Female Founder Interview - Adriana Catalina Vázquez Ortiz, Lilu

In this Spotlight Series, we interview 4 female founders that participated in C-shark Tank Season 2 by she1K .

1. Why did you and your co-founder decide to embark on addressing breastfeeding mums?

It was a gradual process - since neither my co-founder nor I are moms, we had to peel many layers of user research before we realized how much need there was to innovate for new moms.

While pursuing my masters in product design, I started speaking to friends about the challenges that women face when returning from maternity leave, and so I started talking to moms. I wanted to dig deeper and understand things they thought could be improved or changed, especially when returning to work. Moms are eternally multi-tasking, and women are so incredibly good at coming up with life hacks – but I realized there was a need to build better technology in key areas which are challenging for lots of parents when friends, colleagues and professors around me were all simultaneously struggling to make pumping work, despite being quite tech-savvy, goal oriented and determined. Failing to breastfeed led moms to feel guilty and inadequate, and also quite lonely - but in reality most women we talked to had difficulties - so it dawned on me it was the technology, or lack there of, that was failing moms. I pitched the idea to improve pumping technology to my then robotics class lab mate - at first he paused, realizing he knew nothing about breastfeeding, but a week after his own research, he came to the same conclusion - something had to change and be improved. And so we began to look for ways to make breastfeeding easier for moms.

2. How does it feel serving the mums market when you are not a mum yourself?

The more I learned about the postpartum journey and the challenges that are unique to women's health and emotional wellbeing, the more I felt invested in building better tech that makes it easier for the millions of moms who start to breastfeed every year, to make pumping work. Not being a mom myself made me talk to hundreds of moms - and them opening up to me, sharing their stories and how guilty, lonely, frustrated they felt - and disappointed by the technology and services and lack of support, made me realize there was a huge gap and opportunity to better support moms. So in many ways not being a mom has turned out to be an advantage.

3. How has the fundraising journey been for you? What are the positive things you have learnt from it and the mistakes you have made in this journey?

It's been hard but we've been lucky to get funding from SOSV / HAX, LairEastLabs, Fermata, Nick V (and angel) and support from many others, including grants like from BFTP and the NSF. While fundraising is tough for everyone, we came across many advisors and mentors who helped us a lot

Being realistic, as a "LatinX" "female" founder - I do fall under a category where securing VC funding may be more difficult. I try not to think about it like that because it would then feel like we've lost the race before we even get started. I focus on telling the NEED in the market, and the compelling evidence we've gathered to show WHY innovation is needed in the space, and why it is also a good market opportunity.

I think it's important as founders to educate ourselves as much as possible about the investors' vision, thesis, how their fund works, and other things that will influence their decision making process. And to not take things personally. I've also learned to increasingly enjoy the conversations with a VC. I now think of them as market research opportunities because they're great sounding boards. Everyone will have an opinion of course so learning to distill feedback into what's actionable now, what we could incorporate later and what would just be a distraction is also something you learn along the way.

4. How did you meet your co-founder? How is it like working with a male co-founder?

I met Sujay in an embedded systems class at the University of Pennsylvania. It was a class that mostly Electrical Engineers took but I signed up because I was curious to deepen my knowledge about hardware and mechatronics. The professor made us give a quick intro at the beginning of class and encouraged us to pick a lab mate we didn't know. I happened to know only one person in that class and I wanted to take the advice of that professor and learn from someone I didn't know but still most people wanted to pair up with friends. But Sujay came up to me and asked if I was the "girl who went to MIT" - I said "yes" and he asked if I'd be down to be lab mates. And we turned out to have a great working and collaboration dynamic!

Probably the geekiest co-founder story. It's great to work with him because we divide and conquer well and we have different perspectives - there's no task to little or too big for him which I like as well. I also really admire how comfortable he is with talking about women's health topics with women and moms - while learning to be respectful that he is not a woman (just like I'm not a mom), and that no matter how deep our empathy can run, the end-user and customer still will always know best.

5. How big are your dreams?

We have lots of ambitions for Lilu - we want to build a whole suite of complementary products for new moms that we can take to international markets. We want to build products that also tie in a digital component, as data is key to further the understanding of how to better serve our consumer, while also providing interesting ways to scale, like by connecting moms with services they can benefit from.

From a social impact perspective, it's a no brainer, but also from a market and business opportunity, I think it has immense potential because the easier we make it for moms to breastfeed and pump, the bigger this market can get because it's a virtuous cycle - more moms will pump, and for longer periods of time - meaning they'll need more tools to support them throughout a longer cycle. If I could fast track time I'd love to eventually branch out to other areas in women's health. So many things are interconnected - so as "niche" as breastpumping may sound, it really affects mental health and so many other things in a woman's life and will have long lasting impact in her health, even beyond menopause. I find the human body fascinating and evidently there's a lot of work to be done to understand how the entire body is interconnected - looking at it through the breastfeeding and postpartum lens barely scratches the surface but it's a great place to start! 

Join us for Season 3 from Sept to Nov 2020.