Ep74: Dame Jessica Ennis-Hill former Olympic Champion and FemTech entrepreneur and Dr Michelle Tempest Partner at Candesic

Steve Roest (0:00)

Hi, this is Steve Roest, and you're listening to HealthTech Hour on UK Health Radio.

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Bye Hello, and welcome to this week's HealthTech Hour with me, Steve Roest. Each week, we bring you the best news, views and interviews with the CEOs, leaders, clinicians, who are changing the face of healthcare in the UK and beyond. As regular people, as regular listeners know, I'm a HealthTech founder myself, founder of PocDoc. We're revolutionizing the blood testing space by allowing anyone with a smartphone to test themselves for major diseases. PocDoc is also a supporter of the show, so thank you very much to the team there. Also, thank you very much to everyone who's listening live on UK Health Radio. UK Health Radio is the world's leading talk health radio station. Also just launched on Spotify, so if you either miss me or miss anybody else, you can catch up through the UK Health Radio channel on Spotify. We have our own channel on Spotify, which you can go into, so if you miss this, and you can also watch this on YouTube. So thank you very much for all of the subscribers. It's everything, all the numbers are going up, which is great, so thank you very much. We must be doing something right. All right, so onto today's show. Today's show, we are talking about female health, specifically hormone health and how hormone health or hormone levels and the management of hormone levels and the understanding of hormone levels can be combined with state of the art data and advice around fitness, wellness and nutrition to help women lead happier, healthier lives. We've got two fantastic guests on today. So first of all, Dr. Michelle Tempest, who is a HealthTech advisor, investor and the founder of Candesic. And Dame Jessica Ennis-Hill, I got the dame in there as per our pre-show chat. Gold medal winning star of London 2012, who has founded Jennis, which has combined hormone tracking, hormone management with fitness and nutrition to help women, like I said, get healthier and happier. Welcome to the show, both of you. How are you?

Jessica Ennis-Hill (2:34)

Very well, thank you.

Steve Roest (2:36)

Good.

Jessica Ennis-Hill (2:36)

Great to be here.

Steve Roest (2:39)

Good.

So I thought I'd start with Michelle. So when we have two guests on, we sort of have to manage how the conversation goes. But I thought we would just start with Michelle. So could you give us the story about how you first kind of met Jessica and got involved in what became Jennis and what your original kind of impressions were at the time? Just, I think it's a super interesting origin story.

Michelle Tempest (3:05)

Yeah, no, look, it is a super interesting story, although we actually met on stage pretty much. We were at a conference and we were speaking about female health.

And as a result, we then got talking and connecting. And after that, she's just the embodiment of the kind of founder that you want to invest in. And I guess just as a bit of a backtrack about myself. So I was originally an NHS doctor, so I was a psychiatrist by background. And then since around 2004, I've worked at a company called Candesic and we work as a strategy consultancy and also do due diligence work for large transactions, private equity. And then in my hobby time, I love all the things which are AI and technology and obviously everything to do with female health. And as a result of that, I'm a Cambridge angel and I do a bit of angel investing.

And yeah, I think it's slightly atypical kind of way of actually finding a company that you really like. And it's very much driven by the individual who founded it. And also we were on a panel looking at female health and discussing the gap in the market, I would say, for everything which is female health care. Because to date, it has been under researched, under provided for and under invested. And I'm super passionate about changing that.

Steve Roest (4:33)

Yeah, we've had some amazing founders on the show who are working in the female health space, either sort of from a charity perspective or from a company perspective. And quite a few of them have sort of said, it's kind of a shame that we have to talk about it as like female health, as opposed to just health.