I took up running a little over a year ago. I could run at best two miles, and at the end of my run I would feel exhausted. Even worse, I just wanted it to be over. Not only was I in cardiovascular pain, but I was anxious. Could I do it? Could I go a little farther today? What if I get so tired I have to walk for a while–does it still count as a run? Today I ran my usual 6 miles. At times the run was easy, and other times challenging, but I have no anxiety or fear about doing it anymore. In fact, it’s become a habit because it makes me feel so good. At approximately the 5-mile mark today, I realized how running distances and building physical endurance is a lot like the effort it takes to pursue my entrepreneurial aspirations. Primo-Lacto: A Closed System For Colostrum Collection, has been funded by three grants and my own savings. Getting this product into the hands of the women who need it most has been the biggest professional challenge I have ever encountered. 
I’m going to back up a few years now…well, 20 years to be honest. When I was 25, my biggest aspiration was to get products I designed “on the shelf,” and that’s exactly what I did. I modeled my career after a few different mentors I had in the consumer product space and worked for 30 different clients under JS Design Group Inc., and a few large companies full-time over a 15-year span. I designed everything from costume jewelry for Nordstrom to salt and pepper grinders for Bobby Flay. I had the epitome industrial design career and one day, when I was 36, I became so bored that I applied to graduate school. I knew there was more to design, but I wasn’t sure what. What emerged was an interest in health care design. Spurred by the decline and death of my grandparents, and then the birth of my daughter, I saw first hand how the end of life and the beginning of life was handled in our “modern health care system”, which made me begin to ask many questions.
When you are ready to ask the questions, it means you are ready to see the truth. There is a high probability that you will become angry, sad or embarrassed when you learn about the reality of things. Reality can be a hard pill to swallow in an intensive care unit, a labor and delivery room or an operating room. I was at a moment in my life when nothing really mattered anymore except figuring out how to make things better for people in vulnerable positions. Chögyam Trungpa wrote,”If we can come to an understanding of pain in our own innate nature, we will then be dealing with the situation directly, and there will be less pain. The pain becomes purely chaos, orderly chaos.” During and after the birth of my daughter I had to come to terms with all kinds of pain. Believe me, this is stuff I’d much rather sweep under a carpet and forget about, and I did. It wasn’t until years later when I came to terms with that pain and “dealt with the situation directly.” I met several doctors while a graduate student at Stanford who gave me access to the hospital’s L&D and NICU units, became advisors and later requested to co-teach health care design classes with me at Stanford’s d. School. Through teaching, and through product design directed towards improving safety and patient experience in labor and delivery, I believe I am doing what Trungpa is describing, and in doing so, feel less pain by transforming it into “orderly chaos.” Anyone who practices design thinking would agree it is a kind of orderly chaos, a beautiful mess of ambiguity waiting to be understood. What I love about design thinking is that it is about changing from: making people want things (the latest whatever), to making things people want. In other words, asking questions that matter (learning what questions to ask), and creating solutions that people actually need.
Those first 4-5 months I began running I was in pain. My legs hurt, my breath was irregular and I didn’t know how to control it. My mind was too wrapped up in all of this pain to enjoy the scenery going by. It wasn’t until I could actually embrace the physical pain of running that I could move past it and found myself running faster and longer distances in a more relaxed manner. I got to know my heart through all of this. I learned how to breathe and how to pace my movement so I no longer suffered and could enjoy the wind, the sun and sounds.
Developing a brand new product, an IP portfolio, securing non-diluted funding, recruiting clinical champions, dealing with FDA, regulatory, manufacturing, QMS, biocompatibility reports, insurance, human studies, and navigating the healthcare sales labyrinth has been a marathon. But get this: I am beginning to figure commercialization out–the finish line in sight. That means regular sales through appropriate and dedicated distributor and rep partners. I am learning that I have my own particular business style and I am beginning to trust this informed intuition. I am hearing my heart on a whole other level, trusting my pace, embracing the pain of this tremendous learning curve, celebrating the chaos, enjoying the scenery, the wind, the sun and sounds. This baby is gonna fly.