Women With Impact #46 - Zhenya Lindgardt
Welcome to Women With Impact, a newsletter all about the journeys of mission-driven women and how they have a positive impact in our world.
I’m Clara Richter and this is the 46th edition of Women With Impact. If you enjoy this issue, please share it with a friend and like it above.
For this edition, I interviewed Zhenya Lindgardt, President, CEO and Board Director of Sera Prognostics, Inc., The Pregnancy Company. Sera Prognostics focuses on improving maternal and neonatal health by providing innovative pregnancy biomarker information to doctors and patients. Zhenya also serves as CEO and President at The Commons Project, a global tech nonprofit building solutions that empower people to access, manage, and share their data. Previously, Zhenya served as the VP of Platform and Customer Engagement at Uber Technologies, where she incubated and scaled early-stage Uber businesses and set up customer engagement programs across business units. Before Uber, she was Managing Director and Senior Partner at the Boston Consulting Group, where she spent nearly two decades. Zhenya has a degree in Business Administration from the University of Southern California, an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Wishing you a pleasant read!
Best,
Clara
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The Journey
You worked at the Boston Consulting Group for 19 years. What made you switch industries, from strategy consulting to tech at Uber, and most recently healthcare?
I loved working at BCG, especially working on a lot of impactful projects over the years. As a consultant you need to, however, step back from a product or project at some point, and let the company continue to build the solution and let them take the lead. I have always known that I would want to go and build something myself, but it was hard to leave BCG, because it’s a great place to work. The right time to leave was when I received an opportunity, which I could not turn down. Joining tech unicorn and pre-IPO Uber, to have the chance to join the executive team and lead the corporate incubator, I just couldn't miss this opportunity.
In addition, STEM is the future, and I deeply believe that software is going to be integrated into everything we do. Largely, it already is, and sometimes we are simply just not aware of it. So I wanted to be in “the mecca.” Moreover, I also wanted for my little girls to learn what the future of careers could look like for them, and where better to do that, than being in the community itself.
You were appointed CEO at The Commons Project Foundation in 2021, during the global covid pandemic. What are your main takeaways when it comes to managing personal data in the 21st century?
Having been in big tech, I know how important personal data is. I know how powerful it is in creating innovative solutions to move the overall societal innovation forward and to improve our lives. That said, every entity and company knows a lot about us. Most individuals willingly give the rights to use that personal data in order to better access the goods and services a company offers. When the opportunity came along at The Commons Project Foundation, that the team was looking for a tech leader to help empower individuals with their own data - so that they can use their data to get better care in health or better access to services by gaining agency over their data - I was immediately convinced. In the next decades we will learn how powerful our data is, and who has access it. All of us need to be organised enough to know where our data resides. And at the bare minimum, to be able to access and use it, when we need it.
If I would ask a person on the street whether they know where their medical record is, or if they're traveling abroad and asked to show it a medical doctor, probably most people would not be able to do it. In critical situations, however, this could mean life or death, for instance if you have chronic conditions or allergies. The covid pandemic was a really good wake-up call, because all of us had to carry our personal health data: whether it's a negative PCR test or our vaccination record.
The Foundation is aiming at translating the learnings from the pandemic to other use cases. I wish that there was more awareness and education to bring tools to access, use and share own data to individuals. Empowering people with their own data that is what motivated me to join the Foundation, to educate and provide the necessary tools for people to achieve better health.
Since 2023, you lead Sera Prognostics. Could you please share a little about what excites you most when building the product of preterm birth tests and leading the company forward?
As you might see, being part of change and mission-driven organisations is what excites me most.
I recall when I was pregnant, I heard a lot of advice which I could not understand. My doctor said that I could not ride a bicycle and I received a copy of a book “What to expect when I am expecting.” A thick book, which wherever I opened it, it contained scary details on what could go wrong. I put it away, as it was just generic data and I did not want to stress out unnecessarily.
At Sera Prognostics, we provide personalised information and research-based data to doctors and expectant mothers during pregnancies. Details are compiled on how the pregnancy is going, what daily things one could do to lead to a healthier pregnancy and baby. Other than my doctor, I did not have a source of reliable information that is research-based, that goes beyond “this week your baby is a size of an almond”. I wanted to know, what happens for instance when I drink three cups of coffee, what are the risks? When do c-sections happen and what could go wrong? How do I know if it will go wrong for me?
Gynaecology is an incredibly time-stressed specialty, given shortage of nurses and obgyns, with a limited set of predictive tools that give physician reliable information about likelihood of complications before they develop. The healthcare system unfortunately is changing very slowly to bring innovations. Joining Sera, a company which addressed exactly that gap, which brings screening information to the doctors and expectant mothers, was a mission I wanted to take on.
One of my biggest motivations is that I want to work on solutions is so that my daughters one day can have safer and healthier pregnancies. This is a relevant topic for half of the world’s population and not to have access to basic information on risks in their own pregnancies is a massive gap that needs to be addressed.
The Lessons
What recent piece of advice have you been given?
A quote by Vivian Greene I read recently resonates with me the most: “Life is not about waiting for the storms to pass. It's about learning how to dance in the rain.” There are many ways of saying it, such as “make lemonade out of lemons,” etc.
In a world which is constantly changing, in business, academia and society, there are always challenges which will come your way. The most important aspect of how to deal with that change, is your outlook: reading the situation at hand and making the best out of it. To me, that is a motto. Working with the team, which I absolutely love doing, and being a part of a team, doing the best with the opportunities and challenges in front of us, is something which I do daily.
For example, the pace of adoption of innovations in gynecology is slower than in other specialties, like Oncology. There are reasons for that, of course, to be appropriately conservative, requiring more testing. 34% of deaths among newly born babies is because of prematurity: when babies are born too soon. There are many different reasons why babies are born early and with our pre term test screens for the conditions which could result in prematurity, and if presence of higher risk is known early, the physician could make interventions to help bring the baby to full term. Bringing this innovation to market and support healthier mothers and babies across the world is incredibly motivating. Without doubt, I need the advice which I just shared to apply to Sera – for us to overcome all of the barriers to adoption of the breakthrough innovation.
What situation in your life have you most grown from?
I was born and raised in Russia, which at the time, one could say was a third-world-country environment. In the early ‘90s, there was no food in the stores. I remember aisles of canned seaweed carefully stacked in pyramids because there was no fresh produce in the supply chains in the supermarkets. In the US, where we are incredibly fortunate to have a strong economy, I learned that overcoming adversity and staying resilient, making use of resources around you to achieve impact, is a privilege. It’s a privilege to all of us, and anyone can make an enormous difference. I did not start out with access to opportunities that I have now, but I had the opportunity to apply my hard work, by studying and by putting one foot in front of another.
Anything is possible with hard work and perseverance. This belief allowed me to set goals for me and my teams in any organisations that I have worked with, and eventually to reach these goals. My learning from overcoming adversity is the importance of dreaming big.
What advice would you give to our Women With Impact community?
In addition to dreaming big and setting high goals for yourself, also take care of yourself. If you forget about yourself, it will be hard to take care of others. Once you take care of yourself, support as many as you can, because there are so many in our world, that need help. And lastly, I believe that we should build stronger networks among women, such as you are doing, Clara.
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