Female Founders: Srishti Mirchandani of Eleanor Health On The Five Things You Need To Thrive and Succeed as a Woman Founder

An Interview With Candice Georgiadis

Hard Work: You must be willing to commit deep energy towards your work, and push through the challenges of starting and growing a business. Expect many dreams or early awakenings filled with reflections on your work, but also remember that you owe it to your cause to commit to the hard work without burning yourself out!

As a part of our series about “Why We Need More Women Founders”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Srishti Mirchandani Gallagher.

Srishti co-founded Eleanor Health, a company focused on delivering high-quality, evidence-based addiction and mental health care at scale. At Eleanor Health, she secured the initial funding, management team, and customers for the business, stood up the initial operations, and has overseen the New Jersey market as General Manager since its inception. Srishti has dedicated her career to addressing pressing challenges of our healthcare system, including prior roles with the Oxeon Venture Studio to create de novo healthcare companies, Accretive Health (now R1)’s Quality & Total Cost of Care business, and roles across academic, business, and community organizations improving health.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?

Health is our most fundamental asset, and I believe strongly that our health creates the foundation for all of the experiences and impact we can have as humans. For me, this conviction started at an early age. I was fortunate to have a very healthful early life, and trained as a pre-professional ballet dancer for many years. In that training, I saw the direct correlation between how my health enabled my performance at something that I loved to do. At the same time, I noticed how that correlation played out in the lives of people around me, through injuries and illnesses but also through the possibility to regain strength and ability. Watching this in the people I loved led me to the strong desire to find ways to enable long, healthy, fulfilling lives for as many people as I could possibly impact.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company?

Launching our very first clinic site and operations in North Carolina was a sleep-deprived, passion-driven labor over many months. To stand up effective health care operations from scratch is no small feat, let alone all of the furniture we wanted to put together to make the space as comfortable and inviting as possible! The day of our clinic launch felt like a milestone, but the real culmination would arrive soon after: when our first community member walked in the door and completed their initial appointments, we heard their story, and I recognized that this is exactly what we had been pouring our energy towards.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

We had an important, in-person meeting that I had been planning for intensely, and was looking forward to. To save on hotel costs, I had planned to make a day-trip for the meeting, flying in the early morning and heading directly to our meeting site. Well, I showed up at the airport and realized I had booked my flight for entirely the wrong week! After trying to finagle with the airline service agents, I had to simply laugh it off and hail a ride straight back home through the rush hour traffic in order to make the meeting virtually.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

My family are my greatest supporters, and of particular note, my husband and my two brothers. They listen to the roller coaster stories of building a company, and they lend their perspective whenever I ask for support. Most importantly though, they are cheerleaders of my personal favorite type: not the rah-rah celebrations, but the strong belief in what I can achieve. That confidence from people I love and trust enables me to commit my energy and my passion towards hard work, even when the going gets tough.

Ok, thank you for that. Let’s now jump to the primary focus of our interview. According to this EY report, only about 20 percent of funded companies have women founders. This reflects great historical progress, but it also shows that more work still has to be done to empower women to create companies. In your opinion and experience what is currently holding back women from founding companies? Can you help articulate a few things that can be done as individuals, as a society, or by the government, to help overcome those obstacles?

Collectively, we have to change the narrative. Women are rational, and I think many of us look at these statistics and it makes us doubt our ability to be in that 20%. We realize that the rate of failure for any new company is high, and we are rational about our odds to break through. The narrative that is told less often is how well positioned we are as skilled, passionate, driven women to build the companies and have the impact we want on this world. And, critically, it is ok if we fail. We will learn, grow, and bring that experience to our own next attempt and to cultivate other women in their own entrepreneurial journeys.

This might be intuitive to you as a woman founder but I think it will be helpful to spell this out. Can you share a few reasons why more women should become founders?

For one, we do know that women are underrepresented as founders. As a result, our perspectives are missing entirely or diminished from the dialogues that innovate the world around us. In founder roles, women naturally have more opportunity to lead these dialogues and share their voice and perspectives on behalf of themselves as an individual expert, and even on behalf of other women or identities they represent.

What are the “myths” that you would like to dispel about being a founder? Can you explain what you mean?

A pervasive myth about being a founder is that the rest of your life has to come to a standstill. You will be committed to your work well above 100%, but the rest of your life not only continues, it enriches your work through the life experiences and perspectives you are always gaining. In my own personal life alongside these few years in founding Eleanor Health, I have had life milestones of my own and celebrated milestones of my family and friends, traveled to new destinations around the world, explored new museums, concerts, art, and books, and am excited to be expecting my first tiny human coming soon. Your identity as a founder is a powerful one, but it absolutely does not undermine your countless other identities and interests.

Is everyone cut out to be a founder? In your opinion, which specific traits increase the likelihood that a person will be a successful founder and what type of person should perhaps seek a “regular job” as an employee? Can you explain what you mean?

If you have a business, idea, or impact you are passionate about and can harness this towards hard work, you are cut out to be a founder. Being a founder has countless ups and downs. You will have many moments when you feel you’ve taken a step forward and then a step back, and you must be able to weather this constantly. If this sounds completely exhausting more than it sounds fulfilling, just make sure to ask yourself whether this is truly the cause you are passionate about and are willing to take this journey on today.

Ok super. Here is the main question of our interview. Based on your opinion and experience, what are the “Five Things You Need To Thrive and Succeed as a Woman Founder?” (Please share a story or example for each.)

1. Passion: You need a business, idea, or impact you are passionate about. For me, this is the passion towards improving health and healthcare, particularly for underserved populations. Eleanor Health is a direct embodiment of this passion, and the work I do every day moves towards this goal.
2. Hard Work: You must be willing to commit deep energy towards your work, and push through the challenges of starting and growing a business. Expect many dreams or early awakenings filled with reflections on your work, but also remember that you owe it to your cause to commit to the hard work without burning yourself out!
3. Voice: As a founder, you are taking on a role to represent others, including your customers. Cultivate your natural empathy, and use this to strengthen your voice as a founder and visionary.
4. Humility: There will be unexpected twists, turns, and nonbelievers. Take these in as bumps in the road, and be ready to reflect and grow.
5. Community: Find your people. These are the friends, family members, and mentors who believe in you and will not let you forget how capable you are.

How have you used your success to make the world a better place?

I am fortunate that the work we do at Eleanor Health directly improves the lives of individuals; we serve community members who have often been left unsupported and stigmatized by society. In my role, I work towards constantly improving the way we deliver our care to individuals and support their communities, balancing the personalized approach to serve one person at a time most effectively, while building the systems to have this impact at scale.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good for the greatest number of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.

Health for all! If I could inspire any movement, it would be grounded in our understanding of health, including how we invest in it for ourselves and for people around us. One of the reasons for my naming the company Eleanor Health is the inspiration from Eleanor Roosevelt’s legacy and her work on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. If we could all better understand, reflect on, and stand up for universal human rights, including the right to health, we would bring incredible good to the world.

We are very blessed that some very prominent names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.

Serena Williams is an inspiration to me in so many respects. She is not only one of the best athletes of all time, but an incredible voice for change, mother, partner, investor, and certainly a visible representation of what investing in one’s health can accomplish. I would be honored to share a conversation with her on inspiring health across the world.

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.