The Coyote Fireside Chats resumed last week with Jenica Patterson, the lead for the Sprint for Women’s Health Initiative and Director of the Project Accelerator Transition Innovation Office at ARPA-H.

The first Coyote Fireside Chat of the new year was a panel that discussed “Partnering with Healthcare Providers,” presented by experts Michelle de Haaff, assistant director at Stanford Biodesign and former VP at Glooko, and Noel Pugh, CEO and co-founder of e-Lovu. Nina Joshi, a Coyote Venture Fellow and Senior Consultant at Kaiser Permanente’s Innovation Studio, moderated this event.

Why We Invested: Sunfish

Coyote Fireside Chats continued with a panel discussing “Selling Benefits to Employers.” We were grateful to be joined by Cara McCarty Abbott, CEO/Co-Founder of Betterleave (a Coyote portfolio company) and former VP of People, and Coyote Ventures’ Venture Partner Corina Leu, who is also a Strategy Consultant at Mercer. Melody Qiu, Coyote Venture Partner and VP at Progyny, moderated the event.

We recently hosted a panel that discussed how to partner with healthcare payer systems, featuring Mika Eddy (CEO of our portfolio company Malama Health, and a former Director at UnitedHealth Group), Michael Ellis (VP of Corporate Strategy at Blue Shield of CA) and moderated by Laura Finney (Coyote Venture Fellow and Senior Manager at Oscar Health). The views expressed in this blog post are topics discussed between the individuals who participated, and do not represent the views of the organizations they represent.

Betterleave aims to transform the bereavement care space with a differentiated, integrated approach to grief and mental health. Bereavement care is a growing category of employee benefits that enables modern employers to connect with and support their employees through the difficult and complex grieving process. Betterleave’s platform brings together industry-leading partners from death care, insurance, health systems and hospices, and mental health networks to provide grieving individuals with personalized administrative and counseling services. It is the first comprehensive digital and clinical care platform to deliver a full spectrum of bereavement care support, including end-of-life planning, access to licensed therapists and community groups, and post-loss programs.

Coyote Fireside Chats is a new ongoing series of casual, informational sessions intended to provide founders and aspiring founders practical lessons for navigating the digital health and venture capital landscapes. We hosted the first of this series on October 18th, discussing “Raising a Seed Round from VCs.” It was led by Jessica Karr, General Partner at Coyote Ventures, and Jess Guenzl, Investment Committee member at Coyote Ventures and Investor at 137 Ventures. Charu Sharma, also on Coyote’s Investment Committee and a two-time VC-backed founder, moderated the virtual event.

Meet The Bean. The Beans is a platform designed to automate the finances of America’s caring professionals, who are disproportionately women. The 40M frontline employees represent the largest and fastest growing segment of the U.S. economy, and financial stress remains the top reason for these workers vacating their jobs.

We stand at a critical tipping point of the climate crisis. The planet has already warmed by 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit since the industrial boom of the 19th century and scientists forecast a rise of 2.7F, potentially by 2030. The impact of this is evident all around us: with melting ice caps, rising sea levels, rising temperatures and more extreme weather events. The recent Hurricane Ian that hit Florida is reported to have contained 10% more water due to climate change, resulting in more rain and severe flooding. Left unchecked, the climate crisis threatens our security and survival on this planet.