On the TechTO stage ×1
First seen on a TechTO stage in 2020. Every TechTO talk is searchable — ask the archive about Alyssa ↗
In their words
I'm going to tell you three ways I think being unreasonable is actually a good thing, especially for a founder, and that's being unreasonably determined, unreasonably confident, and unreasonably ambitious.
If we can make it feel like something that's normalized and should actually be celebrated, and is something you do for you as a radical act of self-love, more people will flock to it.
We did a pre-seed round last summer, pretty quickly. If I had stopped to think about how hard it was for me as a female entrepreneur, solo, being non-technical, I think that would have held me back.
Quick answers
What was Lilia?
An egg-freezing concierge Atkins founded in 2019 and took through Y Combinator's Winter 2020 batch. It matched women to vetted doctors, handled the research and scheduling, and pushed for transparent pricing. It started as an at-home fertility hormone test before narrowing focus. Lilia is no longer operating.
Why did Lilia shut down?
Atkins writes on her own site that the only route to venture scale was getting into the provision of care — building clinics — and that the egg-freezing market is still too small to support that. She secured an acquisition offer from an industry incumbent, but it fell through over a visa immigration issue.
What does she mean by 'being unreasonable'?
It's the argument of her 2020 TechTO talk: that not stopping to calculate how hard something is can be a founder's advantage. She traced it through a student window-cleaning business, talking her way into a content marketing job at Top Hat with no content marketing experience, and setting out to get a generation of women informed about egg freezing.