CAN SHE MAKE IT GEL?
WHEN YOUR JOB involves trying to bring to market what could be the biggest breakthrough in birth control since the pill, you keep your mornings predictable. Every weekday, Saundra Pelletier gets up at 4:30 a.m., trying not to wake her 10-year-old son while she slips into her workout gear, which includes a sweatshirt with the word bullshit printed on the left shoulder. By 5, the 48-year-old single mom—who lives about a half hour from the San Diego offices of her company, Evofem Biosciences—is on the phone, often with her investors in London. At 5:30, still on the phone, Pelletier exits her garage with a quick nod to the nanny, who is on her way in. Half an hour later, she’s at either CrossFit or Fitwall, where she can work all the major muscle groups in 40 minutes. As the cool-down session begins, Pelletier bolts, already en route to her next stop and a triple soy latte from Starbucks. Since there are no locker rooms at either gym, she swings back home—the phone automatically clicking over to a waterproof speaker in her bathroom—to clean up. Back in her car, she dictates emails to her assistant, until arriving at the office by 8:30. “We get quite a lot done, actually,” she says.
But there’s always room for improvement. When Thomas Lynch, the chairman of Evofem’s board and the head of Ireland’s largest hospital group, asked what he could do to thank Pelletier for her work as CEO—aside from stock—she responded by asking that a shower be installed at the office. “So what you’re telling me,” he said, “is you want something that lets you work more?” She did. (Lynch obliged.)
In Pelletier’s list of priorities, her morning routine comes third, after only her son and her companies. That leaves her mom and her fiancé (the founder of apparel company Athleta) duking it out for fourth place.
Perhaps the reason Pelletier is so wedded to early-morning certainty is not because of any deficiencies in her relationships with her loved ones, but because her company is dealing with a level of uncertainty that most startups, and their founders, will never contend with. “We’ve had a significant amount of failure,” Pelletier concedes. That uncertainty may explain why, when everyone in her son’s class at school had to say what their parents would like as a holiday gift, her son replied: “My momma would like a dirty martini.”
For Pelletier to achieve Evofem’s goal of becoming a global leader in
