What’s the big idea for your company and what stage are you at in your journey as a founder?
The big idea for our company Jack Fertility is to remove all barriers to men’s reproductive health, making it as easy as possible to assess male fertility. We aim to empower all people with sperm to start taking control of their fertility journeys, and reduce the fertility burden borne by women. Our audacious goal is to preempt the male fertility crisis by creating the global standard for comprehensive sperm health monitoring and preservation.
Based at the Wood Centre for Innovation in Headington, Oxford, we developed a minimum viable product of our postal kit, and sperm motility ageing algorithm, hundreds of expert and customer interviews. We are now raising a pre-seed round to overcome regulatory hurdles to take this to the UK market.
How did your time at Saïd Business School influence, or support your decision to become a founder?
Jack Fertility started as an Entrepreneurship Project (EP) in the year my classmate and co-founder, Nick Shipley (pictured, above) was on the MBA. Nick led the project with his team and I advised on strategy. We both found the project a fascinating opportunity to use Professor Thomas Hellmann's Entrepreneurial Finance Project model in a real-world scenario, for an incredibly important cause. Both the EP and my experience being hired by the venture I had advised in Creative Destruction Lab, and our mutual usage of the O Network, the Foundry, and other ECentre programmes demystified and humanised the founder journey. We were further supported by the School as we joined the Oxford Seed Fund portfolio last summer and had some amazing Oxford Saïd interns and users/beta testers. The incredible alumni network has been a great asset: Claire Mongeau (MBA 2022) is our Founders Factory Reckitt Benckiser accelerator lead investor.
What key lessons have you learnt from the process so far?
Values and mission are critical: during difficult times, clarity on our vision and deep work with the Oxford Character Project, Pinky Lilani's Kindness and Leadership initiative, and Oxford Saïd faculty on values has allowed us to clearly make tough decisions without regret. As Co-Founders, we always stay aligned on our values even when we disagree on other things, making difficult decisions very easy.
What will you not compromise on in your business?
You can't 'move fast and break things' when it comes to people's fertility. High quality and integrity of our tech from accurate and precise results to data and cybersecurity, have been critical from day one. We refuse to compromise on excellence in our research and development, nor in our risk managed and direct to consumer approach to the business.
How do you define success?
Core to our mission is to improve health, but more importantly is to win the fight against Spermageddon, the global phenomenon of plummeting sperm counts due to modern lifestyle and environmental factors (sperm counts around the world have halved over the past 50 years, with the pace of decline more than doubling since 2000 to over 2% per year). Success for Jack Fertility is becoming the market leader in sperm testing.
