Your boss will freeze your eggs now
Small Steps Vol. 104: The rise of corporate egg freezing 🥚; a funeral for nature 🪦; and how to be a climate intrapreneur 💪.
Kick start
👩🏽⚕️ The rise of corporate egg freezing. In this interesting article, the New York Times delves into whether the surge of companies offering egg freezing as a corporate benefit is the feminist dream or a Silicon Valley fantasy. While the tech has been around since the 1980s when it was primarily used as a means of fertility preservation for cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy, the practice has now exploded. In the US, the number of egg freezing cycles recorded increased nearly 300% from 2015 to 2022, and large corporations including Starbucks, Match Group (who own Hinge and Tinder), and Forbes are all offering egg freezing allowances as part of their workplace packages.
The practice isn’t foreign to Australia either, with Google having recently joined the ranks of companies offering reimbursements for staff for fertility treatments, after Apple and Facebook were the first to roll out this trend about a decade ago. Harrison.ai and Asana, among others, also offer fertility policies for their staff. Still, only 5% of Australian businesses subsidise fertility treatments for their employees and only 11% offer paid leave for this purpose, with another 4% offering unpaid leave.
Egg freezing is expensive, with an average cost of roughly US$13,000 in the US and A$5,000 for an egg freezing cycle in Australia, excluding storage fees. This also excludes the actual cost of IVF, which can be upwards of US$20,000 in the US for a single cycle and A$12,000 in Australia (but you may be able to get about half of this back depending on your Medicare eligibility and private health insurance cover). Factor in that only one in three conceiving parents have a baby in their first IVF cycle and the costs really stack up.
Without your boss chipping in, the costs are prohibitive for most people. Then consider the intersectional factors contributing to the need for fertility care and the demographics of people working for the companies with the resources to offer these employee benefits, and you’re left with big questions about who gets to access the freedom and empowerment that many people feel they gain from being able to slow the reproductive clock.
Know any great founders working to improve access to fertility care? We’d love to chat!
What we’re thinking about
🪦 A funeral for nature. This week in Bath, UK, a group of passionate architects and climate advocates held a ‘Funeral for Nature’ as a creative call to action to combat declining biodiversity. Featuring hundreds of the Red Rebels, 50 drummers and hundreds of mourners, the protest moved the public to watch on with hushed reverence.
Organiser Robert Delius said that the “day highlighted the potential of creative industries to help communicate the important issues of our time. David Attenborough has said that the climate crisis is actually a communication crisis, suggesting that we should think more creatively about how we inspire action on climate and biodiversity issues.”
Image sourced here.
💪🏽 What’s a climate intrapreneur, and how can I be one? In this great resource from Work for Climate, passionate climate expert Digby Hall explains how you can shift the needle on climate from within your current workplace to make a real difference. His advice?
You’re not alone - start a group chat! 📱
Identify the decision-makers in your organisation that care and get them onboard as an ally 🤝
Build a business case demonstrating a tangible, evidence-backed return for the business 💵
Don’t lead with climate – start with the business risks if leadership doesn’t act (like infrastructure, greenwashing and loss of great staff) 🔥
Identify the person who will block your proposal and engage them directly to get them onside 👐
Stay focused step-by-step targets rather than leading with too many ideas at once🎯
The vibe when your boss won’t get onboard with your climate ideas…
New paths
👩🏻💻 Are you a generalist leader in the health/medical space with a love of operations? MoreGoodDays is hiring a General Manager (Melbourne)!
🎧 Mindset Health is on the lookout for a Head of Finance and two Software Engineers (Melbourne).
🌱 Trace is hiring a Marketing Manager (UK) to help expand the UK founding team.
🔋 Amber Electric is after a Customer Operations Specialist and a Senior Compliance Specialist (Operations) (Melbourne).
🔥 Want to work for an impact company? Fill out our expression of interest form for roles across our portfolio. There’s even more jobs at ethical companies on the global B-Work job board.
Giant leaps
🎓 In a huge milestone for HEX, its future-focused innovation education programs are now aligned with the globally recognised International Baccalaureate curriculum.
For the road
🪸 AI is keeping an ear on our coral reefs. SurfPerch, an AI tool developed by Google and Deepmind, has processed thousands of hours of audio recorded at coral reefs around the world, and can now determine how healthy a reef is through how it sounds. Coral reefs are surprisingly noisy, but become much quieter when damaged or overfished. Want to hear what a healthy reef sounds like? It only takes 3 minutes to do your part as a citizen scientist by helping train the model through ‘Calling in Our Corals’ - check it out here.
🌏 How your startup can tap into the National Reconstruction Fund. Climate tech investor Priyanka Karunanithi has shared this useful primer on the flagship government policy, which has earmarked $3 billion (~20% of the $15 billion total) for investment into green technologies. Her tips for startups? Apply now if your company needs 10s, if not 100s of millions in funding, or have commitments from other equity or debt financiers and your IM documentation ready to go. If you’re a pre-seed or seed startup, it’s likely best to wait for now.
⚡ Bill Gates defends AI’s appetite for electricity. The tech billionaire believes that AI will be more help than hindrance to solving the global emissions problem, despite the carbon emissions from data centres being estimated to grow 160% by 2030. “Let’s not go overboard on this,” Gates said at the Breakthrough Energy Summit in London last week. “Data centres are, in the most extreme case, a 6% addition [in energy demand] but probably only 2% to 2.5%. The question is, will AI accelerate a more than 6% reduction? And the answer is: certainly.” Read more about it here.
🐄 Can CRISPR solve livestock’s methane problem? It’s a high-risk, high reward solution, but gene editing of the microbiome of cows and calves via CRISPR-based treatments could potentially solve the cow burp methane problem. While research is still in the early stages, the team at the Innovative Genomics Institute are looking into this revolutionary approach.
🧑🏽⚕️ Thrive AI Health is the new kid on the healthtech block. The US startup, backed by Huffington Post’s Arianna Huffington and the OpenAI Startup Fund, is building AI-powered assistant tech to help people achieve healthier lifestyles through personalised coaching on sleep, food, stress, fitness and ‘connection’. It’ll be interesting to see how this disrupts the competitive landscape and how Thrive can strike the balance between its goal of ‘democratising’ its tech and protecting health data privacy.
🧩 How do you know if you really have product market fit? It’s one of the most important but often nebulous concepts in startups, and anyone who’s cracked it will just tell you, “you’ll know it when you see it.” This edition of the Venture Crew newsletter dives into the metrics that will help you move away from ‘gut-feeling’ and towards a tangible assessment of your business, including retention and customer love, customer lifetime value, and the ideal growth rate.
🤑 Why the perfect seed round may be a $2m cheque. Episode 1’s Adam Shuaib analysed data from 15,000 startups to find out what the optimal seed round looks like in today’s fundraising environment. He found that startups that raise US$2m are most likely to later successfully land Series A and Series B funding, and that startups that secure funding within 12 months of incorporation double their chances of surviving to Series A.
Save the date
📅 July 21: Applications close for Academy Xi and IRESS’ Women in Tech and STEM Business Scholarship. There are three scholarships on offer for women and an additional scholarship for a Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander applicants to fund your participation in an Academy Xi course! We’d highly recommend this for anyone dreaming of a STEM career, but have found the entrance barriers too high – this is the perfect way to forge your path forward.
📅 July 22: Applications close for the NSW Fostering Innovation Sponsorship Program. The program aims to provide grants from a pool of $400,000 for businesses helping foster innovation in NSW. It’s primarily targeted at events including conferences, award nights and innovation festivals, and we recommend checking it out!
📅 July 24: Stone & Chalk Ecosystem mixer. Held at Stone & Chalk in King St Melbourne, come along to network with VC investors. Tickets are $10 and the event runs from 5 pm. Tickets available online.
📅 August 31: Applications close for the KPMG Private Enterprise Global Tech Innovator competition! This competition is an unrivalled platform to profile your business. Get international exposure, validation from tech industry partners and potential investors, and mentorship and guidance from KPMG advisors to help your startup. Definitely one to check out!
📅 November 21: The ARENA and Innovation Bay Showcase. They’re currently canvassing rolling applications for climate tech companies to present at their annual event to over 100 investors. Applications close when the event fills up, so get in quickly if interested.