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What happens to the sperm if the company goes out of business?

What are the privacy protections around DNA and other personal information inherent to sperm collection and storage?

Do you offer jurisdiction options?

A very common-sense question to ask.

We have agreements with our cryostorage providers to automatically transfer ownership of the assets to them in case Legacy ever did not exist in the future. So you would work directly with them and have the choice of either keeping the sample frozen there, or transferring it to a facility of your choice. We would help facilitate this to the greatest extent possible.

We do not yet have jurisdiction options, but I will say that I originally incorporated the company in Switzerland to benefit from their strong stances on privacy, and the "nuclear bunker option" is one that we are serious about setting up in the future. FWIW, nuclear bunkers are actually extremely common in Switzerland, this is a country-wide policy (https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/prepared-for-anything_bunkers-f...), so it's not a crazy idea to set up a cryo-facility in one.

For privacy, I'll start just by saying that I've been a privacy advocate for as long as I can remember, am a user of Protonmail, Signal, VPNs, etc. I know how important data privacy and am only interested in working on a company that is designed to be privacy-focused from the beginning. As far as I know, we are the only company that is HIPAA-, GDPR-, and CCPA- compliant.

Most importantly, we do not sell your data. We outline our data collection in our privacy policy (on the footer of the website)

> So you would work directly with them and have the choice of either keeping the sample frozen there, or transferring it to a facility of your choice

That reads pretty much as "good luck with that!" to me, I'm sorry. People would pay you exactly because they would never have a facility of their choice and in case it goes sour they would probably have to face a ridiculous price tag from some other new company not truly interested in keeping their sperm but that just happened to be part of your risk hedging or simply of a insurance deal.

Hey - I hear you, but I don't think that's entirely fair. We are obviously building a company that we believe will go far, and will be around for decades, but we recognize there's no guarantee that will happen.

In a worst case scenario, folks could keep their sample frozen where it is and pay retail rates at those facilities instead of the wholesale rates we offer.

We are real people who care a lot about the people who are using their service, and their ability to have kids in the future. We would genuinely do everything we could to support.

It wasn't fair in the slightest, having a plan in place for your company going under is more than many have and shows foresight.

Not having kids but good look with your business :).

Could you edit your post and list which countries (and states) you operate in and plan to expand to? I know HN is mainly US based and that many YC startups tend to be US based. But it would be useful for people to know about the geographical reach because unlike online SaaS launches that probably can work worldwide for many solutions, this one has many physical aspects to it.

Yes, of course! I'll edit it shortly. We're live across the United States, and actively working on international expansion to Canada, Europe (via Geneva & London), and the Middle East (via Dubai).

What's your timeline for the Canada expansion? Would like to become your customer.

As soon as COVID allows it... you can keep in touch with clientservices@givelegacy.com.

PS many of us are Canadian so we get this question from friends. A temporary measure, once the borders re-open, is to simply drive anywhere across the US border, have it picked up that day, and then return to Canada.

You should consider Asia as well. For example, Singapore would be a great demographic fit for this kind of product:

- low-birth rate

- high education

- high per capita income

That's on the list, too! I was in Singapore in late 2019 starting to do the research (would be our base in Asia). It'll take time, of course.

I'm a potential customer, and I'd like to treat this as any data storage company- because that's what this is, a genetic data storage company.

One of the things I find annoying about existing companies is that I can't see how my data is doing. For digital data, I can monitor to see how my data is doing, but all I know about existing companies is that they will tell me if something fails.

I'd like to see live monitoring data from your freezers. Is that something you'd share?

That's a great question, and one where keeping everything cool is important in both cases.

We get a lot of monitoring information, both on the way to the cryostorage facilities (everything from humidity to temperature variance to battery level of our trackers), and we similarly get daily or weekly checks of the frozen sperm (like manually checking on levels of liquid nitrogen).

We hadn't considered making this information front-facing, although I understand why you'd ask that. What would you be most interested in seeing? Would 'last checked' and 'current temperature' be enough for you to feel it is secure?

- How long without cooling does it take for the samples to be destroyed?

- When it does go down, how long does it take you to catch it?

- Are you doing active "chaos monkey"-style testing such as intentionally turning off random systems and ensuring your backup procedures detect and solve the problem before the samples are destroyed?

- Given the current deterioration rates in your industry and your facility under normal operation, what is the probability of a sample surviving 10 years? 20? 30? What about after accounting for the possibility of equipment/system failures?

Facility backup generators activate within seconds of an outage, and are load-tested regularly for 30 minutes. In case of heat/smoke/motion detection, facilities managers are sent smartphone alerts. There are very clear SOPs for almost every possibility.

THAT SAID, you can plan for all kinds of issues - power outages, natural disasters, human error, technical error, etc. - but you will never be able to bring risk down to zero.

For this reason, we also offer multi-site storage, whereby we divide samples into multiple tanks across multiple locations. AFAIK, we are the only company in this space to do so.

> you will never be able to bring risk down to zero.

I'd avoid these straw men, trust your customers to understand risk management.

> you can plan for all kinds of issues - power outages, natural disasters, human error, technical error, etc

Great, I'd love to see this risk modeling. Which sets of components would need to fail in order for a sample to be destroyed? Which components have failed? How often? Are the failures correlated?

What legal risks exist for the customer in your industry? When things go wrong in that way, how does it happen?

Do samples degrade over time? How fast? What is their viability rate?

When we did IVF, I had two choices for providing my sample. Collect it at home and then drive it to the clinic, where I had a max of 15 minutes and had to keep the cup between my legs for the entire trip, or provide the sample at the clinic.

How do you keep the sample fresh for transport if it's collected at home?

ps. In case anyone was wondering I went with collecting at the clinic, and boy do I have some fun stories from that experience!

> boy do I have some fun stories from that experience

Not gonna lie, I'm kind of dying to hear them.

Alright. So I go to the clinic and check in with my wife. They take her off to get ready to "receive the sample". A few minutes later they call me up to the desk. The nurse looks at me, pulls something out of the desk, hands it to me with a cup, at tells me to go to room two.

To clarify, since it's relevant, I'm a white guy, my wife is Asian, and the nurse that checked me in is Black. What she handed me was a porn DVD of hardcore Asian porn. I guess she just assumed since my wife was Asian, that's what I was into. I saw in the drawer and there was a variety of choices, but I was never asked.

So I get into the room. To the left is a sink for hand washing with a small counter next to it. In front of me is a very standard office chair, but with a fresh absorbent pad on it (like what you put down when you're house training a puppy). In front of the chair is a 20 inch old-school CRT (this was in 2014, so it was old even then) with a built in DVD player. To the left of the chair is a huge rack with porn magazines.

I evaluate my situation, and decide I'm not going to use the chair, or touch it, or touch anything in the room that I don't have to, because I don't know why it just didn't seem right. Luckily I was smart and brought my laptop with me, so I pop that open and set it on the counter. Attach to the wifi and... all the porn sites are blocked. Apparently they use the same filter as all the other medical offices.

Luckily, being the enterprising engineering that I am, I bounce an SSH session through my home server.

So I start doing my business. I'm standing there with hand occupied, facing the door, when it opens! Apparently the nurse forgot to flip the sign to say "occupied" and also forgot to warn me to lock the door (protip: Always lock the door!). She turned back around and ran out, but I had to start over so to speak.

I finished up, sealed up the sample, washed up, rang the little bell, and the nurse collected my specimen. She was the consummate professional and didn't say anything about the walk-in.

I then went and sat in the waiting room while the doctor impregnated my wife.

ps. This story is a lot better when told in person after a few drinks.

> Attach to the wifi and... all the porn sites are blocked.

This cracked me up.

>Luckily, being the enterprising engineering that I am, I bounce an SSH session through my home server.

When you think about it he also bounced the sperm through the clinic.

So after having a vasectomy, you also provide a sample to ensure the tubes are really tied. There's a few stories one can tell about vasectomy prep, procedure, and recovery, none of which I'll share here. Anyone who's had the procedure probably has the same stories.

Anyway, generating that sample was something I did at home, but it was still an odd experience driving it to the doctor's office, ringing the bell for the receptionist, and handing over the sample (inside approved collection container which was inside a brown lunch bag as I recall).

Weird for me, but if your a medical office receptionist, you're used to receiving all sorts of samples.

Yes, the brown lunch bag! Because no one knows what's in the brown lunch bag that you are carrying into the fertility clinic...

> I then went and sat in the waiting room while the doctor impregnated my wife.

Beautiful phrasing.

Thanks. :)

Amusing side note, the doctor was a woman and devout Christian, who believed that she was simply a conduit for God's work, and if you got pregnant it was because God guided her hands well.

Also interesting was that she had the highest success rate of all the doctors in the clinic.

The lord works in mysterious ways!!

Of course she had, she believed she was doing God's work.

Haha! You and me both! The worst part, to me, was it being referred to as "the specimen". I don't know why that always weirded me out.

Sperm can actually survive fine for 1-2 hours hours when kept near body temperature, so a 1-hour courier service is sufficient (and it usually takes less than 60 minutes). If there were any issues, we'd know when it arrived at the clinic.

For anyone outside of major cities, we do overnight shipping with Fedex's biohazardous materials division. We use a transport medium that keeps sperm alive for up to 48 hours during transit. You add it to the sperm, it protects it during that period, and it gets washed out (via centrifuge) when it arrives at our clinic. It's not perfect - you can expect to lose approx. 10-15% motility during that time, but is particularly useful for folks in rural areas or far from fertility clinics.

PS Always love hearing other folks' clinic stories... my favourite is hearing how clinics have their pornography stolen ALL the time and have to frequently re-stock.

Thanks for the info. I guess that means I could have done it at home! Oh well.

I wrote up my story in the sibling comment since someone asked: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23851310

I've tried Dadi and Sppare.me in the past and had good results on the front-end (I haven't retrieved any samples yet). I'm not sure the service could have been improved. What are you doing differently than existing mail-in sperm analysis/freezing companies?

Hey there - great question, and happy to hear that you are already being proactive + thoughtful about your reproductive health. A few things our team is doing differently than others in the space:

1. Clinic-level analysis: Most other solutions offer a basic analysis (count, concentration, volume + some motility). Our analysis is a comprehensive assessment that evaluates count, conc, volume, motility + morphology, which gives patients and their doctors the information they need to make decisions around treatment options

2. Personalized lifestyle recommendations - sperm health can be improved since sperm is regenerative. We provide all of our clients with data-driven personalized lifestyle recommendations for sperm health improvement.

3. Multi-geography storage - for every sample we receive, we split it into 3-6 vials and then distribute those vials to two different storage locations as an added measure of security. We get a lot of really good feedback about this from our clients.

4. Telehealth appointments - all clients have the option to speak with a specialist after they receive their results in order to learn more about their sperm health.

5. Client experience - we pride ourselves on providing a superb client experience. Each client receives a dedicated client service advisor to guide them through the process and answer any questions they have.

Curious about this too. I recently looked into sperm preservation. Something like $1,250 to setup and $250/year after the first year. Seemed reasonable to me.

These rates aren't unreasonable! I've seen storage get as expensive as $1200 per year! We try to make our pricing as affordable as possible ($145/year)

That's exceptionally good. I'm paying Reprotech in Minnesota $200/year ($1000 upfront for five years of storage).

Wish I had heard about you in the spring, would've picked your org solely because of your georedundancy option mentioned in a sibling comment.

One more thing I'll add to Sarah's answer: in our case, the company was founded by - and run by - healthcare and fertility specialists. We are a healthcare company first, and a consumer company second, not the other way round.

This sounds minor but actually affects a lot of the way we do our work e.g. we ensure rigorous analysis, we take extra de-risking steps around cryostorage, we call clients to share bad results because it's more humane to do, we connect them to our urologist on staff, etc. etc.

This might seem overtly politically correct and I'm actually a bit surprised in myself for saying this, but have you considered changing instances of male/men to just generic families? (e.g., We help families have children vs we help men become fathers).

I will state up front, I'm not trying to police language, just pointing out that deciding specific keywords up front affects how people find your business online or how it's talked about through referrals.

1) Should you ever decide to expand your business to include eggs, the importance of branding and search results is much more efficient by targeting families instead of retrofitting the keywords.

2) Say for instance, the mother is just as interested in their partner's sperm as the "man" is. Here gendered language can be both useful and detrimental to specific targeting campaigns based on the keywords.

3) Storing sperm is beginning to reach wider availability for transgender women under some plans. Most forgo the process altogether, because guess what, most transwomen suffer economic discrimination as it is and can't afford it. Would you ever consider an LBGTQ-centric campaign towards offering assistance for this community? I think it's a really great idea since I'm already going to be referring your business to my community since you're significantly more affordable but obviously I have not tried you yet. There's also people with sperm who don't identify as men.

Point is, I'm only hesitant to refer because some people are more sensitive at being gendered through a service. I'm not trying to be all like, "hey MAN, you should totally freeze your sperm here, DUDE" while someone is just beginning transition. Not saying that's what you have said or done in anyway, but having not experienced your service I can only be concerned at the possibility. No pun intended, more sterile language that is more focused on families is a better story and more inclusive of various backgrounds. I'd have to go through your customer journey before I'd make any reasonable recommendations to my community but I'm already keen on referring you simply because you seem the most economic and high quality. Just the option alone to be able to self-service and not dealing with anybody instead of going to a clinic where there's even the possibility that they might oscillate between whether you should deal with male or female employees and then offer you pornography mostly targeted for straight men is a jarring experience that is fixed by your service.

From my own shopping experience with these services and consulting with others, the amount of effort it takes to compile statistics on price and storage duration from competitors is difficult. Good job making it obvious and easy to digest.

Your price points are definitely attractive considering most of the people I know jump for a $5000-6000 option at a local clinic that only stores for average 10 years. You're doing a lot of good things here. The branding feels warm and family-friendly versus the clunky and tragic design of most clinics. I definitely get the feeling I'm shipping something extremely sensitive with a responsible entity that isn't just going to disappear overnight.

Good job! Best of luck to you in your endeavors. Seems extremely thoughtful.

Don't apologize for being "politically correct." You're doing the founder a favor, by pointing at money they're leaving on the table. And when I went to a fertility clinic shortly before my transition and they certainly didn't apologize for treating me like a goddamned freak.

Point taken, and especially with recent development in the ongoing war for whether or not discrimination against trans patients is legal, it's probably safer to bet towards situations where nobody even sees you.

The whole question of will they cover it, won't they cover it, will they sabotage me, won't they sabotage me is not a silly question anymore if federal protections for patients are increasingly politicized, just looking at the past few months alone. I was only able to push for certain policies in what is covered or offered at all through my provider by basically defeating their arguments with "I won't be your patient next year if the government makes it okay for you to deny me. You need to offer these services now or I will have to seek care outside your system and make it more expensive for you to care of anyways. Work with me here, I'm trying to not die."

I thought it was extremely well written, pointed, and clearly written as constructive criticism. I don't even view this as about being politically correct, but about being inclusive, and creating an inclusive space, for everyone who is thinking about using our service.

I'm sorry to hear about your fertility clinic experience - it feels like they are still living in the stone ages.

Hey - this is one of the best-articulated responses I've read around this topic, so first of all, thank you. I take it to heart and have shared it with the full team, because it's important are actively thinking about this.

I am really sorry to hear about your past experience at a fertility clinic. One of the many reasons we are offering an at-home solution is for this exact purpose... performing such a personal process in a clinic is often times scary, unsettling, and uncomfortable (and sometimes downright humiliating - especially when interacting with people who have intolerant views).

Our brand is something that we've given a lot of thought to and that we continually discuss as a team. We work with many different clients who are using our services for various reasons. To your point, we've found that many of our clients are part of the LGBTQ community and are preserving their fertility prior to starting hormone replacement therapy.

I have personally spoken to many of these clients and have heard similar feedback to yours. We, clearly, still have a lot to learn about our clientele - their backgrounds, goals, needs, experiences with fertility, thoughts around family planning, etc.

I would love to set up an LGBTQ-centric campaign for the community, and I will make sure we do soon.

Thanks again for your awesome feedback! And if you would like to try the service, please message me at khaled@givelegacy.com, if you're open to giving us this kind of honest feedback, I'd love to get you a free kit.

PS in this field.... puns are always welcome.

I consider myself an antinatalist and have no use for your service, but I just want to say that you're exceptionally good at handling the comments here.

Thinking about the types of people who would be interested in your service, I would lean hard into serving the trans community specifically. I can't think of a better way to demonstrate trust than being archivist of choice for people who are planning to stop making sperm.

I'll add to the chorus of other AMAB trans folks here and say thank you for being so receptive to this suggestion (and thank you to odomojuli for bringing it up so eloquently).

My partner and I knew we were done having kids before I started transition earlier this year, but if that had not been the case, a service that was more private, especially one that was specifically inclusive, would have been invaluable. I've had negative experiences in other areas of healthcare, and I really would have felt hesitant to go to a sperm bank in person, for the same reasons others here have mentioned.

Thank you for this response, it really echoes my feelings.

Before I started my transition, preserving my sperm was a top priority. At the time, my financial situation was dismal, and it took me almost a year to save up enough to afford it. That’s a whole year my transition was delayed.

When I finally went through with it, the whole experience was pretty awkward. The folks at the cryostorage place were nice, but I felt like I was not 100% welcome. The actual “sample collection” process was very awkward and uncomfortable.

If there had been a trustworthy service like Legacy back then, I definitely would have jumped on it.

As it stands, the site and branding definitely feels targeted totally to men, which isn’t super welcoming to people in my position. It’s a sad fact that I have to deal with feeling unwelcome a lot when it comes to healthcare related things, so if I have to go through that I’d at least like to be able to do it from the comfort of my own home, not needing to physically interact with someone.

If you did find a way to balance your branding to make trans people feel more comfortable, I think that would be a wonderful thing and I think there is a pretty large market there. As odomojuli said, I think using more “family-centric” language would be a great start. If you don’t feel comfortable explicitly catering to trans people, fine, but lowering the emphasis on “MAN” would go a long way.

> We help families have children vs we help men become fathers

We live in an age where men can AND do become fathers without a female partner. Both through adoption and through surrogacy. Given that, it would be a disservice to such men who deeply desire to be fathers.

e.g.

* https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/chan-surrogate-gestat... * https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/jan/29/i-always-wan...

How would it be a disservice, exactly? "We help families have children" covers that case. (Well, it covers the surrogacy case -- this company's services presumably wouldn't be needed by someone looking to adopt.)

“Reproduction in the age of COVID-19 lockdowns”

Haha! You joke, but there are concerns that COVID-19 might affect male fertility (we are running a study to test this). So it's not the craziest idea to think about preserving your fertility during a global pandemic...

Wow, this hit me hard. Thanks for that realization. This is something very worth thinking about.

I am a registered sperm donor at a fertility clinic in Amsterdam. I've long been interested in topics surrounding fertility and reproduction. Let me know if you want me to betatest your service.

This guy jacks.

What if your goal is to specifically suppress fertility [0]? Do you have a checkbox that says "I am making efforts to reduce my sperm count"?

IME, it takes about 3 weeks of consistent effort to get one's swimmers to go away. Maybe you know what is it about "3 weeks" in the spermatogenesis process?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat-based_contraception

(edit IMO -> IME)

Wow, interesting, had never even thought about that. I suppose the vast majority of our clients are actively trying to (or planning on someday trying to) have children.

But yes heat-based contraception would be a good bet. Saunas, hot tubs, tight underwear and your laptop on your lap 24/7!

You always want to be using 2.5-3 months to be on the safe side. There's no guarantee anything you do will take effect before then. Happy to connect you to our urologist if you have more specific questions!

This is like the complement for other YC company, Lilia. Do you work together as founders in some way (I guess there are lots of overlap in the challenges you're dealing with)?

Yes! Well first and foremost, Alyssa is an amazing entrepreneur, someone I really enjoy speaking with, and is Canadian, so not much more to ask for there.

We catch up from time to time and I can imagine us partnering down the line. Notably, we do already partner with major female fertility companies in this space to offer packages for couples (like with Ava Fertility, a very rigorous and data-driven company that helps women track their ovulation periods)

I'll just add that we actually do testing & freezing as two linked but independent offerings. So Lilia matches the freezing component of what we do. A company like Modern Fertility (also YC) is closer to the testing component of what we do.

Wow, great service. Hope to see it operative in Europe soon.

Thank you! We were actually originally founded in Geneva, so we're working on it :)

Having been through 8 rounds of IVF I think about fertility issues a lot and lately I've been wondering, have there been any studies about covid and it's relation to sperm count?

I'm curious because testes have ACE receptor sites, so it's fathomable that it could cause wide-spread sterilization, or at least lower sperm counts.

Yep! We wrote a post about it a while back (https://www.givelegacy.com/resources/will-covid-19-affect-ma...). I was proud that we have developed enough domain authority to be the #1 Google result for a couple of months for 'COVID19 and male fertility'.

In brief:

1. Theoretically, yes. The testes have the second-highest number of ACE2 receptors, after the lungs. This could explain why men are more likely to get COVID-19 than men.

2. In the short-term COVID-19 is likely to decrease sperm quality, similar to the flu. this we can say with reasonable confidence, but it's nothing particularly scary.

3. We don't know if there are longer-term effects. We've already heard about potential scarring in the lungs, for example. What is the same was true in the testes? After all, some viruses like Zika CAN have longer-term effects.

The fact is, there has been no conclusive research yet, so we are running a study ourselves to try to identify some preliminary evidence.

What is the viability over time of your samples? Even the highest quality cryostorage results in 10% loss per year.

Hey there, great questions. Sperm has been frozen for 40+ years and then thawed with no issues. In fact, scientists believe you can freeze sperm indefinitely with no loss in quality.

That said, when you are going through the thawing process, you will lose about 50% of the frozen sperm. That's why we do a post-thaw count and motility check 24 hours after freezing, to make sure we know exactly how much of your frozen sperm you'll be able to use in the future.

By the way - if you are going the IVF/ICSI route in the future, of all the sperm you've frozen, you really only need one healthy sperm per attempt, as the sperm is injected directly into the egg. This is the latest technology in sperm and is very commonly used nowadays.

Guaranteed viability at specific time points would give a significant advantage over other vendors.

What are the costs per year for long-term storage? Can a customer move to your storage from a different storage facility? I'm particularly interested in

> we then offer you the option to freeze at rates more competitive than a traditional clinic.

We have a handful of different plans for storage depending on your needs/goals. If you're interested in paying on an annual basis, you can store for $145/year. Alternatively, you can pay for multiple years upfront for a discounted rate.

We are able to assist in the transfer of your sample from your current clinic to our long-term storage facility. We just require some completed paperwork in order to facilitate. If you're interested in this, you can email sarah@givelegacy.com!

If one's sperm quality is poor, what does Legacy recommend be done about it? Is there anything specific or is it just general health/lifestyle improvements?

Yep - this is a great question and I have tons of thoughts here.

First and foremost: sperm quality is an indicator of overall health, and the two are closely correlated. This is both good and bad.

Good because living a healthier lifestyle improves sperm quality. Bad because there is no easy fix to improve sperm quality. Supplements are fine, and there is some limited research to support them, but they are not a panacea.

We brought on a sperm expert from Harvard - Dr. Mariel Arvizu - to create a protocol to assess and evaluate the lifestyle of our clients and create personalized recommendations based on what we believe is highest impact.

We bucket our recommendations into categories like nutrition, sleep habits, etc. and reference WHO or other trusted resources when possible.

We also get you in touch with a urologist (we have one on-staff) to do a consult if needed. He can discuss your specific case and provide insight.

Lastly, it depends on the results of your analysis. For example, morphology (how "normal" your sperm is) can be significantly impacted by things like using saunas, hot tubs, etc. or even from having the flu. There are simple and easy changes you can make to address things like that.

Sperm takes about 2.5-3 months to regenerate, so any changes you make today will be reflected in your sperm analysis after that time period.

Is there a good resource to learn more? I went to a fertility clinic and was told nothing really could be done lifestylewise to improve motility. They seemed to think IVF and IUI are the only way, which they offered for a fair chunk of change.

Of course they're incentivized to tell you that... we have a fair amount of resources here: https://www.givelegacy.com/resources/ and are working on making them more user-friendly.

In brief, you want to focus on improving your overall health as that's closely correlated with sperm quality. If you have more specific, medical questions, I'd be happy to connect you to our urologist for a short (free) consult.

Do y'all anticipate any FDA scrutiny over the testing/analysis part?

I actually have to say that working with the FDA was easy in a way that I didn't expect. There's a straightforward process to register and get approval or an exemption - we did both. You can apply as a "small business" to reduce your application costs, which we did, and you typically hear back within days or weeks.

This is funny... but really... :D

Clickable link: https://www.givelegacy.com/

Thank you!

Added above. Thanks.

Brilliant idea.

Thank you!

Brilliant comment! Thank you.

What is your company policy on racial and ethnic diversity? Would you balance caucasian and non-caucasian banks?

We're pretty racially and ethnically diverse as a team (try pronouncing all our last names...), and we've worked to make our website reflective of that as well.

As I'm understanding your question, I don't think it would be right to balance or have a target for the ethnicities or races of sperm that we receive. Could you tell me more about how you mean it?

Perhaps they mean the cryobanks we work with?

My guess is that he thinks you will extend your business to selling samples (bank), complete with pics and bio of the donator.

What does this question mean?

Being a startup, I would not be impressed if a customer gets a sample from the wrong guy by accident, or they have a security breach.

Healthcare + startups = bad

To me the name "legacy" is a huge turnoff, big enough that I probably won't use your service. Maybe it's just me though!

Are you actually their marginal customer though -- as in are you going to buy one of their competitors with high chance?

If so, then can you talk about which names you like more and they can do better. If you weren't in the market to begin with, then it might not matter for them.

More like someone who had never really considered freezing my sperm but I'm 35 and I could possibly be talked into it, and while I'd like to think I'm above something as trivial as the company's name / brand image Im sure affects my decision making.

I'd love to learn more! Is there something in particular you don't like?

As a marketer (and the growth person on the Legacy team), I've learned you can't build a strategy or business that appeases everyone. Ultimately, a name is just a name.

Ultimately, we are working to help hopeful fathers build families.

For another data point, I immediately thought "that's a surprisingly good name!"

As someone who is actively looking for a sperm storage solution, the name didn't resonate with me, either positively or negatively. In fact, I forgot the name already once today and had to check my messages to find the link (told a friend about the service - very interested).

Nothing about the name as it is now will stop me from becoming a customer, my decision will come down to the results of my research and the answers to my questions.

Personally I like the name. speaks to an idea of value.

The idea that your legacy is primarily defined by one's offspring seems to just buy into current social stereotypes and doesn't really signify what the service is about as you described it. Other than that I think there might be some confusion with the "other" legacy (https://www.legacy.com also a YC company?) whose service is aimed at those on the other end of the life spectrum.

Yeah, just the describing your children as your legacy seems like a gross way of thinking about the world to me. Not trying to detract from the value of what you're doing, or suggest that the name is a bad decision, just thought you might be interested in the reaction I had.

The Sperminator has a nice ring to it.

As a counter-balance, I think the name is perfect. It is relevant and memorable enough for me to find again when I am in a position to spend the money on it, but generic enough to not put off indefinitely on the assumption that I'll remember it forever.

It is only while posting this that I am making the negative connection to things like "legacy code," but the concepts are distinct enough to me that they might as well be different words.

A couple of points from sexual and reproductive ethics, though by no means exhaustive.

First, we are not owed children. No one has the right to a child. Children are human beings, thus persons, not property. IVF commoditizes human life. The result is an assault on human dignity. If anything, the child has certain rights that the parent owes the child in this regard, among them the right to be conceived by parents who do not view her or him like an object to be produced. Attitudes like these also have pernicious consequences. If the weakest among us are not given basic human respect, then it undermines the foundation for all other human respect (insert your favorite social cause here).

Second, IVF often involves the fertilization of multiple embryos. The result is that the remainder are aborted and thus murdered.

I would discourage people from making use of IVF. I also encourage Khaled to rethink engaging in an immoral business such as this.

There are various lesser known surgical procedures that can increase chances of pregnancy, but putting those aside, sometimes we must accept that we aren’t going to have children. Consider adoption. Furthermore, freezing sperm generally indicates a selfish attitude toward procreation that goes back to my first point. I.e., ask yourself why you’re freezing your sperm. Are you prioritizing something above having children like a career or convenience? Are children being treated as an afterthought? You would be better off having children earlier when you have the energy to raise your children.

If you don't like it, don't use it. Simple as that. Judging others will just cause you to have no friends.

Launch HN: Legacy (YC S19) – we help men test and freeze their sperm