The post Why Persistence Matters: Melissa Faith Hart on Building eBodyGuard and Betting on Her Mission (S18Ep3) appeared first on Alice Heiman.
]]>In this episode, eBodyGuard Founder and CEO Melissa Faith Hart shares the deeply personal journey behind building a personal safety technology designed to be the bridge between individuals, communities, victim advocates, first responders, law enforcement and the justice system when help is needed most.
Melissa takes Alice inside the realities of leaving corporate America to become a founder, investing her own money, raising a family and spending years developing a technology designed to improve personal safety. She explains why listening to the people you serve became central to building eBodyGuard, how she learned to navigate complex public safety systems, and why persistence mattered throughout the journey.
The conversation also goes beyond business. Melissa and Alice discuss the cognitiveload carried by female founders, accepting challenges, simplifying life during demanding seasons, and learning to recognize that doing your best doesn’t mean doing everything on your own. Building and developing a trusted team is a critical step in the process.
Melissa Faith Hart:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ebodyguardllc/
Website: https://www.ebodyguard.org/
Alice Heiman:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aliceheiman/
Website: https://aliceheiman.com/
Melissa Faith Hart is the Founder and CEO of eBodyGuard®, a personal safety,
evidence, and wellness technology company connecting individuals with first
responders and public safety systems. Drawing on more than 20 years of experience
working with law enforcement and District Attorneys, Melissa previously helped
develop the nation’s first criminal eDiscovery system and supported the integration
of hundreds of law enforcement agencies. Today, she is focused on using technology
to improve personal safety, enhance evidence collection, protect individual privacy,
and strengthen the relationship between individuals, communities and public safety
professionals.
The post Why Persistence Matters: Melissa Faith Hart on Building eBodyGuard and Betting on Her Mission (S18Ep3) appeared first on Alice Heiman.
]]>The post Why Sales Feels So Hard: Alice Heiman on Mindset, Process, and Finding the Right Customers (S18Ep2) appeared first on Alice Heiman.
]]>In this solo episode of Sales Talk for CEOs, Alice Heiman breaks down why so many CEOs and sales teams are struggling to generate consistent revenue – and why working harder isn’t necessarily the answer.
Alice explains how outdated sales mindsets, the wrong metrics, mismatched team members, and processes built for yesterday’s buyers can make selling far more difficult than it needs to be. Instead of measuring activity for activity’s sake, leaders need to focus on meaningful customer connections and understand how today’s buyers actually want to engage.
She also walks through the importance of mapping the customer journey rather than simply mapping your sales process. By understanding what customers are doing before, during, and after interacting with your team, CEOs can build a sales approach that meets buyers where they actually are.
Watch below or on our YouTube channel
Alice explains:
Why believing sales is hard can make selling harder across your organization
Why sales activity isn’t the same thing as sales effectiveness
How to determine whether you have the right people on your sales team
Why your sales process needs to evolve as buyer behavior changes
How to map the customer journey instead of only mapping your sales process
Why email, phone, LinkedIn, and other channels work differently depending on your buyers
How targeting the wrong customers makes sales unnecessarily difficult
Why defining and continually refining your ideal customer profile is essential
How the right target, methodology, team, and mindset can make sales easier
Connect with Alice Heiman:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aliceheiman/
Website: https://aliceheiman.com/
The post Why Sales Feels So Hard: Alice Heiman on Mindset, Process, and Finding the Right Customers (S18Ep2) appeared first on Alice Heiman.
]]>In this episode of Sales Talk for CEOs, Alice Heiman sits down with Tamar Gill, Founder and CEO of eCore Services, to explore her journey from practicing law in the Republic of Georgia to building a 150-person, fully remote B2B data company.
Tamar shares how becoming a mother reshaped her career, why an unexpected remote job introduced her to the world of data, and how she eventually took the leap into entrepreneurship during COVID. Rather than pursue venture capital, Tamar chose to bootstrap eCore, protecting the people-first values at the heart of the company while learning how to grow through referrals, delegation, and disciplined financial decisions.
The conversation also explores a growing challenge for sales and go-to-market leaders: bad CRM data. Tamar explains why organizations need reliable data before layering AI and automation on top of their systems – and how poor data can quietly drain sales productivity.
Tamar explains:
How she rebuilt her career after moving from the Republic of Georgia to the US
Why remote work became the foundation for the company she would eventually build
How she landed her first client and grew through relationships and referrals
Why she chose to bootstrap eCore instead of pursuing outside funding
How she built a fully remote team of 150 people while keeping people at the center
Why founders need to learn how to delegate instead of trying to do everything themselves
Why unreliable CRM data creates hidden problems for sales teams
What CEOs need to understand before adding AI and automation to their go-to-market strategy
Why Tamar believes committing fully – and leaving no Plan B – is critical when building a company
The post Building Without a Plan B: Tamar Gill on Bootstrapping, Better Data, and People-First Growth (S18Ep1) appeared first on Alice Heiman.
]]>The post Why the Best Leaders Slow Down: Elatia Abate on Reinvention, Presence, and the Future of Leadership (S17Ep8) appeared first on Alice Heiman.
]]>Launch faster.
Sell faster.
Adopt AI faster.
Make decisions faster.
When uncertainty increases, the instinct is often to accelerate. More meetings. More planning. More activity. More tools.
According to futurist and leadership strategist Elatia Abate, that instinct may be pointing leaders in the wrong direction.
One of the most counterintuitive ideas she shares is simple:
Sometimes the most strategic thing a leader can do is slow down.
Not because business is slowing down.
Because the pace of change demands better thinking, not simply faster reactions.
The framework Elatia teaches is built around a distinction between two very different ways of leading.
Past-anchored thinking starts with what has worked before. It asks leaders to build from history, existing assumptions, and familiar patterns.
Future-led thinking starts somewhere else.
It begins by acknowledging today’s reality, then asks a different question:
“Given that we’re here, free of the constraints of the past, what is it that we want to create?”
That single shift changes everything.
Instead of allowing yesterday’s assumptions to define tomorrow’s strategy, leaders begin designing intentionally toward the future they actually want.
For founders navigating rapid technological change, uncertain markets, and growing teams, this isn’t simply an interesting mindset shift.
It’s a practical leadership discipline.
Elatia explains that one of the most important capabilities leaders can develop is learning to identify and challenge their own assumptions. Many strategic decisions aren’t limited by a lack of intelligence or effort. They’re limited by assumptions that were never questioned in the first place.
This way of thinking also changes how leaders measure success.
Too often organizations become consumed by process metrics simply because they’re easy to measure.
Elatia encourages leaders to begin with outcomes instead.
What are you actually trying to create?
Only then should you determine the activities that support that outcome.
That same thinking applies to artificial intelligence.
Rather than asking, “How can we use AI?”
She encourages leaders to begin with a different question:
“What business outcome are we trying to achieve?”
Only after defining the outcome should organizations decide whether AI is the appropriate tool and establish clear guidelines for responsible use.
Much of Elatia’s work sits at the intersection of leadership, strategy, and the future of work. Before focusing on these questions, she held executive roles working at the intersection of people, innovation, and product. A turning point came after attending a conference in 2016 that challenged how she thought about technological disruption and redirected the next decade of her research. That journey provides the context for the frameworks she now teaches, but the lesson for leaders is remarkably practical.
In periods of rapid change, better leadership is rarely about reacting faster.
It’s about asking better questions.
It’s about recognizing assumptions before they become constraints.
It’s about creating enough space to think intentionally before rushing into action.
As Elatia says, “Counterintuitively, we actually want to slow down.”
For female founders leading businesses through constant change, that may be one of the most practical competitive advantages available.
Check out Elatia’s last podcast episode with us!
The post Why the Best Leaders Slow Down: Elatia Abate on Reinvention, Presence, and the Future of Leadership (S17Ep8) appeared first on Alice Heiman.
]]>The post From Retail Shelves to Every Bathroom Stall: How Denielle Finkelstein and Thyme Sullivan Pivoted a Period Product Startup (S17Ep7) appeared first on Alice Heiman.
]]>Their journey began with a Facebook message between two cousins who hadn’t seen each other in more than 30 years. What started as a conversation about cleaner period products quickly became a shared mission to build a company together. Although their backgrounds were different, they discovered their skills complemented one another, and within weeks they were working side by side.
Throughout the conversation, Denielle and Thyme reflect on what it really means to become a founder later in life. They discuss walking away from successful careers, building a business while raising children, leaning on supportive spouses, and creating a company that reflected the life they wanted to live rather than repeating the burnout they had experienced in corporate leadership. They explain why they committed to putting themselves first, their families second, and the business third—and how that promise helped sustain them through the inevitable highs and lows of startup life.
The episode also explores the difficult decisions that shaped their company. They share how listening closely to customers led them to rethink their original business model, why they chose to leave retail behind despite having momentum, and how they navigated fundraising while preserving the flexibility to build the company on their own terms. Rather than chasing certainty, they learned to trust their instincts, embrace change, and give themselves permission to make mistakes along the way.
More than anything, this is a conversation about the founder journey. Denielle and Thyme offer an honest look at entrepreneurship as a second chapter—one built on courage, partnership, patience, and the willingness to keep moving forward even when the path isn’t obvious.
Denielle and Thyme explain:
◼ Why they left successful corporate careers to become founders later in life
◼ How reconnecting after more than 30 years led to an unexpected co-founder partnership
◼ What they learned about building a company while raising families and supporting one another through startup life
◼ Why they believe taking care of yourself first, your family second, and your business third creates a stronger foundation for leadership
◼ How listening to customers gave them the confidence to completely rethink their business
◼ What fundraising taught them about resilience, patience, and finding the right partners
◼ Why having a trusted co-founder helped them navigate uncertainty and make difficult decisions
◼ Their advice for founders on embracing risk, building a strong network, and trusting the journey over the destination
The post From Retail Shelves to Every Bathroom Stall: How Denielle Finkelstein and Thyme Sullivan Pivoted a Period Product Startup (S17Ep7) appeared first on Alice Heiman.
]]>The post How Lauren Goodell Grew Sales by Leading with Humanity, Resilience, and AI (S17Ep6) appeared first on Alice Heiman.
]]>She also opens up about fundraising, choosing the right investors, finding a technical co-founder, growing inbound demand through authentic thought leadership, and managing health and family responsibilities while building a company. This episode is packed with practical advice for CEOs, founders, and sales leaders who want to grow revenue without losing sight of people, trust, and sustainability.
Lauren Goodell took a 90% pay cut, left a top 1% sales career at Microsoft and Salesforce, and launched a company while caring for two parents with serious health diagnoses and managing her own chronic illness. Her story is not about pushing through at all costs. It is about building something sustainable by listening to customers, choosing investors who actually show up, and learning (sometimes the hard way) that a company never shuts down because a founder took a day off, but they shut down all the time because founders burn out.
How Lauren conducted over 300 customer discovery conversations using the “Mom Test” framework, and how those conversations drove a complete company pivot from event planning to an AI-powered AE co-pilot.
Why she says “don’t take dumb money,” and what it looks like when investors go beyond capital to provide mentorship, network access, and genuine personal support during a founder’s hardest seasons.
How Zinnia built its early pipeline almost entirely through organic inbound from personal LinkedIn posts, with zero paid marketing, generating six to eight leads per week by being a person people wanted to learn from.
Why the team launched a separate consulting practice after customers kept asking for implementation help, and what that reveals about the power of consultative selling over transactional tactics.
How Lauren structures non-negotiable boundaries (gym time, family weekends, therapy) not as self-care platitudes but as an operating system that her team helps enforce, and why she credits those boundaries with keeping the company alive.
Lauren Goodell is the Founder and CEO of Zinnia, an AI co-pilot for account executives. She previously ranked in the top 1% of sellers at Microsoft and Salesforce. She has been recognized as one of JP Morgan’s Top 100 Women to Know in the U.S. and one of the Top 25 Women in Business by the Charlotte Business Journal, and she is a national keynote speaker on integrating AI with empathy, creativity, and trust.
One of the most striking moments in this conversation comes when Lauren describes the advice she received from Catherine O’Day at Atlanta Ventures: “A company never shuts down because a founder took a day off, but they shut down all the time because founders burn out.” That single insight reframes everything about how founders, especially women carrying caregiving responsibilities alongside company building, should think about sustainability. Lauren also offers a sharp filter for anyone considering entrepreneurship: if you are satisfied in your current role, do not leave. But if there is a problem you cannot stop thinking about in the shower, in bed, in the middle of the night, and you are willing to spend seven to ten years on it, then go.
The episode surfaces a theme that rarely gets this level of honest airtime: vulnerability as a leadership strategy. Lauren describes telling her investors exactly what was happening with her parents’ health and her own hospitalizations. Rather than seeing that transparency as weakness, her investors responded with deeper support, including offering to rent her a place closer to her parents. That dynamic only existed because Lauren chose investors who valued her as a person, not just as a vehicle for returns. For any founder evaluating term sheets right now, this is a masterclass in what “smart money” actually means.
Lauren’s go-to-market approach also challenges the assumption that early-stage companies need aggressive outbound engines to survive. Zinnia grew by letting personal content on LinkedIn do the heavy lifting, by taking a consultative posture in every sales conversation, and by expanding into services when customers said they needed help implementing the technology. The insight here is practical: when your sales process is genuinely about understanding the person on the other end of the line, new revenue lines emerge from conversations you are already having.
Thank you to Lauren Goodell for such a candid and generous conversation.
Since we recorded this conversation, Lauren made the call to close Zinnia. We’re still sharing it, because the founder journey isn’t just the wins. It’s what you do with what you learn. Take a look at her feed on LinkedIn to learn more.
The post How Lauren Goodell Grew Sales by Leading with Humanity, Resilience, and AI (S17Ep6) appeared first on Alice Heiman.
]]>The post A Better Way to Sell: Becc Holland on Conviction, Curiosity, and Leading With Care (S17Ep5) appeared first on Alice Heiman.
]]>When conversion rates stall, most CEOs look at activity metrics. The real gap is usually what sellers were never taught about the buyer’s world.
What would you think if your doctor walked in, skipped every question, and immediately recommended surgery?
You would leave. You would tell your friends. And you would never go back.
Yet this is roughly what happens on most sales calls. A seller shows up, talks about the product, asks a few surface-level questions, and then tries to map features to whatever the buyer just said. The buyer, meanwhile, is sitting there thinking: I already researched this online. Why am I on this call?
Here is what I am seeing consistently across the companies I work with. The sellers who struggle are rarely lazy. They are almost always under-equipped. They were trained on the product, handed a list, and told to go. Nobody taught them how their buyer thinks, what metrics keep that buyer up at night, or what problems exist in the buyer’s world that the buyer hasn’t even identified yet.
The fix is not a new script. The fix is a strategic decision that starts with the CEO.
Becc Holland spent years selling enterprise heating, lighting, and cooling projects to governmental buildings and school districts in Texas. The floor on those deals was $2 million. The sales cycles stretched a year and a half. In that world, you did not batch-blast 2,000 emails and hope for a reply. You drove to the buyer’s door. You knew their world before you walked in.
She built this company not because founding looked appealing, but because the broken practices she kept seeing compelled her to act. That is a particular kind of founder story: not the one where someone sees a market opportunity and races toward it, but the one where someone absorbs enough frustration, enough evidence that things could be better, and finally decides the personal cost of building is lower than the cost of staying silent.
Here is a number that should reframe how you think about your pipeline: 80% of deals are lost to indecision.
Not to a competitor. Not to budget cuts. To indecision. The buyer sees the problem. They even acknowledge it is big enough to matter. And they still do not move.
Holland’s explanation for this is worth sitting with. Buyers are scared of outcome uncertainty. They worry about picking the wrong product. They worry about what happens if they swipe the card and the solution does not work. Nobody gets fired for not buying software when a discount was available. People do get fired for purchasing something that fails to solve the problem.
So the buyer’s default, two to three times stronger than the impulse to act, is to stay still.
This is where most sales approaches fall apart. If a seller’s only play is to surface a pain the buyer already knows about, the buyer will nod along and then do nothing. They already knew about that pain before the call. Knowing about it is not what was keeping them from acting.
What moves a frozen buyer is discovering something they did not know. A problem underneath the problem. A risk they had not calculated. A metric that is trending toward trouble before it becomes visible. That is where the diagnostic model comes in.
Holland frames selling the way medicine works. A doctor does not walk into the room and say, “You have stage four cancer” before asking a single question. A doctor asks targeted questions based on deep knowledge of how the body works, looks for indicators the patient may not have noticed, and arrives at a diagnosis the patient could not have reached alone.
The same logic applies to selling. If your sellers are asking, “What’s keeping you up at night?” or “What’s the impact of not solving this?” they are asking the buyer to do the diagnostic work. And if the buyer already knew the full scope of the problem, they would already be solving it.
Holland’s approach flips this. She teaches sellers to learn the top 20 leading indicators that their buyer persona is measured on, the industry averages for those metrics, and at what point those metrics start causing problems. When a seller knows, for example, that network latency above a certain threshold typically causes server downtime, and that the average backup success rate for companies of a certain size falls below a critical benchmark, that seller can ask precise diagnostic questions. Not “Do you have a problem?” but “Are you over 40 employees in your IT department? Is your average server uptime below 99.5%? If so, you may be running into an issue you haven’t flagged yet.”
That is the difference between attracting demand and creating it.
Attracting demand means reaching out to the slim portion of the market that already knows they have a problem and is already shopping. Holland points out that outbound conversion to that slice averages about 6%. Inbound, where the buyer has self-selected, runs around 35%.
Creating demand means finding problems the buyer did not know they had. When a seller surfaces one of those, the buyer leans in. They pull in decision makers. They find budget. Because now they have new information that makes staying still feel riskier than acting.
Here is where it gets practical, and where most companies are unknowingly undermining their own teams.
Holland describes a pattern she encounters over and over. A company has a four-week onboarding program for new sellers. The first weeks are filled with meeting the founders, meeting the marketing team, learning the internal tech stack, getting certified on the product, maybe going to lunch with an AE or a CSM. At the very end, there is a small deck about the buyer.
Holland’s position is that the buyer manual should occupy three and a half weeks of that four-week onboarding. Not a small deck at the end. The dominant focus.
This resonates with a pattern I see across the CEOs I work with. The CEO became a CEO because they knew the problem deeply. They lived in the buyer’s world. They had conversations with buyers that were rich with context, knowledge, and the ability to spot things the buyer had missed. Then they hired sellers and said, “Sell my product.” And all of that buyer knowledge stayed locked inside the CEO’s head.
The strategic move is to transfer that knowledge. Not just product knowledge. Buyer knowledge. What does a CTO worry about? What metrics define their performance review? What does their day actually look like? What are the common failure points in their world, and at what thresholds do they become urgent?
If you are a CEO and you have never asked your clients to sit on a panel so your sellers can learn how buyers in that role actually think, this is one of the highest-leverage things you can do this quarter.
If I could sit down with every CEO reading this, here is where I would start.
Go look at what your sellers are actually sending. Not what they are supposed to send. What they are actually sending. Pull up the email logs. Look at the subject lines. Read the first lines. Holland notes that 90% of the time, sales leaders know what the emails are supposed to look like but have not checked what is actually going out. One CEO I know received a forwarded email from a prospect who was so appalled by the outreach that she sent it directly to the CEO as a courtesy. That CEO had no idea those emails were representing the company.
Then look at how much of your onboarding is about the buyer versus about the product and the internal org chart. Count the hours. The ratio will tell you a lot.
Finally, ask yourself: do my sellers know enough about the buyer’s world to find a problem the buyer has not yet identified? If the answer is no, the gap is not effort or talent. The gap is knowledge you have not yet passed down.
Selling should feel like helping because, done well, it is helping. Your buyers want an expert in front of them. They want someone who can find what they missed, who can make their world better than it was before the conversation started. Holland’s conviction, the one strong enough to push past the 90% of her that never wanted to be a founder, is that sellers and buyers actually share the same goal. The CEO’s job is to make that possible by equipping sellers with the knowledge to diagnose, not just pitch.
Fifteen minutes a day learning about your buyer’s world. That is Holland’s challenge to every seller and every CEO leading a sales team. It sounds small. The compounding effect is not.
The post A Better Way to Sell: Becc Holland on Conviction, Curiosity, and Leading With Care (S17Ep5) appeared first on Alice Heiman.
]]>The post From Osteopenia Diagnosis to Sold-Out Product: How Marie Berry Built YVO Around Bone Health and Community (S17Ep4) appeared first on Alice Heiman.
]]>Marie Berry is a serial entrepreneur who has founded and exited two companies before launching YVO. Her career spans leadership roles at Adidas, WPP agencies working with Chanel and Ford across Asia, and serving as CMO and operating partner at an early-stage venture fund. She holds a triple master’s in international business from ESCP Business School and lives in Miami with her husband and two daughters.
One of the most striking moments in the conversation is when Marie describes being at an investor dinner, two weeks before her due date, when her contractions started before dessert. She went home, her water broke, and she went straight to the hospital. That story is not just colorful. It captures something real about the impossible overlap between building a company and building a family, and the way female founders are expected to minimize one for the other. Marie also names a truth that deserves repeating: “There’s never a good time to have a child. And when you’re a founder, you just do it.”
The themes that run through this episode connect directly to the decisions CEOs face every day. First, community as a growth strategy is not a backup plan. Marie’s 30-day rucking challenge, which she expected would attract a handful of friends, turned into a hundred women within a week and became the foundation for demand that outpaced her inventory twice. That is not an accident. It is what happens when a founder builds something rooted in a real need and lets the community pull the product forward instead of pushing it out through paid channels. Second, your previous career is your unfair advantage, even when you are building something completely different. Marie’s Adidas network helped her source manufacturers, get prototypes made, and set up her supply chain. Every step of her hardware and logistics learning curve was shortened because she was willing to call on people she had worked with years earlier. Third, the “sandwich generation” reality for women in their thirties and forties, caring for young children and aging parents while building a company, is not a side note. It is the operating context, and the founders who acknowledge it and build support systems around it are the ones who sustain the work.
Marie’s partnership with Body Spec, which gives every YVO customer a free DEXA scan, is a standout example of how to build credibility into your product experience. It turns a purchase into a measurement moment. Customers do not just buy a vest. They get a baseline for their bone health, which deepens their connection to the brand and gives them a reason to stay engaged over time.
A sincere thank you to Marie Berry for sharing her story with such openness, from her adoption in Bolivia and childhood in Germany to building brands across four continents and now creating something deeply personal in Miami. To learn more about YVO, visit the link in the show notes.
For Alice’s unique 15% off code – click here Alice15
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]]>The post How Cheryl Sew Hoy Built Tiny Health During COVID, Two Startups, and Two Kids (S17Ep3) appeared first on Alice Heiman.
]]>In this conversation, Cheryl walks through the specific decisions that shaped Tiny Health’s trajectory, from putting $50,000 of her own money into a proof-of-concept study to cold-contacting the authors of scientific papers and asking them to join her advisory board. She explains how she discovered that her initial “vitamin” positioning (preventative health for pregnant moms) generated almost no demand, while a “painkiller” message (solutions for baby eczema and allergies) converted immediately. That insight reshaped her entire go-to-market strategy and continues to drive acquisition today. She also opens up about the emotional toll of fundraising, including closing her seed round in two months during COVID, then facing over a hundred rejections before landing three term sheets for her Series A. Her approach to managing that emotional rollercoaster, including using AI as a thought partner to process defensive reactions before responding to investors, is refreshingly honest and immediately applicable.
The enterprise and healthcare provider sales motions are still young, roughly two years old, and Cheryl is candid about the learning curve. She describes how the HCP team mirrors a more traditional sales process (conferences, booth leads, onboarding calls), while her enterprise partnerships are more bespoke, co-branding arrangements where Tiny Health powers the microbiome testing for longevity clinics and organizations like Mayo Clinic’s Exec Health program. The distinction matters because it reflects a strategic choice: Tiny Health’s test is not a commodity that can be white-labeled. The science, the sequencing pipeline, and the data analysis are the product, and that requires the Tiny Health brand to remain visible even inside a partner’s ecosystem.
What makes this episode particularly valuable is how directly Cheryl addresses the operational reality of building a company while raising three children. She negotiated specific responsibilities with her husband (he handles bedtime routines), recruited her aunt to travel with her and her infant so she could continue breastfeeding while on the road, and hired her mother full-time to run fulfillment from their front door. None of this happened by accident. Each arrangement was an explicit conversation, a negotiation, a trade-off made with clarity about what she needed in order to keep building without burning out. Her advice is practical: know what you need, ask for it directly, and budget for the help that makes growth sustainable.
Cheryl Sew Hoy is the CEO and Founder of Tiny Health, the leading microbiome health platform using shotgun metagenomic sequencing to help individuals and families optimize gut and vaginal health. A repeat founder, she previously built and sold Reclip.It to Walmart Labs in 2013, later led a $30M government-backed initiative to grow Southeast Asia’s startup ecosystem, and has raised $34M across her ventures. She holds a master’s in Engineering Management and Data Mining and a bachelor’s in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering from Cornell University, both on full scholarship.
One of the most striking moments in the conversation comes when Cheryl describes her approach to building credibility without a science background: “I had to surround myself with the expertise I didn’t necessarily have and built that credibility. ‘Cause who am I?” Rather than pretending to be something she wasn’t, she assembled an expert circle, recruiting a microbiologist from Mayo Clinic, contacting paper authors at Johns Hopkins and UCSF, and hiring a Chief Science Officer to build the scientific pipeline. She also captures the emotional discipline required in fundraising: “The moment you get a no or someone is just interested on a call, then you get on your next pitch, your confidence goes down. It really tanks. So I’ve learned how to take breaks in between calls.”
Three themes stand out for CEOs navigating similar territory. First, de-risk technical credibility by building the expert circle rather than trying to become the expert yourself. Cheryl’s playbook of self-funding a small study, recruiting published researchers as advisors, and hiring a dedicated science lead gave her company the authority it needed without requiring her to hold a PhD. Second, let early market data reshape your positioning. The shift from preventative “vitamin” messaging to condition-specific “painkiller” messaging (eczema, allergies, sleep) transformed Tiny Health’s customer acquisition economics and is a repeatable framework for any founder struggling with product-market fit. Third, design your support system before you need it. Cheryl’s explicit negotiations around household labor, childcare, and paid help were not afterthoughts. They were strategic decisions that directly enabled her capacity to lead a high-growth company.
Connect with
The post How Cheryl Sew Hoy Built Tiny Health During COVID, Two Startups, and Two Kids (S17Ep3) appeared first on Alice Heiman.
]]>The post 50 Co-Founder Conversations and 200 VC Pitches Before it all Clicked (S17Ep2) appeared first on Alice Heiman.
]]>Her family worried she was giving up years of hard work and financial stability. Her husband, however, had watched her passion for the idea grow over several years and encouraged her to take the leap.
Instead of rushing into entrepreneurship, Nikita spent nearly a year researching the problem, building prototypes, validating her assumptions, and deciding whether the opportunity was real before officially launching. When she realized the company would require deep technical expertise, she approached finding a co-founder with the same discipline – meeting more than 50 candidates before completing a three-month working sprint with her eventual co-founder to make sure they were the right fit.
Throughout the conversation, Nikita explains how she approached entrepreneurship as a process rather than a leap of faith. Whether she was searching for a co-founder, landing her first customer, raising capital, or adapting to the demands of startup life placed on her marriage, she relied on persistence, preparation, and continuous learning rather than hoping things would simply work out.
She also shares the personal habits that have kept her grounded along the way. Inspired by lessons from her father, she treats exercise, nutrition, and caring for her physical and mental health as non-negotiable parts of leadership. She explains how she and her husband learned to prioritize quality over quantity in the time they spent together and why honest conversations became essential as entrepreneurship changed their daily lives.
Rather than presenting entrepreneurship as glamorous, Nikita describes it as an ongoing process of showing up, learning through action, and continuing forward even when certainty is impossible.
Nikita explains:
◼ Why she chose to leave a successful consulting career and the conversations that followed with her family
◼ Why she spent nearly a year validating her idea before starting the company
◼ How meeting more than 50 potential co-founders helped her recognize what truly matters in a founder partnership
◼ Why she and her eventual co-founder worked together for three months before committing to build a company together
◼ How she learned to balance startup life with her marriage through communication and intentional quality time
◼ The routines her father encouraged from childhood that continue to shape her approach to resilience, discipline, and leadership
◼ Why entrepreneurship requires far more execution than planning
◼ Her advice for women who are waiting until they feel completely ready before taking the first step
The post 50 Co-Founder Conversations and 200 VC Pitches Before it all Clicked (S17Ep2) appeared first on Alice Heiman.
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