MGMT Boston - W13, Q2 23 - VivorCare // Kayla Dowd, Hi Marley
VivorCare // Kayla Dowd, Hi Marley
Welcome to MGMT Boston where we try to help (almost 500) of you manage your awareness of top Boston startups and local up & coming operators putting in the work. Glad to have you here!
TLDR:
VivorCare - Hil Moss & team are on a mission to help a rapidly growing population, cancer survivors, lead happier & healthier lives
Thanks to Jennifer D. for the intro to VivorCare
Kayla Dowd, Senior Customer Success Manager @ Hi Marley - the first Customer Success Manager hire at Hi Marley has a lot to teach us about the meaning of insurance and empathy in Customer Success
Thanks to Bryan G. for the intro to Kayla
Other Resources:
The Endeca Effect: Overview / Markets / People / Products / Conclusion / Bonus - Steve Papa Alumni Learnings
MGMT Boston Operators Club - I’m launching a thing, check it out or e-mail me directly to learn more!
Q2 Startups Highlighted: Wonderment, EKOS, CloudZero, Basys, Mirakl, Black Kite, Herald, Elucid, Swapt & Markit Social
Q2 Operators Highlighted: Dana Wensberg, Paperless Parts, Jasmine Pogue, Skilltype, Mark Hardy, Black Kite, Tony Iuliano, Recorded Future, Kelly Cheng, Goldcast, Ashlyn Donohue, LinkSquares, Jon Coombs, Flexcar, Michele Choi, Medley, Dan McCarthy, Kard & Carla Price, Enablement Leader
VivorCare
Founders: Hil Moss & Justin Grischkan
Founding: 2022
Mission: Helping survivors lead happier, healthier lives
Workplace: Remote
Stage & Capital Raised: Pre-Seed & <$5M raised
Investors: Flare Capital, Koa Labs, Techstars, Oncology Ventures & assorted Angels
Key Customers: Cancer survivors, health plans, health systems
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): <$25M
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!
VivorCare is the first virtual survivorship clinic with a mission to help survivors lead happier, healthier lives. If we’re going to talk about VivorCare, first we need to talk about its co-founder, Hil Moss.
Hil had her whole life planned out. She had enrolled in business school at Yale in the fall of 2018 to accelerate a successful career in business planning for cultural organizations. Six weeks into classes, life took a sharp left turn with a breast cancer diagnosis. Hil spent 15 months going through aggressive treatment including 24 rounds of infusions, a double mastectomy, and five additional surgeries at Dana Farber here in Boston. “What was that like?” I asked her. “It was wild,” she replied with a laugh. That’s putting it lightly. Undoubtedly a life altering experience that would knock anyone down. But that’s not Hil. She wasn’t gonna give up, wasn’t gonna stop, she was just going to work harder. She’s a survivor.
Hil ran a multi-channel initiative to make the young adult cancer process more transparent. She created content across Instagram and her own blog that addressed topics ranging from mastectomy to egg freezing to genetic mutations. She even nurtured an Instagram community of 3000+ young women affected by breast cancer and volunteered her time to mentor young women who had been recently diagnosed.
The experience taught her a ton about cancer treatment and our healthcare system in America. She uncovered that there is a system level gap for cancer survivors who, after exiting active treatment, sort of get thrown to the wolves. What Hil experienced firsthand and through getting to know other members of her cancer community is that we’ve got a beautiful, but complicated, new problem. Cancer survivorship is growing rapidly and the way that we distribute care has not quite kept up. Hil returned to Yale to get her MBA. Plus a Masters of Public in Health with a mission to help acquire the skills to solve this problem.
Cancer survivorship is very misunderstood. Even 5 or 10 years ago there just weren’t as many survivors. And survivorship has to do with much more than cancer. Cancer survivors utilize more healthcare than the general population. They often can’t find clinicians to manage their care. Cancer treatments create various cardiac toxicities, bone toxicities, pain, neuropathy and more. Second, 7/10 cancer patients enter treatment with comorbidities, like diabetes, that are exacerbated or neglected while going through cancer treatment. Third, there are mental health challenges like “fear of recurrence” that cause significant distress and can drive overutilization of healthcare.
In summary, it’s a complex & high risk population to manage, and there is now unprecedented pressure on oncologists (cancer doctors) as well as primary care physicians, who aren’t always trained to deal with this emerging patient population.
Hil founded VivorCare alongside Dr. Justin Grischkan, who was a clinician at University of Pennsylvania at the time, in 2022 to help fill the gap. After talking to 600 survivors, they built a more holistic care solution for cancer survivorship and within the last month VivorCare has started seeing patients. Their first virtual clinic is live in PA.
They are customizing their care plans at the individual patient level with the aim to act as a connective tissue within the larger healthcare system as survivorship means very different things to different people. VivorCare was a TechStars 2022 graduate, and they plan to leverage technology, including potential AI solutions, in the quarters ahead.
Operators to Know (Founding Team):
Justin Grischkan, Co-Founder & Chief Medical Officer
Hil Moss, Co-Founder & CEO
Natasha Rabinowitz Steele MD, MPH, Clinical Content Peer Support
Alicia Tan, Director of Operations
My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the VivorCare team if I missed any up & coming operators internally
Key Roles To Be Hired:
More roles coming in the months ahead!
If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:
What are the key milestones the VivorCare team is looking to achieve in the months ahead?
What is the long term vision for the company?
What are some of the biggest obstacles to achieving that vision?
What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add in 2023?
We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about VivorCare you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team help more survivors. All of us applaud your efforts. See you in virtual halls and across the U.S. in the years ahead!
Kayla Dowd, Senior Customer Success Manager @ Hi Marley
Career Summary / Customer Success is Empathy / Career Insights
Career Summary
Kayla Dowd has been in and around insurance all her life. As Hi Marley’s first Customer Success Manager, she is on the front lines of representing “simple, lovable communication” for this rapidly growing insurtech startup. Which actually undersells it. Her family has been in the insurance business for 125 years. If her family business did one of those “cumulative team experience” slides it might have a fourth digit on it. Are careers predestined? Do we find our way to an inevitable destination based on our talents, backgrounds, or family dinner table conversation? You have to wonder!
Kayla grew up in Western Mass around the family insurance brokerage business where her dad works, preceded by her grandfather, preceded by her great grandfather, preceded by her great great grandfather who started the business after immigrating to America from Ireland with his 13 siblings. Yeah, that’s not a typo. The road rose to meet the Dowds. And in the years since they’ve built the longest continuously family owned insurance business in MA that spans Property & Casualty, Benefits, and Wealth Management.
From an early age she got to see that her Dad was really passionate about what he did. He taught her that insurance helps people protect the things they love the most. He is passionate about helping other people and demonstrating that insurance is “so much more” than people think. Her two brothers work there too! But Kayla didn’t want to do what everyone else in her family did. She wanted to carve her own path.
Majoring in Business Administration and playing collegiate tennis at St. Michael’s College, she learned a lot about what it means to be on a team and carry the responsibility of winning an individual match. After St. Mike’s, she started her career at Wayfair as an entry level merchandising analyst. Eventually insurance came calling. She made her way over to Marsh McLennan Agency as an Operations Coordinator which led to a Regional Sales Coordinator role where she worked alongside a team of 60 in different functions like P&C and employee benefits.
Kayla knew Mike Greene, Hi Marley’s Co-Founder & CEO, and his family socially from vacationing in the same area in New Hampshire. It was Mike’s wife that suggested Kayla might be a great fit for his budding startup, Hi Marley. She wasn’t ready though. She loved MMA. A year later? The full court recruitment press was on. Hi Marley was at 20 employees and needed some help! Bryan Ginsberg, Director of Growth, was also instrumental in helping to recruit her.
Kayla thought of startups as chaotic places without structure or process. And she wasn’t..exactly wrong. She onboarded as the first Customer Success Manager and dove in. The change excited her, she likes being challenged, and she learned she thrives under pressure. Kayla was on the road with the sales team almost every week to meet with insurance carriers and present to rooms of 50 adjusters at a time. Chaos in the best way.
She feels like she’s truly making an impact building out processes and scaling the company even though she came in without knowing anything about startups or Customer Success. She admits she herself probably wouldn't have been hired by today's standards/requirements! She’s just grateful they gave her a chance. There’s something to be said for “the best resume isn’t always the best fit. If you see potential it’s worth giving someone a chance”.
Hi Marley has grown to almost 100 employees and Kayla helps manage some of their largest & most complex accounts as a Senior Customer Success Manager. She is most proud of creating a process to collect feature requests from customers and channel them internally to the appropriate teams for roadmap scheduling.
Kayla is really passionate about what she does. Since you insure the things you love the most, if you’re in the claims process, you’re likely in an upset state. Kayla & the Hi Marley team constantly think about how customers can feel more loved & comforted through those really stressful times. They’re trying to change an industry. At Hi Marley you’re encouraged to share new ideas and all opinions are valued. Kayla co-leads their Wellness Committee internally and participates in a bunch more internal cultural initiatives too.
Customer Success is Empathy
What is one way it means to be great at Customer Success? For Kayla, it’s about putting herself in the shoes of others using empathy. Internally and externally. How can you alleviate customer concerns? How can you understand the challenges of internal product & engineering teams when a bug occurs? You’ve got to walk a mile in their shoes.
Externally
Kayla explains “when I prepare for calls, I try to figure out ‘why is this important to them?’ ahead of speaking with a customer.” She goes on to share..
I try to understand the industry first and the personas I’m speaking to. What does Hi Marley do for them? Why are they making this big purchase and what problem are they hoping it solves for them?
When I think about hearing customer challenges and retaining them, I think about how to better understand how a platform challenge or bug impacts the people that work there.
Internally
She’s made an effort to spend time with different stakeholders across the business in order to build relationships across every functional area whether it’s Product, Engineering, or Growth (Sales). Challenges are going to happen. It’s easy to point fingers. And it’s satisfying, how can you not? But it’s better to understand all the different perspectives and resist playing the blame game. When she worked at MMA, every team helped her understand what they were working on and she’s tried to replicate that same cross functional understanding at Hi Marley.
Forming relationships with teammates across different functions is critical. I'm always trying to connect with others on different teams to better understand what they do
Understanding various functions and their pain points in order to see things better from their perspective is a priority. If I can understand their workflow, I can see why a feature gets delayed for an extended period. It’s much better to talk it through and understand the “why”.
In a remote world, I have to go out of my way to see more people & build relationships and, when necessary, make things uncomfortable in the nicest way to get stuff done!
Career Insights
Don’t Be Afraid to Take Chances - “Go out of your comfort zone. That is what I did to come to Hi Marley and I’ve never been happier professionally.”
Be Confident & Just Do It - “Related to taking chances, raise your hand to do things that you know you’d be uncomfortable doing. If someone asks to present a slide at an all team meeting, and you know you hate presenting, do it. No one is judging you more than yourself. Take every opportunity you can to go outside your comfort zone.”
Build Your Network - “I still see people that I worked with at MMA. Our paths cross in the craziest of ways and I made so many strong relationships there. I love coming into the office so I can spend time with people that aren’t on my team to get to know them better. Making connections like that are so important because you never know where you could be in the future. Having connections and relationships are huge. I love being customer facing and working with people to build those relationships too”
Kayla doesn’t know what the future holds. She didn’t even foresee herself inside of a rapidly growing venture backed startup in the first place. So wherever life takes her! But first and foremost she wants to stay at Hi Marley and see the mission though. She believes in the company, its vision, and its leaders. One day, when the timing is right, she’d like to manage a team or help own a strategic initiative.
If you want to learn more about Kayla, you can check her out on LinkedIn or potentially at a local tennis court. Thanks for sharing. Excited to see the policyholders you & the Hi Marley team help in the coming years!
Any feedback for me? One thing you liked? One thing you didn’t? Local startups or operators to highlight? Just reply to this e-mail!
See you next week!
-Matt