Building a sunscreen brand sounds simple, until you try to do it without shortcuts—these founders never imagined it would take six years.

Before they built Good Instincts, Carylyne Chan and Emily Hurd worked together at a cryptocurrency information startup. Chan, a software engineer based in Singapore, and Hurd, a senior revenue officer in New York, were living on opposite sides of the world when they were introduced. The two crossed paths in real life during after-work park hangs in New York and a company retreat in Hawaii, where, because of the sunny conditions outside, conversations drifted toward sunscreen.

Chan had already developed a strong personal focus on sun protection, urging friends to adopt stricter daily routines.

“All the people around me have been terrorized into proper sun habits at this point,” Chan said. “That was one of the founding things for me—a personal passion for it.”

Hurd’s interest deepened later, after pregnancy made mineral sunscreen less of a preference and more of a nonnegotiable. The two compared brands and tips. What frustrated them both was the difficulty of finding a mineral sunscreen that felt both trustworthy and wearable.

“I want it to be an enjoyable experience for my family and for everyone, really,” said Hurd. If it’s pasty and goopy, people don’t want to wear it.”

Chan initially approached sunscreen the way many tech founders approach products: move quickly, iterate fast, fix problems later. But she quickly realized that mindset didn’t translate to consumer health products.

“It really took us 100+ iterations, over 10,000 population hours for us to get here,” Chan said.

Over a conversation and email responses with Founder Brew, Chan and Hurd reflected on Good Instincts’s six-year journey shaped by failed formulations, manufacturing setbacks, and the slow realization that consumer health products don’t move at software speed.

Was there a moment where you realized “move fast and break things” simply doesn’t work when you’re dealing with biology and human health?

Carylyne Chan: A software person is always just like, “Okay, let’s just go really fast”... That just doesn’t work in this case. It took us close to four years before we got to a formulation where we were like, “Okay, this is the one”...There is a reason why there are not that many good mineral sunscreens on the market because it’s really difficult to formulate.

For software it’s very easy—if it doesn’t work, we roll back. But for this, you have to keep balancing, and that’s just on the formulation side. We can’t be reckless about it. It’s really important that the end product works super effectively and is super safe, so we can’t “move fast and break things.”

Read more about Carylyne and Emily’s journey building Good Instincts.—JH

For decades, golf has functioned as more than a sport—it has operated as an informal extension of the boardroom. Keyeriah Miles knows this firsthand.

As a former fintech consultant, Miles’s work depended on fostering those relationships and closing deals. But in 2020, she noticed that while much of her industry moved online during the pandemic, some of her male colleagues continued building relationships and closing deals on the golf course—an outdoor space considered safe within social distancing guidelines.

Golf, she realized, wasn’t separate from work. It was part of how work moved.

“You get to see a person in almost every light, so you get to see if they cheat, if they’re a team player, and things like that, which also transitions to business,” Miles said.

While female participation has surged in recent years—with more than 8 million women playing on-course golf in 2025, according to the National Golf Foundation—the sport remains a space many women are still trying to navigate. Miles, who had never played the game before, decided to learn and started practicing three times a week.

In 2023, she co-founded Ladies Who Golf, a membership-based community designed to bring more women into a longtime “boys’ club” network for business and leadership. Today Miles is building toward a simple goal: expanding who gets access to the rooms where business actually happens.

Read more about how Keyeriah Miles is turning golf into networking and opportunity.—JH

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