Doctors Said "Just Live With It." Her Team Built a $1B Startup Instead

Menopause isn’t gentle. For many women, it’s a physiological shockwave — flipping sleep, mood, metabolism, cognition, sexual health, and long-term disease risk all at once. And all too often, the healthcare system’s response has essentially been: “live with it.” In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Mindy Goldman, a UCSF gynecologist and nationally recognized leader in menopause and cancer survivorship care, whose career took an unexpected turn from academic medicine into the heart of a fast-scaling women’s health startup. What began as deeply personal loss and years of clinical frustration evolved into something much larger: helping shape Midi, a menopause startup now delivering insurance-covered care to women across all 50 states.Dr. Goldman shares the formative moments that changed her trajectory, from losing her closest friend to breast cancer, to realizing how many women are dismissed, misdiagnosed, or told to simply “push through” midlife symptoms. We unpack the care gap hiding in plain sight, why menopause became a systemic blind spot in modern medicine, and how Midi is using telehealth, clinical rigor, and scale to rebuild women’s healthcare from the inside out.This is a conversation about listening to hard experiences, translating clinical insight into infrastructure, and what happens when medicine meets venture-scale ambition. If you care about health innovation that makes a massive impact, this episode shows what it takes — and why it matters now more than ever. Subscribe to First in Human: - Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/first-in-human/id1842644737 - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3C1xG5SxPei8m2lI63WSkd Check out Midi's website: https://www.joinmidi.com/