Jenny Button: from Law School to Launching a Hardware Startup

On an autumn note, afternoon, I agreed to meet Jenny Button on a grassy noal near St James's Park in London, expecting to offer basic advice on starting a company. I did not expect to find an eloquent polished lady with a clear vision and more excitingly a working prototype that had been 3D printed. After a few more conversations, it was clear that Jenny's passion and commitment were profound and I was compelled to invest in her med tech startup. In today's conversation, Jenny discusses her fascinating journey culminating in the launch of M, a femme tech medical device company as a solo founder. Jenny, I'm interested to learn about your childhood. What did you think you wanted to be when you're growing up? Ooh, I didn't know, honestly. I didn't have any idea. I think I was very lucky to be part of a family that didn't put heavy expectations on going up particular path, but I did go to a school which had expectations that didn't include topics like computer science, engineering or more of the technical degrees or areas that you often find in entrepreneurs. I would say that I had a lot of freedom, but I liked the idea of doing lots of different things. My GCSEs, my A level, they were always varied. There was some economics, some history, some maths and languages. There was so much that I found exciting, but there wasn't anything that I really specifically wanted to do. You mentioned previously that your mom was adventurous and enterprising. Tell us about some of her projects and work and how that impacted your own ambition. Yeah, so my mom took what I think of as a more unusual career path where she did her bachelor's degree in her 30s and she studied biology. When she trained as a chef, then she moved into the not-for-profit sector, then she moved into property development. She moved around loads of different sectors just across the course of her career and she made it look really accessible to me. But I think the degree was the biggest because as I got older and I reflected on it, I felt that you could go from knowing equivalent to nothing about something, to being university educated in that subject at any age, and to do that she re-did the equivalence of GCSEs and the A levels in her 30s and then she went to UCL to study in this case biology. I think that it's easier to be ambitious when ambition itself looks achievable and accessible even when it involves hard things, so that certainly impacted me and what I thought I could do. That's such an important point, it's not just looking at the huge mountain, but taking little steps. So you decide to study law at Bristol University? At what point in that journey did you realise that you wish to pursue a career other than law? I think I thought a degree which had broad application was a good thing because I wasn't sure what I wanted to do and I thought that a degree about thinking and about reasoning was really exciting. I really, really liked that idea and then we had lawyers in our family and they were lawyers who loved their jobs, so I got to the end of the degree and I think the thing that was really important to me that I did know was I didn't think that I would love being a lawyer like the people I knew who loved it and that was sort of my measure. The thing that I definitely wanted was to love what I did and I really loved elements of the degree, but I didn't think that I was going to love doing the profession for 30 40 years. So what was your first job after university and how did you land that role? So I left uni and then I started doing a bunch of internships in a whole bunch of different sectors, just exploring different opportunities. I was interested in politics for a bit. I was still somewhat interested in law. I was interested in research and then a couple of months into that process I got introduced to to my first boss and we got on really well. He was a successful entrepreneur and I think at the end of that day he offered me a job. He said come work for me and I'll mental you in everything that I do, which is building, scaling, selling businesses and that sounded so exciting. That sounded like doing lots of things, which was exactly the kind of thing I wanted to be doing. As I said yes, and I started the next week and I did that for just over five years. That sounds very fortunate. I believe he was part of what we call a family office. It would be great if you could say a couple of sentences, what that is, and essentially my understanding is that there are a group of people who tend to find opportunities that the everyday common person would not see. You must have been inundated in such opportunities and wondering how that shaped your perspective of the whip and breadth of society. Yeah, it's a really difficult question. I find it a really difficult question. I think when you're seeing new businesses being formed in every sector, everything looks accessible because you're seeing it. And I think in practice access to capital is always a huge problem. That's often something a family office doesn't have as one of its primary barriers, either if it's investing in businesses or if it's starting them. And that was certainly the case where I first worked. I think the best bit is that you do see a vast variety of people from a diverse set of circumstances who want to start companies. I think what you don't always see is a diverse group of people who then do start them and then who are necessarily successful at them because again, it's so often comes back to capital and capital investment is something which is not a widely available resource to the many. It's a resource of the few. The music room is a business you next co-founded. Tell us a bit about how that happened and what you were trying to achieve. Yeah, it was quite a simple opportunity. I think there was some dead commercial space in a real estate portfolio which was being used for more broadly events and I saw an opportunity to evolve it into a sample sale business. So sample sales and associated businesses are basically managing events for luxury brands to eliminate their excess stock at the end of season. And the benefit of that as a business model rather than a brand selling that stock in their store is that they are often private or limited in who can attend them. And that means that the damage to brand equity can also be limited. So you can liquidate stock particularly as a luxury brand and you don't see the same downturn in your future sales as you might do if you eliminate it in store. And that model wasn't as widely used in London as it wasn't places like New York or Paris and there was a really good opportunity to scale that market. And so I started it, I started it with my previous boss and mentor and it's still going about six years later. Well, fantastic. You mentioned that while you described your previous boss as giving you this chance and I'm wondering how his entrance into your life boosted your confidence and ambitious levels and ideas of what you would be looking into in the future. Yeah, I think I got incredibly lucky getting to work with him, particularly because he was more of a mentor and a colleague than a boss. He was one of those people who I would still is, I would come into the office every day and he would call out every mistake that I made, never destructively, but always call out. And at the same time, every day I would be told that there's really no reason I couldn't do anything that day. And anything was really quite a variety in that role. So across five years that builds up your self belief and it thickens your skin quite considerably. And I think having that in a background, at least a business background where often convention is ridiculed and conventional thinking, if it doesn't have reason is ridiculed, it sort of sets you outside this box where you really, you have to think for yourself and you also trust yourself to think, well, so that was a fundamental change. For a fundamental building to my confidence and when you have confidence again, it's much easier to have ambition and ambition becomes, I guess, more of a personality trait after that. That's very interesting. Did you have any moments in your life where you felt that your confidence was starting to go down and then you did something that made it go up again? Oh, that's a great question. I think that raising money for my next startup is, it is something that can sap confidence because it's quite a challenge of endurance and it's easier to choose to be confident maybe one day or the next day, but if you try to be confident six months after, eight months after, it's often you are eventually worn down. And I think, I think it's difficult to just boost yourself back up. I think that's where a legacy of someone having told you repeatedly that you can do things is a well of resource that you draw on when your confidence is challenged. And I know the times where mine has been rocks, there's been that to go back to. So it gets rocked for maybe a day or a couple of days, but there is kind of like a, there's a floor to how low it goes and that floor, I think, was set over many years of support and guidance and other people having confidence in me. That's beautiful. So next you launched a FEMTECH Medical Device Company as a solo founder. I would like to hear everything about this, but first tell us what M does. Brilliant. So it has developed a bio wearable menstrual product for actionable insights into reproductive health. So in practice, what that means is there is a menstrual cup, which is smart because it has sensors in and those sensors are taking biometric readings relating to menstrual health and they able to give a user insight into what is happening with their menstrual cycle and then indicate any parameters which might show some level of dysfunction within their menstrual health. So Jenny, what in the world gave you the right to build this product? Where did this belief come from and where did your conviction come from? It's difficult to trace it back, isn't it, because there's so many places something that that came from. I think I had a healthy disregard for the medical profession and as a result, I thought that the future was consumer facing health and I still think that I think healthcare systems and consumers need tools for individuals to be able to manage their health better, both to keep them out of a healthcare system, but also just to improve health outcomes and to improve autonomy and advocacy from a consumer and an individual for their own health. And I love the idea of all of the tools that can give you insight into your health. You know, at the Apple Watch, the Aura ring, these are all tools which I felt and feel like it's like they make the body translucent. I love that idea. I love the idea that you can have access to a tool as an individual that gives you information about your body and there was nothing like that in female health, menstrual health, reproductive health. There was nothing that gave me the kind of insights that I thought made my body translucent and I knew that the people in my life, the women in my life, wanted a product like that and I thought that would probably be a smart menstrual product, something which had clinical utility but was also highly relevant to a consumer and that was obviously going to exist in the future in my mind. It was just a question of when and then I thought, well, why not me? I think I had confidence and naivety and I'd had some success which gave me more confidence and so I started by asking the question, can it be done and it all went from there. Great. And I believe you actually came across somebody who may have traversed a similar path in an unexpected way. Can you talk a bit about that? Oh, you'll have to remind me about this one. Yeah, I just remember we met once. Actually, you know, I've remembered, sorry Emma, I've remembered this. I remember when it was 2020 and it was lockdown and I read an interview with Tanya Boller who is the founder of LV which is one of the big FemTech startups in the world and then also particularly one of the biggest in hardware in women's health. And she had done this interview where she built LV into this wondrous company and she said in the interview that, you know, she hadn't had a health background or a tech background. She'd come from what I think was the UN. She'd been working in something close to health policy and that story was really important to me because I didn't have examples of how I could go and work in a sector where I had never worked and started a company in it, worked on lots of companies on lots of different spaces when I worked with my old boss, but I hadn't worked in tech or healthcare and seeing that there was someone and particularly it was a woman slightly older than me who had started a company, got it funded, launched a product which was highly successful, products which I had tried which I loved. That was really important. That was a story of somebody who could do something from zero. And I think that gave me the beliefs and conviction to go and ask those questions of whether this kind of product I could imagine was possible and whether I could do it too. That's great. I recall actually hearing this story one a few years back when I met Jenny on a grassy knoll in St James's Park, this was mostly a favour for a friend who said, you know someone who's building in Femtec and I told him in the past that I'd made an investment in that space. So with very little expectation, I went to what I thought would be wanting to just provide a bit of advice to this aspiring entrepreneur and we ended up sitting on the grass and out of her bag. Jenny takes out her device and shows me how it works and how she had it made and we left the meeting with me thinking, gosh, I could have tried to invest in this lady said, luckily I did and here we are a few years later. Any startup is tough but hardware is notoriously challenging. What have you had to learn about building physical products and understanding how the healthcare system works? Yeah, I didn't know much about either in the complexity or the level of detail that I suppose I know now and it is challenging. I do think that it's an addictive kind of challenging rather than a de-energising kind of challenging. I think building physical products, you have to learn a vast amount about user research that validates your features, the design process within engineering, how you build something that can then go into mass manufacture and then completely different how the healthcare system works is an education in science, in the commercial models that go across places in UK healthcare systems at NHS, EU and then US and they will work very differently commercially. So you do end up studying a massive amount in a startup. I studied engineering as a sort of amateur and I studied healthcare economics as an amateur for about a year of each, probably a year each for building the company and that was really difficult because you are failing in public. If you don't know something about the healthcare system and you talk to an investor about it and they tell you something highly relevant that you don't know, you can feel like an idiot, at least I did, I suppose at the start, but it's so fun. It's so fun learning about areas which are so interesting. You feel like you're on the forefront of creation, the forefront of innovation and definitely right at the zeitgeist of impact because women's health is notoriously under invested, notoriously poor outcomes, notoriously very little innovation historically and seem like you're right on the edge of that is incredibly addictive. So how did you go about studying independently these topics that people usually go to university to study and probably feel intimidated by? Yeah, I think I started by asking a lot of questions to people who knew some of the answers. So any engineers that I would meet, any designers, it's easy enough to ask people questions. I think once you get a certain number of answers, it's easier to then go and read a book and I've read a lot of textbooks, a lot of biographies, a lot of commercial and business homes trying to understand the more detailed answers to some of these questions. And then I've written to a lot of people on LinkedIn, if I've got a particular question I might just send it over to a stranger or if it's something more detailed requires a conversation now, I've often asked for calls just to understand somebody's detailed and malleable perspective on something. Startups are notoriously lonely and starting solo as a solo founder is doubly lonely. How did you navigate that process and did you ever consider searching for a co-founder? I didn't consider searching for a co-founder. I think it is lonely to start something by yourself. But for that reason, as a company that has almost always had quite a broad spectrum of advisors, so it had a board very early on in the process, it's got several advisory boards. It's got a team, it's used contractors, it's used freelancers and there's a whole ecosystem around it. I think that makes it a lot less lonely because it means there's always someone to talk to about the thing that's in your head and finding the right people to talk to has been probably the difference between it being lonely and it being less lonely. There's no eye in team as they said and you mentioned messaging several designers and engineers and I believe you also mentioned messaging one of the Dyson leading engineers on LinkedIn and asking about the feasibility of the project. Did you previously know them or walk us through how you assembled your team and who was particularly challenging and rewarding for hire? Yeah, I love LinkedIn. I think it often feels like the great I'm not sure how many other people love LinkedIn but it's the opportunity to go and ask a question and message someone and then they'll choose a fair apply. I think when I had this idea, I think menstrual products are going to be smart and then the question is, well, can this idea happen now or not in 20 years? I figured that Elvy heard hired as their first hire an engineer. They had built a hardware product within FEMTEK and a quasi medical device and so I thought well, I need an engineer to answer this question, is it possible? I did not know much about engineering but I definitely knew how to search Dyson engineer on LinkedIn and I wrote to a couple of them and one of them ended up writing back and we did a call and he had a bit of free time and he gave some advice and then shortly thereafter he came on as our head of R&D and from there, I think we've often assembled our team through network and LinkedIn. I do plenty of call reach out on LinkedIn. I think it's a sort of an opportunity to see the kind of skill sets that are out there, the kind of experience that people have. It's obviously a very open source so I love it as a platform and then assembling the rest of the team has been a question of finding the right hires, finding people that I really respect and every single member of the M team is somebody that I look up to and then advisors would have been the people who are the most challenging to hire because getting the best advisors for a particular area of the technology or the company that can often be very challenging to even persuade them to meet you, let alone put their name behind something which is perhaps not yet proven. So I think on one particularly successful call where the head of bioelectronics at the University of Cambridge, that's Professor George Maliaris who's the Prince Philip Professor of Technology at the University, he agreed to come on to the advisory board for M and I think I crashed my car a couple of minutes after the call because I was so excited. I was probably the most challenging and rewarding day for the advisory roles. Do you have any particular strategy regarding your LinkedIn outreach or how do you curate your profile so that you maximise the answers you get? I don't curate my profile at all, I mean I hate social media as a principal so there's almost no information about me on LinkedIn which is relevant. I think usually my approach is if I'm writing to someone there's something which is excited me enough to write and I think that probably comes across in my messages because I explain exactly why I'm excited and I think that's probably quite connecting even with a stranger but yeah, it works. I couldn't tell you quite why it works but it works maybe more than, more than is common. You previously mentioned that the skill is in asking the right questions which is something you've mentioned before. How did you develop the skill? I'm not sure but I think that having a legal background does help with asking the right questions because your sort of structure of reasoning in your head is quite set. There's a sort of formula in my head where I observe a conversation or a situation and I can see the assumptions, the inferences, the conclusions, the reasoning, the opinions, the objective facts. So I think maybe that helps with phrasing a question in a way which is quite intentional but I think asking the right questions it was easier in COVID to start doing that because in lockdown the world slowed down for a lot of people and I had the time to think about this company quite intentionally and because I knew so little asking the right question was pretty much what's the next thing, what's the next big thing I don't know if I've got no idea how to build this company but what do I need to know next so it starts with what is this possible in theory and then how do we design this kind of product and then how much is it going to cost and the sort of different people who know the answers to different things but it was very much the answer to one question would unlock the next and that's usually how I knew it was the right one. So fundraising is very time consuming, did you have the luxury of choice of investors and how did you choose which investors to pitch to later on and how did you make sure your time is allocated well? Funding is very time consuming, it's very difficult often at the beginning, it's slightly easier when you get into the swing a bit and when you practice it. I think there's very few people who have the luxury of choice of investors when they are early in the start up so I think when I started raising ends precede the best advice I got was go out to your network and it was also the least helpful advice because I didn't have a strong funding network, I hadn't worked in investment banking or conventional start-ups or venture capital so my network was just everybody that I'd ever met so I approached the people in my inbox that I babysat for when I was maybe 12 to 14 and they invested. I approached family, friends, colleagues, business connections and it was sort of crew of people who gathered together and I didn't have the luxury of choice but I think it's luxurious that the people who invested in MR all people I really like and so it's kind of like maybe maybe a little self-imposed but it's sort of the better part of like matchmaking you know you know the people often or you have the relationship with people you like and then those people invested and then for our next round it ended up being very similar you go out to a broad variety because our product has several different business strategies and commercial models which means it's a variety of different investors but the investors who come in are often the ones that you resonate with on a personal level and so I think we're really fortunate that I really love the funds and the people who have invested in it and there's a mutual respect there so it's a series of relationships and that is not the luxury of choice but it's a great luxury to have even if it's sort of unintentional fascinating it seems like the earliest stages of capital tend to be the friendly basis when it comes to later stage funding you have to most likely go to larger funds which in Europe is a great challenge and particularly for fentex where exit opportunities are still considered limited what do you think needs to happen to potentially dispel this notion that exits are rare in this space or not possible is it just about capital or is there more to it I almost feel unqualified to think of my opinion on that question I think it's I think it's a difficult question it's a need of a question for me later stage funding in Europe is a challenge but there's a lot of companies who go and have gone successfully to the US to get funding I think that becomes a challenge for Europe in getting some of that technology into Europe a particular company's growing scale but there there is later stage funding that I suppose have been fewer exit opportunities in fentex fentex is a more of a colloquial term that does cover an awful lot not just across women's health but across products for women often and I suppose for companies like which have more clinical actually ability or clinical utility I think at least our investors often look at equivalents within the health care space so a new diagnostic tools med devices tools that enable biotech development and so on and so forth so I think there's plenty of evidence of exits there but the truth is that fentex which is med device or or diagnostic often these companies are still fairly early stage because the sector has been small until more funding has gone in but it's not a small market and I've never met an investor who has thought that the 50% of the population is a small market that's very true on the other side people are very sensitive when it comes to health related data so do you think M has an advantage being a European company and respecting stricter privacy regulation then it's US American counterpart yes I do I think that regulation in Europe is is both stronger but it's also communicated in a way which is quite clear and it sits quite close to the end user so even the average person on the street has often heard of GDPR whereas in the US I think there is less of an understanding and there's less transparency often around privacy regulation at least close to a consumer so I think we do have an advantage there in in being a European company great if we look ahead I wanted to hear your opinion of what the big open problems are in women's health and the challenge is going forward that society should be very mindful of I think there is a substantial challenge in the lack of funding that goes into women's health research in academia I think a lot of the solutions that you would expect to find in other areas of health care have historically come out of spin out particularly in the last decade or two and when's into female physiology and biology are under resourced which they are it's about 2.5% of funding in the UK goes into women's health that becomes a real problem for then having the opportunity to start a company where you've identified an opportunity to develop a drug for endometriosis or a new diagnostic for polycystic every syndrome or a new screening technology for ovarian cancer all of all of these areas particularly in health care they require a massive amount of research and we are decades behind on research and women's health and that also creates then a struggle towards the end of the pipeline of starting companies so getting more money into gyneapathology at MIT getting more money into welcome sanger where they're doing incredible work and research into endometriosis that I think is the the big opportunity to solve that challenge and then you've got I think a separate opportunity to get new founders to spin some of this technology or how to or use those insights to start new companies be they technical founders or non-technical founders I think that perfectly illustrates why it's so important that women like you or people in general take challenges like you are taking on with them because we have to start somewhere be it by building startups or doing research in the space or any other way that can further our knowledge in the how has your journey shaped your view on who should and should not attempt to be a founder and what about in Femtec particularly I certainly don't feel that you need to be technical to be a founder of either a tech company or a biotech company or a Femtec company I think that having an interest to which borders on an obsession is extremely helpful and you certainly need a willingness to work extremely hard and upscale your knowledge extremely rapidly I think it's harder if you want to do it as a nine till five because there is so much additional work that goes into startup where you have limited runway and then often maybe an absence of initial knowledge and skill but I don't think there's anyone specifically who shouldn't attempt it I just think that it's for some people extremely addictive and extremely rewarding and then for others it would probably be scary draining and disappointing and in Femtec I mean and biotech where where we are is in a sector the opportunities are huge if you can create products which can quantify the body and quantify health status there is there is there are so many directions you can go in there are so many paths to impact and that that is amazing to me anyone who wants a path to impact should be seriously looking up becoming a founder and and going into the startup world I love what you said about not having to be technical because I think often nowadays we hear that the issue is that not enough women going to stem and that the problem has to be tackled early on which is a valid point but I think being technical is just one way of building a company and clearly there's you can have a different background and still do it yeah yeah so Jenny I would wanted to ask your advice on something specific around how to motivate the capital allocators so fortunately as an angel investor I have managed to make a small handful of investments in Femtec and that has been a great education process for me in understanding why there is a strong need other than the let's say obvious ideas of there being 50% of the population as women or the one you mentioned that only 5% of therapeutic capital is directed towards women can you please arm me with a statistic or idea that would immediately make my colleagues investor colleagues say yes I'm going to go out and look for investing in in women's health because I think that would very much help at least the people who allocate capital to have this on the radar rather than dismissing it and so I think that would really help the ecosystem so that's what I would like your help with there's a great question I would put the the answer in the space that we work in because that's where I know the most statistics and that would be that the UK government did a survey or a report into women's health in the UK and they interviewed or sent a detailed poll which I took part in to I think 101,000 women in the UK and the health picture will be very similar for the US as well and also Europe the big result that came out was that one in three women have a severe reproductive health symptom which means that one in three women look like they are not healthy and that is a ginormous market it's a market where there are very poor outcomes and there's a lot of room for improvement but ultimately it's a market which is then resulting in very suggest diagnosis because there are so many people going on to wait lists which is easy enough to google there are diagnostic technologies which have not been iterated or innovated on in many areas of reproductive health for some decades and there are limited tools to monitor these conditions when somebody's diagnosed conditions like endometriosis, polycystic ovary syndrome, heavy menstrual bleeding, perimenopause, women go through several different stages in their reproductive years and in their menstrual health journey but there is a ginormous market of people who are suffering and that is an opportunity for impacts but it's a ginormous opportunity for innovation, commercialisation and profit and our investors are all well aware of that. Great I will be sure to relate that once I get any if if I get any kickback but I think people are slowly really realizing this and I it will take a bit of time but I think we're making small improvements every year but yes yeah and if I might add I think it's also important to mention that there is the issue of fertility rates declining but that's not the only problem all these women that suffer the symptoms they are being impaired in their work life in their daily life is affected by this and their quality of life is suffering whether they want to have children or not. Yeah absolutely. Yeah, spot on. Great well thank you very much Jenny for joining us very inspirational story of yours you make us believe we can do anything I hope that's the great takeaway of our audience and we really appreciate your time. Good luck with the future of looking forward to seeing how that goes. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you. Okay, but we'll stop the recording soon.