Functioning Is Not the Same as Well
Why I built EazeBio — and what I learned the hard way about being a woman who can't stop performing.
I lost my father to cancer that was caught too late.
The signals were there for years — and no one weighed them seriously. Not the doctors. Not the system. Not even him.
By the time anyone listened, there was nothing left to do but grieve.
I have carried that grief into every room I have walked into since.
For a long time, I did not recognize it as grief.
I recognized it as drive.
If I just built enough. Proved enough. Made something good enough.
Maybe the loss would feel like purpose instead of pain.
That is not how grief works.
It is also not how bodies work.
While I was building, my own body began its quiet protest.
Fatigue that sleep did not fix.
A shorter fuse than I recognized as mine.
Mornings heavier than the day warranted.
An immune system slowly turning against itself.
I told myself I was tired. Stressed. Just in a phase.
I was functioning.
Functioning, I had been taught, was enough.
Functioning was success.
Functioning was what you did instead of complaining.
My body disagreed.
Here is what no one tells high-achieving women:
The most dangerous symptoms are the ones that do not stop you from showing up.
They are the ones you adapt to.
The ones that become your new baseline so gradually you forget what the old one felt like.
By the time your body shouts, it has been whispering for years.
And here is what no one tells women, period.
For decades, we were excluded from clinical trials.
Our hormonal variability was said to “complicate” the data.
The result is a system largely built on male physiology.
Women wait four to seven years, on average, for a correct autoimmune diagnosis.
Mood shifts in perimenopause — one of the highest-risk windows for new-onset depression — remain routinely under-identified in primary care.
We were not imagining it.
We were trying to communicate something real in a language the system had not learned to hear.
What I Built From the Breaking
EazeBio was not born in a boardroom.
It was born in the space between what I knew as a scientist and what I was experiencing as a woman.
And in the slow, undeniable realization that those two things should not have to be so far apart.
I wanted to build what had not existed for my father.
What had not existed for me.
An at-home biology intelligence platform that could see the pattern before the crisis.
Something that could meet a woman in her own kitchen, on an ordinary Tuesday morning, before the day got loud enough to drown her out.
Biomarkers and AI. Daily insight into inflammation, hormones, immunity, metabolism.
Not a single test — a pattern, in your hand, in real time.
Something that did not require a woman to be sick enough, dramatic enough, or convincing enough before her biology was taken seriously.
I have spent two decades building in this field.
I have founded and exited companies before this one.
I advise at Stanford and speak around the world.
But none of that matters more than the question that started all of it:
What if women did not have to wait?
To the woman reading this:
If you are reading Influential Women, you are almost certainly the woman in the room people quietly rely on.
You are the one who delivers.
You are also, statistically, the one most at risk of mistaking exhaustion for ambition.
Of mistaking override for resilience.
Of mistaking “I’m fine” for actually fine.
I am not interested in performing healed.
I am interested in helping more women — especially the ones the world already considers successful — stop dismissing what their bodies are telling them while they are still early enough to do something about it.
So if you take one thing from my story, take this:
Your body is not betraying you. It is communicating with you.
Your needs are not inconveniences. They are information.
And the version of leadership that requires you to override that information indefinitely is not leadership.
It is a debt you are quietly taking out against yourself.
You are allowed to listen earlier.
You are allowed to build something from what you hear.
I did.
It turned out to be the most important thing I have ever made.
