Women's Health Mavericks_8. Lauren Makler_Cofertility_with Intro.mp3: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

Women's Health Mavericks_8. Lauren Makler_Cofertility_with Intro.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Abby Mercado:
Hi, I'm Abby Mercado, Co-founder and CEO of Rescripted, former VC investor and ever entrepreneur, fierce advocate for women, and mom of IVF twins. Welcome to Women's Health Mavericks, a podcast dedicated to shining a light on the people who are moving the needle when it comes to women's health and wellness. From inspiring entrepreneurs and innovators to leaders of big brands defining culture to movers and shakers of biosciences companies dedicated to treating women. We'll introduce you to the people, the ideas, and the businesses that are changing the face of women's health in America and across the globe. With these changemakers on our side, the future of women's health is bright. Now let's get into it.

Abby Mercado:
Good morning, Women's Health Mavericks listeners. Today, I'm so excited to introduce you to Lauren Makler, the Co-founder and CEO of Cofertility. Prior to starting Cofertility, Lauren spent the bulk of her career at Uber, where she founded and led strategy at Uber Health. Cofertility, a company obsessed with improving the family-building journey, is a human-first fertility ecosystem, rewriting the egg-freezing and egg-donation experience. The number of egg freezers in America has skyrocketed nearly 250% over the past five years. Egg-freezing is certainly not an insurance policy as many have referred to it, but it's a great thing to do if you want to preserve your options. I wanted to chat with Lauren to dig into the business of egg freezing, what women are looking for when it comes to their experience, and how we can collectively do better to make it doing something so potentially valuable for your future, more accessible, and more human. I am so thrilled to welcome Lauren Makler, the Co-founder and CEO of Cofertility. Lauren is amazing and so is Cofertility, and I'm so excited to welcome her to the podcast today. Welcome, Lauren. So happy to have you.

Lauren Makler:
Yes. Me too. Thanks for having me.

Abby Mercado:
Yes!

Lauren Makler:
I'm really, really excited about this.

Abby Mercado:
Cool.

Lauren Makler:
I remember the first time we met, actually, and I just, I knew there was more that would come from it, you know? And so, this is really exciting to make happen.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah, well, obviously. Well, cool. Well, let's kind of get started. I would love to just dive into who Lauren is. What makes Lauren special? Where are you from? Where were you raised? And like, how did you get into it?

Lauren Makler:
Yeah. Well, why don't I just, like, quickly, I'll tell you what Cofertility is. So, yeah.

Abby Mercado:
Let's do that.

Lauren Makler:
There's like the context because it all fits together. Cofertility is a fertility ecosystem that helps women freeze their eggs for free when they donate half of the eggs for free to intended parents that can't otherwise conceive. So people who struggle with fertility challenges, gay men, cancer survivors, and more, essentially taking cash compensation out of egg donation. For those who don't qualify for egg donation, or who maybe aren't interested in egg donation, will still help them find a way to freeze their eggs through our 'Keep' program. And so, it's been really exciting to have this out in the world, and to see folks taking advantage of it and making matches between intended parents and donors is, like, the best. And I share that because so much of my personal background really led to me wanting to build this company. You asked where I'm from, where I grew up. I'm originally from Rhode Island, and I love to meet other fellow Rhode Islanders. I live in Los Angeles now. So very different, but I have a lot of Rhode Island pride and affinity for my home state. I went to Northeastern in Boston and actually, I had an internship in healthcare that made me really want nothing to do with healthcare.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah, it definetely was going to happen, right?

Lauren Makler:
I was working at a nonprofit that was focused on improving healthcare outcomes, and our biggest project was getting doctors to wash their hands and I was like, like that that would save lives. Yeah, because of infection that's caused by doctors not washing it.

Abby Mercado:
Obviously, are there doctors that don't wash their hands?

Lauren Makler:
This was why I was so upset about healthcare. I was like, how is it?

Abby Mercado:
I'm upset now, and, at best.

Lauren Makler:
Yeah, totally. So I was like, how is it some of the smartest people amongst us can't just figure out that they need to wash their hands? And, in retrospect, I imagine some of it comes from being overworked and from not necessarily having the capacity all the time to do it. But I just was very off-put that that was like something that would save tons of lives and it just wasn't happening, right? So I ended up shifting gears after watching, I graduated and binge-watched all of MedMan and decided that I should go work at an Ad agency. And so I did that happen. I know, right? So like, obvious, I loved it, but I very quickly got bored.

Abby Mercado:
What's your major in? Did you say what you majored in?

Lauren Makler:
I studied Organizational Communication, mostly because I didn't want to be pigeonholed. I didn't know what industry I wanted to be in, and I thought, Well, this is something I could apply to anything, which turned out to be very true. But I think I realized too, that, like, most of my education came from my work experiences and not from actually. Just curious.

Abby Mercado:
Just curious 'cause, like, you were able to kind of make that pivot early on. So, anyway. Cool.

Lauren Makler:
Yeah. So, in advertising, like it was cool, but I realized like, Oh, I'm just making recommendations to other people about their business all day. Like, this sucks. Like, how boring. They don't have to listen to you and you have no control over whether or not they do it. And you're just like, what, like working for the next promotion? Like, I just couldn't bear that. And I was lucky enough to have a mentor who was like, Hey, if you're going to work this hard, you really should go to a startup and get some equity. I was like, what's that? I didn't even understand what it was and I went home and googled it. And I was like, Oh, I want that. That makes sense, right? Like, the harder you work, the better the business does. The better the business does, the better you do. Like, it just made sense to me. And I first landed at what ended up being the wrong startup for a few months. But then I found myself at Uber in 2013 and I was new.

Abby Mercado:
I heard of it.

Lauren Makler:
Yeah. I was in the first like couple hundred employees there, so my timing was pretty great from that standpoint, and I stayed for eight and a half years. I had the absolute time of my life working crazy hours, but feeling just so, so passionate about what we were building. In the early days, I got to help launch Uber across the East Coast, the, like, core rides business where it was like, Hey, have you heard of this app? Let me tell you how to get somewhere. But then I actually saw an opportunity for Uber in healthcare. So as much as I wanted to get away from healthcare, it was apparent to me that, if you think about the concept of social determinants of health, right, this idea that someone's zip code tells you more about their health than their genetic code, transportation is a barrier to care for a lot of people. And so, I put on Uber's first experiment in healthcare, which was on demand flu shots, where you could press a button in the app and have a nurse come to you and give you a flu shot, which was like a cool test of what happens when we bring care to people, but where the bigger opportunity for Uber was was actually in bringing people to care. And so, I pitched a new business line at Uber in 2017 to our executive leadership team, a business that's now called Uber Health and it helps people get to the care they need through their healthcare organization requesting rides for them. So it's for, like, a low-income and elderly population. And during my time there, we served over 10 million patients. So that's like.

Abby Mercado:
Million, is so amazing.

Lauren Makler:
Yeah. Yeah. And then during that time I became a patient myself. And this sort of leads me to the fertility thing, which I'll make a long story kind of short, but around the same time, actually, that I pitched Uber Health, I was diagnosed with an incredibly rare abdominal disease, one of like 150 some odd people in the world to ever be diagnosed with it. I had, thankfully benign, but still masses growing everywhere throughout my abdomen and pelvis, and was told that I'd have to have a number of surgeries to remove the disease, and that there was a high likelihood I would lose my ovaries in that process. And so I asked, like, Should I freeze my eggs or should I do? I want to be a mom someday, but I'm certainly not ready now. And just given how rare my disease was, and we didn't know how my body would respond to the hormones of an egg-freezing cycle. And so.

Abby Mercado:
Did you have to kind of ask that question, or, like, was it presented to you by your care team, or would the average person know and ask if they should freeze their eggs?

Lauren Makler:
Probably not. I think, I remember, before my first surgery, they asked me to sign paperwork that said, If you need to take my ovaries, take them. If you need to take my uterus, take it. If you need to take my fallopian tube. Like, I signed this whole thing. And I remember being like, but wait, like I.

Abby Mercado:
I think remember this from ... maybe

Lauren Makler:
Yeah. Like, what are my options if that happens? And I think I, in some part of my brain, it probably actually got credit Uber too in that they had fertility benefits at the time. And I had some friends who had been freezing. So I had like, was familiar with it. I'm also a planner, like just to the extreme, like I like to be ten steps ahead.

Abby Mercado:
When you're the CEO of a startup. Okay, that checks.

Lauren Makler:
I'm just like very much that way, right? So I'm like, just thinking all the ways this could go. And so I asked, Should I meet with a fertility doctor? What should I do? And I was thankfully pointed in the direction of a reproductive endocrinologist who works with patients who have rare diseases and cancer. So I got really lucky. He's amazing. And so I asked him like, Hey, I get why freezing my eggs isn't right. Like, it shouldn't be our plan right now, but like, what would my options be? And that's the first time egg donation ever came up for me, or was ever like a topic on my mind, right? And at the time, I remember, like, looking at what was out there for egg donation and just being like, Oh, I'm not really into this. I felt like it was really like transactional and felt kind of weirded out by the anonymous nature of it all.

Abby Mercado:
Walk us through the process. Like, paint a picture for us. What did you see? What did you feel?

Lauren Makler:
It was interesting. So like, I had just started dating my now-husband, just started dating him. And so, I was not in a place where I was actually looking for an egg donor specifically, but I was trying to put myself in my future shoes of like, what would this look like? And so I remember seeing, like, some websites that were like super focused on looks, glamour shots, donors, like, literally like looked like headshots. Like, if you were like on IMDb, right? Like, I was like, Oh, this is really focused on looks. And then, complete like, opposite. I remember so clearly being on a random, I think it wasn't the clinic I was going to, but it was just a different clinic that, like, had their own donors and you could download a spreadsheet of their donors, and every woman was a row on a spreadsheet, and that was the extent of the information you were getting, right? So it was like, this just seems like too little information to get for someone who is like, genetics will be where your child is coming from. It just didn't, that didn't track for me. The other thing that I saw that was really jarring, honestly, was that as someone who is Jewish, I thought, What would it mean to have a Jewish donor? I wasn't necessarily sure that that was, like, a requirement for me, per se, but it was something I was curious about. And what I saw was that the cash compensation for someone who is Jewish was higher than someone who wasn't. And then when I looked deeper, I was like, Wait, this is the same, like, for any sort of specific heritage, it goes up and up the more specific that you get. I was like, Wow, that's so weird. And I realized that that, I mean, I came from Uber, right? So I understand surge pricing, right? Like, the more the more demand, the more demand there is for something, the greater the price, right? But like, just didn't feel right to me for, like, the cost of a different woman's eggs over somebody else's, right? And so anyway, back to where I was this like, I remember feeling like, Oh, I don't know how this sits with me. And at the time, my older sister was 34, had had two children of her own, and she came to me and said, Hey, what if I freeze my eggs and donate them to you before you go into your surgeries? And my doctor at the time was like, Yeah, that's a really good avenue. It would help sort of alleviate the stress if you wake up with no ovaries. You will always have those eggs there.

Abby Mercado:
Right. Like the importance of before. Because, I mean, that's kind of, it's like a mental healthcare thing, a mental emotional health. Just having that peace of mind.

Lauren Makler:
Especially when you are going to be in the hospital for two weeks after a surgery. And it's a really tough place to be. And so that's what we did. My sister froze her eggs, donated them to me ahead of my surgery, and I woke up from that surgery with my ovaries, thankfully. And then.

Abby Mercado:
And did your sister have coverage? Like, what was the process for her?

Lauren Makler:
Actually, I actually convinced Uber to let me apply my benefit for egg-freezing to my sister.

Abby Mercado:
Oh, clever.

Lauren Makler:
If you don't ask, they can't say yes, you know?

Abby Mercado:
For sure. I'm always, I've advocate.

Lauren Makler:
I tell everyone that, You got to ask the question, you know? And so that's what I did. And I ended up having recurrence of disease about 18 months later, which was a huge bummer after going through that major surgery. And then I ended up pairing that next surgery with something called Hipec, which is like a heated chemo wash of your abdomen. And since that surgery, I've been in good shape. But I also did not lose.

Abby Mercado:
Amazing.

Lauren Makler:
Lauren. So I didn't lose my ovaries that time either, thankfully. And from there I ended up, now we got married and I've since conceived my beautiful two-year-old Eden unassisted without using my sister's eggs. And I'm so grateful for the gift that my sister gave me. But also that, like, I just had this moment, I remember, I really struggled with breastfeeding in the beginning, and there was this company that it's called Mommy, and they help a lot of new moms in that postpartum period. And I remember thinking, like, if I'm going to spend my time working, which I absolutely wanted to do, like, I wanted to build something that helped more people have what I had in my arms, which was this baby.

Abby Mercado:
You just spoke to my soul. Yeah, I was, I mean, after I went back to work, I said, I'm going to be, I'm a worker. I'm always going to be like, I love working, but if I'm going to work, I'm going to get work. I'm going make it really, really mean something.

Lauren Makler:
Totally. And so, I just remember being really inspired by the team at Mommy was doing for like a different category of women's health. And I thought, for me, I'm holding this baby that I didn't know that I'd ever be able to have, and the joy that I felt in that was something that I wanted everybody who wanted it to have, too. And so, I made the decision pretty postpartum that I'm just gonna I'm just gonna leave.

Abby Mercado:
Hormones included!

Abby Mercado:
Oh my God. Totally. That I was going to leave Uber after my maternity leave, and then I was going to, like, exclusively focus my job search in this space. And the craziest thing happened within 24 hours of me giving notice, like, I didn't put it on LinkedIn, didn't put it anywhere, Halle Tecco, who is one of my amazing co-founders, DM'd me on Instagram. And was like, Hey, we barely knew each other at the time, she was like, Hey, I heard you might be building something. How's it going? And I was like, I'm not, but like.

Abby Mercado:
Thanks for asking.

Lauren Makler:
Yeah. Like, are any of your, 'cause she's an investor and has done some incredible work in this space, like, are any of your portfolio companies hiring? And she's like, You're on the market? Yeah. And she's like, What's your phone number? I'm calling you. And so she had been sitting on the idea for Cofertility for quite some time and never felt the timing was right. And I've loved it and I told her my experience with my sister and everything that we had been through. And she was like, You're it. Let's go do this. And so that's how it all came to be.

Abby Mercado:
That's amazing. Okay, so tell us about the early days of Cofertility and then we can dive into some more.

Lauren Makler:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool. Totally. So that happened, that conversation was October of 2021. I am someone who needs, I'm all about having gut instincts, right? But I wanted to like, test our hypothesis. I did believe that women would sign up for this and would want to go through our Split program where they donate half of the eggs retrieved. But I wanted to be sure of it. Because at the end of the day, I realized I'm in my, well, you know, to my mid-30s, like, I'm not the target audience here, right? And so I wanted to ask women that were more squarely in the age range of egg donation, like, this is something that they would do. And so I created a Typeform, and Halle and I were like, Let's get this out to as many people as possible. And so we pinged a bunch of influencers in the demo, asked them to share it in their Instagram stories, and we had like over a thousand replies in 24 hours. It was so incredible. And over 66% of women said they were interested in our Split model.

Abby Mercado:
Wow!

Lauren Makler:
And so, that to me was like a, like, I was shocked. I remember refreshing the Typeform, refreshing being like, This can't be real.

Abby Mercado:
It's enough to give you chills. Like, it's the moment when, and like, I mean, it's fairly common knowledge. It took Rescripted a minute to get to product market fit, where I'm pretty sure we are now. But like that moment when you're like, Oh, is this it? Yeah, this feels like, this is it! You know? And I'm sure that that it was a very similar moment. It was chills. Your heart was probably racing. You probably ... in your body.

Lauren Makler:
Am I going to do this or am I not? And to keep refreshing was like, I have to do this. I'm a yes for this. And we wanted to bring on a third Co-founder. And Halle had worked with Ariel Spiegel in the past, and she got us together and it was just like, yeah, we hit it off. We had a really shared vision for what we wanted this to be. We also had loved what she built originally with the Cofertility brand as a sort of content site for all of your fertility questions asked and answered. And I also just love the name Cofertility. It felt appropriate for what we were doing and so we decided to like, bring her into it with the Cofertility name, and we raised several million dollars a month later to go do this thing for real. And so we spent almost a year working on it, learning, figuring it out, and soft launching the business, which is a very Uber thing to do, to like, test and iterate and make sure that you're going to market with the right thing. So we did that and we launched in October of 2022. And it's just been like off to the races ever since.

Abby Mercado:
Amazing. I want to key in a little bit more on that. So being an Uber alarm, tell us about the importance of product. Tell us about the importance of user design, of research, of understanding the consumer. We've like done a, like, a bit of a shallow dive. Dive deeper for us. Tell us more.

Lauren Makler:
Yeah. I mean, I think it is in a lot of ways somewhat similar to Uber in that, and actually had an REI ask me the other day, like, Who's your customer, the intended parent or the donor? And I was like, Well, first of all, for us, their members, they're part of what we do. We don't think about it as like customer-driven. But we really see ourselves as having, you know, two sides of our business, which is really important to think about, right? Like, at Uber, a lot of people might guess that riders are the customer, but in reality, riders and drivers are the customer. And so here, donors, Split members, Keep members are equally as important to us as the intended parent, the one who ends up sort of like footing the bill of this experience, right? And we have to think about it that way. We have to see both sides coming together in a pretty consistent way. It has to have the rhythm of growing on both sides. And then we also really think about the donor-conceived child a lot too. So like, that's like the third party that we really think about constantly. And so, for us, we built user personas within each of those categories so that we could think through, right? Like, the experience of two gay men who were looking for an egg donor is very different than someone who's been struggling with their fertility for years and has had multiple failed cycles and is told by their doctor like, hey, it's time to pursue donor eggs, right? It is super different. And so, we had to like, build our funnel to understand and sort of react to all of those experiences. And so, we were actually laughing the other day about what our soft launch funnel looked like compared to what it looks like now. And I think, you know, my biggest thing is don't be afraid to like, try things. We literally had, this is for our Split and Keep member funnel. We had funnel A, funnel B, funnel C, funnel D, funnel E because we just kept being like, Oh, that way didn't work. Let's try it again. That one's not working. Like, let's make this one small tweak and see if that changes it. And we would see from, like, people getting, like, stuck at one place to whatever changes we implemented, like, suddenly, like, floodgates would open, right? And so, it's never going to be right the first time. And no funnel is ever perfect. So like, there's always changes and things that you can be doing to get better at it. We literally like, just yet, like yesterday, made changes to our intended parent signup form because there was like changes that were worth making.

Abby Mercado:
Totally. And it's always so confusing when, when you're like, Is this not working because of the words or the code that's behind the scenes? You know what I mean? Like, is it the product or how we're marketing it? You know what I mean, like.

Lauren Makler:
I think it's usually the words.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah, totally, totally, 1,000%. You sound like a CTO. He's like the product.

Lauren Makler:
Yeah. I mean, no, I don't necessarily see it that way. I just think that sometimes when you're in this position, you can't even imagine what it's like to be the user or to be looking at it for the first time. And so, it's important to keep doing that and not be ashamed of where it started.

Abby Mercado:
Absolutely. Being ashamed of where it started, quote unquote, like, that totally misses the point. It's like, we should recognize our growth. Like, let's talk about where we are now and like, how beautiful that change was and an interesting and exciting journey it's been. Well, so, thanks for telling us about just.

Lauren Makler:
Yeah. Of course. Yeah, yeah.

Abby Mercado:
So want to dig into consistently in Cofertility marketing material and within your voice. Lauren the CEO, you guys are always using the word human, which I love. And what helps me track back to this Harvard study that you had mentioned me in the past. And so, I guess, you know, you're nodding. You know, the study I'm talking about where this kind of dives into donor-0conceived people, and how they feel and like, what this is like, and then potentially cash compensation. So tell us more about the Harvard study and how it inspires you.

Lauren Makler:
Yeah. So I think it's really important to know that the idea of donor conception started, it was like an imagined scenario of people who were doing it, were doing their best. So like, I don't fault from where this space came, right? They were doing something new, something led to like, something game-changing to help more people have babies. And I love that. That's where it started. But it did start in a place that was very focused on, let's just pay people to get them to give eggs or sperm to help these people have babies, and we'll tell them it'll be anonymous. They'll never reach out. They'll never get heard from ever again. And like, that's how we'll do it. And in doing so, it often meant that, like, those donors were asked to do it several times. And we can even just focus on egg donation, right? Like, a donor would do at least six egg retrievals. Those eggs would get divided into lots of six. And so, they could be helping 5 or 6 families with one egg retrieval and then would do it six times. So their eggs would be going to like 25, 30 families. And that's a lot of biological half-siblings out there, right? And so, this is happening. These children are being born. They're growing up. But they didn't have the ability to like, learn about the donor-conceived child or donor-conceived person experience until those people were old enough to share what that experience was and what it was like, right? And so, now, we have information, we can learn from the donor-conceived community, and we can hear and see and learn about what that has felt like to have that be their origin story and be so much a part of their life in a way that 2015, even ten years ago, wasn't possible. And so this study that you brought up, there's an organization called the US Donor Conceived Council that is made up of all donor-conceived people, and they advocate for the rights of future donor-conceived people. And I really love what they do. And I think it's just really important work. And I think that organizations like ours have a lot to learn from them. And so, we actually had them do an audit of everything we do, our website, our materials, everything, so that when we say we really strive to honor the donor-conceived person that comes through the other side of what we do, that we can, like, be truthful in saying that and really mean it. And so, that's been a really great experience for us. Like, they told us what we're doing well, what we could improve on. And then we implemented those things. Like, it feels good to know that, like, we aren't doing that blindly. But this Harvard study was a question around does the exchange of cash to, you know, the donor, how does that make you feel as a donor-conceived person? And over 60% of people responded saying that they found it troubling for them. And so we feel that, again, no fault from where we came from. But now that we know that, how can we do better and how can we do differently? And so this is just one way where we take cash compensation out of the equation. And that's not to fault anyone who is choosing to go the cash compensation route. But for intended parents who are really mindful of that, this is a really great alternative for them. And so that along with this idea that many donor-conceived people really advocate that future donor-conceived people should really have access to their donor if they have questions about their genetics and things like that, I mean, 23 and me exists today, and anonymity and donation is impossible. And that's something that is unfortunate, that is still being marketed today with egg donation. And so we're really upfront about it with our donors and with our intended parents. And for those who want to enter into a disclosed relationship with us, they have the ability to have a match meeting, and to get to know the donor.

Abby Mercado:
That's awesome. That's like, not widespread, is it?

Lauren Makler:
With our.

Abby Mercado:
With you, obviously. But like amongst other organizations.

Lauren Makler:
I think some offer it. Not a lot do. And I have, just have to tell you, I've been in a lot of meetings in my career so far, and when I get to sit in on a match meeting between a donor and an intended parent, it is the absolute best, most incredible meeting ever.

Abby Mercado:
Yes, I just had a, like, a visual, eyes-welling-up-with-tears emoji just there.

Lauren Makler:
Yeah, you did. You looked just like it. It's the best. It's truly the best 'cause it's like a very big deal and really meaningful for both sides.

Abby Mercado:
Of course it is. So when this organization, I forgot what they're called the.

Lauren Makler:
The USDCC.

Abby Mercado:
USDCC. When they audited the Cofertility, like, what was one valuable thing that you learned that you didn't know before that you guys implemented?

Lauren Makler:
They talk a lot about even the term donor-conceived people as something that we should adopt and use consistently and regularly, and introduce that term and concept to intended parents and to donors, right, to, instead of just thinking about this as like the baby that's born, let's be real that this is a donor-conceived person and that we should be thinking about what their experience is like. And so that was eye-opening for me. And we absolutely hear where that's coming from. And we use that. And I think there are intended parents that I think it's hard to have that conversation. When you've been through a really rough fertility journey, and all you want to get to is baby, and this is the last resort, this is the last thing, your doctor is like, Hey, let's try a donor eggs, right, to then have to open up this conversation about, do you want to meet your donor? Do you want to have access to their contact information? When are you going to tell your child they're donor-conceived? Are you going to tell your family? Or what is this journey look like? So it's a hard conversation.

Abby Mercado:
And it was hard before, right? You know, like they were like, Oh, you're you tried to get pregnant. Oh, you can't get pregnant... Oh that didn't work. Okay, that's not working. Now let's have this brand new super hearty conversation.

Lauren Makler:
Yeah. And listen to me telling them about 23 and me and what that means, right? Like, it is not an easy conversation to have. But through the donor, the USDCC, I learned the importance of having that conversation at the beginning of their journey with us and sort of supporting them in that conversation.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah, amazing. Well, so obviously we're talking about women's health having like, said the words women's health, specifically. It's The Women's Health podcast. Yay! But so, let's transition to the freeze side. And the question is, how big is the problem? Tell us about the problem. Why do you believe in it and why do you believe in, like, what you're doing? I'm on the freeze side. I know you're like, How long do we have?

Lauren Makler:
I know. I could talk about this all day. It's wild. I think that it is incredible that egg freezing exists. And what you'll always hear from us is that egg freezing is not a guarantee. It is not an insurance policy and it should not be called that. I really hate when it is.

Abby Mercado:
Why? Because it doesn't always?

Lauren Makler:
No, it's not perfect. Like, no, no, biology is perfect, right? And this is sort of in that realm. So it isn't perfect. However, we know that people who freeze their eggs, especially the younger they are, the more likely they are to have a child later in life. And so I feel strongly that, and this is actually, I think this was an opinion that came out of ASRM, that egg freezing can contribute to gender equality. When I read that, I was like, Whoa! I could not agree more. When you think about, you know, I'm thinking about my time at Uber and figuring out what job I wanted to go for next, and thinking about, oh, I better make sure, like, I was working 100 hours a week, right? But thinking like, I have to make time for dating. I have to sign up for the apps because I'm getting older, right? And I have to make sure I have time to do that. No male peer of mine was thinking that way. Let's put it that way. You know what I mean? And so, I, fundamentally, believe that egg freezing can contribute to gender equality. And I think it is amazing that this science exists. However, I am angry that it is so cost-prohibitive. Not to mention the fact that it's harder to process than I wish it was. But the cost is the number one thing that makes me angry. And so what I love about what we're doing with Split and Keep is that we're able to make it more accessible. Like, you shouldn't have to work at a big tech company to have access to egg freezing. And so I feel really passionate, especially when I think about healthcare professionals. We know that doctors are twice as likely to experience infertility as the general public, and they are well aware in their mid-20s what the next ten years of their life is going to look like. And so if they want to proactively freeze their eggs because they know that they're going to put off childbearing for ten years, they should absolutely have access to doing so. So I get really excited about being able to offer this to women who find themselves in that position, right, who are like, Hey, I know I'm not ready to have kids or I know I have to complete this education or this training that I have ahead of me before I get to that stage of my life. Or I have different goals that I want to achieve before I do that. They absolutely should have the option and access to do this. Halle often says, she's like, I did a lot of cool things in my 20s and unfortunately, egg freezing wasn't one of them. And it's, like, her biggest regret. And at the time, one, she didn't know that she should freeze her eggs at that time, and two, couldn't have afforded it even if she did. And so I see our role here as twofold. One is awareness and two is access.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah, literally all of the above. It's so incredibly frustrating. And it's so all about awareness, so all about access. And I'm grateful that you guys exist. So helpful folks.

Lauren Makler:
Also the same way about you guys.

Abby Mercado:
Well so tell us about the, some of the other challenges. Tell us about some of ... challenges. So you're speaking to all of these different people. And I guess, I'm curious on the awareness piece for the Freeze Co. How are you thinking about that? What is resonating? What maybe hasn't resonated? ...

Lauren Makler:
Yeah. And we're constantly testing and learning. So sometimes we're surprised by what resonates the most, right? It could be a funny, quippy Instagram ad that just draws them in and once they're there, they're like, Wow, this is awesome. I think what I get even more excited, like, top of funnel acquisition is important. So I'm not saying I'm not excited by that, but when I get really excited about is the levers and the opportunities we have to take someone who is already showing interest by coming through that initial part of our funnel to then nurturing and educating them enough to the point where they're like, Oh hell yeah, I want to do this, right? And so, we, we're testing things like webinars where they get to meet with our clinical operations team and ask questions about what the experience is like and hearing the questions that they asked in that webinar and what do we now do with those questions, like, how do we turn those into videos that are then something that can be accessed in a more self-service kind of way by people, and how do we, like, deliver those messages and like different nuggets and as part of an experience? But I think it's awesome that more women than we expected are like very aware of egg freezing. And so some of the education comes in terms of like, okay, I know I want to do it, but what is it like? What do I expect?

Abby Mercado:
Yeah for sure.

Lauren Makler:
And so, there's a lot of that. And then there's education around donation, right? I think a lot of times, one of the things that I keep hearing is like off-putting about donation is, How will I know if I'm like walking down the street and I see someone who looks like me? Well, I wonder if that's my kid. And it's like, actually, you know, if you enter into disclose donation, where you know the family your eggs are going to and you don't have to have like, this ongoing relationship with them, but perhaps you're in a scenario where you exchange emails once a year or maybe send a holiday card. And so it doesn't have to be this black box of where did my eggs go? You know,

Abby Mercado:
It creates fear and anxiety. For sure.

Lauren Makler:
Yeah. And so I see a lot of what we're doing on the marketing side as a way to get rid of that fear and anxiety and to be honest and truthful about, you know, I can't hide the fact that egg freezing is not a walk in the park. It is a 10 to 14-day period of time where you have to give yourself injections and you have to go to the doctor every other day. Like, that's very real. I can't change that. But I can be really open and honest about how we describe it and help take some of the fear out of it.

Abby Mercado:
Totally. Amazing. So I have a bit of a wild card question for you. So I'm curious to learn more about career pool and how you implemented this in your home and in your organization as CEO.

Lauren Makler:
Okay. So.

Abby Mercado:
Okay, I don't know where you're going to go here, but. I don't know. You tempted me.

Lauren Makler:
Yeah. And actually it was wild. I wasn't expecting it. But I did an interview with Bustle, and it came up in that conversation and I, it was like a little tidbit that I just mentioned. And then it ended up in the article and I was like, Okay, here we go. So it's like, this concept that.

Abby Mercado:
Like, you might need to change markets.

Lauren Makler:
Yeah, yeah. So my husband Jake, he and I are partners in all of the ways. And I feel very lucky that that's the case. But he is something actually, we realized while I was still working at Uber that if we leverage one another's skill sets in our work, that we would both be better at our jobs, more efficient, and that it would actually strengthen our relationship for a number of reasons. It would give us more to talk about. It would give us more respect for one another and where they're coming from. And it works. And so what that means is that like, there are times where I know that based on his skill sets, if I were to do something, it might take me ten hours, but if I ask him to do it, it could take him one hour.

Abby Mercado:
I'm going to need specific examples. I'm like, what's going to take you ten hours?

Lauren Makler:
Yeah. No, I mean and vice versa, right? Like, there are things that he needs to do for work that like, when he brings them to me, I'm like, No, no, no, we're going to do it this way. And here's how it's going to work and vice versa. So he is great at go-to-market strategy. He's also great at deck creation. So like a slide that maybe ten hours is a lot. But like if it took me an hour to come up with a really mediocre slide, he in like ten minutes could have an A-plus slide. It's just something he's great at. Whereas like, last night he was drafting this email and I was like, Why are you sending this? He's like, What do you mean? I was like, This, should, one, not be an email? And two, send a one-line text to this person saying, like, that you're going to call them on your way home from whatever tomorrow and casually bring it up in the conversation, right? He's like, Oh my God, you're right. It just totally reframed what he was trying to do. And so, we leverage each other in our work quite a bit. And it became this thing that, so we named it because this is like, Hey, I need a career pool right now, as opposed to like when you just want your partner for emotional support. It's different, right? Like, sometimes you actually want their help and sometimes you just need to vent. And so we named it.

Abby Mercado:
I love naming it. I love naming things.

Lauren Makler:
Yes. And so I've been very open with my team about it. Hey, like, Jake did XY.

Abby Mercado:
Jake put together this slide.

Lauren Makler:
Yeah, totally. Because I don't like taking credit for somebody else's work. And also like, I think there os a time in a place when you don't need to give that credit and when you do. But the reason I was open with my team about it is because I realized we can all get so much out of this concept of career pooling. And so now my team literally like, there was a screen ..., like, a photo the other day dropped in our water cooler slack channel that was one of our marketing managers, a photo of her husband on her laptop, fixing something in one of the spreadsheets for us, and she's like, Real-time career pooling. Now it has become a thing where, like, we really do leverage our partner's skill sets. And I think Cofertility is better for it. I think each of our relationships, like of course, has its pros and cons, but I really think it's an awesome concept.

Abby Mercado:
Well, thanks for letting me go there. That's a wild card.

Lauren Makler:
Jake will love it. He'll love it.

Abby Mercado:
You think? Hi, Jake. Well, Lauren, we're coming to a close. You know, we've talked a lot about things that you might rescript in women's health, in, you know, the family building industry and the fertility industry. What's your biggest problem in this industry and how do we rise above it?

Lauren Makler:
There are so many things that need to change, but I feel like something I learned it with Uber Health, honestly, was that you can't boil the ocean. And so to start and be specific with something that really lights you up. And for me, I am really lit up by what we're trying to solve right now, right? I feel like egg donation is really overdue for something new here, and I also feel the same about egg freezing. I don't think this way of going about it, that we've seen over the last handful of years is working. And it's time for change. And so that's what I want to rescript. It's what I'm working on all day, every day. It's all I can think about in the shower, you know? It's like, How are we going to do this? And so that's where I'm at.

Abby Mercado:
Amazing. Well thank you for that. And I think that's a great thing to rescript. And I am definetly with you. And yeah. So where can people find you? Where can people learn more about Cofertility.

Lauren Makler:
Cofertility.com will lead you to any number of experiences with us, whether that's looking for an egg donor or participating in our Keep or Split program as someone who wants to freeze their eggs. On Instagram, we have @FreezeByCo for those who want to freeze their eggs through either program. And then we have @FamilybyCo for intended parents who are looking for donor. Personally, I'm @Lauren Makler and I'd love to engage directly with our members on either side, so please feel free to reach out.

Abby Mercado:
Awesome. Well, thank you so much again, Lauren. This has been absolutely fantastic and I'm sure we are affecting.

Lauren Makler:
Definitely. This was really fun. Thank you for having me.

Abby Mercado:
If this podcast means something to you, be sure to hit follow or subscribe. This helps you because you'll never miss an episode. And it helps us because you'll never miss an episode. It's wild enough to be a woman without taking on the Wild West of women's health information. The good news is that Rescripted did the legwork on your body so you don't have to. And we're here when you're ready to be an expert in you. Head to Rescripted.com and follow us @hellorescripted on Instagram and TikTok.

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