879 Alex Taylor: Co-Founder of Perelel

29:02And they're really the voice of the brand in that way. And so my co-founder and I, we really would run the day-to-day of the business. And Dr. Bioti, our medical co-founder, would run lead with the formulation process with the team. So it ended up being a really incredible trifecta of kind of these founders working together to get this off the ground. But getting it off the ground was challenging, especially in 2020, which wasn't that long ago. And yet most didn't see women's health as a viable category. We were constantly fighting this notion that we were prenatals. We knew that we were going to support women through every life stage.

29:41That's why we're called parallel, always by your side, parallel to wherever you are in your hormonal journey. And we had a big vision. And I think while those early days were tough, we've proven ourselves. And I think every founder loves to be an underdog and come out and show them what a new category could be. I mean, you know that better than anyone, but also that, you know, women's health truly is a category and we're finally giving it the attention and more capital that it needs to thrive.

30:10Kara Goldin:This episode of the Kara Golden Show is brought to you by Third Love. One of the things I love most about talking to founders is hearing about the problem they set out to solve. The best companies don't create products just for the sake of it. They make everyday life better. That's one of the reasons I've admired Third Love since they first launched. They looked at something millions of women had simply accepted, that bras are supposed to be uncomfortable, and decided to change that. I've learned over the years that when something fits well, whether it's a great pair of shoes, a favorite jacket, or a bra, you don't think about it.

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31:31Kara Goldin:This episode of the Kara Golden Show is brought to you by Rippling. Anyone who's ever operated a business knows the biggest challenge isn't getting information, it's figuring out what to do with it and doing it fast. That's what makes Rippling AI different. It's built on your live people and business data. One platform, one unified source of truth with all your business systems connected from day one. That means Rippling AI can pull accurate data in real time to build reports, dashboards, workflows, and more. Let's say you find out your sales team is at risk of missing quota. Instead of waiting days or even weeks for someone to build a report, just ask Rippling AI.

32:16Kara Goldin:It instantly pulls real-time data from Rippling and Salesforce into a presentation-ready dashboard showing quota attainment, headcount plan, and monthly revenue to quota by region. In seconds, you can see exactly what's behind your quota risk. But here's what I think is really powerful. Rippling AI doesn't stop at insights. It turns those insights into action by creating an automated recruiting workflow whenever it notices open sales roles and lagging time to fill are directly impacting quota attainment. And because permissions are automatically inherited and actions flow through your existing approval chains, all you have to do is review it and tap confirm to set the workflow in motion.

33:05Kara Goldin:Question answered, action taken, problem solved before it has the chance to happen. Ready to rule your business? Head to rippling.ai slash Kara Golden and get the only AI built to give you full visibility and take complex actions across your entire organization. That's R-I-P-P-L-I-N-G dot A-I slash Kara Golden. Sign up for exclusive access today. This message is a paid partnership with AT &T Business. Hey everyone, Kara here. Let's get real about those early days of building a business. Not the highlight reel, the actual day-to-day, the friction, trying to manage everything across time zones, across teams, across locations, and realizing how much depends on staying connected.

33:55Kara Goldin:I remember those days at Hint, a retailer call, an order, a decision, all of it. and you realize quickly connection isn't a nice to have, it's the lifeblood of your business. As a founder, you don't want to think about your connectivity. You just need it to work every time. That's why AT &T Business matters. AT &T Business is the reliable provider for small business owners. And when you have that kind of reliability behind you, you can focus on what actually moves your business forward. Powered by AT &T Business. Built to work. Get AT &T Business at business.att.com. So when you were, you've said it a couple of times that it was really tough getting it off the ground.

34:47Kara Goldin:What was the hardest part? I mean, you had joined initiatives before and this one you co-founded from nothing, right? It was just an idea. You saw the problem. You had an idea of what needed solving, but what did you do first? I mean, was there a big business plan? You were talking to a number of professionals in the medical community, but what was kind of the hardest part about building parallel in those early days? Well, I have to answer that by also acknowledging that part of what made it, I don't want to say easier, but easier for us to tackle was truly the fact that my co-founder and I, we covered such expansive space across the business.

35:36You know, in us, we had not only, you know, two incredible CEOs, but people that understand how to operate, scale, logistics, brand, marketing, creative. We had the Swiss army knife just between these two individuals. And then add in Dr. Bayadi, our medical co-founder, and it just made us more expansive. So it really first started with the fact that we had a very strong founding team and a strong foundation and a shared conviction of what we wanted to create. We've always been very clear on our mission. But that said, in terms of the challenges, a lot of the challenges were, again, building belief in the category that this wasn't a nine-month window for women, that women are having multiple children.

36:18And if they're not, they're still navigating their hormonal life and looking for support that is made by the doctors and experts who know best. They want something they can trust. And so that really became a huge hurdle just generally for the category. Capitalizing the business always comes with its own challenges. I don't think there's any founder out there that said it's a walk in the park. It's not. It's challenging. And it's doubly more challenging when, you know, you're in the throes of the early days of the pandemic and suddenly no one's investing when they don't believe in your category.

36:50So, you know, we definitely feel like we had some chips on our shoulder, but every founder does. It's just hard. And quite frankly, the fundraising process just sucks. But you get through it, you put one foot in front of the other and you keep going. I think some of our challenges were honestly a lot of just like what was happening in our personal lives. We forget that my co-founder and I had vibrant, big careers and we had family, like we had started our families. And when we were in the early days of starting parallel, my co-founder and I were both pregnant. I was pregnant with my second, and she was pregnant with her third.

37:26And, you know, that was really challenging, just the physicality of being pregnant. I had HG with my second, which I didn't have with my first, which is essentially all day morning sickness in layman's terms. And so it was really just the personal side of it that made it really challenging and holding the fact that there was guilt. We wanted to be with our families, but we wanted to build this business that required an outsized amount of our time. But I kept grounding myself in the fact that as the business growed and matured and we brought in a more, you know, added weight to our bench insofar as our team, that there would be those moments where we could be home by bedtime.

38:04You know, we could be there for dinner. We could do a couple pickups a week. So I think that's definitely something that kept us going. But it was really the fact that we overlaid the early days of building this business with the early days of starting our families. And we forget that like you don't sever yourself. As nice as that show concept is, like, you know, you show up and you still carry the weight that you maybe slept four and a half hours last night because you're sleep training and you're still also trying to get a business off the ground. So honestly, some of the biggest challenges were just holding the personal weight in tandem with the need to build this business that we had all put a lot of, you know, take on a lot of risk to start.

38:43and that also adds a lot of weight. And then of course we were up against the juggernauts, this category, vitamins and supplements. There's a lot of money in this category, a lot of incredible brands that are well-capitalized and so it forced us to really think about what can only we do, how can we do things differently and how can we break through and pierce through this category and we really did that through brand differentiation, content programming, which really leaned into my expertise as a former media executive, world building in those early days. And again, just a lot of incredible content and having a superior product, of course.

39:24I think that we were very fortunate that we had a great product and great marketing.

39:27Kara Goldin:This episode of The Kara Golden Show is brought to you by Rippling. Anyone who's ever operated a business knows the biggest challenge isn't getting information, it's figuring out what to do with it and doing it fast. That's what makes Rippling AI different. It's built on your live people and business data. One platform, one unified source of truth with all your business systems connected from day one. That means Rippling AI can pull accurate data in real time to build reports, dashboards, workflows, and more. Let's say you find out your sales team is at risk of missing quota. Instead of waiting days or even weeks for someone to build a report, just ask Rippling AI.

40:13Kara Goldin:It instantly pulls real-time data from Rippling and Salesforce into a presentation-ready dashboard showing quota attainment, headcount plan, and monthly revenue to quota by region. In seconds, you can see exactly what's behind your quota risk. But here's what I think is really powerful. Rippling AI doesn't stop at insights. It turns those insights into action by creating an automated recruiting workflow whenever it notices open sales roles and lagging time to fill are directly impacting quota attainment. And because permissions are automatically inherited and actions flow through your existing approval chains, all you have to do is review it and tap confirm to set the workflow in motion.

41:00Kara Goldin:Question answered, action taken, problem solved before it has the chance to happen. Ready to rule your business? Head to rippling.ai slash Kara Golden and get the only AI built to give you full visibility and take complex actions across your entire organization. That's r-i-p-p-l-i-n-g dot a-i slash Kara Golden. Sign up for exclusive access today. This message is a paid partnership with AT &T Business.

41:57Kara Goldin:it and you realize quickly connection isn't a nice to have. It's the lifeblood of your business. As a founder, you don't want to think about your connectivity. You just need it to work every time. That's why AT &T business matters. AT &T business is the reliable provider for small business owners. And when you have that kind of reliability behind you, you can focus on what actually moves your business forward. Powered by AT &T Business, built to work. Get AT &T Business at business.att.com. I love how you've made the brand Parallel feel accessible and easy to understand, especially when there are many people who, I think particularly when you were starting, health supplements for women was typically, you know, prenatal vitamins, right?

42:58Kara Goldin:Especially for women who were choosing or wanting to have children. It was, you know, that was it. And then, you know, hormones is for people who are going through, you know, post-menopause or menopause, right? And so what you're doing in an accessible way, I can only imagine how hard it was because they really are different life stages, but also maybe topics that people don't necessarily want to talk about too. So how did you navigate that? Yeah. Well, I think that taps back into my content expertise and understanding, first of all, you know, I have a degree in journalism and communications. I understand that very well in storytelling.

43:50And so we really held our content to a high level of editorial integrity in journalism. And we really tapped into incredible people. We created space for more taboo conversations that have evolved tremendously in the past six years, by the way, from talking about postpartum depression, anxiety, to the concept of matricence when a woman goes from being a woman and that massive psychological, physiological shift that happens as she becomes a mother. It's actually greater than adolescence, which we don't talk about. So we started to normalize a lot of these conversations, even the topic of perimenopause.

44:24And, you know, it's, I think there's, again, these moments where consumer habits overlay with shifts in technology and platforms, and we have social media. We now have a new space, a new soapbox for people to share their experiences, but also connect. And the brand very much has benefited from that over the years.

44:42Kara Goldin:That's incredible. So you launched with how many SKUs and how has that changed today? So because our approach is very much rooted in the idea of targeted nutrition, we couldn't just launch with one SKU because that body of SKUs would represent what the brand is, right? The brand is expressed in every touch point. And so we knew we had to launch with five SKUs. We launched with a product for preconception. So it's called our Conception Support Pack. So anyone thinking about or actively trying to get pregnant. Each individual trimester of pregnancy, so a first trimester pack, second trimester pack, third trimester pack, that has differentiated nutrients to align with that stage.

45:24And then a mom multi-pack that's specifically formulated for postpartum in the early years of motherhood. Most people are shocked to learn that postpartum can last for up to five years. I mean, we can't understate the impact that pregnancy has on your body. And then from there, our vision was always to continue to scale. How do we support women who might not be in the throes of building a family or have decided not to? How do we support women in perimenopause? How do we support women that are challenged with other hormonal issues like PMOS? And so, you know, we've really thought about how do we cater to women across the entire continuum.

46:00But what I think is so fascinating is while co-founding Parallel and again, just recognizing that these products could already provide so much education with the wealth of knowledge we do have, it's also been challenging because the category writ large is so limited because of the lack of research. And when we don't have that body of research, we can't create better products, better therapies, better care for women. We can't equip our physicians with the knowledge they need to educate their patients on what POMS is or how to even diagnose endometriosis without invasive surgery. so you know to me it really kept coming back to this common denominator of research being so foundational to not only advancing women's health but women writ large to thrive right you know mckinsey released a report a couple years ago that was just absolutely heartbreaking to put it simply you know women will spend 25 percent more of our lives in poor health compared to men which equals 75 million years of life lost every year.

47:07We're diagnosed later than men for over 700 diseases, which is consequential and can be life or death. Most of what we know about heart health is based on men and over 50 % of women that go in for a heart issue are misdiagnosed. I mean, the statistics will make your head spin. And so as I've seen this and continued to build our business and again, indoctrinate myself in this category, thinking about my own experiences, You know, whether it's watching my grandmother fade away to Alzheimer's, something that disproportionately affects women. And yet so many families are constantly searching for answers to losing my best friend at 19 to a cardiac condition that we still know little about.

47:47And it's been 20 years because most of what we know has been researched on men. That red thread is the lack of understanding. And so I have started to get more and more involved in how do we create change and taking that entrepreneurial mindset and applying it to policy. Because if we're going to make big swings and changes in the category, we need government dollars to fund this research. We also need support from private capital because VC money does help proof of concept. A lot of these things that ultimately do lead to larger government subsidized and supported opportunities in women's health.

48:27So it's really thinking about, you know, what is that potential economic upside to support this? How can we gain more funding in the private sector, public sector to fund more research and innovation to ultimately provide 51 percent of the population with better care and products? So that has just become my obsession. And I'm proud of what we've done to kind of thread that through the business. We have an impact program. But much of my time now is spent going to Washington, hosting boots on the ground, grassroots events in my living room with women to educate them on what is perimenopause. You know, like there's just so much we don't know.

49:09And first of all, we have to make women aware that we don't know. And because of that, we need to link arms and change it.

49:17Kara Goldin:It's so, so interesting. I know you launched with some of what you're doing every day. As a co-founder, you decided to launch the Parallel Pledge for Women's Health Equity, a$10 million commitment to fund research and expand access to maternal care. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Yes. And that commitment has truly gotten me through some of the harder days at Parallel, just building the business, dealing with how challenging it can be, But knowing that we're making a positive impact, and I know that sounds very like canned, but it's true. Like when you know that you're actually helping people and you're having this butterfly effect beyond your customers, it's pretty exciting.

50:01And so literally before we even formed the company or sitting there dreaming up what this could be, we did develop a business plan. We did create a model just to kind of give ourselves. We did create a go-to-market strategy. We did all those things. And in that planning, we decided to create an impact program. And I was very inspired by what the founder of Tom's had done. I thought that one for one model was really incredible and always dreamed if I'm going to participate in capitalism, how can we do good? And I've always thought that's really an interesting tension in place to hold. And so at any rate, my co-founder and I agreed that we wanted this business to do make a positive impact beyond our customers.

50:41We introduced the Parallel Pledge for Women's Health Equity, which is something we established day one. And it's a two pronged commitment. So part of that was inspired by what my co-founders experienced, what we've seen in the market. And that is we have our own challenges here in the United States. There's a lot of incredible organizations doing work for moms outside of the U.S. But we have our own issues in our own backyard. You know, one in 33 babies born in the United States are born with birth defects, many of which are nutrition related and they're unpreventable. So part of our Give Back program actually donates our own product, not a third party or lesser than product, our own product to women here in the United States to give them better access to prenatal care.

51:25And so we partner with the Good Plus Foundation and they make sure our product gets to the families that need it most. And then we also have a component to our Give Back program, which deploys cash grants to support women's health research across the continuum of women's health life. So whether that be research around pregnancy, postpartum, perimenopause, etc. We partnered with McGee Women's Research Institute, which is the largest women's health research organization in the world, really researching our bodies from, again, menarche through postmenopause. And so we partner with them, deploy cash grants to support the good work they're doing.

52:02And it's exciting. We've deployed millions of dollars in just less than six years, and that feels really good to make an impact. And sometimes we hear from families that have received these products. We'll get photos from our partners, and it makes it all worth it. It makes it really worth it. Yeah.

52:21Kara Goldin:You are doing such great work and I love everything that Parallel is doing. So what is success for you and your co-founder? I mean, when you look at the business overall and see the growth, you started this from nothing to something. You've deployed money through the equity program. I mean, you're helping so many people. When you think about success, what is that? Success to us is getting the random DM from a customer saying that she felt less alone as she navigated her journey. Success is getting an email from a husband saying thank you for being there for our family as we navigated a really challenging moment.

53:13or running into a customer at the coffee shop who says, wow, thank you so much. I felt like I had all my needs. That's truly what success feels like. And also looking at the impact of our Give Back program. But of course, I mean, from a business perspective, it's scaling a business that is profitable and that is impactful and delivering for our shareholders, but also making a positive impact in the category writ large and providing those returns to ensure that the business can continue to scale and thrive. You know, our hope is this business will continue to grow and support more women and more families and provide them with reassurance.

53:53And, you know, for me personally, it's also about that impact work and the platform we've built and the ability to educate millions and millions of women about the women's health research gap and take that energy and take that inertia and translate it into change. And so that's also what I'm really excited about is that this energy now can be funneled into a lot of that work, at least for me personally at this stage.

54:17Kara Goldin:I love it so much. Well, Alex, thank you so much for joining today. What you're doing is really incredible and love everything that Parallel stands for and also the products that you have created as well. So we'll have all the info in the show notes, but everyone needs to check out Parallel and see exactly what you've created and definitely try it. And good luck with everything. I know you don't need it because you guys are really killing it. But Alex Taylor, co-founder of Parallel. Thank you again. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks again for listening to The Kara Golden Show. If you would, please give us a review and feel free to share this podcast with others who would benefit.

55:06Kara Goldin:And of course, feel free to subscribe so you don't miss a single episode of our podcast. Just a reminder that I can be found on all platforms at Kara Golden. I would love to hear from you too, so feel free to DM me. And if you want to hear more about my journey, I hope you will have a listen or pick up a copy of my Wall Street Journal bestselling book, Undaunted, where I share more about my journey, including founding and building. Hint, we are here every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Thanks for listening and goodbye for now. This message is a paid partnership with AT &T Business. Hey everyone, Kara here.

55:51Kara Goldin:Let's get real about those early days of building a business. Not the highlight reel, the actual day-to-day, the friction, trying to manage everything across time zones, across teams, across locations, and realizing how much depends on staying connected. I remember those days at Hint, a retailer call, an order, a decision, all of it. And you realize quickly, connection isn't a nice to have. It's the lifeblood of your business. As a founder, you don't want to think about your connectivity. You just need it to work every time. That's why AT &T Business matters. AT &T Business is the reliable provider for small business owners.

56:36Kara Goldin:And when you have that kind of reliability behind you, you can focus on what actually moves your business forward. Powered by AT &T Business. Built to work. Get AT &T Business at business.att.com.