Freezing eggs can be a more accessible process. This Northeastern alum’s startup shows how
Lauren Makler, a 2009 Northeastern University graduate, saw first-hand a problem with the traditional egg-freezing options. So she co-founded a startup to do something about it.
A bulletin board next to Lauren Makler’s desk serves as a daily reminder of her motivation to work. Tacked on it are photos of several children. Except these are not Makler’s children. They’re kids that Cofertility, the startup she cofounded, played a role in creating.
“Maybe those intended parents would have found a way to have a child otherwise, but if we never created Cofertility, those humans themselves wouldn’t exist. It’s really incredible to think about,” she said.
Launched in 2022, Cofertility breaks through the traditional friction points in the egg-freezing and donating process, namely cost and the pool of donors. The startup features an egg-sharing program that allows clients to freeze eggs for up to 10 years for free if they donate half of them to other clients who wouldn’t otherwise be able to conceive. Those who choose to keep all of their eggs can freeze them at a discount through partner clinics and lenders.
Plus, Cofertility’s process is billed as less transactional because there is no compensation involved for the donors, so that financial gain isn’t the incentive for donating, Makler said. The startup also emphasizes a “human-centered,” non-anonymized approach. It means donors and families can have conversations to understand each other beyond what’s disclosed in their applications and this helps “give meaning to the match,” according to the startup. With over-the-counter DNA tests more widely available, no egg donor is truly anonymous, Makler said. She said the number of people Cofertility has served is in the thousands.
A career in the health space wasn’t one Makler envisioned when she was a student at Northeastern University. But a life-changing diagnosis in 2017 put the now 38-year-old right where she needed to be.
That diagnosis put her own fertility in question. She was diagnosed with multicystic peritoneal mesothelioma, a rare abdominal disease that occurs in 2 in 1 million people each year. Makler was told that the treatment would involve several surgeries that could result in losing her ovaries.
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She had just started dating her now-husband Jake at the time of this diagnosis, but as a self-professed planner, she began to research how to freeze her eggs. Makler encountered a traditional egg donation process that she felt was “antiquated and outdated.” Donors are paid thousands of dollars to donate their eggs, she said, and the amount goes up for factors like heritage, education and talent.
“They’re literally surge pricing for egg donors,” she said.
Staring down a tough choice, Makler’s sister offered to freeze her eggs and donate them to Makler. But she neither froze her eggs nor needed to take her sister’s offer, as it turned out, the surgery did not impact her ovaries.
“I got to live my life with the gift of frozen eggs,” she said of her sister’s generosity as a back-up option. “I got to make that decision about my career without the pressure of my biological clock.” Years later, she would have her first child, Eden.
“I remember holding this newborn in my arms and thinking, ‘I have to go build something in this space,’” she said. So Makler decided in 2021 to leave her job at Uber, where she worked for eight years, first as a senior marketing manager, then in strategic partnerships until she headed up a new health-focused vertical on the platform.
Following graduation, her first job had been at the advertising agency Allen and Gerritsen where clients included the Boston Celtics and Waters Corporation, which provides tools and software for scientists.
She said she got “bored making recommendations to other people,” and a mentor suggested that she look into working at a startup and get equity in a company. That’s how she landed at Uber as one of the first 100 employees at its Boston office, where she was directly involved in propelling the new company forward.
The journey into the healthcare space ended up being somewhat of a full circle moment. While studying communication with a focus on organizational communication at Northeastern, Makler had completed a co-op at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, a non-profit that provides tools and resources to better patients and workers in the field of healthcare. Here, Makler worked on a campaign to encourage doctors to wash their hands.
Although she wasn’t interested in pursuing a career in healthcare at the time, she recalled learning about social determinants of health and how non-medical factors such as someone’s environment — if they live far from a health clinic or don’t have access to a car to get to appointments, for example — could play a role in their health.
So when Uber received a request from Boston Children’s Hospital to have the tech company use its network of drivers to have nurses provide on-demand flu shots to anyone who requests one through the app, Makler tapped into her health knowledge and appealed to Uber’s executive leadership to establish Uber Health in 2017.
“That was my first foray into what I call ‘intrapreneurship,’ like being an entrepreneur within a larger organization,” she said.
Building on this foundation, Uber Health continues to offer healthcare providers the ability to request non-emergency medical transportation and wheelchair rides for their patients, and some Medicare Advantage members can use their health benefits to pay for grocery deliveries and over-the-counter medication. By the time she left Uber, the company had helped 10 million patients, Makler said.
Makler credits three classes she took at Northeastern for her success.
There was a crisis communications course, and another on public speaking. The latter she used what she learned in that class to convince her parents to let her live off campus. It’s a skill that has come in handy many times since, including when talking to Uber leadership and people who got behind Cofertility.
“It’s really exciting to take something from a kernel of an idea and to grow it from a concept on a page or in a deck and to persuade people to get on board, investors, future employees and then members, people we’re actually serving,” she said.
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The last class was communications and the quality of life, taught by Michael Woodnick, who retired from Northeastern in 2009 after more than four decades.
The class focused on how to communicate and live with intention. Woodnick, who befriended a handful of students over the years, including Makler, noticed immediately how much of a deep thinker she was in class.
“Not only would she express an opinion, but she wanted to know what was going on beneath the surface,” he said.
Woodnick, who would go on to serve as the officiant at Makler’s wedding, called her a “beneficent presence” who had a “very keen insight into people.”
“She’s multitalented. She’s multifaceted,” Woodnick said. “She gets an idea and she makes it happen.”
Being able to help patients through Uber got Makler “hooked on this idea that you can actually disrupt healthcare by thinking about problems in new ways,” she said.
In addition to that bulletin board of baby photos, another picture that Makler cherishes is of her now two children sitting on her lap as she signed an agreement with an investor for Cofertility (her second child, Jonah, was born three years after Eden, who is now 5). It marked a moment that she wanted to not only set an example for her children but for her team as well.
“Just because something doesn’t exist, doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t and it won’t work,” she said. “If you are in love with a problem and obsessed with a problem, then you are the person who should fix it. I am a huge believer in that.”
