khaledkteily

Well done

Wow, interesting, had never even thought about that. I suppose the vast majority of our clients are actively trying to (or planning on someday trying to) have children.

But yes heat-based contraception would be a good bet. Saunas, hot tubs, tight underwear and your laptop on your lap 24/7!

You always want to be using 2.5-3 months to be on the safe side. There's no guarantee anything you do will take effect before then. Happy to connect you to our urologist if you have more specific questions!

That's on the list, too! I was in Singapore in late 2019 starting to do the research (would be our base in Asia). It'll take time, of course.

The lord works in mysterious ways!!

Yep - this is a great question and I have tons of thoughts here.

First and foremost: sperm quality is an indicator of overall health, and the two are closely correlated. This is both good and bad.

Good because living a healthier lifestyle improves sperm quality. Bad because there is no easy fix to improve sperm quality. Supplements are fine, and there is some limited research to support them, but they are not a panacea.

We brought on a sperm expert from Harvard - Dr. Mariel Arvizu - to create a protocol to assess and evaluate the lifestyle of our clients and create personalized recommendations based on what we believe is highest impact.

We bucket our recommendations into categories like nutrition, sleep habits, etc. and reference WHO or other trusted resources when possible.

We also get you in touch with a urologist (we have one on-staff) to do a consult if needed. He can discuss your specific case and provide insight.

Lastly, it depends on the results of your analysis. For example, morphology (how "normal" your sperm is) can be significantly impacted by things like using saunas, hot tubs, etc. or even from having the flu. There are simple and easy changes you can make to address things like that.

Sperm takes about 2.5-3 months to regenerate, so any changes you make today will be reflected in your sperm analysis after that time period.

Haha! You and me both! The worst part, to me, was it being referred to as "the specimen". I don't know why that always weirded me out.

Sperm can actually survive fine for 1-2 hours hours when kept near body temperature, so a 1-hour courier service is sufficient (and it usually takes less than 60 minutes). If there were any issues, we'd know when it arrived at the clinic.

For anyone outside of major cities, we do overnight shipping with Fedex's biohazardous materials division. We use a transport medium that keeps sperm alive for up to 48 hours during transit. You add it to the sperm, it protects it during that period, and it gets washed out (via centrifuge) when it arrives at our clinic. It's not perfect - you can expect to lose approx. 10-15% motility during that time, but is particularly useful for folks in rural areas or far from fertility clinics.

PS Always love hearing other folks' clinic stories... my favourite is hearing how clinics have their pornography stolen ALL the time and have to frequently re-stock.

Haha! You joke, but there are concerns that COVID-19 might affect male fertility (we are running a study to test this). So it's not the craziest idea to think about preserving your fertility during a global pandemic...

Hey - I hear you, but I don't think that's entirely fair. We are obviously building a company that we believe will go far, and will be around for decades, but we recognize there's no guarantee that will happen.

In a worst case scenario, folks could keep their sample frozen where it is and pay retail rates at those facilities instead of the wholesale rates we offer.

We are real people who care a lot about the people who are using their service, and their ability to have kids in the future. We would genuinely do everything we could to support.

Yes! Well first and foremost, Alyssa is an amazing entrepreneur, someone I really enjoy speaking with, and is Canadian, so not much more to ask for there.

We catch up from time to time and I can imagine us partnering down the line. Notably, we do already partner with major female fertility companies in this space to offer packages for couples (like with Ava Fertility, a very rigorous and data-driven company that helps women track their ovulation periods)

I'll just add that we actually do testing & freezing as two linked but independent offerings. So Lilia matches the freezing component of what we do. A company like Modern Fertility (also YC) is closer to the testing component of what we do.

As soon as COVID allows it... you can keep in touch with [email protected].

PS many of us are Canadian so we get this question from friends. A temporary measure, once the borders re-open, is to simply drive anywhere across the US border, have it picked up that day, and then return to Canada.

Facility backup generators activate within seconds of an outage, and are load-tested regularly for 30 minutes. In case of heat/smoke/motion detection, facilities managers are sent smartphone alerts. There are very clear SOPs for almost every possibility.

THAT SAID, you can plan for all kinds of issues - power outages, natural disasters, human error, technical error, etc. - but you will never be able to bring risk down to zero.

For this reason, we also offer multi-site storage, whereby we divide samples into multiple tanks across multiple locations. AFAIK, we are the only company in this space to do so.

One more thing I'll add to Sarah's answer: in our case, the company was founded by - and run by - healthcare and fertility specialists. We are a healthcare company first, and a consumer company second, not the other way round.

This sounds minor but actually affects a lot of the way we do our work e.g. we ensure rigorous analysis, we take extra de-risking steps around cryostorage, we call clients to share bad results because it's more humane to do, we connect them to our urologist on staff, etc. etc.