Running Off the Side of a Mountain: On Hang Gliding and Building Nadi in Public.

Published: 2025

A while ago, I stood on the edge of a mountain in Switzerland, strapped into a hang glider, and thought: what the hell am I doing?

Sharing Nadi publicly for the first time gave me exactly the same feeling.

The hang gliding instructor told me: “When I say run, you RUN.” And building in public, for me, feels precisely like that moment before I ran. Terrifying.

The scariest part is before the run

Here is what I learned on that mountain, and what has turned out to be true of building a business too: the scariest part is not the run itself. It is the bit before — when you are still on solid ground, when every sensible bone in your body is screaming “WHAT ARE YOU THINKING?”

But then you run. And you are flying.

The adrenaline, the relief, the pure joy — I felt all of it soaring through the Swiss clouds. And I felt a version of it again, unexpectedly, when I started sharing Nadi and women began responding. Comments and DMs from women saying that the thing I had been thinking about for so long actually resonated with them. Stories I never expected. Messages asking how they could help. A waitlist growing faster than I imagined.

I am still terrified. But I am also exhilarated. It turns out running off the side of a mountain is surprisingly good preparation for leaving a stable career and throwing yourself into building a business.

“I work in finance. Why am I building in women's health? And am I allowed?”

This is the question I get, in various forms, quite a lot. So let me answer it directly.

I would like us to stop working in silos. Health affects wealth, and wealth affects health. How incredible would it be if we built solutions with that connection genuinely in mind?

The logic is not complicated. When your body forces you to slow down — through illness, chronic conditions, or the health events that punctuate many women's lives — it often means less income, fewer savings, and more stress about future security. And the reverse is equally true: without financial stability, it is much harder to access the care, the rest, and the lifestyle choices that support good health.

This health–wealth loop hits women particularly hard. I have written in more detail about the specific numbers elsewhere on this blog — the pension gaps, the cost of gynaecological conditions to the economy, the investment gap between men and women. The pattern they describe is consistent and stark: women's health challenges translate, over a lifetime, into financial disadvantage. Closing the women's health gap could add at least $1 trillion to the global economy annually by 2040 — which tells you the scale of what is currently being lost.

There is also a knock-on effect I think about a lot: the health–wealth loop almost certainly means fewer women taking the risk of entrepreneurship or careers with more flexible but less reliable income. When your financial position is more precarious to begin with, the safety net for risk-taking is thinner. Which means we are losing not just income, but innovation and ambition.

Why I am building anyway

So: am I allowed to work in finance and build in women's health? I think the more useful question is why these are considered separate domains at all.

I want to be part of the solutions that close the gaps the statistics describe. I want to help women live healthier, wealthier lives — and, not incidentally, save the economy a very large amount of money in the process. Nadi is my attempt to build at exactly the intersection that most systems keep artificially separate.

And I would genuinely love to connect with others who want to do the same. Building in public is terrifying. It is also, it turns out, the only way to find the people who have been waiting for the thing you are building.

Anyone else done something recently that felt like running off the side of a mountain? I can report that the view, once you are flying, is worth it.