​Hi I’m Amanda Brief, Cofounder and CEO of my.Flow, and we’ve created the world’s first tampon monitor to address the issues of period stigma, shame, anxiety, leakage, and risk of infection. More importantly, I am an MEng IEOR Class of 2015 alum - Go Bears!
 
It’s great to be back at Cal, thanks to the Fung Institute for having me back…any excuse to grab a slice at Sliver and then a second dinner at Toss. You guys have this fancy new hall with private rooms, and a garden?! “Back in my day…”
 
Anyway, it was here at Cal last year that my baby was born…and by my baby, I mean my company. It really is like my child, a next of kin; I’ve dropped and rearranged my life for her, flown over 7,000 miles with virtually no notice for her, stayed up nights to nourish her, even entered a shotgun founder relationship that my cofounder likes to say, is “just like a romantic relationship, without any of the fun parts,” for her.
 
So, I love my fellow IEORies; anyone in my cohort can attest to the fact that three of us, and an adopted MechE, were irritatingly attached at the hip all year. Industrial Engineering and Operations Research is a discipline that allowed me the much-needed room to explore several options for future personal expansion, from optimization to supply chain to financial engineering. But something felt missing – when people asked me what I built as an engineer, what I created – we IEORies don’t have as much to physically show for our efforts. And it was partially out of this insecurity; this need to feel like a “real engineer,” – and I do think some of that had to do with being female - that I enrolled in Critical Making, just across the way at the CITRIS lab – a mixed grad/undergrad Spring semester course in a maker space where I could 3D print, circuit build, laser print, and design my little heart out. And some pretty great stuff came out of that class – a lightup skirt that lets people know they’re getting too close, a garbage can that sings an Oscar the Grouch song to notify you to empty it, and…a tampon that tells you when it’s full? Needless to say, very Berkeley.
 
But that’s why Berkeley had always been my dream school – it’s where smart, open-minded people come to learn, right? And indeed I found evidence of this in my startup. Being a part of the Berkeley and greater Silicon Valley startup ecosystems has truly been a game changer, bleeding into my personal life in a very real way. Pun intended. In fact, when a Midwestern friend of mine recently told me that she just assumes my life is exactly like Richard Hendricks from the hit HBO show Silicon Valley, I had to admit that she’s really not that far off.
 
One huge difficulty he faces as a technical founder is making those that are behind the checkbooks understand the necessity and potential ubiquity of his baby. And I could not relate more. I’ve received every type of reaction to being the “tampon lady” that you could possibly guess. I wish I had a flipbook of all the reactions to my pitch. Laughter, to straight up walking out, and my personal favorite, a man saying “That’s a pretty funny joke” in a language he thought I didn’t understand. As Giselle eloquently put it when we were discussing this event - talking about menstruation is socially awkward at best--taboo at worst – so how do I deal with that?
 
Well, by sticking to the facts. The period is something half of us experience, for half of our lives. And by us I mean all humans. That’s a pretty big deal, and an even bigger oversight for something that’s missed the innovation train for so long. Most of us females – 70% in fact – are in some way unhappy with our bodies and the physical experience of being a woman. 61% of the over 300 women we’ve talked to dislike or dread their menses. For 27%, it is not a predictable event. 54% think periods should be more openly discussed, 48% address their menstrual needs as discreetly as possible, 56% would buy a product that would help them prevent stains and leakage, and 82% would buy a product that would help them prevent the risk of toxic shock syndrome, despite its lack of prevalence. So yes, I’d say we have something worth addressing.
 
While we’ve gotten a lot of exposure – we’ve been featured in over 150 news, blog, television, and radio pieces over the past 6 months, and are heading down to LA for the Hackaday Prize finals this weekend, it hasn’t always translated into fiscal success. It’s been a bumpy road, but most of us would agree with the fact that adversity breeds strength, and my relationship with my.Flow is no exception.
We’ve ultimately decided that we would benefit from an established industry partner; as such we’re in talks with Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Kimberly-Clark, and other major tampon manufacturers about moving forward together.
 
I’m not going to claim my graduate degree, or my startup, or even just being a woman in engineering, has led me to find an ultimate career “destination,” because in a way, I’ll always be searching. It’s who I am. But the things we haven’t discussed need to be brought to light, and it’s because of our unique perspective that I really believe we as women will play a huge roll in the engineering shakedown to come. It’s about Bloody Time!
Thank you.

Vyshaali Jagadeesan interned at my.Flow during the Summer of 2016, and is a member of the MEng Class of 2017 at UC Berkeley.

Working at my.Flow this summer gave me an insight into the dynamic startup environment and helped develop my technical and communication skills. I have interned and worked for small companies before but this was my first foray at a startup. I had an inkling this would be an excellent way to ease my transition from a regimented 40- hour work week to the pandemonium of a public, academic institution. I had quit my position in diagnostic device manufacturing to complete a Masters of Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley to translate my background and interests to a career in medical device development. I met Jacob and Amanda over Skype as they were finishing up HAX, a hardware accelerator in China. I was enthusiastic about the groundbreaking product and their public reception but most importantly I was inspired by their mission to change the dialogue around menstruation.

I didn’t know what to expect when I hopped off the Caltrain for my.Flow’s orientation weekend less than 24 hours after I had returned from a six-week European adventure. I met the team in person for the first time, and I felt immediately comfortable. It’s hard to say if this was due to the sheer amount of time we spent together that weekend, working, planning, exploring the City or playing “would you rather” ceaselessly.

I had expected my first day at my.Flow would be similar to my first day at past jobs. I would read the company policies, get acquainted with their products, and learn their protocols and procedures. Within the first hour of meeting Amanda and Jacob, I was giving my feedback on my.Flow’s current product iteration and contributing to the company’s summer plan. I found this efficiency refreshing after 18 months of stifling adherence to protocols and rigid schedules.

At first, I struggled with the lack of structure coming out of a highly controlled manufacturing environment. As my.Flow only had two full-time employees there were no established procedures. After my initial hesitation, I was able to bring structure to my work, and I realized that I was able to finish tasks more efficiently when I created my own formats for documents rather than working within existing frameworks.

I didn’t just contribute to the design of the product, I also worked on various other projects as roles in a startup are fluid. I not only learned a lot about saturation sensor technology, but I also learned how to pitch to different audiences and conduct market research. I learned a lot observing Amanda pitch at the events, tactfully sidestep questions that could reveal proprietary information and remain composed even when her pitch was followed by snickers in male dominated environments. 

In an atmosphere where everyone is vying for a finite amount of capital, competition is inevitable. But at many events, I was pleasantly surprised by the support the startup community provided. We were often given useful feedback, suggested potential user groups and provided fruitful leads.  

Working at my.flow I not only learned about saturation sensors but I also got a glimpse into the inner workings of a young start up. Thank you for the immersive eye opening experience. I look forward to seeing my.Flow succeed and bring peace of mind, period.

Amanda Brief writes about running [around for] my.Flow in various locations around the country and globe.

After returning in May from China and a brief stint in Bulgaria, I was pretty excited to stay put for a while. But the best I could do was stay domestic. Returning back to the US after over three months had me flying an extra three thousand miles back to my former home (and still at least part of my heart’s home), NYC, for my.Flow’s press tour. There, I talked with and demoed my.Flow for six journalists, most of whom would go on to write articles - of varying positivity - about us that would then spiral into over a hundred more publications worldwide within the following weeks. I was lucky enough to get to see the 9/11 Memorial and climb the new Freedom Tower for one of my interviews, which was incredibly emotional for me as a New Yorker. Our wonderful PR firm, Proper Propaganda, broke the news the day our embargo lifted that we had “broken the internet” :-). Then it was back to my current home, SF, for the culmination of our HAX program: Demo Day. Just about everyone I lived with in China was there, devotedly supporting one another, and with six fellow HAX buddies crashing on the futon in my studio apartment due to exorbitant costs out here on Best Coast, it was an acutely bittersweet end to our time together.
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I then catapulted into pitch mode within the Bay Area, and just a couple of weeks later on a tip, headed to check out the sprouting Boulder-Denver area, known for its growing healthcare tech community. I made some great connections there at a TechStars event, such as with the ladies of Revolar and Prima-Temp, and got some pretty amazing nature time in too (which also was a driving force behind my move to Cali in the first place), and was back for a bit less than one week before I headed back East to NY. There I gave and received some long overdue family and friend hugs, met with a potential tampon manufacturing partner in NYC, and onboarded our first medical advisor, Dr. Jonathan Jakus, Chief of OBGYN at the hospital where I was born! Full Circle...Full Cycle...Period. Maybe that was a stretch...​

Jacob McEntire is the cofounder and lead hardware engineer of my.Flow™.

When I tell people what my job is, I get a lot of different reactions.  Some people are confused, some are amused, and others are just grossed out.  But they all want to know: how does a man come to work on a menstrual product?  Well, there are a lot of answers to that question, but I want to talk about one thing in particular: how stigma prevents us all from learning.

As somebody without a period, I learned very little about menstruation up until I started working for my.Flow™; my education mostly comprised hazily-remembered high-school bio classes, and brief chats with girlfriends where the takeaway was a week-long break from sex.  Not exactly comprehensive.  And it wasn’t by chance that the only ways I learned about the period were formal education and incidental exposure.  It’s because it’s not something that we generally talk about.  I’ll admit that I thought the menstrual cycle was kind of gross, and had no real desire to discuss it.  Thus it largely remained out of sight and out of mind.

When I commenced work with my.Flow™, I began to ask my friends about their cycles (which started off about as awkwardly as it sounds), and I soon realized that there’s an entire conversation going on that men don’t see.  One of the most striking things to me is the universality of this community that I had no idea even existed; what’s common knowledge to half the world was (and still is, to some extent) arcane lore to me.

Now, let me be clear here: just like any other aspect of your health, your period is your business, and everyone has the right to talk about it as much or as little as possible.  However, it seems pretty crappy that my friends and partners are often made to feel uncomfortable or even embarrassed if they do choose to talk about it.  And that discomfort is something that all of us can be complicit in, and that we all must monitor ourselves on.  The period is an important part of women’s health, and it seems damaging to our collective knowledge that we push all conversation around this subject down into obscurity, for the reason that “it’s gross.”

When Amanda and I talk about my.Flow™, we usually talk about how it can improve the period experience by using insight to alleviate anxiety.  But we also strongly believe that it can help dispel the stigma around menstruation.  Apps, and the data that they track, are quickly becoming a universal language.  Ten years ago, you might have thought it weird if somebody could see the data on how you slept at night, or how many steps you took last Tuesday, but that data is now available, and pretty normal; most people wouldn’t balk at a friend seeing stuff like that.

By allowing people to see menstruation on a phone, in the same context in which we view other personal-health data, it abstracts it slightly from the notion of “the period” that elicits the knee-jerk “ick” reaction too many of us still feel.  I think that this data-driven normalization is the first step toward a more comprehensive understanding and acceptance of all health, and I’m happy to be a part of it.

-Jacob McEntire

At my.Flow, we like to call ourselves menstruation enthusiasts.  We imagine a world where anyone with a period feels free to talk openly about it, and we like to think that our product, along with other recent menstrual innovations, is a step in that direction.  But, as a company, our first priority is to build a product that improves the quality of life of our customers.  And we have many different customers with many different wants.  While some are happily open about their periods, many prefer discretion.

We all want to get rid of period stigma and start the conversation around menstruation, but we also know that your period can be a very personal and private thing.  While we want to give our users the option to speak openly about their cycle, the last thing we want is to force this on people who might not want to.  That’s why we’re making a product that can be as discreet, or as open, as you want it to be.

Wear your flow monitor discreetly tucked under your pants, or hang it on the outside (it is pretty gorgeous if we don’t say so ourselves), for all to see.  Customize your notifications to say “your car is ready” or “your tampon’s at 90%!”  Keep your data to yourself, or share it with the biotech community.  Ultimately, this product is a tool we’re developing to help you learn about your body in new ways!  How you use it is up to you.

Also, while we’re chatting, “smart tampon” may be a catchy headline but it doesn’t quite describe our product.  We’ve put in a lot of work to make our wearable flow monitor very smart, because the tampons themselves are pretty dumb.  The only differences between our tampons and those you would buy at the store are a slightly longer tail, and a pair of medical-grade conductive threads woven through, which are no thicker than a human hair.

We are proud of our work, and what it represents, and we can’t wait to share it with you!

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This past week, I became the first woman in herstory (i.e. history) to track her flow using a tampon monitor! With the help of Jacob and the amazing mentors at HAX, I strapped up to our lovely PCB (printed circuit board) and was able to determine that my tampon was 42% full within 2 hours of insertion. So among other awesome implications, my pants were spared :-). Pretty neat stuff, huh?

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Last few days in China and even more monumentally, here at HAX. Demo Day here May 6th and back home (SF) on May 17th, with the goal of getting more people on board with our mission. It's a sort of nerdtopia here, with all 15 companies in the batch and even more HAX alums burning the midnight oil - with the office never fully empty at any hour, even on weekends  - working solely on projects we're deeply passionate about, because someone believes in us and our vision. Going back to our home countries, we won't be losing that individual passion, but realistically nothing replaces such a tight community of makers and dreamers.

​Somewhere I always knew that school wasn't where I'd do the real learning...

Love and Insight,
Amanda