Midi Health CEO & Co-Founder Joanna Strober on origins of Midi Health, menopausal women at work, using AI, and more
In this week’s episode of the CNBC Changemakers and Power Players podcast, CNBC Senior Media and Tech Reporter Julia Boorstin spoke with Midi Health CEO & Co-Founder Joanna Strober — the fast-growing women’s health platform rethinking perimenopause, menopause, and longevity. Strober shares how a year of being misdiagnosed and dismissed pushed her to build Midi, how the company now treats 25,000 women a week through insurance-covered, expert care, and why celebrities like Amy Schumer and Tory Burch are backing the mission. She also talks about normalizing menopause at work, the new conversation around hormone therapy, and how she’s become a more fearless, purpose-driven leader.
Listen to the full episode here. New episodes drop every Tuesday.
All references must be sourced to CNBC Changemakers and Power Players podcast.
STROBER ON MENOPAUSAL WOMEN BEING KICK ASS AT WORK
JOANNA STROBER: Honestly, like there’s actually very good studies on this. 50% of women say that because of menopause symptoms, they don’t apply for a raise or a promotion. And 10% of women actually do leave the workforce because of menopause symptoms. So we get women all the time saying, I thought I was going to have to leave my job. I did leave my job, and now I go back to work because of Midi. But think about it, if you’re not sleeping and you’re having anxiety attacks and your marriage might not be doing very well, and you’re feeling really frustrated all the time, it’s really hard to perform at work, but that is all hormonal.
STROBER ON ORIGINS OF MIDI HEALTH
STROBER: You know it’s kind of true. I was going through perimenopause. And what is perimenopause? Well, it’s before you have menopause. So I went to a primary care doctor, and they told me I had anxiety and I should go to get therapy, and maybe I needed marriage therapy, and they told me to get sleep study because I wasn’t sleeping, and they gave me pretty much no input at all on the fact that any of this could be related to my hormones. So had a really hard year, at least, a really hard year, and eventually someone said to me, you should go to a hormone specialist. And I drove an hour, and I paid a huge amount of money, but I got the care that I needed, and within two weeks, my life was better, which was great for me, but I felt really angry. I felt really, really angry that had taken me so long to get the right care, and also that I had to pay out of pocket to get this care because I felt like my insurance should have covered it. So it’s very much like, wow.
STROBER ON DEBATING A REVOLUTION
STROBER: I think we’re leading a revolution. That’s what I’ve decided. We’re going to revolutionize women’s health. Women are talking about it, and that is step number one. We also, you know, we used to see, when you saw menopause ads, it was old ladies. They were like 80, and that was a picture of a menopausal woman. So just changing, having Naomi Watts talking about it, we’re changing what women look like in menopause, right, and what and showing that women in menopause are not grandmothers, like they are still ruling the world, and they can. And I think a lot of that is we can take away that stigma by changing the image and changing the discussion, and that women are much more likely to talk about it when they feel like they can get treated.
STROBER ON USING AI
JULIA BOORSTIN: How do you you use AI for as a tool yourself to make your life more efficient as you’re growing this company?
STROBER: Well, I talk to ChatGPT all day. I have an entire conversation all day long asking advice. I’ll ask advice about, you know, I put the board meeting, I was prepping for board meeting. I put the deck in, and I said, okay, you’re a harsh board member give me feedback on on what the board members should be critiquing me about at the board meeting, actually, we had a great process recently. We went through our OKR process. So the OKR process was created by John Doerr, and he’s written this book called measure what matters. So he he is basically accessible to you on ChatGPT.
BOORSTIN: John Doerr is.
STROBER: Yes. So you can say—
BOORSTIN: Did you upload it?
STROBER: It’s there already. You don’t have to do that at all. It has all of its it has all of his podcasts. It has all of his everything. So you say to ChatGPT, pretend to be John Doerr and give me a critique on my OKRs for the company. And this is actually really fun. So you can have a nice John Doerr, or you can say, be a harsh John Doerr, and then it changes the feedback that it gives you. So I actually had an eight-hour plane ride where I talked to John Doerr for eight hours, and I got feedback over and over and over again on the OKRs that I came up with. Finally, he liked them, and it was like, very nice.
