EP88: RESILIENT INNOVATION with Dr. Cara Wells, Entrepreneur and Founder of EmGenisys, Inc.

About the Guest:

Cara Wells is an accomplished entrepreneur and PhD holder in Animal Science from Texas Tech University. She is the founder of EmGenisys, a company committed to bringing innovative technologies to the animal science sector. Despite facing significant setbacks in her career, including the dissolution of her first company and the loss of her intellectual property, Cara has demonstrated resilience and resourcefulness, earning recognition through several entrepreneurship competitions and awards. Her current work exemplifies her dedication to making a significant impact in the field of animal genetics and breeding.

Episode Summary:

In this episode of Becoming Undone, host Toby Brooks dives deep into the entrepreneurial journey of Cara Wells, founder of EmGenisys and a PhD graduate from Texas Tech University. Cara shares her experiences, from her initial dreams of becoming a veterinarian to navigating the high-stakes world of animal genetics and startup ventures. Her story is one of resilience, innovation, and an unyielding drive to make a positive impact on the world, despite facing numerous challenges along the way.

Throughout the conversation, Cara candidly discusses the highs and lows of her journey, including the collapse of her first company and the subsequent struggles to regain control of her technology. She also highlights the importance of finding the right team, the necessity of being both confident and coachable, and the thrilling yet daunting task of building a product that can live up to its potential in the market. Cara's insights provide a valuable roadmap for aspiring entrepreneurs, especially those looking to innovate in technical and scientific fields.

Key Takeaways:

• Resilience in the Face of Adversity: Cara's journey illustrates the importance of perseverance and resilience. Despite significant setbacks, she continued to push forward, leveraging her expertise and passion to create new opportunities.
• The Value of a Strong Support Network: Mentors and supportive teammates were crucial in helping Cara navigate the complexities of startup life and regain her footing after major setbacks.
• Importance of Adaptability: Cara's ability to pivot, learn, and adapt was key to her ongoing success, showcasing the necessity of being flexible and open to change in the entrepreneurial world.
• Balancing Confidence and Coachability: Cara emphasizes the need to be confident in one's abilities while remaining open to feedback and willing to learn from others.
• Innovation and Impact: The potential of Cara's work in animal genetics demonstrates how innovation can address global challenges, from food security to endangered species preservation.

For more inspiring stories of resilience and innovation, tune in to Becoming UnDone. Stay updated on future episodes to gain insights and inspiration from high achievers who turned their setbacks into stepping stones towards success. Listen, subscribe, and leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Transcript

0:00:00 - (Cara Wells): We were in the accelerator program at that time. We had good, supportive mentors. They tried to coach us through it, but ultimately, you can't reason with unreasonable. And that company disbanded. And that was probably one of the biggest failures in my life at that point. I had always been pretty successful at everything that I'd worked at, and this, I'd never worked harder. And the company still dissolved the IP and the license went back to the university, and I was there with no company and no rights to a technology.

0:00:35 - (Cara Wells): And at this point in my life, I had spent seven years on that technology. If you want to be an entrepreneur, I think you have to accept the fact that it's not going to be an easy road, that it will be a long road. It's a high risk, high reward game. But some people end up changing the world because of it. I am carewalls and I am undone.

0:01:16 - (Toby Brooks): Hey friend, I'm glad you're here. Welcome to another episode of Becoming Undone podcast for those who dare bravely, risk mightily and grow relentlessly. Toby Brooks, a speaker, an author, and a professor I've spent much of the last two decades working as an athletic trainer and a strength coach in the professional, collegiate, and high school sports settings. And over the years, I've grown more and more fascinated with what sets high achievers apart and how failures they can hurt in the moment can end up being exactly the push we needed to propel us along our path to success.

0:01:45 - (Toby Brooks): Each week on becoming undone, I invite a new guest to examine how high achievers can transform from falling apart to falling into place. Id like to emphasize that this show is entirely separate from my role as a professor, but its my attempt to apply what ive learned and what im learning and to share with others about the mindsets of high achievers.

0:02:03 - (C): This is your first episode.

0:02:04 - (Toby Brooks): I hope youll love it.

0:02:06 - (C): And after enjoying it, I hope youll.

0:02:07 - (Toby Brooks): Dig back through some of my previous episodes where I interview high achievers who didnt let failure or setback stand in the way of their eventual victories. And if youre a regular, thank you so much. I hope you know just how much you've meant to me on this journey. My deepest hope is that the show can encourage and inspire you on your own journey towards success. For Texas tech alum Kara Wessels Wells, early visions of becoming a veterinarian led to dreams out west, where she first pursued a degree in animal science.

0:02:42 - (Toby Brooks): However, a few experiences on the darker side of the days in the life of a vet as a technician came along about the same time as other experiences showing her the bright side and exciting aspects of animal genetics. She pivoted. She went on and got her PhD. But a chance encounter along the way with a now trusted mentor got her moving purposefully down the entrepreneurship path. However, big dreams have been roughed up with hard times along the way as she's discovered the intense highs and the debilitating lows that can often come along with that entrepreneurial life. Today, as founder of Ingenesis, she works tirelessly to bring emerging tech to the animal science space.

0:03:21 - (Toby Brooks): I hope you'll enjoy my conversation with doctor care Wells in episode 88, resilient innovation.

0:03:28 - (C): Joining us this week from Dripping Springs, Texas, is entrepreneur and PhD and just all around great person, Kara Wells. Kara, thanks for joining us today.

0:03:39 - (Cara Wells): Absolutely. Im looking forward to being here.

0:03:42 - (C): Yeah. So we go back several years. We participated in the Texas Tech accelerator program, and at the time you were just coming out of a pretty messy business situation and starting your own thing and, well certainly get to that. But I always start off with a little bit of a softball. What did you want to be growing up and why?

0:04:05 - (Cara Wells): I thought I wanted to be a veterinarian. I think that's a pretty standard what a little kid wants to be growing up. And I wanted to be a veterinarian because I loved animals. I think that my first obsession ever, as probably a two, three year old, was my cat and my grandma's dog. I loved walking her dog. I thought that was so much fun. I wanted one of my own. And then when I was about seven, I randomly got this obsession with horses.

0:04:40 - (Cara Wells): And I say that because I think it's important. I think it's really shaped who I am today. But at the time, I was the kid of two engineers living in the suburbs, and I just had to have a horse. And I didn't know anyone who had horses. I'd never ridden one, but I just thought they were magnificent and beautiful. And so I took it upon myself to go to Barnes Noble, buy horse books, buy horse encyclopedias, and I really focused my childhood around riding horses, eventually owning horses.

0:05:20 - (Cara Wells): And I kept that passion all the way to college. I'm not a veterinarian, but I do have a career working with animals, which doesn't lead horses, and I do have a PhD in animal science. So my career ambitions did change a little bit around the, along the way, but, yeah, that, that want to be a veterinarian never really completely changed.

0:05:43 - (C): Yeah, actually, until you mentioned that, it never really crossed my mind that a career in embryonics and genetics and all these kinds of things, you don't necessarily connect that to childhood dreams of being a veterinarian, but it's really just a really narrow niche involved in animal sciences. So we'll get to that. But I guess start at the beginning. You alluded to the fact you grew up in a suburban, the storybook household.

0:06:09 - (C): Where were you, and how did you end up at Texas Tech? You got your bachelor's in 2013 in animal science and ultimately your doctorate. So talk us through from kind of those early beginnings of the horse loving gal in Barnes and noble to showing up and loving.

0:06:24 - (Cara Wells): That's a great question. So I'm from Missouri City, Texas, which is right outside of the Houston area, and my mom is a longhorn, and my dad is an aggie. So I think we have the Texas rivalry going in place. And like I said, I wanted to be a veterinarian, and the two good options in Texas to study animal science and be a veterinarian is a and M or Texas tech. And I tried, but I could not get into the aggie thing.

0:07:01 - (Cara Wells): And I had a place, Switzerland, between my parents, the longhorn, and the aggie. So my mom took me up to Ludwig when I was in high school to visit Texas Tech. And at that point, I think I had already visited a few other universities, and at Tech, they showed me around. I had a professor take me out to the equestrian center. They invited us to a thanksgiving lunch, and I just really felt like they wanted me to choose Texas Tech.

0:07:37 - (Cara Wells): And I understood that they had a good animal science curriculum and animal science program, and I just felt the friendliness of West Texas. And after that, it was game over. I was going to go to Lubbock, and I feel like I got the out of state experience being in Lubbock with the benefit of in state tuition.

0:07:59 - (C): Yeah. And for girl who loves horses, Texas Tech is a great place to be, that therapeutic riding center and equestrian center. We've had a master rider on our show in the past, and so certainly that West Texas mystique and the idea of the old west has to be a perfect fit. So you find yourself in worse with.

0:08:18 - (Cara Wells): Me to love it.

0:08:20 - (C): I haven't heard that one before. I have heard a story, though. Uh, I have a mentor who, his office is in the old dairy barn that's been renovated. It's super cool. And he said when tech first started, students would actually bring their dairy cows to tech, and it would offset their tuition. They would sell the milk to. I'll have to edit all this out, but I've never heard of someone bringing their horse to Texas tech before that. That's great.

0:08:44 - (C): So you're in your undergrad, and obviously when we're 18, we don't have everything figured out. What were your biggest goals at that point in your life? Where did you see this path leading you?

0:08:56 - (Cara Wells): Sure. I wanted to be a veterinarian, and statistically, getting into vet school is really difficult. And so I saw my undergraduate career is just part of that goal of getting into vet school. And so I looked at the education as a curriculum. You have to get the grades. You have to do the volunteer work. You have to do research. You should work at a vet clinic. And I really just try to follow that rubric of how to be successful, how to get into vet school, and kind of have tunnel vision toward that goal.

0:09:38 - (Cara Wells): I did bring my horse with me to Lubbock. I think that was a compliment to that goal, though, because I was working with horses. I ended up having a business in college where I was training horses, giving riding lessons, and taking care of horses at a boarding stable. I wanted to go to vet school. I wanted to create that goal, and I ended up finding out that I really enjoyed animal science. I liked livestock.

0:10:09 - (Cara Wells): I liked rural animal science, too, which is something that I didnt know prior to coming to tech.

0:10:15 - (Toby Brooks): Trey. Yeah.

0:10:17 - (C): You also mentioned you started a business. Both of your parents are engineers, so I dont know if they had their own place or if they were employees. But most people dont get into veterinarian, that line of work with the business aspect in mind, even though I'm sure at this point you recognize there's a big business part of it. So when did entrepreneurship and pursuing business aspects of animal science start to materialize for you?

0:10:44 - (Cara Wells): So I said I was super tunnel vision on being a veterinarian. But somewhere as an undergraduate, I was working at vet clinics, and I got to see the dirty side. Being a veterinarian, I saw perfectly healthy dogs getting put down because their owners were having a baby or they didn't want to spend $300 on preventative treatment or dewormers or stuff like that. And the veterinarian was powerless to force these owners to do anything.

0:11:25 - (Cara Wells): At that same time, I was doing undergraduate research, working with breeding animals, and the brooding side of the animal health business seemed to be a little bit happier. I had the opportunity to work with multi million dollar stallions and bulls, and these animals were beautiful. They were pampered. Their owners took care of them. And so I was like, huh, maybe I don't want to be a veterinarian. That does everything.

0:11:52 - (Cara Wells): Maybe I want to focus on the reproductive and breeding side of animal health. And that's what I ended up doing, was making this decision around 2013 when I was graduating with my bachelor's in animal science, and I kind of needed to make a decision, so I stayed on to do a PhD and pursue reproductive physiology. So I became expertise on this reproductive physiology side. With all that being said, I finished my PhD, and I came out and I thought I was this expert.

0:12:29 - (Cara Wells): I graduated with honors. I wanted a job, and just my dream job was not calling in my life. I thought that I had all these skills, and I should be working, oh, a great breeding facility or getting to work with endangered species or something really cool. That just was not happening. And finally, after more than six months of applying for jobs and actually not getting a single interview, I got a job offer at a human IVF clinic.

0:13:01 - (Cara Wells): The interview went great. I got my offer, and they offered me dollar 18 an hour and or had a PhD. And I was able to negotiate an entire $21 hours. I was driving about an hour each way in traffic. I wasn't really using my brain. I was just following a very rigid protocol, and I wasn't really satisfied at that job. And it was frustrating because I was like, I just worked really hard on my PhD. I really worked hard at my education.

0:13:40 - (Cara Wells): I have all these great ideas. I gotten a taste of being an inventor and gone to conferences and seen all these global challenges, and here I am working in a windowless lab making $21 an hour and not really being thrilled about it. And I actually had the weird stroke of fate, if you will, to be on a Southwest Airlines flight with a woman named Kimberly Graham, who had been hired a Texas tech to run their innovation center.

0:14:17 - (Cara Wells): And we were just chatting about random stuff. And somehow, in that 45 minutes flight, she opened me up to the idea of entrepreneurship. And if you don't like the job that you have, maybe you need to create one for yourself. And to me, that was exciting. I didn't really have too much to lose if I walked away from my job that wasn't really paying me that well.

0:14:43 - (Toby Brooks): This is a picture perfect example to me of how sometimes when we find ourselves in a situation that isn't ideal, it doesn't always mean that we have to push, press, or otherwise impose our will on it to cause change to occur. I know I've fallen victim to this fallacy more than once, thinking all I need is a Kobe Bryant motivational video, some pre workout, and an energy drink, and I can overcome the world.

0:15:06 - (Toby Brooks): Except sometimes all that does is make things worse. Karen went to Texas Tech from her Houston area upbringing, the child of a divided home with a UT alum for a mom and a Texas A and M alum for a dad. Ever independent, she decided to launch out on her own and move away to Lubbock, several hundred miles west, to start her journey of becoming a veterinarian. However, after getting there, at some point along the way, she found clarity in knowing that vets don't just get to have fun with animals.

0:15:37 - (Toby Brooks): Just like medicine, it's a job that's freighted with sadness and heavy with the emotions that can come with seeing tragedy unfold as a part of your daily work. Instead, she discovered the fulfilling, apparently lucrative field of animal genetics. Instead of helping animals who were suffering or dealing with owners who were irresponsible pet owners, she could apply science to help committed and driven animal lovers investors maximize their breeding efforts.

0:16:04 - (Toby Brooks): So she decided to head off in a figurative new direction and pursue a PhD that could help her do just that. Bright eyed and full of confidence, she graduated with that doctorate, expecting tons of job offers for high paying jobs, just like she'd always dreamed of. But six months of humbling indifference later, she found herself in what she recalls as a windowless lab where she didn't get a chance to do much other than follow a protocol.

0:16:30 - (Toby Brooks): So, yeah, sure, she could have done lots of things to try to improve her situation. What came next was a chance encounter with Kimberly Graham, former director of the Texas tech innovation hub who now serves as the chief innovation and entrepreneurship officer at Tulane University. The two strike up a conversation and quickly connect immediately. Kim plants the seed of not just being content with a dead end job, but to consider building the job of Kara's dreams through entrepreneurship and innovation.

0:17:00 - (Toby Brooks): And while it was only just the beginning, it would be a conversation that would change the trajectory of Cara's life forever.

0:17:07 - (Cara Wells): And I like the idea of being able to control my own bait, be my own boss, and hopefully use my brain and my intellect and my innovation to solve global challenges. So that's when I started to get my feet wet. Becoming an entrepreneur, becoming a business owner, and realizing that if my dream job doesn't exist, I just had to make it for myself.

0:17:37 - (C): Yeah, I don't believe in coincidence. I believe in Providence. And this encounter came along at the perfect time for you. And again, we were talking a little bit before. I don't know the details, so I'm looking forward to hearing this story. Your PhD was not without its bumps and bruises. And you didn't emerge from that unscathed. So you make this pivot at some point through your bachelor's degree, you're going to get this doctorate.

0:18:03 - (C): You are co founder and CSO of Embryonics. You're a published author. You've done research that's appeared in peer reviewed literature. But it wasn't without its setbacks. Talk me through what that season of your life was like prior to this divine appointment. I'll call it with Kimberly Graham.

0:18:27 - (Cara Wells): Absolutely. So my PhD was the means to get that dream job, right? It was a means to get a good education. And outside of the university, I didn't really know anyone who had a PhD. You know, my parents were both engineers. They had a great life and made a great living with a four year degree. I knew some mds, some DVN, but I didn't really know what it was to get a PhD. But I knew that I liked learning.

0:19:01 - (Cara Wells): I've never really been afraid of challenges, and I saw this as the opportunity to do something exciting. I liked research. I had the opportunity to do cool undergraduate organizations. Absolutely. I want to do a PhD. And I didn't really know what to expect when I got into this. I got matched with a professor who was very experienced in this field, and I thought that we would be a really good fit. In a lot of ways, we were.

0:19:37 - (Cara Wells): I used to think of him, of that horse that liked to test his rider. Not really a bad guy or anything, but just a little honoring to throw some challenges. And I'm not really one to shy down from challenges. That was welcome. That was ok with me. And when the challenges were academic, that was fantastic. I'll read a paper, I'll think of new creative solutions. And a lot of times I was given a project or a problem with absolutely no guidance.

0:20:11 - (Cara Wells): And that was a little bit frustrating. But actually, I learned a lot through that project. For example, I was doing research with embryos. I had never grown embryos outside the body before and minded these were mice. And it was like, okay, here's some mice. Go make embryos and culture them into blastocyst. I didn't even know what a blastocyst was until I accidentally grew one for the first time. I had to figure all this stuff out.

0:20:39 - (Cara Wells): And then I was told to invent solutions for things, and I didn't know what I was doing, but I was turban, and I figured it out. And all this time, my mom is asking me like, hey, when are you going to graduate? And I'm like, I don't know, these things can take years. I said, well, I'd really like to know when you're going to graduate. And so I was able to appease my mom for about the first two years, and then she's like, I really need to know how long this is going.

0:21:08 - (Cara Wells): At that time, I had done very minimal research, so I would talk to my professor. It was, you know, always lack of funding or the mics didn't arrive or something, but there was really good infrastructure there. There's really good ideas. And I have friends in the animal science department who had breeding animals. They did ivf on cattle or on goats or embryo transfer. And I was able to convince my friends to collaborate with me and do research on embryos that they were paying for.

0:21:47 - (Cara Wells): And once we started doing that, the data started flowing in, the research started flowing in, and I was able to do research and experiment in a really real world environment that gave us great results. It made me aware of real problems that existed, and the industry made me aware that people were willing to pay to solve these problems. And it got me the data that I needed to publish and finished my PhD research and about three, three and a half years.

0:22:20 - (Cara Wells): So at that time, that PhD research was a technology that was owned by the university, which is absolutely how it should be. It was created there. My professor and I created it together. And then when I met that woman on the plane in that serendipitous moment, I was going to get the license for that technology and commercialize it. And I did. I did this with three of my friends. One is now my husband.

0:22:52 - (Cara Wells): And we had massive success right out the gate. We were able to get started funding. We were able to win business plan competitions, and we were really able to have success in selling our product. Market fit. The problem was, is we let that ego get to our heads. You know, we were having all the success. We were going to exit and be billionaires before we were 30. And if it was easy, everybody would do it. No one ever caught entrepreneurship like get rich plan, but, like, you watch movies, you read books, you. You hear about the exciting exit, and it does psychologically, it gets in your head a little bit.

0:23:41 - (Cara Wells): And so there was a point where my team that was commercializing that company, we just weren't getting along. I was not the CEO. I was the one that knew most about the industry. I developed the product. I was a co inventor. I had relationships with the people who would end up being our end users and customers, but I was not the CEO. However, I was acting like the CEO because when put on the spot, it was me answering these questions, and I unintentionally stepped on the real CEO's toes.

0:24:16 - (Cara Wells): And what should have been a conversation ended up to a lot of built up emotion and stress. To top it all off, I was working without paying. My entire team had full time jobs. I didn't. So I just had the stress of being a young entrepreneur. No savings in the bank account and trying to do something when I didn't know what I was doing. We were in the accelerator program at that time. We had good, supportive mentors.

0:24:47 - (Cara Wells): They tried to coach us through it, but ultimately, you can't reason with unreasonable. And that company disbanded. And that was probably one of the biggest failures in my life at that point. I had always been pretty successful at everything that I'd worked at, and this, I'd never worked harder. And the company still dissolved the IP and the license went back to the university, and I was there with no company and no rights to a technology.

0:25:18 - (Cara Wells): And at this point in my life, I had spent seven years on that technology. I was frustrated, I was mad, I was angry, I lost some of my best friends. But I think I was more hooked than error. I loved the technology. I loved the problem. I saw really good ends to a means. If we could commercialize this, we can improve embryo selection. Doing that makes IVF more efficient. We can treat infertility better, we can help breed the best animals that are going to grow faster and feed more people.

0:25:56 - (Cara Wells): That's good for food security, it's good for the environment, and then we could scale it out to do other cool things like save endangered species. So I really just had to get my hands on that technology. So I commercialize it and get it into the public sector. I really believed at the time that all my good effort was my own good effort and that it would be honored. So with the help of the Texas tech accelerator and some of the mentors that I'd gotten to know, I formed a new company.

0:26:33 - (Cara Wells): And I went back to the university and I asked for that license, and they said, oh, well, it didn't work out for you last time. Like, why is this time going to be different? And I'm like, okay, well, that was wrong team, but this time it's going to be different. And they were like, okay, well, give us a business plan. They're like, okay, great, I can do that. So I did a business plan. I brought in letters of intent from customers, and I did everything that they asked me to do.

0:27:07 - (Cara Wells): And despite the legal contracts in place, the university undercut me and gave that technology directly to my customer. And so once again, I was left being ambitious, I was left being motivated. I had no job, no income, and no technology. And that was an all time low in my life. I thought there was a system that if you played by the rule, the system would work out, and I was the only one that risked something, and I was left with a negative balance in that situation.

0:27:49 - (C): Yeah, and it's got to be maddening, because years before, you saw the promise in this idea and this technology, and not only the promise, but the financial windfall that would come with it and have that kind of tantalizingly dangled just out of your reach for year after year. And in the meantime, youre suffering financially. You dont have an income. And so not only are you not getting rich quick, youre getting poor pretty steadily.

0:28:18 - (C): What did you tell yourself during that time to keep after that in order to keep pursuing this goal?

0:28:25 - (Cara Wells): Pressure makes diamond, and I don't think it was what I was telling myself. I think it was just the potential and the prospect that that technology had to really make a difference in people's life. I tasted it before and I wanted to taste it again. So that's what kept me flying out of this really slippery hole that I was and that I wanted to do this. And ultimately I got that back time and time again and over months, over years, realized that I'm smart, I have a brain, I have an education, that if I can't get that technology back, maybe it's time for me to use my education and create something new that I can have ownership in and that I can control the destiny of.

0:29:27 - (Cara Wells): And that's not just something that happens. At Renee, it was a huge pill to swallow, to basically abandon something that I'd worked on for almost a decade of my life and completely accept the fact that not only except the fact of what starting over really was, it wasn't just starting a new company, it was starting ground zero, having to go from ideation of something, to do the research, to do the experiments that were going to be required to validate it.

0:30:01 - (Cara Wells): There is no guarantee that the new technology would even work. If we validate it, how do we make a product out of it? How do we protect the intellectual property and how do we go to market with that technology? So that was the only way forward to me. And I, for some reason, I was stupid enough to say, like, yeah, we're going to go down this really, really rough road and we're going to pursue this. And in February of 2020, I was sitting in the Lubbock airport, completely deflated. I had a terrible meeting. I wasn't willing to get my PhD in technology.

0:30:48 - (Cara Wells): That was becoming very clear and evident. And I watched a TED talk about a technology out of MIT called video motion magnification that had nothing to do with embryos, had nothing to do with reproduction. But it inspired me to try something new. Of course, I didn't exactly want to be reliant on another university's technology, so that was just the inspiration bit. I shared the TED talk with a veterinarian that I was friends with him, and I started collecting data.

0:31:25 - (Cara Wells): And I think after that it was just the positive, positive feedback reinforcing that I was on the right path, that we should start going. Once the new idea started showing signs of working, we weren't going to abandon thin, and that just gave us the confidence that we needed to pursue it further down the road. So I don't think there is any like epiphany or pivotal moment that I encourage myself to keep going. I think it's just the taste of that potential and then getting little bits of positive feedback that, hey, you're doing the right thing. Keep this up and it will work out for you.

0:32:07 - (Cara Wells): And of course, the more hardships that we go through, the more equipped we get to handle them in the future and mistakes that we're never going to make again. And so I really came into my own. I found a new group of confidence and we've been growing from there, and it hasn't been without setbacks since then. But if you want to be an entrepreneur, I think you have to accept the fact that it's not going to be an easy road, that it will be a long road. It's a high risk, high reward game. But some people end up changing the world because of it, for sure.

0:32:40 - (C): As we're talking about the industry, I grew up in the midwest, not far from Lexington, and I was a huge Kentucky fan. So you drive in and you see these huge thoroughbred farms. These horses are living in nicer living arrangements than I have today, but it's big money. And so when I think of the breeding industry, especially as it relates to horses, I think of tough, old rich dudes filling rooms with boots and maybe science as well. But when you walk into a room filled with your target customer base, you're not like them in many ways. And so talk me through what it's been like navigating that aspect. Being a young woman, highly educated, but really maybe othered in some senses, even though this has been your lifelong dream, what has that been like for you, and what have you learned through that process?

0:33:35 - (Cara Wells): You know, that's a good question. Most of our customers and people that we work with, they have money. They own some of the most expensive animal on this planet, and they've been doing this for years and years. One of my teammates, he always jokes that my horse should be deemed the horse that changed the industry, because it was the horse that created the inspiration from this all along. But I had lots of great interactions with people and lots of negative interactions with people.

0:34:10 - (Cara Wells): First, I had the luxury of playing the student card. I'm a researcher. I want to do this. I'm working on my PhD. Can we try this? And I think, generally speaking, people are kinder towards students or more open minded. But once you own a business, the way people think of you is that you're already rich. They don't know that I'm self funding my payroll. They don't know that I'm writing grants or that I have a side job, pet sitting, trying to make ends meet. It's. I'm the CEO of a company. Your company must be well funded, and you must have money.

0:34:51 - (Cara Wells): And sometimes we can play this to our advantage. You know, we make ourselves seem a little bit bigger than we actually are. Other times, people want to take advantage of you. And I found that when you walk into that room, the best thing to do is that it's not about you, it's about them. It's how can I save them money? How can I improve their pregnancy rates? And how can I help their return on investment in whatever industry that we're in?

0:35:20 - (Cara Wells): And once I started understanding that, the interactions got a lot more successful. I will also tell you that working with the owners of the animals is a lot easier than working with some of the companies that they use to breed their animals. Everyone has different interests in here. It's usually all how to make money. The owners of those animals are the ones that bear the economic burden of failed pregnancy, which is the problem that I'm trying to solve.

0:35:53 - (Cara Wells): And some of their customers get paid whether or not their procedures makes a pregnancy or not. So I've really had to learn how to know my customer, know the demographic, the interest, the goals of the person I'm talking to, that we can make our pitch as successful as possible. I also don't even attempt to fit in. I own the person that I am pretty proudly. I've learned a lot. I always look at people and think that there's something that I can probably learn from them.

0:36:26 - (Cara Wells): And with that mindset, it typically makes the conversations get better. Not always, but if they don't want me there, then they're probably not going to be a good customer. I'm going to spend my time and effort on people that will be good customers. Right.

0:36:42 - (C): I certainly have always appreciated that about you, Kimberly, as well as your mentor. She's used to walking into rooms where she has to, to maybe stand her own in a way that she wouldn't.

0:36:52 - (Toby Brooks): Have to if she were a guy.

0:36:53 - (C): And that's unfortunate, and I hate that. But to compliment you, it's certainly been great to see you grow and flourish through this process. And the accelerator program is. It's a lot, but it's child's play compared to really owning and operating your business. These milestones are arbitrary in the real world. Like, these milestones mean the difference between us keeping the doors open and not. And so I think I'm most interested in.

0:37:20 - (C): There may or may not have been a point in time where you thought, if this doesn't happen, then I'm pivoting, I'm going to get a faculty job or I'm going to go do something else. But you pushed through, and for most businesses, there's this moment of, can we reach escape velocity so that this thing can live? I can bankroll this for a while, but sooner or later, it's got to start standing on its own legs.

0:37:44 - (C): Was there a point in time where you had that kind of ultimatum conversation with yourself or even with your husband? And what helped you push through to success?

0:37:56 - (Cara Wells): For sure, my financial projections have never been actual versus reality. Those two things have never mashed up in the history of me owning this business. It's always taken more money and more time than I initially slated for. And I think that's pretty common at most startups. With this new venture, I. New venture? It's five years old now. You know, I was so mad and I was so furious, and I was so determined to prove people wrong when I first started it, that was the motivation that I needed, and I got pretty lucky, and I had a good idea really early on.

0:38:41 - (Cara Wells): I also had people that promised a lot of funding, but that actually didn't come to fruition at the level that I was promised to deal with that we pitched to some investors and stuff years ago, and I was just told, it's too early, it's too early. And having a product that I need to hire engineers and machine learning engineers and stuff to build, I was looking at something that was going to be rather expensive to make.

0:39:12 - (Cara Wells): And thats this chicken and egg situation that entrepreneurs often faced. How do you build a product without money? And how do you get money without a product? And so I was really stuck in that and I found some success at business plan competitions. Business plan competitions, they're really thrilling. They're a lot of fun. They put you on a stage, you get to show off everything that you're working on. It's a showcase and you get to have great conversations with people that support you. And in my case, I was lucky to win over a half million dollars doing this.

0:39:50 - (Toby Brooks): Kara's bright and driven, for sure, but what has probably helped keep her on track for turning her dreams into reality is that she's resilient and resourceful. One of the consequences of meeting up with an innovation entrepreneurship leader like Kimberly Graham has been an introduction to the world of learning entrepreneurship. This is a growing space in the world. Federal and private funding agencies alike were getting tired of pouring millions of dollars into research funding, answering questions that had little to no real impact on society.

0:40:20 - (C): I looked it up.

0:40:22 - (Toby Brooks): Things like a half a million dollars to investigate pigeon gambling behavior, or nearly three quarters of a million on a mathematical model to predict cow defecation. So instead, programs like the National Science Foundation's I Corps program were born. In these programs, students of entrepreneurship learn about concepts like the Lean startup, customer discovery and value propositions, things that most grad students have never been exposed to.

0:40:48 - (Toby Brooks): And through participation in this and other programs, Kara gets good at seeking out what customers need and finding ways to solve problems that people would pay to have her solve. And in that process, she gets comfortable writing and presenting business plans, building what are called pitch decks, and coming into her own. Not just as a content expert with a PhD, but as an entrepreneur who understands how to own, operate and grow a successful business.

0:41:16 - (Toby Brooks): She manages to win several. And you heard her, she gets enough capital to keep her dream going even when she doesn't yet have a viable product to sell. But she soon will. It's in the work. Except even that process would pose possibly her biggest setback yet.

0:41:34 - (Cara Wells): So that was awesome. That kept us going. That allowed me to hire the people that I needed to hire to build this product. And then last fall, the product was set to launch. Everything was ready. I had the launch date set with my engineer and launch date happened and my engineer went radio silent on me. He didn't deliver the product. And not only did he not deliver the product, as he sent me a bill for some stuff that he didn't exactly deliver.

0:42:15 - (Cara Wells): And all this work had gone into this and I can't get hold of my engineer and I don't know where my product is. And I have the luxury of people wanting to pay for my product and I couldn't deliver it to them. So this, even just recently, after all the other hardships, was a big wake up call of like, why am I doing this? Why should I keep going? And to make matters worse, I have friends in the industry who have my back. They looked into the deliverables that I had received and they called my product vaporware, meaning what the engineer had showed me that he built, sent me data on and was all fabricated and it didn't actually exist.

0:43:04 - (Cara Wells): And this was something that I had spent a quarter of a million dollars on over the past year, not including all the other business expenses. So I was like, I've been through enough, how am I going to get out of this one? And I was basically out of money at this time because my budget, the product was supposed to launch, I was supposed to have sales, and that was supposed to be my new financial pipeline.

0:43:32 - (Cara Wells): And that did not happen. So I hired a new engineering team. They got in working with a product, I realized I had to start over from scratch. I can raise money, but raising money takes time. My husband and my parents started giving me loans, started making investments. But when I'm taking care of a team of about twelve people, my husband's salary doesn't exactly take care of us for very long. I was embarrassed. I had to tell customers that they couldn't have the product yet, which was a better situation than giving them a product that didn't work. So I'm super thankful I didn't find myself in that situation.

0:44:19 - (Cara Wells): But I mean, the past few months have been hugely stressful and I think the only thing that keeps me going is I'm too far down this road to turn back now. We've overcome too many challenges. I'm not turning back now. I am very close to closing a venture deal right now. So if everything goes the way that it's played it to, I think that we're going to be okay financially. I think that I'm back on track.

0:44:50 - (Cara Wells): Fortunately for me, all the success that I've had shows we built a lot, we've done a lot. We're fairly well known in the agriculture and livestock industry for what we do. And there's value in my brand, there's value in my team, and there's value in my ip, and there's value in the product. That we've tried to do. So I just think that being a stubborn person, being a resilient person, having tenacity, having grit is what's kept us going.

0:45:26 - (Cara Wells): And just the fact that I feel like we've come too far to walk away. But I've been given a million reasons to go take a nice job, but I would be bored. Let's be honest, right now, the coolest job in the world. I get to work with really smart people, I get to talk with really smart customers, and we get to do things that's never been done before. And I just, I can't see myself walking away from that to go do a nine to five because I want health insurance and a nice salary, I'm hooked. I'm addicted.

0:45:59 - (Cara Wells): And as addicts do some pretty crazy things to get that clicks that we want.

0:46:06 - (C): Yeah, for sure. It's the double edged sword because I had some previous business experiences where I just jumped all in and partnered and it didn't end well. And when I entered accelerator, I was like, that's it. I'm doing this all myself. And you will never find a billion dollar company that is owned, operated, run by one person. You just don't. You have to trust people along the way. It's a relationship not unlike marriage. You're trusting people with your future.

0:46:38 - (C): And sometimes if we trust the wrong people, man, it can take years, if ever to come out of that. Throughout this process, it hasn't gone according to maybe the way you would have scripted it, but you're here and you're successful. You mentioned you've been successful in winning competitions and seed round funding and NSF I Corps, and just a lot of things that you wouldn't have had to do had it come easily.

0:47:04 - (C): What do you think has been the biggest lesson you've taken away from the setback, the failure, the adversity that you faced along this journey?

0:47:12 - (Cara Wells): I've learned so many things. Really hard to pinpoint the biggest one, but I think that the best success I've ever had was when you try to find a blend of confidence and coachability. I don't know everything, but I have to be confident enough to put myself out there, to put my ideas out there, to put my product out there, but then coachable enough that when I need to pivot or learn something or make an iteration that I'm not too proud to make those changes.

0:47:46 - (Cara Wells): And so I. It's not the strategy that works for everyone, but I'm also at throw darts and sees what's the thing type person. I never look at an opportunity and say, I can't do that. I look at every opportunity and say, hey, I can do that. I might need to get creative with how I craft the narrative or how I submit my application, or how we try to force ourselves to align with the priorities of that funding organization.

0:48:19 - (Cara Wells): But I'm just. I'm a glass half full type person, and I look at opportunities. You miss all the shots that you don't take. Yeah. So I would just tell people, be positive, be competent, and you've got to put yourself out there, and you have to try. And for us, it the winning, the competition, and the investment and the money, that is the necessary part of what keeps us going. But then we have a phone call or an in person meeting where I get to work with rhinoceros embryos.

0:49:02 - (Cara Wells): You know, those species are going endangered, and I'm not going to bring them back myself. But if I can play one small piece in that quest to keep these animals on the planet for future children to see, that's pretty amazing. I work with companies that want to help humans and animals reproduce in space. Our technology allows us to see mammalian development in real time. Nothing except for cockroaches have ever actually fully gone from fertilization to birth and space before.

0:49:36 - (Cara Wells): And so how cool it is this for me to have the opportunity to be on a space reproduction project? The work that we do with cattle is amazing because that's making animal production more efficient in our country. It's helping foods security in other countries were helping with insect resistance, heat tolerant, and making these more resilient for the future. And I get to be part of a lot of global challenges.

0:50:07 - (Cara Wells): And the success is in those little moments where you're like, wow, I'm part of something that's bigger than myself. And how cool is that, that I can literally sit here and work on my computer on something that could change the world?

0:50:21 - (C): Yeah, it's exciting. And a lot of times we PhDs get maligned for, if you can't then teach, and you haven't taken that route, you've used and leveraged that education to continue to play a role in the industry that you want to serve, and that's to be applauded. What advice would you give younger you, knowing in retrospect, what you've been through, especially maybe the last decade, if you could impart a little bit of wisdom to young aspirant veterinarian Kara, what would you say?

0:50:52 - (Cara Wells): My only failures, I think, in my life to date came from me not having the confidence to speak up sooner or take ownership of my own intellect. In grad school, I was tinkering along until I finally said, you know what? I've got to do something. I've got to find people to get me this data. It's not going to land in my lap. I've got to find collaborators, and I've got to put myself out there and do that.

0:51:21 - (Cara Wells): And then, sure enough, I found friends that were willing to help me. I got the data. I was able to graduate. My first company failed because I sat back and I took orders from a CEO who was making all the wrong decisions. I knew the right answer, but I didn't want to cross them. So I didn't speak up until it was a little too late. With my new company, I've been a lot better at finding my voice, and I've been a lot better at when my voice isn't heard. I'm going to go somewhere where my voice is heard.

0:51:57 - (Cara Wells): With the engineer, I saw signs that the project wasn't getting delivered on time, but I didn't want to hurt his feelings. I didn't want to. I didn't want to assume the worst, and so I just wasn't confident in finding my voice. And then it blew up in my face. So I would tell my younger self that if you really think you know something, it's okay to speak up. You might be wrong, but speaking up never really hurt anyone.

0:52:27 - (Cara Wells): And when people do that, sometimes they are heard, and sometimes they're pleasantly surprised, for sure.

0:52:34 - (C): You've probably heard this one. You mentioned you'd listen to the show a few times. I love music and the emotions that it can frequently represent that words can't. If we were to watch a montage of your life, what song would you pick to play in the background and why?

0:52:49 - (Cara Wells): Oh, you don't know. That's a hard one. I might need to get back to you on that one. My life has been good. It's been exciting. So I don't know that I can name this song, per se, but it would be exciting, it would be eventful, it would be uplifting, and the song would never be over because we're going to keep going, and we're going to do the next great thing and the next. I've had a lot of hardship. I've had a lot of times where I was insanely stressed, but overall, I think it would be an uplifting song.

0:53:21 - (C): Yeah. I'll allow you to get back with me. I actually create a mixtape of all my guests so that we have all their songs together. How can folks follow what you're doing and connect with the work that mgenesis is involved in?

0:53:35 - (Cara Wells): So we are in the process of redoing our website. So that's super exciting. We have different social media channels. We have LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook. And sometimes we get lucky enough that there is a press release that goes out about us and they can find us in the news.

0:53:52 - (C): That was what reminded me of you. You posted to LinkedIn recently about another competition. So that's great. I certainly appreciate your time. It's been an enlightening conversation and I just want to encourage you. I know that this entrepreneurial journey is a tough one at times. It's exhilarating and it's maddening and everything in between. And it's been inspirational for me to watch you navigate, setback, and find your voice and find your success.

0:54:19 - (C): So, Kara, thank you for the work that you've done and thank you for coming on the show today.

0:54:24 - (Cara Wells): Thank you. This is fine. I really appreciate your support. Likewise, I'm totally championing you. I love the platform that you're giving all these people and a greater audience to learn something from people who have gone through amazing and tremendous experiences. Yeah. Thank you so much for this. And I just want to stop you because you made a comment about teaching, and I've had a lot of great people teach me, and I don't think that any of us could do amazing things that we didn't have good teachers paving that way for us. So amen.

0:54:59 - (Toby Brooks): Awesome.

0:55:00 - (Cara Wells): I am care Weld and I am undone.

0:55:03 - (Toby Brooks): I'm thankful to care for dropping in, and I hope you enjoyed our conversation. For more info on today's episode, be sure to check it out on the web. Simply go to Undonepodcast.com ep 88 to see the notes, links and images related to today's guest, Kara Wells. I know there are great stories out there to be told and I'm always on the lookout. So if you or someone you know has a story that we can all be inspired by, tell me about it.

0:55:28 - (Toby Brooks): Surf on over to Undonepodcast.com, click the contact tab in the top menu and drop me a note. As I shared a few episodes ago, I'm excited to start a new position in July. And as exciting as that is, it also means that after 14 years, I'm rapidly winding down my time at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences center. I'm excited about this new chapter for sure, but it's bittersweet to leave the place we've called home and the people who've been like family through this transition. I'm going to do my best to keep creating new content.

0:55:58 - (Toby Brooks): So coming up, I'll catch up with former collegiate and now professional baseball athletic trainer Mikayla Moore. I'm also working on a new multi part documentary series of former McDonald's All American and first overall NBA draft pick Larry Johnson. This and more coming up on becoming undone. Becoming Undone is a nitra hype creative production written and produced by me, Toby Brooks. For now, I'm a one person show relying on AI tools from descript, decipher and opus clip to create, produce and deliver the best show I know how for you, my friends and listeners.

0:56:45 - (Toby Brooks): Follow the show on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn at becoming undone pod and follow me obijbrooks on X Instagram and TikTok. Check out my link tree at Linktr ee tobyjbrooks. Listen, subscribe and leave me a review at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time, keep getting better.