Listen to the full interview with Jessica Schaefer on the “Inside the C-Suite” podcast.
It only takes a quick glance at Jessica Schaefer’s resume to see she is someone who could have easily coasted through life on early success.
In one of her first jobs, she was so good at what she did that she spent two working days shopping and tanning yet still achieved unprecedented results. She then switched direction to pursue PR and communications and founded her own company, Bevel. It was so successful that she built a book with clients that had a combined $500 billion of assets under management.
But even after all these achievements, Schaefer felt called to do something totally new: After experiencing frustrations with freezing her eggs, she started Lushi, a femtech company aiming to give women a more comfortable and user-friendly fertility journey.
Schaefer began her career at Moody’s working in sales
STARTING A CAREER DURING A FINANCIAL CRISIS
Schaefer was raised by two entrepreneurs, which may be where what she calls her “alpha” personality came from. With minimal awareness of PR and communications growing up, she set her sights on investment banking at an early age and earned an MBA with a focus on investing.
“So many people said, you have so much personality. You don’t belong behind a spreadsheet,” Schaefer says with a laugh. Instead, they recommended PR and communications, and she gave it a go.
As a 2008 graduate, it was a knuckle-biting time for anyone to start a career. But positive as always, Schaefer says it was a great time for her to learn crisis management.
Soon, she moved to Moody’s. It was another great opportunity for trial by fire—the firm had been largely blamed for the subprime mortgage crisis, and part of Schaefer’s job was showing Moody’s had taken accountability.
As was typical for Schaefer, she was promoted every single year in the organization. This was partly thanks to her close relationship with CFO Linda Hubert, whom Schaefer said she would frequently talk to about interest rates and media in the ladies room.
But eventually, Schaefer recalls, “I got bored, as most entrepreneurs do when you’re working for a large public company. And the president was like, well, why don’t you do sales?”
She turned out to be a fantastic salesperson, being promoted quickly and landing sales that haven’t been made in years. Schaefer eventually got so bored that she would handle calls on Mondays, meetings on Tuesdays, close deals on Wednesdays, and tan on her roof for the rest of the week.
WORKING WITH STEVE COHEN
Next up in her career was a PR job with Steve Cohen, founder of Point72 Asset Management.
“It was one of the best decisions I ever made,” Schaefer says. “The opportunity to work with one of the greatest investors in the world to help him rebuild his reputation and launch the Point72 brand—it was one of the best learning experiences.”
Despite frequently being the youngest in the room and the only woman, Schaefer recalls that Cohen always asked for her opinion first so she wasn’t influenced by others.
Point 72 was the launching pad for Schaefer’s own PR firm since she spent so much time working with the CEOs that Cohen invested in. One day, the CEO of micro-investing app Acorns offered her a job as his chief communications officer, saying she had done more in three days than others had done in three years. Amazingly, another CEO then claimed he wasn’t giving her enough equity and wanted her to work for his trading technology firm instead. Schaefer then told Cohen that two guys wanted to hire her, to which he replied: “You’re not going anywhere.”
With interest coming to her from three directions, there was one logical conclusion: She would start own PR firm, and all three men could be her clients.
STARTING BEVEL
Schaefer was a solo founder and bootstrapped Bevel. However, she hit the ground running, making key hires like a head of operations and publicist right off the bat.
Bending the typical rules of the industry, she hired people from outside the PR world, from firms like Goldman and McKinsey, and paid them what they were worth. Then, she incentivized the team by giving them bonuses for meeting quarterly performance metrics based on what clients paid Bevel for, such as interviews set up and social media impressions.
“Everyone was also incentivized to sell and really build the company so that it wasn’t just me closing all of the deals,” she says. “Everyone would get a percentage of the revenue. And so if you worked on a brand and you brought them in, it triggered more money.”
While building Bevel, standout experiences included working with Acorns on campaigns with the likes of Dwayne Johnson and Jennifer Lopez, and taking companies like Better.com and Dave.com public. Another early client was Alan Patricof, who started Graycroft and Apex, and was a founding father of venture capital.
The nature of the work meant partnering with brands during their early days and seeing them grow to having tens of thousands of employees and being featured in Times Square, which Schaefer found rewarding.
She was also sure to provide the diversity she hadn’t experienced in her own career early on. “When I launched Bevel, one thing that was important to me was that it was diverse and diverse at the top, and that’s very rare,” she says. “So if you looked at the executive team of Bevel, it was all women
Over seven years, Schaefer built up a book of clients representing $500 billion of assets under management.
Lushi’s logo and mascot
VENTURING INTO FEMTECH WITH LUSHI
Around the time she sold Bevel, Schaefer also went through a divorce and decided to freeze her eggs.
When self-injecting drugs (part of the standard egg-freezing process), Schaefer accidentally took the trigger shot instead, which led to her ovulating. That was when she thought to herself: There has to be a better way.
“At that time, I was doing my earn-out, and I became obsessed with the fertility space because a lot of our late-stage private equity funds were investing in femtech,” she says. “So you saw this massive swing. And I always like to be ahead of any industry or in the hottest industry.”
Fueled by personal experience and passion, Schaefer is poised to revolutionize women’s fertility, providing innovative solutions that empower and support women through one of life’s most vulnerable processes.
Lushi is a fertility platform that administers the shots for women and monitors them remotely, ensuring they don’t make the same mistake Schaefer did. It also provides an entire health-tech platform to help women through their journey, along with the opportunity to book a fertility consultation with its very own Stanford-educated chief medical officer, Boskovic.
“It’s very stressful on the body,” Schaefer says. “You’re not supported from a mental health perspective, and you’re injecting yourself with these kinds of drugs. Let me tell you, you feel insane.” She hopes to remove the medicalization of the industry and open up the floor for conversation. Schaefer also believes workplaces should empower women to take the time off they need, and hopes they will provide Lushi as a benefit for employees.
Naturally, with her PR past, Schaefer has had some fun with communications for Lushi, creating a fun and cheeky campaign that aims to destigmatize the process.
“We have one campaign where it’s basically, the frattie, the finance bro,” she says. “You turn 30, and it’s like, ‘It doesn’t have to be him. You still have time.’ That’s one campaign. The other is this really hot guy without a shirt with a carton of eggs. ‘Do you want your eggs scrambled or fertilized?’”
Lushi’s $5 million dollar seed round is oversubscribed and launched officially in December. It currently costs $69.99 to join, with bundled pricing for injection specialists and remote monitoring ranging from $150 to $3,500.
In the long-term, the startup aims to offer the full egg-freezing cycles at a comparable cost to current egg-freezing options, and to build injection bars where they’ll administer shots, with fertility mocktail bars focused on improving the quality of eggs.
Schaefer’s entrepreneurial journey is a testament to her resilience, adaptability, and relentless drive to challenge the status quo. From scaling the heights of investment banking and PR to founding Bevel and growing it into a powerhouse of clients worth $500 billion in assets, her career showcases an unmatched ability to pioneer new paths.
Yet, it is her pivot to femtech with Lushi that underscores her commitment to leveraging her success for broader impact. As she sets her sights on transforming the fertility landscape, it’s clear that Schaefer’s story is not just about business success but about championing change where it truly matters.
