At HLTH 2025, Laurie McGraw asked Missy Krasner—who co-founded Women Healthcare Leaders for Progress with her a year ago when a thousand healthcare women signed on—how women founders should think about this moment.
Missy's answer was refreshingly pragmatic: "The women that are being successful in innovating and getting funding are women that are—it doesn't matter that they're women. They're finding a particular niche and they're figuring out a business model. And the minute that they grow and they get traction, no one cares they're a woman."
She points to Joanna Strober at Gennev, companies like Elektra and Maven—founders who identified real problems in women's health and built real businesses solving them. Not because they positioned themselves as "women-led companies." Because they found product-market fit and generated revenue.
"At the end of the day, it's about ARR and revenue. If you have it and you have product market fit, people will pay attention."
This isn't about pretending gender dynamics don't matter. They do. But Missy—who's spent 35 years in healthcare innovation, co-founded Penguin AI which just raised $30 million, and serves on multiple digital health boards—has learned what actually works when the political winds shift: obsessive focus on business fundamentals.
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