Both Sides of the Formulation Table

My parents founded Desert Harvest in 1993, for my aunt. She had interstitial cystitis, and at the time there were almost no answers for women with IC. They built the first product for her, out of our family kitchen. I was there at the start.

I took a long way around before I came back. I studied leadership and organizational management at the University of Denver, then spent years in the entertainment industry — managing venues and coordinating global events for musicians most people have on a playlist somewhere. It was loud and mobile and full of people, and it taught me how to run complicated things calmly. In 2012, my parents retired and I became CEO. I was second-generation by blood long before I was second-generation by title. Under that title, the company has grown by more than 1,500%, and served more than 100,000 women — with pelvic, sexual, urological, and menopausal health.

For years, "second-generation" described my relationship to the company. It didn't describe my relationship to the conditions themselves. That changed in 2016.

The diagnosis didn't arrive as one dramatic afternoon. It arrived the way care in this field so often does for women — pieced together, later than it should have been. But once it landed, it sat inside every decision I made afterward, in a way it hadn't before. I was reading the same research, sitting in the same formulation conversations, asking the same specialists the same questions — except now some of the questions were about my own body.

I don't think anyone in those meetings treated me differently. I think I listened differently. A line in a customer letter that used to read as data started reading as a Tuesday I recognized. A debate about a single ingredient stopped being abstract the moment I understood, physically, what it was standing in for.

What that taught me is that women's bodies are far more interconnected than the specialty silos suggest. Pelvic health doesn't stop where hormonal health starts. The two share a nervous system, a vascular bed, an immune system — and, eventually, a menopause. A company built to answer one question, asked by one aunt in one kitchen in 1993, turned out to be circling a much larger one all along.

I don't think the diagnosis made me a better CEO. I think it removed a layer of distance I hadn't known was there. Before 2016, when a customer wrote in describing a flare, or a bad night, or the particular loneliness of a condition most people have never heard of, I understood it. After 2016, I recognized it. Those are not the same thing.

It followed me past the company, too. After thirty years of watching women in the IC community be studied — asked, over and over, to hand over their medical histories to research that rarely came back to them in any usable form — a newer piece of my work started. In 2026 I co-founded Mithras Health with Giovanni van Dam. The model is deliberately plain: you own your records, you choose which studies may use them, and you're paid when approved research actually does. Nothing is ever sold. It's pre-launch, and everything it can demonstrate today runs on synthetic data, not on anyone's real history. I'd rather be caught under-promising than the other way around.

I still think about the order of it. Desert Harvest was founded for this condition twenty-three years before I was diagnosed with it myself. The empathy came first, structurally — built into the business by two people making a product for one woman at a kitchen table, long before that woman's niece would need it too. The diagnosis didn't create that empathy. It confirmed something the company had been organized around since 1993, and put me, finally, on both sides of it — the chair that decides, and the chair that waits to find out.

That second chair is the one nobody prepares you for, no matter how long you've sat in the first. I run a company most days from the decisions-and-deadlines chair. But I write from the other one, more often than people expect, because it's the one that still tells me the truth.