Anna Lee is revolutionizing sexual wellness with Lioness

This Month, the SHACK15 Journal spoke with member Anna Lee, the Co-founder and CEO of Lioness, the women-led sexual wellness company that built the world's only smart vibrator that gives biofeedback orgasm data through science. Anna was previously a mechanical engineer at Amazon, launching the Amazon Dash Button’s original concept and the Kindle Voyage Page Press Technology. She has most recently been named Forbes 30 Under 30 and and has been covered in numerous publications like Fast Company, Glamour, and Popular Science, as well as a full spread in The Times Magazine and Buzzfeed’s 14 Sex Tech Founders Who Are Changing The Way The World Thinks About Sex. Anna is a prominent sex educator on TikTok with over 400,000 followers. She is a big advocate in Lioness’ mission to expand understanding and research in sexual health, and destigmatize female sexuality.

SHACK15: Can you tell us about your background and what led you to found Lioness, the women-led sexual wellness company that built the world's only smart vibrator that gives biofeedback orgasm data through science?

Anna Lee: Haha. I love how you phrased this question! Usually I just get asked, “did you always dream of making sex toys for a living?” I wish! I grew up in S. Korea until I was seven years old in a conservative family where we never talked about sex and in turn, I was scared of my own body well into my twenties. As I went to high school and college, I fell in love with tinkering, building, and machining things and decided to be a mechanical engineer. While I was a mechanical engineer at Amazon, I had met a male CEO of a sex toy company (which no longer exists anymore) and I asked him how he knew he built a good vibrator. He told me that there was an industry standard where you put the vibration on the nose to know how it would feel on a clitoris! This is when I realized how outdated the sex toy industry was and how little research literature there was around female sexual health. I felt like I had the intersectional superpower to engineer a solution for the stigmatization, taboo, and lack of resources around female pleasure: a better, smarter vibrator that gives people biofeedback orgasm data so they can understand their bodies through data-driven sexploration.

SHACK15: Congratulations on being named Forbes 30 Under 30! How has the reception been to this incredible recognition?

Lee: Thank you so much! It’s honestly such a cool honor to be listed among some incredible, brilliant humans. Not that we should be driven by external accolades, but it gave me a good moment to pause, reflect, and celebrate with my loved ones and the people who have been rooting for me. Sometimes it gets hard to do that enough in the midst of a chaotic startup life! My parents only speak Korean so they had no idea what it was and asked why I wasn’t on the cover of the printed magazine. My parents will always keep me grounded ;)

SHACK15: What are some of the main attitudes that are shifting in the way we think about sexual wellness? Where does Lioness come into the conversation?

Lee: I think a huge one is just the fact that sexual wellness and pleasure are becoming more and more mainstream as a whole. When I started Lioness 8 years ago, the term “sextech” for the category of our industry wasn’t even coined yet. We were constantly getting declined for opening bank accounts, running Meta ads, being a part of tech conferences, etc. for being “pornographic”. Now, I’m seeing broader conversations especially about pleasure, toys, and sex education as a part of overall wellness.

For Lioness, we focus not only on giving people the tools for sexual exploration, but we also have the world’s largest dataset on female sexual function and we work to make sex nerdy. Two really fun things we’ve done recently:

Publish a paper led by Dr. Jim Pfaus in the Journal of Sexual Medicine that there are three unique orgasm patterns!
Do a 2023 Pleasure Wrapped where we did an aggregate of 29,430 masturbation sessions data to show times people like to masturbate the most, favorite motor strengths, and etc.

A small snippet from our 2023 Pleasure Wrapped.

SHACK15: How can we go about destigmatizing sexual health? What progress has been made?

Lee: On a personal level, I really do believe one of the best actionable ways that EVERYONE can contribute to destigmatizing sexual health is to take the time to learn about their own bodies. What things do you like/dislike? What are things you’re curious to try or want to learn more about? What does your physiological sexual response look like? What does pleasure look like for you? Knowledge is pleasure. :)

SHACK15: Any fun top tips for people in our community looking to improve sexual wellbeing?

Lee: YES! Consider your sexual pleasure as one big exploration experiment…or, as we like to call it: sexperiment. See what things make your sexual pleasure better or worse: how does caffeine affect your orgasms? Alcohol? Caffeine? Stress? Here’s an example of my sober session vs after drinking alcohol!

As a shameless plug, I post all sorts of fun sexperiments I do and things I’ve learned in sex research on my Tiktok and Instagram. :)

You can also learn more about Lioness: www.lioness.io!