Lee and Rebekah discuss:

• Rebekah’s personal experiences with menopause, and how they inspired the inception of MPowder

• The abhorrent lack of education and funding around female-specific health issues

• Obtaining backing from predominantly male investors through open honestly and storytelling

• Rebekah’s creative upbringing in theatre, leading to creative support in the landmark 1997 UK elections

• The importance of data and knowledge in catering to consumers

• Growing a team from 4 to 30+ as MD of bite

Links & references:

Lee Cooper: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leecooperrecruiter/

Rebekah Brown: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebekah-brown-17384a/

MPowder: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mpowder/

https://mpowder.store/

https://www.instagram.com/mpowderstore/

Get in touch: lee@extrology.com

Episode highlights:

“What fascinated me about theatre, storytelling and performance was that ability to feel like you're in someone else's world, and you could learn from that. You become a richer person as a result of experiencing these stories and walking in someone else’s shoes for a while.” - 5:35 - Rebekah Brown

“What’s stayed with me is the importance of understanding humans and not looking to categorise. I think the danger with big data particularly, and with any form of data, is that you have that desire to segment and to place narrative onto something, as opposed to genuinely looking at what's there.” - 13:35 - Rebekah Brown

“‘Bite’ was the biggest learning experience of my life; the most stressful, the most difficult, but it got me to where I am today. It was life changing as a 29 year old MD completely out of my depth, but we survived.” - 19:30 - Rebekah Brown

“I think if you talk to many women, particularly at this stage of life who’ve worked through industries that invariably are largely male-dominated, I don't think I ever felt like a success. I mean, throughout my time at Bite I felt like an imposter.” - 24:35 - Rebekah Brown

“For most GP’s in practice currently, they won't have covered menopause. If they have, they’ve done it for about 4 hours. It's such a complex biological life stage in terms of the way that the symptoms manifest themselves, it's highly unlikely that they're going to be able to join the dots for you.” - 31:45 - Rebekah Brown

“In terms of funding for research, only 2% of UK medical funding goes to female health. You can imagine the tiny amount that goes to menopause.” - 34:05 - Rebekah Brown

“If you look back at my pitch deck, it's hilarious - the first few slides are a really quick biology lesson! ‘This is the body, this is what happens, these are the stages’, and the jaw dropping response actually from these guys was like, ‘Oh my goodness, I had no idea, this is awful. I had no idea this was happening’.” - 44:20 - Rebekah Brown

“My hope is that we reframe what midlife is about in terms of women growing up, and their perception of midlife and beyond is that it's a stepping up point. It's a liberation point, rather than an end-of-life stage.” - 47:30 - Rebekah Brown

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