Reinventing Pediatric Care | Ellen DaSilva, Co-Founder and CEO of Summer Health
Reinventing Pediatric Care | Ellen DaSilva, Co-Founder and CEO of Summer Health
Talking Seed-Stage Entrepreneurship and the Consumerization of Healthcare
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Reinventing Pediatric Care | Ellen DaSilva, Co-Founder and CEO of Summer Health
This week, I spoke with Ellen DaSilva, the co-founder and CEO of Summer Health.
Ellen spent many years as an executive at Hims & Hers, where she joined as employee #8 and saw the company through IPO. While at Hims, Ellen had two kids, and she began to realize that pediatric care is broken: the average new parent accesses their pediatrician 10 times a year, yet has to suffer through average wait times of two weeks to see their primary doctor and two hours at the emergency room.
Ellen built Summer Health to solve her own problems as a mom. Summer Health is a 24/7 messaging platform between parents and pediatricians, with the long-term vision of reinventing how all Americans access healthcare. The company is Seed-stage, launching last year after raising capital from Sequoia and Lux.
I sat down with Ellen to talk about Summer’s mission, as well as a topic I don’t think enough podcasts cover: what it’s like to be building at the earliest stages. We see a lot of later-stage, successful entrepreneurs on podcasts, but we rarely hear from founders earlier in their journeys.
The episode is 23 minutes (I’m trying to keep things short and punchy) and the full topics covered are listed below. You can listen on Spotify here or Apple Podcasts here.
Thanks for listening—Episode 3 will come next week.
In this conversation, we talk about:
(2:13) How Ellen came to found Summer Health
(5:28) The specific moment that gave Ellen the idea for Summer Health
(8:07) Why Ellen made the decision to start direct-to-consumer instead of going through payers or employers
(10:35) How Ellen thinks about unit economics and evolving her go-to-market
(12:28) The ROI for employers
(13:13) What it’s like to be an entrepreneur at the seed stage
(14:32) How Ellen spends her days as co-founder and CEO
(16:31) Obsession as a founder
(17:28) What surprised Ellen from talking to customers
(20:00) What keeps Ellen optimistic
See you next week for Episode 3.
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