Claire Coder

She was born and raised in Toledo, OhioOhioOhio is a state in the Midwestern United States; its capital is Columbus. It joined the Union in 1803 as the 17th state, the first carved from the Northwest Territory, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 11,799,448.Open the full entry. Her mother is an art therapist who worked with low-income communities; she writes that both her father and her grandfather owned rental units, which sparked her interest in real estate.⁠[1][2][3]

She writes on her personal website that her retinas detached when she was in fourth grade and that she was legally blind for one year.⁠[4]

She recalled that her school health teacher handed her a “goodie bag” with a tampon and a pad and little more: “I was forced to go home and figure it out by myself.”⁠[5]

As a teenager she started a button business: she designed, pressed and sold buttons, magnets and compact mirrors to friends and family and on EtsyEtsyEtsy (Etsy, Inc.) is a U.S. public company headquartered in Brooklyn, New York, that operates Etsy, an online marketplace centered on handmade goods, vintage items, and creative products. Founded in 2005, it listed on Nasdaq in 2015 and moved its stock listing to the New York Stock Exchange in 2025. The company acquired the music gear marketplace Reverb, the secondhand fashion marketplace Depop, and the Brazilian handmade marketplace Elo7, then sold all three between 2023 and 2026, returning to operating only the core Etsy marketplace.Open the full entry. On the Rescripted show she placed this at ages 13 to 15 and said that she used the money to pay friends to do her homework; on her blog she writes that the business had no big vision but had real revenue and was profitable from day one, thanks to low overhead and free rent at her parents’ house. The show notes of The Impact Makers Podcast describe her first company as a promotional products company started at 16 and say that she became a top seller on Etsy; Aunt Flow’s own biography likewise says that she launched her first company at 16. Ms. Magazine wrote in 2016 that she had already established and sold one business.⁠[1][6][7][8][9][2]

She writes on her personal website that at 15 she started teaching Zumba in a church basement. At 16 she got her first credit card, which she writes she paid off every single month, and from the same age she began taking risks in the stock market.⁠[4][3]

She writes that she was a top-performing high school student in Toledo, that everyone expected her to go to college, and that the message she heard was “the only way to be successful was to get a college degree”; she had heard of technology founders who dropped out, but the stories of success without a degree all seemed to be about men. Feeling that college was not right for her, she spent hours researching alternatives and so came across the Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry. She first applied as a high school sophomore, at 15, was not selected, and applied again and again.⁠[6]

She also writes that growing up in Toledo she had no exposure to entrepreneurship or venture capital, and that her network there included no accredited investors.⁠[7]

She enrolled at Ohio State UniversityOhio State UniversityOhio State University (officially The Ohio State University) is a university in Columbus, Ohio, United States, established by the state legislature in 1870.Open the full entry, majoring in comparative religion. She has said that she never wanted to go to college—“College really wasn’t for me”—and that she spent her first semester skipping class for networking events and exploring Columbus. The Fisher College of Business article says that she worked at The Calling Center at Ohio State, where she learned fundraising and cold calling; the job, she said, “taught me everything I needed to know about sales.”⁠[2][10][11]

The idea for Aunt Flow came out of a Startup Weekend event in Columbus. In the Ms. Magazine interview she said that it was not until November 2015 that she started to put the pieces together; Paste dates the event to the fall of 2015, and WOSU and Techstars to 2015; the Fisher College of Business and Upworthy give 2016. WOSU and Ms. Magazine describe a 72-hour event, the Fisher College of Business and The Impact Makers Podcast a 54-hour one. Her age at the time is 18 in her own account and in Aunt Flow’s biography, and 19 in the Techstars and BUST articles.⁠[2][12][13][14][11][5][8][15][16]

As she tells it, her period started unexpectedly on the Friday night of the event and she had no supplies; the venue was about a $20 UberUberUber is a technology company headquartered in San Francisco, United States, whose legal name is Uber Technologies, Inc. Co-founded by Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick, it uses digital platforms to connect riders with drivers, delivery consumers with merchants, and shippers with carriers, with main businesses in Mobility, Delivery, and Freight. Dara Khosrowshahi has been chief executive officer since 2017.Open the full entry ride from campus, and the tampon dispenser in the restroom took quarters. The Fisher College of Business article says that toilet paper was all that she found in the bathroom and quotes her: “And so I’m rolling my own tampon.” The Ohio University article has it that her period started in a bathroom stall when she was an undergraduate and that she did not have a quarter to buy a tampon. She has said that the crowd was predominantly male, that she felt uncomfortable asking for a tampon, and that she made up a reason to leave early. From this came her question: if toilet paper is offered for free in bathrooms, why not tampons and pads?⁠[1][14][11][13][5][17][18]

That night she pitched the idea with no business plan and picked up a couple of teammates who worked on it through the weekend; the next day a woman said to her that she wished her company would provide tampons and pads, which persuaded her to keep going. Ms. Magazine wrote that 180 ideas were pitched at the event, that she was one of the only women there, and that Aunt Flow placed second. She said that she could not spend a weekend “pretending that I liked to code another fitness app.”⁠[14][2][12]

She also attended Startup Week in Columbus, when she was 18; the Techstars article says that she attended the event in its first year, spoke in its second and mentored in its third.⁠[7][14]

She dropped out after her first semester. She has said that she went to her guidance counselor’s office to announce it, and that she did not take a leave of absence but dropped out fully. In an article of January 2025 she recalled that nine years earlier, while her classmates were returning to their dorms after winter break, she was scrambling to find an apartment in Columbus, and wrote that she had started Aunt Flow at 18; in a post of March 2022 she wrote that she had left college to start Aunt Flow six years earlier that month. In 2020 she said that she dropped out the day after she had the idea for Aunt Flow. The subtitle of the Causeartist podcast page says that she quit college at 19, and on the show she corrected this: “Actually, I was 18.”⁠[18][10][19][20][21][22][23]

She has said that her parents were unsupportive at first and that after she left university, “My parents stopped talking to me.” Later, she said, her father came to call himself a “flow bro,” and her mother, the art therapist, supported the company’s community outreach. She has also said that it was her father who taught her that perseverance pays.⁠[19][23]

She moved out of her dorm and signed a lease for a three-bedroom apartment in downtown Columbus, renting out the other two bedrooms to cover the rent. She has said that in January 2016 she had no job lined up, had not yet started Aunt Flow and did not know where she was going to live, and called it “the hardest time for my life”; during the first three months of 2016 she struggled to afford tampons herself.⁠[23][20][24]

She took a job as an account executive at a marketing company. She has said that she was the only woman in the office, that she pretended to listen to music through headphones while co-workers degraded women, and that she hid tampons in her sleeve when she had her period; she did not speak up until she quit, and judged herself for it: “I wouldn’t stand up for my gender; I was a phony.” Those first months, she said, were hard: she struggled to make rent and had no college friends. The job gave her experience of running crowdfunding campaigns.⁠[10][8]

She worked several jobs at once to pay for food and save for her first inventory: she herself names two, at a café and at a marketing agency; Paste has her working two waitressing jobs, and the show notes of The Impact Makers Podcast three. She has said that all the money she made waitressing went back into the business. The Fisher College of Business article says that she committed $20,000 of her own money to starting Aunt Flow, at a time when she was “just trying to figure out how to eat.” In 2020 she said that she took no salary for the company’s first two and a half years and lived on her savings.⁠[20][12][8][19][11][25]

At 18 she got her first interview for the Thiel Fellowship, which came with a free trip to San Francisco—the first time she had traveled west of IndianaIndianaIndiana is a state in the Midwestern United States; its capital and largest city is Indianapolis. It was admitted to the Union on December 11, 1816, as the 19th state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 6,785,528.Open the full entry. She thought that she had done well and made lifelong friends there, but she was not selected.⁠[6]

Harlem Capital and other sources date the founding of Aunt Flow to 2016, in Columbus, Ohio. The company began as a buy-one, give-one subscription box: for every box of 100% cotton tampons or pads that a customer bought, it donated a box to an organization serving people without access to menstrual products.⁠[26][2][12]

In May 2016 she opened a crowdfunding campaign with a goal of $25,000; Paste wrote that she found Crowdwise a great platform to work with, since it takes only 5% and does not require companies to give gifts to backers. The show notes of The Impact Makers Podcast say that in 2016 she raised $25,000 through crowdfunding for the first product run. From June to August she worked out suppliers, manufacturing and logistics; she found manufacturers through platforms such as AlibabaAlibabaAlibaba is a technology group focused on commerce, cloud computing, and AI. Founded in 1999 by 18 people led by Jack Ma, it received a major investment from Yahoo in 2005.Open the full entry.⁠[12][8][23]

Pre-sales opened on October 20, 2016; the first day brought 100 paying subscribers and crashed the website. A soft launch with a new back end followed on November 20, and the first shipment went out on December 1. A box of 18 pieces retailed for $13, shipping included, and customers could also subscribe monthly. She put her first month’s revenue at $7,000.⁠[12][2]

She began holding gatherings called “Period Parties” and events called “Menstruation Nation,” the latter in four acts ending with a “Manel” of three to five men; men who joined the conversation were called “FloBros.” She writes that after announcing her first “Menstruation Nation” event she received death threats. Early promotion also included brownies shaped like vulvas, videos of people telling their first-period stories and buttons with pictures of ovaries.⁠[2][21]

When Ms. Magazine interviewed her in October 2016 she was 19; she said that pitching was hard because of her age, her gender and the subject, and that one of her goals was to become a motivational speaker. She has said that back in 2016 Aunt Flow was one of the first companies to remove “feminine hygiene” from all of its branding; she later explained that Aunt Flow is inclusive of all genders, since trans men and people who do not identify with either binary gender also menstruate.⁠[2][1][25][27]

When Paste wrote about her in January 2017 she was working from a tiny apartment in Columbus, with about 30,000 tampons and pads kept in a nearby storage unit and about 300 subscribers; on the team, Lindsey McEntee handled social media and community outreach and Melory Mirashrasi worked on expanding the brand. She gave Paste this line: “Starting a company that no one wants to talk about is fucking difficult.” She later recalled that the project had begun in her apartment and a U-Haul storage unit.⁠[12][19]

By the time of the BUST article in March 2017 there were nearly 500 subscribers. Lindsey McEntee, then 24, was the COO (“Chief Ovulation Officer” in the article); she had found the company while browsing nonprofit jobs, reached out to Coder and come on board the previous fall. Coder’s own title was given as “Chief Estrogen Officer.” The company’s first two local donation partners were OSU Star House and Mid-Ohio Foodbank, and BUST quotes McEntee as saying that it was going to donate 22,000 boxes in that cycle of donations; in the Causeartist interview of the same month Coder said that the company was getting ready to make its first donation, of 22,000 pieces. Coder said that the company had actively supported a ban on the “pink tax” in Ohio. The article says that the two women sometimes struggled to be taken seriously, both because of their ages and because the start-up industry is typically male-dominated.⁠[15][10]

She appeared in Season 1 of TLC’s reality show Girl Starter, in which eight girls competed for $100,000, and on the show she worked with executives from Vera Bradley and Microsoft. Aunt Flow’s biography of her says that a bag she designed for Vera Bradley sold out in 24 hours and that she has her own line of GIFs.⁠[13][9]

When WOSU profiled her in July 2017 she was 20, and the company had a small warehouse on the west side of Columbus holding at least 100,000 pieces, with about 500,000 and then 1 million more on the way; the article says that she had hired her first full-time employee. Businesses could buy Aunt Flow’s products and offer them free in their bathrooms, while individuals could still subscribe. She said that three months after launch she had feared that the company would go under. CityPulse Columbus wrote that month that the company had donated more than 25,000 tampons and pads.⁠[13][24]

Speaking at the Fisher College of Business, she said that three other tampon subscription-box companies were launching when she started, one of which went on to raise $13 million; an analysis of her customers showed that about half were businesses ordering for office bathrooms, and she pivoted to stocking business bathrooms with tampons and pads. Aunt Flow, she said, had no marketing budget and relied on its donation partners to tell its story; it once beat a higher-priced competitor: “We won because we are a certified woman-owned company.”⁠[11]

She has described an early lesson: she wired $15,000 to a new manufacturer without checking its references, it turned out to be a scam, her bank referred her to the police, and as of 2020 the money had not been returned.⁠[22][25]

In 2017 she applied to the Techstars accelerators in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York: she had a call with Los Angeles, reached the final round in Chicago and heard nothing from New York, and was admitted to none.⁠[7]

When Upworthy wrote about her in March 2018 she was 21. She said that within a year the company had come to stock more than 100 businesses across the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry, from local coffee shops to companies such as Viacom and colleges like “Ohio and Brown Universities”; it donated one piece for every 10 that a business bought, had given more than 125,000, and aimed to donate 500,000 in 2018. She often gave talks on menstrual education.⁠[5]

In a blog post of 2018 she writes that Aunt Flow had never paid for marketing and relied on earned media; one headline it used was “19 Year Old Drops Out of College to Talk About Menstruation for a Living,” which she herself calls clickbait. She writes that a feature in ForbesForbesForbes is an American business media brand that began with Forbes magazine, founded by B.C. Forbes in 1917. It is known for rankings such as the Forbes 400, the World’s Billionaires list and 30 Under 30, and operates Forbes.com, ForbesLive events and licensed editions in 81 countries. Since 2014 a majority stake has been held by the Hong Kong investment group Integrated Whale Media; a 2021 plan to list on the New York Stock Exchange through a special purpose acquisition company was terminated in 2022. It is headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey.Open the full entry magazine produced zero sales, whereas a Hello Giggles feature shared by Zooey Deschanel brought hundreds; an editor’s note on the post says that Aunt Flow has since hired public relations firms.⁠[28]

She spoke in the “Leading Through” speaker series at the Fisher College of Business of Ohio State University; the article, dated March 13, 2018, gives her age as 21. The show notes of The Impact Makers Podcast episode released on June 28, 2018 say that she was 21, that the company had donated 100,000 menstrual products the year before and that it served more than a hundred businesses and organizations; she said that she had met ageism and sexism from clients and investors, and that she had no regrets about leaving college, only some mild fear of missing out on dorm life and school pride.⁠[11][8]

In 2018 she applied to Techstars again and was admitted to the New York program, which she calls “my dream”; she has said that she applied six times in all. She moved to New York for three months with her first team member to join Class 142 at Techstars NYC, whose managing director was then Alex Iskold. She writes that Techstars takes 7% for $20,000 and offers $100,000 at the next round, which is tricky to unlock in a high-priced round; half of the founders in her cohort were women and 15% were people of color; and the cohort was one of app developers and technology companies, whereas hers was a hardware company whose only technology was a website. She had no co-founder and never planned on having one. Her verdict is that the program was worth it for her because she needed to build her network, and that Techstars led her to her lead investor, Harlem Capital; she also warns that the cost is incredibly high and that founders must know why they want to go through it.⁠[7][19][14]

She calls 2018 the company’s real starting year, the year in which it found its footing: she hired a director of sales, and the company moved from selling directly to consumers to selling to businesses, working out manufacturing along the way.⁠[23]

In December 2018 Aunt Flow closed a seed round of $1.5 million; she writes that the round closed within three months of the Techstars program. Harlem Capital announced on January 4, 2019 that it had led the round, calling it its first investment as a fund and its first in FemTech; its managing partner, Henri Pierre-Jacques, said that he had met her at Techstars Demo Day. The other investors named in the announcement were Precursor Ventures, Break Trail Ventures and Rachel Lam.⁠[21][7][26]

She tracked the fundraise in HubSpot’s free customer-management tool: conversations with 86 unique investors (each a phone call or meeting of 30 minutes or more), 102 meetings in all, and more hours than she kept counting after 150; a mean check of $75,000; 34 investors who said no for now but wanted to stay in touch; at most, nine meetings before a no, over a $25,000 check; and legal bills of $55,000, of which she disputed $30,000. She writes that many investors said that they were investing in her, so that a rejection felt like a lack of belief in her personally, which made it hurt more.⁠[29]

The investors she lists for the round are Precursor Ventures, Break Trail Ventures, Harlem Capital, Ashley Merrill, Bryan Rosenblatt, Edward Zimmerman, Alicia Syrett, Eric Salzman, Ethan Auslander, Techstars, Rough Draft Ventures, Marc Schwartzberg, David Fassler, Rachel Lam, Tom Rutledge, Lumos Fund and Social CapitalSocial CapitalSocial Capital is a US technology investment firm founded in 2011 and led by Chamath Palihapitiya. Its activities evolved from venture funds toward investing and incubation with permanent proprietary capital.Open the full entry. On the Causeartist show she said that the $1.5 million came from angel investors and that the process took about four to six months.⁠[29][23]

On the same Causeartist show she said that schools made up about half of the business, among them Kent StateKent State UniversityKent State University is a university based in Kent, Ohio, United States, established under Ohio law in 1910 as a normal school; it now has eight campuses. On May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard fired on protesting students on its campus.Open the full entry and Penn State, and that Ohio State, where she had studied, had not selected Aunt Flow as a supplier despite its offers to match prices; the episode description names Viacom, Jeni’s Ice Creams, Bark Box, StanfordStanford UniversityStanford University is a research university in California founded by Leland and Jane Stanford in 1885 and opened in 1891.Open the full entry and Brown UniversityBrown UniversityBrown University is a private nonprofit research university in Providence, Rhode Island, and a member of the Ivy League. Chartered by Rhode Island's colonial legislature in 1764, it is known for its undergraduate Open Curriculum, which has no common required core. Christina H. Paxson, president since July 2012, announced on August 3, 2026, that the 2026–27 academic year would be her last in office. As of October 1, 2026, the search for Brown's 20th president remained underway.Open the full entry as customers.⁠[23]

After the accelerator she stayed on in New York, where, she writes, she spends half of her time.⁠[7]

The Thiel Foundation announced the 2019 Thiel Fellows on July 10, 2019, and she was among them. The list gives her location as “Toledo, OH / Columbus, OH & New York City, NY,” her project as Aunt Flow and its category as “Healthcare, Feminine Hygiene.”⁠[30]

She writes that she had applied again and again since the age of 15, that at 22 she secured another interview, and that this was the year in which a phone call brought the news that she had been awarded the fellowship. By then, she writes, she was three years removed from college, did not really “need” the money and does not know why she received the fellowship that year rather than others; she puts it down to one thing: “What worked for me was persistence.” In the CEO.com interview she placed the award two years after she dropped out of college. She describes the idea of $100,000 to not go to college and to pursue her dreams of changing the world as “Legendary,” and writes that the fellowship was not just a “stamp of approval.”⁠[6][19]

Also in 2019 she became a Tory Burch Fellow of the Tory Burch Foundation.⁠[31]

At 22 she bought her first property, a three-bedroom house in Columbus. She writes that she had saved about $35,000 for the down payment, crediting her not having gone to college, an early investment in BitcoinBitcoinBitcoin (common symbol BTC) is an open peer-to-peer electronic cash protocol, network, and native digital asset. Full nodes independently verify transactions and blocks according to the consensus rules; transactions are recorded as UTXOs, and blocks are organized into a public ledger through proof of work. Bitcoin is not issued or managed by any single institution, but using, holding in custody, and trading it still involve key, privacy, market, and legal risks.Open the full entry, risks taken in the stock market from the age of 16, her first Thiel Fellowship stipend and “a decent salary this year.” Her credit score was 720, her credit history about four years long, and she had never had a loan; because she ran her start-up as a single-proprietor LLC, the income that she could show was low, and four banks turned her down before her father co-signed and Genoa Bank gave her a five-year adjustable-rate loan at 4.75%, with 20% down required.⁠[3]

She viewed ten or more houses, looking for properties around $150,000, and settled on one listed at $180,000 that had been on the market for more than 120 days: she offered $165,000, the seller countered at $180,000, and she came back at $175,000 with the seller covering $1,500 of closing costs. She put $36,000 down on a 30-year loan with a monthly payment of $751.17. She writes that she spent half her time traveling and only two weeks a month in Columbus, and planned to live in the finished basement and rent out the rest for about $1,500 a month. On her personal website she calls it the first rental investment that she bought, at 22.⁠[3][4]

On the Rescripted show she said that in 2019 the company made pre-sales to Viacom, Twitter and Netflix, with shipment planned for March 2020.⁠[1]

Her profile page on the Forbes website says that she is on Forbes’s 2020 “30 Under 30” list for Social Entrepreneurs; it lists her as founder of Aunt Flow, gives her residence as Columbus, Ohio, and under education has “Drop Out, The Ohio State University.” Minority Business Entrepreneur Magazine likewise describes her as featured in the Forbes 30 Under 30 class of 2020. An article under her byline on Aunt Flow’s website, dated January 4, 2020, has it that “The Forbes 30Under30 2019 recipients were announced,” that more than 15,000 nominations were submitted in 2019 and 600 people chosen in 20 industries, and that she was recognized in the Social Entrepreneur category. The article sets her own answers beside figures for the cohort as a whole: she works an average of 70 hours a week; she sees being under 30 as an advantage for press opportunities, riskiness and energy, though her age of 22 means a lack of life experiences; she is optimistic about the United States economy; she is not an immigrant or a first-generation college student; her most important apps are Apple Maps, RobinhoodRobinhoodRobinhood is a financial services brand co-founded in 2013 by Vlad Tenev and Baiju Bhatt; its publicly listed parent company is Robinhood Markets, Inc., headquartered in Menlo Park, California, United States. The company has grown from commission-free mobile securities trading into crypto assets, retirement accounts, and other financial services, and trades on Nasdaq under the symbol HOOD.Open the full entry, SpotifySpotifySpotify is an audio streaming subscription service offering on-demand music, podcasts, and audiobooks through a free ad-supported service and a paid Premium subscription. Its parent company, Spotify Technology S.A., is incorporated in Luxembourg, has its principal operations in Stockholm, Sweden, and is listed on the New York Stock Exchange (ticker SPOT). It helped move the recorded-music business from buying and owning music to on-demand streaming and is one of the largest audio streaming subscription services by users.Open the full entry, Gmail and LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry; and her dream mentors are Carey Jaros and Josh Braun.⁠[32][33][34]

In 2020 the pandemic kept people out of offices and classes, and use of Aunt Flow’s products dropped at once; she has said that by February 2020 she was fielding calls from pre-order customers who did not know when they would return to the office, and the launch of the dispensers was paused indefinitely; on the Rescripted show she said that the pre-sold units had been due to ship in March 2020. Her one goal, she said, was to keep all employees on the payroll. The company wired nearly all the money in its bank account to retool its pad production to make masks and launched a sister brand, Work Flow, selling FDA-approved three-ply medical masks as well as cleaning wipes, gowns and hand sanitizer to customers including the State of MichiganMichiganMichigan is a state of the United States nearly surrounded by the Great Lakes and made up of the Upper and Lower peninsulas; its capital is Lansing and its largest city is Detroit. It was admitted to the Union on January 26, 1837, as the 26th state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 10,077,331.Open the full entry, Veterans Affairs and Dominion EnergyDominion EnergyDominion Energy, Inc. is a utility holding company headquartered in Richmond, Virginia, serving about 4.1 million primarily electric customers in Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina.Open the full entry. The two brands together were called FLOW.⁠[33][1][17][25][35]

She writes that in 2020 the company had $12 million in revenue and $3 million in profit. By December 2020 FLOW had donated 15,000 medical masks; the Ladderworks interview of December 2022 says that the company donated more than 1 million masks in all and that Work Flow had been discontinued. She later said that the effort ran for nearly 12 months.⁠[21][33][35][17]

Authority Magazine published two interviews with her, in July and October 2020, both giving her age as 23. In the July interview she said that for four years she had put every penny back into the company and worked 80 to 90 hours a week; the company had donated more than 500,000 menstrual products and changed legislation in five states. The introduction to the October interview lists the 36|86 Festival, Women of Toledo, Disrupt HR and The United State of Women among the events at which she had spoken; in the interview she mentioned a session that she had given at the 36|86 Festival in August.⁠[22][25]

She has said that the company was finally ready to truly launch its dispensers in 2021, and that it concentrated on K-12 schools, universities and sports and entertainment venues. In 2021 the company doubled its headcount, added 300 customers, supplied more than 3,000 bathroom dispensers, stocked bathrooms with 5.8 million period products and donated more than 1.6 million to people in need. Aunt Flow’s website says that in 2021 NBCNBCNBC (National Broadcasting Company) is an American national commercial broadcast television network. It was founded by RCA in 1926, began as a radio network and later developed television. With ABC and CBS it is one of the three traditional U.S. broadcast networks; it passed to General Electric with RCA in 1986, merged with Universal to form NBCUniversal in 2004, has been controlled by Comcast since 2011, and is one of the five networks that rotate in the White House television pool.Open the full entry named it one of the best women-owned brands and that its Model R dispenser won the ISSA Distributor’s Choice Award.⁠[17][1][36][37]

On April 21, 2022 Aunt Flow announced an $8.5 million Series A round led by JLL Spark, the venture arm of the real estate and investment management firm JLL, with Amboy Street Ventures, Harlem Capital, CityRock Ventures and Precursor Ventures taking part; Kitty Sullivan, a principal at JLL Spark, was to join Aunt Flow’s board. The company said that the money would go toward expanding its customer base nationally, growing its advocacy, donating more than a million products to grassroots partners, and introducing new products and more sustainable packaging.⁠[38][36][39]

Fortune wrote that Aunt Flow then stocked 23,000 bathrooms, among them offices of Netflix and Google, Princeton UniversityPrinceton UniversityPrinceton University is a private university and Ivy League member in Princeton, New Jersey. Chartered on October 22, 1746 as the College of New Jersey, it moved to Princeton in 1756 and adopted its present name in 1896. Undergraduate education leads to A.B. and B.S.E. degrees and emphasizes small-group discussion, independent research and residential college life. Graduate education spans the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and engineering. As of October 2026, Christopher L. Eisgruber was president. Its 2026–27 operating budget was $3.407 billion, including $342 million for undergraduate aid.Open the full entry and Penn State University, and more than 200 AppleAppleApple is a public technology company founded in 1976 and headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Its business includes the iPhone, Mac, iPad, wearables, and services such as digital content, payments, and cloud storage. The company builds its product system through in-house hardware, operating systems, and services.Open the full entry retail stores; that the cost to an employer was about $5 per female employee per year; and that Apple had worked with Aunt Flow on a dispenser with a front window that lets janitors check supply levels. Aunt Flow was the second woman-led company among JLL Spark’s 40 investments. She said to Fortune: “We are a necessity,” “Not an amenity.”⁠[38]

In a post of March 2022 she wrote that 23,000 bathrooms were by then stocked with Aunt Flow products, that eight states had passed legislation requiring schools to offer accessible tampons and pads in bathrooms, that the company had 29 full-time team members and that it had raised $11.2 million in venture funding; in 2016, she pointed out, when she was starting out in Ohio, no state had passed legislation requiring schools to offer free period products.⁠[21]

UtahUtahUtah is a U.S. state bordered by Idaho to the north, Wyoming to the northeast, Colorado to the east, Arizona to the south and Nevada to the west, with its capital at Salt Lake City. It was admitted to the Union on January 4, 1896, as the 45th state, and the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted 3,271,616 residents.Open the full entry passed HB 162, requiring its K-12 schools to provide free period products in their bathrooms; in the Ladderworks interview she said that Aunt Flow was the company selected to provide the free-vend dispensers and organic cotton period products. A press release issued by Aunt Flow on September 13, 2022 says that 6,300 Aunt Flow free-vend dispensers had been installed in the majority of public and private K-12 school bathrooms in Utah, an effort made possible by private donors and The Policy Project, and that on that day it and The Policy Project were holding a “Period Party” at Twenty & Creek in Sandy, Utah, to pack nearly 3,000 period packs for young people in need. In the same interview she said that the team traveled to Salt Lake City and spent an evening packing 3,000 period kits. CEO.com writes that she worked with grassroots organizations such as The Policy Project and the Period Project in Utah and with student advocates to pass the bill, and that Aunt Flow received investments from the Andrus Family Foundation and the Larry H and Gail Miller Foundation to install its patented dispensers in schools and other public spaces.⁠[35][40][41]

On October 21, 2022 she took part in Women Entrepreneurship Week at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, first leading a workshop called “I’ve Got 99 Problems, Let’s Solve One,” in which students turned problems from their own lives into business ideas, and then speaking with entrepreneurs from Southeast Ohio at a Founders’ Forum hosted by TechGROWTH Ohio and held at Athens Uncorked; the event biography gives her age as 25. The university’s article says that Aunt Flow then had more than 20,000 “dispensaries” (the article’s word) across the United States and Canada, had raised more than $11 million and had donated 3.6 million period products, and that Ohio University stocked its products in a few bathrooms. Of returning to a campus that had supported the company’s mission for years, she said: “It’s really exciting to be able to come back and do a full circle.”⁠[42][18]

A question-and-answer piece on Aunt Flow’s website dated March 9, 2023 gives her age as 26. On the Rescripted show released on March 23, 2023 she said that Aunt Flow was her first and only job and that management is learned through repetitions, of which, given her age and the stage of her career, she had had only a finite number; when money was tight she cut her own salary first and no one else’s. The host, Abby Mercado, put the company at 15 or so employees; Coder said that it stocked more than 23,000 bathrooms across the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, with customers including State Farm Stadium, where the Super Bowl had been held; schools and universities paid $5 to $20 per female student per year.⁠[9][1]

On January 27, 2025 she published an article marking nine years of Aunt Flow, writing that the company’s years of advocacy and policy work had led to legislation in 27 states requiring or funding schools to offer period products.⁠[20]

The International Facility Management Association (IFMA) lists her as a Top Global FM Influencer, and her profile page speaks of 45 FM Influencers in the group; the page gives her age as 28 and says that Aunt Flow’s patented dispensers were in more than 60,000 bathrooms and that the company had raised more than $17 million in venture capital. IFMA’s list page currently presents the class of 2026 and labels the previous class “2025 Global FM Influencers,” and her photograph appears on that page among the earlier influencers.⁠[43][44]

In the Bear and the Bull interview of November 26, 2025 she called Aunt Flow “a public restroom infrastructure company,” closest to property technology rather than a feminine hygiene company; in 2025 the company launched a complete disposal solution, which she said had cut the cost of clogged toilets by 90%.⁠[17]

As of November 2026 Aunt Flow’s website lists her as founder and chief executive officer. Her page at the Tory Burch Foundation says that she lives in Columbus, Ohio, and New York City, sits on the board of FoxFold and has led capital raises of $16 million; that Aunt Flow’s free-vend dispensers are in more than 70,000 bathrooms, that it serves more than 1,800 customers and that more than 4 million students rely on its products; it names Disney Parks and every Apple Retail Store in North America, corporate partners such as Google and Netflix, colleges such as Princeton University and The Ohio State University, and more than 100 professional sports stadiums and entertainment venues; and it says that laws in 27 states require free period products in schools.⁠[37][31]

Her personal website says that Aunt Flow has put free period products in 47,000 bathrooms, donated 6,000,000 tampons and pads and raised more than $16 million in venture capital, and that it has changed how legislation is written in 25 states. A Techstars article of January 2026 says that the company has given more than 6 million period products to people in need.⁠[16][4][45]

In an interview with the CEO.com host Clint Betts she spoke of “a six year quest” to build Aunt Flow and said that she grew up in Toledo, Ohio, and was still based in Columbus. She said that the company had 35 full-time employees and its headquarters in Columbus, with about half of the company in Ohio and the other half everywhere else; that its products were in more than 30,000 bathrooms across the United States, Canada and, most recently, the United Kingdom, with customers including 23 professional sports team stadiums, every Apple retail store in the United States and Canada, and offices of Google, Netflix and Twitter; that she had raised $11 million, none of it from Drive Capital; and that 20 states had some legislation requiring schools to offer free period products. She described the first two years as “Long nights crying on the floor and a lot of Ramen,” a time when she wanted to throw in the towel, and said that she had no plan B.⁠[19]

She has said that she did not learn that she was dyslexic until she was 19; she considers dyslexia a superpower, because all her life she has had to find workarounds. Being dyslexic, she has said, she prefers podcasts, among them How I Built This, Serial and The Daily from The New York TimesThe New York TimesThe New York Times is an American morning daily newspaper published in New York City. Founded in 1851, it is published by The New York Times Company.Open the full entry.⁠[1][25]

She has said that she starts each day with a run to relieve stress and that she loves sweets; in the 2023 question-and-answer piece she completed the sentence “I am unapologetically…” with a lover of sweets, saying that she loves cookies, cakes, cupcakes and desserts in general. Her profile on the International WELL Building Institute’s website says that outside work she enjoys the music of Macklemore and teaches Zumba classes; she has said that she would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with Macklemore. The show notes of The Impact Makers Podcast say that she has worked as a nude model for artists, which, she said, helped her embrace her body and herself.⁠[22][46][8][9]

In the 2023 question-and-answer piece she said that her childhood dream jobs were Britney Spears and dolphin trainer, rated her own weirdness at 7.11 out of 10, named a fully charged laptop as the one item she would take on a four-hour flight, and chose “Might Not Like Me” by Brynn Elliot (Kat Krazy Remix) as her walkout song; on punctuality her line is: “If I am not 10 minutes early, I am 10 minutes late!”⁠[9]

She names Jeni Britton Bauer, the founder of Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams—who is also from Ohio and did not go to college—as her inspiration, and has said that when she was starting out she “cried and ate a lot of Jeni’s Ice Creams.” The interviewer for Causeartist in 2017 put it to her that her dream was to be on Ellen.⁠[22][10][8]

Her personal website lists Gabbi Health, Olly Awake and NextGen HQ as companies in which she has invested, and as advisory roles board advisor to Well Certified (2021–2022) and to “Forbes Counsel” (2020–2021).⁠[4]

Two pieces of advice that she gives are “Just Google it!” and “Make a Big Ask”; her practice is to ask for what she wants, accept a no when it comes, and learn when and how to ask again. She has said that she is exceptionally remarkable at just one thing, persistence.⁠[8][22][6]

She has said that one should not start a business to make millions but out of passion, and that it is all about execution: just do it already. She encourages women to use women-only networking groups and funds that invest in women: “You get money for being a woman.” Entrepreneurship, she has said, is an emotional spectrum of high highs and low lows, and “starting is the easiest part.”⁠[12][25][11][23]

In November 2022 she wrote that she keeps a personal SlackSlackSlack is a team communication and collaboration platform developed from an internal tool at Tiny Speck. It organizes work through channels, direct messages, searchable history and integrations, with features including Huddles, Clips, Canvas and AI assistance. Its paid service launched in February 2014, and Salesforce completed its acquisition in July 2021.Open the full entry with a channel called #decisiondiary in which she records every big decision—its date, a review date, a description, the desired outcome, her reasoning, the consequences if the outcome fails and how she felt—and had done so for more than a year. A year earlier, she wrote, her big decisions were worth $2,000 and now they were $25,000 or more; the desired outcome rarely matched what happened, though the results were often still positive; and as companies grow, her role is to empower others to make decisions.⁠[47]

Personal website: https://www.clairecoder.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[16]

Aunt Flow: Official website: https://goauntflow.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[37][16]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[48]

Tory Burch Foundation: Official website: https://www.toryburchfoundation.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[31]

LinkedIn: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairecoder/ (opens in a new window).⁠[16]

Instagram: Public account: https://www.instagram.com/clairecoderofficial/ (opens in a new window).⁠[16]