Carolyn Treviño Jenkins - CEO & Co-founder of We Are Here

Welcome to another Founder Wisdom Podcast. We have Carolyn Treviño Jenkins with us today. She's a CEO and co-founder at We Are Here. She's been at Techstars Health 24, CancerX 25. She's a board member, an advisor, a mentor, and a tenacious operator. Carolyn, welcome to the pod. Tell us a bit more about yourself and what you've built.

Well, first, thank you so much for inviting me to the podcast. I'm excited to be here. And to share more about our story. Uh, I have a tech background. I have co-founded a couple of other tech companies. I've been fortunate to build and exit those with some co-founders, very different from who I co-founded this business with. In 2018, I was running someone else's software company, not one that I had co-founded, as CEO. And 60 days in, I was diagnosed with cancer and I was handed a paper binder and they said, here's some help for you. And that was in essence the totality of the navigation I ever got around the non-medical side of my treatment. And fast forward to 2021, I met my co-founders who are also cancer survivors.

They—

between us, we have multiple different cancer diagnoses. We live in multiple states and we all got the same Figure It Out for Yourself binder. Well, technically not the same. We all got a binder each created by our own healthcare system. And I just knew tech could do a better job. There's so many gaps and so many missed opportunities that not only could make the journey better for the patient, but also help the healthcare environment because healthcare is losing out on revenue when patients don't adhere to care and patients have worse outcomes when they don't adhere to care, which then of course means means more appointments, more cost of care. So we're in this vicious cycle that we could really improve for the entire ecosystem by digitizing what is a very analog system today.

Interesting. Um, start with the working from— for someone else. Like, tell us about your career, uh, where you've taken it so far, and the ultimate reason why you've launched your own company was your own, uh, cancer diagnostic, right? So tell us a bit more about the journey.

Yeah, you know, my first startup was in 1997 and we exited that business in 2000. It was, you know, right before the market crashed, you know, the internet bubble, the Y2K scare, everything was amazing, amazing. And then the market crashed the day we were— we did our first dog and pony show to go public was the day the market crashed. So a couple years later, the original team from that startup bought back. So we did a management buyout and we bought back our business, right? 9/11 had happened. Tech was on a down curve and we rebuilt the business. And we also started a software company and we sold them both in 2008 before the market crashed. And 2 years later, crazy enough, we got the software company back. So it's sort of like this, you know, ping pong of businesses here. And we rebuilt that, and that business is actually still up and running today. But I was hired away from that to go run someone else's software company. It was a SaaS software company started by Joel Trammell, and it was enterprise strategy execution software designed to sell directly to CEOs. And that was, again, 60 days later, I got handed my binder and told I had cancer. And I spent the next year still as CEO of Core Software, but it was hard to try and run a company and have surgery and have the, you know, and it was hard to balance those things. And when I knew I needed yet more surgery, it was finally time to step aside and do consulting work instead of trying to work full-time. But that gave me the opportunity to really discern, um, before being diagnosed with cancer myself, I helped my grandmother who died from mesothelioma, a type of lung cancer. I was my mom's primary caregiver when she had bladder cancer. Uh, my dad had already passed. Um, and then I had breast cancer and all of those journeys were harder than they should have been.

And how did that feel to see like your full family to get cancer? In your mind, was it, uh, time ticking bomb till the diagnosis was yours?

No, it didn't really occur to me at all that, because again, I mean, my grandmother— mesothelioma is an environmental cancer, right? People who get exposed to asbestos. So I had no reason to think I would have asbestos. Um, when my mom got bladder cancer, I wasn't really worried that it was genetic. Now I've been tested and I have a gene related to ovarian and breast cancer. So I worry more that my daughters might end up with cancer. And this past fall, so we started We Are Here in 2021, but this past fall my son was diagnosed with brain cancer and he is on a journey with astrocytoma right now. So I'm, You just never know where it's going to come from.

How do you even keep functioning when everyone around you and yourself have cancer? Where do you find like the energy, the motivation to just keep on going when everything is so bleak?

For me, and for me and my personality, one, it's a lot of humor and a lot of sarcasm that works for me. I sort of joked my way through cancer, and my doctors sometimes weren't quite sure what to do with me. Um, they were like, like, I, I don't know what to do with this person who's laughing. Um, yeah, I, I have a virtual box. I put a lot of things in my box for God that I have a lot of questions when I finally, uh, make my— and have an opportunity to, to have a conversation, uh, directly with. Um, because it's the best thing I can do is to just— things I can't I can't control. So I need to give it away and focus on what I can. And what I can do is focus on how to make the day, today, the best day possible. How can I make the journey the best? How can I fight for the second opinions? How can I fight to get any financial support or nutrition support or whatever needs to be there and focus my energy on what I can control? Um, and I learned these skills very young. Um, my son was born— my, my first was born when I was 23, uh, and he was born with a lot of disabilities. And so I learned at a fairly young age, a young adult age, how to just deal with what I can control and let go what I can't.

You feel that's a strong component in cancer survivors? It's like the skills that they've built before, their mindset, their habits, and what we take as granted as CEOs and founders, but for most human beings, it's, it's, it's like foreign language.

Matter of fact, yes, I firmly believe it. And the research backs it up. There's been a lot of research that indicates that about 87% of cancer patients believe that their level of distress and their mental health impacts the progression of their cancer. About 77% of doctors agree with that. And there have been some clinical studies to reinforce that. Your mindset isn't going to cure your cancer. I can't wish it away, but I can certainly protect myself as much as possible by trying to limit the amount of distress that I have. And that's one of the many tenets of the software we've built. And by helping cancer patients find the right resources at the right time, it alleviates distress from them. That's one of the many things that the platform we developed can do.

What about physical habits for your energy? Because when you undergo chemo and the pressure of it all can really take your energy levels down, which is a vicious cycle, how do you fight that?

Yeah, again, absolutely. So many studies to back up your diet and your— and the diet you should be following when you have cancer can vary by the type of cancer you have or the treatment that you're given. And these are often areas that your health team maybe doesn't have time to share with you, right? Your nurses and your doctors' number one job is to save your life or prolong it, right? They're fighting the cancer. So they don't necessarily have time to say, here's some recipes, here's some things for you. More and more health systems are starting to involve nutrition, but sometimes you have to advocate for yourself and ask for it, right? Instead of having to go find it on the internet and then know if it's good or not good. You know, before I had surgery, they were very good to tell me what medicines and what spices to avoid because they might enhance your bleeding. And you want to not have that happen. But other than that, no one ever talked to me about my diet, my entire journey or post-journey. But there's so much data and information. And if you don't have cancer, there are amazing ways to eat to help reduce your odds of getting cancer.

Right. And I'm guessing that working at We Are Here is like directly aligned with your purpose, right? What do you have to say about ikigai and, uh, working on stuff that you love while getting paid and just fulfilling your true purpose as a human being when more than 60% of the population is stuck in a deadly toxic 9-to-5?

Yeah, well, it is definitely passion mission aligned for me at this stage in the journey. It is that passion and mission alignment that makes it worth it for me to have walked away from much bigger salaries. Because we're still startup mode. We're still early in our journey. We have revenue, but you know, we're not by a minute, by no means are we yet paying ourselves market value. If I was running another company, I would have a much larger, larger, much, much larger salary and probably better hours, frankly. But it's that knowing and the help Every single day, having patients give the feedback on the platform, right? This is the only thing I found to be helpful. I had never heard of this resource. But more importantly as well, or as important, not more important, but as important is the navigators. The software is two-facing. It's meant to be used by navigators in hospitals, at providers, at concierge services, These might be nurses, social workers, dietitians, navigators at a nonprofit, because it— right now they're using Excel or Rolodexes, or you see them post on Facebook and on LinkedIn, who knows, I need— my patient needs a resource. Does anyone have one? Our database has tens of thousands of resources that are vetted and specific and get matched exactly to that patient throughout their entire journey. That's what the AI is doing. So it's empowering them to do a better job supporting the patients as well as helping the patients. So it's sort of this two-way street, if you will, but listening to the navigators, it's a long, sorry, it's a long-winded answer. The navigators go from, I had 200, 250 resources to I have thousands of resources and I don't have to parse through them because that's what the AI is doing. It's parsing through the resources. And looking at the patient's treatment plan, their demographics, and what the patients say they need help with. And it's bubbling up the right resources for me as a navigator to quickly review and say, yeah, these are what I should share with the patient.

And what's the business model here? How do you make money with this?

Yeah, well, we sell to hospital systems, to providers, to concierge services, to clinical trials. Pharmaceutical companies, people who participate in clinical trials have the exact same challenges. So I'm going to level set for the listeners who don't know. 74% of patients, adults in our country with cancer, skip or delay care because they can't afford it. It's maybe— it doesn't— it's not about if you have insurance, you can't afford the deductible or the copay, or maybe you can't afford to take off work. Or pay the babysitter, the gas, the parking. There's so many costs that go into cancer care. And when you think about— you get into phases where you're having to go weekly, multiple times a week. If you're in radiation, you might be going daily for many weeks in a row. That's a lot of expenses besides just a copay. So there's all levels of things. And then some people don't go because they're afraid and their fear has the better of them. So they're afraid to go to their care. These are all barriers that our system helps patients address.

Interesting. Do you think it's taboo to charge cancer patients? Um, and why is it all paid for? And doesn't that push society to outsource their health? And isn't that why we keep on getting health problems, that people are actually Oh, sorry, am I back?

Yes, you're back. Um, I think I caught your question though. Um, we won't charge patients. Um, as I said, patients already can't afford it. That is, 74% don't skip— they already skip care. They're not going to pay extra for their health to get their care. They can't afford it. So we're not direct-to-consumer. However, if you're a hospital system, not only if you're patient-centric and you want to treat your patients well, will this help tremendously with your patients. Our current patient satisfaction NPS score is 100 after several years of operating, but it also protects the revenue of the hospital. It helps them maximize their revenue, and hospitals have to keep their doors open. You know, when a patient cancels last minute because they don't have a ride or they can't afford the copay or they don't have the childcare or whatever the many reasons that they cancel, the chemo chair goes empty, the radiation table, maybe even the OR room. That's just lost revenue, right? You can't make that back up as a hospital. So for a hospital, using a system like ours can improve adherence to care, right? That makes sure people stick to their care plan basically, and they show up when they're expected to show up. And that helps them maximize their revenue, which also helps them do the best possible care for the patient. Because when you miss an appointment, you're also not treating the cancer. You're giving it a little bit more chance to grow. So it's a win-win. Help the patients have the best outcome, but also help keep my revenue as predictable as it can be by keeping people on care and help improve patient satisfaction as much as possible. And that's a huge win for a hospital. Or for a provider or clinical trial. And that's why they can afford to pay for it. There's an ROI for them.

Yeah, my point, uh, was more around financial accountability. If people should actually pay for their health, right, and start caring about their own health so that they don't get sick down the line. Obviously it's not 100%, uh, going in that direction. In my point, there's other more complex factor, but don't you feel that a lot of humans nowadays are just outsourcing their health and they just hope the government will pay for them when they're sick. We see obesity, right? Everyone wants the easy route, but there's cost to that easy route is more my point. What do you have to say about that?

Oh, okay, I apologize. Now I understand your question better. You know, I think of course there's probably some subset of the population who's not accountable. I think we see a lot of patients, for example, we have someone, she's given us permission to talk about her. She has a full-time job, she's in her 60s, she only makes $11.75 an hour, but she has insurance. She went all the way through her cancer care, But every time she misses work, she misses getting paid because she gets paid by the hour. So every time she goes to treatment, it actually costs her money. So is it that she didn't care or she's not willing to work or she's not insured? It's not government insurance. It is her company's insurance plan. When she got into remission, the copay for her remission drug was $108 every other week. She makes $11.75 an hour. She's doing her best. She goes to work even in her 60s. She can't afford that copay. I think we see a lot of people like that who do the best they can. It's not that they don't care. And then there's probably some people who don't take their health as seriously as they could. Now, within our platform, it's up to really our ultimate customer who buys it, but there's a ton of prevention information. We have a category we support called Previvors. So people who have a lot of cancer history in their family, or maybe they've tested positive for a gene for cancer and they're trying to figure out what are the best things I need to do. And in general, it's the same thing we all need to do, right? You know, eat healthy, exercise, mind your, you know, the— they're all environmentally— not everybody can afford to go buy all organic food. You know, not everybody can afford to do those things. So I think we have to be mindful of judging everyone as a whole. I'm sure, you know, again, there's some people who could stack it up. The, the, the single mom who's already working 3 jobs, am I gonna judge her because she doesn't also go to the gym and work out to minimize her risk of cancer? I can't place that judgment on her. Like, that's not my place.

Right. Um, how do you get into these hospitals? How do you find all these new partners? What do your, uh, sales, um, funnels and playbooks look like?

Yeah, so we've been very, very fortunate. Uh, we were selected by a couple of very exclusive accelerator programs in the startup world. Those are organizations that are designed specifically to choose elite startups that match their thesis and then they help support them. Sometimes they invest, sometimes they don't. We were selected by Techstars Health in 2024. That year they had, you know, of course, thousands of applicants from around the world. They chose 14 companies and we were one of the 14. The very next year we were chosen by Cancer X. And Cancer X is a consortium of the largest and most respected cancer centers around the country, the largest pharma in cancer, all the major cancer nonprofits who've all come together to say, let's identify cancer's biggest problems and let's try and solve them together and be cooperative instead of competitive. And the things that we all know are a problem. And they identified patient navigation as a problem. And we were one of 15 from around the world companies chosen in 2025. So that's given us some leg up, if you will, because hospitals pre-chose us as a company that we're excited to see grow and support and work with. And we have a company that's going live on the 15th in our sort of— and on August 1st, it'll be live for everyone. It's sort of a beta, if you will, for a couple of weeks or warmup. To them getting trained. And we met them at health conference. So, you know, and that's where a lot of our leads come from, being in front of people at Health, at Vive, you know, AARP, uh, HTEC Collaborative also supported us. We went through their accelerator program. So we get a lot of warm contacts through that type of activity.

And we are here in one sentence, like a ChatGPT for cancer survivors. Is that what it is?

Not at all. It's, it's more of a research assistant on steroids, if you will, for cancer nurse navigators, cancer social workers, and on the flip side, cancer patients, because it finds resources and recommends. But it's not a chatbot.

Got it. And it connects other, um, cancer-affected people together as well, or you have that function so that they can chat together? It's just like purely connecting them to health providers?

It is truly connecting them not to a health provider, it's connecting them to a myriad of resources. And that resource might be a recipe to help them sleep, for tea, with 4 ingredients. It might be to a nonprofit that will help pay for their gas so that they can get to treatment. It might be a checklist for how to prepare for surgery. It might be connecting them to someone to help with the thoughts of a second opinion. But to answer your question, it might also be like, you wanna belong to a community, and we will connect them to, we will educate them, if you will, about multiple communities so that they can pick the one right for them. They might want a one-on-one peer, and there are organizations that do that. They might want a support group on Facebook specific to their cancer type, and there are organizations that do that. So they get connected to what is the best option for them.

Got it. And the only channel they can hear about you is like through their own hospitals, uh, do you, or do you also do like Facebook ads so that they can download the app directly themselves?

We do have a presence on Facebook and Instagram. Um, there's not an app, it's a web app. It's not a mobile app so that it's more accessible for people that don't have much bandwidth. Um, but they can get access directly to our support, but in general you would get it from your hospital system. You would have access through your Cancer Concierge Service. So for example, the customer that's launching on the 15th of this month, they sell to self-insured employers and to Medicare Advantage plans. So if you're in one of their employers, their employer, and you get diagnosed with cancer, their employer says, oh, we've hired navigators to support you, to help you have better outcomes, have a better experience, help you with work-life balance. Those navigators are now using our software to serve those patients.

Got it. And you've won multiple awards being part of various accelerators. What's the next step for you, um, this year?

Oh, that's a really good question. Well, our first thing is to get this customer across the finish line, uh, you know, that's, you know, the next couple of weeks. Well, that we're heads down focused on that. Um, we have some other amazing customer opportunities we're following up with on a regular basis. So getting that closed in closer, you know, Q4, we'll probably launch a fundraise.

Interesting. Um, the fundraise, uh, yeah, if you're about to unlock your first client, like, why are you investible as a company?

Uh, they're not our first client. We already do have revenue today. So it's an additional client. We've rolled out a lot more functionality. We have gone through very deep HIPAA compliance. So there are a lot of hurdles that we've closed. Our last raise was a small angel in July of last year. And it was a $100K check, just to be honest with you. I mean, like we've raised before that, so we haven't needed to bring in a lot of money, but it's to the point where now we have enough in our sales pipeline. We need a little bit more staff. And we want to have the bandwidth to really focus on going to a lot more conferences. I'm presenting at the Plan Tree conference, plane, plane, like an airplane, plane tree conference later this year. We want to get in front of more conferences, build that thought leadership, you know, share a lot more of the research and data that we have. We have such proprietary data because nobody else collects this information. And it's fascinating. We have documented over 20,000 needs of about 3,000 patients and the ability to successfully or not address those needs and what it meant to their care. So we have a lot of time that we want to spend presenting those findings both to journals and in conferences because it's pretty amazing.

Love it. Well, thanks for being on, Carolyn. Uh, where can people find out more about you?

You can find me personally on LinkedIn under Carolyn Trevino Jenkins, or you can go out to our website, wearehere.com, and look on the leadership page after you read about us.

That was Carolyn and Charles Cormier.