#7 | Real talk with Andrea Berchowitz, co-founder of Vira Health, about choosing entrepreneurship and recognizing what you are meant to build

I am sitting down today with Andrea Berchowitz, co-founder and CEO of Vira Health, a startup focused on improving women’s healthcare, starting with menopause. 

Andrea served clients at McKinsey in London and Johannesburg and worked in philanthropy, with the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. I was curious about working with the foundation and what can be learned from a secondment in the social sector. We spend a little bit of time there, but then shift gears and talk about her path as an entrepreneur. 

We talk about the moment she realized that she wanted to be responsible for something end-to-end, stepping away from careers in established institutions. We discuss the struggles inherent in raising capital for a startup and what to expect if you choose that path. 

Among a number of interesting stories, Andrea also shares her three main lessons as a co-founder and CEO: 

• First, contrary to the image of the CEO as setting the bar high for excellence, Andrea describes an early-stage startup CEO as “the grand defender of mediocrity”. What does this mean? It means they define what will have to suffice; what is “good enough”. Though counter-intuitive, in practice, they may have to lower the bar, gauging, “how low is high enough?" With limited runway and limited shots on goal to come up with something that customers will accept, resources have to be constrained - even if the team would prefer to invest more…

• Second, We talk about the need to understand and keep pace with the technology itself, engineering and product management, to get a realistic handle on what can be built, how, in what time, in what order, and with what team.

• And third, we talk about the hardest lesson of all when the founder’s grand vision makes contact with reality: that is to say, retaining conviction that what you are building can be a billion+ business, returning the fund for your investors, while your v1.0 release is necessarily a work-in-progress.  

Andrea talks affectionately about how she shares the load with her co-founder Rebecca, and we discuss the broader implication on whether to start alone or together. 

Andrea's Ted Talk "The link between menopause and gender inequity at work" can be found here. This is her LinkedIn page, and here is Stella, Vira Health's menopause care service.