fastcompany.com – Karen Long is no stranger to entrepreneurship, having worked at fast-growing startups in everything from biotech to wine. But with her newest company, Nuelle, she faced some hurdles that she’s never encountered before.
Nuelle is a device that is designed to encourage arousal for women who experience problems with their sex drive at various stages in their lives. Long says she started the company after conducting extensive user research, in which many women shared that they lacked alternatives to hormone therapies.
“This was where we saw one of the greatest unmet needs in health care,” says Long, who saw an opportunity to create a device-based alternative. After assembling an all-female executive team that included obstetrician Leah Millheiser and former Art.com senior vice president of marketing Lesa Musatto, she set forth for Sand Hill Road to secure the company’s first big check.
Long expected that it would take some time to find the right set of backers, but she didn’t anticipate her all-female team being referred to by a male partner as “the Charlie’s Angels.” Nor did she expect that she’d face the kind of blatant dismissals that she did: She was regularly laughed at in pitch meetings, and was told by several venture capitalists that she must be exaggerating the data, as “it doesn’t happen to my wife.”
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