My Story

Hi everyone, in this post, I’d like to reintroduce myself and tell you my story.

I’m Kate Medetgul-Ernar. I’m 28 years old and I’m cofounder and CEO of Guardiome. I’m a mother, a wife, a programmer, and a genomics enthusiast.

My story starts in North Carolina. I grew up in a rural area of North Carolina where I rode horses and cleaned barnes on the weekends. In these early years I spent a lot of time in nature wth good friends, sneaking into neighboring farms and bringing home strange animals. I have a lot of precious memories from this period and this is defintiely where my love of nature comes from.

When I was eleven, my parents split and I moved to Connecticut with my mom. It was a bit of culture shock for me. I started going to a private middle school with uniforms and picked up classical ballet as a hobby. I have to say I wasn’t the best student. I wasn’t interested in studying but I genuinely enjoyed biology. Specificaly I became fascinated by evolutionary biology and I would study it in my free time. However during this time, my mom was very busy with work, I was alone a lot, and I struggled with depression. So I used ballet as my outlet.

By the time I entered high school, I was determined to become a professional contemporary ballet dancer. I was all in, as they say. I would be up on school nights until 1am practicing in front of my mirror then fall asleep in the splits. I would stretch my feet under my dresser to improve my arch on point. I did it so much that I ended up breaking a few metarcles in my foot. In sophmore year of high school I switched to online school so that I could commute into New York City to dance. I danced for 6 to 8 hours during the day and would do my homework on the train home.

During this time I was dancing as a pre-company member in a contemporary ballet company. I thoroughly enjoyed it. But when I grduated high school and was offered a formal position in the company, I strangley declined. I chose to go to college to study biology instead. In hindsight it was an odd decision considering how hard I had worked for it, but I just had a feeling that there was something important for me to do in the field of biology. So I went across the country to UCSD to study biochemistry and cell biology.

A few months into my freshman year I met my husband. We have been together ever since. We didn’t have money for housing so we lived in a car together for over a year. We both got jobs in a wet lab. When we weren’t in class, we were in the lab. And when we weren’t in the lab we were sleeping in the car. In the lab I worked with yeast trying to discover how genes are born through fitness and adaptation experiments. This was my first exposure to the power and importantce of genomics. In 2015, my husband and I started Guardiome together. Guardiome was the first completely private whole genome sequence service offered directly to cosumers. In a time when other consumer genomics companies were trying to capitalize on the naivete of consumers to make money and deliver little value, Guardiome stood with the consumers. We got together friends in the lab and spent many late nights building and breaking software and hardware. Six months later, we shocked the DTC genomics market by offering customers a Genome Vault, which was basically your genome on your coffee table. It was a device that could fit in your hand that securely stored your DNA sequence. It had a small touchscreen where you could search for specific genes or variants in your DNA, and perform analyses.

After exciting press and a rush of orders, we headed to the Y Combinator interviews with our Genome Vaults in hand, bursting with excitement. Though the YC partners were supportive of our vision they advised us to drop the hardware. Eventually we submitted. We are now a software only company with the same values and vision.

At 24 I had my first child. I feel blessed to be her mom. She makes me want to be a better version of myself everyday. Today I am a mother of two and a full time entrepreneur. Every mother knows that this kind of path is exceedingly diffcult to walk. You have to see opportunities instead of problems, build a group of people who support you, and follow your gut on what your next move should be. The rest is a story I am writing now. I hope you will come along with me to see how it turns out.

In this blog I talk about all things genomics and bioinformatics. I also have a companion YouTube channel where many of these posts are in video form. If you have questions about my journey or yours, you can contact me directly at katharine.me@icloud.com.