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S1 E3 - Mirza: closing the gender pay gap
This week we are exploring the story of Mirza, a femtech meets fintech company on a mission to close the gender pay gap. Mirza is co-founded by a female team, Siran & Mel.
Siran graduated with a degree in Gender Studies from Harvard and had expected to go into academia or nonprofit, but what started as a short skills pursuit in the private sector turned into a passion for leadership, management, and operations. Siran built the driver support organisation for Uber in New York and oversaw the support business for the US Northeast, before moving to London for a degree in Social Business & Entrepreneurship at the London School of Economics. With Mirza, she’s gone full circle and looks forward to bringing together her passions: women’s empowerment, structural change, and building a company of the future.
After graduating from UVA, Mel began her career focused on building fast growth companies. From launching and scaling sales territories in Europe, to making college education more accessible, to managing a luxury real estate portfolio, Mel fell in love with the process of building a concept from the ground up. A lifelong ideator, Mel had launched side hustles and passion projects while working, but it was during her time at London Business School that she realised she wanted to go all in on her own business. Mirza is her second company and is the manifestation of her passion for equitable access for all women and the desire to operate in the social impact space.
**Since the time of recording Mirza have taken a slight pivot: using information from their platform they advise on the types of childcare that they need and the types of childcare that can financially afford at the time. Mirza helps tackle the delta between the two and through employers they help finance the portion of childcare costs that are unaffordable. In addition, they now generate data on employee financial health and policies that work to help employers to create better workplaces for working parents.
If you would like to get in touch with Siran Cao at Mirza you can email her at: siran@heymirza.com.
The next series of Pitch Deck we will be hosting EdTech and Future of Learning founders who are preparing to raise capital - if you would like to get involved, sponsor the next series or know someone who would be a great guest please get in touch here: www.pitchdeckpodcast.com.
This series is brought to you by Juno: the life company, www.withjuno.com. To get 10% off your first 3 months use the code: PITCHPOD.
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5. S1 E5 - Baboo Bottle: providing the proper latch
51:22||Season 1, Ep. 5On this week's episode I am talking with Michele Rieppel and Laurie Frey about their invention the Baboo Bottle. It’s a revolutionary baby bottle that closely replicates a mother’s breast, it has been successfully used to get a baby to feed when they have been otherwise refusing the traditional baby bottle. It’s inspiring to hear the journey of an inventor and an invention that is saving lives and saving parents from serious stress and worry. Michele Rieppel is a certified breastfeeding specialist with 15+ years of daycare entrepreneurship and Laurie Frey is an entrepreneur with big-picture, multi-disciplinary oversight, budgeting, operations and communication expertise. She has general managed touring budgets exceeding $50 million annually for the world’s top illusionist, David Copperfield, as well as managing smaller clients with an in-depth focus on greater efficiency and higher profit margins. If you would like to get in touch with Laurie and Michele at Baboo Bottle you can reach them at https://www.baboobottle.com. The next series of Pitch Deck we will be hosting EdTech and Future of Learning founders who are preparing to raise capital - if you would like to get involved, sponsor the next series or know someone who would be a great guest please get in touch here: www.pitchdeckpodcast.com. This series is brought to you by Juno: the life company, www.withjuno.com. To get 10% off your first 3 months use the code: PITCHPOD.4. S1 E4 - Oshun Medical: championing women's health and diagnostics
46:41||Season 1, Ep. 4This week I am talking to the founders of Oshun Medical, an early-stage diagnostics and personalised medicine company born in late 2020 out of the necessity to solve the global maternal mortality crisis. Oshun Medical’s goal is to prevent potential medical problems faced by women globally by providing them with comprehensive information on their health and risks to develop specific conditions that are unique to women. Dr Barbara Levy M.D., FACOG, FACS, is a lifelong advocate for advancing the quality of women’s health. Serving as Vice President of Health Policy at ACOG, she directed the expansion of the Advocacy Division to support the Office of Global Women’s Health, reducing maternal mortality and building sustainable capabilities in several countries. Dr. Levy has also been a vocal advocate for women’s health with appearances on The Oprah Winfrey Show and multiple other media outlets. Stevie Morgan-Cline was previously the COO of a genetics start up. She spent 3 years at ACOG as a Director, focusing on external relations and developing partnerships. Prior to that she was a Senior Director at Johns Hopkins University. If you would like to get in touch with Stevie at Oshun Medical you can email her at: stevie@oshunmedical.com. To find out more: https://www.oshunmedical.com.The next series of Pitch Deck we will be hosting EdTech and Future of Learning founders who are preparing to raise capital - if you would like to get involved, sponsor the next series or know someone who would be a great guest please get in touch here: www.pitchdeckpodcast.com.This series is brought to you by Juno: the life company, www.withjuno.com. To get 10% off your first 3 months use the code: PITCHPOD.2. S1 E2 - Mini Mealtimes: a dietician in your pocket
01:06:45||Season 1, Ep. 2On the show today we talk to our first female founder of the series, Marie Farmer. Marie founded the award winning app Mini Mealtimes after worrying about her son's health and nutrition. And realising the only options for advice were either patronising, expensive or generic. She has been featured in numerous publications including The MailOnline, The BBC, The Metro and the Evening Standard.To address this short-fall, she formed an expert and passionate team to solve this problem. Together, they created an app that works as a ‘dietician in your pocket’. Mini Mealtimes provides age-appropriate personalised nutritional information for parents, helpful easy to action advice, and a bank of simple recipes and recommendations.If you would like to get in touch with Marie Farmer at Mini Mealtimes you can reach her at: https://www.minimealtimes.com/ or if you're interested in investing please email Marie directly: marie.farmer@minimealtimes.com.The next series of Pitch Deck we will be hosting EdTech and Future of Learning founders who are preparing to raise capital - if you would like to get involved, sponsor the next series or know someone who would be a great guest please get in touch here: www.pitchdeckpodcast.com.This series is brought to you by Juno: the life company, www.withjuno.com. To get 10% off your first 3 months use the code: PITCHPOD.
1. S1 E1 - Class-ify: the home for home workouts
01:04:44||Season 1, Ep. 1Kicking off the first series are the team from Class-ify. This series focuses on the Health and Wellness industry and we showcase founders who are currently raising capital. The idea for Class-ify was born out of the first Covid-19 lockdown in the UK by Dan Stott, Tristan Rushworth and Jim Beattie. They noticed that the fitness industry wasn't ready for classes going online so suddenly and created the home for home workouts. With the online home-workout space growing by 30% in the first half of the year, they realised this was being optimised by the celebrity and influencer trainers alone. This left a void for local gym, yoga and breath-work trainers (to name just a few!), who are known and loved by their communities with no platform to host and manage their home workouts and grow their communities all in one place, and that's where Class-ify comes in. In just a few months they have launched their MVP and onboarded numerous trainers who have 50+ paying members in their communities.Prior to Class-ify Dan spent the past 5 years at Elder joining as one their first employees, help to build from concept to £20m ARR and he was previously at JustEat where he was also one of their first sales team members and this is where he met Jim. Jim grew Just Eat's international product team from 0 to 100 people and most recently worked for OYO where he’s spent the past 3 years as their CTO. Tristan has recently finished up at the Bank of Ireland where he spent the past 5 years helping to launch a corporate banking franchise, generating >£50m income within 5 years and prior to that worked at Santander and Barclays. If you would like to get in touch with Class-ify you can reach them at: www.class-ify.com or if you're interested in investing please email Dan directly: dan@class-ify.com.The next series of Pitch Deck we will be hosting EdTech and Future of Learning founders who are preparing to raise capital - if you would like to get involved, sponsor the next series or know someone who would be a great guest please get in touch here: www.pitchdeckpodcast.com. This series is brought to you by Juno: the life company, www.withjuno.com. To get 10% off your first 3 months use the code: PITCHPOD.Pitch Deck the Podcast: Introduction
01:47|Welcome to Pitch Deck the Podcast! I created this podcast after realising there’s a great deal we don’t learn about a founder or founding team simply from a powerpoint pitch deck and ultimately investors invest in people before they invest in an idea, so why not learn more about the people behind the ideas? Ask questions, invest in our guest's businesses or want to be part of a future series? Just email me on: sara@pitchdeckpodcast.com