Syama Bunten: Two point four percent. That’s how much venture capital goes to women. Point three four percent goes to Black women. Dr. Liz Clayborne knows these numbers intimately because she’s been fundraising against them. Her story will change how you think about who gets capital and why.

Women don’t talk about money the way we should. Not honestly, not openly, and not with each other. But that’s changing. I’m Syama Bunten, founder of Wealth Catalyst. And Getting Rich Together is where the conversation lives. Every week, a different woman, a different path, and a conversation that will change how you think about your own financial power. This community is growing and you belong in it.

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Today I am here with the brilliant Dr. Liz Clayborne, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at our DC salon. Liz, you are just such an incredible human who is up to so many incredible things. For those of you who are tuning in today, Dr. Elizabeth Clayborne is an emergency physician and entrepreneur who turned a problem she saw in the ER into a medical device company. She’s the founder and CEO of NasaClip, a hands-free solution for nosebleeds that is now scaling across health systems. I’m so impressed, Dr. Elizabeth Clayborne, by your journey, by who you are, and by the woman I had a very brief encounter with. And so today is my great pleasure.

To double click on this beautiful life of yours, thank you so much for being here today on Getting Rich Together.

Liz Clayborne: Thank you for having me. I would say the feeling’s mutual. I absolutely enjoyed the salon experience in DC, and there were so many powerful women there. And you just curate such a wonderful environment for important things to be shared and important things to be amplified. So I appreciate the opportunity.

Syama Bunten: Absolutely. Okay, let’s dive right in. So before you were a startup founder, traveling around the country and taking big important meetings and being a physician, you were obviously once a little girl. So I’d love to start from the beginning. Talk to me. What was life like between the ages of seven and twelve years old? Where did you grow up? What was family life like? And what was money like?

Liz Clayborne: Yeah, I love that you start with origin stories, because I think it’s such an important part of the origin story. So I was born and raised in Denver, Colorado. I am the eldest of four girls, which I would say definitely plays into a lot of my personality. I’m definitely the true eldest child personality, pretty type A, a bit overachieving in school, and did a number of sports.

My parents had an interracial marriage. I was born in 1983, and I remember this distinctly because when Jungle Fever came out, they did a documentary on our family. My mom is white, my dad is Black, and I just remember this because they wanted to get a shot of my mom doing our hair on the front porch.

Because there’s this stereotype that white women wouldn’t know how to do their Black children’s hair. And to be honest, at the time, Denver actually had one of the highest percentages of interracial couples in the country, second to Seattle I think. So I didn’t ever really notice the fact that I was this biracial kid. I was definitely not the only one in my school who was biracial. But when I traveled around the country, it became clear to me that not everywhere was like the place I grew up in. I would say I had a really amazing childhood. I have three younger sisters who I’m all very close to.

Growing up, one of the things that I think really set me up to be what I am now is that I had parents who just did not set limits on what I believed I could do. They really made me feel like I could achieve and do anything I was interested in, and they encouraged that and built opportunities around it. I would say we were lower middle class. We all slept in the same room, for example, in our first house. We had bunk beds with a trundle that pulled out, and my baby sister was in a crib in the corner. I never thought that was a big deal until I would go to friends’ houses and think, this is nice, and you guys don’t all share clothes and have hand-me-downs and go to consignment sales. But to me, it just never felt like lack.

I have to say, there’s a lot funny about it now, because there are certain things I look back on and realize my parents were kind of struggling during this period. During the summer we used to go to the school and get hot lunches, which meant my mom was getting services at that time. But we thought it was just cool that in the summertime we got to go see the lunch ladies, get lunch, and play on the playground. I never thought it came from a place of lack.

I was public school educated, which I’m very proud of, because I went on to go to Duke University and become a physician. And it’s one of the reasons I’m really pro public school education for my children now. Outside of my mom being able to participate, and it probably being a pretty strong public school system, it gave me exposure to all walks of human life that I think was necessary for me to be the type of physician and human being I am today.

Syama Bunten: It’s amazing. So spill the tea, what kind of high school student were you?

Liz Clayborne: I would actually say I was like the jock nerd, I guess, because I did the International Baccalaureate program, for those who know it. The IB program is basically all honors classes. I went to a high school that was 70 percent Black, but I was maybe one of five people in my graduating IB class.

So it was very weird to be in a high school hallway with a whole bunch of diversity and then walk into a class that was mostly white kids. That was just an interesting dynamic. I was very academically focused, but I also swam in high school, and I was the first person to play on our all-male football team. I was a kicker on a 5A football team. That happened because I played soccer. I was a midfielder and I could score from midfield, and I had a leg.

In Colorado, where I grew up, the male soccer season is in the fall and the female soccer season is in the spring. So they could never get any male soccer players to give up their season to kick, but they knew I was off season, and they said, we heard you have a leg, would you like to be a place kicker? I knew nothing about it. I would say that was a very formative experience for me.

You can imagine what I experienced going into the male locker room to look at film or get taped up. No one was naked, by the way, but I was steeped in an environment surrounded by high school boys who are still going to talk their talk whether I’m there or not. It was fascinating for me to play on an all-male team and see the difference from an all-female team. It taught me so much more about the male psyche and made me so comfortable being in that environment.

I think that’s one of the reasons I never had an issue taking a risk or being in a male-dominated industry and thinking I’m any less than. And I love hanging out with guys. On top of that, I love football. I know more about it than most people. I have a long of 47, consistent in the thirties, and I am a diehard Broncos fan.

Syama Bunten: You know, Liz, it’s so funny. We have so many similarities and so many differences. I’m like, shit, you did what? I was also born in 1983, also biracial. My mom is Indian, my father is white, and I also went to an Ivy school. So funny.

Liz Clayborne: Continue.

Did you do Theory of Knowledge? Remember Theory of Knowledge? We had to do a thesis on anatomic modern human development, which is basically why human beings look different. Because I’m biracial, I wanted to know why phenotypically we look different. I tell people this, and this is why I’m a nerd, because who does that in high school? But I could tell you, not just about skin color, because everyone knows about skin color, but I could tell you why Black girls have big butts.

Syama Bunten: The area of knowledge. Oh my God.

Liz Clayborne: Why Asian individuals have single epicanthal folds, which is the Asian eye. It’s because everyone is perfectly designed for the environment their ancestors were in. A lot of people, and I know we’re on a tangent, but it’s just really interesting when you’re thirsty for knowledge in this way. It sets up your understanding of the world differently, and when you share that, there’s so much more acceptance that could happen, especially when it comes to race.

A lot of people know that skin color, melanin, is related to where your ancestors came from in relation to the equator. A lot of people coming out of Africa don’t have dark skin because it’s protected from the sun. As far as other features like noses, the purpose of the nose is to heat and humidify air. If you’re in a hot, moist environment, your nose is open and broad. But as you migrate north, the air gets cooler and drier, and you get narrowing of the nasal shaft. That way it has more contact with the nasal mucosa and more time to heat the air before it enters the lungs. I wish they would just teach things like that. It would make it stick that that’s why some people have long, pointy noses and others have broad noses.

Or the big girl butt thing, since I know everyone’s going to say, but she told us she was going to tell us why Black girls have big butts. All women need about 30 percent body fat to carry children. That fat can be anywhere. If you’re in a cooler climate, it’s spread in your subcutaneous fat layer because it helps insulate you, so it’s not concentrated in one area. But if you’re in a hot, humid climate, you want to concentrate the fat, and the best place to concentrate it is the butt, because it’s lower than the hips and doesn’t offset the balance of the person. So it inherently became more attractive to men in that region, because it represented women who could be healthy and carry children. That’s one of the interesting things I learned in high school being a nerd in the IB program.

Syama Bunten: That is so amazing. I love that so much. Holy bananas. Okay, so when you were on the field, I mean, it’s so incredible to hear how you were the only girl on this team, developing this level of comfort that I think most women never get the opportunity to experience at such a young age.

When did you decide that medicine was your calling? How did that come to pass? Was it in high school? Was it an early thing, when you were seven and you’re like, I want to be this when I grow up? Where did that through line come from?

Liz Clayborne: You know, it’s interesting, because I don’t think I was really gung-ho about medicine until I got into college. My mom is a nurse, so I was always interested adjacent to medicine, and she actually nurtured that interest. I remember she used to take me to the clinics with her, introduce me to her physician friends, and let me shadow. But I loved the show ER that was out when we were younger, and it never occurred to me that I was going to grow up and be an ER doctor. It wasn’t until I really got into college. What’s interesting is that I liked it, but if I’m really honest, I chose it in college because it seemed like the hardest, most respected profession to pursue.

Syama Bunten: You’re such a badass, Liz.

Liz Clayborne: And it seemed interesting. But I ended up doing a non-science major, so you’ll learn a lot more about that. I think that’s also why I ended up ultimately being an entrepreneur. I went from doing biomedical engineering in college to designing my own major in medical ethics and religion.

Syama Bunten: I have to say.

Liz Clayborne: A very unique non-science background as a premed, and it was strategic. I decided to do that even though I knew I was going to medical school.

Syama Bunten: Where did you get this sort of self-directedness in how you approach your life? It really seems like there’s a tremendous amount of clarity and vision. As a very young woman, it seems like you had a plan. Where do you feel like that came from? And how did you start to think about exercising that in your university years?

Liz Clayborne: I think if you look at some of the non-traditional things I did really young, like playing football, I learned early on that when you take a risk and do something different, it is rewarding. You get to experience and accomplish things you wouldn’t otherwise if you were too scared to do them. Not everyone’s going to say, yeah, I’ll play on the all-male football team. And even in college, not everyone’s going to say, I don’t know if I want to be a traditional premed student and do a science major, I’m going to design my own major and look at these different courses instead.

Every time I did it, it showed me that it was worth it, very worth it. And if you look at the background of my parents, who always supported what I wanted to do, I certainly had parents who wanted me to do well, but my parents were more the ones saying, you need to calm down, you’re doing a lot. My mom even today asks, are you taking care of yourself? Are you resting?

Syama Bunten: Well.

Liz Clayborne: They were more just wanting to make sure I was happy. But I come from an accomplished family, and I know a lot about my genealogy. My dad is African American, and we know the plantation our Black ancestors were emancipated from in Whittiers, North Carolina. I know my great-great-grandfather, who fought in the Civil War and took his eight-year-old son, once he was emancipated, to Gossport, Indiana, where we still have a farm, and where our family built over 600 acres they owned at one time.

Every generation from that eight-year-old, who then got married and went to college, one generation out of slavery, which is remarkable when you think about it. This was in the 1920s. Do you know what the high school graduation rate was in the 1920s? Probably about 30 percent. The college graduation rate was about 6 percent, Black or white. So to be college educated in the 1920s was unheard of, let alone for a family to have multiple people who went to college. Even the women, like my great-great-aunt Frances, who’s the ancestor I remember most because she died at 96, went to high school. She rode horseback to her high school and graduated. There’s just a lot of pride around education in my family. My grandfather, my dad’s dad, had a PhD in education from IU. There was always respect for education, but never a sense that you couldn’t do something you wanted to do.

On my mom’s side, they’re mostly Irish, and they came over from Ireland during the potato famine. My great-great-grandmother on that side lied about her age to get through Ellis Island. She was only 14, and you had to be 16 at the time to immigrate on your own. So she lied, and she took that lie to her grave. We found out after she died. People doing amazing things, right? A lot of people think what I’m doing is amazing, but I think it’s in my genes to a certain point, to answer your question. And then I was nurtured by the right parents, and I have the ambition, the tenacity, the resilience, and the drive to just get it done for my life.

Syama Bunten: It’s incredible. Did your parents ever talk to you about money? Did they ever have conversations with you about spending it, or how to think about it? Obviously, as you were getting ready for university, and then went on to get your medical degree, when people move forward into higher education, it gets much more expensive. So how did you start to think about paying for university? What were some of those conversations like at home?

Liz Clayborne: I had probably two different types of parents. My dad was, and still is to this day, a very fiscally conservative engineer. He’s a penny pincher, doesn’t spend money on anything, and is always encouraging us to save and prepare. He made sure he could provide for a family of four children and his wife. My mom worked part-time, she was a nurse, but she was much more like what I would say I am, which is, I’ll just make more money if I want to spend more money. I’m going to figure out how to get more money if I want to do that thing. So it was a nice balance between the two of them.

But I definitely understood I was going to have to pay for college. My parents were able to contribute very minimally. I think all of us got fifteen thousand dollars, and I know exactly what it is because my dad is very much an everyone-gets-the-same-thing kind of person. So all four of us got fifteen thousand dollars, which wasn’t going to do anything. I went to Duke University for undergrad, a very expensive private university, but I got academic scholarships, some financial aid, and I worked, which I didn’t know was going to be such a unique thing.

I read an article recently talking about Duke culture, that there were people who never even knew where the financial aid office was. For me, having a job and getting financial assistance for college was just what I always knew I was going to do, but I didn’t think of it as a weakness. My opinion was, look, I got here public school educated. I didn’t have a private school education and a lot of people vying to get me into this school. So to me, it just solidified that I deserved to be there. Hell yeah.

Syama Bunten: You did it. That is so amazing. Okay, so take me through it. As you’re graduating with your medical degree and starting to think about launching yourself into the world, those first stages of building a financial life for yourself, building a life, being on your own and taking care of things, what were some of your early experiences being out of the house, out of schooling, and launched into the world?

Liz Clayborne: I think when you go through medical school, it’s a little different because you’re sheltered in that college state for a much longer period, where it’s not real life yet. I graduated from Duke in 2005, and I did a two-year research fellowship at NIH, which I thought was really interesting. It’s also what made me fall in love with the DC area and with policy. I had done this non-traditional major, and I actually did research on race, ethnicity, and genetics.

That was really looking at race-based therapeutics and the way we look at race as some kind of indicator we think has a genetic component, when it’s actually a social construct. So how do we meld that? What am I defined as, as a Black and white kid, genetically? What does that mean for my risk and the medications I take? I really liked all of that. It blended everything together.

Syama Bunten: Happy I know you, Liz. So much stuff, I’m like, amazing. Okay, sorry, go ahead.

Liz Clayborne: This was in 2005. I feel like my stipend from NIH was twenty-one thousand dollars. I lived in Dupont Circle, I had two roommates. I’ll never forget this, two roommates, but we lived in a nice apartment, and I thought I was rolling at that time. I got so much money with my twenty-thousand-dollar stipend. I mean, I didn’t have a car or anything like that, I took the metro everywhere. But I made it work, I had a job, and I used that time to really make sure I wanted to go to medical school.

Then I decided to go to medical school at Case Western, because I did a dual degree and got my master’s in bioethics while I was in medical school. I really married that interest I had from undergrad in medical ethics and religion, which to me comes from this idea that our secular Western society likes to separate religion and spirituality from medicine. But historically and culturally, most cultures have medicine men or medicine women. It is a spiritual experience when you’re sick, it really will bring you to your knees. And it’s a misnomer to look at a human being as just a disease entity. I was always more fascinated by looking at the whole picture.

The way I balanced that with my medical education is that while I was getting my MD, I got this master’s in bioethics, and because I got it done in four years, it was free. I was always looking for ways to save money, because I knew I didn’t have anyone supporting me at that time besides myself. For medical school, you just go into debt, that’s what you do. Some people might have parents who pay for medical school. I fully funded my medical education, which is one of the reasons I wanted to get the master’s program done in four years, so I wouldn’t have additional debt. Even when I talk to premed students now, you’re kind of told you’ll be able to make enough money to pay off this debt, and it’s just a necessary evil.

From a structural position, I think the way we do medical education in this country is backwards. I think it sets us up to have too many subspecialists and money-hungry physicians when they come out. They literally take the most bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, optimistic group of students and pervert them into pessimistic, burnt-out residents who then work themselves to the bone. In many ways, I think it corrupts all the things that attract people to medicine. In countries where medical education is free, they get a little more balanced participation across different specialties, especially primary care, where you need a lot of smart minds. That’s my personal opinion, as someone who has a bioethics master’s and an MD on the back end.

But at the time, I felt like I was still living that college life, where of course I don’t have a lot of money, but I’m not in lack, and I knew where I was going to live. I wouldn’t say that stage of real-world money hit until I was a resident. The problem with residency is you’re really poor, because you’re still not getting real paychecks. Honestly, if you look at what we’re paid hourly, we might make less than minimum wage, because they work us so much. I went into emergency medicine, so that was four years of residency, and living in DC, they adjust your residency salary based on where you’re living, but a lot of the time it’s pretty tight.

I don’t really know how people with families manage in residency, because you’re definitely not paid enough to support anyone besides yourself, but people made it work. It never felt real to me until I was literally an attending. By the time you’re an attending, you jump into this huge income bracket.

Syama Bunten: What is it like to go from, my gosh, I have all this debt, they’re telling me it’s going to get paid off, but I still need to see the proof in the pudding? By this point, it sounds like when you become an attending, how many years are you into the space at that point?

Liz Clayborne: Four years of college, four years of medical school, four years of residency, and then you graduate and you’re a new attending making hundreds of thousands of dollars, but you probably have, well, now it’s more like four hundred thousand dollars of debt for new grads. I had about two hundred fifty thousand, almost three hundred if I count the fifty I carried from undergrad. That’s a lot of debt. So one of the things I did was get a job at a hospital that helps pay down debt.

If you work in an underserved neighborhood, there are federal programs for paying down debt. I knew I was going to need to do that to offset my debt, but I picked a place I probably would have worked regardless, so it didn’t feel like that big a deal. I was able to get some loan forgiveness, which really helped. But paying those loans really hurt, because you work so hard, you finally have this money, but you still feel like you’re always on a budget, because you can’t fully use that income, so much of it is going toward your debt.

By this time, I was also getting married, having a kid, and trying to buy a house, all the things as a woman that you feel like you delayed by going into a career in medicine, because you’d been so focused on achieving those things. It’s scary, because a lot of us feel behind at that point, since we’re a lot older than some of our peers who went into different professions.

Syama Bunten: Well, that’s so interesting to me, because I’ve heard young people say, I want to be a doctor because they make lots of money, and then I feel like there’s…

Liz Clayborne: Don’t do it for money. First of all, I believe if you did an analysis of lifetime earning potential, we don’t actually make that much money over our lifetime, because it’s all backloaded. You’re basically working for very little for the first several years of your profession, then you’re paying off debt for another five to ten years, and then finally you’re in the clear. That’s not to say you can’t do it, and there are certain specialties that do very, very well.

There are a lot of physicians now who are really focused on making sure you make smart decisions, because, to your point, Syama, a lot of us just didn’t get good training on how to manage money. It’s almost like athletes who get paid a lot of money and then blow it and don’t know how to build wealth. I’d say medicine is similar. We’re so smart in some ways, but financially, I found that education just didn’t exist. A lot of the insights I have into managing money came after I founded the business and had to learn how to run one.

Syama Bunten: Well, in these early stages of getting married and establishing a family, what were some of the money conversations you were having at home, if any? It sounds like on your end there’s this internal change, money coming in, paying things down, getting reestablished. What were some of these early conversations like as you were thinking about building a life together?

Liz Clayborne: You immediately move into a very different income bracket, usually the top 5 to 10 percent, being a physician. But you’re very aware of the debt you have, and you have a lot of expensive things you’re probably trying to do in a short period of time, like buy a house and have kids. For some people, and I fortunately didn’t have this experience, they struggle with having kids. There’s the whole IVF situation, which wasn’t well supported when I was coming up, and that was a very real financial strain for a lot of my friends who were in that position.

For me, at the time I was getting married, and I say this because we’re both aware we’re divorced and can talk about the ups and downs, to be honest, there’s power and lessons in going through a divorce. I married someone who didn’t make as much money as me, and I think that created a lot of struggles in many ways. It created struggles in the dynamic of the relationship, but also in the pressure I had as the primary breadwinner, the person who was going to have to plan for all the big things with family and kids. I’m not saying it’s always like that, some people marry someone who makes less and it’s still very supportive, and they make joint decisions together. But in my particular experience, I felt like I had to be very conscious of those decisions.

I think I was kicking the ball down the street a little bit, telling myself, well, I’ll make that money, I can catch up. That first five years, you’re just thinking, I can make this up, I can make this up. What you’re really focused on is getting out of debt so you have no more student loans, and then you can start stacking. There are instruments that help physicians, especially with mortgages, physician loans for houses, because lenders know our earning potential and our ability to buy homes. I utilized those tools to get the things I needed to have kids.

I think you have to be mindful, but by no means did I feel uncomfortable. Compared to how I grew up, and I still say this now, my kids are so spoiled. My two little ones have no idea, they have way too many stamps on their passports, they think it’s normal. I remember we were going to a domestic destination, Houston, for a wedding, and my daughter was skipping down the jet bridge saying, mommy, what beach are we going to? And I said, we’re not going to a beach today, we’re going to a wedding in Houston. The woman in front of us said, I love that your daughter associates walking down a jet bridge with going to the beach, and I thought, well, I might have had something to do with that.

I was paying off my loans and still definitely enjoying my life during that early stage. The rubber didn’t hit the road for me until I divorced. Then all of the financial things became really, really difficult, because divorce is expensive. In my particular case, selling our marital home was extraordinarily difficult, because it happened right after interest rates went up, along with a lot of other things. It financially drained me in a way I never anticipated. It was a huge change in my plans and very financially distressing, and it’s still something I’m building out of, because in addition to going through a divorce, I decided to found the company during this same period, right after I’d been pregnant on the front lines of COVID with my now five-year-old.

Syama Bunten: Liz, I was just going to say, right when you’re getting yourself out of student loan debt and establishing yourself, now it’s like, let me do something very risky, going into starting the business. And even divorce is risky. Everything else before that seems very thought out, there’s a plan, here’s the strategy. You throw a divorce in there and it’s risky because you have no idea what’s going to happen on the other side. You have no idea who you’re married to until you go through a divorce. You have no idea what personal risk and money will look like on the other side. And then certainly when you start a business, my gosh, there’s another huge component of risk, but also possibility. These two things happening together is so much to handle. How did you prepare yourself for either of these things? How did you think about what it looked like to jump off a cliff after you had been so deliberate and thoughtful about the progression of your career?

Liz Clayborne: Yeah, and I’m a Taurus, so security is an important thing for me. This was very uncomfortable. I think you’ve heard a little bit of this story, but 2020 was such a pivotal year for me. I know 2020 was really hard for a lot of people with the pandemic, but I was a full-time ER physician, and I was about six months pregnant, because I delivered in May. So I was six months pregnant when the pandemic hit in March of 2020, and I worked at the hardest-hit hospital in the state of Maryland.

We were intubating people in the parking lot. It was extraordinarily terrifying. There were two other pregnant women in my group, so if all of us had left, the group would have been in major trouble given how much volume we were dealing with. My OB said, this is super risky, we have no idea what the risk is to the baby. Honestly, if I knew then what I know now, it was very risky. I’m just so fortunate that my daughter was born without any issues.

Right before this, I had found out about infidelity in my marriage. I was in the worst personal position you could imagine. At the time when I needed the most support, physically, emotionally, financially, I had basically had everything taken from me all at once. I was working front lines, I wasn’t getting the support I needed at home, and because of the pandemic, I couldn’t even really get my family around me. I delivered my daughter in May of 2020, May 30th, 2020. She was healthy, it was fine.

I went home, and I decided during my maternity leave to do an accelerator program for NasaClip, my device.

Syama Bunten: Nobody sounds like, and I’m going to go start a company while I’m breastfeeding, and…

Liz Clayborne: The reason I decided to do it goes back to 2015, when I was a resident. Just to tell a little bit about the company, because I always have to plug it as a founder, when I was a resident I found out we see about 500,000 ER visits a year for nosebleeds. I couldn’t believe that many people came to the ER for a nosebleed. I thought, why are you here for a nosebleed, just put pressure on your nose. But when I looked at the problem more carefully, I realized patients mismanage nosebleeds, they almost do the opposite of what they’re supposed to do. They tilt their head backwards, when it’s actually supposed to go forward. Patients pinch their nasal bridge, when you’re actually supposed to pinch over the flare of your nostrils.

Syama Bunten: So where did that misinformation come from, that you’re supposed to tilt your head back?

Liz Clayborne: People come in with their head tilted back and tissue lightly stuffed in their nose. You need ten to twenty minutes of constant, uninterrupted pressure over the flare of your nostril, without letting go, to stop a nosebleed. That sounds simple, but it’s actually hard to do, nobody pinches their nose and doesn’t let go for ten minutes. I think they panic because they’re doing the wrong things, and they come to the ER. We see 500,000 of these visits, and people think they’re going to be seen right away, and I’m like, this isn’t a gunshot wound, a heart attack, or a stroke, so you have to wait. It was frustrating for everyone involved.

I was trained to take two tongue depressors and tape them together to make a clip, and I thought, there’s not a device for this, these patients don’t even need to be here. So the idea came to me as a resident that I could create a hands-free, adjustable, external nasal compression device, which is NasaClip. You can check it out at nasaclip.com. We have adult and pediatric versions of the device, and it’s basically the band-aid of nosebleeds. It has soft, medical-grade sponges that go in the nose. You can add a vasoconstrictive agent too, like Afrin spray, and then it holds external pressure. You take it off after ten to twenty minutes, and the sponges are replaceable.

At the time, in 2015, when I was still a resident, it was just an idea in my head, but we were going through all these things, I was getting married, having a kid, trying to buy a house, all of this happening at once. So it was on the back burner, but I did get my patents done. Then in 2020 I heard about an accelerator program, but they wanted you to be full-time to do it, because back in the day, accelerator programs expected you to be some trust fund kid with nothing better to do than an accelerator program, because by no means were they expecting you to be working or having children while starting a company. To the credit of this accelerator program, they changed their rules after I gave them feedback, and that’s no longer a requirement. But at the time, it was. So the only time I could do this accelerator program was during my maternity leave after COVID.

Because it was COVID, it was a virtual event, so I breastfed my newborn through this accelerator program. I just decided I was going to do this. Everything else was really challenging at that time. I was physically devastated from everything I’d been through with COVID, emotionally going through what looked like the start of a divorce at that point. I also had an eighteen-month-old, or nineteen-month-old, at home, a toddler I was taking care of. I decided I needed to take this risk on myself, because I believed the device could do really well, and I didn’t know when else it was going to happen. At that point I was living month to month, because the whole picture of where my life was supposed to go, so planned out before, had kind of evaporated when I saw the beginnings of the divorce and everything else going on.

Maybe I went back to my roots of, I’m going to double down on me, I’m going to bet on me. So I made the decision. I got fifty thousand dollars of capital and some executive management support, and from there I was able to raise my first million. Now we’ve raised over 4.5 million. We’ve been on the market for more than two years. We’re on Amazon.com.

We’re in probably 300 doors nationally now. I think this is going to be the band-aid of nosebleeds, and I tell the story with all the personal flavor to it a lot, because I want people to understand it came from me really driving through one of the most challenging years of my life.

I took a lot of financial risk, because not only did I end up divorced about two years after that, it was a long process because of COVID, so we didn’t do it right away, we tried for a while and it didn’t work, but we ultimately divorced. I had to take a very significant pay cut to run the company, which I’m still doing. I still feel like I’m taking a lot of financial risk personally, because I don’t make as much, I can’t pay myself at this early stage the way I did as a clinician, and I’m investing heavily, my own assets and money, into the company, and constantly fundraising.

But to me, in addition to the NasaClip device, we have pipeline technology now that I’ve thought of, where we’ll use NasaClip as an intranasal drug delivery platform. What a better way to deliver intranasal drugs like Narcan, or naloxone, the opioid reversal agent. Instead of spraying it up the nose, it can go on sponges that maintain contact with the nasal mucosa, and you put the system under pressure, making it more likely to be effective in one application. That opens up a forty-three billion dollar intranasal drug delivery market. I believe I’ll be able to make this happen for the company. I think it’s going to happen.

I’m already seeing the fruits of my labor, because, as I mentioned, I have a five-year-old now. My five-year-old, the Corona baby, is a redhead from the Irish side, from her grandmother, and she gets nosebleeds all the time, because redheads tend to get nosebleeds more often. So she’s my best little NasaClip model. If you go to our social media at nasaclip.com, or follow me, you’ll see her, because she gives me the best natural content of putting on her NasaClip.

They see me as this physician, this founder, this CEO, this person who’s on TV a lot, because I didn’t mention that during the pandemic I was also on national TV almost every week, because they liked the story of the pregnant frontline provider. As you can tell, I have a knack for live television interviews, and it was so important to me at that time, because I don’t think people really understood what was going on. All of those things in 2020 primed me to be ready to be this founder, the resilience, the pivoting, the innovation, the speaking, and the belief in myself. That’s why I was able to successfully raise. A lot of that came from this unforeseen experience of having national television opportunities as a physician and going through the pandemic as a pregnant mom.

Now I have a five-year-old and a seven-year-old. My seven-year-old, maybe a year ago, asked me a question I think is so powerful and so reflective of this whole story. She said, mommy, can boys be doctors? She was genuinely curious whether it was possible for them to be doctors, because in her reality, this is a girl job. I’m a physician, I have a lot of female friends who are physicians, her pediatrician happens to be a woman. So she just assumed it’s a girl job. For her, being a CEO is a girl job, being on TV is a girl job. That’s her starting point. I love that, because if you look all the way back at my whole history and my ancestors, I can’t imagine how amazing it would be for them to know their future great-great-great-great-granddaughter would think boys can’t be doctors.

Syama Bunten: So amazing.

Liz Clayborne: You should have told her, if they work really, really hard and know the right people, maybe.

Syama Bunten: As you’re building the business, you’re still juggling so many hats, a single mom, there are so many things you’re up to. As you’re laying down the foundations for your future, for your kids, what are things going to start to look like? Having a startup with great traction is incredible, because that’s a great way to create generational wealth, get that business going and see it as one potential channel.

As you’re thinking about other ways of building, and I’d love to hear more about this, your exposure now to venture capital, which is something most of us don’t get a lot of exposure to unless we’re a founder or an investor, how do you start to think about contextualizing all of it? What are you thinking about in terms of your exposure and what you’ve been learning? How do you see your pie today? How are you planning for the future, and what are some of the thought processes you walk through?

Liz Clayborne: I’m so grateful for the experience, because I had absolutely no business background. As you heard, I was a medical ethics and religion major, premed, there was no business in any of that. So a lot of my business know-how was self-taught, trial by fire. I did a lot of excellent accelerator programs, including Springboard, which is for women. I did a Blue Cross Blue Shield accelerator, I did NSF I-Corps. I’m a sponge for knowledge, and unlike the stereotype of physician founders, I know what I don’t know, so I was able to take that on and learn.

The first thing that was baffling to me getting into the startup and venture capital world was learning about the dearth of funding that goes to women. The 2.4 percent of venture capital going to women, 0.34 percent of that going to Black women, was just astonishing to me, even coming from the still heavily male-dominated industry of medicine, which is changing a lot now. I was blown away by that discrepancy, especially after learning that female-founded teams tend to be faster to revenue, faster to profitability, and have 6x greater returns. If venture capitalists were really about their dollar, their paper, their money, the way they say they are, they’d probably only invest in women if you look at the statistics.

So obviously there’s something else going on that’s not letting the capital flow in that direction, and in my opinion, it’s unconscious bias. Most venture capitalists are white men, and it’s an area where they’re highly risk averse, because it’s high-risk investment, so they’re going to invest in what they feel comfortable with and what they know, which is usually other white men. I think the only way to change that, in addition to being a stellar founder, and by the way, I have an open round for whoever’s interested, I have a seed raise we’re finishing up, about four hundred thousand dollars left in that, and then I’ll have additional fundraising, so I’m open to anyone who wants to get on the NasaClip bandwagon, in addition to being an outstanding founder, is that we have to change who is investing, and have more women and more people of color in the pool of people who are investing.

To a lot of what you talk about, Syama, I think a lot of women just don’t have any idea about the opportunity to do angel investing or be involved in venture capital at all. Even for me as a physician, I feel like we’re not well taught, as I mentioned, about financial discipline or how to plan for the future. Most physicians I know have their 401k, and maybe they’ll buy a vacation home or a rental home, and that’s it, real estate and their retirement settings. There’s nothing about how you diversify your portfolio, how you invest in something you really believe in. For my early rounds, my pre-seed rounds, I went to a lot of my physician colleagues and had them write five-thousand-dollar checks, but I had to educate them on what it meant, what the risk was, what the payout was, what the timeframe was. No one knew any of that.

So for me now, a lot of my drive is not just to introduce what I think is a simple but elegant solution to nosebleed emergencies, but to really serve as a model for what can happen when Black women and women have early access to capital, what can be brought to market, and how it can change other people’s lives. Because me having a billion-dollar exit, in addition to being a really powerful story, is going to position me to invest in other women and people of color. That’s really what I’m driving toward, and that’s the legacy I want to provide my girls, and everyone who comes after me and is in my community.

Syama Bunten: I love that. That was going to be my next question. Because you’re a physician, it feels like we’re living and have the potential to live so much longer now than anyone before us. It sounds like everywhere I look there are longevity conversations, everyone’s trying to get to 120. My question for you, Liz, was going to be about looking back on a life well lived, let’s say at a young age of 110. What is that legacy? Obviously it sounds like generational wealth, helping propel a more equitable future for women and women of color who are building. But what else does that legacy look like for you? What is that body of work?

Liz Clayborne: I think the thing I want to teach my daughters more than anything is to live a life full of happiness. If more people dialed into their true, authentic nature, what they’re really passionate about, you’ll find they’re able to somehow maneuver into making money doing that thing. Traditionally in society, we’ve been driven to respect productivity, and we’re valued for what we produce, whether or not it’s attached to something we’re passionate about.

Obviously I’m still Type A at heart, and I want my girls to do really well in school. But more than that, I want them to grow up and have a job they absolutely love, that they’d do for free, and it’s all the sweeter because they get paid to do it. Because then you’re able to give from a fountain that’s overflowing, instead of barely keeping your cup full so you can extend to others. I think we’re required, as women, to make so many sacrifices at so many different parts of our life. For me personally, in addition to a legacy I think is powerful, resilient, and inspirational, I want it to be one where I didn’t just work hard. I don’t want it to be, she worked hard. I want it to be, she lived a beautiful, happy life and was successful. I don’t think it’s always about your productivity and how much you do. Capitalism is very attached to input, you put in this work and you get this out.

But especially for women, and I have an executive coach who gave me a really powerful example of this, when you look at a pregnant woman early in her pregnancy, it doesn’t look like she’s doing any work, does it? You can’t see the work she’s doing. She’s creating a human being, doing some of the most important work there is. Is it not valued because you don’t see what comes of it until the end? How do we equate what that time is versus the input?

So to me, it’s not always about showing what you did, putting the hours in. I also think we need to change the disease of busyness in our society. A lot of the work I had to do to find balance was understanding that working harder doesn’t make me smarter or better. In my opinion, if I can work less and do more, that’s what makes me smarter, that’s what makes it better. I’m always striving for what gives me efficiency, but also allows me space for happiness and joy in my life.

I’m actually making time right now to date, by the way, we talked about this a little bit, because it’s still my plan to have a loving, fulfilling relationship, and that’s part of the life I want my girls to see. I want them to be proud of me on the professional side, but it’s almost more important for them to see me emotionally fulfilled, with a partner I love. So I have to make sure I’m dedicating time to that too.

Syama Bunten: That’s beautiful. I have two final questions for you, Liz. The first is, we’ve talked a lot about money, student loans, investing, all these different components around money. You briefly alluded to it when you said your daughter equates the jet bridge with the beach. My question was going to be, what has been the most fabulous recent thing you’ve spent your money on? Experiences, items, you name it, what’s been the most fabulous?

Liz Clayborne: The audience isn’t going to be able to see it, so I’ll show it to you. For Christmas this year, I bought myself a wedding ring. It’s a three-stone ring, with a white, pink, and yellow diamond, and I put it on my right hand. It was kind of a love gift to myself, because it’s been really hard being a single parent. The dating thing is really, really hard for me right now, and I think I was putting so much pressure on myself. A lot of what I had to remind myself was to love myself.

Syama Bunten: Beautiful.

Liz Clayborne: And to pour into myself. So I bought myself this ring, and because I wear it all the time like a wedding ring, to me it represents loving my mind, body, and soul. I wanted it to be a daily reminder. Honestly, it wasn’t really something I could afford, these are lab-grown diamonds, but still a diamond ring. I’m just really proud that I decided to do that for myself. It really grounds me.

Syama Bunten: Be careful.

That’s beautiful. And then our final question, what is it that we, the audience, can do for you? What are you calling in this year? What’s on your heart? How can we support you?

Liz Clayborne: I think the best thing that supports me and the NasaClip journey is sharing my story. If you were inspired by anything I said, tell others about it, check out our website. If you have nosebleeds, if your kid gets nosebleeds, if you have an athlete who gets nosebleeds, or an older parent who gets nosebleeds, please check us out on Amazon, leave us a review, tell others, tell your hospitals, tell your healthcare workers. And certainly for those in a position to invest, it’s still very much a grind to fundraise, and I’m so close to punching through. Our goal this year is to reach a million in revenue, but I need to be capital flush to get there.

If you’re interested in reaching out to me, I’m on LinkedIn, Elizabeth Clayborne, C-L-A-Y-B-O-R-N-E, or you can email me, I’m sure I can share those details for the show notes. Sharing the story, and mentioning that you heard of Dr. Liz and the NasaClip story, spreads like wildfire, it really does have a tremendous impact. The other thing I’ll say is I always reach back. If you want to ask me a question, need advice, or want to talk to me about something I could help with, I welcome that outreach too, because I’m bringing as many people with me as I can.

Syama Bunten: Amazing. Dr. Liz Clayborne, thank you so very much for your spirit of generosity today for sharing your incredible story, your ancestry, your vision, the highs, the lows, and the money stories that have followed with you in this future you’re creating. I’m so appreciative of who you are on this planet. Thank you.

Liz Clayborne: Thank you for having me.

Syama Bunten: Thank you for listening. This is the conversation we come back to every single week. Real women, real wealth, and what becomes possible when we stop being silent about money. If today’s episode moved you, don’t let it stop here. Wealth Catalyst is where women go to take it further. Our Freedom Tour salons are gathering women in 32 cities this year. Intimate evenings in homes and private spaces where women talk honestly about money, risk, and what they’re building.

And if you’re ready to go even bigger, join us at the Wealth Catalyst Summit, a full day event in San Francisco this October. Find your city and claim your seat at wealthcatalyst.com. We’ll see you there.