent over the last 50 years, one in six couples will now experience infertility and the stats are only getting worse. so with that in the back of his mind, he wanted to proactively get tested, yet when he approached first the NHS, it's almost impossible to get a test. You have to actively try to conceive for a year, you have to tell your GP about that, so that's already like a huge mental block,for most men in particular, but also if you're not in a heterosexual relationship and you want your fertility tested, that's a whole other conversation, but basically it's one of these huge barriersand as we started uncovering these, he also just said to me, he was like, it's so embarrassing, it's so emasculating. When he went looking at the private options, similarly, it has to be in person because sperm dies within an hour. So you have to go through this incredibly embarrassing process, to then get results that you don't really know what to do with unless you either pay for an additional consultationor you simply sort of say, okay, well, let's, move on, and have to make some really difficult decisions about whether to pursue fertility treatment and all of that said, meanwhile, we're popping PCR tests through the post and that started the conversation of why can't you just, Pop this in a post box, we're able to do everything else in terms of testing and Nick and I had been chatting about this and I'm sort of the science friend in our friend group and he said, why is this the case? And in the back of my mind, I was like, look, artificial insemination is how the entire livestock industry works globally and so many people send all sorts of samples through the post for conception purposes even and I thought, for testing, actually, it probably isn't that complicated and so after sort of abusing our Oxford email addresses and interviewing anyone foolish enough to answer our emails over about six months, we really talked ourselves, first trying to talk ourselves out of developing what became Jack, which is a postal sperm testand then back into and really developing the conviction around the massive market that there is for proactive male fertility testing, as well as all the different societal taboos that we could also be breaking down at the same time to also remove the burden on women because so many times Nick's wife had three or four different options of things she could send through the post, yet for women, fertility treatment is so much more different and there's so much less you can do it was very empowering experience of, it is scary to start something. It's massively high risk personally, I just thought, you know, if not now when and especially at the beginning of such a wave of what ultimately we will be this massive market opportunity and also huge societal need, all of my MBA instincts as well as my personal instincts were telling me it's time to take that leap, and felt very empowered and supported to do so.

[00:14:04] Susannah de Jager: It's so exciting to hear you talk about it because you do have an amazing background for it, you've got all of this experience and I really understand on a personal level that draw towards wanting to do something for yourself and something so important where you can see the market need, you've got this great partner, you've got so much together as well. So it's really inspiring firstly and I like the phrase you use of we try to talk ourselves out of it because I think that's quite a good way of like really beating something up. If it's still burning a hole in your head after months and you're like, I got to do it. I've just got to go for it. When you say it out loud, it almost seems obvious as all the best ideas do, I'm not trying to take away, but I'm like, yeah, sure, why is that not a thing? Why is it not a thing?

[00:14:51] Lily Elsner: Yeah, huge question. I appreciate you asking it because this is what took six months. It just seems so obvious and of course, this is also something investors ask us all the time. But after, I mean, we've interviewed hundreds of experts at this point globally and have become quite embedded in the Femtech and sort of broader reproductive health landscape, because it seems so ridiculous and I think there's sort of two major reasons why.

Breaking Taboos and Technological Innovations

[00:15:18] Lily Elsner: The first is technological priorities, and that's really the innovation and what we've done at Jack and kind of our, the reason why it is novel. But the second one is this incredibly entrenched taboo, both from the perspective of fertility clinics themselves, fertility has always been something that people are very ashamed of. There's so much pressure on both male and female sides. I mean, of course, for women, when I normally, when I pitch, I say, what gender do you think of when I say the word fertility? People always say women, and then it's equally likely to be male or female factor in infertility and often we find that there's so much shame associated with even investigating the male side.

So men often will, take up to a year to even book a test because they don't want to contend with the fact that they may or may not be virile or whatever we want to talk about because it's so tied to masculinity and so even people who have a relatively healthy relationship with masculinity will feel very scared. So for example, we trialed a tagline for Jack of, is your sperm okay? With over a hundred people and they all hated it, I wouldn't say all, but most of them felt quite threatened and for me, I was like, especially as a woman, you're constantly worried about your fertility but for men, I think it's the first time and to have it so intensely in your face of, Oh my God, I may not be okay and the fear is interesting, that reaction to the fear as well, rather than in my head and just maybe it's my personality. I was like, Oh, well, we'll just check, like, we'll just find out. But similarly, if we take a step back on the revenue model of fertility companies and fertility clinics. It's really not necessarily in the revenue driving interest to investigate the male factor because about 90 percent of cases of male infertility are treatable. So it's usually a mix of lifestyle factors, so identifying what is detrimental to the spermatogenesis process. So that's things like heat exposure can often be really detrimental. So long cycling rides in Lycra is terrible for sperm, I'm afraid to say. I know, I know here all, I know I was like greater Oxfordshire on a Saturday, unfortunately.

[00:17:36] Susannah de Jager: The mammals are just dying right now!

[00:17:38] Lily Elsner: Truly.Especially actually followed up with a too long sauna, I mean, that is basically birth control, but that's a whole other conversation.

[00:17:46] Susannah de Jager: What about ice baths?

[00:17:47] Lily Elsner: I know. Ice baths, ice baths that can report are good, so not, not too

[00:17:53] Susannah de Jager: Sales are going to go up!

[00:17:54] Lily Elsner: I know. I know.

[00:17:55] Susannah de Jager: There's going to be a bump.

[00:17:56] Lily Elsner: I'm like, buy now. This is not investment advice. But yeah, I mean, there's so many pieces that as we started looking at this, you just have to think we see the rise of private equity buying up fertility clinics in the US as well as the UK and around the world because it is so lucrative and so what I found and actually there are definitely clinics that do this, there are many that don't, but if you have a male fertility patient, the number one reason why women have IVF in the UK, 37%, is due to male infertility. So the women are, in most cases, almost completely fine. It's just that the sperm quality is not high enough. The issue with that is that usually that is incredibly treatable. So for example, it'll be either an environmental or a lifestyle factor happening that's causing...

[00:18:43] Susannah de Jager: Doesn't sound lucrative though.

Barriers to Male Fertility Treatment

[00:18:45] Susannah de Jager: No, it doesn't, because what do you do? Like, how do you make money off of saying just be healthy for three to six months, you know, lay off the booze, start exercising, or in a couple cases, and this is what is so saddening, especially in sort of the fertility justice area, I've been speaking with a number of people, who ended up having, or either are donor conceived children or people who did not need to have fertility treatment. It actually was often either a blockage in, sort of the parts of the reproductive system. A varicocell is one of the most common issues, that's a blood vessel that basically the heat of that blood vessel almost like, to just put it vividly, it just sort of cooks the sperm because of the proximity of the tubes and so basically, it's like internal birth control, but if you remove that blood vessel, it's a very simple procedure and so you can go from being almost completely infertile to perfectly healthy just after that surgery and waiting a few months and so, this isn't in all cases, but it's very frequent and so you often see people going into, you know, they'll spend, between 5, 000 and 10, 000 pounds per cycle, going through up to five cycles and to be able to save that money by just having a surgery that you didn't know you needed to have, because again, men aren't necessarily going to the doctor saying, Hey, actually something's a bit, a bit wrong downstairs, I'd love to check or we want to have a baby, we're trying for a baby. I mean, it's so, so many barriers to getting this done and so that's why on our side, we just saw this massive opportunity to be able to say, look, it's in the heads of so many people to have a product that comprehensively shows you what's going on and then roots you to the right care and of course has revenue generating opportunities of saying, look, you don't have to do this on your own because I think there's also a mental health component of that, of supporting people through this vulnerable process and that's what we've designed you get the same results you would have gotten at a fertility clinic, you get all of the guidance that you would get normally through a consultation and then also concrete next steps on what you need to do and mitigating a lot of the fear that's around that because it can save people so much, not only money, which of course a consumer is interested in doing, but also so much stress and so much heartache,removing that coulda, woulda, shoulda, just through simple education is part of, why we decided to go direct to consumer rather than relying on all of the infrastructure that we see in the more B2B landscapeSo I want to come back to that point because I think that's really important to cover.

Innovative Postal Fertility Testing

[00:21:17] Susannah de Jager: But before we do, what is novel about what you're doing? What have you created in the kind of technology that you're using? Cause I'd love to understand that a bit better.

[00:21:25] Lily Elsner: Yes. the real differentiator for Jack is that one, it's entirely postal, which is a really important point because there are a few competitors that exist that are either handheld devices and what we found through Nick's background is in fast moving consumer goods marketing and consumer insight, so we've done so many different interviews and different ways of assessing this. But basically what people said is that there's a huge ick factor with testing your own sample as you can imagine. There's also a big concern around, again, the quality of the samples necessitating there's a competitor that does courier pickup and as anyone who has ever ordered something, Uber Eats or any even just picking up packages, there's so much uncertainty in that timing and the way that unless you're sort of doing what we've done, and I'll get into that in a moment, the quality of the sample is not going to be within the appropriate range. So what we've done to mitigate this and to be able to enable this postal aspect is like I mentioned, normally sperm dies within an hour. So the first thing, sperm are just cells. So you need to keep them alive, they need to have enough space to be able to move around and so what you give them is basically food and a little more space. So we have a preservation medium that we have the individual who uses the kit just pops in a little bit of this medium and seals up the tube where they collect their sample. Then they pop it into our kit, which has a bunch of temperature controls and temperature monitoring so we know that we can keep it within a certain range. It goes through the post tracked 24 and arrives at our lab. When it gets to our lab, our embryologist then assesses the sample as if we were at a fertility clinic with a few adjustments, and then we apply an aging algorithm that we have developed based on a huge research study we did last fall, and so there's a sort of complimentary data strategy that we're developing to be able to get a lot of this information that just doesn't exist in the world, in an age where data is king, is gold, that's another longer term play that we're doing.

[00:23:24] Susannah de Jager: That's really interesting because obviously most people have now heard of Zoe, which is, a completely different area, but always these problems that aren't looked at, you think, oh, we just need so much more data and then you could be educating people out the front, right? Like these are the factors, try this before you try it for a baby. This is what you should be thinking about and that educational piece predicated upon hard, cold data, that's super exciting. I hadn't heard you speak about that element before.

Direct-to-Consumer vs. B2B Models

[00:23:54] Susannah de Jager: So moving back to what you said about direct consumer rather than B2B. We've spoken about this quite a lot and how it's a less familiar model to lots of investors,particularly in the UK. I'd love to hear a little bit more about some of the conversations you're coming into, and what mental block appears to be, because to me it seems like it is a natural direct to consumer play.

[00:24:20] Lily Elsner: To our earlier points around the Oxford ecosystem and thinking so much about the genesis of ventures, a lot of the times B2B does seem the less risky route because for us, we analysed all of our competitors and saw how they went to market and saw what was successful and what wasn't and unfortunately, for male fertility in particular, we haven't known a lot about the customers. There are three companies in the U. S. that have done this incredibly successfully. So they've paved the way in terms of how this all works. But in the UK and in greater Europe, we've seen one or two companies that have entered the market, and have actually failed on the B2B side and part of that was because their results weren't necessarily what clinicians needed and then similarly about retaining some of these contracts.

Challenges in the UK Investment Landscape

[00:25:09] Lily Elsner: it's a really difficult conversation to have, particularly in Oxford, where we have so many spin outs that are so focused on areas like drug discovery, or even if it's hardware, it's these super deep tech ventures, it's almost like we've forgotten about all the other types of businesses and for me, I've been quite frustrated with that because, especially Nick having worked at Nestle and Kraft Heinz and these huge companies and me being, I mean, I literally was chief of staff for the U. S. credit card division of Capital One, specifically in our data analytics and digital marketing area, our margins are extraordinary and so we don't need that many customers to be profitable and so it's almost like we, in the UK, have conditioned ourselves to hear consumer equals high cap, high failure and I think there needs to be a bit of a correction because especially in healthcare for some of these incredibly important products, there's always going to be a willingness to pay.

But I think when we're talking about the investment landscape in Oxford, I've seen this consistently and it is another area of flight for potentially extraordinary successful Oxford based businesses is that, it was really shocking when looking in databases and looking at who backs these types of companies, it goes from being all the different types of funds to my options are basicallyabout six early stage funds that do consumer and then a variety of family offices and then it's really just angels, um, who I then have to go and say like, basically, do you want to make a lot of money? And then, then we can have the conversation. But if I use any of those key words, consumer, health insurance, you Healthcare, e commerce, these have become almost like dirty words.

The beauty of Jack is that it's not too complicated. Like, we can just get to market, and everyone's always so worried about IP.

The first conversation an Oxford investor always asks me is, what's your IP? And thankfully for us, like, we have done so much innovation, we have a patent pending. We have a number of really strategic moves in terms of our protecting our brand as well as licensing opportunities. But for me, I'm like, don't worry about our IP until you've heard the business, right? Is the IP actually what's important here? And I think that's partially the dominance of spin outs and so many of the other types of investments that we see here, but it does put again, the blinders on of saying, you know, why if you are investing at certain levels, wouldn't you rather support something that's going to go to market and quickly make revenue and have an exit opportunity rather than sort of just being so focused on a patent that may not actually be necessary for a long time, and may not be the first thing that you need in terms of developing the business.

[00:27:50] Susannah de Jager: It's really interesting hearing you say that because there is a lot of focus on IP, and of course you want to moat to protect your business, but there are other ways and I think it probably is quite one dimensional in Oxford, from my experience.

Current Fundraising Efforts

[00:28:04] Susannah de Jager: I'd love to hear exactly where you're up to at the moment, what the raise you're currently working on is, because I know you are currently working on a raise. You're speaking to hundreds of investors, which is why it's so useful to have you here to talk to people about some of that experience. Where are you and how is it going?

[00:28:20] Lily Elsner: So we're currently raising 500, 000 pounds, for ostensibly a pre seed raise, which is really going to take us to market. So, we have our MVP, the, I mean, the whole thing is built out, which is extraordinary, super exciting. Thanks to, we're based in the Wood Center for Innovation and have a small lab there. So I've done all of our innovating there and it's ready to go. we just need to go through that regulatory process for a class one medical device and then get selling, which is super exciting to finally actually have a business and start doing that. So overall, it's been going really well. we were able to successfully raised last summer on a very healthy valuation. This time we've also been able to raise a healthy valuation, but I've been floored by some of the feedback, not from the investors themselves who are investing, but actually just advisors in the ecosystem who just are perpetuating this perception of UK companies having these floor level valuations.

[00:29:20] Susannah de Jager: I mean, I had someone suggest to me, we raised last summer at 3. 5 million and someone said to me, actually, I should probably lower that to two and I said, why? Like, we have so many assets, there's so many reasons why that valuation was what it was. Why in the world would I lower it? Just from, I mean, this is showing my Americanism, but why, from a negotiation perspective, why would I go in with such a low valuation? And he was like, that's just how it is and it really was so shocking to me, and of course then had a lot of interesting cultural conversations about, sort of, perception and negotiation in Britain versus America, but that aside, I think I share that too, because in my experience, like, part of becoming the founder that I am and our founding journey is learning how to take what advice is appropriate and also just learning how to trust your gut and trust your instincts because we do know that this is going to be a really successful business and we're backing not only ourselves but our existing investors and what they've supported us to build to date. So we've have almost half of the round committed at this point and we're looking still for the right lead investor. We've had a number of really exciting conversations both in the UK and in Europe about potential leads. But I think that's the other trap that early stage companies, particularly in Oxford and the UK, fall into is taking the first money that they get rather than being incredibly intentional about their cap table and that's one of the biggest lessons that Nick and I have learned in that even the first time that we turned down money, it was one of the hardest things we've ever done. But looking back, it was the best thing we did because that would have killed the business. And it's really interesting because this comes up a lot and it always sounds like quite a privileged position, but actually hearing you talk about it, particularly in an area that is depressingly a bit less well understood, there is always going to be feedback that encourages you to shift slightly to meet the demands of a larger pool of investors. But that doesn't mean it's the right thing to do and it can be so tempting, but it's so important to stick to what you know and you guys do know, you come from that background, it's going to be the correct business model and find people that actually support that and support your vision for how to develop it and I know that you've got kind of Femtech Lab, Founders Factory,

Moonstone Fund and the Oxford Seed Fund. But it is fishing in a smaller pool and I hear that difficulty, but it sounds like you're doing amazingly. So that's super exciting.

Gender Bias in Venture Capital

[00:31:53] Susannah de Jager: You are a female founder in a male focused company and in a predominantly male environment, which we know venture capital still is. Do you see that impacting some of the responses you're dealing with?

[00:32:10] Lily Elsner: I do. put bluntly, I do and it's such a complicated topic in terms of gender and gender perception and we've had some amazing conversations about this. I've had an investor at the investment committee asked me directly, why are you doing this? Looking at Nick being like, Oh, it makes total sense, you're a father, you have all of these experiences and then just looking at me being like, and you?

[00:32:38] Susannah de Jager: Just see what the response you get.

[00:32:40] Lily Elsner: I do often say that I'm just, I'm just really passionate about sperm. It was a hobby of mine.

[00:32:45] Susannah de Jager: It's so strange because we know that on the flip side, lots of femtech businesses are still predominantly run by men and I wonder if they get that same feedback.

[00:32:54] Lily Elsner: Recently Flow made headlines because they became the first femtech unicorn and they're founded by two men and it's basically a period tracker and there are so many women, including the women who started Clue and so many of the other companies in this spacewhere the really it was so difficult to contend with that because, of course, you don't want to say, oh, you know, it's just a gender thing, but the evidence shows that it actually really probably is a gender thing in this case of just like the privilege and the... it's really the trust and it's so difficult to know that you're approaching an investment conversation already several steps behind and that's what I've really realized through, again, just hundreds of data points of the various pitches I've done. Interestingly, not when we do explicitly call out gender, but personally this summer I was in a number of pitches where I realised the difference between pitching for an explicitly female founder space versus just a generic pitch was that I, halfway through pitching for a female founder thing, I realised I was having this sort of like, I was almost seizing up because I was defensive about something and I realised it was because I was so used to being interrupted, even in the first minute of whatever time limit stated pitch, even a pretty high touch, sort of regulated type pitching environment. I was so used to being interrupted or questioned or asked. I shared with you an anecdote earlier of an Oxford MBA, I mean, 10 years of experience in corporate and all these different, wearing so many different hats. I've been asked to define acronyms just to make sure that I knew what they were and I just about, I'm like, first of all, would you ask anyone that? And how is that appropriate? How is that relevant? And then I noticed that's an experience that I just never hear Nick having and similar, very rare that my male counterparts ever have that sort of experience, but I think also an interesting point to share on this perspective of being a female founder in a male space, I actually am the customer. We anticipate most of the Jack kits to be purchased by women for their male partners. It really is, and I think that's where it's so, and frankly fun from our perspective, especially as a male and female founding team, is that Nick is able to make sure and speak with our marketing team, of course, both based on his expertise, but also being the target audience in a lot of ways by making sure that it's a confident, approachable, masculine brand. But I, on my side, of course, am thinking about all of the women, and frankly, I would say about half of our 2, 000 plus wait list at this point is women who want to buy for their partners because, of course, the likes of Hertility and so many of these other trailblazing companies in the remote female fertility space have raised so much awareness that this is important and they're looking for this male factor side to have their partners tested and so, for me, I think it's almost dangerous to not have that perspective on your team So especially as a woman, I mean, part of it, it is fun, it's really interesting, I've learned so much about the frankly, the male psyche, in the process of doing this research, but also it truly in the spirit of innovation, I think this is one of the most exciting areas that you can possibly be in because it's one of the last frontiers, and for me that's incredibly excitingand then getting to be the one who's sharing this, the facts and the excitement that I find and hopefully paving the way for more people to tackle such an important issue on the male fertility side.

[00:36:26] Susannah de Jager: It makes a lot of sense when you talk about bringing both perspectives as a team and it's well documented that diverse teams are really good for lots of reasons, but in your particular business, you can't have a perspective that not living. You can try and get into the head of your customers, of course, and, and people do that brilliantly, but it's a clear benefit that both you and Nick are founders of this company.

So Lily, It's really interesting, and dare I say it, not terribly surprising when one looks at the data to hear you talk about some of those differences that you experience as a female co founder. Gender inclusivity, a catalyst for innovation by Hannah Isabel Tornow, who was doing her PhD on this. It is a bit depressing, to still see it, but it's also reassuring to see the data and the numbers written down in a dispassionate way. You know, 90 percent of companies in Oxfordshire's science and technology sector are led by men, only 18 percent of the technology and IP based companies have a woman founder and women are just underrepresented in senior leadership roles with only 19 percent of companies having women. In any leadership position, clearly this also filters through to the experience of investors and potentially unconscious bias.

Strategies to Mitigate Gender Bias

[00:37:45] Susannah de Jager: Obviously, nobody is intentionally bringing any bias into the room, but I'd love to hear, perhaps from you some of what you think could be done to mitigate this and this is a problem that both investors are suffering from because they're leaving opportunity on the table, potentially by not recognising other characteristics of great leaders that maybe are less traditionally recognised, but also just on a personal level, what you would like to see when you walk into rooms.

[00:38:14] Lily Elsner: Yeah, I appreciate that because I think there is so much we could talk about with this. But I think from my experience there are two major things. The first is there's an incredible book called the Authority Gap by Mary Ann Sieghart I think her last name is, and she writes beautifully on just how women frankly, aren't taken seriously. If a woman said something, if a man said something, it falls very differently, even if they use the same words and I've seen that, I've had to challenge even my own unconscious bias in a lot of cases, over the years and I find even last night I was at the wonderful Exit Right panel talking about Advanced Oxford and about Art Innovation Ecosystem and Investment Landscape and what I found was interesting is that we all know that investment is relationship driven, absolutely, but what we don't necessarily talk about is how we find those relationships and how those relationships are built and I've really struggled, especially as a younger woman, developing relationships with people who are some of those investors. It's taken a lot of like people developing other relationships, getting intros and intros and intros. Whereas I've found, especially just given and especially in the UK, often it ends up that people went to the same schools and they were all boys schools and you find out so many of these other things that you can't necessarily, if you only have a year or two to develop your relationships and ecosystems. I don't have a solution for that, but I think just having people think about why they know someone and why they're going to give them their time, especially when it is, it's like, is this a favor to my neighbor or is this an exciting investment opportunity?

The second particularly around gender investment is that I wish that while team is extraordinarily important especially when you're thinking about investing. We're almost on the angel side, but also in the context of funds, I wish there was a way to be gender blind in the same way that you think of the orchestral example of, having people be barefoot so you don't hear high heels, or some of these things where I just feel like I've had so many discussions where, the perception of a venture can be changed so much by hearing the identity of the founder, and so what I wish is that there is a way that you could remove some of the identity to even have some of that assessment conversation and then find out with a sort of more gender aware style of understanding and then really understanding why you're, we know that women are asked the prevention questions, men are asked the aspirational questions and I have to do a lot of work on my side to pivot those into, I'm like, sometimes in an investment conversation, I'm never asked, I'm never asked about my financial model, I'm never asked about fertility revenues and exit opportunities or anything, I'm usually asked about whether I know what the science is, and I'm like, yeah, first of all, yes, I do and second of all, let me tell you how much money we're going to make that sort of conversation.

[00:41:10] Susannah de Jager: I've heard that before as well, that thing of being put on a defensive stance is a very common female experience and one that I would really encourage anyone listening who is in these seats or subject to it to read this report because there are some really useful toolkits in there and practical examples of how to become more aware, overcome some of these unconscious biases and as you say, they're not just men that have these biases, women bring these biases to conversations with people we meet too. So it's something I try and check myself on regularly we all are subject to things that we think are true and that we stereotype and it's part of being human.

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

[00:41:53] Susannah de Jager: Lily, thank you, this has been a really, really interesting conversation from my perspective, I've so enjoyed it. Thank you for coming on today.

[00:42:02] Lily Elsner: Thank you so much for having me. I love the conversation, you are such an amazing host. Thank you so much!

[00:42:08] Susannah de Jager: Thanks for listening to this episode of Oxford+ presented by me, Susannah de Jager. If you want to stay up to date with all things Oxford+, please visit our website, OxfordPlus. co. uk and sign up to our newsletter so you never miss an update. Oxford+ was made in partnership with Mishcon de Reya and is produced and edited by Story Ninety Four.