My Buster Bluth-Inspired Path to Becoming a Sexual Wellness CEO

A self-indulgent bread crumb trail and the beginning of a record of a thing.

I tell a lot of people “my life is so weird.” It’s a stupid statement. Everyone’s life is weird. But the juxtapositions in mine—a CEO/co-founder of a women’s sexual wellness brand who talks all day about female boners before waiting inline to pick up my kids from their school in Tulsa, Oklahoma (I’m boots on the ground, people!)—feels a little unique, perhaps. Or at least worthy of some note taking while I’m in the middle of the experience. I didn’t do that for my daughters when they were babies like a good mom, so let’s right that wrong by doing it for my career, like a real American mother in 2025.

Me, a real American mother, at the annual Ob/GYN conference in San Francisco last year. Clitoris finger puppets designed by a Henson muppeteer and mug designed by a genius colleague.

“Mommy, how did you get your job?”

“Well, child, gather your teddy bear. Snuggle in tight. Once upon a time…”

To tell you the story would require many boring details, so let’s not. But I guess the point here is that the trajectory of life brought me to become a co-founder and CEO of a women’s sexual wellness company called Vella Bioscience.

But to try to tell you the story is the only place I know how to start this newsletter, before I can bring in the present. So here’s my indulgence, laid out in phases—like a praying mantis metamorphosis.

Phase 1

I grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I took the opportunity of college, and my generous family’s support, to move as far away from Tulsa as I could: Maine. Like a certain kind of, yes privileged, white woman millennial, I have a bachelor’s degree in a, let’s face it, irrelevant subject—anthropology, which I pursued as most bachelor degrees like this are: with an audacious arrogance, and no specific career intention. I fancied myself a young Margaret Mead or Marie Colvin, wanting to change the world through a refined lens tuned to empathy as a superpower, but I was way more Buster Bluth.

Phase 2

After graduating college, I worked in magazine and book publishing in NYC (what’s up Aperture, RIP Princeton Architectural Press), and went on to get a master’s degree in Landscape Architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design—which I name drop, 80% because IYKYK that place is a cavernous body where the unwell and the sleepless go, a place of unholy transformation.

What I thought being a landscape architect would be like.

But I wanted to design parks, goddamnit. Parks are spaces that make communities healthy. But I was unhealthy, or “unwell.”

What being a landscape architect is actually like.

Still reeling from not sleeping for 3 years straight. I needed a break. On the cusp of 30 years old, my husband and I made a fateful decision to move back to Tulsa, a place where we could afford and (theoretically, cough cough) have some family support to raise a family of our own.

Phase 3

Now I was bored at home alone with an infant in Oklahoma.

Bored at home alone with an infant (she’s around somewhere), circa 2016.

I got a grant with a friend to do a research project on the Osage Orange Tree (a slight detour).

Call me “complicated” or “interesting,” but I will always hold a flame for the cultural significance of the Osage Orange Tree.

And eventually started doing some small freelance graphic design projects for a friend who was starting a company that was looking at the therapeutic and novel potentials of cannabinoid molecules.

Phase 4

And then that snowballed. We met a doctor, Dr. Harin Padma-Nathan, who led the clinical development of Viagra and Cialis. We joined forces to look at whether CBD could cause vaginal and clitoral smooth muscle relaxation. (Viagra and Cialis work because it causes penile smooth muscle relaxation, which allows blood to flow in and an erection. Women also require this process in our vaginal and clitoral smooth muscle tissue in order to orgasm.) Well, it did. And Harin and another doctor colleague Dr. Michael Frid, invented an efficacious and safe formula that uses liposomes as the delivery mechanism.

We started Vella Bioscience in 2020. And I became the CEO in July of 2023.

Today

Leading a women’s sexual wellness brand is hard for me. I don’t want attention for talking about sex, and I sure as hell don’t want people to think I want sexual attention. But it’s hard no matter what. It requires moving so many things forward, and now we are in a profound moment of things just rolling back.

Maybe it’s because I’m about to turn 40, and that magical thing that celebrities say— “I just stopped caring what other people thought of me after I turned 40"—is starting to happen to me.

But whatever it is, while we have Big Zuck and every other way-too-powerful man, feeling themselves as peak Vigo from Ghostbusters II…

I’ve decided to try to go back to Margaret Mead and Marie Colvin. To be brave and take notes when something feels important. It’s hard to know what’s missing after it’s gone, or it’s been taken away, and especially before it’s even arrived. There’s a lot missing in women’s sexual health. It shouldn’t shock you, but it might. This is my record of that, a kind of natural history of collected observations.

“The David Attenborough of women’s sexual wellness US capitalism,” they’ll call me. And I’ll love that.

Carolyn