Laura Yecies is the CEO of Bone Health Technologies, whose first product is Osteoboost, a device for treating postmenopausal women with osteopenia. Osteoboost is the only FDA-approved device that addresses the very common loss of bone mass density in this patient population.
Ben Creo is a Visiting Lecturer at Harvard Business School, where he co-teaches the “Innovating in Health Care” course alongside its founder, Prof. Regina Herzlinger, and Executive Fellows Brian Walker and Dr. Lee Kaplan. Ben is an author of the HBS case study: Herzlinger, Regina E., Ben Creo, Jacob M. Cook, and Rachel Lev-Corn. “Osteoboost: Go-To-Market Strategy in a Healthcare Startup” Harvard Business School Case 325-135, July 2025.
Ben Creo: Laura, you’ve held leadership roles at major tech companies such as Netscape, Yahoo, Checkpoint, you’ve led startups in the tech space. What catalyzed the shift from the tech sector to leading a healthcare startup?
Laura Yecies: I grew up in a family of doctors, and when I was a kid, I thought I’d be a doctor. When I was in college and business school, the PC era grabbed my attention because I just really love using technology to solve problems. I was lucky to be able to do that for about 25 years at companies that touched many millions of users. After I sold one company, Catch, to Apple, I knew I didn’t want to retire and thought about moving into healthcare in a clinical role. I took pre-med classes at Berkeley, but I really missed what I was doing in technology and having so much more of a leveraged impact. I saw the convergence happening in health technology and realized that was going to be my focus. I had also encountered health issues in my family and saw a lot of gaps in healthcare that were of interest to me. I’m really glad I made that shift into healthcare, and very glad I worked in tech companies before that.
Ben Creo: What were some of the gaps in healthcare that motivated you to say, ‘I can solve that’?
Laura Yecies: I saw gaps in product usability. I saw gaps in diagnostic accuracy. I also saw gaps in attention and innovation focus, even when a health problem seriously affects many people. For instance, more women die of hip fractures, which, of course, relates to osteoporosis, than die of breast cancer. While I’m glad about the many new developments in breast cancer, they’re disproportionate when compared to osteoporosis.
Ben Creo: How did your early experiences at tech companies shape the way you now lead in healthcare?
Laura Yecies: You can move quickly in tech companies, so I can get very impatient. When you’re working in a clinical field, you can’t always rush the science and the clinical studies. But I think my tech experience has kept my foot on the gas. Tech has also taught me to focus on user experience and usability; it’s those products that would typically win, particularly in consumer tech and increasingly, in enterprise tech.
Ben Creo: What motivated you, then, to step into the CEO role at Bone Health Technologies?
Laura Yecies: My grandmother had osteoporosis, my mother has it. My dad worked in a nursing home as medical director, and I worked there in college. It gets back to this unmet need and lack of innovation. We didn’t know if our osteopenia product would work. We had reasons to believe it would, but it wasn’t proven. My personal investment thesis was that if it worked, there would be a great commercial opportunity. It’s exciting, several years later in this early stage of commercialization, to see the demand and interest from patients and doctors.
Ben Creo: Your first product, Osteoboost, is a wearable device for women with osteopenia. What has surprised you the most about building this company at the intersection of women’s health, medical devices, and digital health?
Laura Yecies: I am not surprised that there’s a lot of demand, but it’s surprising that there isn’t more consensus around the importance of fighting osteoporosis. A lot of patients just accept that older women will get frail, that it’s a natural part of aging to lose bone. And of course, that’s true. But it’s also a natural part of aging that your arteries get stiffer and that you get high blood pressure, and we don’t accept that. Cancer is tied to aging, too, and we fight it. But there are visionary researchers, investors, employees and team members who are really focusing with me on this area. I have found the lack of investment in women’s health in general very surprising. It means that there is a bigger opportunity for those who do invest, but it does seem like a market failure, to use the business school term.
Ben Creo: Absolutely. McKinsey & Company has called women’s health “a $1 trillion opportunity.” What unique perspectives do you believe women leaders bring to healthcare innovation, especially in a product category like yours that affect female patients?
Laura Yecies: An HBS study found that patents for women’s health were mostly filed by women scientists or women inventors. This idea that we tend to be motivated to work on problems that touch us personally reminds me of my late father-in-law, who was an allergist and had terrible allergies. He empathized with his patients. Now, I’ve had male physicians, and I’ve seen male women’s health executives who are very empathetic, but I do think that women leaders bring a more intimate, deep level of empathy to the problem. Things may be more obvious to them, both what the need is and how to address it.
Ben Creo: Are there unique challenges you face as a female CEO that maybe your male counterparts have not experienced?
Laura Yecies: Women do raise a disproportionately low amount of capital, but I’m not sure if that’s been a challenge for us. Because there are fewer women CEOs, you may stand out more. Raising capital has been challenging for us, but we have managed to do it in a time when many other medical early-stage medical devices have not. There are certainly people who are not as comfortable with women in leadership roles. I’ve interacted with those individuals. But I’ve also had advisors and supporters who try to support women entrepreneurs, so I’ve benefited as well. And I try to pay that forward with other women CEOs.
Ben Creo: How do you handle those moments when there is pushback, when someone is maybe underestimating, second-guessing you? What strategies have you used that might be helpful for others?
Laura Yecies: I find it motivating. I want to prove people like that wrong, though that doesn’t mean you’ll bring them around. Sometimes you also have choices about who you work with, like when building a board. Would these people choose to be on my board? Probably not. Frankly, for the most part, my experience has been the opposite. As I mentioned, osteoporosis hasn’t been a high-investment area, so people who are working in the field are mission driven. It couldn’t be more of a pleasure to work with them, learn from them. For instance, I look at my two independent board members: They have stock in the company, they don’t get cash compensation. They’re mission-driven, too.
Ben Creo: What do you think about strategies to increase women representation in healthcare startups and in leading healthcare firms? There’s an enormous financial opportunity there, but their leadership is very underrepresented.
Laura Yecies: I think you have to look at different areas. Take investors. How are they screening their deals? How are they getting connected to deals? People in their networks are people like themselves. And so, I think there are strategies to broaden and level the playing field in education. Women comprise more than half of med school students. We’re seeing women go into healthcare, and I see women experience more leadership success in biotech, in digital health, than in pure tech. I see less progress in medical devices, which is very unfortunate because there are important medical devices that need to be developed.
But, when you have some successes and some exits, that ignites more success. When I was raising my first round of equity, one angel group asked if they could increase their investment. The group had an exit from another women’s medical device company, which was acquired by Merck. That success led to greater investment in Osteoboost. We need to highlight those wins because they really influence the mindset.
Ben Creo: Are there mentors whose advice stands out or who you’ve turned to for guidance?
Laura Yecies: Definitely. Karen Drexler has been an important mentor to me, especially as I transitioned into healthcare. My first boss at Netscape has always been an important mentor to me on leadership development. So yes, I’ve had several mentors along the way in different areas.
Ben Creo: Is there any advice they’ve given you that has resonated? Or any advice for other women who might aspire to lead startups in healthcare?
Laura Yecies: This is not specific to women, but general startup advice I’ve given is around the problem of not having the resources to create attention or to market in the same way as, say, a big consumer packaged goods company with a huge advertising budget. They can sort of manufacture a problem or at least accentuate something that people might perceive they need. When you’re a startup, you need to be sparking something. The problem needs to be so important to the consumer, the doctor, the patient, to solve, that they’re going to want your MVP product. And this is what makes me so bullish and optimistic about Osteoboost: you have 90% of patients with clinically diagnosed low-bone density who are not receiving standard-of-care treatments. So, either postmenopausal women don’t care about their bone density, or they don’t like the available options. I’m convinced it’s the latter. I think that’s why we have had a successful pre-order program and why people will purchase the product even without insurance. I think as you’re assessing a startup, you need to really believe in the urgency and importance of what you’re doing, what that problem is, what your solution is.
Ben Creo: Osteoboost is the only FDA-approved medical device for treating this significant problem. Why are you the first device and not the fifth?
Laura Yecies:. The more sanguine, view-of-the-world answer is that it’s biochemically and biomechanically very hard. Bones remodel slowly. It’s hard to come up with drugs that make a meaningful improvement without unwanted side effects, and it’s hard for a device to show a statistically significant benefit. Because it’s hard, people haven’t done it, or they’ve stopped doing it. Pfizer, Lilly, Merck have all exited the field. So that’s one potential answer. It’s not a very satisfying answer, though: We have CRISPR gene therapy, a new vaccine for pancreatic cancer, all kinds of cool artificial limbs.
Osteoboost is leveraging existing technology. It’s not like we split the atom. So then, you get to the why. That seems to be around a lack of motivation. Society accepts that older women get frail and fracture. Do we care less about the health of older women than men? There’s lots of data that argues that maybe we do. We love our grandmothers and mothers and aunts, but as a society or as a system, we’ve accepted substandard care. I think there’s some combination of those two, the difficulty and the lack of priority and focus.
Ben Creo: Why might it seem less care is invested in the needs of our grandmothers and moms?
Laura Yecies: I see women say this about themselves – fractures are a natural part of aging. The other thing about bone health is it’s a bit insidious. The hip fracture scenario is dramatic. But, in your 50s, 60s and 70s, bone loss might not seem so dramatic. Maybe that’s part of the problem. But then, when you look at high blood pressure, we generally intervene early, managing blood pressure in the 40s, 50s, 60s to prevent stroke in the 70s. So why aren’t we doing that with osteoporosis? I address that issue in an article I wrote. The quality of someone’s life in their last decade, maybe their last two decades, typically comes down to their musculoskeletal health and their brain. Have you been able to keep your mind intact? And then, with your musculoskeletal system, can you get around? Can you play with your grandchildren? Can you do your activities? If you’ve had a pile of vertebral compression fractures, it’s not so easy to do those things.
Ben Creo: When you’re communicating with both medical professionals and patients regarding a new medical device, how do you build trust to change the narrative?
Laura Yecies: With medical professionals, it is partially FDA approval. We could have pursued a Class 1, over-the-counter route, but we believed gaining trust and credibility would be harder. So, we held ourselves to a higher standard, conducting a randomized controlled trial. And then, through the FDA de novo process, we can build trust with both patients and doctors. Doctors also want to see peer-reviewed studies. We have a manuscript available on JBMR+, a highly regarded bone journal. We also need to talk to medical professionals. They want to see the device. We’re seeing a lot of demand driven by patients who are looking for non-drug options or looking for early interventions. And then we’re also fortunate that our scientific advisors and our investigators are highly respected; as my chief medical officer says, ‘you are who you hang out with’.
Ben Creo: As your firm is growing, as you’re trying to fulfill your mission, what are the values that drive you, or the non-negotiables you have?
Laura Yecies: How I treat people, what I’m doing for the people on our team, how I work with them, that they get meaning and enjoyment from their work. And then what we’re doing for patients. If we’re not benefiting patients, we have to change what we’re doing. That’s our whole purpose.
Ben Creo: What motivates you day-to-day as you build Osteoboost?
Laura Yecies: When I was CEO of SugarSync, I used to hear from users helped by the product. Now I hear from patients, and it’s even more motivating. These early patients found us, they pre-ordered the product, they really care about their bone health, and they’re so excited to have the product and this sense of empowerment. I feel very grateful for the opportunity to work on that, and it keeps our team going.
Ben Creo: Are recent decisions you’ve made as a CEO that you’re especially proud of?
Laura Yecies: I think our general strategy. We acquired another company to build out our solution, so I’m proud of that decision. I’m proud of the team I brought together. I’m proud of how we’ve built the product, the quality of our research.
Ben Creo: In five years, what’s your vision for Bone Health Technologies? And what might be some of the key indicators or metrics that say, yes, we’ve succeeded?
Laura Yecies: My vision is that we are impacting millions of patients. There’s clearly an enormous market, and so that’s my goal: To be improving bone health for millions of people – that we’re intervening early, that patients slow or delay or prevent bone loss. My goal is that women can expect their bone health to be treated and optimized. Half of all women now are fracturing due to osteoporosis. How can we cut that in half? We’re an aging society and other health conditions are also harming our bones, so it’s a growing problem. We want to reverse that and go in the other direction.
Now that people see that women do care about their bone health, maybe there’ll be additional solutions that are complementary.
Ben Creo: You’re a small firm in the healthcare space. If you could change one thing about how the U.S. healthcare system treats innovations from small firms, what would that be?
Laura Yecies: The whole process of getting reimbursement is expensive and difficult for startups to navigate. In the medical device field, there’s been a lot of research, especially out of Biodesign, showing that the process is much slower than for pharmaceuticals. And I don’t see any good reason for that. Devices can be economical, they can have tremendous health impact.
Ben Creo: Final question: What advice would you give to someone stepping into their first startup CEO role?
Laura Yecies: Put the right team in place and have the right skills around you. Do you need regulatory? Do you need clinical? Is it really a software play? As the CEO, you’ll have some skills, you won’t have all. Of course, you need to make sure that you have defined a problem that can drive funding, patient purchase, clinician purchase. And then, make sure you have the passion for what you’re going to do. Look at big recent healthcare exits, like Hinge, they’ve been at it for a while. You have to have that mindset. It’s not typically a quick hit. But hopefully, it’s something that you’re passionate about, and you’re working with a good team. After all, it’s the journey—life, liberty, and the happiness of pursuit.
Ben Creo: That’s great advice. Laura, thank you so much.