Watch: Three Health Companies Pitch Investors in Our Startup Pitch Showcase

Annie Burford

Annie Burford is dot.LA's director of events. She's an event marketing pro with over ten years of experience producing innovative corporate events, activations and summits for tech startups to Fortune 500 companies. Annie has produced over 200 programs in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York City working most recently for a China-based investment bank heading the CEC Capital Tech & Media Summit, formally the Siemer Summit.

Watch: Three Health Companies Pitch Investors in Our Startup Pitch Showcase

On Thursday, May 7th, we featured three emerging healthcare startups founded in Southern California as part of our biweekly Virtual Pitch Showcase.

Dr. Mickey Pentecost, co-founder and ceo at Diadem Biotherapeutics, Jennifer Saxton, founder and CEO at Tot Squad and Brian Conyer, co-founder and CEO of GIBLIB presented a high level overview on their products and services to angel investor Spencer Rascoff and Jay Goss, general partner at Wavemaker Three-Sixty Health.

dot.LA Virtual Pitch Showcase: Healthcare Startups in Southern Californiawww.youtube.com



About the Companies

Diadem Biotherapeuticsis developing novel, engineered exosomes that control immune cells to treat inflammatory diseases. They're more powerful than biologics and more affordable, stable, and doseable than cell therapies. For cells to communicate at a distance, they use secreted vesicles called exosomes. Originally thought to be cellular garbage, exosomes are now a hot new area for therapeutics.

Tot Squad's mission is to help make parents' lives easier by connecting them with the experts they need, virtually and in-person. From birth-related services like doulas to safety services like car seat installation, Tot Squad is here to deliver peace of mind to parents, from pregnancy to the playground. Because every parent needs a squad. Now, you can have your pressing parenting needs answered virtually via our live video link with trained experts, or we can dispatch these same experts to your home for more personal communication, depending on where you live. Thorough background checks, certification checks and training mean our continued mission of providing the best in child-related care is now available to you with the ease of a click of a button.

GIBLIBcurates and create high quality educational videos from expert physicians at the leading academic medical centers and stream the library on-demand to medical professionals globally. GIBLIB was founded in 2016 with the vision of providing all health care professionals access to the most knowledgeable experts in medicine. To get started, our founders, Brian Conyer and Jihye Shin, set out to assemble the best academic partners to feature in the educational videos, the most talented creatives in video production to produce Hollywood studio quality content, and the smartest software engineers to deliver the most innovative streaming technologies capable of reaching a global audience.


About the Judges

Jay Goss is a general partner at Wavemaker Three-Sixty Health

​Jay Goss, General Partner at Wavemaker Three-Sixty Health

Jay is a General Partner at Wavemaker Three-Sixty Health, a leading seed-stage healthcare-focused venture capital fund in Southern California. The fund's investment thesis is that after 40+ years, healthcare is transitioning away from fee-for-service to value-based payments, and with that comes a massive amount of disruption. There will be no shortage of clinical operations and business challenges to solve in the coming decade, and entrepreneurs are already coming out of the woodwork to solve these problems. Moreover, countless business models are now for the first time commercially viable because the healthcare industry is embracing value-based payments. The fund counts among its investors 50+ healthcare senior executives, eager and extremely able to add value to the early stage companies in which the fund invests.

Prior to launching Wavemaker Three-Sixty Health, Jay operated dozens of early stage companies all over Southern California.

Spencer Rascoff is co-founder and executive chairman at dot.LA

Spencer Rascoff, Co-Founder, Executive Chairman at dot.LA  

Spencer Rascoff is an entrepreneur and company leader who co-founded Zillow, Hotwire and dot.LA, and who served as Zillow's CEO for a decade. He is currently executive chairman of dot.LA and a board member at TripAdvisor. In the fall of 2019 Spencer was a Visiting Executive Professor at Harvard Business School where he co-taught the "Managing Tech Ventures" course. In 2015, Spencer co-wrote and published his first book, the New York Times' Best Seller "Zillow Talk: Rewriting the Rules of Real Estate."

Spencer is the host of "Office Hours," a monthly podcast on dot.LA featuring candid conversations between prominent executives on leadership, diversity and inclusion, and startups.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/annieburford
annie@dot.la

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The Impact of Authentic Storytelling. LA Latino/a Founders and Funders Tell All

Decerry Donato

Decerry Donato is a reporter at dot.LA. Prior to that, she was an editorial fellow at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.

The Impact of Authentic Storytelling. LA Latino/a Founders and Funders Tell All
Decerry Donato

As one of the most diverse cities in the world, Los Angeles is home to almost 5 million people who identify as Hispanic or Latinx. Yet, many feel they still lack representation in the city’s tech space.

“I can safely say that last year’s LA tech week hosted all of the events on the west side, and very few were focused on telling Latino and Latina entrepreneurial stories,” said Valeria Martinez, investor at VamosVentures. “We wanted to change that this year.”

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LA Tech Week Day 3: Social Highlights
Evan Xie

L.A. Tech Week has brought venture capitalists, founders and entrepreneurs from around the world to the California coast. With so many tech nerds in one place, it's easy to laugh, joke and reminisce about the future of tech in SoCal.

Here's what people are saying about day three of L.A. Tech Week on social:

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LA Tech Week: Female Founders Provide Insights Into Their Startup Journeys

Decerry Donato

Decerry Donato is a reporter at dot.LA. Prior to that, she was an editorial fellow at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.

LA Tech Week: Female Founders Provide Insights Into Their Startup Journeys
Decerry Donato

Women remain a minority among startup founders. According to Pitchbook, even though women-led startups in the United States received a record $20.8 billion in funding during the first half of 2022, U.S. companies with one or more female founders received less than 20% of total venture funding in 2022. U.S. companies solely led by female founders received less than 2% of the total funding.

The panel, titled Female Founders: Planning, Pivoting, Profiting, was moderated by NYU law professor Shivani Honwad and featured Anjali Kundra, co-founder of bar inventory software Partender; Montré Moore, co-founder of the Black-owned beauty startup AMP Beauty LA; Mia Pokriefka, co-founder and CEO of the interactive social media tool Huxly; and Sunny Wu, founder and CEO of fashion company LE ORA.

The panelists shared their advice and insights on starting and growing a business as a woman. They all acknowledged feeling pressure to not appear weak among peers, especially as a female founder. But this added weight only causes more stress that may lead to burnout.

“The mental health aspect of being a founder should not be overshadowed,” said Kundra, who realized this during the early stages of building her company with her brother..

Growing up in Silicon Valley, Kundra was surrounded by the startup culture where, “everyone is crushing it!” But she said that no one really opened up about the challenges of starting your own company. .

“Once you grow up as a founder in that environment, it's pretty toxic,” Kundra said. “I felt like I really wanted to be open and be able to go to our investors and tell them about challenges because businesses go up and down, markets go up and down and no company is perfect.”

Honwad, who advocates for women’s rights, emphasized the value of aligning yourself with people with similar values in the tech ecosystem. “[Those people] can make your life better not just from an investment and money standpoint, but also a personal standpoint, because life happens,” she said.

Moore, who unexpectedly lost one of her co-founders at AMP Beauty, said that entrepreneurs “really have to learn how to adapt to [their] circumstances.”

“She was young, healthy, vibrant and we've been sorority sisters and friends over the past decade,” she said about her co-founder Phyllicia Phillips, who passed away in February. “So it was just one of those moments where you have to take a pause.”

Moore said this experience forced her to ask for help, which many founders hesitate to do. She encouraged the audience to try and share their issues out loud with their teams because there are always people who will offer help. When Moore shared her concerns with her investors, they jumped in to support her in ways she didn’t think was possible.

Kundra said that while it is important to have a support group and listen to mentors, it is very important for entrepreneurs to follow their own thinking and pick and choose what they want to implement within their strategy. “At the end of the day, you really have to own your own decisions,” she said.

Kundra also said that while it is easy to turn to your colleagues and competitors and do what they are doing, you shouldn’t always follow them because every business is different.

“When I was in the heat of it, I kind of became [a part of] this echo chamber and that was really challenging for us,” Kundra added, “but we were able to move beyond it and figure out what worked for us [as a company] and we're still on a journey. You're always going to be figuring it out, so just know you're not alone.”

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