Emily Sylvester, CEO and Founder of Mother of Fact in Langdon, NH, is a different kind of leader today than six months ago. After participating in the LIFT: Accelerating Equitable Health Innovation 2024 program, she is more confident and prepared to scale her early-stage startup’s digital health platform, expanding access to lifesaving nutrition and healthcare services for underserved families.
Emily is one of many entrepreneurs developing innovative, non-medical solutions to address the urgent health equity gap in the US, where income-related health disparities rank among the worst globally. After witnessing first hand a widening health equity gap in services as a clinician, she explored technology-based maternal and infant health solutions to reach more underserved families faster. Such solutions are effective because health disparities stem from inequitable access to social determinants of health (SDOH) – food, housing, transportation, education, and social connection – all of which are vital for individuals to reach their full health potential.
Through LIFT, ten entrepreneurs tackling upstream social determinants of health gained essential tools, resources, and networks to secure funding and scale their impact. Alongside Emily, other innovative founders like Gordon Taylor, CEO and Founder of Houston-based Nia, and Sunny Williams, CEO and Founder of Chicago-based Tiny Docs, experienced transformational growth through the program. At LIFT’s conclusion, Emily, Gordon, Sunny, and their peers attributed their progress to three key factors: partnership, perspective, and planning.
Partnership: The Value of Authentic Connections
Building meaningful, long-term partnerships with fellow entrepreneurs, mentors, and Advisory Board members is a cornerstone of Village Capital’s small cohort model. Emily reflects on the ability to feel a genuine bond with others in the cohort, sharing, “Village Capital has opened doors to building deep relationships with fellow founders focused on SDOH, where we continuously lift each other up.”
This is because each Village Capital program centers on a unique environmental, social, and economic challenge — this one was health equity and social determinants of health — and encourages collaboration between the cohort by intentionally bringing together and leveraging their unique innovations in the space.
As a result of forming close connections, the participants became actively invested in seeing one another grow – a kind of collaboration rare in the competitive startup landscape. Throughout the program, entrepreneurs worked as a team to help one another overcome challenges, reimagine their businesses, and validate innovative solutions. They also opened doors for one another, including introductions to potential pilot programs or investments. And this is just the beginning.
Nia focuses on access to food by leveraging technology to eliminate food deserts and set up local community pick-up hubs. Gordon also credited true partnership with helping his startup grow. Generally speaking, he said, “I found this group to be incredibly supportive of one another and interested in seeing the group succeed.” About the influence of mentors, he specifically thanks Sasha Hirzel, LIFT Advisory Board member, for rethinking their distribution strategy, Gregor Hoffman, LIFT Advisory Board Member and Village Capital 2016 alum for insights on a more efficient go-to-market strategy, and Amelia De Paola for connections with VBCs on food access.
Tiny Docs increases access to healthcare through an interactive cartoon series that provides children with medically accurate, easy-to-understand health education content. As Sunny reflects on his experience, he shares, “There is tremendous value in having smart and talented people examine your business from a fresh perspective. When you’re deeply immersed in your work, it’s easy to get stuck on particularly stubborn challenges. This community sharpened my thinking and helped me grow as an entrepreneur.”
Perspective: The Value of Peer Due Diligence
Peer due diligence, another core component of every VilCap program, led to the entrepreneurs’ accelerated growth and investment readiness. The peer due diligence process encourages founders to collaborate, review one another’s business models, and share feedback and support – all in a safe environment. In doing so, founders gained valuable perspectives from their peers on pressing challenges, catalyzing co-development and innovation for their solutions and business models.
For Emily, peer due diligence taught them how to better communicate Mother of Fact’s product strategy and intellectual property value – a key market differentiator. Additionally, she realized the need to emphasize the market size specific to the problem she was addressing, leading them to refine their messaging around the scope of the maternal health crisis. She noted, “We understood the value of showcasing our ability to staff clinicians effectively and scale operations, which has become a key part of our growth narrative.” Ultimately, these refinements helped them achieve the highest investment readiness score among all startups using the Abaca framework.
Other participants found that peer due diligence helped them not only recognize their progress but also pause to celebrate it. This moment increased founders’ confidence when discussing growth potential, leading to visible improvements in execution.
Gordon noted that the peer feedback process taught him how to simplify his messaging and engage more people outside of the food industry.
Peer due diligence changed Sunny’s business trajectory as he considered and refined his exit strategy. He relates the peer due diligence process to the famous E.E. Cummings quote, “Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question,” explaining that this feedback encouraged him to “ask deeper questions and test ideas with the support of inspiring and talented entrepreneurs.”
Planning: The Value of Abaca’s Milestone Planner
Alongside new partnerships and perspectives, the value of Village Capital’s Abaca framework served a catalyst for progress. Designed to enhance startup readiness for funding opportunities, the web app leverages data-driven insights to provide a clear roadmap, milestone planning, and self-assessment that helps founders better understand their business models, identify growth barriers, and prepare for investor discussions.
For some founders, like Emily, the Abaca framework validated their efforts to scale their solutions effectively. Emily thanks Abaca for “help[ing] us clearly assess our business’ readiness across various stages. The Milestone Planner (self-assessment) tool provided a clear picture of our strengths and areas needing improvement, particularly around product-market fit and scaling strategies.”
For other founders, like Sunny, Abaca guided a necessary shift in strategy, especially in integrating an investor exit into their overall framework. Along with fostering a willingness to explore such a strategy, using Abaca for Milestone Update sessions throughout the program helped Sunny enhance Tiny Docs’ marketing strategy and reach more potential customers.
For Gordon, the Milestone Planner and self-assessment tools helped him “think about specific aspects of [his] business.” This structured approach resulted in increased clarification of Nia’s business goals as well as a sense of accountability, enabling Gordon to track progress, make informed decisions, and improve his pitch to potential investors.
Celebrate Progress and Continue Momentum Ahead
Emily, Gordon, and Sunny are especially well-positioned to continue driving meaningful change in health equity and reach the families who need it most. With strong connections, a clear vision, and tangible actions, Emily leads Mother of Fact by engaging new customers, Medicaid experts, and a clinical advisory board. She and her team have also secured two new contracts, adjusted staffing costs, completed three-year projections, and finalized funding channels.
Through LIFT, Gordon elevated Nia to the next level by finalizing their business offerings and concrete investment framework. He also re-developed a more efficient distribution and commercial readiness strategy centered around their access point model, refining their value proposition, and securing customer validation, all critical learnings that will set him and his team up for success on day one.
Gordon reflects, “By combining investment savviness, financial expertise, operational know-how, and a multidisciplinary problem-solving approach, our team can [now] make a compelling case to future investors that our solution is sustainable and capable of driving positive social impact at scale.”
Lastly, Sunny leveraged LIFT to refine his communication around Tiny Docs’ growth strategy and progress. He reports, “[With] the traction of the business model and the milestone updates, revenue is constantly growing.”
By leveraging the power of partnership, perspective, and planning, we can continue to scale innovative, non-medical solutions that address disparities in the social drivers of health, meeting historically marginalized and underserved communities where they are. We invite you to learn more about our continued efforts supporting health equity innovation in the US through our upcoming Thriving Communities initiative, as well as our recently-launched program addressing critical ecosystem challenges in Latin America. We are interested in collaborating with stakeholders across the ecosystem to support innovation solutions helping to build a more equitable future for all. For more information about our health equity work, please reach out to Kelly Bryan, US Regional Director at Village Capital.