Co-founder Samantha Miller has a simple goal: Make emergency contraception available everywhere condoms are sold.
n January 2016, when Samantha Miller persuaded pharmaceutical giant Pfizer to sell her the rights to two of its popular birth control formulations, she wasn’t just closing a deal. She was launching what she and her co-founders at Oakland, California-based Cadence OTC hoped would be a women’s health care revolution: making female contraception as accessible as condoms. Ten years later, you can find the company’s products at more than 17,000 convenience stores in 49 states.
Just a year and a half earlier, Miller had been introduced to two doctors who would change the course of her professional life: Malcolm Potts, a respected reproductive scientist and professor of public health at UC Berkeley, and Nap Hosang, a fellow public health expert and ob-gyn. “For decades, Malcolm had had the dream to bring the most popular form of female contraception, the pill, over the counter,” says Miller, 61. “He approached Nap, and together they tried to make it happen through advocacy—writing letters to the FDA, asking medical associations to get on board. But you can’t do it through advocacy. It’s an industry problem. That’s when they came to me.”
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