Nearly 39 million Americans live with migraine, and women experience this condition at three times the rate of men. For most of these people, accessing specialized care means waiting months for an appointment, navigating complex referral systems, and cycling through years of trial-and-error treatments.
As someone diagnosed with migraine at age two and as a health tech veteran who spent years navigating the healthcare system, Izac Ross knows this journey intimately. As a result, he founded Haven Headache and Migraine Center to address a problem he understood from both sides.
In this episode of Growth Layer, Ross shares how Haven is compressing what typically takes two to three years of treatment adjustments down to six to nine months, and why the company chose a hybrid care model when most digital health startups were going fully virtual.
The Personal Journey Behind Haven
Ross's professional background spans the evolution of health tech itself. He started at Philips Healthcare working on remote monitoring services before "health tech was called health tech," then moved through design consulting to early-stage roles at Collective Health and Alto Pharmacy. Most recently, he served at Hinge Health before founding Haven.
But his founder story begins much earlier. After living with relatively managed migraine for years, Ross experienced what's called a migraine transformation in 2016. He went from having occasional migraines to experiencing headache or migraine pain every single day. The wait time to see a headache specialist at UCSF was nine months. At Stanford, it was ten.
"You can imagine having a level four pain, which is not crazy, but having pain every day is exhausting. It’s terrible," Ross explains. For two years, he lived with daily headaches while waiting for specialized care.
Then in 2018, the first anti-CGRP medications were approved by the FDA, representing the first targeted prevention drugs ever developed specifically for migraine. These medications work differently from the older approach of repurposing drugs designed for epilepsy, depression, or hypertension.
"When I got on that first dose of that anti-CGRP medicine, it was like the first time I felt hope in a long time," Ross recalls. Within a year, his daily headaches stopped. He was able to socialize more, experience his twenties and thirties, and even complete AIDS Lifecycle, a demanding bike ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles.
But Ross noticed something troubling. These breakthrough treatments were getting stuck in academic health centers, with the same six to twelve month wait times he had experienced. That observation became the seed for Haven.
Finding the Right Team to Build Haven
The company's founding story began on a ski trip at Mammoth with a former colleague from Collective Health, Samura, who would become Ross's co-founder. After spending most of the weekend discussing the opportunity, they decided to apply to Y Combinator with just three weeks until the deadline.
They didn't get in, but the process clarified that they had identified a real problem worth solving.
The biggest hurdle to actually launching wasn't technical or financial. It was clinical. With only 700 doctors in the United States who specialize in headache medicine, finding the right chief medical officer was essential. "That's one doctor to every 80,000 headache patients," Ross notes.
Haven essentially gated the entire company's existence on finding this person. After reaching out to 80 potential candidates in California, they found Dr. Hinda, a headache neurologist who had spent nine years at the Stanford headache center teaching, treating patients, and conducting clinical research. "Somehow she said yes and is on this journey with us," Ross says. With Dr. Hinda on board and another former Collective Health colleague joining as CTO, the founding team was complete.
Why Haven Chose Hybrid Care Over Fully Virtual
Many digital health companies in recent years have launched as purely virtual services, seeking to maximize efficiency and scale. Haven took a different approach.
The company is virtual-first, meaning patients see their providers online for consultations and follow-up visits. But in Los Angeles, Orange County, San Diego, and San Francisco, Haven operates or partners with facilities where patients can receive in-person treatments like Botox for migraine (which is FDA-approved and covered by most insurance plans) and nerve blocks for acute flare-ups.
"This actually was because I wanted to be able to use my own service," Ross explains. He uses both anti-CGRP medications and Botox for migraine. If Haven had been purely virtual, the company would have been "seeding the people most in need back to these academic systems that were failing them to begin with."
This hybrid model allows Haven to deliver the full spectrum of headache care rather than forcing patients to coordinate between multiple providers for different aspects of their treatment. It's proven to be a key differentiator from other online competitors and addresses a critical lesson from previous health tech failures in the space: migraine and headache disorders still require some hands-on patient care.
Compressing the Treatment Timeline
The real innovation at Haven isn't just about access, though reducing wait times from months to weeks matters enormously. It's about the ongoing care model.
Haven uses a text-based headache diary that allows the clinical team to monitor patients daily and see whether care protocols are working. If adjustments are needed, patients don't wait another three to four months for a follow-up appointment. They can be seen the same week or the next week.
"What's been incredibly powerful about that is we're able to take what is typically a two to three year cycle of making adjustments to get kind of stable down to six to nine months," Ross says. This compression happens through the integration of Haven's clinical team and technology platform working together, not through one replacing the other.
Building the Right Go-to-Market Strategy
When Haven launched, Ross and his team theorized there would be a direct-to-consumer channel. They kept this relatively quiet initially, thinking they would primarily partner with health systems or providers.
"We found just such a breath of need here that direct-to-consumer advertising on Google and on Meta was a great channel for us," Ross says. It took significant experimentation to figure out the right messaging and how to actually capture that consumer.
The company discovered an iceberg effect. While some people actively seek care, there's a much larger population below the surface who have given up trying to navigate the traditional system. Many potential patients face not just the nine-month wait for specialists, but also the burden of getting their primary care provider or community neurologist to complete complex multi-page referral forms required by their insurance.
"A lot of patients were just giving up," Ross notes. Haven's direct access model removes these barriers. The company also builds direct referral relationships with primary care physicians and OB-GYNs, which has shown strong early success. Ross sees both B2C and B2B channels growing in parallel, each feeding growth in different ways. Notably, Haven explicitly avoided the employer channel that many health tech companies pursue. "That channel is becoming increasingly crowded," Ross explains. "If you're in a minority disorder, even though migraine is not a minority disorder, it's not thought of as a top ten spend item in an employer's mind."
He describes the frustrating dynamic where women's pain disorders like migraine and endometriosis don't show up prominently in the claims reports that employers review. "I'm just going to be ignored and laughed out of the room, which is terrible," he says. The comment highlights a persistent bias in healthcare resource allocation, even for conditions affecting millions of people.
The Challenge of Reaching Skeptical Patients
One of the most interesting marketing challenges Haven faces is reaching people who have tried everything and failed. After their first visit, patients often tell the Haven team: "I was really skeptical when I saw that ad."
Ross sees this as an area where the company still has work to do. "I think leading with symptoms, showing that we understand, has been a really important thing, but figuring out how to get somebody to believe that from an ad is something we're still working on."
Where Haven excels is in what happens once someone makes contact. The intake process is designed around compassion and understanding, not efficiency metrics. The team asks about each patient's lived experience with migraine and headaches. They ask about past failures in seeking treatment. They take time.
"They get off the phone with us and they're always like, no one's asked me this before," Ross explains. "No one has spent time understanding the headaches."
In the early days, Ross personally conducted about twenty intake calls per week. This wasn't scalable as a long-term strategy, but it allowed him to learn what was and wasn't resonating in Haven's messaging. It's a practice that reflects his background in design thinking and user research.
Patients typically remain skeptical until their first appointment, but the company has found that giving people with chronic disorders space to be heard is powerful in itself.
Designing Before Building
Ross credits much of Haven's strong product-market fit to the work done before spending money on development or marketing. As a trained product designer, he approached the startup with a researcher's mindset.
"I think we're really lucky that we took a lot of time to understand, not just from my perspective but from the community, what did they need? What would make them switch or seek us out?" Ross explains. This included surveys and user research that shaped Haven's core value proposition before the company wrote code or treated its first patient.
With AI making engineering more commoditized, Ross believes this approach represents an important shift. "The differentiation is how do you actually figure out what a consumer needs and wants," he says. "Designers are going to become more and more of the folks that are going to get sought out for these roles."
The hardest ongoing challenge for an early company, Ross notes, is deciding what represents a minimum viable product for each new initiative. "There's a version where we won't be able to do it and there's a version that's too narrow that also will not meet the need," he says. "How do we sort of put the right pieces together at the right times to unlock the next growth phase?"
Building in Network from Day One
A crucial decision that sets Haven apart from many digital health startups is accepting insurance. The company is in-network with essentially every PPO in California, as well as Medicare and Tricare. There are no additional subscriptions or out-of-pocket fees beyond standard co-pays.
"The trial risk for them feels a lot lower because they're not paying out of pocket with this," Ross explains. This contrasts sharply with the direct-pay model many online health services still use.
Being in-network means Haven can serve the full population of people with migraine, not just those with the financial resources to pay cash for care. It also addresses a fundamental equity issue in migraine treatment.
What Comes Next for Haven
Currently, Haven operates only in California. Next year, the company plans to expand to at least one additional state. Because of the hybrid care model, this won't be a simple flip-the-switch expansion to all fifty states. Instead, Haven will grow state by state, ensuring they can deliver the full spectrum of in-person and virtual care in each new market.
For people outside California who want to become patients, Haven collects contact information through their website and will notify interested patients when they launch in new states.
Ross also hopes to continue bringing more technology into the experience to scale the model and offer it to more people. The vision is to maintain the quality of care and human touch that makes Haven effective while expanding access to a much larger population.
The Bigger Picture: Bias in Women's Health Funding
Throughout the conversation, Ross touches on a persistent challenge in building Haven: the bias against women's health in venture capital, even when investors claim it's a priority area.
"I really did see the sort of bias out there in venture against women's health disorders even when they claim that this is the hot new field," Ross says.
With roughly one in five women affected by migraine and effective new treatments available, the opportunity is significant. But the funding landscape hasn't yet caught up to the rhetoric around women's health as an investment category.
This disconnect has real consequences. It means fewer companies building solutions for conditions that disproportionately affect women, fewer innovations in care delivery, and continued gaps in access to effective treatment.
Lessons for Health Tech Founders
Several themes emerge from Haven's story that apply broadly to founders building in health, wellness, and family care:
Lived experience matters, but isn't enough. Ross's personal journey with migraine gave him deep insight into the problem, but Haven's success also required clinical expertise, technical capability, and operational rigor.
Distribution strategy should match your disorder's profile. Haven's decision to avoid the employer channel and focus on direct-to-consumer and provider referrals came from understanding how migraine appears (or doesn't appear) in claims data and employer priorities.
Design research before development. The time Haven spent understanding patient needs through surveys and user research before building anything created a strong foundation that has required relatively few pivots.
Hybrid models solve real problems. While fully virtual care works well for some conditions, Haven's hybrid approach acknowledges that effective migraine treatment includes in-person procedures. Fighting this reality would have meant serving fewer patients or serving them less effectively.
Messaging to skeptical audiences is hard. Even with strong product-market fit, reaching people who have tried everything and failed remains an ongoing challenge. What converts skeptics is the experience itself, which makes building word-of-mouth and retention crucial.
Getting Started with Haven
Haven Headache and Migraine Center is currently available throughout California. Patients can book an introductory call through havenheadache.com. The company accepts most PPO insurance plans, Medicare, and Tricare, with no additional subscription fees.
For people outside California, Haven is collecting contact information to notify interested patients as they expand to new states in 2025 and beyond.
You can find Izac Ross on social media at "gay with a headache" and follow Haven's updates at @havenheadache on all platforms.
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The Growth Layer is a conversation series from Future Digital exploring how real growth happens in health, wellness, and family brands. Each episode pulls back the curtain on the pivots, decisions, and behind-the-scenes discussions that shape category-defining companies. Subscribe for more founder stories and growth lessons from leaders transforming care.
