Venture Everywhere Podcast: Laura McDonald with Scott Hartley
Laura McDonald, co-founder and CEO of FLORA, chats with Scott Hartley, Managing Partner of Everywhere Ventures on episode 95: Fertility in Full FLORA.
In episode 95 of Venture Everywhere, Scott Hartley, co-founder and Managing Partner of Everywhere Ventures, sits down with Laura McDonald, co-founder and CEO of FLORA — the first individually owned fertility insurance solution available for individuals or via employers. Laura shares Flora’s journey to creating accessible, portable fertility coverage that moves with policyholders regardless of their employment status, addressing a critical gap in reproductive healthcare financing. Laura also discusses how she and co-founder Dr. Christy Lane built proprietary actuarial models from the ground up, secured A-rated reinsurers, and assembled a world-class team to bring this category-defining product to market.
In this episode, you will hear:
Applying actuarial innovation and fertility data to build predictive models.
Creating a new insurance category merging life, health, and P&C for reproductive care.
Flora’s portable fertility benefits that lower employer costs and boost retention.
Expanding access through voluntary programs like FSAs, HSAs, and ICHRAs.
Developing a low-code/no-code platform to digitize underwriting and claims.
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TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 VO: Everywhere Podcast Network.
00:00:14 Jenny Fielding: Hi, and welcome to the Everywhere podcast. We’re a global community of founders and operators who’ve come together to support the next generation of builders. So the premise of the podcast is just that, founders interviewing other founders about the trials and tribulations of building a company. Hope you enjoy the episode.
00:00:33 Scott: Hi, everybody. I’m Scott Hartley, co-founder and Managing Partner of Everywhere Ventures. I’m super excited to be here today with our portfolio company founder Laura McDonald. Laura is the co-founder and CEO of Flora.
00:00:46 Scott: Flora is the first individually owned fertility insurance solution. It’s available for individuals or via employer. Laura also helped found the Gen F Society, a community-driven platform uniting women around health and fertility and wellness.
00:01:03 Scott: And you previously were in the venture world doing strategy partnerships. Now you’re on the conference circuit in Las Vegas. Laura, welcome to the podcast and thanks so much for being here with us.
00:01:14 Laura: Hi, Scott. Thank you. I’m thrilled to be here.
00:01:17 Scott: Taking a step back, tell us about Flora and maybe the motivations that you guys had in starting this. What are the gaps in the market that you saw around fertility and insurance and some of the changes that you’ve seen happen over the last five years and what you guys still saw in the market that was missing.
00:01:34 Laura: Flora was co-founded by myself and Dr. Christy Lane. It’s been a few years now since the genesis, if you will, of the idea. We both came at it from very different paths, and life perspectives, and journeys. So maybe I’ll start with that.
00:01:51 Laura: We are two female founders around the same age. We’re in our 40s and we have seven children between us. First of all, seven children, that’s a lot. And these children range from 4 to 20 years old and we’re the same age. So what does that tell you? We all have completely different life paths and timelines around building a family. And what you think might be your path is often not what it is.
00:02:14 Laura: I have four children between the ages of 12 and 20. I have three daughters near the top end. So one of them is in third year university. And really when we’re building, we’re thinking about reproductive rights and building your family, we often think of my daughters and what their future will look like. Christy has the younger set. Hers are four years old and around 8 and 10. And she went through fertility treatment.
00:02:36 Laura: We came together a few years ago. We were introduced by a common connection at Munich RE, the large reinsurer who said we should connect because we were both thinking that there was a gap in the market for funding fertility treatment. Christy, because she had been through it, and myself because I had seen a close family member go through it.
00:02:54 Laura: We looked at the existing landscape and the good news was that there’s a lot of traction and momentum in the space. We’re seeing more and more venture dollars go there. It’s been labeled a global health crisis. We need new mechanisms of funding.
00:03:07 Laura: But the only models that really existed were either group models through Fortune 500 companies, which is terrific if you work for a big bank or a Google, but most of us don’t. Or the other models were completely focused on IVF and they were money back guarantee products, which serve a place, but they’re attacking the problem really later stage.
00:03:26 Laura: So we really looked at insurance as community, as people coming together to fund one another’s risk. Why not do that around an underserved market, like reproductive health and fertility, where we need more funding. We really believed there was a power for insurance to do that. That groups of women could come together who aren’t necessarily related, but fund one another’s risk so that if any of them needed treatment in the future, they would have dollars to do it.
00:03:52 Laura: That helped us build Flora, which took two plus years of building out proprietary data sets, actuarial underwriting, leaning on Christy’s experience. She was a prof at Stanford in their medical school. She studied fertility data going back 20 some years. That allowed us to get amazing risk partners to back this product and to launch the first essentially private coverage to protect your future fertility and reproductive health catered to women as our primary policyholders.
00:04:20 Scott: Talk a little bit about the preexisting world. There these large platforms that if you work in an Airbnb or you work at a Google, you work at a Goldman, maybe there’s employee benefit that is a reimbursement around IVF or certain fertility treatments, which is catering to the 0.1% probably of the employed base in America if you’re fortunate enough to work at one of these great companies.
00:04:43 Scott: But as you said, that’s not most of us or certainly not with the golden handcuffs of needing to stay at one of those companies through the entire life journey of your family planning. You may not want to be there for that whole 5-10 period of your life.
00:04:58 Scott: Talk a little bit about what that existing solution was providing and then also on the money back guarantees of some of those programs. And obviously what you guys are offering, the control is in the hands of the individual family, not beholden to going through those corporate channels. Is that accurate?
00:05:15 Laura: Yeah, that’s very accurate. When we look at the group models, they’re quite expensive. This is going into the nitty-gritty of insurance of individual risk factors. They’re typically catered to Fortune 500 companies.
00:05:26 Laura: Often those people, not all of them, but they can in many cases, they’re earning high incomes. If they maybe they had to, they could afford treatment, but they’re fortunate to get it through work. Those plans are typically capped at about 20,000 to 30,000 in lifetime coverage. Still super meaningful, but that certainly doesn’t cover the full spectrum.
00:05:44 Laura: And they’re caught in the golden handcuffs. So you’re seeing people stay in jobs they don’t necessarily want to stay in, or they’ll maximize the benefit in one job and actually leave to find another job where they can get more of a benefit.
00:05:57 Laura: So often, say a woman will use it for egg freezing and then she’ll have maxed out the benefit. And if she needs to use those eggs in the future, she won’t have more coverage. So those group models, they certainly play a role, they help, but if you leave the employer, they do not go with you. So that’s one of the key setbacks of those policies.
00:06:15 Laura: On the money back guarantee products, those are catered to individuals. But those are when you’re in IVF, you’re going through IVF and you want to know that if you’re unsuccessful, if you don’t have a baby at the end of IVF, you won’t pay for all of the treatment. The challenge with those models, if you are successful, you do have a baby at the end of your IVF rounds, which you hope to, and which fortunately many people will.
00:06:39 Laura: You still end up paying for all your IVF treatments plus a big premium. So instead of it costing you, say $50,000, it maybe cost you $70,000. It’s very expensive to get that guarantee attached to it. It serves a role, but it doesn’t necessarily make it more accessible for the wider population.
00:07:00 Laura: This is where Flora comes in. We built a policy and we wanted to make it very affordable. So for as little as $15 a month up to about $70 a month, depending on your risk factors and your age, you will have $50,000 of coverage available to you down the road if you end up needing fertility treatment.
00:07:20 Laura: We hope to expand that coverage, but even at 50,000, that’s double most group plans and it’s owned by you. So really think of that a little bit like either life insurance that’s in your name and not in the name of their company or not completely attached to your mortgage. It’s yours. You own and control it. It moves with you no matter where your job takes you, no matter if you move. It stays with you and you have complete control over how you use it.
00:07:48 Laura: We try to make it as thoughtful and flexible as possible so that we could really make it accessible and affordable for women, again, as a primary policyholder no matter where they are at their stage of life. And we’ve priced it based on generally when you buy the policy, you’re younger, it’s less expensive. You’re going to hold up for longer periods. If you’re a little bit older, it’s more expensive. But when you’re older, you have more disposable income available to you. So very thoughtfully conceptualize this model to work for many people.
00:08:17 Scott: For those folks that aren’t familiar with the insurance market, how did you guys think about structuring this product or creating this product? What was the sequence?
00:08:17 Scott: So talking about Christy’s background in fertility data, obviously you observed the problem to be massive. What were some of the next steps that you guys thought about as you went on this journey of, gosh, okay, “Let’s build a company to plug this gap that we see.” How do we sequence different sides of the coin here, start building this product that’s relatively complex as far as something to really create a new category, to create a new space? Obviously takes a number of moving pieces.
00:08:54 Laura: It is incredibly complex. The barrier to entry to create this type of product is so high. Going into it, we naively thought, Oh, like it’s such a good idea. We’re getting customers to buy insurance at an early stage. And there’s going to be insurance companies who are just going to want to join us in building out these models.
00:09:11 Laura: And then we realized, no. Wait. We are going to be building out these models in its entirety, all the data sets, the actual underwriting. Insurance companies are going to be interested in partnering, but this is on us.
00:09:23 Laura: First, we did about a year of research with the world’s largest menstrual tracking app globally. Fortunately, Christy had built fertility journeys from them before, so we had a close connection there. We wanted to understand the demand for this type of model. Would people proactively buy something like fertility insurance?
00:09:42 Laura: We looked at generally the pre-trying to conceive demographic. So you’re thinking about kids in the future. What we found was that 50% or more are concerned about their future fertility. Actually other studies have shown as many as 70% of even 23-year-olds have fertility anxiety.
00:09:59 Laura: So this awareness is very real right now. One of the main reasons is that a lot of these young adults are the first generation to have been born because their parents went through fertility treatment. Fertility treatment’s not that old. The oldest IVF babies are in their 40s. So we’re starting to have kids who were born because their parents went through fertility treatment and it’s more the norm now. And so they’re very aware of it.
00:10:23 Laura: So we did a lot of research. We also did research into what would people pay for this? What would be their budget around with this? What would they expect from the policy? And that was the beginning of us developing what this looked like in the structure.
00:10:35 Laura: Then you have to build out the actuarial and what’s called a loss ratio and make it, is it going to be in line with what reinsurers and carriers want to support? Yes, we’d love to offer hundreds of thousands of coverage available to anybody who needs it, but this is still insurance. This is a financial model. This is actuarial.
00:10:53 Laura: So we worked with InsurTech New York. They have an incredible MGA lab. It’s hard to get into, but if you get in, you get incredible resources and help. Highly recommend them for anybody in this space, InsurTech.
00:11:04 Laura: And then we worked some incredible actuaries, underwriters, put on a very robust team. And then leaning on Christy’s years of research in this space to understand what are the risk factors associated with fertility, what treatment paths are most successful, what is the causation success outcomes, all of that got incorporated into our model.
00:11:26 Laura: And then we had to get the big things, getting reinsurers willing to back this product. So that means there’s security around paying out future claims. We’re fortunate to get A-rated reinsurers, but it was thanks to almost two years of building out those actuarial models. A lot of InsureTechs are never able to get reinsurers to back the product.
00:11:46 Laura: They really have to believe that your models, the first of its kind, are accurate, that they’re accurately predicting future risk, and that they’re willing to put their reserves on the line for your policyholders to pay out those claims. We’re fortunate to have some incredible partners in that space who are ready to expand with us as the product evolves and are very, very committed to this market.
00:12:08 Scott: How do you think about the tension between providing a service which, given the goal of the company and the ethos and the backgrounds of you and Christy, to really provide a service which benefits many people while at the same time not wanting to necessarily negatively select into a cohort of buyers that will completely utilize and break the actuarial models that you are there to underwrite?
00:12:35 Scott: How do you think about that as a founder of that tension in the model of these two sides? Because you are building a business that has to manage risk.
00:12:44 Laura: It definitely keeps me up at night because I want to be able to help everybody. But insurance by its nature, it has to be somewhat exclusionary. It’s only a fit for certain people depending on their risk profile.
00:12:57 Laura: For us, that means we can underwrite or people you can apply for a policy at this stage for the first iteration of the product. You’re a woman between the ages of 20 to 34. That’s when you apply for the product. We hope we’re going to expand that up to age 40 soon.
00:13:12 Laura: But at the starting point, you have to apply between the ages of 20 to 34, because we understand your risk is a bit lower in that timeframe, and then you can use it up to age 45. And we’ve had to put in other criteria in there, like you can’t make a claim within the first year. So we’re trying to eliminate those who know they need treatment right away, haven’t divulged that.
00:13:31 Laura: This is an insurance contract. You have to be truthful when we ask you underwriting questions that mitigates that risk. If you’re going through fertility treatment right now, unfortunately, you’re not a fit for this product. This is a proactive type of product. So that’s a knockout question.
00:13:45 Laura: In our roadmap, we have plans to expand coverage. Can we look at other solutions for those who are actively in treatment? One thing we don’t cover right away is elective egg freezing. We cover medically required egg freezing and medically required fertility treatment.
00:13:59 Laura: But down the road, can we include elective egg freezing? Those are things that we’re contemplating and considering. But for the first iteration of the model, you can’t boil the ocean. You have to be very specific about what you can and can’t ensure. And that’s our starting point.
00:14:15 Laura: You did mention though, Scott, the Gen F Society, which is a community layer that we have on top of this. And that’s where we’re looking to provide solutions for those who don’t necessarily fall into our category that we can underwrite.
00:14:27 Laura: So we have some incredible women’s health partners in the hormonal testing in the sexual wellness and the reproductive wellness who are offering sometimes free products, incredible discounts, resources, education. Anybody can join the Gen F Society for free. There’s some tiered levels as well, but there’s a freemium model.
00:14:47 Laura: Whether we can provide you with a Flora insurance policy or not, there will be resources for you there. We will expand those resources over time and also try to understand what are the needs of the broader demographic and how can we build more solutions for them. So think of Flora where we’re at right now as a starting point and we’ll look to expand those offerings over time to make sure we can include more and more people.
00:15:11 Scott: On that note, back to the sequencing of how you built a marketplace like this. On one side, there’s a ton of demand for this type of product. On the other side, with your underwriters or with the reinsurance partners, there may be certain cohorts which are more appealing for them to kind of offload or not.
00:15:31 Scott: So when you think of the sequencing or the go-to-market, you have a broad base in the Gen F Society and providing holistic wellness and information, but maybe within the specific early wedge of what your go-to-market is around who you can underwrite or what exact profile. How did you guys think about that initial customer profile and how do you think about getting in front of those folks?
00:15:56 Laura: When we look at the demographic that we’re starting with, women ages 20 to 34, we divide them up into three buckets. When we look at somebody in their early 20s, maybe starting to think about their fertility, maybe they’re hearing about egg freezing, but they’re still pretty young. It’s like my daughter in university.
00:16:13 Laura: The way we reach that youngest demographic is through their parents. So many parents have been through fertility treatment. They understand that that’s gonna actually be one of the biggest expenses they’re gonna help pay for their kids going forward.
00:16:26 Laura: They’ve saved for their education. They often help them with down payments on homes now. Fertility treatment, which can often be 20, 50, $100,000. It’s actually in many cases, the third biggest expense. And it’s really the only one you can insure proactively.
00:16:42 Laura: So if I buy my daughter, who’s 20 years old, a policy, and it cost me $15 a month. It’s gonna stay that pretty much for the life of the policy. It really means very little to me, but I’m getting her to focus on her health and her reproductive health, and I know she’ll have coverage in the future. That’s how we target that younger demographic.
00:17:00 Laura: Once somebody has graduated from university, they’re getting a secondary degree, maybe they’re focused on their career, they’re understanding that I can’t afford a home in my 20s, let alone start to build a family. That’s when they’re really starting to think about fertility. That’s when we target them directly. We have partners who are fintech apps, healthtech apps, where they’re already engaging, that’s where we go. That’s how we target that, say 25 to 30.
00:17:26 Laura: And then when they’re 30 plus years old, they’re really starting to actively think about their fertility. One of the ways they also target those is those, for example, who’ve already proactively frozen their eggs. They’re already invested in protecting their reproductive future. Why not buy a Flora policy if you need to use those eggs in the future? So that’s one way we target that demographic, along with also engaging with associations they may belong to, networking groups, and we have an angle where we’re now partnering with employers.
00:17:56 Laura: Ours is actually very different than the existing group plans. It’s a very, very affordable way for employers to offer fertility benefits, no matter the size of their organization. They simply help pay for the premiums for their employees. We’re rolling that out more widely soon, but it actually keeps the utilization costs.
00:18:14 Laura: So in employer lingo, it keeps their costs very, very low and stable. It offers a great benefit to their employees who are a fit. And if the employees leave the company, they take it with them. So it’s still very valuable to them. And that’s a way that we’re seeing a broader picture to disrupt the employer’s face as well, while still keeping it very much focused on the individual consumer.
00:18:38 Scott: With some of these different policy tools, whether it’s FSAs, HSAs, ICHRA accounts, where people can leverage some of their tax advantage savings to pay premiums or to pay for something like Flora?
00:18:53 Laura: Yeah, it very much aligns with that voluntary supplementary like flex benefits. That’s really the direction of employee benefits going forward. Let people choose coverage that’s meaningful to them. And for some, it’s caregiving support and for others, it’s pet insurance. For many, it is fertility insurance. In the demographic that we’re targeting, about 80% would move jobs to access fertility benefits. That’s where we want to lean into.
00:19:19 Laura: We think it’s a fit also for the Fortune 500 companies where their utilization costs have become very high, but also all those companies who were excluded because their groups were too small where they couldn’t afford the group offerings. Flora really allows them to offer these types of benefits because they’re in demand. And it can lead to sort of retention of those employees while giving them something really meaningful to their lives right now.
00:19:41 Scott: In creating a category, what do you think it is or what do you think has been missing in the market? You guys are the first to have created this, the first individually owned fertility insurance. What do you think it is that has led this to not be created yet?
00:20:03 Laura: It’s understanding the demand for this type of product. We’ve had so many individuals reach out and saying, “I’ve been waiting for this type of security blanket around my future family.” But then all of the steps you have to take within the world of insurance and regulatory and compliance to get this product launched, it has been challenging for sure.
00:20:27 Laura: We have had to assemble a team that are really just the best of the best. So you need to know the world of insurance inside and out. Both Christy and I have backgrounds in different ways in insurance. Christy was a prof at Stanford. She founded their wearable health lab. So understand how do we look at new data sets for risk? Hers was looking at wearable data and she worked closely with reinsurers.
00:20:50 Laura: My background was I was the wholesaler, if you will, the front-facing person for an insurance company for their products out in the market. And I also, at another company, worked with reinsurers using AI data for body dimensional measurements. We understood those worlds.
00:21:07 Laura: And then we were able to lean on and bring together an amazing team. Our actuary had built the first models for NEXT Insurance, which ended up selling to Munich RE for billions of dollars. Our medical underwriter, she’s from a large reinsurer. We were just so connected in that space that we could bring on the best of the best to help us bring this model to market. So I would say one, the actuary underwriting.
00:21:30 Laura: Then figuring out to cement a new product. How do you launch this from a compliance and regulatory side? We’ve had to be very unique around that structure, but that would also be part of our mode. And I won’t dive into detail here. Some of that’s a little bit proprietary, but it is not easy to find what categories this fits into because it feels like life and health, but it also fits what’s in called the PNC space or the excess surplus space.
00:21:54 Laura: And then building up the tech stack. How do people apply digitally? How do you process claims? What does that underwriting workbench look like? We used a combination of low code, no code. Brought on a CTO who has deep insurance expertise and built that in-house. So three big parts, underwriting actuarial, compliance regulatory being the second, and then tech stack to bring this product to market.
00:22:17 Scott: Going back into your backgrounds. So Christy’s background as a prof at Stanford, coming from the medical world, and then studying English literature and psychology, which I love.
00:22:27 Scott: My book, which came out in 2017, was really about this flip side of the coin of the value that those backgrounds actually bring to tech companies and how you storytell and how you communicate, how you hire, how you fundraise. Talking a little bit about the team dynamic, how did you become an entrepreneur and tell us a little bit about that journey?
00:22:46 Scott: Because for a lot of folks out there, the dream of running a business like what you guys are creating, feeling boxed out or feeling like, “Gosh, I didn’t study AI when I was 12 years old. I can’t start a company,” to actually say that one, you can.
00:23:00 Scott: And two, those backgrounds are actually very deeply relevant in how you communicate a story and how you hire a team and how you have the passion and communication ability to go build something like this.
00:23:10 Laura: I think some people are born with that entrepreneurial drive. Not everybody, but I know I was. I have an identical twin sister and she has an MBA and was in healthcare, but she never wanted to. I think I kind of label it like put two sticks together and make fire.
00:23:26 Laura: Ever since we were kids, I was like, let’s do this. I mean, it was a little stuff when we were kids, like, let’s make a card store and sell cards or let’s do a fashion show and charge people to come in.
00:23:36 Laura: I went to university, I studied English literature and did very well in it, but I just wanted to get out of university and start doing things. That was my path. I ended up having this weird route of doing a bit of modeling and then I did acting. Acting was one of the greatest things I learned of how to pitch and perform and think on your feet.
00:23:57 Laura: I always say my one little claim to fame was I almost had a lead role in White Chicks, having auditioned with the Wayans Brothers. But that didn’t happen. So I took a different path and then I ended up founding a gift company. I was 21 years old. I franchised it across Canada and the US.
00:24:14 Laura: And then later, I ended up founding a digital media company that was focused on women and wealth. We grew that to be sort of largest in Canada and creating a voice around that. Did a brief stint in an insurance company and then founded Flora.
00:24:28 Laura: There were little things in there along the way, but I’ve always looked for opportunities to see a gap in a market. I boldly felt like I could fill that gap and learn the industry and figure out a solution.
00:24:41 Laura: And so, I would just encourage anybody who sees a gap and thinks that they know how to solve it to do it. It’s just taking that first step, learning everything you can about that industry and about making connections, going out and meeting the right people, networking.
00:24:57 Laura: And then many of those relationships you make years ago, come back later. There’s many paths to entrepreneurship. Certainly the academic ones are incredible. And Christy and I have that great balance. But I just am so drawn to people who see a problem and wanna solve it and believe that they’re the ones to do it because they can solve it, because often they are. That’s been my journey.
00:25:20 Scott: Thanks for sharing that. The line about acting, somebody told me in one of the opening stories of my book about going to Broadway auditions and realizing that everybody gets the exact same script. Everyone gets the same words on the page.
00:25:34 Scott: It resonates so much with entrepreneurship because especially sitting on the venture side and hearing many people say, I had that idea, I had that idea, I tried this, was too early. It’s again, not about the words on the page, it’s not about the idea, it’s about the execution. It’s about imbuing those words with your own story, your own character, your own emotional resonance and all those things.
00:25:58 Scott: That’s really what leads you to fundraise, that’s what leads you to win, that’s what leads you to hire effectively, to sell clients. So it really goes back to that example of imagining 40 people auditioning for one part on a Broadway play. Everyone getting the exact same piece of paper with the exact same script. One person gets the part, 39 people don’t. It’s very, very similar. So I think those skills that you’ve obviously learned through many of these experiences, they’re ones that really add to the entrepreneurial repertoire.
00:26:26 Laura: I’d recommend anybody wanting to be an entrepreneur, take some acting classes.
00:26:32 Scott: Shifting gears to our lightning round here at the end of our episode. What is a book, a podcast or a newsletter that you’re currently enjoying?
00:26:43 Laura: Sex on Wednesday. We were featured in it. It’s like a very cool look at reproductive health and what’s happening in the US right now. Martha Kempner, super witty and engaging.
00:26:53 Scott: Is that a podcast or is that a newsletter?
00:26:55 Laura: That’s a newsletter.
00:26:56 Scott: All right. I will have to check that out. If you could live anywhere in the world other than Manitoba, where would it be?
00:27:02 Laura: That one’s tough for me because I’m always just focused on my kids. I want to do whatever they want to do. But Dubai intrigues me right now. I’m dying to visit Dubai. I don’t know if I’d want to live there, but it’s on my bucket list right now.
00:27:16 Scott: On the bucket list. Very cool.
00:27:27 Scott: As a mom of four, as a CEO, you got to have some crazy productivity hacks. What is your go-to?
00:27:35 Laura: Going for a run. One, I think having my kids made me a faster runner. They did because if I had to fit an exercise, I had to get the most impact possible in a short period of time. But that, for sure. For a mental health perspective and figuring out life, just go for an hour run and everything will sort itself out on that run.
00:27:55 Scott: It’s so true. It’s like you realizing that we live our lives in such short form bursts in very few things. It’s no wonder that people say, I had this great idea in the shower or on a run. It’s continuous periods of long form thinking where you’re not looking at your phone every 15 seconds, self-interrupting hundreds of times over and over again.
00:28:15 Scott: I also find that running, especially trails or up through the trees, I really get away from my devices, away from my phone, is helpful to put together long form ideas. Finally, where can listeners find you and Christy online?
00:28:29 Laura: LinkedIn, where we’re most active. We have an Instagram account for Flora, of course, but LinkedIn is where we share the most right now. Please reach out. I’d love to have a conversation.
00:28:45 Scott: Laura, thank you so much for everything that you and Christy are building with Flora. Really a category defining new company that we’re super excited to be a very small part of. It’s incredible. It’s an important thing that’s needed in the market. Thank you for everything you’re doing. Thank you for being on the podcast with us today.
00:29:03 Laura: Thank you. And we are thrilled to be part of the Everywhere team.
00:29:07 Scott Hartley: Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoyed today’s episode. For those of you listening, you might also be interested to learn more about Everywhere. We’re a first-check pre-seed fund that does exactly that, invests everywhere. We’re community of 500 founders and operators, and we’ve invested in over 250 companies around the globe. Find us at our website, everywhere.vc, on LinkedIn, and through our regular founder spotlights on Substack. Be sure to subscribe, and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
Read more from Laura McDonald and Christy Lane in Founders Everywhere.