The Worst Someone Will Tell You is No.
The story of Pranitha Patil building Function Health, and what happens when women stop waiting for a system that was never built for them.
‘The Worst Someone Will Tell You is No.’
That’s my motto. Has been for as long as I can remember. It’s what I tell my kids when they’re nervous to try something. It’s what I come back to when I’m afraid to make an ask I’m not sure will land. It’s the simplest thing I know about building anything - a company, a career, a life that actually looks like what you want.
The worst someone will tell you is no. And if they say no, you find the person who says yes.
Pranitha Patil heard no from the medical system for a decade. And she used that experience, that rejection, and found inspiration in it to build Function Health.
The no she was handed.
Pranitha was 16 when she was diagnosed with PCOS. In her early 20s, pre-diabetes and high cholesterol entered the picture. She was working as a consultant at Accenture, traveling five days a week, eating whatever she could get on the road, managing two chronic conditions without a real roadmap.
At 25, she sat in a doctor’s office and was told her cholesterol was too high. She was also told she couldn’t go on a statin. Not because medication wasn’t the right call, but because no clinical research existed for someone like her. Young. South Asian. Female. The drug existed. The test existed. The science existed. The data on her specific body did not.
That’s a particular kind of no. The kind that isn’t even a decision, it’s an absence. A system that never accounted for you, so it has nothing to offer when you show up.
Most people accept that no. They go home, they manage what they can, they hope for the best.
Pranitha went home and started a spreadsheet.
The answer she built herself.
For years, she tracked her own biomarkers. Updated the spreadsheet through every career transition, every new city, every annual physical. Ran experiments on her own diet. Noticed patterns. Made connections between what she ate, how she moved, and what the numbers showed. She became, as she said, her own baseline, because no clinical baseline existed for her.
In 2021, she met her co-founder Jonathan, who had an idea: make biomarker data as accessible as possible. Pranitha said yes immediately. Because she knew, from years of keeping that spreadsheet alone, what access to your own health data actually does for a person.
It unlocks power.
Function Health now has nearly 500 employees. It has delivered over 50 million health results. Fifty-five percent of its members are women. That last number is not a coincidence. It’s what happens when you build something that answers a no women have been receiving from healthcare for generations.
The ‘no’ women’s health has always handed us.
We talked about perimenopause in this episode. About the fact that some OB-GYNs receive only a few hours of training on menopause, for something that can span a decade of a woman’s life. About how our mothers went through it without language for it, without options, often handed antidepressants and told that what they were experiencing was something else entirely.
The medical system’s response to women’s health has, for a very long time, been a version of no. No, we don’t have research on that. No, we don’t have a baseline for you. No, we can’t explain why every symptom you’re experiencing is apparently the same symptom.
What Pranitha is building is an infrastructure for yes. A longitudinal record of your own body, built over time, so that when things change - and they will, at every stage - you have somewhere to return to. Data that belongs to you. A picture of your health that you actually get to see.
That’s not a luxury. It’s what should have always been available.
The ‘no’ she refused about motherhood.
Pranitha had her first baby last year. Her son is almost one. She became a first-time mother while Function was scaling past 400 employees, while funding rounds were closing, while everything was in motion.
She did both things. She is still doing both things.
I asked her about it directly - what it actually looked like, not the version in the press release. And she said something I want to write down and keep: “The thing nobody tells you about being a founder and a new mother? That it can absolutely coexist. You can crush it.”
Everyone around her kept framing it as a tension. Two things pulling against each other. She refused that frame. She and her husband looked at their life, their ambitions, their timing, and designed around it. He stepped back from work this season. She sprints. They know it’s time-bound. They built accordingly. Her breadwinner story is a team story, the way most of them are when you look closely enough.
She didn’t accept the no. She designed a different answer.
The ‘no’ her father defied first.
Pranitha grew up in a traditional Indian household. Her father has a PhD; her mother, a master’s in computer science; her older sister is an OBGYN. Academic achievement was the air they breathed. And in Indian culture - she said this plainly - having daughters is still not always celebrated the way having sons is. Boys are still, in many places, still the expectation.
Her father had two daughters. And he told both of them: you have to be financially independent. You have to be able to be on your own. Find a partner, yes — but make sure you have your own money.
That was rare. That was him saying no to a cultural expectation, and yes to something different for his daughters. And Pranitha carried that yes all the way to co-founding a health company that is changing what women know about their own bodies.
The worst someone will tell you is no. And sometimes the most important yes in your life starts with someone who refused the no before you were even old enough to ask.
It will all be okay.
I asked Pranitha what she would tell her 25-year-old self. The one packing lunches in a suitcase to survive road trips at Accenture, secretly managing two chronic conditions, keeping a spreadsheet nobody else knew about because the system had nothing better to offer her.
She said: it will all be okay. And maybe one day you’ll change a bunch of lives because of this thing you’re doing on your own.
That 25-year-old got handed a lot of no. No research for you. No data on your specific body. No roadmap for what you’re managing. She took all of it and built the answer herself.
The worst someone will tell you is no. And sometimes the no is the beginning.
Listen to the full conversation wherever you get your podcasts.
— Alexis
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