Making mentorship, menteeship, and sponsorship really work. Dr. Jenny Schneider with Nikita Singareddy and Cydney Kim|| EP. 153

Inspiring Women with Laurie McGraw

---

Laurie McGraw is speaking with Inspiring Woman Dr. Jenny Schneider about the new Home[ward] Grown program to elevate women founders and leaders that was launched last year. Nikita Singareddy and Cydney Kim, co-founders of Fortuna Health, are the first mentee graduates of Home[ward] Grown and join this Inspiring Women conversation.

Home[ward] Grown has both an external and internal focus to strengthen and support women in their leadership journeys. Jenny shared Home[ward] Grown was launched because empowering women is more than just a matter of equitable representation – It’s a business imperative. Jenny believes in order to achieve the ultimate promise of healthcare’s triple aim of improved patient experience, outcomes and cost requires us to elevate the vital perspective of healthcare’s leading consumers: women.

In this discussion, Jenny, Nikita and Cydney discuss how this program went and how they all benefitted. Mentorship and mentEEship is fluid. Setting up regular calls with open ended agendas put responsibility on the shoulders of Nikita and Cydney. One of their important conversations was about simply discussing all of the hard business problems they were facing at the company today. How should they approach a current business decision, and could they go through how it might impact their trajectory in the future? For Nikita and Cydney, they were able to take these discussions and use them in their reality of building Fortuna Health. For Jenny, while she has significantly more experience in building and scaling companies, she too learned new approaches to business problems – or certain areas of healthcare where she wasn’t as familiar. From this conversation you can also hear the energy that Jenny, Nikita, and Cydney drew from this opportunity to work together in a concentrated way during the course of the program. Energy from solving big problems. Energy from getting to know other passionate builders who also dream of solving big problems and aim to have a large impact.

The Home[ward] Grown model for mentorship is a new time based and concentrated approach to mentorships which is so important for leadership success. As the first “graduates’ of this quarterly program, both Nikita and Cydney were effusive regarding the opportunity and how they felt it was helpful to them and their company. For other leaders who want to give of their time and experience to other founders/leaders, this approach to mentorship may be appealing and may also align with otherwise busy calendars.

Inspiring Women looks forward to showcasing future conversations with women in the Home[ward] Grown mentorship program.

Guest Bios:

• Nikita Singareddyis the co-founder and CEO of Fortuna Health, a multi-lingual platform to easily check eligibility, enroll, and recertify on Medicaid (backed by Andreessen Horowitz). Nikita has worked as a healthcare investor and served in strategy and operations roles at Oscar Health and Truepill. She is a former Medicaid beneficiary.
• Cydney Kimis the co-founder and COO of Fortuna Health, a Medicaid navigation platform. Prior to Fortuna, Cydney served as VP of Strategy & Operations and GM for a Series C health tech company (HALO Dx) where 30% of the patients were Medicaid beneficiaries. Cydney has worked in a number of commercial and operator roles spanning healthcare and tech/media.
• Dr. Jenny Schneider is the CEO of Homeward, a technology-enabled healthcare provider delivering care to those who don’t have it, starting in rural America. Previously, she served 5 years as the Chief Medical Officer and President of Livongo responsible for product, data science, engineering, marketing, clinical operations, and growth strategy. In her final year at Livongo, they led the company through the largest consumer digital health Initial Public Offering in history, a secondary offering, a convertible debt offering that raised over $540 million, and the industry’s largest merger ever between Livongo and Teladoc Health, valuing Livongo at $18.5 billion and beginning a new era of consumer centric virtual care. Honored by Modern Healthcare as one of the 50 Most Influential Clinical Executives and by Fierce Healthcare as Woman of Influence for work empowering women and modeling diversity and inclusion in the workplace.