Healthcare is Broken—This Company Wants to Fix It

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
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**Ed Elson** (0:45)
Welcome to the Prof G Markets Founder Series, I'm Ed Elson.
Healthcare in America isn't just expensive, it's often out of reach. Nearly half of Americans can't access or afford quality care, and even for those who can, system is broken. Long wait times push nearly 40% to delay or skip appointments altogether. In 2017, my next guest set out to make healthcare more accessible, launching a platform that connects patients with doctors and treatments directly through their mobile devices. Today, it's grown into one of the leading telehealth companies, offering care across sexual health, hair loss, and weight management with no waiting room required. With more than 2.5 million subscribers, it is reshaping how people engage with care and redefining what the future of healthcare could look like. This is my conversation with Andrew Dudum, co-founder and CEO of Hims & Hers. Andrew, thank you for joining me on the podcast. I guess I want to start with the founding story of Hims & Hers. Back in 2017, you start this company. And back then, I started to see a lot of ads around New York City that were these kind of iconic ads that I remember of these cacti on these billboards. And we're trying to figure out what this company did. And ultimately, it seems like the main product back then was erectile dysfunction.
Is that right? Is that how you started?

**Andrew Dudum** (2:21)
When I started the company in 2017, at the heart of it was this opportunity to build something that really changed what people thought about healthcare.
We did that experience. But then, when you look at other aspects of our lives, you pick up your phone, you click a button, and you can get access to amazing financial services. You can get on-demand food, and you can buy a car from your iPhone. Everything had been completely consumerized in a beautiful, price-transparent way.
Yet, healthcare was still this environment that was paternalistic, that lacked any empowerment, that lacked all price transparency, and really was built for a system, not a consumer. So what I set out to do was, can we take the best of consumer love, the best of consumer healthcare, the best of consumer technology, the things that we've grown to appreciate in Amazon and every other service, and reimagine what's possible for everyday people when it comes to their health. Part of that is, to your point Ed, the stigmatization of healthcare. Things like sexual dysfunction, things like hair loss that affects maybe 50 percent of the population. Things like weight loss that affects 70 percent of the population. Actually normalizing the fact that these things happen and they're common and everyday people suffer from them. That's a big first step of it. Then the next step of it is actually making incredibly easy to get care on demand. You click a button, you can connect with a Hims & Hers doctor in minutes often or within an hour, from any state in the country and now across nearly a dozen countries globally. And then you can receive amazing personalized care. You can get that treatment delivered to your door within a couple of days and it makes you feel great. That type of opportunity to rethink what's possible in healthcare, move it from a very reactive system to a proactive one, but also build something that people love. That was really the ambition. And I think in the early days, some of the stigmatized conditions were a really great way for us to start the conversation with people about what healthcare could look like in the future.

**Ed Elson** (4:44)
So it sounds like those stigmatized issues such as hair loss, such as erectile dysfunction, these sort of male focused issues, maybe that was your entry point into becoming a larger telehealth company that focuses on a range of different issues. I guess the question is, why did you focus on those issues to begin with? Because I think in the beginnings of the company, that's how Hims, it originally was Hims, and it's transitioned to Hims and Hers. I think a lot of people think of this company originally as, this is specifically for male issues, things like hair loss, things like ED.