Jennifer Loehding: 0:02

Welcome to the Starter Girlz podcast, the show dedicated to the Starter Girl. She's an achiever, she's a creator, she's a magic maker, she's a dreamer and she is doing all the things. I'm your host, Jennifer Loehding, and welcome to this episode. All right, here we are, welcome. Welcome to another episode of the Starter Girlz podcast. I'm your host, jennifer Loehding. I'm so excited about my guest today. She's an amazing woman startup founder, Shannon Aylesworth. Founder CEO of Ursamin, a platform designed to improve the lives of chronically ill patients. I want to say, critically, we don't want critically ill patients. So, Shannon, welcome to the show. I'm so excited to chat with you today.

Shannon Aylesworth: 0:49

Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. It's coming up so critically ill is good too. Usually they are critical. Usually they are critical is the challenge. But yes, chronic and critical are often interchangeable.

Jennifer Loehding: 1:02

We wanted to make sure we got it. I wanted to make sure at least said that right. You're sometimes not looking at my words and they, like they, jump out at me and I can't read my own writing. So what's playing that on my poor writing skills.

Shannon Aylesworth: 1:12

Yeah well, multiple C's. I have a hard time too. That's why I think we started using polychronic, because it was just easier to spit out.

Jennifer Loehding: 1:19

So that's good, I like that. Polychronic, that's good. It's a new word I haven't heard.

Shannon Aylesworth: 1:25

Well, that's the counter to it, as nobody understands it, but we sure can say it. Well, that's right.

Jennifer Loehding: 1:29

That's right. Well, I'm so excited to have you here today on. You know, starter girls is all about how do we empower women creators, achievers, entrepreneurs, leaders to be better at all things, and so I'm excited to have you on here today and chat with you. I know that we got to chat with you on a different platform, the makers bar so it's going to be fun to kind of expand a little bit on what we talked about before. But before we get started, I want to have you tell us a little bit about EarthMins our audience knows what this is and then want to dive into a little bit about how this came about for you.

Shannon Aylesworth: 2:02

Yeah, so it's a software platform. The simple answer is a software platform to help patients get better care out of the healthcare system, which is really fragmented, and most of us know this today is you have, on average, six doctors at any given day. A patient who's got multiple chronic illnesses has 12 to 14. And you've got to deal with them on a regular basis, plus pharmacies, plus lab tests, and it gets crazy and this is going to get worse for everybody. We say multiple chronic illnesses but it really is. Every patient is dealing with a very bad, fragmented system.

Shannon Aylesworth: 2:33

So we build a software platform that consolidates it for patients or for people we don't call ourselves patients. That was a big thing early on, as I kept saying to doctors stop calling me the patient, call me a person. Is women, we have a higher rate of incidence of chronic illnesses and we also are the majority of caregivers. So we have like a double whammy when it comes to managing our care, not only for ourselves and our loved ones. So I built a platform, starting a couple of years ago, to help patients and caregivers get better care from the system by managing all of their information, managing the communication. It's a collaboration platform between patients and doctors.

Jennifer Loehding: 3:09

Yeah, and we talked a little bit about that because I thought it was I'm excited about it, I think it's awesome and, as we talked about, both of us shared in this is that, as a person not a patient, a person having a chronic condition it is a lot of work. It's hard to navigate all of the information and the prescriptions and the things that you have to go through to just navigate whatever it is that you're dealing with the disease, the condition, whatever it is.

Shannon Aylesworth: 3:39

Just to know what you're dealing. Listen, I had a kaleidoscope eye and like 130 million people in the country have a chronic illness. So you're already dealing with something that you have to more regularly manage yourself and we don't actually know how to do that. Two months ago or three months ago, I had kaleidoscope eye and I Googled it and the answer was I'm either having a stroke or I have diabetic retinopathy. Well, I'm not a diabetic and I wasn't having a stroke. I was pretty sure of that and it turned out it was just an ocular migraine.

Shannon Aylesworth: 4:09

But the misinformation that's out there because we are all dying for information we're all looking for that information is so bad. So it's so much more than it's consolidating the information but then also giving you tools to be able to manage it so that you're not constantly feeling like you have to go to the ER and there's a big shortage of workers too. So it's kind of this huge problem that we're all dealing with and I obviously, with women being a caregiver, and that'll dovetail into why I ended up doing this as a caregiver, watching somebody you love try to get frustrated. Mental health is actually. There's a big suggestion that mental health issues are stovetailing out of chronic illnesses as well, because just trying to figure out how to manage it and it's daily it's daily management. It's not like an acute illness that you get and you move on. It's ongoing for the rest of your life. You're going to be managing and you have a new normal that you've got to live with.

Jennifer Loehding: 5:00

Right, right, I have two things to say I have nothing else about you today because I get those ocular migraines and I've had those eyes. I never heard of a call that, but I actually did go to the ER for one of those. You did yes, one of those things you are talking about. I've had ocular migraines for years but I had a weird, a weird one, and so you're telling them I just found something else out about you.

Shannon Aylesworth: 5:22

I called my sister. Well, listen, I have two nurse sisters and so I'm fortunate I have a team. I have a team, a village. Yeah, I called my sister and I said I know this isn't a stroke, but it's telling me to go to the ER. Right, and she goes. Hit Google and she goes. I said, well, what it says is wait an hour and if it's still there, go to the ER. But everybody who has medical in the family knows that a stroke, the witching hour is get it within an hour and you can minimize. You almost have no damage from a stroke. So it's really so. Google's telling me wait, which I could have. Like that's how much misinformation. Yes, an ocular migraine call. I ended up calling my eye doctor and she goes. Oh, yeah, she goes. You might get a lot of them, you might. I said, well, listen, it was really pretty well, it was happening.

Jennifer Loehding: 6:08

Yeah, I get a lot. I do get a lot of them. I did go to an neurologist but it's like, yeah, you were talking like, okay, I just had that recently happen to me. And to tell you the misinformation, yes, because when I went into the ER they treated it like a stroke, although I had nothing indicating that I had a stroke, like nothing. So we ended up doing all this stuff, doing all these tests and there was nothing there. And then I go to the neurologist. When I came out and he said, yeah, I think you just had a different variant of an ocular migraine, because it was different than what I normally get. But yes, I get them, and so now I know about these other ones you might have wasted time, the wasted money Exactly.

Jennifer Loehding: 6:44

You're terrified.

Shannon Aylesworth: 6:46

Probably, you're terrified through the whole thing, right? I mean, like there's so many things that if you had somebody at your fingertips, who do I call Even? Who do I call?

Jennifer Loehding: 6:55

Hey, this is probably what it is, and you're like okay, well, that makes life a little bit easier so yeah, and to add to that you were talking about, like the mental depression and stuff being keyed into that. Yes, because I went to an acupuncturist once years ago when I was dealing with this nerve condition and he told me he said, you know, anytime you start dealing with a chronic condition more than a couple of weeks, it starts affecting your mind, it starts, it starts messing with you. And this is probably why you see this because you and it's a vicious cycle, right, it's a vicious cycle that you get into because if you have a chronic condition, you don't feel well, you don't know if you're going to get better, so then you've got this depression or this mental stuff and that doesn't necessarily help the condition. So you're in this like circle that goes around like this on a continual basis. How does it end? Right?

Shannon Aylesworth: 7:45

Yes, and so they're treating the symptoms. And that's where getting back to a primary care, getting back to somebody who can look at you holistically and that's really what it's about. The information that we're saying put together is just so that you're not treating this, because that's like I always envision the game. Whack-a-mole is what happens to you as a patient and you look at right, it's literally whacking you through the system and nobody's intentionally losing track of you. But you see, veterans who have PTSD because they've got multiple issues Listen, autoimmune come in threes. They always go. Chronic illnesses they come in threes and you can't and you're literally going but I don't feel well. Well, you're not acute because there's a simple answer for acute, there's not a simple answer for chronic, and that's where you get in that cycle and it does.

Shannon Aylesworth: 8:31

There's a lot of people that I follow that talk about the mental aspect and how your brain actually with my back, because I have major back issues. I was at 45. I was like a 95 year old and they were like you have to retrain your brain not to feel that pain, and so I had to, like mentally, I could tell when my body was to, my head was telling me to feel pain, but I didn't have pain because I had fixed it. So it's really, it's really complex and we as people, really as people, as patients, as people we have to get control of our health. We have to start learning and we have to have that's why they say health literacy. So education and knowing what to look for, that's kind of. Again, how do we put that in the hands of?

Jennifer Loehding: 9:11

the patient. It's kind of what you're bringing all together here.

Shannon Aylesworth: 9:14

So I love it. Yeah, complex Really complex.

Jennifer Loehding: 9:17

Yeah, tell us a little bit, because I know you shared with us on the makers bar, but I'd love for our audience on this show to know a little bit kind of the backstory of how this came about for you.

Shannon Aylesworth: 9:27

Yeah. So my story of when I found out, when I committed to doing this as I lost my mom. She dealt with three chronic illnesses. What I didn't know at the time, I thought, was we thought was acute, we thought she had things show up in her lungs, she had COPD, she had emphysema, she had something show up in her lungs.

Shannon Aylesworth: 9:50

And we were playing whack-a-mole at that time because chronic illnesses wasn't communicated really as much as it is now, like there's a really big, it's just gone through the roof and there's so many. There's so much the cost they talk about the healthcare system. The reason there's so many eyeballs on it is there's so much waste. You being in the R is huge waste. Well, my mom was going through it. It wasn't as big, I think it was like 20% of the population, so it wasn't getting as much attention. So we thought we were just oh my God, my mom was going to die. So we spent 12 years where they were doing this constant management, ct scans and MRIs and it cost us way more money than she didn't have any money. We were draining our pockets, we were exhausted and then she had this pancreas issue that really did go acute and they pre-diagnosed inconclusive cancer and decided to put her into chemo, not looking at her holistically and saying chemo. In fact, the number one side effect to chemo is a reputable lung scar tissue. Well, if you've already got immunocompromised, if you're already immunocompromised in your lungs, you're not going to start.

Shannon Aylesworth: 10:52

She lasted two months. She didn't tell anybody how she felt. It was literally. It was that fast. The oncologists and PCP didn't talk to each other. We didn't know any better. I had nurses, like I said, I got two nurses in my family. All they kept saying was something's wrong. Why are we doing this? Why are we doing this? Because we're not. She's not just going down South-South and she was actually getting better for a while. So she ended up passing after two months.

Shannon Aylesworth: 11:18

It was horrific. I met with the PCP after for myself and she said I didn't know she had died, she was. I didn't know. I didn't know she went to chemo. I didn't. She said I didn't know she was why she was getting better. We had gotten her on a path because she had her trajectory. Her mom's trajectory was going down. We had, you know, turned her, turned her that's a whole other story turned her going north.

Shannon Aylesworth: 11:42

And then why would you, why would you mess with that? And it was when I started Googling and saw that that was completely preventable. Had the oncologists and the primary care talk, listen, I don't know what would have happened. We don't know, we never know. My mother right, my mother always says everything happens for a reason. She was my best friend and I couldn't fix it and so I was livid. I wanted to sue everybody because it was completely preventable and all they had to do was communicate.

Shannon Aylesworth: 12:09

And that's when I started seeing the fragmentation of that's going on. And that's when, when I dug into the fragmentation, what I've done in my sales career for 25 years is fix a data flow problem that allows patients, consumers, and it's completely unrelated to healthcare. It was totally it's cable, it's cell phones, it was completely unrelated. But I was like every other industry has solved this problem and you're doing nothing. And my mother died. And then, as I was talking to so many people, everybody had a story. There's not one person that, like we talked about early on, maybe it was before this. There's absolutely a need. Um, everybody knows it. It's now just making the right moves and moving in that direction, and that's when I started to go down this path on. Well, let me jump in and see if I can take my experience and help somebody else.

Jennifer Loehding: 12:59

Yeah, and I think what is so? You know, I always talk about this on the shows, about how our journeys are or they're not linear, right, like they're not. Like you go from here to here, to here to here, it's like you're doing something and then something happens that comes out of nowhere. It's sort of sometimes stirs something up, but what's interesting is all the things we've done up to this point play a role in what happens next. Right, like when you take your career and you look at your skill set that you had in your career and how can you take that skill set and bring it to what you're doing here and tackle a whole nother industry, right, with that same skill set? Yeah, yeah, the dot connect is what I'm saying. They're not necessarily linear, but everything starts connecting when you look at the whole. You know the whole scope of everything in between.

Shannon Aylesworth: 13:45

Yeah, yeah, I had so many moments where I was like, oh my God, like every little point in my career, and I just had one the other day. I was talking to this guy and I go, I was in the Peace Corps. I don't know if we talked about that yet, but I was in the Peace Corps early on in my career. I got out of college and I was like I was going to change the Peace Corps in Honduras.

Shannon Aylesworth: 14:03

Yeah, I'd written a whole architecture document on how to rewrite the program because I was sitting there doing I was teaching women how to market their tamales better and they were like it was really. And I was like I wrote this whole thing and they're like that's usually when volunteers go home and I'm like no, save the world. And they ended up implementing it a year later on my way out and they were like this is how we'll get better outcomes for the volunteers, for the people that we serve and the money that the US was sending down there. I was very frustrated with the fact that I was like there's so many things we can do and we're just wasting money. Of course, I was very idealistic at the time. I'm a little bit more mature now but to your point. It was like I just this job. Every day I kind of see something that in my past serves me here I don't always remember it.

Shannon Aylesworth: 14:55

I don't always remember it. There's times where I'm like, oh my God, that's how that part really helps me here. It's all like you say, it's not linear, but it all maps.

Jennifer Loehding: 15:03

Yeah, if you connect, like you think about the Peace Corps, for instance, where you were trying to make a difference on some larger level, right, like you're trying to make a difference and now you've spent these years kind of in a different space and then you come back and that's kind of what you're doing here. You just found now that a calling and a need that brought these pieces to here.

Jennifer Loehding: 15:21

It's interesting how things work out like that, and I think those end up becoming some of the best stories or the best things that we put out there, because we find we have something we go through and then you find the need in that moment of that crisis, right, and I, my family or I'm going through that, then surely somebody else is going to be going through that same situation, and how can I use my gifts to make a difference?

Other: 15:45

so, hopefully, somebody doesn't have to go through that.

Shannon Aylesworth: 15:47

Yeah, with that kind of pain, yes, yeah so well yeah, I mean, a lot of people have been through it. It's just every day, but he's got a story and that's what keeps me going.

Other: 15:57

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Jennifer Loehding: 17:00

Interesting. I said this last time. Sorry you had to go through that, but in the aftermath it's those stories that usually propel us into the next great thing that comes about. You're doing something awesome. I think it's a much needed thing. Like I said, from my perspective being a person that has to deal with something, I mean, yeah, I've had a lot of incidents where I've been in the hospital and had a lot of wasted time. We couldn't get a diagnosis and we go in. It's the same thing. We're still wrestling with it today. I still haven't gotten it clear on what we're dealing with. It is frustrating because you get situations where you don't know whether medicines can mix together or if this doctor's saying one thing. You got this doctor saying this they don't necessarily agree on treatments and stuff. Yeah, if you can have everything in one place, it sure would make it easier on everybody doctors and patients.

Shannon Aylesworth: 17:48

People, it's both sides, I think, the doctors. The doctors don't even have it.

Other: 17:54

Like nobody has it. There's no source of truth.

Shannon Aylesworth: 17:57

There's no, everybody's doing the best they can and you're like okay, and that's where people just keep falling and the challenge is that people have to suffer from it and it's kind of a it's yeah, it's. It's one of the things where I keep saying all your info in one place. That's what we said, but I'm like it's a little cliche because it's not really. We do so much more than that. We're just like, hey, there's no single source and it's getting where there's so many sources.

Shannon Aylesworth: 18:21

I talked to a doctor last night. Her sister is stage four metastatic breast cancer because, because that patient information is everywhere Nobody saw. There's obvious. If you look at my mom's trail of her history afterwards, you're like, oh, it's so obvious. And the people who know this are the doctors. And the doctors are like not, they're only giving again.

Shannon Aylesworth: 18:44

I say whack-a-mole, they're being presented a slice of data and it's moved on. So they do the best they can. So one of the things that we're thinking about is like a shared calendar which says hey, the patients had these five appointments. You don't have to absorb doctor so and so you don't have to absorb all the data. You just need to know are they I love this term trajectory up or down. Where have they been? And no, is there something you should worry about?

Shannon Aylesworth: 19:10

Medications? They're drowning in the medications. They have just as many problems as the patients do. So how do you give them a view where you're like, if this patient comes in, are you handing them upward or are they in a downward and you're playing whack-a-mole and just that vision. So that's where it's not really about us giving people like it's the value. That's why we ended up rebranding, because I was like saying all info is very static. It's all about you, jennifer. When you come in to see me, you've got an ocular migraine. What happened the last three years? Play that shows me a trigger that sets off this migraine. Is it important? Like listen, normal is a really big thing. We all have new normals now because of what's going on with the food and the environment and all that stuff.

Shannon Aylesworth: 19:53

There's all this thing called new normal. That's why your doctors are going ah, we don't worry about that. We don't worry about that. You, if you're one, look at your one test result. You'll be like, oh my God, I'm dying. They're like no, that's kind of normal for you, you're normal.

Jennifer Loehding: 20:05

Right right.

Shannon Aylesworth: 20:06

So, as much as you can do that with patients, now you've got the ability to intervene. Like my mom, do not give her chemo. She's got compromised lungs, she's not. Her doctor would have been like no, keep going. That's where, if you look at the team-based care, like the big hospitals and now you got me going on my pedestal because that's what happened If you look at the really smart I should say the real, the big hospitality hospitals where you come in and they with her, I learned this you get like six doctors.

Shannon Aylesworth: 20:33

They all come around and they go okay, we all look at your stuff, this is going up, this is going down. I'm aggressive, I'm, you know, I'm conservative, here's your options. And you go, yeah, I go, listen, I like this, do no harm, or hey, I want to go aggressive. And then you all work on that together and everybody's kind of watching the results because they say healthcare I learned this 60 days ago was you can have twins with the same exact disease and it will present differently. So you have to be involved in your care. Your doctors have to see everything. They don't need to influx of your data. You know. They don't need to know. Doctors are like sometimes, like sometimes you know they're sharing you that they had gas yesterday. No, I didn't need to know that.

Jennifer Loehding: 21:17

So it is finding that middle ground right, right, well, and to your point, I mean yeah, because I think there's so like you could go, and I don't even know we're gonna. We could be on this forever. You could go to one doctor and one is being more aggressive, one's being more, you know, not so aggressive, right, and you may go and you may be in the middle, and then you go into the one and the one scares you, right? So then you're doing things that you probably shouldn't even do because they haven't checked, really, all the other notes. And you know, I think, when you're talking about being even like assertive about your own healthcare, because I think most I don't wanna say the most a lot of people, I think, go in. The doctor tells them that and they don't question anything, they don't ask any questions, but then you have somebody like myself who's gonna go in and say I'm gonna go home and research what they just told me because I wanna get my own information and make sure that this is even in alignment with what the other doctors over here telling me, right? So there are other people that do that, but I think a lot of people don't, and so that's where you get a lot of that If they're not really going.

Jennifer Loehding: 22:15

Hey, I just went to see primary of your primary says okay, well, your cholesterol is high. A person over here doesn't even know, but this one over here doesn't even know how your diet. Maybe you exercise every day, maybe it's a hereditary thing, or maybe it's your diet. We don't even know. You know? I mean there's just a lot of not. Yeah, the communication is not there and I think having you know to go and you know we all have to do it, go to these different doctors. When you're talking and, like you have only a few minutes to get all this information out, like, hold up, you're telling me to take this, but you don't even know my lifestyle. You haven't asked me, even if I exercise every day. You know.

Shannon Aylesworth: 22:49

Well, because they don't have it all. So they spend most of their time trying to get from you. And then there's also they're trying to figure out shared decision-making. Are you gonna do it? And listen? My mother swore till the end that she did not smoke. To be honest, we know, everybody knew. Now, does that mean we're gonna judge? There was judgment at that time. Right, there's a lot of judgment for what people do and how they choose to live their life, but the fact is the doctors don't care. You might get some that are very judgy right.

Shannon Aylesworth: 23:19

But in general, their job is to treat the person and make sure their concern is more. Are you gonna follow up? Are you gonna quit? Are you gonna take care of yourself? The interesting thing is the doctors now they give you a look at. It's also an age thing. The older generation, the white coat, was you tell me what to do and I do it. But they also only had one doctor.

Shannon Aylesworth: 23:37

We now have all this crazy diseases and chronic illnesses, and kids are all coming up with this. The kids, the millennials, are all very health conscious because most of them have some version of autoimmune disease that they've gotta manage. So they know that they're health, so it's changing. It's changing and I think we're probably the generation where and I put it so, I don't know your age, but we're that generation where we're like, okay, we'd love the doctor tells us what to do, but we are really like, okay, I feel like crap. I don't know.

Shannon Aylesworth: 24:05

All of my friends, all of my girlfriends feel the exact same way. So you can't tell me that there isn't something you get to do with hormones in addition to the food, in addition to chronic illnesses. That isn't presenting the same way. And for that, like I was talking to my friend today and she goes yeah, you've had this stomach issue since you came out of Honduras. It's probably some autoimmune. We know our systems, that's the reality. We know whether we're gonna follow up with our plan and we know ourselves the best. And they used to say, oh, doctors just thought I was crazy because I'm a female. No, that's the way doctors were in that generation. They were like you come in, you get diagnosed, you move on and you're the same doctor you don't have. Now we have even the average patient who has?

Shannon Aylesworth: 24:46

six perfectly healthy. Yeah, and you're perfectly healthy. You've got six doctors that you've gotta manage.

Jennifer Loehding: 24:53

I feel like I have too many all the time. I'm like I've got the ones that I really like and I got the ones that I kinda listen to. That's what I say. I got the ones that I feel like they kinda I feel like we talk kinda sorta speak the same language, and then I got the ones that I'm like they're out there trying to give me 100 prescription.

Jennifer Loehding: 25:07

I'm like no, this is good, I would love to know for you as you're navigating those is because you're a new startup and you came from the corporate space and moved into this entrepreneur space and, like I said, we've got a lot of women on. This is actually been really good, I think it's. We touched upon a lot of good stuff, even on knowing your own body and being aware and asking questions and standing up for yourself. I think we kinda covered all that in this. But I'd love to know, like, maybe some of the challenges you face kinda moving into this You've said some, but maybe as a female entrepreneur, some of the challenges you faced into this and kinda what you're doing to push through some of those.

Shannon Aylesworth: 25:47

Yeah, as you said that, I thought, I thought and I continue to think about communication style of women versus men, and I've dealt with this my whole career. Listen, I'm technology nerd and so we were talking before. 5%, 10% of the technology people are women and so you learn in your role how to communicate and I don't think there's ever an intentional let's keep them down. It's not like a let's keep women down. I do believe that there has to be a better balance of appreciating communication styles and values and that's called diversity. But for me in particular, when I moved into this with the VC stories and how to fundraise and how to communicate my business, I just did a pitch last week to a panel of women and it was so fun because it was just so thought provoking. And it's not men. Men are very factual, based with numbers and there's just a whole different way that men communicate and women and I've had these great mentors of last year and a half that have been trying to help me kind of absorb how to be a better communicator in that space. And if we look at how the world has evolved and how money has evolved and how women are gaining more wealth, so we have more power. But it's not intentional, it's just really about the way men and women communicate, and so my challenge has been evolving that as I become a business owner, versus selling something.

Shannon Aylesworth: 27:17

And I was a career salesperson but even then the reason in sales it worked is because my style, which is more nurturing and more detail oriented and more soft selling I'm not a legacy I actually wanted to start a sales consulting business for women because I was like your style is very different and actually women are the top 10% of all salespeople because we tend to be more nurturing and loving and non-threatening versus the men who are kind of like the art of war, and so it's been the same thing. As an entrepreneur, it's been very hard for me to try to figure out how to adjust that and find ways to either I don't wanna say become more manly, but communicate in that way, because otherwise it's like they're like I don't know what you're talking about and generally everybody usually on panels it's all men I mean, and there's nothing wrong with that, it's just understanding that I don't know everybody's got a significant other. You know that the communication is often. How do you figure out how to communicate better to each other?

Other: 28:18

And that's my biggest challenge is how do I do better?

Shannon Aylesworth: 28:20

Especially in the BC world, where it is a very it's very built for men, because that's who had the wealth traditionally. So it's hard, it's very hard, but it's really about finding your friends. And this is. I had a woman actually have a woman. She's I give her a shout out, it's called Global Investor and she's trying to get a million women funded. And I said to her once I said I just struggle. I feel like I've gotta really change the way I communicate, which is very hard because it's fast and it's it's the old school of selling and I'm very anti that style. And she goes no, you don't have to. We have to change the way investors expect you to communicate to them, because that's how we're really going to make a difference in the investment world.

Shannon Aylesworth: 29:08

So it's been hard, it's been yeah, it's been a lot of me trying to study how to be more manly. I don't know if that's you know. I don't know that that's what we want. We want to appreciate each other's strengths.

Jennifer Loehding: 29:20

Yeah, well, I'm sure, because you're dealing with a lot of male. I mean the medical industry, I mean I'm sure there's more female doctors coming up now, but there's a lot of men in that, you know, in that I feel like in that what do you call it? Market niche, whatever? And so yeah, and they do communicate very differently than women, because we tend to be kind of role with the like you're talking the feeling right, the feeling, the intuitive side of things, if something feels right or if it doesn't feel right, whereas men want give me the facts If that doesn't show the facts. And there has to be sort of I feel like that middle ground a little bit, because I think men need to be a little bit more intuitive. Sometimes women could be a little bit more factual with somebody, correct?

Shannon Aylesworth: 29:59

Find that middle Correct. Yeah, that's exactly it. It's like we're getting more and like, if you grab I don't just want to say the younger generation, because my team has all these guys who don't have, they're just, they don't. None of us see that. We don't see gender, we don't see you know, race, ethnicity. It just we happen to, we happen to come together because we appreciate each other's opinions and so you get a really diverse group of people that give you the strength to continue to move. And then you just, you just know you've got to communicate a little bit differently and hopefully bring them. And there's again. There's so many people trying to do good and trying to change the landscape for women that I would say early on I think I probably spent too much time trying to figure how to navigate that versus making my own path. And that's where you and I talked about gut and figuring out like, stick with your gut, because every single, every single time I would go back to I'd be like I freaking knew it.

Shannon Aylesworth: 30:55

I knew I should have gone on this and I wasted a whole bunch of time trying this because the startup space put you know, the startup space is like it's like a meat grinder right, get as many startups in as you can and only 5% make it out. And so it really is. You're like, do you make a choice to not run as fast and be a little bit smarter, a little bit more thought provoking in your journey? Mine is whether I bootstrap or raise money, and there's days when you're terrified. I'm terrified because I'm going to run out of money and I don't know if I'm going to find my next founder. You know investment or whatever, and you know, as one lady said, she's three time bootstrap or it's all she does. She's like my hero. I just follow her all day long because I'm like if we could bootstrap it.

Shannon Aylesworth: 31:35

But you know, healthcare is a big industry. Healthcare is, you know, and they're no different. I mean, they've got kind of splits of gender where you see, like the nurses is obviously dominated by women, because that role is very nurturing and patient care and doctors are diagnostics. So they're very math. I found doctors really. I actually resonate really well with them. But I'm a technology, math and science girl, so I'm a little bit different in that way and that I can. I can talk to them technology and art and science and it's really, it's been really eye opening for me, like moving industries. If you're ever worried about being afraid of moving industries, I found my people just by moving in. It's the same as technology, it's the same environment. I just happen to not they got more acronyms than we do on technology side. So many acronyms, oh that's great.

Jennifer Loehding: 32:25

Well, this has been good. I think there's been a lot of takeaways in here. I mean, I think we talked there's so many. I mean we talked about being aware of your health and moving in from the corporate space to the entrepreneur space and, yeah, there's a lot of them. Have to go back and listen to this. I can get all of our takeaways and this and finding your people I think, finding finding your right people.

Jennifer Loehding: 32:44

So a lot of good stuff here. Shannon, If our audience wants to get in touch with you, maybe they want to learn more about Ursamin itself, or maybe they want to learn a little bit more about you and kind of what you got going on. Where do we want to send them?

Shannon Aylesworth: 32:56

Yeah, so wwwursamman. com, short for Ursa Minor U-R-S-A-M-I-Ncom. We have a YouTube channel, which is really good one, because it's a lot of just frank conversations like this. We talk about a lot of stuff. It's not always on point with what we're doing, but just you know, entrepreneurship and the company as a whole, and LinkedIn and Facebook, it's all under UrsaMan or you can find me as well.

Jennifer Loehding: 33:19

Awesome. And is your podcast your YouTube Because you have a podcast right? Or is that the YouTube?

Shannon Aylesworth: 33:23

Well, YouTube is like the. Yeah, it's unlimited. Youtube is got, the it's not. It's a. Is it a podcast? It's called Unlimited Access. So it's our show. It's where we talk about. Okay, it's your show, it's our show. Yeah, it's on YouTube, it's under UrsaMan, and then we also have a lot of other stuff under there as well.

Jennifer Loehding: 33:39

But you're doing cool things. I love it. And you're rocking rocking. You know the world. I know it's not an easy journey doing these kinds of things, but stick with it, because that's what you got to do. You got to just stick with it right?

Shannon Aylesworth: 33:53

No, it's a big mission. They always say a wildly audacious goal is what you want. I don't. I don't know that I subscribe to that, but it certainly is as somebody. People say it's ambitious. I'm like, well, I never did anything small. Listen, go with it. And yeah, I'm really excited to have been on the show. Thank you for this.

Jennifer Loehding: 34:09

That's good. I love it. I love it. Well, thank you so much for sharing with us today and Thank you Doing what you're doing. It's been fun.

Shannon Aylesworth: 34:15

Yeah, thank you.

Jennifer Loehding: 34:16

This is awesome. All right, and of course, to our audience we do want to say if you enjoy the show, head on over to Apple, give us a review there, check out the YouTube, hit that subscribe, so we can keep sharing all of this content. And, as I always say, you guys, take care, be safe, be kind to one another, and we will see you next time.