Julia Cheek, founder and CEO of Everlywell, has spent the past decade building at the intersection of healthcare, technology, and consumer access. What began as a response to her own experience navigating the healthcare system has grown into a company serving millions of people and helping reshape how diagnostic testing and virtual care are delivered.
In a recent fireside chat with The WIE Suite’s Dee Poku, Cheek reflected on the realities of building a healthcare company from the ground up, from raising capital as a first-time founder to scaling a team, navigating regulation, making acquisitions, and adapting to the rapid rise of AI. Her story is ultimately one of recognizing a problem before the market was ready for it—and having the conviction to keep building.
Cheek did not come from healthcare or technology. Her exposure to entrepreneurship began at Harvard, where she was surrounded by founders and saw entrepreneurship as a viable career path for the first time. But it was her own experience as a patient that ultimately gave her the idea for Everlywell.
She saw an opportunity to make healthcare testing more accessible, convenient, and transparent. Rather than trying to reinvent the science, Cheek focused on bringing together existing technologies, laboratories, physicians, and an e-commerce experience in a way that made sense for consumers.
That distinction became an important part of her approach. “My expertise was clearly not in inventing novel science,” she explained. Instead, she understood the consumer problem and built the platform around solving it.
For founders entering complex industries, Cheek believes there can be value in not being overly immersed in the industry's traditional way of doing things. Coming in as the patient or consumer can offer a different perspective—and sometimes that distance is exactly what allows a founder to see a new path through a complicated system.
Cheek’s early fundraising journey was far from straightforward. As a solo, non-technical founder without healthcare experience, she did not fit the traditional venture capital profile. Rather than allowing that to stop her, she changed who she was pitching.
Her earliest investors included doctors who had founded businesses themselves and angel investors who understood the mission behind the company. Institutional venture capital came later, once Everlywell had already generated significant revenue and demonstrated traction.
For Cheek, the lesson was simple: you don't need everyone to believe in the idea. You need to find the people who do.
That early independence also gave Everlywell room to build and learn without the pressure of institutional expectations before the company had proven its model.
Perhaps one of the most candid parts of the conversation was Cheek’s reflection on her own leadership evolution.
As the company grew, she received the familiar advice that founders should step back, delegate more, and become increasingly removed from the details of the business. But Cheek found that trying to follow that formula created more stress—not less.
Her answer was to stop trying to become a different kind of leader.
Cheek describes herself as someone who operates in the details and expects a high level of accountability from her team. Rather than seeing that as something she needed to eliminate, she learned to build a leadership team that worked well with her style.
“I have to find leaders who enjoy this style,” she said. “I can flex 20%. I can’t be a totally different person.”
For Cheek, effective leadership isn't about conforming to a prescribed model. It's about understanding how you work best, being honest about where you need support, and finding people whose strengths complement your own.
As Everlywell has grown, Cheek has learned to filter an enormous amount of information—from data and customer feedback to advisors, employees, competitors, and industry experts.
Her approach is not to ignore outside input, but to understand where it is coming from.
Everyone brings bias to a conversation, she noted, and the value of advice depends partly on the person's experience, role, and track record. Ultimately, though, the responsibility for the decision remains with the leader.
Cheek also believes speed matters. Leaders will inevitably be wrong sometimes. The goal isn't to eliminate every possibility of making the wrong decision; it's to make thoughtful decisions quickly enough that you can adjust when necessary.
“If it is a one-way decision,” she explained, it deserves more consideration. But even then, you will never have complete certainty. You make the best decision you can with the information available, move forward, and make the next decision.
That ability to keep moving has been central to Everlywell's evolution. The company has repeatedly rethought its strategy, including during and after COVID, expanding from a consumer-focused testing company into a much broader healthcare platform.
Cheek is particularly candid about the pressure female leaders face to be liked.
She has always been comfortable making decisions based on what she believes is right, but she acknowledges that wanting people to like her—and wanting to be perceived as a good leader—has been harder to let go of.
Eventually, she realized that trying to control other people's perceptions is a losing game.
As a female CEO, she says, there will always be judgments about how you lead, the decisions you make, and the mistakes you inevitably make. The answer isn't to manage those perceptions. It's to keep doing the work.
“You can't want or try to be popular or liked because that will unduly influence your decision making,” she said.
For leaders, that may be one of the hardest lessons to internalize—and one of the most liberating.
Today, Cheek is looking at another major inflection point: AI.
She sees enormous potential for AI across healthcare, from care navigation and clinical documentation to diagnostics, drug discovery, and the way clinicians spend their time. But she also believes the technology is changing more than individual processes. It is changing the fundamental economics of how companies can be built.
The teams of the future will look different, too. Everlywell is investing in senior engineering, AI infrastructure, and operations while giving its existing team the tools to adapt. Cheek expects everyone's job to evolve as AI becomes increasingly embedded in the business.
Her view is optimistic but practical: move quickly, understand the boundaries, and build responsibly within them.
For Cheek, the next chapter is not about recreating what worked before. It is about recognizing that the rules have changed—and being willing to change with them.
After a decade of building, scaling, and reinventing Everlywell, her approach remains remarkably consistent: identify a real problem, stay close to the customer, make decisions with conviction, and keep moving forward.
The market may not always be ready when you are. But that doesn't necessarily mean you're too early. Sometimes, it means you're building what comes next.
