Pay attention to what you can’t stop thinking about. Sometimes, your gut knows before your brain does.

By Betsy Vereckey 

“I was the most unlikely candidate to quit my job and start my own company,” recalls Stephiney Foley, T’18.

Foley is the founder and CEO of Yuzi Care, a managed marketplace that helps parents discover, book and manage their health care as they navigate new parenthood. The platform also provides an electronic health record (EHR) system tailored for perinatal care providers—ranging from doulas and pelvic floor physical therapists to mental health specialists and newborn care specialists (NCS).

When she launched Yuzi in 2023, Foley was the sole breadwinner for her family, with two young children in daycare and a mortgage to cover.

But the experience of becoming a mother changed her completely. Following the birth of her second child, Foley experienced postpartum depression, “the biggest hormonal drop women ever experience, even more than menopause,” she says.

“There’s so many aspects to postpartum that no one talks about,” Foley says. “Most people don’t understand the full weight of that experience until they’ve been through it, often not until their second or third child, and each pregnancy is different.”

At the time, Foley was working at Amazon as a technical product leader. She started to investigate the postpartum market and realized it was an untapped business opportunity. Even though 85 percent of women experience perinatal mood anxiety disorder after having children, there aren’t many resources to help them through it.

“I thought, ‘If I don’t start my own business, will I regret it 30 years from now when I’m 70?’ The answer was yes,” she says.

This wasn’t Foley’s first career pivot. She attended West Point and served in the military for
around seven years as a platoon leader in Afghanistan and Hawaii and as a supply chain and operations officer in California. Foley is an immigrant who was naturalized as a U.S. citizen a week before she started West Point. She joined the military because she “wanted to give back to the country that has given me so much,” she says.

After Foley left the military, she enrolled at Tuck, thinking she might go into investment banking. While there, she became an Ayers Center for Entrepreneurship and Private Equity Fellow and was co-president of the Entrepreneurship Club. She began to wonder if she might end up an entrepreneur like her mother, who owned her own real estate development business in Shanghai.

By the time Foley was ready to start Yuzi Care, she had accumulated a variety of professional experiences that paved the way, from operations and leadership experience in the military to private sector experience from Amazon and Tesla.

To gain a deeper understanding of the birthing process, Foley became a doula herself. She partnered with hospital systems and employers to build out a network and created a software platform to power the entire experience for consumers. Today, mothers and fathers use the platform to arrange services such as 24/7 healthcare support and education on breastfeeding. Users can also sign up for support on mental health issues.

Foley is still connected to her Tuck classmates via a group chat comprised of fellow entrepreneurs who function as her support network.

“I didn’t come into this with a health care background, but Tuck’s focus on general management meant I knew how to ask the right questions, build the right team, and adapt quickly,” she says. “That’s the beauty of a Tuck education: It doesn’t just train you for the path ahead. It equips you to chart a new one when the landscape changes.”

This story originally appeared in print in Tuck Today magazine.