The CQ | Leading Teal Health's $10M Seed Funding
Plus our investment team's top reads of the week
The CQ is Forerunner’s weekly newsletter rounding up the most pressing consumer news and analysis, plus some bonus musings from our investment team. Subscribe now to get the latest edition in your inbox every weekend.
There are several instances in consumer health — and particularly in women’s health — where a better experience isn’t just a nice-to-have or a matter of greater convenience and comfort, but a fundamental lever for better healthcare outcomes. A better experience can actually be life-saving.
Teal Health exemplifies this premise. Launching to the public in the coming months following their upcoming FDA approval, Teal is commercializing the market’s first-ever at-home collection method for cervical cancer screening. This initial offering, the Teal Wand, transforms the experience for one of the most routine, critical screenings in women’s health and in doing so, dramatically improves the very quality of care by solving for adherence.
At Forerunner, we’re on an endless search for companies helping consumers take health into their own hands with proactive, modern measures. Teal’s mission to eradicate cervical cancer through a fundamentally new approach is an especially ambitious iteration of this effort.
In another corner of our portfolio: Flip is seeing truly explosive growth as creators and consumers look to find a new home while TikTok’s future remains uncertain. The social commerce platform is seeing 250k+ new users join *daily* — with users spending an average of 35 minutes a day on the app, thanks to the new algorithm that’s enabling the company to meet this unique moment.
What We’re Talking About on Slack:
Parents are gaming their kids’ credit scores. More parents are adding their under-18 children as authorized users on their credit cards so that their spending habits will be reflected in their kids’ credit scores, giving them an early financial edge, especially when it comes to renting an apartment, buying a car, or even getting hired. In 2019, 8% of American parents surveyed had added a child as an authorized user, and data from TransUnion last year shows 700,000 22-to-24-year-olds have such accounts. This practice disproportionately benefits children of wealthier families with good credit scores. “There’s this idea out there that somehow your credit score is a marker of how responsible and moral you are…In reality, however, your score does not reflect your virtuousness.”
Even Harvard MBAs are struggling to land jobs: 23% of 2024 grads were still looking for work three months after graduation, compared to 20% in 2023 and 10% in 2022. It’s happening with grads at over a dozen schools with top MBA programs, like Wharton, Stanford, and NYU’s Stern School of Business. At the University of Chicago’s Booth School and Northwestern University’s Kellogg School, the share of students still looking months after graduation more than tripled. Amazon, Google, Microsoft and consulting firms like McKinsey have cut back on MBA recruiting and internships. “Companies tell us, ‘We’re not coming to campus anymore.’”
The new $30,000 side hustle: making job referrals for strangers. Considering outside applicants have a 1 in 200 chance of being hired while those with a referral have a 1 in 25 chance, job seekers are turning to underground referral markets, like Blind, ReferralHub, and Glassdoor’s referral forum, to gain employee referrals from total strangers just to get a foot in the door. One tech worker made over a thousand referrals to his employer, which he sourced through Blind, helping secure multiple hires and earning about $30,000 in referral bonuses. Critics worry that this may lead to a flood of unvetted candidates and undermine the referral system, meanwhile the employees making referrals are putting their professional reputations on the line.
Consumers want brands to prove they’re worth it. According to a survey conducted by Business of Fashion and McKinsey, 75% of Americans say they are trying to save money on fashion “often” or “as much as possible” and 64% of shoppers across income levels are opting for better value by trading down or purchasing fewer, more expensive items. Nearly one in three adults say they’ve intentionally bought a dupe, and over 70% of consumers plan to shop from outlets or off-price retailers in the next year even if their budget increased. “The survey revealed the stickiness of value-seeking shopper behavior.”
Contrary to recent reports in the media, AI progress hasn’t stalled, but it’s become increasingly invisible. “The vast majority of people won't notice this kind of improvement because they aren't doing graduate-level science work.” Many of the important breakthroughs in AI are happening behind the scenes, often hidden in complex systems or products. And since some consumer-facing AI applications still struggle with factual accuracy, the public is in the dark about these under-the-radar advancements.
Chronic pain is a hidden epidemic. The New York Times takes a deep dive into the current state of research on chronic pain, which affects around 100 million Americans—more than those suffering from diabetes, heart disease, and cancer combined—and up to 2 billion worldwide. The study of pain has long been neglected and underfunded compared to other diseases, mostly due to the fact that it is linked to so many conditions—“because it’s everywhere, it’s sort of nowhere.”
Your brain is lying to you about the “good old days.” According to a 2023 Pew survey, nearly 6 in 10 Americans said life was better 50 years ago. But if you look at the data, people today are wealthier and more educated, not to mention the increased opportunities for minorities. Vox sheds some light on this: “As the world improves, so do our expectations. There’s a term for this in climate science: ‘shifting baselines.’ When things improve—by, say, coming up with a vaccine that essentially eliminates polio—we don’t remain in a constant state of gratitude that we don’t live with the same limitations and threats that our grandparents did. We reset our expectations and forget how things used to be. When progress does stumble—like the major recession in 2008—we don’t remain grateful that we’re still much better off than we were in the distant past. Instead, we get angry we’re somewhat worse off than we were a few years ago, even though it’s almost certain that we’ll be better off a few years from now.”
The online therapy boom has mainly benefitted privileged groups, studies find. During the pandemic, the number of Americans receiving psychotherapy jumped by 30%, largely due to the shift to teletherapy. The increase was primarily among people in higher-income brackets, living in cities, with steady employment and more education, while disadvantaged populations, such as low-income children and adults with “serious psychological distress” were left behind. Unreliable internet access and inadequate insurance reimbursement have been barriers, meanwhile some clinicians opt to serve wealthier, less distressed patients. “What we find is that it does appear to be just exacerbating existing disparities.”
Sedentary work is linked to a 37% higher risk of insomnia-like symptoms, a new study finds. FYI: 80% of the U.S. workforce have highly sedentary jobs. The study analyzed data from more than 1,000 workers over a 10-year period to discover how factors such as the amount of technology used at work, levels of physical activity, and work schedules affect employees’ sleep patterns. Interestingly, researchers didn’t find much correlation between extensive computer usage and worsened sleep.
How far would you go to make a friend? “The problem is not just about a lack of community centers or churches or dinners at neighbors’ houses. We’ve lost the ability to carry on the kind of conversation that creates real connections with people who see us authentically and whom we see in return. It’s possible we’ve all been lonely zombies, confusing ‘medium friends’ with real, close friends. If our friendship-making muscle has atrophied, then what’s the workout to pump it back up?”
Portfolio Highlights:
Teal Health raised $10 million, as covered by Fortune, TechCrunch, and Inc.
Domino reports how designers from The Expert are offering support to those affected by the LA wildfires. The Expert’s initiative is also covered in House Beautiful and Architectural Digest.
OURA CEO Tom Hale visits the Masters of Scale podcast, speaking about building partnerships and innovating new features.
Fortune and CNBC cover Chime’s launch of a new tax service that offers free tax filing on the app.
Job of the Week:
Principal of Business Development at Headway, the marketplace for consumers to connect with in-network mental health providers.
There are other ~615 jobs currently available at portfolio companies, check ‘em out.