Varsha Rao is the CEO of Nurx, a leading telehealth platform focused on women. Through Nurx, you can get prescriptions, like contraception, acne treatment, migraine treatment, and at-home testing delivered to your door. Jana invested in Nurx’s seed round in 2016 and introduced Varsha to the company as an angel investor and, years later, Varsha was recruited as CEO.

We talk with Varsha about how her prior roles—as COO of Clover Health, Head of Global Operations at Airbnb, and founding an ecommerce company in the 90s— prepared her to lead a company at the intersection of healthcare and consumer technology.

Varsha shares why she’s so passionate about Nurx’s work to break down barriers to accessing healthcare: “Access hurdles come in a number of forms. One is a geographic...about 20M women live in contraception deserts...second is economics - it can be expensive to access care - the third is really around stigma.”

Lastly, we like to wrap up with shoutouts to people who have helped us along the way. Varsha highlights Regina Benjamin, former US Surgeon General in the Obama Administration, and Nurx Board Director.

The #ANGELS Pod brings you conversations about the latest tech trends with the people inventing and shaping them in Silicon Valley and beyond. Hosted by the co-founders of #ANGELS, an investment collective: Jessica Verrilli, April Underwood, Jana Messerschmidt, Chloe Sladden, Katie Stanton, and Vijaya Gadde. We cover personal stories about breaking into tech and scaling up, and inside looks at the most interesting startups, from the people building them.

This podcast is just getting started and we’d love your feedback. You can reach us on Twitter @HashtagAngels and thanks in advance for listening!

The #ANGELS Podcast is a production of Haitch Industries. Our theme music is by Tobey Forsman of Whipsong Music. The episode was produced and edited by Matt Herrero.