The doctor is an accidental entrepreneur

Life has a way of taking people places they never imagined and might not have known they wanted to experience.

Take Dr. Lara Zibners Lohr (MBA ’23), who was born in Honolulu, lives in Vienna and London, and calls Colorado her “heart home.”

She is a medical doctor who never planned on going to business school. Now, she’s set off on a new adventure – call that a venture. The self-described “accidental entrepreneur” is on a team launching a healthcare product for women which draws on her firsthand experiences and medical expertise.

The first step on this unlikely path occurred because Zibners had something to prove – to the world and to herself. With young children, she and her then-husband made the difficult decision to divorce.

“He managed the financial part of our lives,” she says. “I managed the kids, the house, the well-being of our souls. When we split up, a number of people said, ‘You’re going to lose your shirt. You have no idea what you’re doing. You have no life skills.’ And I got annoyed, and I said, ‘I’ll get an MBA, and then everyone will stop annoying me.’ That’s overkill, but that’s how I operate. So then it became, ‘Wait, that’s a good idea.’”

Going home again

At nearly 50, Zibners did not fit the typical MBA profile, which made her more determined and a standout candidate. She Googled programs and researched the rankings to find the best online MBA program she could pursue from Europe. She wanted an all-American experience after living on her ex-husband’s home continent for years.

As much as it was possible, she “wanted to go home.”

“It was a no brainer,” she adds. “If you get into UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School, that’s where you’re going to go!”

What made online MBA@UNC especially meaningful for Zibners is the network of people she now counts on.

One fish, two fish, many big fish

Zibners, who is the national educator for the Royal College of Surgeons in London, came to UNC Kenan-Flagler with impressive credentials.

She earned her BS in biochemistry and cell biology at the University of California at San Diego, her MD cum laude from The Ohio State University College of Medicine, and her master’s in medical education from the University of Dundee in Scotland. With experience in emergency medicine and pediatrics, she has practiced at the Columbus Children’s Hospital, Mount Sinai School of Medicine and St. Mary’s Hospital in London.

Still, she was awed by her classmates. “You read about your class before you get into the program,” she says. “You read everyone’s bio, and you’re instantly like, ‘Oh, gosh, I’m really not the big fish in this.’ I went from my day job where I answered to no one and am the boss, and all of a sudden, you’re thinking, ‘Wow, these people are all really high caliber.’ At orientation, I see there’s the Navy SEAL and there’s the astronaut and there’s the lawyer.”

Zibners reconnects with her healthcare professor, Dr. Adam Brown (MBA ’14), at a conference in Amsterdam.

Taking classes primarily from Vienna, Zibners was unsure how relationship building would happen with her online classmates. However, she is still in close contact with a crew of several people and has countless other connections on LinkedIn. She went to graduation to see people in person and has connected with other alumni face-to-face since then.

“All along you felt like you really got to know people,” she says. “Everybody got to know me including what I look like at two o’clock in the morning.”

To participate in the program, stay close to her kids and continue her numerous commitments – people may never have seen a CV with so many entries – Zibners opted for classes that had her doing coursework in the middle of the night from Europe.

In her work at the Royal College of Surgeons, she brought with her the conviction that online education and training is feasible. Pre-COVID, she had pitched an idea for an online training course, and everyone rejected it. Then the pandemic hit and no one knew how they could go online and assess people. Zibners came to the rescue by describing her experience at MBA@UNC.

“We’ve actually launched the course and now it’s running in the U.K. as an online trauma certification course,” she says. “We can identify instructor potential, people who aren’t passing, and it was so informed by my experience in the online MBA program.”

Finding yourself

The MBA program kept surprising Zibners, and she learned unexpected things about herself.

“I was shocked that I loved accounting. I had no idea that I would. I thought, ‘Everyone hates that class.’ I loved it,” she says. “I loved economics. I loved finance. I loved all these classes about stuff that was never in my life. The fact that I have an inkling of interest is amazing. My whole life is different. I used to do my finances in Word.”

Lessons from class are now contributing to Zibners’ latest role as the co-founder of Calla Lily Clinical Care, maker of the patient-centric, leak-free vaginal drug delivery platform. Time magazine named its underlying technology among the best inventions of 2020.

Having had seven rounds of in vitro fertilization (IVF) and taking progesterone first vaginally (which leaked) and then moving to an injected form to ensure absorption, she felt strongly that women deserved a better way to deliver drugs vaginally.

“It’s really traumatic,” she says. “It is not like other shots. It was cycles of me jamming my hip and steeling myself every time. I don’t remember IVF but I remember progesterone.”

Birth of a business

The company is starting with the development phase of vaginal delivery platform of progesterone. Zibners imagines eventually it could be used for cancer treatment, therapeutics, microbiome and more.

“There’s no product on the shelf yet,” she says. “But the possibilities of what we can do are so endless and amazing. I just believe. I don’t see how this doesn’t succeed.”

Still, the situation sometimes feels surreal.

“I’m an accidental entrepreneur,” she says. “This was never my plan. I think it’s utterly terrifying and scary and a responsibility that I never appreciated.”

“If you get into UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School, that’s where you’re going to go!” says Zibners. 

Wearing many hats, Zibners could find it hard to pull away from work. But she recently remarried and has a son, 11, and two daughters, who are both 14 but are not twins. The girls are three and a half months apart; one was born of a surrogate while the other was adopted. The adoption went so smoothly that she adopted her son, too.

She and her new husband, who she met while working in trauma care in London, are self-described “mountain people.” They are big skiers and hikers. Zibners has played piano her whole life and continues taking weekly lessons even though she never has time to practice.

With work and family life, Zibners rarely gets the chance to marvel at how far she has come since applying to business school.

“If you told me three years ago that I would be talking about a Series A,” says Zibners, “I would have asked, ‘Is that a baseball term?’”