Taking our next steps with Tia

The following email was shared with Tia employees to provide visibility into my decision to move into the Chairwoman of the Board role and appoint my co-founder, Felicity Yost, as Interim CEO.

Team Tia, 

Today marks an exciting next chapter for Tia. After eight years of serving as Tia’s founding CEO, I have made an important decision to take on a new role as Chairwoman of the Board. In this new role, I will focus my time on driving strategy related to the future of Tia at the Board of Directors level and shift away from leading the company day-to-day. Together, with Tia’s Board of Directors, we’ve appointed Felicity — my co-founder and Tia’s current President — as interim CEO. This decision realigns our roles around our respective strengths and talents in support of what Tia needs today to maximize success for our team, and impact for our patients and health system partners as we continue to further our vision of transforming healthcare for women.

I am sharing this news with you before we share it externally later today. And in typical Tia fashion, I want to give you visibility into my thought process that led to this decision. Most importantly, I want to emphasize that this transition is a positive one — an opportunity for Felicity and me as co-founders to redirect our superpowers so that Tia can continue to succeed today and for the long run. It’s an opportunity that’s only possible because of all that you have helped us achieve and I am excited to build upon our collective vision in this next chapter, together.

Go back to go forward

I founded Tia in 2016 with a big vision to reinvent healthcare for women. I was a patient turned entrepreneur, frustrated by the pitfalls of a broken healthcare system that notoriously dismissed women and wrongly treated us as “small men with different parts.” It was the early days of digital health, before women’s health was “on the map” and before design and experience were seen as integral to improving health outcomes. My north star was to create a brand, product and company that made women feel uniquely seen, heard, and cared for as whole people (yes, interconnected human beings!) versus parts or a “number” in a system. And, I was determined to prove to the world that women’s health was not “niche,” but a smart and big business.

Most people thought I was crazy for taking on a notoriously complex industry, but I found my first believer in Felicity. She joined me as my co-founder and “other half”— bringing masterful systems-thinking and operational chops that complimented my strength in brand, user-centered design and storytelling. Together, from our living room floor in San Francisco, we set an ambitious goal to create a new standard of care for women and started building. 

From our initial “AskTia” app to opening our first Tia Clinic in NYC, from striking our first health system partnership to scaling our “Whole Woman, Whole Life” primary care model across the country, Felicity and I have worked side by side through all of the twists and turns to further our mission and business, together.

Today, Tia is no longer a napkin sketch, but a reality — the category-leading primary care provider for women. With nine standout clinics and a robust virtual care platform serving over 40,000 members in four markets, Tia has transformed the lives of women with a model of care proven to make them healthier — creating a blueprint for what comprehensive women’s healthcare looks like for the industry to follow. And we’re just getting started. 

Right leadership, right strengths, right time

Tia’s culture places great weight on the practice of reflection — encouraging us all to “hold up the mirror” to assess our individual talents and non-talents, and determine how best to apply them to further Tia’s goals as they evolve over time. 

With a commitment to this practice of reflection, I frequently ask myself: how can I best serve Tia and our mission? 

After recent reflection about Tia’s priorities and my own strengths, it became clear to me that Tia needs two things to achieve our near-term and long term goals:

#1: We need a CEO and leadership team who excel in operations.

Tia is well beyond the proof-of-concept stage and now in the “rinse, repeat and strengthen” stage, which requires a maniacal focus on operational excellence. This is both a normal and exciting evolution for a company at our stage and size. Specifically, to hit our near-term financial goals, we need to ramp up clinics and further strengthen our unit economics — all while maintaining and improving quality of care and experience for our patients and partners. 

Felicity’s operational superpowers and deep institutional knowledge of Tia and our health system partners make her the optimal leader for Tia’s current needs. By empowering Felicity as CEO to lead our day–to-day operations — in close partnership with Tia’s Chief Clinical Officer, Jess Horwitz, and Chief Operating Officer, Stacey Irving — we will drive greater organizational focus and impact against these near-term goals. As you well know, Jess and Stacey are exceptional beacons of Tia’s culture and mission-driven business. They’ve both played pivotal roles in helping Tia deliver high quality and economically durable care at scale. As Jess and Stacey often say, quality and economics is a “non-choice” in primary care and we need to pursue both in tandem. I’m excited to further empower Felicity, Jess and Stacey as a triad of leaders to help us execute against our clinical and financial goals.

#2: We need to actively maintain an eye towards the future state of Tia and women’s healthcare.

More specifically, we need to refine Tia’s longer-term strategy and ensure we’re set up for continued growth in context of a rapidly evolving primary care and women’s healthcare market.

My role as Chairwoman of the Board will be to develop this strategy by decoding these trends and bringing forth net-new opportunities to our Board and management team — helping us balance today-state needs with the future. As women’s health access dwindles and outcomes worsen, there is so much need and opportunity for Tia to expand what we do, who we serve, and where overtime. I am motivated to spend more time ensuring Tia can seize the right expansion opportunities at the right time to further our mission and business for the long-run.

Furthermore, with women’s health (finally!) on the map in the eyes of investors, policymakers and the healthcare industry, it’s critical that we continue to evangelize Tia’s model and outcomes to shape the healthcare system of the future. As you all know, nothing brings me more energy than sharing the magic of Tia with our members, partners and the broader healthcare community, and I’m excited to dedicate more time to serving Tia in this way. 

Onwards, together

In summary, I made the decision to realign my role and Felicity’s in a way that maps our talents to Tia’s needs because it’s the best thing for Tia, period. By doing so, I believe we will maximize success for the company, and further our individual growth as leaders and co-founders, too. Change can be hard, but this change feels very right — for me, Felicity and by extension, for all of you, as well.

Building a company requires being nimble and dynamic and appropriately assessing what and who the company needs to achieve our near and long-term goals.  As Tia enters subsequent chapters there may come a time where we bring on new leadership with additional talents and perspectives, but I can unequivocally say that Felicity is the optimal CEO for Tia today and has my full support in stepping into this new leadership role.

I am so proud of everything our team has accomplished thus far and grateful that you have dedicated yourselves to our shared mission and vision. I am incredibly motivated by Tia’s future, this realignment of roles to talents, and look forward to sharing more about this decision live in a series of Co-Founder Town Halls we are hosting for all teammates. 

To accommodate schedules across our HQ and frontline care teams, Felicity and I will be hosting multiple sessions and hold space for open Q&A. Please look out for invites on your calendar to join any of the following Co-Founder Town Halls:

• Friday, 1pm PT / 4pm EST
• Monday, 9am PT / 12pm EST
• Tuesday, 12pm PT / 3pm EST

If you are supporting patient care virtually or in a clinic, and these times do not work for you, but you would like to connect, please reach out and we will find an alternate time that works for your schedule.

With gratitude,

Carolyn