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Founder and CEO, Extend Fertility
www.extendfertility.com

She’s only 35 years old, but already her entrepreneurial successes have been highlighted on three covers of Forbes magazine.

In 1989 as a Stanford undergrad student, Christy Jones co-founded the technology company Trilogy and later became president of a spin-off that she grew from the start-up stage into a NASDAQ-listed business.

Now, as founder and CEO of Extend Fertility, the Harvard M.B.A. is taking on an entirely new challenge: building a company that specializes in the emerging science of helping women to freeze their eggs and potentially slow down their biological clocks. Here Jones explains her new mission in life, and how she first became an entrepreneur.

Talk about the Right Place at the Right Time

“I lucked into starting Trilogy. I was a student at Stanford looking for a summer job. I was 19 and met a fellow student at an investment club. His father was in business and he was groomed to be an entrepreneur. He wanted to start a software company, and asked if I would join him for the summer. That’s how I got involved with Trilogy. It was many years of trial and error before things took off.”

Twentysomething and Wildly Successful

“We finally had a breakthrough and built software that was difficult for others to do and sold several multi-million-dollar software deals to large computer manufacturers. By 1993 or 94, I started working on a brand new business within Trilogy. We spun off the company in ‘96 – it became pcOrder, which provided software and services to help the computer industry effectively sell their products over the Internet. We took the company public and Trilogy ended up re-acquiring the company in 2000. After that, I took time off to see what was next.”

Leading a Meaningful Life

“I had a wonderful time in the software industry – it was a great place to be in my 20s. But I wanted to do something different in my 30s… something more personally meaningful. I was not married, and most of my girlfriends were in their 30s and not married, though some were married and starting families and some were going through treatments for infertility.

“That got us talking about egg quality issues for women in their 30s. Around that same time, a book came out by Sylvia Hewlett. The media were saying women needed to pay attention to their biological clocks. That’s when the light bulb went off for Extend Fertility.”

Stopping the Biological Clock

“I started doing research and learned that egg freezing had not been viable because eggs are mostly made of water. During freezing, the water would form ice crystals and damage the eggs. Also, no one was really trying to perfect the method for freezing eggs.

“There are five million single, childless women in their 30s in the U.S. From age 30 to age 40, there is a 10 times increase in the rates of chromosomal abnormalities in newborn babies. Fertility rates also decrease dramatically after age 35. So not only is the quality of the egg decreasing, the other aspect is quantity – you don’t have as many eggs.

“We recommend people freeze their eggs before the age of 35. Peak egg quality is in your teens and 20s and starts declining around age 27. By age 42 or 43, most fertility clinics will send you to an egg donor.”

To Wait or Not to Wait to Have Kids?

“Education is a huge part of this effort. If a woman doesn’t have the right partner yet, and wants to have children someday, then she deserves the opportunity. When you’re giving someone the option to make that choice, you also have to educate them so that they understand the potential risks and benefits.

“The last thing we want is for women to think, ‘If I freeze my eggs, I can wait as long as I want to start a family.’ We encourage women that if you have the opportunity to conceive naturally during your 20s and 30s, you should do that. Egg freezing provides a back-up for the growing percentage of women who haven’t started their families by age 35… or who think they may run out of time to have baby number two or three.”

First Customers

“Our clinics have frozen eggs for 120 women… about two-thirds to three-quarters are medical-need patients (whose treatments for medical problems, like cancer, could make them infertile). The remainder are women in their 30s who want to preserve their fertility as an elective option. We see the primary opportunity for growth in the elective market.

“It’s too early for any of our own customers to have used their own frozen eggs to conceive a child. We do have a research study ongoing that has already produced three ongoing pregnancies in the U.S. and our science has resulted in more than 100 frozen-egg babies born worldwide. Our stories are stories of hope – women who need to have one or both ovaries removed, others who went through divorce or are single in their 30s but still want to have children, and others that are diagnosed with cancer or have family history of premature ovarian failure.

Early Stage Science and Business

“(Egg freezing) is still categorized as investigational because we don’t have thousands of data points. Of the 200 babies that have been born from frozen eggs so far, they have shown no higher incidence rates of problems than those who were born naturally. While the in-vitro fertilization (IVF) field is only about 20-25 years old, there have already been one million babies born from IVF!”

Future Goals, ‘Later Baby’

“It’s early in terms of development of the market. In 2006, we’d love to break even. Our major initiatives are to finish our validation study and demonstrate the most frozen egg babies born in the U.S. We launched a sister Web site (www.laterbaby.org) to help educate women and reach out to referring obgyns. We want to make egg freezing part of the dialogue that every obgyn has with women when they’re in their early to mid 30s.”

Finessing the Financing

“The company has been funded primarily by me. I put in the initial chunk of capital. At the beginning of this year, I brought in a former colleague as an angel investor, who put into the company a round of funding in exchange for a promissory note that could convert to equity. I didn’t want to set a valuation on the company during these early days.

“As we move into 2006, another source of funding is that we received about a half a million dollars in medical grants from a major pharmaceutical company. We’ve been partnering with existing clinics rather than building our own, so we’ve been able to keep our capital costs low. We have some ideas for larger investments that we might like to make to take the company to the next level, but we’re still in the process of evaluating everything.”

Greatest Success

“I feel like every day we are a success because every day we have women telling us, ‘Thank you for what you are doing.’ They appreciate having information about their biological clocks and the ability to take proactive steps to preserve their fertility. Looking out 10 years, we want to have the same revolutionary impact that the birth control pill had for our moms in terms of giving women more options and control over planning their lives.”

Greatest Challenge

“It’s a huge educational initiative – whether it be educating women or obgyns. It’s figuring out how to tackle that when you’re a small start-up. You need to prioritize and partner to get the biggest bang for the buck in your outreach investment.”

Words of Advice

“I once heard a seasoned venture investor give all these statistics about start-up companies he had made successful investments in. He said, ‘How many of these companies do you think reached moments where everything looked like a complete disaster and the strategy needed to be reinvented? 100 percent! Nothing is ever perfect. You have to figure out how to make it work.’”

Personal Life

“I married a year ago, and froze my eggs about 18 months ago. I did that because I was in a long-term relationship, but I knew that even if we did get married, I wouldn’t be starting a family until after age 35. For us it’s really a back-up measure. I don’t foresee needing them in the next few years. But if we do get into a situation where we want more children – I know that we have 12 eggs on ice!”

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