1006 Kayla Rodriguez Graff:

Wings of Inspired Business Podcast EP1006 – Host Melinda Wittstock Interviews Kayla Rodriguez Graff

Melinda Wittstock: Coming up on Wings of Inspired Business:

Kayla Rodriguez Graff: We got a no from the USPTO, we got a no from the FDA, we got a no from Medicare on coverage. So, each one of those pieces has been a hurdle that we’ve had to overcome. I think when you believe that you truly can make a difference, then you find the way around. You burrow under, you kind of fly over. But I do think after the FDA was probably the biggest and first one for us, and as a team, we met the next day and we called it Operation Phoenix, where we were going to rise from the ashes of getting an FDA no, because it really is a no-go moving forward. And so, over the next two days, it was at my house. We just white boarded and built a plan on how we were going to leverage all the things we learned and move quickly into the wound care space. And we built a 12-month plan, and I believe we got FDA clearance in 10 months.

Melinda Wittstock: The patent office said no. The FDA said no. Medicare said no. Kayla Rodriguez Graff’s company is now FDA-cleared, patented in almost 20 countries, reimbursed, and healing wounds in clinics across the country with a dissolvable sheet made from manuka honey and collagen. Kayla is the CEO and co-founder of SweetBio, the Memphis biotech she started with her brother in 2015, the same year she got engaged; she was married the next year and had her first baby the year after that. Today she shares what happened the morning after the FDA said no, why the milestone a device founder should raise against is reimbursement rather than clearance, and how she built a company and three children at once without choosing between living and building.

Melinda Wittstock: Hi, I’m Melinda Wittstock and welcome to Wings of Inspired Business, where we share the inspiring entrepreneurial journeys, epiphanies, and practical advice from successful female founders … so you have everything you need at your fingertips to build the business and life of your dreams. I believe in paying it forward, so as a five-time serial entrepreneur, I started this podcast almost 10 years ago to catalyze an ecosystem where women entrepreneurs mentor, promote, buy from, and invest in each other. Because together we’re stronger, and we all soar higher when we fly together and lift as we climb. Please take a moment, hit subscribe so you never miss an episode, tell your friends and colleagues, and we appreciate it when you help this wisdom get discovered with a 5-star rating and review.

Melinda Wittstock: Today we meet a founder who treats a ‘no’ as a routing instruction. Kayla Rodriguez Graff came out of Target’s innovation office in San Francisco with no idea what a 510(k) was, and a phone call to her brother, a biomedical tissue engineer who had spent three years combining collagen and manuka honey into something greater than its parts. Her four tests before saying yes: is the need big enough, will people pay, can we make it for less than we sell it for, can we protect it. Their great-grandfather and, decades later, a cousin died of the diabetic ulcers SweetBio now treats. When the FDA turned down the first application, the team met the next morning, named the plan Operation Phoenix, white boarded a twelve-month pivot into wound care, and had clearance in ten months. SweetBio has raised $12 million and has two clearances, patents in almost 20 countries, multiple reimbursement codes and a randomized clinical trial. Kayla recently presented at the U.S. Senate on women’s entrepreneurship and is the incoming board chair of Life Sciences Tennessee.

Melinda Wittstock: We talk about why applying to the FDA is like sitting a final exam, why a startup is a canoe that can turn with the tide, and the pre-mortem Kayla runs every year: a mock New York Times headline about the sweetest unicorn passing a billion dollars, and the question, what broke? We get into how the COVID test inspired VERIS, the daily dissolving sheet patients apply at home, why she shows up in Washington and Nashville every year because a regulation she misses could end the company, and the life underneath it all: three kids, the move from San Francisco to Memphis to prove you can build something extraordinary without killing yourself, and her mother’s rule that when you run out of A, B, C and D, you go to the Greek alphabet and then count on your toes.

Melinda Wittstock: Let’s put on our wings with the inspiring Kayla Rodriguez Graff.

[INTERVIEW]

Melinda Wittstock: Kayla, welcome to Wings.

Kayla Rodriguez Graff: Wonderful to be here. Thank you for having me, Melinda.

Melinda Wittstock: So, you’ve been working on SweetBio for a little bit more than a decade. What was the impetus that inspired you to use all these natural ingredients to help people heal their wounds? What was the spark?

Kayla Rodriguez Graff: You know, absolutely. It’s been such a wild ride. If you think about the last decade, we’ve also had such macro environment changes, you know, across the board, navigating through challenging, you know, a pandemic and additional pieces that impact the healthcare industry like reimbursement and Medicare. And so, you know, not only is it something to build around a vision, vision, but also to navigate the changes that for us are highly regulated by the macro environment. And I didn’t know any of that when we started. You know, my background is I worked for Target corporate for many years out at the headquarters in Minneapolis. I moved to San Francisco to pursue an MBA and, and work out of their innovation office, out of Target’s innovation office in the Bay Area. And, you know, one day I remember calling my brother, who happens to be a biomedical tissue engineer, and said, you know, I’ve I’ve studied entrepreneurship.

Kayla Rodriguez Graff: I’ve always been inspired to build something. We come from a family of strong female entrepreneurs. You know, we should do it. It’s going to fail anyways. The odds are not in our favor, so we might as well give it a go. And he said, okay, let’s, let’s do something. And, you know, I had a couple of ideas that were not great to start with. And then he brought this forward, which was a technology he’d been working for 3 years on that came out of a clinical need to help soft tissue repair.

Kayla Rodriguez Graff: And he combined materials were really respected in the healthcare space— collagen bases, manuka honey— but had limitations. There was only so many ways you could use them because of the form factor or the performance it could deliver. So he set out to remove those limitations and create, uh, you know, some greater than its parts. Um, and by the time he talked to me about it, it was performing well in the lab. It was this comprehensive solution that could help the body repair. So when he brought it to me, originally we started in a very small niche market in dental. That was the first, you know, opportunity for us to think about how to help patients. And, you know, he said, do you think it’s a great technology? It works.

Kayla Rodriguez Graff: Do you think it could be a business? And, you know, I said, okay, well, let’s see if there’s a need that it’s big enough, people are willing to pay for it, that we can make it for less than we can sell it for, and we can protect it. If we can get those things answered quickly, then let’s see if there’s that, you know, that should provide at least the ability for us to take one foot in front of the other towards this. And it became pretty clear that not just in dentistry was this, you know, massive gap, but across wound care, which was, you know, significantly larger. And, you know, we as a Puerto Rican brother-sister team have seen the impact of what these wounds have caused for decades, Our great-grandfather, who I never knew, passed away from a diabetic ulcer, and then a cousin of ours decades later passed away because of a diabetic ulcer. So the fact that we had the opportunity to bring a technology to market that could change the trajectory of generations was the first kind of, I’m in. The second part of it was, wow, what if we can do this? What if we could innovate the product while opening up access? What if we could make this affordable mass market, which again was my background at Target, was getting really good quality things to the masses. And that was my second foot that jumped in, right? Like if we can make top performance affordable, make advanced wound care that could bridge that gap between performance and access, that has the opportunity to change the landscape. And no matter what’s going on in the macro environment, if we hold true to the fact that you have better technologies that are designed for affordability and access, we should be able to be here for the long term.

Kayla Rodriguez Graff: So those were some of the initial thoughts when we were starting.

Melinda Wittstock: You’ve probably had all kinds of challenges and issues along the way. What are some of the biggest ones you’ve had to overcome?

Kayla Rodriguez Graff: Some of the biggest issues I’ve had to overcome and us as a team, I think that when you start a company, you’re, you know, enamored by the idea. I think there needs to be a reframing right away, as I know you are very familiar. How do you focus on the problem? Like fall in love with the problem because your solution may need to change as you get more information from that market and how they really feel about that problem and the friction they have about that problem. So I think there was some early reframing that, you know, I really loved the technology. Um, and I thought, wow, we could, as a marketer, like, we can leverage what was beginning to be such positive affinity towards these materials of collagen and honey. They were kind of lower shelf, if you will, at Target. Eventually they will be, you know, eye level, kind of prime placement. But let’s just make sure that we really understand the problem.

Kayla Rodriguez Graff: And so, you know, I’m grateful we kind of tackled that pretty early. But what I, I very much underestimated was the regulatory, the patent office, reimbursement. You know, it took us years to be able to protect the product and maintain that protection. It took us years to be able to navigate through the FDA, and we had several missteps. And the reason we stepped further into wounds was we had appropriate resistance from the dental branch. We were new, and it’s hard to go down— you know, a 510, meaning there’s something similar, when there isn’t something similar. So every single— you know, I, I do joke that I, I hit every branch down, um, from that tree. But, you know, we got a no from the USPTO, we got a no from the FDA, we got a no from Medicare on coverage.

Kayla Rodriguez Graff: Um, so each one of those pieces has been a hurdle that we’ve had to overcome. I think when you believe that you truly can make a difference, then you find the way around. You burrow under, you kind of fly over. But I do think after the FDA was probably the biggest and first one for us, and as a team, we met the next day and we called it Operation Phoenix, where we were going to rise from the ashes of getting an FDA no, because it really is a no-go moving forward. And so Over the next 2 days, it was at my house. We just whiteboarded and built a plan on how we were going to leverage all the things we learned and move quickly into the wound care space where we knew, we already knew the technology had the potential to help a lot of people. And we built a 12-month plan, and I believe we got FDA clearance in 10 months. So since then, I think that proved to our team we had the ability to, you know, do hard things and navigate through it.

Kayla Rodriguez Graff: But I think the timeframe associated to some of the no’s in our industry. That’s probably the second thing I underestimated is, you know, it could take 2 years to get Medicare coverage. And if it’s a no, you know, are you capitalized enough to be able to withstand what that takes?

Melinda Wittstock: So, there’s a lot of things to unpack in that journey, and so let’s take them one at a time. First of all, the resilience and the also the ability to think outside the box and pivot. So if you couldn’t go over the fence, you had to go around it or under it or some other way. Right? Or smash the fence down. The other one that’s interesting is patience, because it always takes so much longer for like every company, but especially in a regulated industry. And so the mindset there that you needed to have and exhibit, did you learn that? Or is that just something that is innate to you?

Kayla Rodriguez Graff: That’s a really fantastic question. I’ve spent some time thinking about this. I also went through a Stanford program that was about business scaling when we started to, you know, get closer to commercial because, you know, we started this company over a decade ago, but we’ve been on the market for the last 18 months. I mean, it’s been a very short commercial path for us. It took that long in order to get all of the pieces in line. And I had always communicated we’re not launching this until we’re ready. Until we launch, when we launch, we will scale. And we need to be operationally ready to do so.

Kayla Rodriguez Graff: And we need to have such clarity that this is solving a problem in the market and delivering value in the market, and we can protect it. So it’s been a very patient road. And I’ve thought about that. I think, I think part of it is maybe nature. I have, I think, a family of strong women that are quite resilient. You know, my, my grandmother My grandmother ran a bridal store out of Puerto Rico, one of the largest bridal stores, but she came from what they say in Puerto Rico, the barrio, the dirt floors and the wood house, and made her way through. And so I do think there’s part of it that is nature. I think part of it is nurture.

Kayla Rodriguez Graff: I do think that I had the freedom to fail when I was younger, and I think processing failure is like exercising. It’s a muscle that if you have the luxury to build while you’re young, then it sets you up for, I think, more resilience in the future. But I do think about going to get, you know, a graduate degree. I remember before starting that program saying, I’m going to push myself almost to my breaking point. I want to know how I behave at my worst time as a leader and work to get that closer to who I am at my best times. I want to know what those edges are. And so I think, again, potentially nature of having that in my family. I think nurture, having the luxury of failing and being able to recover, move forward, adapt, adjust.

Kayla Rodriguez Graff: I remember my mother saying, when you run out of A, B, C, D, go to the Greek alphabet, count on your toes. You’re never out of options. And I think I’ve always had that approach. Some of them are tougher than others. You know, I think the FDA one, I had a little— I had my first son, a little baby. I remember holding him and thinking, what am I doing? You know, what am I doing? Is this, you know, is this what I should be doing with my life? This is so hard. But then I remember thinking, you know, anything’s going to be hard. Why not do something that matters? And so that reframing— approach is something I think we all take.

Kayla Rodriguez Graff: Like, okay, just not the right path now. It’s too early for that. It might not have been the right way we delivered that. There’s a lot of ways we can think about this differently and then move forward.

Melinda Wittstock: 100%. And so with the FDA and navigating all that, what were some of the lessons that you learned? Like, where did it go wrong? And then because it was such a bureaucracy that you have to navigate and there’s rules that are changing and all these sorts of So take me through that process.

Kayla Rodriguez Graff: Yeah, I think there’s, there’s this, the entrepreneurial side of it, and then there’s the device side of it. I think the first thing was there was a perception that once you achieved FDA clearance, that that is, you know, a value trajectory changing moment for a company. It is true, if you do get a clearance and you do have the FDA say this product is safe, if it’s FDA cleared, you know, Class II, it’s safe. That is a milestone. It is significant. Arguably more important is that there is a crystal clear, established, proven reimbursement path. If you don’t have that, you do not have a commercially viable product. So I do think that from an entrepreneurial side, making sure that the capital you’re raising to achieve milestones, you have the right milestone.

Kayla Rodriguez Graff: For us, it should not have been FDA clearance. It should have been reimbursement.

Melinda Wittstock: Mm-hmm.

Kayla Rodriguez Graff: That would’ve given us the longevity to go forward and let’s get clearance and let’s make sure we have enough capital to go attack the commercial path. That’s where we have a trajectory-changing event. So we, you know, compared to most device companies, we’ve raised $12 million and have 2 clearances, patents in, you know, almost 20 countries. multiple reimbursement codes, randomized clinical trial. I mean, it’s, it’s, we’re very, very, I would say, cost efficient, capital efficient. However, that was out of necessity too. So I think from an entrepreneurial side on the FDA, it was a challenge to tackle, you know, a 2-year process. First, the first year we got a no, then the second year we did get it through.

[PROMO CREDIT]

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Melinda Wittstock: And we’re back with Kayla Rodriguez Graff, the CEO and co-founder of SweetBio.

[INTERVIEW CONTINUES]

Kayla Rodriguez Graff: But then to raise enough capital to ensure that we actually hit the real milestone. I think another— so that’s on the entrepreneur side. On the regulation side, you know, applying to the FDA is like sitting for a final exam. You have to do all the work before that, make sure you have all the tests. But most importantly, one thing I did not appreciate is how final everything needs to be. Once you submit to the FDA, your packaging is done, your formulation is done, your manufacturing is done. You are not making any changes. You better be consistent.

Kayla Rodriguez Graff: You better be at a at a mass level producing, and I don’t mean mass mass, but at a level that you can find the balance between cost and scale, producing a consistent product and ensure that you’re prepared for scale because any changes that you make could trigger a new regulation, new regulatory application. So I think that’s something that I try to share with device companies is that Like, it’s got to be done before you submit it, um, and move forward.

Melinda Wittstock: So that’s tricky because if you’re an entrepreneur and you’re always improving your product and you’re iterating and all this kind of stuff, it’s figuring out the timing of when do you go for that application and what’s the cost of— say maybe you have like a big leap forward, but oh man, we’re gonna have to go through that whole process again.

Kayla Rodriguez Graff: Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock: How do you balance that?

Kayla Rodriguez Graff: Absolutely. I think, you know, The one benefit that entrepreneurs have over large industry, large companies, is speed, right? You’re a canoe, you can shift with the tides. I think our job when we got that first clearance was to create optionality so that we could potentially go one path or go another path. So, I think when you don’t have certainty on how things are going to go, you’ve had to make, you know, again, it needs to be done, but you can’t be overly done because that’s too expensive…

Melinda Wittstock: Right.

Kayla Rodriguez Graff: …can’t be, you know, absolutely perfect. It needs to check all the boxes of safety and, you know, but you can’t get everything you want because you don’t have the capital to do that. Then how do you engineer some optionality? So, um, you know, we do things like— it sounds a little wild, but pre-mortems, right?

Melinda Wittstock: What happened?

Kayla Rodriguez Graff: Like, what happens when we are wildly successful in this, or we’ve died? What happened? What took us down?

Melinda Wittstock: That is really smart. I’ve heard that idea before. I’ve actually talked about that, um, in the context of a previous company of mine. And it was interesting, the team, because they were a little freaked out to begin with this idea of pre-mortem, like, we’re not going to die, you know. But it’s very important to know that because things come up, right, that, you know, you may not have been thinking about because inherently entrepreneurs are such positive people.

Kayla Rodriguez Graff: Yes.

Melinda Wittstock: What could go wrong?

Kayla Rodriguez Graff: Dangerously optimistic is what I like to say. We’re dangerously optimistic.

Melinda Wittstock: 100%. It’s worth looking at other companies that have tried something similar before. Like, where did they go wrong? I mean, this is the beauty of AI now is you can do these deep competitive research kind of projects and, okay, absolutely. Who’s tried this before? What happened to them? I mean, you know, there’s almost like no excuse now to not know, right? But you gotta be curious enough to ask.

Kayla Rodriguez Graff: I think I completely agree. And I think, you know, that in reality, there’s probably 2 to 3 likely outcomes. And this was, you know, this was an exercise, I believe it was P&G when they were, you know, very much into laundry detergent and it was a significant portion of their business. And their leadership team challenged each other and said, okay, we’re gonna look out 100 years and we’re no longer around. What happened, right? And I think, you know, they came up with all these ideas, but one of them was that clothes became disposable. They no longer needed laundry detergent. And, you know, don’t quote me on this, but I believe that’s when Pampers diapers, disposable diapers, started coming into the conversation and an industry was born, right? Like, you can put yourself in that mindset and say, okay, we’re, you know, I mocked up a New York Times article for my team. We do a summit to kick off the year and think about what success looks like.

Kayla Rodriguez Graff: And so I mocked up a New York Times article and I said, you know, the sweetest unicorn, SweetBio, passes $1 billion in valuation. And I said, what happened? What happened, right? And what broke?

Melinda Wittstock: Yeah.

Kayla Rodriguez Graff: And all of a sudden we had the action item list of what we needed to tackle operationally to prepare for that level of scale. We immediately updated some of our systems.

Melinda Wittstock: Yeah, see, that’s so important. But also just in that, in the Pampers case, it actually led to innovation.

Kayla Rodriguez Graff: Yes, yes. And for us too. Our initial product that we launched with was— is our APIS product back in 2019. And we were doing market discovery. We got clearance, we got the product in clinicians’ hands, and it was being applied by the clinician in the office. This was 2019 in May, June, July.

Kayla Rodriguez Graff: I had a baby that December. I was out for a couple weeks, came back, and, you know, we know what happened in 2020. And what was interesting is we had a product applied by clinicians in an office for diabetic patients, one of the highest at-risk populations for COVID. What we saw was we saw this fear of patients going to the clinics and being exposed, but also the other edge of that sword was you don’t treat these wounds, high likelihood of amputation. your life expectancy goes down to single digits, right? So what do you do? You’re in a catch-22. Simultaneously, we saw the COVID test market take off. And what was interesting was you took such a complicated diagnostic test that was never available, and you mass-trained it to a lot of people using pictorial instructions across languages, across the nation. And so we said, well, what if, what if we could take this technology that’s currently in the doctor’s hands, in clinics, applied by the patient, What if we could bring this to the home? What if this was simple? Our product is simple enough.

Kayla Rodriguez Graff: It’s a solid dissolvable sheet that’s applied daily, every other day. What if we could get this into the patient’s hands? And maybe it’s not appropriate for everyone, but could we treat more people using this logic of a COVID test? And that’s where our VERIS product evolved. We took a weekly solid sheet applied by the doctors, in a clinic to a daily dissolving sheet applied by the patients in the home. So you can see how, you know, the macro environment changes and being small, being nimble, creating that flexibility in the 510 for us to be able to launch. We knew we wanted kind of this product and then act and get it out there. And so when we launched VERIS, you know, it’s just so wonderful to see so many more patients get better. It just, it’s one thing, I think, to build a product that, you know, makes sense, but it’s a whole nother thing when we started to hear the patient stories. And so to us, that’s kind of been the highlight of being able to do these premortems, take a look at, like, filter in this information from the environment and adapt and innovate.

Kayla Rodriguez Graff: And it may not be, the innovation may not be the product, it might just be the access point.

Melinda Wittstock: Right. That’s so interesting. So you mentioned before that you have 3 kids.

Kayla Rodriguez Graff: I do.

Melinda Wittstock: Doing all of this with them. So talk to me about that. This comes up on the show a lot. A lot of women entrepreneurs go into entrepreneurship because they have kids, because there’s more flexibility with entrepreneurship, but also more demands because your kids are a constant and your business is a constant. So how do you balance it all?

Kayla Rodriguez Graff: Very true. Um, you know, I’ve got I have 3 kiddos. They’re 9, 7, and 4. And, you know, I think from a timeline standpoint, we started the company in 2015, and I was engaged that year. 2016, got married. 2017, had our first kid. I think I’ve only known chaos. I think that’s part of it.

Kayla Rodriguez Graff: You know, I remember having, you know, being pregnant and raising our first million dollars. you know, being pregnant again, raising, you know, continuing to raise capital. And then the kids grow, right? Like the demands change and then the company grows and the demands change on it. I do feel like, you know, SweetBio is my firstborn. It did teach me a lot of resilience on how to manage my time, what I need to lean into, what I need to foster. Of course, you know, real kids have very different needs, but I do think it prepared me. To be honest, um, for motherhood, I think, right, you know, when I had my, my first son, I did make an intentional decision that, you know, when I work, I work, and when I’m at home, I’m, I’m at home with them. Um, I was in San Francisco and chose to relocate to Memphis during the height of amazing, amazing entrepreneurship in the Valley.

Kayla Rodriguez Graff: Um, But I believed that you could build an amazing company in a different way where you didn’t have to, you know, kill yourself to build it. I wanted to be able to have a family and do something incredible and extraordinary. So I think from the beginning, while we wanted to build a company that was top-performing access for the masses to help people get better, we also wanted to show kind of the next generation of entrepreneurs entrepreneurs that, you know, you don’t have to choose between living and building, that you could do both. Um, some days are easier than others. You know, I think today I had a doctor’s appointment, took my daughter. She just turned 4, so I had to go take her to an appointment while my husband is taking, you know, dropping the boys off at, at school, to which we have a birthday party, and then we have her birthday party and, you know, travel baseball and all those pieces. And I think as an entrepreneur, you excel at wearing a lot of hats, um, and you excel— you have to find a way to prioritize, structure, and attack. And so I do think there’s some things that entrepreneurs, you know, I’m sure there are common themes of skill sets that they have.

Kayla Rodriguez Graff: But those are a few pieces of being able to prioritize, recognize when there’s, you know, friction. Like if I’m not spending enough time with my kids, my travel schedule, whatever it is, make adjustments and then move forward. But at the end of the day, it comes down to grace. And ensuring that, you know, I am kind to myself, I’m taking care of myself, I’m sleeping, I’m exercising so that I can be there for everyone. And I think looking down at the day-to-day basis, you may feel like you’re failing. Looking at a week basis or a month basis, you start to see normalizing, okay, I am having some sort of, you know, balance. And then, you know, taking the horizon out a little bit further, that’s been helpful for me to ensure, okay, this is a high season. There are going to be high seasons for work.

Kayla Rodriguez Graff: There’s going to be high seasons for family. Let’s make sure it starts to balance out.

Melinda Wittstock: Right. 100%. So you are also advocating for women entrepreneurs in Congress. You recently presented at the US Senate on women entrepreneurship. So what was that like? And I love that you’re doing that. So tell me a little bit about that, because all the big corporations have huge budgets. And so when Congress talks about small business, it’s not really small, it’s huge. And I don’t know to what extent they really understand what it takes to start and build a company from scratch.

Melinda Wittstock: So what was your experience with all the senators?

Kayla Rodriguez Graff: Yeah, that’s— I mean, it’s a great question. So I’ve been going out to, um, to Washington, DC for, I would say, the last 8 years. I’m out there at least once a year. I also go to— we’re based in Tennessee, so I’m at the state capitol at least once a year. And I’m also involved in in local government in the Memphis and then our county government in terms of, you know, understanding what policies are happening. You know, I have a mayor meeting set up recently. I was just, I was just out in DC. I was just out in Nashville, you know, and it’s, it’s so important, I think, to remind legislators who are working on policies that entrepreneurship, small businesses are the backbone of of America.

Kayla Rodriguez Graff: It drives economic development. 100%.

Melinda Wittstock: And I don’t know how much— I think some really understand that, but a lot of them take huge amounts of money from these big companies that don’t necessarily want the competition, right? I mean, larger checkbooks that you’re almost— entrepreneurs are competing with. That’s why I’ve always thought it made sense for entrepreneurs to really get together as a force, but I’ve never really seen that happen at scale.

Kayla Rodriguez Graff: Yeah, you know, I think one of the really neat examples, I’ve got, you know, 2, but one is I’m on the Intuit Small Business Council, and they’ve got a couple dozen entrepreneurs and small businesses from across the nation. And, you know, Intuit, they make QuickBooks, SurveyMonkey, you know, and so they pull together us entrepreneurs because we are the users of their services.

Melinda Wittstock: Right.

Kayla Rodriguez Graff: We are their customers, and they bring us to DC every year. And we typically have a policy topic that we’re talking about, And it impacts us as small businesses. I think the realization every year is you can talk about small business to legislators, it’s very different and incredibly impactful when you bring the small businesses to the table and you explain what it means when you can’t release payment because of a paywall, what that means for not just my operations to make payroll because I can’t unlock capital from a customer, It also on my psyche, on my ability to, to, to be in the place I need to be at to innovate, to help more people. So I do think that every time I’m out there, it matters having that conversation, um, and building the relationship. And, and I’m also the incoming board chair for, uh, a state organization for Tennessee that represents life sciences. There’s one in every state, so I, I will represent the state of Tennessee, and we go out there talking about policies for innovation in the life sciences and healthcare space. The reason why I wanted to get involved is because we’re so highly regulated. I need to know what’s going on.

Kayla Rodriguez Graff: I have to understand, but faster than my competition, you know, what’s going on and how we’re going to respond to it. And so I do think building relationships with the legislators, but just that consistent access. And if you can’t, you know, joining an industry organization that does do it and sends you the summaries, There are so many opportunities to get involved, and it does— you can see the conversations with not just the legislators, but, you know, their staff. It matters to hear it, and we’ve seen policies change because of bringing these voices to the table and layering in the impact that those policies have on small businesses.

Melinda Wittstock: 100%. That’s really good that you’re doing that. I think a lot of entrepreneurs really aren’t aware of it, and it’s understandable too because we’re so busy. It seems like sort of like a nice-to-have, but it’s good that you prioritize that. Maybe there’s more of an impetus because you’re in a regulated industry. So, it’s like—

Kayla Rodriguez Graff: Yeah, no, that’s fair. That’s totally fair. I mean, if I was too busy for it, I’m also too busy to fail because I missed something. You know, it’s like one or the other. I have to understand it. I have to know what’s going on with Medicare because I don’t have the capital, you know, stack to be able to take more than one shot on goal.

Melinda Wittstock: Wow.

Kayla Rodriguez Graff: And if there’s going to be a change in the regulation environment, albeit FDA, Medicare, patents, clinical trials, you name it, and there has been drastic ones in our industry, drastic, that are very public. I need to know what they are. And if we need to have a voice at the table and say, I understand that there’s been bad actors, or I understand that this is how that would apply, let me help provide perspective of what it means for all of us small businesses and what that would, what that would mean.

Melinda Wittstock: Right. That makes perfect sense. And so where do you think you’ll be, Kayla, in the next 10 years? You know how you, you do these pre-mortems and whatnot. And so what’s on deck, I guess, in terms of how your company grows and scales from here? You’ve challenges with the different stores, getting, getting the right shelf space. You got, you got all that, all that kind of stuff to do.

Kayla Rodriguez Graff: Yeah, you know, when we started this company, we had to make some decisions on how we were going to show up in the market. And, you know, we decided you could take this technology and bring it over, over the counter, right, and create a product product that could be accessible by anybody, for example, at a Target store. We were small, and we knew that we wouldn’t be able to raise a whole lot of capital doing so. And so we said, well, what if we have the backed-by-doctors now in your hands? Eventually, get it to over-the-counter for the best wound care option available, a new and improved Band-Aid, right? Or a new way to solve wound care problems with a new delivery system, whatever it was. But we did go this, you know, highly regulated, knowing it was going to be a harder, longer path, but a less crowded space once you get there. So, you know, it’s been wonderful to build our APIS product that is now in the doctor’s hands to help patients that come in the clinic, and our VERIS product that can be, you know, applied in clinics but also sent home to the patients and applied at home. I’m really excited to double down on data and show how that helps in new ways. to reinforce the core technology and build more products in new form factors that solve real problems.

Kayla Rodriguez Graff: You know, I’m thrilled that we’ve come up with a new configuration in this strip of our product. We make squares. We started to make a strip where we can treat C-sections and, you know, joint replacement, hip and knee, neuro spine surgeries, these incision lines that have issues, you know, staying closed and, you know, potentially getting infected. You know, if we have the ability to make a small product that is affordable that can help those wounds improve, especially, you know, as a mom, that C-section market, those are solving, you know, really critical needs. And then there’s always this vision of what does this show up as when anybody anywhere could consume this, right? Like anybody anywhere could buy our product. And so, you know, I’m really excited that we’re signing commercial partnerships for our 2 flagship products so that we have the ability to focus on the technology, build amazing things moving forward, fully support those products as they start scaling, and kind of, you know, dream, dream of the next, next big things.

Melinda Wittstock: Right. Well, that’s wonderful. So I want to make sure people know how to find you and get a hold of these amazing products and learn more about what you’re doing. What’s the best way?

Kayla Rodriguez Graff: Yeah, I mean, if, if there’s any clinicians that are listening in, please reach out to us at info@sweetbio. We’ll get you connected right away. Um, you know, we’re really excited that our products are available across the nation and they’re reimbursed. Um, so we have a path that allows clinicians to get really great care to their patients, you know, without having a significant burden on the, on the healthcare system or on the patient. So info@sweetbio for any clinicians listening in. I’m available on LinkedIn, so anyone can contact me on there as well. And, you know, our websites are Recover with VERIS— VERIS is V-E-R-I-S— and Recover with APIS, A-P-I-S. Those are our 2 product lines, you know.

Kayla Rodriguez Graff: But we’re more than happy to connect. You know, we, we believe that, you know, everyone deserves access to a healthier tomorrow, and, you know, we, we get really excited to connect with people that align with that.

Melinda Wittstock: Amazing. Well, thank you, Kayla, for putting on your wings and flying with us today.

Kayla Rodriguez Graff: Thank you for the opportunity to do so.

[INTERVIEW ENDS]

Melinda Wittstock: Kayla Rodriguez Graff is the CEO and co-founder of SweetBio, a Memphis biotech using patented, honey-based biomaterial technology to heal wounds, and the incoming board chair of Life Sciences Tennessee.

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