Lauren Makler (00:00):

You have to be obsessed and in love with a problem because you have to be flexible on how you get there. That's how most successful companies are founded. So I think if you're still in love with the main problem, the everyday challenges or just par for the course.

Mike Michalowicz (00:16):

The biggest names in business didn't start out that way. These are the unfiltered stories of entrepreneurs who turned small business into big success and transformed themselves along the way because success isn't just about what you build, it's who you become.

(00:32):

I'm Mike Michalowicz and this is Becoming Self-Made, a podcast from Relay. And today, I'm speaking with Lauren Makler, co-founder and CEO of Cofertility.

(00:43):

Cofertility is a human-first fertility ecosystem that helps women freeze their eggs for free when they donate half of the retrieved eggs to a family who can't otherwise conceive, like people with infertility, same-sex couples, single dads, cancer survivors, and more. The platform makes egg-freezing more accessible and egg donations less transactional as both parties collaborate to support one another's family-building goals.

(01:08):

And in today's conversation, Lauren and I talk about falling in love with the problem because when you fall in love with the problem, you'll also fall in love with the solution. One other lesson I learned from Lauren, it's about trusting your gut. Most people think gut is just a flash thought, but what Lauren shared is it's your own collection of historical wisdom that presents itself in a flash.

(01:30):

I met with Lauren in a studio near her home in Los Angeles where she lives with her husband and children.

(01:36):

I want to talk about the weather, if that's cool.

Lauren Makler (01:38):

I'm not from here, so ...

Mike Michalowicz (01:39):

No, I know. You're from out east, Rhode Island?

Lauren Makler (01:42):

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mike Michalowicz (01:42):

My one little piece coming to LA this morning or last night is this pouring rain. There's actually rain coming into the studio. It's so intense. Didn't you just buy a new house in the last year or so?

Lauren Makler (01:52):

Yes.

Mike Michalowicz (01:52):

How's it doing in the rain?

Lauren Makler (01:53):

So this is our ... We just moved in about a month ago and this is our first rain experience in this house. And it's like an older Spanish-style house, so it has a clay roof.

Mike Michalowicz (02:06):

Oh, the clay tiles? Yeah, yeah.

Lauren Makler (02:07):

I have never heard something quite as loud as rain this heavy on a clay roof. And so I have two little ones who both have sound machines in their room. And I told my husband, I was like, "We could just turn them off."

Mike Michalowicz (02:20):

Yeah, "This is nature's sound machine."

Lauren Makler (02:23):

"This is really loud." So this morning there were no leaks so far, fingers crossed. That's-

Mike Michalowicz (02:28):

That's fantastic.

Lauren Makler (02:28):

Hope it stays that way, but it's a new experience.

Mike Michalowicz (02:33):

But it's also a big shift from East Coast to West Coast. We have nothing like that on the East Coast.

Lauren Makler (02:37):

No, no. East Coast, I remember my dad made sure I learned how to drive in the snow. One day it was a heavy snowstorm. He woke me up at 6:00 AM on a Saturday and was like, "We're driving from Rhode Island to Connecticut today." And I remember being like, "Okay, let's go." It was his way of making sure I could drive in any condition. And because of that, I was never scared about driving in inclement weather, right?

Mike Michalowicz (03:01):

Ooh.

Lauren Makler (03:01):

So it's a good thing to do for your kids.

Mike Michalowicz (03:03):

It's a great thing.

Lauren Makler (03:04):

Yeah. And so out here, I'm not scared of rain. I'm not scared of the wind. I can drive in anything, but people in LA were not raised like that.

Mike Michalowicz (03:13):

So your father intentionally put you in a position where you're at risk, maybe in a safe way, but now-

Lauren Makler (03:18):

From day one, like when I had my learner's permit.

Mike Michalowicz (03:20):

Oh my gosh. This is going to play into your business. I want to start off with an exercise that perhaps you've never done before. It's called The Lifeline. Have you heard of this?

Lauren Makler (03:28):

No.

Mike Michalowicz (03:29):

Okay. Get ready. Let me grab a poster board real quick. Okay, so here's what we're going to do. I'll start the drawing, but you're going to take it the distance. This is going to be a chart of Lauren's life. This is your life in years. So starting at zero and then five, 10, to your current age.

(03:48):

So what I want you to do is for each five-year increment of your life, just think back and put either high point or low point of significance. Don't explain it to me yet. Just draw it out. We'll take five minutes to do that. And then I want to reflect on it because I believe, I know, your life, including that experience in the car, is very formidable in who you become.

(04:14):

It never ceases to surprise me how this typifies the entrepreneurial journey. As you were doing this, we may jump around, you made a sigh, I noticed. It was either during diagnosed or maybe it was the second infertility. I heard it.

Lauren Makler (04:27):

It was diagnosed.

Mike Michalowicz (04:29):

What happened? What is this?

Lauren Makler (04:30):

So I was 29 and I had just met my now-husband. We'd just started dating. And I woke up one morning with a pain in my side and went to the doctor, got additional testing and was diagnosed with an incredibly rare abdominal disease. I'm one of 154 people on the planet to ever get it.

Mike Michalowicz (04:52):

And this contextually, it means in the whole human history, 154 people ever had this disease.

Lauren Makler (04:57):

Across the world, yeah. I'm sure more have had it, but that's who've been-

Mike Michalowicz (04:58):

But been diagnosed, yeah.

Lauren Makler (05:02):

... documented and diagnosed, yeah.

(05:03):

It started a long journey. So I was one of the lucky ones who got diagnosed on the day of my diagnostic surgery because this incredible pathologist at UCSF had seen this disease one time before in his 30-year career.

Mike Michalowicz (05:20):

Those odds are one in a quatrillion or something.

Lauren Makler (05:22):

Seriously. And other people, it takes them years to be diagnosed. My hope is that with AI and other technologies that people can be diagnosed with these things faster, but I was very lucky. But it set me down this path of how do I manage this disease? Who do I see for this? What are the treatment options? I ended up ... I built a spreadsheet because that's who I am and found every paper ever written on this disease, mapped which physicians were still practicing, who was still in the US, and then I called them and made appointments and flew to different parts of the country to talk to experts in my disease.

(06:01):

And so ultimately, they said, "You're going to have to have some pretty invasive surgeries that will have long recovery times to remove this disease so that it essentially won't cut off the functioning of your organs."

Mike Michalowicz (06:13):

So this is a terminal disease left-

Lauren Makler (06:16):

Not terminal.

Mike Michalowicz (06:17):

Oh.

Lauren Makler (06:18):

Well, yeah, left untreated-

Mike Michalowicz (06:18):

Yeah, left untreated.

Lauren Makler (06:19):

... could be really bad, yeah. But considered benign or low-grade. If left untreated, could be incredibly problematic, yeah. I didn't quite compute that from the start. My first question was, "Will I be a mom someday?"

Mike Michalowicz (06:42):

Okay. So that's an interesting first question. Why is that the first question? I mean, you're 27. Is that part of-

Lauren Makler (06:43):

I was 29.

Mike Michalowicz (06:43):

Or 29, I'm sorry.

Lauren Makler (06:44):

And I knew I always wanted to be a mom someday. I grew up in a very family-oriented family. My older sister had two little kids at the time. I loved being an aunt and I just saw that as part of my future. And so I might've been a little bit in denial in that I probably should have been asking, "Will I live with this disease?" Instead, all I could ask was, "How am I going to have kids?"

Mike Michalowicz (07:09):

You know what this confronts me here? And tell me if this is possibly true. You faced a life-altering moment. Do we face our biggest desire at that moment? Because I was thinking if I faced that situation, I may say, "Can I still play in sports? Can I still be active?" I like to be super active. And you're saying, "Can I still be a mom?" I wonder if this is again-

Lauren Makler (07:30):

Wow. I have goosebumps thinking about it. I think you're right.

Mike Michalowicz (07:32):

You're giving me goosebumps. I'm a co-crier, so if you start-

Lauren Makler (07:35):

Oh my God.

Mike Michalowicz (07:36):

If you tear up-

Lauren Makler (07:37):

I probably will.

Mike Michalowicz (07:40):

Okay, good. We're going to be able to cry in this episode.

(07:40):

Okay. So this is a huge moment in your life, so keep telling the story.

Lauren Makler (07:43):

Story. So I remember, I will never forget this, I asked that question. I said ... And this was before we knew exactly what the disease was. They just saw imaging where there was masses everywhere in my abdomen and pelvis and they didn't know what it was. So I think maybe they thought it was horrible ovarian cancer or different options. The physician looked at me and she said, "Maybe you'll be a unicorn." And that's not what you want to hear because unicorns aren't real.

(08:13):

I held that with me. And I remember telling my sister ... She actually told me at the time, "Where's your closest family member?" And I was like, "Well ..." I was in San Francisco at the time, my sister lived in LA, my parents lived in Rhode Island at the time. And so I said, "Oh, she's in LA." She's like, "Great, you need to have her fly up tomorrow morning so that she can go to this oncologist appointment with you."

Mike Michalowicz (08:36):

Oh my.

Lauren Makler (08:36):

And you put one foot in front of the other in moments like that.

Mike Michalowicz (08:41):

Oh, sure.

Lauren Makler (08:41):

And you make the phone call, you do the things. And thankfully my sister's amazing in a crisis. So she came up, we went to the doctor. That was a Wednesday. My diagnostic surgery was scheduled for Friday. My parents flew out and thankfully it wasn't horrible ovarian cancer, but it was this super rare, weird diagnosis that no one knew anything about. Turns out my parents met my now-husband while I was in recovery as opposed to-

Mike Michalowicz (09:08):

That was the first time they ever met him?

Lauren Makler (09:09):

Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And you can tell a lot about people by how they show up in moments like that. And so I knew very, I mean-

Mike Michalowicz (09:16):

I bet.

Lauren Makler (09:17):

... very quickly that he was going to be my person through all this.

Mike Michalowicz (09:20):

How did he show up?

Lauren Makler (09:21):

Beautifully. Flowers and there to have soup with my parents and doing all the things. He showed up. We took very slow walks around the neighborhood after my surgery.

Mike Michalowicz (09:32):

So physical care, empathy.

Lauren Makler (09:35):

Oh, yeah. Big time. I knew he was the one, yeah. So that was one of the good things to come out of this.

(09:39):

But I went to go see a fertility doctor and said, "Hey, can I freeze my ..." Basically, they said, "In these surgeries, you may lose your ovaries." And I had to sign paperwork that said, "Yes, take my ovaries if you need to. Yes, take my uterus if you need to. Yes, take my fallopian tubes if you need to." And as someone who always wanted to be a mom-

Mike Michalowicz (09:56):

Yeah, you're losing all of that.

Lauren Makler (09:58):

... it's very, very daunting.

Mike Michalowicz (10:01):

Oh my gosh.

Lauren Makler (10:01):

And I remember so vividly signing that away, right?

Mike Michalowicz (10:06):

So you're signing away motherhood?

Lauren Makler (10:07):

Yeah, yeah. And so I knew I have to go see a fertility doctor, and I brought a close friend with me to the appointment because I wasn't ready to bring my boyfriend, my new boyfriend at the time. And the friend I brought with me had actually gone through childhood cancer. And so she is someone who knew how to navigate doctor's appointments and had also lived with this type of fear in her mind as well. And so she was a great person to bring with me.

(10:34):

Then I said, "Hey, can I freeze my eggs before this surgery?" And they were like, "No." I was like, "What? Why not? Everybody freezes their eggs before they have treatment or things like that," if they have access and can afford to, first of all. But he was like, "Look, your disease is so rare. We don't know what causes it. We don't know if hormones are involved. We're not going to inject your abdomen with hormones because-"

Mike Michalowicz (10:54):

I see.

Lauren Makler (10:55):

... "we don't know what will happen."

Mike Michalowicz (10:56):

I see.

Lauren Makler (10:57):

And so I was like, "Okay, but how else will I be a mom?" And he was like, "Well, egg donation." And I had never thought about egg donation before. A.

(11:06):

Nd so I went home, I'm a total planner, went home and I was like, "I have to learn everything there is to know about egg donation. What would my options be?" And I was shocked by what I saw. I could not believe that if you're looking for an egg donor, they make anywhere from $10,000 to $100,000 in cash compensation paid for by the intended parent.

Mike Michalowicz (11:28):

Wow.

Lauren Makler (11:28):

And the difference between the $10,000 and the $100,000 is strictly based on someone's pedigree. So it could be their heritage, their race, their religion, their education, their talents, whatever else. And when you think about other forms of donation, blood donation, organ donation, we're not paying for that, nevermind paying more for one person's than another.

Mike Michalowicz (11:53):

What I'm hearing, my little judgy judgment, is this actually sounds like a gift, a horrible gift.

Lauren Makler (11:57):

So in retrospect, I am a believer that our setbacks are our setups.

Mike Michalowicz (12:05):

Ooh. I like that word.

(12:06):

So doctor says you're going to be a unicorn.

Lauren Makler (12:08):

Was not great to hear that, obviously. But years later, after all my surgeries, knowing I had those eggs there, ultimately did go on to have this first child of mine. And that was this catalyst of wanting to be in this space. And I often think about that moment and also unicorn in a company setting is a great motivator. And I wear a ring now every day right here.

Mike Michalowicz (12:35):

Let's see.

Lauren Makler (12:36):

And it has a unicorn.

Mike Michalowicz (12:37):

This was my ... Oh, that is awesome.

Lauren Makler (12:40):

But it's a reminder that maybe you are this single magical creature that can do the things that you never expect.

Mike Michalowicz (12:48):

Maybe you are. Tell me about Uber and Uber Health.

Lauren Makler (12:51):

I got fired before Uber, so that's a good story.

Mike Michalowicz (12:53):

Oh, well, then tell me. Tell me about the termination first.

Lauren Makler (12:56):

Okay. So out of school, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I binge-watched Mad Men, loved it, and then decided I would work in advertising. And so I went-

Mike Michalowicz (13:08):

That's great.

Lauren Makler (13:08):

... got a job in advertising, had a great time, did really well, was promoted twice. And I was like, "Is this all there is?" You just keep getting promoted and wait.

Mike Michalowicz (13:19):

And drink martinis.

Lauren Makler (13:19):

Drink a lot of martinis, but you drink. You drink? You wait and then you keep making recommendations to other people about their businesses all day and you have no control over whether or not they take the recommendation and then you hope for another promotion. And I was very bored.

(13:35):

And I had a mentor there who said, "If you're going to work this hard, you should really go to a startup and get some equity." And I was like, "Why?" She was like, "Get a piece of the action." And I'll never forget this dinner so vividly at the South End of Boston. I remember I went home and I Googled equity. It's like, "What is that?" I was 24. I was like, "I have no idea what they're talking about." I was like, "Whoa, you can go to a startup and own some of the company and if it does well and you make the right bet, it can change your life."

(14:02):

And so I went to a startup that a few of the people at the ad agency were familiar with. They knew the team there. I was one of five people and it turned out to not be a great experience. I was not necessarily in alignment with the CEO on where the business was going, had a huge lack of clarity on what he wanted me to do or why we were doing it. And it was one strategy one day, a different strategy another day. And no, I was trying, but I had no idea what he wanted me to do.

(14:36):

And I will never forget, he left me a voicemail one day that he was frustrated with me and he literally said, "You're fired," over a voicemail.

Mike Michalowicz (14:44):

Okay. Whimsical.

Lauren Makler (14:45):

And I am a overachiever, and so to be fired from a job was shocking.

Mike Michalowicz (14:53):

Devastating.

Lauren Makler (14:54):

And I was like, "Well, oh my God." And I remember my dad being like, "You can collect unemployment." I was like, "I can't." Like, "What? I will do no such thing. I have to get another job."

Mike Michalowicz (15:04):

I like the indignancy, yeah.

Lauren Makler (15:05):

Oh, yeah. And I actually was reading a book at the time called The Defining Decade: Thirty is Not The New Twenty by a woman named Dr. Meg Jay. It was a book that completely changed my life about how to be intentional with your choices in your 20s-

Mike Michalowicz (15:18):

Interesting.

Lauren Makler (15:19):

... and how that will set up the rest of your life. And so I remember being like, "Okay, this is my moment. I have to be really intentional about what I do next." I remember breaking up with a boyfriend or all of the changes happened in my life at the same time. And then-

Mike Michalowicz (15:34):

So this triggers intentionality?

Lauren Makler (15:37):

Yeah.

Mike Michalowicz (15:37):

And I just want to ask you one more question. Okay?

Lauren Makler (15:39):

Please.

Mike Michalowicz (15:40):

So intentionality comes out of this, a mentor comes out of nowhere. And I wonder if mentors are always around us, it's just we choose to listen at certain point.

Lauren Makler (15:49):

Yeah, totally.

Mike Michalowicz (15:50):

Intentionality, then you're diagnosed with a life-altering-

Lauren Makler (15:54):

I started at Uber in between that.

Mike Michalowicz (15:56):

You started at Uber in between?

Lauren Makler (15:57):

Yeah.

Mike Michalowicz (15:57):

So just tell me about Uber because you created Uber Health.

Lauren Makler (16:00):

Yeah, yeah.

Mike Michalowicz (16:01):

Hot dog. You must be proud of that.

Lauren Makler (16:04):

Super proud. But I was lucky enough, six weeks after I got fired, I had my first day at Uber. And so this was in 2013. I interviewed with them and they called me while I was in an Uber on my way home from the interview to offer me the job.

Mike Michalowicz (16:22):

Wow.

Lauren Makler (16:22):

And my life has forever changed since that moment. So I joined when it was about 200 employees, started by launching new markets across the East Coast. I just thought like, "Wow, so cool. You press a button and a car comes to you and you don't have to take your credit card out and you don't have to fight with them about not having a credit card machine and the ..." It was magic. And I thought, "This is going to be big someday."

Mike Michalowicz (16:48):

How did you see that there's an opportunity for health?

Lauren Makler (16:51):

Once I had started at Uber, we were big on stunts and big campaigns. So you could do on-demand ice cream where you press a button and an ice cream truck comes to you for a day. And it was actually a reply to an Uber receipt that came from another now-mentor of mine who was the chief innovation officer of Boston Children's Hospital. And he said, "Hey, you guys do these really cool stunts. What if you did something important, like on-demand flu shots?" And my team was like, "Ugh, that sounds so boring. Hey, Steingold," which was my name at the time, "Steingold, this sounds right up your alley. You'll love it."

Mike Michalowicz (17:28):

"Give it to Steingold."

Lauren Makler (17:29):

Yeah, seriously. Seriously. And so I went to Boston Children's Hospital where I had done an internship during college, went and met with him, and I could not believe how brilliant of an idea it was. I understood that with healthcare, there are things, it's called social determinants of health, where someone's zip code tells you more about their health than their actual genetic code.

Mike Michalowicz (17:55):

That's fascinating.

Lauren Makler (17:55):

Yeah. So I knew that, and what made sense to me about this flu shot campaign was what if we take Uber's ability to make people aware that they should get vaccinated for the flu and remove any barrier that prevents them to do it by bringing it directly to them? And so the convenience factor was a big one.

(18:15):

And so I somehow convinced Uber's legal team to let me put nurses with needles in cars to bring people flu shots on-demand. So that was the first experiment Uber did in healthcare.

Mike Michalowicz (18:26):

Make health accessible, and to a specific community. You found it's based upon zip codes.

(18:32):

Let's do this. I mean, this is all formidable, of course, but this sounds like such a transformative part of your life.

Lauren Makler (18:37):

Totally.

Mike Michalowicz (18:38):

This sounds like it's the spark for the creation of Cofertility.

Lauren Makler (18:41):

Totally.

Mike Michalowicz (18:42):

Okay. Let me put this away and then let's dig into that.

Lauren Makler (18:44):

Cool.

Mike Michalowicz (18:45):

Is that cool? Okay. All right. Energy back. I'm going low. You're a great storyteller.

Lauren Makler (18:52):

Oh, thanks.

Mike Michalowicz (18:52):

No, you really are, but I want to hear the story now of Cofertility.

Lauren Makler (18:56):

Yeah. So first, I'll just start by saying what Cofertility is. We enable women to freeze their eggs for free when they donate half of the eggs retrieved to intended parents that need the help of an egg donor to have a baby. So we're both making egg freezing free and egg donation less transactional at the same time.

Mike Michalowicz (19:15):

So Cofertility allows women to freeze their eggs and do it at no cost?

Lauren Makler (19:23):

Yeah.

Mike Michalowicz (19:24):

What is the conventional method?

Lauren Makler (19:26):

Yeah, yeah. So first of all, it's important to know that the best time to freeze your eggs is when you can least afford it. The younger you are, the better your egg quality and the better your egg quantity. And so egg freezing allows you to have eggs removed from your body and put on ice so that they stay at the age and quality of when you actually did the process.

Mike Michalowicz (19:53):

So the ice is like dry ice if it's ice, equivalent?

Lauren Makler (19:55):

I mean, you could think of it that way, yeah.

Mike Michalowicz (19:57):

And what's the process? Do you just extract the eggs and put it into a freezer or do you have to-

Lauren Makler (20:01):

So it's a 10 to 14-day process where you are giving yourself injections in your abdomen and then you go in maybe every other day for monitoring appointments that include an ultrasound and blood work to make sure that your body is responding properly to the hormone injections. On the last day of the process, you go under light anesthesia. It's like a 30-minute procedure, and they essentially suck the eggs out of the follicles, and then they put them in straws and freeze the straws.

Mike Michalowicz (20:34):

So your procedure is identical technically, but the way you manage it financially ...

Lauren Makler (20:39):

Exactly.

Mike Michalowicz (20:40):

Okay. So tell me about your model versus the conventional.

Lauren Makler (20:43):

So conventional model is that if you are someone who's interested in egg freezing, you would have to pay anywhere from 15 to $25,000 to go through this whole process and pay for all of the pieces of it.

Mike Michalowicz (20:56):

There's not many 20-year-olds that can afford that, or 30 or 40 or 50.

Lauren Makler (20:58):

No, exactly, yeah. And so the process is expensive because the actual retrieval is expensive, the anesthesia, the medication that you need for the injections, and then storage is a really expensive part of this. So-

Mike Michalowicz (21:12):

How much does that typically cost?

Lauren Makler (21:13):

Typically, $500 to $1,000 a year, depending on your geography.

Mike Michalowicz (21:17):

And can they be stored into perpetuity or is there a certain point?

Lauren Makler (21:19):

Perpetuity, basically, yeah. And with Cofertility, not only are you getting the whole process free, but you get 10 years of free storage.

Mike Michalowicz (21:26):

How do you afford to give it free?

Lauren Makler (21:29):

So the intended parent who is involved in this process is essentially sponsoring the cost of the donor cycle and storage.

Mike Michalowicz (21:37):

So the donor, she's donating, if I recall correctly, half of her eggs to a potential parent.

Lauren Makler (21:44):

That are retrieved that day, yes.

Mike Michalowicz (21:45):

That day, okay. And half the eggs are preserved for her use at some future point?

Lauren Makler (21:49):

Yes, yep.

Mike Michalowicz (21:50):

So she doesn't incur any cost. The procedure's identical. It's the same. How's the recipient of the donated eggs, how does that function?

Lauren Makler (21:59):

Yeah. We've built a tech platform that essentially allows an intended parent to come and look at profiles of different donors. And compared to other platforms, at Cofertility, every donor, whether she has one heritage or another or went to an Ivy League school or an art school or whatever that might be, will cost the intended parent the same. And so we're never charging more or less based on someone's background.

Mike Michalowicz (22:27):

Because you were saying earlier there is a premium for pedigree. And what are the typical variables that people are paying?

Lauren Makler (22:34):

So the way that I think about it, especially after spending nearly a decade at Uber, is that it's surge pricing for egg donors. Like, actually. If a donor's background is harder to find or in higher demand, then she can get greater cash compensation or the egg donation company can charge more.

Mike Michalowicz (22:57):

So are some women donating simply to make an income?

Lauren Makler (23:00):

Some are, yes.

Mike Michalowicz (23:01):

And does that money get paid directly to them or is there usually an intermediary?

Lauren Makler (23:05):

There's an intermediary that's helping to facilitate this whole thing that might take some percent of that or might take part of that, but yes, she gets a check.

Mike Michalowicz (23:12):

So give me some of the ones that you feel, probably I will too, that are absurd measurements of like, "Oh, this is a good egg."

Lauren Makler (23:19):

Ivy League school or a musician with a certain skill level or certain heritages or races are harder to find. And I think, I'll be honest, I think part of this is rooted in the idea or the fact that a lot of women are really off-put by the idea of getting paid to donate their eggs, right?

Mike Michalowicz (23:39):

Yeah, I bet.

Lauren Makler (23:40):

It makes them feel like they're selling their body. And so certain cultures and communities have a harder time with that than others.

Mike Michalowicz (23:47):

I see.

Lauren Makler (23:47):

And it makes it harder to find women of that background.

Mike Michalowicz (23:50):

Now, for the person that's receiving the eggs, they probably want a healthy baby.

Lauren Makler (23:55):

A healthy baby.

Mike Michalowicz (23:56):

They want someone aligned with their own ethnicity.

Lauren Makler (23:59):

Yes. Intended parents want, and frankly, I think deserve a donor who reflects their own background. They want someone that's as unique as they are because they're growing their family and they want their child to come from that background, right?

Mike Michalowicz (24:14):

Right.

Lauren Makler (24:15):

And so I think that's entirely reasonable to want someone who reflects your background. So if you're an intended parent that went to an Ivy League school, I can see why you might want that in a donor, or if you're an intended parent who has a very specific heritage, I see you wanting that for your child or the egg donor as well. And so I don't think that's unreasonable. I think what's unreasonable is to expect that someone should have to pay 5X what someone else has to pay just to get that.

Mike Michalowicz (24:48):

Gotcha. Now, you have, I perceive, clear empathy towards your clientele because you, yourself, are a client. You have two children.

Lauren Makler (24:58):

Thank you.

Mike Michalowicz (24:59):

And it's funny, you and I were talking on the phone a couple weeks ago and I said, "Oh, you had one through IVF and you had one child naturally." And you said, "Oh."

Lauren Makler (25:05):

Yeah. I hate that word.

Mike Michalowicz (25:07):

And I love what you said to me because I have such ignorance around this. I used the term natural pregnancy and you had a better term. What was that?

Lauren Makler (25:14):

Unassisted.

Mike Michalowicz (25:16):

Unassisted.

Lauren Makler (25:16):

And I'll explain what I mean by that. I think every pregnancy is a natural experience. Your body is going through a pregnancy. What is unnatural about that? Or any delivery of a baby is a delivery of a baby. Why are we saying some is unnatural and some is natural?

(25:35):

And so we believe the word unassisted or assisted is more rooted in reality of you either have the help of a physician, whether that's you take medication to conceive or help conceive or IUI or IVF, that's assisted reproductive technology, and so we call that assisted. And then if you were able to conceive without assistance, it's unassisted, and it just feels less loaded. It feels less judgmental of a word.

Mike Michalowicz (26:07):

100% agree.

Lauren Makler (26:07):

More factual.

Mike Michalowicz (26:10):

I 100% agree, and I think a parent may absorb that term and have a bias now toward their child.

Lauren Makler (26:13):

Exactly.

Mike Michalowicz (26:13):

Yeah, subconsciously.

Lauren Makler (26:15):

Yeah. And so one of the things that we talked about, which I think is so fascinating is that, like you said, I have one child and I'll tell you how I went from fearing I would never be able to have children to having two, which is-

Mike Michalowicz (26:29):

Lay it on me.

Lauren Makler (26:30):

... amazing. But when I look at these two kids, I could not tell you which one was conceived assisted and which one was unassisted, and I think that's so cool. It's incredible.

Mike Michalowicz (26:43):

I think it's wickedly cool because there's a human. It's a family member. They're not different.

Lauren Makler (26:48):

Exactly.

Mike Michalowicz (26:49):

Your clientele need to have a service that's empathetic. And it sounds like these other alternatives sound very transactional. Your co-founder, I think, also had an experience similar to this.

Lauren Makler (27:01):

Yeah. I think a lot of the people on my team have had very winding roads to becoming parents and no two stories are the same. And I'll finish my story because I think it's really relevant in terms of how we got here.

(27:18):

But essentially, my physician had said, "Hey, we're not going to freeze your eggs. Egg donation might be your best bet." I was shocked by what I saw. And I remember calling my sister and telling her what I had seen. And she was like, "Lauren, I'm going to freeze my eggs and donate them to you." And I remember being like, "No, no, you can't." And she was like, "Lauren, I would give my left arm," and she's left-handed, so it was a big deal.

Mike Michalowicz (27:42):

Oh, that's sweet.

Lauren Makler (27:43):

Yeah, "I would give my left arm if it meant you could be a mom someday." And so she went through the process, she froze eggs. I then went through three pretty major surgeries with very long recoveries, thinking I might wake up with no ovaries, and just knowing that, "Okay, if that is the case, I have eggs waiting for me. They may not be mine, but they're the next best thing."

(28:08):

And miraculously, I did not lose my ovaries. I had an amazing, amazing surgeon who knew how badly I wanted to preserve my own fertility, did his best to do that. And so we still didn't know if I would be able to conceive with this disease. And so knowing that I had those frozen eggs gave me peace of mind. And I went on to grow my career at Uber, to take my time in this relationship that had newly started, and I got to feel less pressure from my biological clock because I had those frozen eggs.

(28:43):

And so years later, we decided we were ready to have a child. I remember my doctor saying, "Hey, try for six months. If you're not pregnant after six months, we'll talk about using your sister's eggs." And on the sixth month, I conceived my now oldest, unassisted. And so I remember being newly postpartum and holding her in my arms and being like, "It's time to leave Uber and I have to help more people have this same miracle that I have."

(29:12):

And so to me, it was like, how can we take this amazing science of egg freezing that exists and make it more accessible? Because cost is the number one barrier holding women back from pursuing egg freezing.

Mike Michalowicz (29:24):

That makes total sense.

Lauren Makler (29:25):

And how do we help more intended parents have options?

Mike Michalowicz (29:28):

Who would be the intended parents? Because when I was going through your site, there's a lot of communities you serve.

Lauren Makler (29:32):

Tons, yes. So there are so many people who might need the help of an egg donor to have a baby, and frankly, we just don't talk about it enough. So people who maybe met their partner later in life often will need the help of an egg donor because of diminished ovarian reserve. Other people might need it for genetic reasons that they don't necessarily want to pass down to a child, cancer survivors, same-sex male couples need the help of an egg donor, and single parents.

Mike Michalowicz (29:58):

There's one on your website that was like, "I never thought about this." Female athletes.

Lauren Makler (30:02):

Oh, yes.

Mike Michalowicz (30:03):

So Maria Sharapova, did I pronounce that correctly?

Lauren Makler (30:05):

Yep, yeah.

Mike Michalowicz (30:06):

I was reading the article about her and I just went into this rabbit hole. She's at the prime of her athletic career and she has now a choice to make because she's also at the prime of childbearing. And historically, women have been forced to make that decision. Either you're all in as an athlete or you're all in as a mom-

Lauren Makler (30:25):

Totally.

Mike Michalowicz (30:25):

... but you can't be both, but you're saying you can be both.

Lauren Makler (30:28):

With egg freezing, yes. Right?

Mike Michalowicz (30:29):

Yeah.

Lauren Makler (30:30):

And I think one of the reasons that Maria was so excited and ultimately decided to invest in Cofertility is this idea that egg freezing can help create gender equality. If we can put men and women on a more level playing field-

Mike Michalowicz (30:45):

Literally in this case.

Lauren Makler (30:47):

Literally, yeah. Then women have more optionality and more ability to go do the things they want to do with their life. And so if they don't have that nagging, ticking biological clock in their ear, they can go use their bodies in the way they want to or pursue their dreams in the same way that they've always hoped.

Mike Michalowicz (31:09):

Have you seen that? And maybe it's a little bit subjective, but have you seen women be at peace or ease because their eggs are frozen?

Lauren Makler (31:15):

Yes. And I'll say this, it's really important that people know egg freezing is not a guarantee. It's not an insurance policy. And I really hate when I see icky marketing that positions it that way. I think it's important to know that whenever biology is involved, it's never a perfect science. But we know that women who do freeze their eggs have more optionality and more success having children later in life than those who don't. So basically, being able to do that does take some pressure off.

Mike Michalowicz (31:46):

You have a program or effectively the big sister effect.

Lauren Makler (31:50):

Oh, yeah. It's not a program. It's really-

Mike Michalowicz (31:52):

Okay. What is that?

Lauren Makler (31:54):

It's a bit of a guiding principle for my team. And it actually, I think, came from my own relationship with my real big sister, the one who froze eggs and donated them to me, who we just bought our house four minutes from hers. Everything in my life, most things in my life, she has gone through before I have. And so she's my first phone call. I'm like, "Hey, what do you know about X, Y, Z?" Or, "Where am I going for this?" And, "How do I go about that?"

(32:23):

And the way we feel about this, especially in the fertility space, is that whether you are someone who's pursuing egg freezing or an intended parent that's looking for an egg donor, it's incredibly daunting. It is so overwhelming and you may or may not know other people who've gone through it before. And so we see ourselves as the big sister in this equation who's been through it before. And so if we can show up as that first approachable step in your journey on either side, then we can help demystify it and make it feel like something that you know and feel confident in your way of pursuing it in the same way I feel after every conversation with my big sister.

Mike Michalowicz (33:04):

You've shown through your history that you're highly inquisitive, you fall in love with the problem. From an entrepreneurial perspective, how important is that and how can you create a company when you fall in love with the problem?

Lauren Makler (33:15):

I think that's how most successful companies are founded. If you're obsessing over, "Oh, I have this amazing solution," it may never work. You have to be obsessed and in love with a problem because you have to be flexible on how you get there. And so for us, we knew about this big problem with egg freezing, cost, and we knew about the big problem with egg donation, icky and transactional. And the concept of egg sharing is something that is done in small pockets all over the world on a clinic level, this idea that you can pair two people up and both can have a win-win and you can remove the cash compensation. The reason that that's not how egg donation is done everywhere today is because it's never been done at a scale that makes it work.

Mike Michalowicz (34:07):

So you found these little pockets so that you had a proven model out there and you said, "Now I just got to make it scalable." Was that basically it?

Lauren Makler (34:14):

So my incredible co-founder, Halle, is someone, she's a visionary entrepreneur and investor, and she knew about egg sharing. She actually had pitched building this company once in 2015. However, the experimental label on egg freezing was only lifted in 2012. And so people weren't sure in 2015, like, "Is this really going to take off? Are people really going to go through 10 to 14 days of injections and under anesthesia to preserve their fertility and time?"

(34:43):

And so she went on, created something else in the meantime, and then 2021, she was like, "Hello, egg freezing cycles are growing 30% year over year, and yet cost still remains the number one barrier." And so it felt ... And she actually came to me with this egg-sharing concept without knowing that my sister had donated eggs to me and that I had been through this whole diagnosis and saga.

Mike Michalowicz (35:09):

What's the importance of finding a partner like Halle? What's the importance of finding a partner in this space that both have fallen in love with the problem? And is there conflict? Is it a compliment? How's that all work?

Lauren Makler (35:18):

All I can say is that I needed a partner in someone like Halle, not just because of her having this incredible idea, but because she believed in me way more than I did.

Mike Michalowicz (35:32):

Oh, interesting. What does that mean?

Lauren Makler (35:34):

So Halle was someone who knew that she didn't want to be CEO. She had done it before and wanted to be able to do other things. She's a professor at Harvard Med School, a professor at Columbia Business School. She was like, "I want to co-found this with you, but being CEO is not my strength and I need someone who's a people leader and who's going to go and do that."

(35:53):

And I said to her, I was like, "You don't want me to be the CEO. What, are you crazy? That's not me." And she was like, "What are you talking about?" I remember sending her candidates, being like, "Oh, this person I worked with would be amazing. Let me talk to this person." And she was like, "It's you. It's you."

Mike Michalowicz (36:06):

So what does CEO mean? What's your role?

Lauren Makler (36:09):

So I run the day-to-day of the business. I am responsible for managing our 30-person team and all operations. She's the chair of our board and our co-founder, and she's part-time. And at different points, she's leaned in on different areas of the business for differing amounts, but that's what it's been since day one.

Mike Michalowicz (36:27):

So it sounds like a collective vision with you and her. She may play a spokesperson role to some capacity.

Lauren Makler (36:31):

Less that, more strategic, right?

Mike Michalowicz (36:33):

Strategic.

Lauren Makler (36:33):

So she is my trusted partner in all strategic decision-making and navigating this whole thing. So we talk all day, every day, but yeah.

Mike Michalowicz (36:44):

Well, that's what I was going to ask you. How important is that jawbone time, the talking time?

Lauren Makler (36:47):

It's important, but we do a lot of asynch. We're not like ... I'm the one who's interfacing with the team and our members all day long.

Mike Michalowicz (36:56):

You fell in love with the macro problem, but I presume micro challenges present themselves.

Lauren Makler (37:01):

Always.

Mike Michalowicz (37:02):

Do you have to fall in love with those two?

Lauren Makler (37:03):

Not necessarily. I don't think so. I think if you're still in love with the main problem, the everyday challenges are just par for the course.

(37:13):

We did decide that ... I wasn't sure at first. So first, she had to convince me that I wanted to be CEO, but I also wanted to make sure, will women between the ages of 21 and 34, which is the required age to donate eggs, will they actually want to do this? And being a data-driven person, Halle's like gut. She's like, "Let's go do this." I'm like, "Hold on. Let's ..." We put together a Typeform, had a few influencers we knew post it in their Instagram Stories. They sent this out. And I remember within 24 hours, we had nearly a thousand responses from women, 66% of them were interested in egg sharing.

Mike Michalowicz (37:52):

Oh my.

Lauren Makler (37:53):

And I kept refreshing over and over and over again being like, "This must be broken. This Typeform is broken. How can 66% of women be interested in this?" And every day since that continues to be the case.

Mike Michalowicz (38:05):

That's so interesting.

Lauren Makler (38:06):

So many interested women in this.

Mike Michalowicz (38:08):

My assumption would be it'd be 6.6 women interested.

Lauren Makler (38:13):

No, no.

Mike Michalowicz (38:13):

Does that awareness then drive you forward saying, "This must be ... We have to scale"?

Lauren Makler (38:19):

Since that day, I have never looked back.

Mike Michalowicz (38:22):

Yeah, that was the defining moment.

Lauren Makler (38:23):

Absolutely. Because this generation, 21 to 34, I'm so excited about the future because of them. They see this as like, "Wow, this is something empowering that I can do for myself while helping someone else grow their family at the same time." They see it as an act of service for both themselves and someone else.

Mike Michalowicz (38:45):

Yeah, which is an interesting parallel because you're growing your family at the same time as you're running this business.

Lauren Makler (38:48):

Oh, yeah.

Mike Michalowicz (38:49):

We were talking on the phone just a few weeks ago and you had the kids in the background. In your business, I am sure you have to have hard conversations with investors, internal stuff. How do you navigate the difficult conversations?

Lauren Makler (39:01):

I think it's important to be honest and be myself, but if investors are also the people that you want to go to then put in more money, you have to be optimistic about it too. And so I think in general in life, I try to see the positive and the reality at the same time. And so I'm straightforward, I'm honest, but there's usually something good that you can share at the same time.

Mike Michalowicz (39:30):

Do you ever get extreme pushback because there's different motivations? The investor wants a return on their money, you want to serve community and be profitable.

Lauren Makler (39:38):

Yeah, I don't think we're ... We're not at that point yet. I'm sure that that will come. I think they're very much understanding that we're just in this really exciting moment of clear product market fit, and now it's about scaling this thing. And so they're pumped about that.

(39:55):

I think there are certain ... Different people have different opinions about how we use the capital we've raised. I think some investors are like, "Only spend your marketing budget on things that are measurable and you have to be efficient with those marketing dollars." And then on the other side of the same table, someone else might say, "Well, this channel works really well. It may not be as measurable, but this one is going to do it." And so it's more of how do you navigate the different opinions? And at the end of the day, whose opinion wins is something that I'm still working toward and learning about.

Mike Michalowicz (40:28):

And I assume that happens with employees. I don't know if it's emotionally loaded, but I'm sure there's a lot of emotion associated with this. And I assume people have their own right path. Does that happen and how do you navigate that?

Lauren Makler (40:40):

Yeah, I think there's always tension when people really give a shit about what they're doing. And so I try to remember that, that the conflict I'm sensing right now is coming because of how much my team cares. So that's the level-set of like, "How cool is it that they care this much?" And then I'm like, "Okay, is this a territorial thing? This person wants to own this part of the funnel and that's why they're talking about this? Or is it genuinely because they think that's the right answer?"

(41:11):

I think being the CEO is a weird experience where you're like, "Wait a minute, I actually get to decide what we do here. It's up to me." And so they're looking at me for like, "Well, what are you going to do, Lauren? Are you going to go this way or this way?" And that's, again, sometimes I have no idea. Sometimes I look at the data and it feels clear. And then other times the data could send you this way or this way, and that's when I come back to the, "What does my body tell me if I were to close my eyes and try to figure out what's right?"

(41:40):

I saw something recently where it was like, oh, people talk about gut instinct, but gut instincts come from years and years and years of experience of seeing things before.

Mike Michalowicz (41:51):

It's cellular wisdom perhaps.

Lauren Makler (41:53):

Yeah, yeah. But it's because of what you have experienced and been through.

Mike Michalowicz (41:56):

No question about it.

Lauren Makler (41:57):

And so I've learned more and more to trust my own decision-making moments like that.

Mike Michalowicz (42:02):

Yeah. So gut instinct is not flippant. It is wisdom collected. And for the folks listening in right now, I hope you heard that. When your people are charged, it's because they give a shit.

(42:10):

Fascinating. What is the future for Cofertility?

Lauren Makler (42:14):

I mean, what we're doing is working. It's really, really exciting. We launched publicly three years ago. We've been working on this for a year before that. We now have, as of this week, 54 Cofertility babies have been born. Dozens of intended parents are expecting and so dozens more on the way. It takes 10 months to cook a baby. People always say nine, but it's 10.

Mike Michalowicz (42:40):

Oh, is it really?

Lauren Makler (42:41):

Pretty much, yeah. We have helped women freeze thousands of eggs for free for their own future. And so I am lit up by that. I have a bulletin board in my office and it's photos of the Cofertility babies. And it's like, what's better than that? How else would I be spending my time?

Mike Michalowicz (43:02):

Just to me, hearing that, hundreds of women have the worry alleviated, babies are-

Lauren Makler (43:07):

So far, yeah.

Mike Michalowicz (43:07):

So far, yeah, and we're just getting started.

Lauren Makler (43:08):

We're just getting started, yeah.

Mike Michalowicz (43:10):

Amazing. What is on the horizon for you?

Lauren Makler (43:12):

Just putting my head down and just keep doing what we're doing. You feel that spark of something starting to work and now you got to grow it. And so it's just putting the energy into keeping it growing and scaling.

Mike Michalowicz (43:27):

You're shifting our world on this axis, and maybe a little bit, but you're doing it. So keep doing that.

Lauren Makler (43:32):

Thank you.

Mike Michalowicz (43:34):

Lauren Makler, CEO and Co-Founder of Cofertility. Thank you so much. We have to do our secret handshake one more time.

Lauren Makler (43:38):

Okay. All right.

Mike Michalowicz (43:39):

You go high, I go low, and then we switch it up. Thank you.

Lauren Makler (43:41):

Thank you.

Mike Michalowicz (43:43):

Thanks for listening to Becoming Self-Made, a Relay podcast. Follow the show to make sure you don't miss a single episode. And if you like what you hear, rate and review while you're at it. Becoming Self-Made is produced by Relay in partnership with me, Mike Michalowicz, and Pod People.