Taryn Rose never set out to be a biotech advisor at DARPA.
Nor did she ever expect that she’d become one of the biggest names in women’s luxury shoes.
“I always wanted to be an entrepreneur,” she recalls. “I started medical school thinking that I would actually go into dermatology and start a cosmetic line.”
But orthopedics called her when a required research project had her analyzing diabetic shoes, and how to improve compliance with diabetics because “they never want to wear those ugly Frankenstein shoes! And they end up getting ulcers.”
Innovator that she is, she redesigned the shoes, and improved the compliance rate while decreasing the ulceration rate.
“With that, I worked with Nike. They sponsored my research project. So I took all that knowledge. And I said, you know, I'm gonna start a footwear collection!”
She was still living like a resident, making only $48,000 a year. “I was a bit tired of being poor, so I ended up building that business to $40 million in sales, then I sold it.”
With the sale of her company, “I did the female version of the Ferrari, which was to buy a very expensive fur coat. That was the one really dumb thing that I did. But it was on sale. I got my wire two weeks before the great recession and the sales lady from Bergdorf called me up and says I know you've been visiting that coat for the last two years, and now it’s 50% off!”
But not everything was wine and minks.
“I was ready to let the company go, but it ended up being very stressful. As a first-time entrepreneur, I didn't realize how important the alignment of the investors I brought in would be. So I ended up experiencing a lot of strife with my board. They ended up buying me out, which was a great relief.”
Rose took the opportunity to spend five years raising her kids, then raised her head again asking “Now, what do I do? I had this fear I had in my head, that maybe I was just a one-hit-wonder, if it was all just luck.”
DARPA CALLING
“I had met the current head of DARPA’s commercialization several years earlier, and we chatted from time to time, just sharing ideas. And one day she said, what do you think of becoming an advisor for DARPA?”
DARPA, of course, is known for weapons, but there’s a significant office for biotechnology as well, and Rose came on as Senior Commercialization Advisor with a specialization in biotech.
“They do a lot of work in synthetic blood, in neural technology, and the human-machine interface, and in wearables, so you don't have to do any more surgery to implant things. There’s a lot of very interesting work being done in the biotech area. And yet they didn't have anyone advising the companies.”
DARPA has been an invigorating change for Rose, returning her to her medical background.
“DARPA will fund companies when it's a wild idea, to figure out if the science works. The DOD doesn’t want to develop startups. They just want to give a contract and say ‘deliver it!’ So we step into this transition period to do the research to see if ideas are producible and deliverable.”
BREAKING IN (AND OUT) OF THE MENS CLUB
“I love hanging out with the guys. I was only one of four women in my orthopedics class, and it’s still only 8% women.”
The chairman of her department said to her, when she applied for orthopedic trauma surgery, “You're a pretty young lady. You're gonna want to get married and have a family. Are you sure you want to do this?”
“And I said, ‘Yeah, I think I'm pretty sure.’ And he said, ‘Well, do me a favor. Go do a rotation and see how you like that, then come back and we'll talk.’”
Rose points out that when she tells that story today, “younger women are like, ‘Oh, my gosh! Do you realize how misogynistic that was!, that he didn't say yes right away?!’”
She explains that she didn't interpret it that way at all.
“I felt like he really cared about me, and he was looking at me holistically. And yeah, orthopedic trauma is hard. You're on call all the time and your schedule is unpredictable. So he had a point.”
Rose observes we’ve swung to the point where, as she says, “well-meaning men would be in big trouble these days saying something like that.”
But she is sympathetic to all sides as roles are shifting all the time.
“I see a lot of my friends who struggle with dual roles. Their partners usually want a very driven, strong, intelligent woman, but sometimes that's a clash at home.”
Rose laughs that she’s a “terrible homemaker. My youngest is 19, and I'm still hanging on to our nanny! But I support any woman who decides she wants to leave surgery and be a homemaker. In fact, one of the four women accepted to my original orthopedic program ended up having triplets. She never went back to medicine, and she’s happy as anything, and is now a food photographer.”
“I don’t judge.” The key, she says, is that every woman individually “has to figure out her priorities and be allowed to express who we authentically are.”
Written by Adam Gilad
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