For Audrey Tsang, there’s never “a right time” to leave the job of CEO, but having been at the helm of Berlin-based period and ovulation tracker Clue for three and a half years — and now being pregnant with her first child — it felt as good a time as any to step down.
“I don’t believe that just because you’re expecting a child that you have to leave a role, but I was looking at, ‘how do I want my daughter to grow up?’ and I want her to be surrounded by family,” says Tsang, whose successor as CEO is Clue’s former CPO, Rhiannon White. “With mine in San Francisco, and my husband’s in Stockholm, that would unfortunately take me away from Berlin and Clue.”
Tsang left Silicon Valley — where she’d worked in product management roles at companies such as Yahoo! and Pinterest — in 2018 to take up the job of VP of product at Clue, a then six-year-old startup founded by Ida Tin, who is known for coining the word “femtech”.
Clue started out as a hardware device that tested hormones via saliva, and later pivoted to become a period tracker. Since then, it has widened its scope and has become a platform for many different aspects of female health, from periods and ovulation to birth control and sex.
More importantly, says Tsang, it’s become part of a societal movement to help people understand, and be more open about, periods and reproductive health.
However, despite being one of the first startups to tackle these issues in Europe, Clue hasn’t seen huge growth in comparison to some other femtech companies. In the 14 years since its founding, Clue has raised $64.3m, according to Dealroom data, and has 10m monthly users in 190 countries. London-based period tracker Flo Health, meanwhile, has raised $276m in total — including a $200m round in August which valued it at over $1bn, making it Europe’s first femtech unicorn — and has close to 70m monthly active users.
Tsang says Clue is on track to reach profitability soon — but won’t specify when.
The challenges
When Flo — a male-founded femtech — hit that unicorn valuation this summer it caused uproar on social media.
At the time, Clue’s founder Tin wrote on LinkedIn that “the systemic issue is that it pays off to be a confident (white) man, with money, to get more money, from men, to do things to make money.”
However, in a separate post, she acknowledged that Clue, and she as former CEO, “has most of the responsibility for seeing a competitor overtake us in terms of growth and sales metrics.”
In 2021, Clue launched a digital contraceptive with FDA clearance, for example, but “failed” to convert it into growth and revenue.
“I’d say that after our Series B, we made many mistakes. We didn’t have a strong management team in place for a number of years — something that was corrected later, especially after my time as CEO, the management team has been totally rocking it. But these years with poor leadership, and I take that on me, we failed in shipping fast and consistently.”
“To become the really large and valuable company that I still know Clue has the potential to become, we would have had to execute better,” she added.
“It’s important to remember that we’re in the women’s health space,” Tsang told Sifted. “This is a space that is plagued by inequity to begin with, with little investment or attention paid to women’s health as a category, so yes, [the last few years were] challenging.”
Since becoming co-CEO of Clue in March 2021 alongside Carrie Walters, and later sole CEO when Walters stepped down in August last year, Tsang has steered the company through a rocky few years.
The company has grappled with the effects of Covid-19, economic turbulence, as well as the limiting of reproductive rights in the US that “affected many of our user community in a very real way,” says Tsang.
In January 2023, Clue announced it was cutting 25% of its workforce. The co-CEOs said at the time that the company had “hired ahead of revenue” to accelerate growth in new markets, which turned out not to be sustainable in the environment of early 2023.
Clue took steps to turn the company around and edge it closer to profitability.
Over the last two years, Clue rebuilt its app — which offers basic period tracking features for free, and additional features such as fertility and pregnancy tracking for paid subscribers — and 80% of the back-end “from the ground up” to make the product “technically nimble,” and set it up for future expansion, says Tsang.
In July 2023, the startup raised €7m in funding from existing investors, to scale up its digital family planning offering and expand its product portfolio to include features such as perimenopause tracking, and a ‘my health record’ feature allowing users to input confirmed diagnoses, such as polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) and uterine fibroids, from doctors.
Clue also continues to invest in research to provide more information and data on the way female bodies work, says Tsang. For example, it helped produce a study on how COVID-19 and vaccines impacted the menstrual cycle alongside US universities such as John Hopkins University.
The future
Tsang is observing a trend whereby “more attention, more funding, more research and more science” is going into understanding conditions that disproportionately affect women and people with cycles.
“That said, it could always happen faster,” says Tsang, adding that less than 2% of funding goes towards female founders, with perhaps even less going towards founders in the female health sector.
Perimenopause and mental health conditions, like anxiety and depression — all of this is still wildly underserved.
“These are not niche or uncommon conditions… Perimenopause and mental health conditions, like anxiety and depression — all of this is still wildly underserved.”
One of the things that Clue will be focusing on under White’s leadership is endometriosis — a condition affecting one in ten women globally, where tissue similar to the lining of the uterus grows in places outside the uterine cavity, causing excruciating pain. The condition takes an average of seven-nine years to diagnose globally, according to a report by the European Commission.
Clue’s goal, according to Tsang, would be to use data “in a responsible way” to shorten that time and “deliver care and support to women faster.”
While Tsang is continuing to support the new CEO from the sidelines, she wants to give White the opportunity to look at the business afresh.
“When I took over as co-CEO with Carrie from Ida Tin… she wanted to give us plenty of space to make this role our own, to make this company and the strategy and the direction ours. And I want to do the same with Rhiannon,” says Tsang. “I’ll be cheering her on from the sidelines and am on speed dial for whatever she needs.”
Tsang could imagine being CEO for another startup again in the future, if the mission chimed with her.
For now, she’s focusing on “stabilising a family structure”, exploring the intersections between AI, health, wellbeing and education and continuing to angel invest and advise startups, until she finds “that next best job I’ve ever had,” she says.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/clue-ceo-steps-down/
