1004 Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs:

Wings of Inspired Business Podcast EP1004 – Host Melinda Wittstock Interviews Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs

Melinda Wittstock: Coming up on Wings of Inspired Business:

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: The current system right now, unfortunately, it’s also really squeezing providers of care. They are forced to discount their services to be part of these networks, these insurance networks, to the point where a doctor these days takes home about $65 for an office visit, which is so sad. I mean, a dog walker makes more than $65, you know, for their time. And that’s all because of what this current system was built into, which is this idea that you somehow need a health insurance carrier to negotiate the cost of your services, and that somehow they’re passing through savings to you, even though they’re depleting your budget by 30% before you’re even out the gate. It’s just the biggest gaslighting project in all recent history, arguably. Because you don’t need that. You can go anywhere and pay cash. And most people don’t really know that, but providers are actually better off taking cash than working with insurance networks. 

Melinda Wittstock: Health insurance now eats around 30 percent of the average American family’s after-tax income, about $35,000 a year for a family of four, and what you get for it is a $5,000 deductible and the right to file a claim someone else may deny. Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs calls it the biggest gaslighting project in recent history, and she would know. She has spent 21 years inside life and health insurance, ranks among the top 175 independent insurance producers in the United States, and built Quantum Insurance Services from a cell phone and a laptop. Now she has founded Ionava, an alternative to health insurance: a Vault for the big what-ifs, and a Wallet that rewards you for being healthy. Today she shares how it works, why the private sector will fix healthcare before Congress does, and what it took to get a woman-founded fintech funded.

Melinda Wittstock:

Hi, I’m Melinda Wittstock and welcome to Wings of Inspired Business, where we share the inspiring entrepreneurial journeys, epiphanies, and practical advice from successful female founders … so you have everything you need at your fingertips to build the business and life of your dreams. I believe in paying it forward, so as a five-time serial entrepreneur, I started this podcast almost 10 years ago to catalyze an ecosystem where women entrepreneurs mentor, promote, buy from, and invest in each other. Because together we’re stronger, and we all soar higher when we fly together and lift as we climb. Please take a moment, hit subscribe so you never miss an episode, tell your friends and colleagues, and we appreciate it when you help this wisdom get discovered with a 5-star rating and review.

Melinda Wittstock: Today we meet a self-described insurance nerd who zoomed out and asked what people actually want from healthcare: protection from the big what-ifs, and help paying for everything else. Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs founded Quantum Insurance Services in 2013, after tripling her boss’s business in three years and being told that her maternity leave had been, and I quote, “really like a paid vacation, so you’re never going to get another raise.” Quantum grew 37 percent in its first year while the Affordable Care Act cut commissions to almost nothing. Then in September 2024 came what she calls a flash of insight, and Ionava was born: a healthcare fintech, built on 400 million life years of mortality and morbidity data, that splits protection from spending. A Vault that pays out $300,000 to $1 million in cash on a serious diagnosis, and a Wallet, funded by 70 percent of your subscription, that you can spend anywhere in the world on health and wellness, that rolls over, earns interest, and pays you more the healthier you get.

Melinda Wittstock: We talk about why cash rates now match or beat insured rates, and why a doctor takes home about $65 for an office visit inside a network. We get into the $7 trillion consumers already spend on health and wellness that insurance ignores, why Jennifer wrote her algorithm on blockchain, and what it took to raise money as a woman in fintech: the coach who told her to say “Princeton” in the first 30 seconds, the Wall Street friend who taught her to write ten-word emails, and her theory of who will never hear a woman’s pitch no matter what she delivers. Plus, the citrine crystal she held on every scary call in 2013.

Melinda Wittstock: Let’s put on our wings with the inspiring Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs.

[INTERVIEW]

Melinda Wittstock: Jennifer, welcome to Wings.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: Hey, hi, it is so nice to connect with you, Melinda. Thank you for having me.

Melinda Wittstock: Likewise. Well, you started in entrepreneurship some time back. You had a cell phone and a laptop, an idea. 2013. What made you take that entrepreneurial leap?

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: You know, it felt sort of natural because I’ve often just done things. I’ve been sort of this innovator and creator at heart for a really long time, whether, you know, when I was at Princeton, I was— I wanted to be a director, right? I liked creating things. And originally I thought Okay, you can make the most impact through the arts because you touch people’s brains, their prefrontal cortex, and you make them reflect on the human condition. And then, you know, we elevate. And then I came to change my perspective on whether, you know, that was really my easiest way to create some sort of lasting impression on the universe, because I then realized that money makes a lot of impact in everyone’s lives as well. And so when I went into business and I was working at an insurance Boutique in Beverly Hills in life and health products. I grew that business and was instrumental in that business really elevating after 30 years of these guys doing business the way they’d been doing it for 30 years. I came in and in 3 years I tripled my boss’s business, just sort of doing what felt natural to me in a different way.

Melinda Wittstock: Oh, wow. So if you do that for someone else, you start to think, well, wait a minute, why don’t I own this?

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And to be really candid about it, I also hit a big That glass ceiling and that, that. So I remember my former boss, God bless him, told me that, well, Jennifer, you had a maternity leave, which is really like a paid vacation, so you’re never going to get another raise.

Melinda Wittstock: Oh my goodness. This is his thanks for 3xing his business? Wow.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: This was, you know, back in, I guess, you know, I could say that back in 2008. So I was like, okay, I get that. All right.

Melinda Wittstock: You just nailed, I think, one of the reasons a lot of women go into business. You know, it’s like, okay, I just need to do this on my own terms. Of course, there’s other things you have to navigate, structural bias in venture capital and a whole bunch of different things, right? But at least you can do it on your own terms and your own schedule and all of these things, right?

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: Well, exactly. I mean, I did have a daughter. I had just had a daughter in 2008. And You know, I was, as it was, you know, I was coming in at 9:15 or 9— I guess it was probably 9:30, whatever, right after I dropped her off at preschool. Right. And staying until 4:30 because I had to be there by 5 to pick her up from preschool and literally working like an absolute machine the entire time. No breaks, no chitchat, nothing, you know, growing my boss’s business 10% year over year over year over year. not playing around, right? Writing his emails for him and signing them with his name.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: And he would say, well, you know, Jennifer, I’m first in, last out, and, you know, you’re leaving at 4:30. And there was another person who worked at that firm who had figured out that if they could just kind of chitchat and keep the boss entertained, you know, that they could also just exist at that position. And I just thought, I’m being penalized because I have to leave 30 minutes early. to pick up my kid, but I’m working harder the whole time. And that’s really stinky…

Melinda Wittstock: It’s really—

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: …because that’s not gonna be something I can change, right? It’s not gonna be something I can change for a good while here. So that did play into it a little bit. I will be honest, it did.

Melinda Wittstock: It’s dispiriting. And this is one of the things that entrepreneurs can do with their own teams where, you know, certainly with mine, I mean, as a 6-time founder, I, uh, I want results. I don’t really care when people work or like how they do it as long as they deliver results. So like, really, that should be the measurement, not like, do you chit-chat with your boss or are you hanging around? Or it’s not really measured by time, shouldn’t be.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: Once you really look at what goes on in corporate environments, right, then the amount of people who are just taking up space that are just pushing echoes of responses to other people versus the people that are actually really doing stuff, male or female. A lot of males are doing that. I’ve met males like that even in my own experience. You know, after leaving Quantum and then working with Ionava, I’ve really seen there are people who can just suck up air in all kinds of different positions. Right. And results are really something you can’t fake.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: Eventually, that really does show itself. And in business, and one of the things I love about business, is efficiency is the key to success. And so if, if you really want something to succeed, you need talent and focus and vision from teams that are going to transmute the power of all their will and all their work into real results. Otherwise, you’re not going to get somewhere really good, you know. And once big, big, big companies are established, yes, other people can sort of— forgive me, but suck off the teat of that success, and then they don’t have the pressure to deliver real success. They’re just sort of regenerating and keeping stasis in motion. So, you know, there’s a level that they can keep it up. But entrepreneurs, they move the needle from 0 to 1, and you have to put incredible amounts of time, focus, and energy to make that happen.

Melinda Wittstock: 100%. Okay. So there you are, you’re launching Quantum, you have a young daughter. What were some of the biggest challenges? I mean, obviously, you had all the deep domain expertise, you’d done it for somebody else. Was it very similar? Was it doing the same thing or was it different? How did it innovate from what you were doing before?

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: It was really doing the same thing I’d been doing for someone else and letting them get the credit for it. And then instead claiming that, hey, I’m doing this now and I’m doing it for me and I’m doing it, you know, the same way I did it before. If you liked how I did it, feel free to come follow me, you know? And I was blessed in that a lot of the business managers and advisors that were in— I lived in, I still do, I live in LA. The ones I called and I said, look, I’m launching out on my own. They said, Jennifer, all new business comes to you ’cause you’re the one that knew what you were doing. And so those were pipelines I had. I didn’t take clients, but I had pipelines of relationships and I could build from ground zero upward with those relationships. And it was great because within 2 years we’d won numerous awards.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: You know, we’d had 37% growth. It was really fun in those early days of Quantum. It was a bootstrap company. I started, as you know, with just a cell phone and a laptop, literally squatting in office space outside my old boss’s office in a little corner of a building that wasn’t being used by anybody else. And that felt fun because I could control my results. I— and I— this is one thing I really learned a long time ago, Melinda, is I’m the kind of person who kind of does everything I do at like 110%, pretty much. I’ve had to learn, you know, as a mom to accept that I can’t really honestly get 110% on everything. There’s a lot I gotta get like an 80% or better on, right? Just so things can work.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: But in, in work, If I’m working, I give 110% at everything I do. And if you are that kind of person, you really need to be working for yourself, I think, because most companies really just need 80%. And that delta between that 80% and that 110% is going to get wasted, misused, unappreciated, underappreciated, whatever, corporate politics, whatever it might be. But if you work for yourself, at least all that extra 30% comes into your vision, your mission, your baby, your business baby.

Melinda Wittstock: Yes. The pattern recognition on more than 1,000 episodes on this podcast is so many women entrepreneurs are like that. They intrapreneur or innovate within a large company, get frustrated. They have all this domain expertise and they’re like, okay, that’s it. I go and create my own company. That tends to be the trajectory. It often coincides with having children as well. So, so there you are, you’re growing it, you’re bootstrapping it, and it still exists now.

Melinda Wittstock: So you exited it? What, what happened there with that company?

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: No, it’s still going. It actually incubated Ionava because Ionava has been basically birthed from my expertise in, in life and health insurance risk management consulting for 21 years. And when I, I had a flash of insight in September 2024, that really was, I said, oh my gosh, this is a trillion-dollar company. This can actually fix healthcare. This can give all the consumers everything that they want. You still create tons of profit, and it’s a win-win-win model because I have long believed that healthcare is going to finally, finally get solved by the private sector, not, God bless them, Washington, D.C., because I could just tell the Congress really didn’t understand healthcare. You could just tell by the way they talk. I like to joke that the only person who actually understood the Affordable Care Act was Elizabeth Warren.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: She actually did, you know, and everyone said she was so boring and that they didn’t care. And so it’s true, insurance is boring, right? And I know people who have been flown to Congress to try to help them understand healthcare and it just, they don’t get it. And so it’s not gonna be that, it’s gonna be the private sector. And I honestly thought that somebody smart would put together a think tank and recruit some of the top minds. And I figured one day maybe I would get a call. And I never did. And so when I had this flash of insight and I realized, oh my gosh, this is very powerful, very timely, I got to work vetting it with a lot of my contacts in the industry. And when I really saw that there was something there and I really couldn’t stop thinking about it, I just thought, okay, well, you know what, I’m gonna do this.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: And it’s been really fun because it’s such a big level up, I guess, of what I did before. You know, quantum was a huge leap for me. It was a big, scary leap. I remember, this is funny, but, you know, we said we’d want to be really candid and help all the listeners to know what it really is like for us as entrepreneurs and as female entrepreneurs. I had a— and please, whoever hears this, don’t make fun of me. I had a citrine crystal that I had bought because someone told me citrine is good for money luck, optimism, cheerfulness, and confidence. Okay? And I was like, well, that’s exactly what I I need if I’m going to launch Quantum from ground zero? I need money, luck, cheerfulness, optimism, and confidence. Because I was so scared, and I would literally hold that crystal as I’d walk into my little squat space.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: It wasn’t even an office every single day. And I would just pray, and I would just hold it, and I’d say, God, please help me. I can’t do this without you. And even when I was making calls that were really intimidating, I’d hold that in my hand so I could try to sound confident when I was scared to death. So anyway, um, that was scary at the time. And then, you know, 12, 13 years later, when you have a company that’s, thank God, been successful, it’s managed to, you know, achieve things and employ other people and help lots and lots of clients and stuff, you’re ready for another level up in taking risk if you’re that kind of person who wants to keep growing. And so one of the things that’s been so attractive for me about moving from Quantum into Ionava is just the 100,000x why, you know, um, on why we would want to make something like Ionava come through for other people. And then also, yeah, the fact that it’s interesting, it’s new skill sets, it’s a venture firm instead of a bootstrap firm, it’s in healthcare fintech, which is literally a new category we’ve even ourselves basically created versus what was before was prove myself in a model then do it for myself.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: I kind of trained myself to have the confidence that I could do it on my own, but it wasn’t really completely reinventing anything new, right? It was just sort of creating a new version of a business someone else had shown me that you could create. And Ionava is actually really building on a lot of the other experiences I’ve had all my life and bringing every single possible skill set I’ve ever developed in my life Together, which is exhilarating.

Melinda Wittstock: So with Ionava, did you raise money for that? Have you?

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: Oh, yes. I mean, I’m actually still raising money. It took so much longer than I thought for an idea this good to get funded. And I know the statistics say that only 0.26% of women in California get funding. I used to say to people, sort of like, Han Solo in Star Wars, you know, never tell me the odds as he’s driving through the asteroid field. But it kind of tracks. Like, I really couldn’t believe how long it took for people to trust that this algorithm that was so unique, that was validated by literally the leading third-party insurance consulting firm in America, that it could possibly be real. And I kept thinking, is it just because it’s coming out of my mouth? Like, Is it that hard to believe because it’s me telling you I came up with it? I don’t know.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: It was crazy to me.

Melinda Wittstock: I’ve had that experience so many times. And like so many women have it. And it’s crazy. Like on our episode 1,000 of this podcast, we went through a lot of the stats. And here’s what’s so interesting. I mean, women return on average, women-founded companies, $0.78 on every dollar invested. compared to $0.31 for exclusively male teams, right?

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: Wow.

Melinda Wittstock: That’s huge. So we’re getting less than 2% of the venture money, but we’re exiting at about 34.3%. We’re getting to exit 6 months faster. We have much better capital efficiency. I mean, like, so the number, it’s really funny because I think of these VCs and how much money they’re leaving on the table. Like, they could be making more money. Like, I don’t get it.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: But like, it’s very frustrating. Yeah, it is.

Melinda Wittstock: It really is. Numbers speak for themselves. And I remember pitching years ago, I mean, I started innovating in AI in 2011. It was crowdsourced content, news primarily, and we were using the beginnings of AI to rate the credibility or the reliability, accuracy, and essence of these different contributions. A really hard thing to do. We had 500,000 people doing it.

Melinda Wittstock: It was mostly bootstrapped. We’d innovated mobile UI. Like, this is pre-Instagram, all of this stuff. And someone, this, this guy looked at me and said, Melinda, someone’s gonna do it. I was like, I am doing it.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: Oh, what was that supposed to mean? Like, that someone was gonna well, do it differently and better because they were gonna— because the idea that you had and just do it instead. Is that what he was trying to tell you?

Melinda Wittstock: I mean, basically he said that they invested based on pattern recognition, right? And so I walked away, I was thinking, okay, where do I not fit the pattern? I didn’t go to Stanford, Harvard, MIT. I didn’t drop out of any of those schools. I didn’t invent this in my garage. I don’t have one. I lived in New York at the time. I mean, I’m just going through all these different things and I was like, oh right, I’m female.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: I mean, What? So, so, so, gosh, first of all, wow, very cool to know how ahead and forward thinking you are. Because I think a lot of times, first of all, I’m just going to say this. So many women are really, truly beautiful, right? Women are very beautiful, and we know how to make ourselves look really good too, right? Because we need to look beautiful mostly. We have to. There’s so much we talked a little bit about the beauty of being on a voice podcast instead of a videocast is, you know, you know, the semiotics. You have to give signals about certain things with the way you do your face, your hair, and stuff like that. Right. And that’s so much extra work and time and energy that has to go into trying to establish credibility.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: Right.

Melinda Wittstock: Yeah.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: And so women are good at that. Right. Look at all the work and spend we put into making sure we look good. It’s not rare that a woman will be beautiful right today. Thank God. There’s so much you can do with peptides and interventions and everything. Right. So yeah, you can pretty much look pretty good.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: Most, most people can look pretty, pretty nice on camera. There are makeup tutorials, like all that. But we still have this thing where when a woman is beautiful, we underestimate them intellectually. Like, I think— I hate to tell you this, but I think I even did. Me, like, looking at your beautiful picture and being like, wow, she’s beautiful, she’s a baller, she’s got this great podcast. And then you tell me something like this. And it’s a mic drop. Like, you were in 2011.

Melinda Wittstock: Yes.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: Using AI and creating crowdsourced news feeds. That, that’s so freaking forward and visionary, and, and it’s immense, a level of intelligence. And then the fact that you executed that too, that’s right there another skill set.

Melinda Wittstock: I think I just intimidated the hell out of them. When I look back at it now, I think I must have been terrifying. Like, there was another guy who said, oh, you’re in AI, let me talk to my wife about the opportunity. And I kind of say to him, oh, is your wife in AI? And he’s like, no, it’s just that she was a woman, right? I was like, what? So I think they can’t get past the looks maybe. And then it’s the combination. If you have all of it, I think it makes them maybe feel a bit emasculated. Like they just don’t know how they can work with you.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: Maybe back then for sure. Like, that was, you know, that’s over 10 years ago, 10 to 15 years ago. And it was definitely even worse. I think there is for sure still so much lingering in the world of patterns and tropes and all these vestiges. And you were hitting it literally, you know, the, the, the changes that have taken place in these last 15 years is kind of weird because some of it feels like progress and then some of it feels like there’s been this backlash and it’s some of it feels worse in certain ways.

Melinda Wittstock: It’s also generational.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: I’m gonna give a hot take. Okay.

Melinda Wittstock: I’m hoping for it.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: Okay. Hot take. I have found, okay, that in general, and I was an anthropology major, okay, at Princeton. So I’m, I’m coming from a socioculture perspective on this. Okay. Not like a bigotry type of thing or ageism thing. Okay. If a man is around 70 years old or older, I have found I could almost never get anywhere with that person in terms of finance because whatever I do, it will not matter.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: But if they’re under the age of 70, okay, I have usually a chance of proving myself and earning terrific respect or partnership over time if I deliver. In other words, there’s this asymptote that like, okay, I’m 70 and a half, it does not matter. I could do cartwheels. I could literally, you know, pull a Nobel Prize out of my ear and it probably wouldn’t matter at all. Okay. But that’s because think about it. They came from a generation where they didn’t have working moms. They’ve never seen anything like this.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: It’s just too foreign. And they have a bunch of millionaire friends that look like them that they can do business with instead. My theory is that under that threshold, you have men who grew up with working moms. And so they came to see a female could be both powerful, maybe even sexy, and competent in a business position or work position. And that is so foundational in their worldview that it somehow helps because they don’t know that they’re— they don’t mean to be. Nobody wants to be you know, having any of these filters. They can’t— we can’t help it, all of our filters, right? Um, but I notice it. And then the younger the men are that I’m meeting, the cooler they are.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: Like, they’re like 30, 40, 50-year-old guys typically. I find like it doesn’t seem to even clock too much that I’m female, which is so nice.

Melinda Wittstock: It is changing. It is changing. And also when the data just speaks for itself, and then also women become better at talking about money, like talking about their business as a business, not just as a product, or like understanding how VC funds work, like how we actually show up and how we pitch and understanding all of that. So there’s increasing knowledge for sure. You know, there have been all kinds of studies though too that in pitches, women tend to be asked questions that put them on the defensive, whereas men— to be asked questions of like, how are you going to maximize the opportunity? How are you going to make it even bigger? And women are asked about how they’re going to mitigate risk. And there was a study, I think it was, I’m not sure if it was MIT or Harvard, but it was a few years back. And they watched thousands of pitches and they just saw this pattern, right? So, women being aware of that can figure out, okay, it’s a little bit of extra work, but you got to figure out, okay, how am I going to turn this turn the tables on this question? How am I gonna finesse the power relationship to, like, level set the power relationship in the pitch? Like, so there’s just so much more work that a woman has to do because you have to be aware of all of these things. Whereas a guy— I mean, I’ll just take my son for an example.

Melinda Wittstock: I mean, you know, he just turned 20, he’s got this really cool startup. I take him to the chiropractor one day because he’s got a headache. He’s, like, too much time on his laptop.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: Mm-hmm.

Melinda Wittstock: And he describes what he’s doing, and the chiropractor immediately says, hey, Finn, that’s great. How can I get in on the ground floor? And I’m literally— my son is a white guy in a hoodie, right? It’s like, wow, this is, this is never, this has never happened to me.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: Right? I’m just like, wow. Yeah. Well, you’re absolutely right, Melinda, about the game theory and the pattern recognition of, of what we’ve gone back to over and over, right, is the vetting of competence, right? And the disequilibrium. I have always said that a man is competent until proven otherwise, and a woman is incompetent until proven otherwise.

Melinda Wittstock: Yeah.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: It’s just what it is right now. I have a friend, she was a— like, early I was in something called Provisors. It was like a group that you had to be invitation only. You had to be in like the top of your field. Men and women. And I was in like the most elite group cuz it was people whose practice was at least 30% entertainment industry, which is like a really like privé kind of and sought after niche. And this one was a coach, her name was Judy Jernett. Shout out to Judy Jernett cuz she was my first ever coach really.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: And she, she came to me and she said, when you stand up, cuz the whole thing was you had to stand up, give like a 30-second blurb about yourself and then just create this, you know, there’s a whole protocol. She said, the very first thing you have to let people know when they meet you is that you went to Princeton. And I was like, oh my gosh, because if you go to Princeton, you are taught to never ever do that. Like, our, our, you know, it’s just a point of pride. Princetonians try to not ever say that. They’ll be like, oh, I went to school in New Jersey. Like, they don’t want to be one of those folks who were like, oh, I went to Princeton, right? But she was like, you have to do that. Otherwise, nobody’s going to give you any credibility at all whatsoever.

[PROMO CREDIT]

Wings of Inspired Business is brought to you by the podcast, Zero Limits Business Growth Secrets where Steve Little – serial entrepreneur, investor and mergers & acquisitions maestro – shares the little-known 24 value drivers that spell the difference between a $5m business, and a $50mm even $500 mm business. It always pays to understand what’s driving the underlying enterprise value of your business. So, check out Zero Limits Business Growth Secrets at zerolimitsradio.com – that’s zerolimitsradio.com and available wherever you get your podcasts. More information about valuation growth at Zero Limits Ventures.com

Melinda Wittstock: And we’re back with Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs, founder and CEO of Ionava and of Quantum Insurance Services.

[INTERVIEW CONTINUES]

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: So, you have to make sure basically within the 30 seconds first meet someone that you obliquely or bluntly make that known. I was like, are you serious? And so I did actually. And I, I do think it helped quite a lot, you know. And, um, it’s gross that you have to do things like that, but you got to do what works. And, um, there’s this really hilarious video you should see that somebody made that it was about this woman who’s on the dating scene and this guy, he’s in finance. And he’s like, oh, I went to Dartmouth and stuff like that. And he’s like, well, where did you go? You know? And then she has this whole rap and she’s like, I went to Princeton. And she’s like, you should check it out.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: It’s pretty great. But it’s about underestimation, you know? And how do you do that and still be polite and likable, which is important in sales, which is tricky. I had to, when I was doing this fundraising for Ionava, I had to call a friend of mine who had 25 years experience on Wall Street. And I was like, listen, I need your help because I just have this feeling that there’s something way over my head. And he was like, 100,000%. And then he just sat with me. He spent hours. He taught me neurolinguistic programming.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: He helped me write emails with like 10 words, you know? And, and he showed me what male people tend to respond to, or maybe not even just male. but the world of finance responds to, which is pretty male-dominated. Um, and it was really critical. I don’t think I would have gotten funding if I hadn’t had that coaching from him.

Melinda Wittstock: Right, right. Yeah, so important. So let’s pivot back to your company right now. And you mentioned that it has this algorithm, it’s changing the game of insurance in the health area. I don’t know much about health insurance other than the frustrations that I hear from consumers about, oh, you know, someone has cancer and the insurance company decides they’re not going to fund their chemo or something like that. There’s this tremendous, tremendous frustration with the insurance industry. One of the things I didn’t realize about it is insurance used to be— they used to be nonprofits way, way back until the ’70s.

Melinda Wittstock: People are underinsured or can’t get, can’t get their treatments funded. So what do you do differently that, that, and how are you solving the kind of health insurance issue?

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: Oh, hey, yeah, thanks for asking. So Ionava is a novel financial solution that’s never existed before. It’s a category creator. And what we did was we zoomed out and we thought, okay, what are people really looking for these days? Because health insurance has distorted to the point where it costs over 30% of after-tax household budget. The average family of 4 costs $35,000 a year for health insurance.

Melinda Wittstock: Okay.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: And even if that is being done by the employer, right, where they’re subsidizing, let’s say, 75% of that cost, it’s the same price point, the same pain point. The employer’s just eating it instead of the individual. Right. But the cost. is off the rails. 35% of— I mean, 30% of after-tax household budget, that’s outrageous. So crazy.

Melinda Wittstock: Yeah.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: And then when you look at it, you’re actually not even really getting first-dollar coverage in most cases. You’re getting a $5,000 to $10,000 deductible and the right to submit a claim that they may or may not reimburse. And so there’s even additional out-of-pocket expense and exposure under the current system, and it’s really depleting Americans, and it’s not even working. So the US spends more than any first-world nation on healthcare and yet has worse outcomes than any first-world nation in healthcare. So our infant mortality, all of these, even our lifespan has started to move backwards in the US. Instead of going longer, people are now dying sooner. It’s not supposed to go that way.

Melinda Wittstock: Incredible. I mean, it’s just so, it’s so depressing that the system’s not working.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: Well, don’t be too depressed because there’s a solution. Because what we have done is we zoomed out completely and we said, okay, what are we really looking for here? We’re looking for something that protects against the big what-ifs, because that’s what everybody’s really scared of— cancer or getting hit by a truck, right? And in the meantime, what do we know? We know that 80% of chronic disease can be prevented or reversed through lifestyle change. The CDC came right out and said that. Okay. And so what we know is with all the innovation in health and wellness now, there is so much that can be done. It just costs money, right? To prevent, to enhance, to improve health. And there’s also a huge gap between what consumers are spending money on. It’s a $7 trillion industry right now is health and wellness consumer spending.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: It’s the only sector of the economy that’s actually growing right now as opposed to shrinking. And regular health insurance largely covers none of it whatsoever, right? So you have your health insurance system and then your supplements, which insurance doesn’t cover, your proactive, proactive, you know, cancer screening or whatever is not covered by any of that. So we flipped the switch and we took algorithms that actually have their origins in 400 million life years of sickness and death data, right, that are from a sector of the industry that works with what we call living benefits. Okay, it’s just like total insurance nerd speak. But they look at the big picture on long-term risk instead of what health insurance does is just thinks of it every single year as the exposure on potential utilization. They don’t even zoom out and look at sickness and death long-term statistics. They really actually don’t. You’d think they do, but they don’t.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: Right? And so we created a brand new algorithm and it acts and feels like a health savings account, except for it’s far more flexible. So it comes prefunded for you as part of the subscription for an Ionava Vault. And whatever it costs you for your vault, 70% of what you’re paying for that vault subscription goes right back onto your wallet. And that wallet is yours to use like a medical and wellness slush fund. Anything and everything health and wellness related goods or services you can use your wallet to spend on. And we actually have an entire marketplace that helps aggregate cash pay customers to vendors of goods and services as well. It’s not a network. You can still use your wallet anywhere in the world.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: It doesn’t need prior authorization on anything. But the marketplace does have hundreds of thousands of goods and services, both health and wellness related. So acupuncturists, urgent care, supplements, clean beauty products, peptides, proactive scans for cancer screening, even hospital services, right? It all counts. You can use your wallet for anything and everything. If it’s a merchant code in health and wellness, your wallet works there. Better yet, what you don’t use in your wallet, it rolls over, it grows for you. And when you turn 65, you can take it with you when you graduate onto Medicare. So it’s really helping more Americans save up for retirement, right? Which I don’t know if I mentioned this, but Americans say the number one reason they can’t save more for retirement after rent or mortgage is the cost of their healthcare.

Melinda Wittstock: Right.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: So we’re fixing that problem because Americans are woefully unprepared for retirement. And you also finally get what you can think of as a good driver discount, right? So the healthier you are and the more you do healthy activities— mental health, hydration, sleep challenges, community, all the markers for health— you can actually grow your health score inside the system. And the higher your health score, the higher your interest rate. On the unused funds inside your wallet. So it’s like a bank account that actually rewards you for being healthy.

Melinda Wittstock: That’s so innovative because— oh man, so you’re blowing my mind.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: Thank you.

Melinda Wittstock: It incentivizes you to be proactive about your health and helps you do that.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: That’s right. Which we know, by the way, when you have your own skin in the game for health, you behave completely differently than when you’ve disenfranchised both ownership of the health And directions for health. Like the current system right now, unfortunately, it’s also really squeezing providers of care. They are forced to discount their services to be part of these networks, these insurance networks, to the point where a doctor these days takes home about $65 for an office visit, which is so sad. I mean, a dog walker makes more than $65, you know, for their time. And That’s all because of what this current system was built into, which is this idea that you somehow need a health insurance carrier to negotiate the cost of your services, and that somehow they’re passing through savings to you, even though they’re depleting your budget by 30% before you’re even out the gate. It’s just the biggest gaslighting project in all recent history, arguably. Because you don’t need that.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: You can go anywhere and pay cash. And most people don’t really know that, but providers are actually better off taking cash than working with insurance networks. By and large, you can go— I had cataract surgery a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve been doing the Ionava system now for a couple of years. And I do it because I want to, A, you know, I don’t want to ever promote or create something I wouldn’t myself do, right? That I couldn’t possibly myself in good conscience do. I have to have alignment in everything I do, so— or at least I try, you know. And so I wanted to see what is it like. And I didn’t think I was going to have cataracts. I didn’t expect it.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: It came out of the blue. And, and I was like, oh my gosh, okay. Because, you know, the wallet, it’s got a certain amount of money in it, right? But it’s not going to be like $100,000 in your wallet. It’s only 70% of your Vault subscription. And the Vault itself, the subscription for your Vault costs half. what health insurance costs, right? So you’re accumulating it over time. But I, I, I’d only just started it a couple years, so I was like, oh no, what’s this going to cost for cataract surgery, etc.? She’s like, oh, you know, around $10,000. And I was like, what? She’s like, yeah, but if you’re in like a regular insurance system, they’re not going to let you have the, the good lenses because you’re too young to have had cataracts.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: And so you’d have to try to fight it, but you never win, and there’d be a prior authorization and stuff. So I was like, what are you— you’re telling me that if, if I were going through insurance, it would cost me 10 grand with insurance, which means I already paid 15 grand that year for my insurance, and then I pay another 10 grand? So we’re at 25 grand there, right? And they would control what lens goes into my eyeballs, and I’d have like the ’90s version of braces in my eyes, you know, like not the right technology. And this is my sight we’re talking about. Or I could just go to the best eye surgeon in Beverly Hills, get a second opinion from the other best surgeon in Beverly Hills, pick the one I want, and then pay somebody 10 grand flat to give me cutting-edge eyes. And I was like, okay, there you go right there. That’s, that’s why we did this, because we know that cash rates now are the same as or less than costs with insurance. But just most other people don’t. You know, we happen to be the insurance nerds who have 21 years of insight in this industry.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: and comparative other sectors of risk management to be able to call this out.

Melinda Wittstock: Right.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: And then facilitate it.

Melinda Wittstock: Right. So how does Ionava sit with all the other providers, you know, like the Blue Cross Blue Shields of the world, right? 

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: Yeah, Melinda, great question. So we’re lucky in that they don’t really know about us or care too much right now. Hopefully. I expect that there will be a time where they notice what we’ve done, and they will care.

Melinda Wittstock: They will be sort of threatened by you. No, aren’t you like disrupting their whole model?

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: Yeah, yeah, we 100,000% are, and we know that we are. And so we’ve been really strategic in the way we’ve created a roadmap of support, I would say, for as we continue to gain market share and grow and prove our model. We’ve already had a lot of early conversations so that when the time comes and we need, you know, we have a little bit more of the support. For example, there’s a think tank out of Stanford that is interested in electing the next President of the United States on a bipartisan ballot to fix US healthcare. And they believe Ionava is potentially the solution for, you know, for that mission. And so while we’re still years ahead and we’re in early days, we know what we’re doing. In other words, we know what we’re doing when it comes to risk management algorithms, yes, but we also know what we’re doing, which is taking on the biggest beast and arguably one of the most You know, unliked but powerful and dangerous industries. So, and also, that’s not lost on us.

Melinda Wittstock: So complicated. So complicated. Hard for politicians to understand, hard for voters necessarily. So like, how do you play in that, in that political space? Because right now, you know, we’re about to have the midterms and there’s a lot of groundswell for like, you know, Medicare for All, or like, you know, all these people have been cut off their health insurance. Like, it’s, it’s a big issue. issue, right?

Melinda Wittstock: So say for all the people who think, okay, let’s just do Medicare for All, right? Or other people who say, okay, there needs to be the public option, right? Like, these are all these things in the kind of public mindset about where the politics of all this meet. And then you have all those insurance companies that I imagine spend huge amounts on like lobbying and like writing checks. I don’t know, the Trump Ballroom or whatever they’re doing, right?

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: Oh yeah.

Melinda Wittstock: So where do you fit in all that? How do you see yourself walking through that kind of regulatory thing in terms of getting this innovation where it needs to be that it could actually be the system?

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: Well, as I’ve said before, it is a very, very good question. Very, very strong and valid point. The private sector is going to be what solves this, not Congress. So we’re Americans and we’re really, really good consumers. We’re really well-trained consumers. And so the beauty of Ionava is it’s just really rational market theory applied to an algorithm that works intuitively and gives people exactly what they want. We have 100% product market fit with our ICPs. And it does it in such a light footprint, 21st century, 22nd century way.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: It’s actually an algorithm that we wrote, believe it or not, on blockchain. We don’t really talk about that a lot because it kind of blows people’s mind.

Melinda Wittstock: Yeah.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: Yeah. Infinitely scalable.

Melinda Wittstock: Yeah. That’s really smart. I actually, can you geek out about that for just a moment about why you did it that way?

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: Yeah, I will. I will. And, and, but I just, and I wanna answer the, the, the rest of your question, right? You just have to pull the rug out from under the system that everybody thought had to be the way it is and come up with something smarter and then execute. And then it speaks for itself, right? When people use something because it fits, I mean, look at what Uber did, right? Look at Airbnb. Look at all these things where you come up with something smart enough and it pulls the rug out from what everybody thought had to be what it had to be. And you prove that and then you get results. You shift things. And the private sector is great at that.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: Businesses have been responsible for, if you look back at the the spice trail even from back hundreds of years ago, right? They create change and they put money where their mouth is and it shifts things around because people act in their own best interests over time. And that’s rational market theory. And so what I really wanted to do was create a system that eventually, right, is so aligned for what providers of healthcare services want and what consumers of healthcare services want that it’s going to be very difficult to argue with that. To the extent that the health carriers might like. I mean, they might try to coexist alongside. They might try to subsume or buy or adopt one day. But the most important thing right now is that we shift and prove the art of a possible, and we make it real, and we connect what should be happening in the 21st century, which is literally the providers of the services in health and wellness should be the ones getting paid directly. And the people purchasing those should have transparency on what that cost is.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: It’s absolutely nuts that a person today goes, gets a lab, and has literally no idea what it’s going to cost them. What other thing in America do you go buy that you say, well, I have no idea what it’ll cost, and the person says, well, I have no idea what it’ll cost either. I’ll tell you later, but no matter what, you got to pay me. What? Who does that? I’m at an Airbnb right now. I’m visiting my daughter, she’s going to college, and I knew what it was going to cost me for that stay before I chose it. And what Ionava does and what our marketplace does, it allows people to shop with transparent pricing, and it allows vendors to list with transparent pricing, and then just let rational market theory do what it does.

Melinda Wittstock: Right. So before we get into blockchain, I’m just kind of curious where you fit in with, say, Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Drugs, because he’s got that idea of a sort transparency or reducing the prices.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: Yeah, I was emailing back and forth with him last week, and he’s very busy right now. He’s really working with James Tallarico to, you know, make a real dent in this. This is a big problem, Melinda, and it’s not something Ionava is going to do alone. Even we’re, we’re responsible for one corner of it, right? Coming up with the new financial system that can transmute this entire system. There’s other blocks, and he’s working on them. And I love what Mark Cuban is doing. And my intention is that over time these efforts can dovetail and synergize. It’s definitely helpful what he has done.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: And Cost Plus Rx is a natural fit with Ionava’s marketplace. And so, you know, that’s one of the things that he and I talked about briefly, but it was all via email. And so I think that some of this is how do you create an infrastructure for what all the other innovators and changemakers in the ecosystem are doing, where everything can come together. And that’s what we’ve done. So for example, on October 14th in LA, we have the LA Tech Week Health and Wellness Innovator Summit. It’s the 2nd annual summit. We created the first one last year, and, um, that was where we got the attention of Aura and some other great things happened for us. And there, the whole point of our LA Tech Week Summit is anything else innovating in health and wellness.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: So there’s a beautiful company called BeSound that does dense breast exams, cash pay dense breast exams, right? Because guess what? If you have dense breasts, the current system doesn’t serve you if you’re a woman, right? So instead you can bypass everything now and just go get, I think it’s like $99 or less for a dense breast exam. And you can just do that and pay cash and not worry about whether it’s going to get covered or not because it won’t and all that stuff. Or there’s a beautiful company called Dairy Pill, which I love, and they’re going to be at the summit. They’ve created a little pill you can take before you have dairy, and it works like 1,000 times better than Lactaid and everything else. And then it lets you not have gastrointestinal discomfort just because you might have some slight lactose intolerance, right? That’s not covered by insurance. Guess what? You can use your Ionava wallet though and buy it, no problem. So the summit is there to synergize all of the other beautiful innovation in health and wellness taking place. There are companies now, there’s one called Ezra that does scans for cancer that can find and detect cancer markers earlier than almost anything you can get somewhere else right now.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: And you can do it for retail for a couple hundred dollars. And that way, these millennials who are dying of colon cancer don’t have to just find out at stage 4 that they’re about to die. They can go do— with an Ionava wallet, what we actually have is certain markers. We say, hey, look, you just turned 30. Why don’t you use some of your wallet money and go and get an early detection screening, and we’ll give you a reward in your wallet for it. We’ll put $25 in your wallet for doing that because you have to align the incentive and facilitate the the payment structure for these things, which the other system was just completely depleting. But Ionava creates this flywheel.

Melinda Wittstock: So tell me about this wallet. So you pay in— so this can be really simple for people. So you pay into this wallet? Yeah.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: Well, you pay a subscription and then that subscription, 70% of it goes right into your wallet.

Melinda Wittstock: Right. And you can replenish it. You don’t— it’s not use or lose in a year or anything like that. It accumulates.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: Exactly. And it grows interest. It starts at 2%, and the healthier your health score gets, the higher your interest rate goes. And I didn’t mention this, but what you need to understand, I guess, to really understand the vault system and, and Ionava system is your vault is actually reserved protection in the amount of $300,000, $700,000, or $1 million. You pick the size vault that you want that unlocks if you should, God forbid, have a terminal, critical, or chronic illness. That’s right.

Melinda Wittstock: Right.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: Or be unable to do 2 out of 6 activities of daily living, which are standard markers for a lot of other products that are in risk management, then your vault gives you literal cash to use for anything and everything, however you want. So a million-dollar vault is more than enough. I mean, the average cost of cancer treatment cash is $262,000, and our smallest vault is $300K.

Melinda Wittstock: That’s incredible. So, it’s almost like if you’re setting up a life insurance policy, be insured for $1 million, $10 million?

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: Yeah. That’s right. That’s right.

Melinda Wittstock: So, I could imagine companies rolling this out for their team members. Have you, have you, have you done that? Is that one of the ways you’re going to market?

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: Oh, well, that’s our definite 2027 roadmap. And funny enough, when I was capital raising, and we, we are actively raising, by the way. So if anyone’s interested in joining, we’ve had a lot of success, and we’re always looking for the right partners who fully understand us. It’s the kind of quality The total raise is $5 million, right, for our pre-seed. But what we’ve had is so much activity that we might end up not needing to take $5 million and then going straight to our Series A. So it’s kind of gonna— a little bit of it’s gonna depend on what happens in these next 2 months, which is really exciting.

Melinda Wittstock: Mark Cuban could write you that check.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: Come on. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. So long as he’s aligned. And I feel like he’s very busy right now. And I agree that he’ll be a wonderful partner over time. And I really do hope that there’s a lot of different people who are really supportive and interested in what we’re doing and are on board. And it’s really exciting. We even have now interest in launching Ionava in South America, and it is meant to be a global system.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: So it’s really exciting. We didn’t think we’d start doing any of that until later in our roadmap, but it might happen a little sooner because it’s a global system, actually, the blockchain piece, which I know you wanted to talk about.

Melinda Wittstock: Yes. So it’s decentralized and kind of I mean, there’s a layer of privacy in blockchain. People confuse blockchain with crypto. They think that it’s one and the same, and it’s not. I mean, my podcast platform, Podopolo, I mean, its underlying architecture with its AI is also blockchain because blockchain is really great for information, right?

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: Right. It’s exactly— it’s transparent. Protected, and it’s immutable. And so what do you want with healthcare, right? You want clarity, you want honesty, right? You want precision. And so it lent itself really naturally to our vault and wallet system.

Melinda Wittstock: This is amazing. So, okay, LA Tech Week, October 14th. So for anyone who’s gonna be in LA, how do they, how do they sign up for that?

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: Oh, goodness. Well, thank you for asking. You can go to our Partiful and you can sign up. We expect over 700 people and are really excited. We’re co-sponsoring and co-hosting this with VSP Vision, which is the largest global health services provider. And we’re honored that they actually asked us to co-host this year the 2nd Annual Health and Wellness Innovation Summit at LA Tech Week, which is an a16z event, is taking place Wednesday, October 14th. From 10 AM to 6 PM. There’ll be so much stuff there.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: There’s speakers, there’s panels, there’s breathwork, there’s swag, there’s beautiful booths from all these aligned health and wellness sponsors and innovators with lots of free fun merch and spin wheels for prizes. Of course, you can sign up for your Ionava Vault at the event. You can get a health score quiz if you want right now in advance of the event and go to www.ayanava.com. And the Partiful, you know, maybe we can post it in the link after, you know, we’ll put it in the, in the comments of the podcast, Melinda. Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock: Yeah.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: But if you just Google 2nd Annual Health and Wellness Innovation Summit on Partiful, you should be able to see it, and then you can sign right up to attend. Oh, and I should mention this. I totally forgot. We’re actually going to livestream the event due to demand. So we’re actually expecting that there’ll be a livestream that might reach a much larger audience because we have centers in Chicago and New York that are also Following the activities of the day’s events. And so it’s possible if you can’t make it in person and you’re not geolocated in Los Angeles to just attend the livestream and get the benefit of all the fun stuff happening.

Melinda Wittstock: I’m feeling FOMO already because I’m almost always at LA Tech Week, but this time I’m not because I have a conflict.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: But darn it, I’m sorry.

Melinda Wittstock: Every year for the past 5 years, it just so happens I’m not going to be there.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: So anyway, oh God, next year, Melinda, you need to be very closely involved with the 3rd Annual Health and Wellness Innovators Summit.

Melinda Wittstock: I would love to do that. And I will put the word out for you if you have like a deck or anything like that you’re looking for. Yeah, I mean, I think it’s really important to change the game of finance just by literally helping, like actually writing checks, helping each other find other women to write checks. Like, I think this would really resonate. There’s so many women innovating in the health space and health tech generally. So, but this is game-changing. Goodness, Jennifer, I could talk to you for many hours more.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: I feel the same way. I was just thinking, I really would love to talk more with you over time offline. We’ll have to find more ways to connect. I really feel the same way, Melinda. You’ve just been phenomenal to chat with. I love how your brain works and everything you’ve done with your background and your life.

Melinda Wittstock: Oh, well, thank you. I’ve been around for a while. But yes, but I do think different than most. It took me a while to realize, you know, right, that not everybody is a systems thinker. Not everybody is matrixy like me.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: Oh, yeah.

Melinda Wittstock: Profoundly nonlinear sort of person.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: And then claiming what the value of that really is and not holding back. I think that is absolutely absolutely critical for us as women to start when we really do understand the power of some of our skill sets.

Melinda Wittstock: Yeah.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: And then we can lean in. I know that was a huge part for me of having the confidence to launch Ionava was when I learned, like, holy cow, I’m one of the top 175 independent insurance consultants in the US, and only 3% of those are female. And then I was like, okay, I guess something about the way my brain works is okay. There’s been such imposter syndrome, and it’s like, no, it’s okay. It’s better than okay.

Melinda Wittstock: Well, you know what, it’s so funny to me how many extraordinary women, they’re so accomplished, have imposter syndrome, right? And then I, I just look at the way the US government is functioning at the moment, and I think there is no excuse for any woman anywhere to feel imposter syndrome anymore. Okay, so just like—

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: Just take the gloves off and also just take some inspo from Dolly Parton, right? I mean, like, look at her. And just the way she was able to own and claim every inch of her worth, right? Every single inch of her worth. She didn’t shy away or hold back any of it. And yet she could still do it with a smile. And she was so much smarter than she let on. I mean, so much smarter than she did.

Melinda Wittstock: I know. An amazing businesswoman. It was just so, you know, reading about when she died and just reacquainting, right, with just the, the how astonishing she was. And I think there’s so many women who have that, but it just goes sort of unacknowledged. So like, I think we’re all going to change the game of business together. So I’m feeling really bullish about women in the next, you know, 10 years and beyond, what we’re capable of. But we have to support each other.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: That’s exactly right. Yep.

Melinda Wittstock: But Jennifer, thank you so much for putting on your wings and flying with us today.

Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs: Thank you for helping me lift. I really appreciate it. It’s been a real pleasure.

[INTERVIEW ENDS]

Melinda Wittstock: Jennifer Burnham-Grubbs is a serial entrepreneur, one of the top 175 independent insurance producers in the United States, founder and CEO of Quantum Insurance Services, and founder and CEO of Ionava, a healthcare fintech delivering an alternative to health insurance.

Melinda Wittstock: Please subscribe to the show so you never miss an episode, and share with your friends and colleagues. We also appreciate it when you give the show a 5-star rating and share your reviews on Apple and Spotify—it helps more entrepreneurs like you find the secret sauce to support and grow their businesses.