One of the most common questions that Liana Douillet Guzmán, the CEO of Folx Health, a telehealth health care company focused on the LGBTQIA+ community, gets asked is whether trans and queer people truly have different health care needs compared with the rest of the population.
“The answer is a resounding yes,” says Douillet Guzmán, who is herself a member of the LGBTQIA+ community. “We exist within a model that was not built for us, and more often than not it is openly discriminatory. We are more likely to suffer from heart disease; we are more likely to have mental health issues; the way we start our families is different.”
Douillet Guzmán was the CMO of the online learning platform Skillshare when she was approached about the top job at Folx Health. It was 2021 and A.G. Breitenstein, the company’s founder and then-CEO, was looking for someone to take over the day-to-day running of the business. “We started from a first principles approach,” says Guzmán of her first few months in the job. If LGBTQIA+ health care could look like anything, “what would we want it to look like?” The answer involved a diverse network of queer and trans specialized clinicians covering everything from primary care, to family planning, to hormone replacement therapy for trans patients.
What drew you to the CEO role at Folx Health?
Folx isn’t just a place that is affirming for our community. We look at what is already out there [in terms of health care resources for LGBTQIA+ people] and build expertise around that. The challenge faced by our community is often that you’re in a place that does expert care but the wait-lists are very long. Or you live in a care desert where you don’t actually have access to anyone. We’ve found clinicians who have been caring for this community for 10, 20, 30 years, and we allow them to do this work remotely. Our average wait times for longer-term needs are anywhere from two to five days. The national average [wait time] for gender-affirming hormone therapy, for example, is six months.
What is your biggest current challenge?
We live in a deeply divided world where one political party in particular has decided that trans issues are going to be a wedge issue for them. Florida, for example, just passed a law that prevents [trans] folks from getting care. We have that startup mindset of, “How do we stay nimble enough that we can be quickly responsive to this shifting legislative landscape while also making sure that we continue to invest in long-term growth?”
What don’t people know about you?
I’m not somebody who wanted to be a CEO. I have two little kids, and they are my North Star. It wasn’t in my plan for this to happen!
The Fortune Founders Forum is a community of entrepreneurs chosen by Fortune’s editorial team to participate at the annual Brainstorm Tech conference, which took place in Deer Valley, Utah, in July. Our inaugural cohort was selected based on a variety of factors, including the potential impact of their companies, and reflected a diversity of geographies, sectors, and demographics.
