What we talked about
In this episode, you’ll learn why proactive hormone testing can be life-changing for women, and how it can give you more options, clarity, and press of mind for your future.
Svetlana Grinchenko, Co-Founder and Chief Business Officer at Strawberry Health, shares her journey from a corporate career at PwC and leading a successful community startup for tech professionals to building a mission-driven health-tech company focused on proactive hormonal health for women.
Show notes
Svetlana Grinchenko discovered her own testosterone deficiency after five or six years of doctors attributing her fatigue to startup stress, having a child, and changing countries, none of which was the actual cause. That personal experience drives how she explains the central problem: regular gynecologists receive only a couple of hours of hormone training in medical school, which means the gap in women’s hormonal health isn’t a technology problem or a cost problem, it is primarily a knowledge problem.
What we covered
- One in every five to six US families struggles with infertility, yet most assume the problem lies with the woman. Svetlana noted that around 30 to 40% of infertility cases are connected to the male partner’s biology, a figure that stays invisible partly because women are the ones who most often seek testing first.
- The most common complaint Svetlana hears doctors receive from women in their forties is “I don’t feel like myself”, a description that gives a physician almost nothing to act on. Strawberry Health’s educational work focuses on teaching women to translate that feeling into specific, actionable symptoms: “I’m not sleeping as well as I did in my twenties, I have difficulty falling asleep, my mood swings more often.” That language change shifts a clinical conversation entirely.
- The at-home test Strawberry Health provides includes antimüllerian hormone (AMH), which measures ovarian reserve, how many eggs a woman has remaining. Women are born with all the eggs they will ever have, and that number declines with every menstrual cycle. Svetlana described Bay Area customers in their early thirties who ordered the test for general health reasons and discovered their ovarian reserve was lower than expected for their age, prompting them to freeze eggs earlier than they had planned.
- Testosterone in women is almost never tested by primary care providers, even though Svetlana describes it as “the hormone of energy and vitality.” Her own deficiency was missed for years while doctors explored iron deficiency and thyroid issues. Once she identified the root cause, she describes the experience as profound relief, “I wasn’t making things up in my mind.”
- Doctors are not ordering routine hormonal tests partly because they do not know what to do with the results. Strawberry Health’s approach is to give women the data and the language so they can walk into a medical appointment prepared, the goal is not to replace the physician but to make that conversation possible in the first place.
- Svetlana’s long-term vision is that every woman, from the moment she becomes fertile, tests her hormones at least annually and builds a longitudinal baseline, so that when she transitions into perimenopause, or when she wants to plan a pregnancy, she already knows her personal dynamics rather than discovering a problem at the point when options have narrowed.
About Svetlana
Svetlana Grinchenko is the co-founder and Chief Business Officer of Strawberry Health, a health tech company making at-home hormone and fertility testing accessible and actionable for women across the US. She is also a mother and an advocate for closing the education gap in women’s hormonal health.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/svetlana-grinchenko
- Website: https://www.joinstrawberry.com
Episode 40 of the PreVetted Podcast.