From Lived Experience to Venture

Some of the most meaningful companies don’t begin with a technology or a search for the next big market. They begin with something much closer to home. Join Storyhouse Ventures and The Hive for a panel with 7C alumni founders, Shadiah Sigala, Nina Warner, Jennifer Claman, and Sarah Powers, who turned deeply personal experiences into companies designed to help others.

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We’ll explore how lived experience can reveal needs others overlook, how a personal story becomes an entrepreneurial insight, and what it takes to turn “someone should make this better” into something real. For students curious about entrepreneurship, this conversation offers a different place to begin: not with a pitch, a technology, or a startup idea—but with what you’ve experienced, what you’ve noticed, and what you understand that others might not.

Shadiah Sigala (PO ’06) – HoneyBook & Kinside Co-Founder

Nina Warner (PO ’17) – Founder & CEO of Edulis

Jennifer Claman, MD, FACOG, is the founder and CEO of Gynovent, a women’s health medical-device company modernizing gynecologic care. For more than 30 years, she practiced as a board-certified OB/GYN, caring for women across the full spectrum of obstetrics and gynecology. At Kaiser Permanente, she also held national leadership roles overseeing medical technology decisions, including evaluating new products and driving their adoption across the health system. Through that experience, she recognized that the vaginal speculum, a gateway to preventive gynecologic care, had seen remarkably little meaningful innovation despite longstanding limitations for patients and clinicians. She founded Gynovent on the belief that improving the tools used in women’s healthcare can improve the quality of preventive care and reinforce the value placed on women’s health. Her work is guided by a simple principle: women’s health deserves the same scientific rigor, thoughtful design, investment, and focus expected in every other area of medicine. Her goal is to translate that principle into more effective products, better patient and clinician experiences, and ultimately better healthcare for women.

Sarah Powers (CMC ’13) – Founder of Nemu

Nemu is the operating system for life’s belongings, an AI enabled tool helping families value, fairly divide, and protect personal property. Sarah’s idea for Nemu came from watching her mother become overwhelmed deciding what to do with a lifetime of her grandparents’ belongings: it was time-intensive and expensive, and she wanted to prevent family conflict. Sarah launched Nemu after earning her MBA from The Wharton School and spending a decade leading entrepreneurial teams at healthcare organizations.