Do you know what area of health tech just crossed the $1B VC investment mark?

(Photo credit @nci)

This has been a strange September for me. It’s the first time in over a decade that I am not participating in some type of back-to-school programming as part of my full-time job. I forgot how much fun it is to meet new students and help them get their careers into high gear. I have signed multiple new clients recently (and a few are current students) so it’s similar but not quite the same. The bittersweet aspects of change. It’s also the 20th anniversary of 9/11/01 tomorrow, which takes me back to the beginning of my career in NYC. It was a devastating day to be a New Yorker. I lost friends that day. I walked home from my midtown office, along with hordes of other NYC residents, and spent the night huddled around the TV with friends. I am surprisingly still thankful for AOL IM, which was the main method of communication that worked that day, when phone lines were overwhelmed. I still take time every year to remember the brave men & women who died that day and in the aftermath. #neverforget 

#techsoundbite

One of my current clients is looking for roles in female-founded/female-focused companies, which got me thinking about femtech as a topic for this week’s newsletter. Femtech (aka ‘female technology’) is used to describe a category of digital health companies that focus specifically on women’s health. 

The term is not without controversy as some are worried that by labeling these apps/technologies with a gendered term, it will have an adverse effect on growth, funding, and product pricing. I mean, has anyone ever used the term ‘ManTech’? It’s also not lost on many in the industry that one of the first male-focused health tech companies Hims immediately got plenty of VC funding in year one to help cure ED, whereas other female-focused companies founded years earlier got very little to help with supporting the everyday challenges of menstruation and pregnancy. (Hims also changed its name at some point to Hims & Hers to expand services to the other half of the population.) And another male-focused health company Ro acquired Modern Fertility earlier this year to do the same. 

“2021 is a landmark year for the femtech industry, with global VC investment crossing the $1 billion mark for the first time, according to PitchBook data.” Maven Clinic became the first unicorn to be focused on femtech by closing a $110million series D round last month. In the same month, my friend Paris Wallace’s company Ovia was acquired by LabCorp for an undisclosed sum. (Yes, I know that one was founded by a man.) Then earlier this week, Flo (a period tracking app) raised a $50million series B round. 

Right now, the majority of femtech funding has gone to companies that focus on fertility, pregnancy, and motherhood, despite the fact that less than 45% of the US female population is able to take advantage of these services. There are calls to step back and evaluate where the next femtech companies should focus their efforts, namely on menopausal and senior-aged women who have their own specific sets of health needs. They also tend to have even more disposable income available to them to pay for these services. 

If you’d like to explore further, as always, CB Insights has done a great job with a femtech market map to help demonstrate the variety of companies that are operating in this space. And their 2nd annual 2020 Digital 150 list includes 10 femtech companies. Also, this Forbes article has identified 52 female-led startups focused on building femtech and healthtech companies. It is inevitable that there will be an increased focus on women’s health companies in the next few years, as women spend $500billion annually on medical expenses. 

Tips to move your resume forward from review to interview

(Photo credit @sctgrhm)

Here are three important resume tips to help your resume tell the right story to a recruiter, so you move forward from review to interview. 

(1) Make a recruiter’s job easier by telling a coherent story with your resume, supported by relevant experiences.

• Your goal with a resume is to get an interview. Full stop. It is NOT to have the recruiter spend more time on it. You want them to scan it, have no questions, and move you forward to an interview. 

• Also, a good tech resume has to tell a story vis-a-vis your experiences because many tech companies are doing away with cover letters. Ask yourself: can someone tell what I want to do by scanning just my resume? 

• Rule of thumb for resume length

  • If you have less than 10 years experience = one page

  • If you have more than 10 years experience = two pages 

  • Never use 1.5 pages! It looks like you forgot to add something - and it’s a strategic misuse of space when you could have explained additional projects!)

• Struggling to fit everything in a one-page resume version? Try thinking about your experience cumulatively. 

  • If you have managed a budget of $25K at job 1, $50K at job 2, and $100K at job 3, only list it for the job with the best example of that experience - or for the most recent job. Recruiters will assume that if you manage a $100K budget now, you’ve either had prior budget experience at other roles or that you are already at the budget management level they require. The only caveat to this advice is that sometimes, it’s useful to show the progression from job 1 to 3 -- but that’s when you ask me (your tech career strategist) for advice! 

(2) Do you have a Master Resume?

• We have all had the experience of working on a resume for days and developing the ‘perfect’ bullet(s). We hit save, and never change that bullet ever again. Not the best move though. 

• I have to tell you: your resume is a living document and needs to be continually updated for new roles/audiences/industries. 

• A Master Resume is a document that contains ALL the bullets and experiences you’ve had over your entire career and can often extend to 10+ pages. Think of it as a repository for everything (classes, certifications, skills, degrees, work and volunteer experiences/projects, awards, failed startups, hackathons, publications, etc). 

• As you get further along in your career, you will struggle to remember pieces of your background or which version of your resume had that perfect set of bullets. Creating a master resume will allow you to have it all in one place and serve as a reference guide when you have to create new versions. It’s especially useful for those pivoting to new industries as you may be able to resurrect now-relevant projects to put on your resume. 

(3) Use a ‘Projects’ section on your resume to help you when pivoting into tech. 

• Tech values informal experiences and a Projects section is a great place to capture and collect these experiences. It can be easily modified to add/subtract new experiences depending on the role you are applying for. 

• This section is also a visual representation of the pivot you are making, so a recruiter or hiring manager doesn’t have to guess about your tech-related skills - they will see it in black and white. Many of my clients only want to put paid experiences in the main Experience section, so this offers them a way to add all the informal experiences. 

• Maybe you and a friend created an app one weekend? Maybe you took a Coursera class to learn SQL? Maybe you did a tech-focused project in a class or for one of your volunteer groups? 

• The Projects section is likely to appear towards the bottom of your resume (right next to Skills or Personal). For some clients, we have put it at the top of the resume (above Experiences) in order to highlight these new skills ‘above the fold.’ 

• Don’t have many informal experiences to add? Consider starting a side hustle/project.

  • Benefits include: builds confidence in your skills; provides a creative outlet; serves as a mini safety net if something happens to your job; helps you when pivoting to a new role as you have evidence to point to of your ability to tackle a new skill set.

  • Reinventing your career in the time of Coronavirus

  • The Passion Economy & the Future of Work

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Should you care about the metaverse?

(Photo credit PluggedIn)

In the blink of an eye, summer has almost slipped by and we are nearing the month of September. I am definitely not ready for pumpkin spice anything and will continue to enjoy being outside.  Maybe I should plug myself into an alternate universe where summer lasts all year? Nah - I already lived in Arizona and my internal body clock ended up really missing how time was marked when there were four distinct seasons. 

#techsoundbite **check out the rename for this section - what do you think?**

I couldn’t resist diving into the metaverse this week as it’s not an area I am really familiar with, so this was a learning opportunity for me too. After Mark Z's big announcement that Facebook will focus on bringing the metaverse to life, the internet is all abuzz. My favorite simple definition of the metaverse is: a single, persistent virtual environment shared by everyone on the planet. The concept of a metaverse was coined in 1992 by author Neal Stephenson in his foundational sci fi novel ‘Snow Crash’ -- and it is positioned as the successor to the internet. If you’d like to fall down a giant metaverse rabbit hole, you could read VC Matthew Ball’s 9-part primer series. Or the NYTimes offers a slightly easier-to-digest topical review. 

Now if you’re like me, you’re probably asking yourself why you should care about this? I’m not a gamer, don’t have any VR headsets, and I kinda like our real world. But in these times, I can understand wanting to escape from the world for brief (or even extended) periods. Especially if I could travel... 

Reason #1 to care: who is building this world that many millions or billions of people will inhabit? And is it a good world for us to inhabit? Will it be like The Matrix where you have to jack in and out, and the VR world is all pristine because it’s been carefully curated? Or will it be more like Epic’s vision to extend Fortnite? Not surprisingly, there are many companies competing to define what this universal metaverse will look like. Microsoft envisions an enterprise metaverse, which seems to be an extension of the IoT universe, a hybrid of the digital and physical worlds. And Facebook’s grand plan is that multiple companies partner with individual creators to build a new virtual world where work, commerce, shopping and education all can happen. I’ll admit - I’m skeptical of the 3D world that Facebook will create, given the bang-up job they have done so far with the 2D world. And these are only 2 of companies that have visions for how the metaverse will be created - it would be helpful to understand who all the other players are to understand motives and goals as the internet 2.0 is being created. 

Reason #2 to care: how will this virtual world interact with our real world? What type of funding/money is at stake here? If this new virtual world is as extensive as many envision it will be, we will conduct our commerce there, take shopping trips, travel to faraway places, and meet with colleagues at virtual workplaces. Cryptocurrency companies believe their currency will be the de facto coin of the realm. Marketers and CPG brands are considering the endless possibilities to position their brands in a new 3D virtual world. 

One big challenge is that the hardware to connect seamlessly with the growing metaverse is still years away, though Oculus is aiming to be at the forefront of the VR headset revolution. Another challenge: I cannot believe that there are many (or any) workplaces yet where employees are clamouring to interact with colleagues in a fully virtual world. What social cues do you lose? I could see beginning with an AR world to try to help us imagine we’re working together in the office...but I’m not buying the VR world yet, except for maybe a few specific workplaces (like small startups). My friend Scott joined Mark Zuckerberg & others for the first public test of the new FB Horizon Workrooms last week and wrote in-depth about his experiences. It is interesting how the VR world can feel both more and less real than our current one - so I’m intrigued but not holding my breath.