Welcome to the latest edition of Re-Humanizing HealthTech, where we amplify and connect voices bringing humans back into healthcare.

After a clarifying adventure in Guatemala, it’s a great feeling to be back in San Francisco. I’ll continue to hold space for unexpected volcanic peaks, cresting evening thunder, and slow mornings out on the lake.

Somewhere between tracking tsunamis in real time and landing rockets on floating barges, we forgot to solve a much more common problem: who’s taking Tracy to soccer practice on Saturday?

The difficulty in managing the day-to-day responsibilities of family care and coordination is one of those fuzzy problems. It’s a multi-stakeholder challenge with a broad surface area: defining expectations across several parties (family members, teachers, friends, sports coaches, employers), navigating various external inputs and point solutions, adapting and adopting appropriate technology, and establishing communication norms.

It’s also a great example of an attribution challenge. Pain that’s unclear or ambiguous tends to be swept to the side, and the residue is left for “someone else” to clean up later. Similar to the ongoing ripple effects from an unreasonable commute, the waste gets buried.

For now, we have texts. A group chat. An actual physical whiteboard. Maybe a shared gCal. I am curious if anyone has tried robo-voice reminders to family members with actual success.

Overall, we have a bunch of frustrated, confused, and under-resourced people trying to do the best by their family and balance everything else in their world with zero tooling. It’s hardly a recipe for success, and it remains an overlooked and underloved problem.

The challenges the future will bring us might be somewhat blurry, but I’m very sure that with a little focus and a lot of willpower, we can disappear some of the (what should be) non-problems like coordination and scheduling that make up our daily lives.

Our featured founder is committed to addressing these challenges, and making our family life simpler.

Read more below.

In optimism,

Katie

Say hello to Jenn. She’s building Simyli, the “Family Operating System” — a smart, secure mobile app that lightens the mental load of family and care coordination by combining calendars, lists, health tracking, and shared reminders in one intelligent platform.

Why did you choose this path?

We built Simyli because running a modern household shouldn’t feel like a second full-time job. As a family of eight — two working parents, six kids, and a never-ending list of moving parts — we saw firsthand how scattered tools and invisible labor create constant stress.

Between school schedules, medical appointments, sports, and caregiving for relatives, families are expected to manage complex logistics with tools that were never designed for them.

Simyli started as a solution for our own family and grew into a mission: to give families the same level of intelligent, secure coordination that businesses and hospitals use every day. With our backgrounds in healthcare, technology, and cybersecurity, we saw the opportunity to merge empathy with engineering — building something that’s private, practical, and built for real life.

What are the missing pieces for you right now?

💰 Capital: Expanding beyond our friends-and-family round to fuel user acquisition, Android growth, and healthcare integrations.

🛠️ Engineering Depth: Additional mobile engineers to accelerate feature velocity across iOS and Android.

🤝 Distribution: Partnerships with health systems, employers, and insurers who want to support families and caregivers.

📣 Marketing Stars: Expertise in consumer storytelling and digital growth to reach families at scale.

🧠 Advisors: Veteran operators in B2C mobile apps and healthcare tech to help us continue to refine go-to-market strategy.

What gives you hope?

It’s been an uplifting November, and the in-real-life magic continues even as the weather cools.

The Council put together a fantastic AGM for their LPs. The team is making waves with their early funds and supporting some extraordinary first builders.

We heard directly from some of their portfolio companies about their exciting trajectories, and I was especially honored to moderate the healthcare panel: Signed ≠ Success: Driving Utilization in a Policy-Heavy World.

I can't speak highly enough of Eliana Berger at Joyful Health and Cameron Carter at Rosarium Health. They're leading with deep empathy for the communities they're helping and designing meaningful solutions that meet people where they're at. It was an absolute pleasure to hear more about how they're creating a better future for healthcare.

Separately, it was an absolute joy to meet some long-time collaborators in person!

More here.

Kristina Subbotina created a warm and light-filled environment to celebrate both the accomplishments and next phase for Lexsy, the AI-enabled lawyer for startups.

The supportive energy and positivity was tangible, and the conversation touched on many “how might we” questions, as well connecting dots across the various experts at the table.

I’m compelled to call out the thoughtful gift of a notebook marked Believe as a keepsake. A blank page is both scary and an invitation to breathe something new into life, which feels exactly right for this moment.

More here.

I operate, advise and invest in Pre-Seed —>Series A healthtech & agetech startups.

Reach out if you’re tackling gnarly problems in complex ecosystems.