The Solve Effect Podcast - Episode 3 - Take on the Taboo: Lessons from Legacy-founder, Khaled Kteily

This is a transcript of Episode One of The Solve Effect, edited and condensed for clarity. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or iHeart Radio.

Hala Hanna:

Welcome to The Solve Effect, where we highlight extraordinary people tackling the world’s toughest challenges with bold, innovative solutions. I’m your host, Hala Hanna.

These days, everyone wants to talk about the fertility crisis, but who wants to talk about the elephant in the room? The other half of the fertility equation: sperm. Our guest on this episode has been dubbed “The Sperm King.” Safe to say, he has no fear when it comes to solving the problem of male infertility.

I’m joined by Khaled Kteily, the founder and CEO of Legacy. Khaled and I have been close friends for over a decade, and I’ve had the honor of watching him transform what started as a personal (and painful) experience into a company at the intersection of tech, equity, and reproductive health that’s really redefining its category.

Legacy is on a mission to mainstream male fertility and give people the power to plan their families on their own terms, and I can tell you that Khaled’s work is as intimate as it is visionary.

Through Legacy, Khaled is challenging assumptions, breaking taboos, and building a future where anyone can take reproductive care into their own hands.

Stick around for a conversation about redefining legacy…one sperm sample at a time.

Khaled Kteily! Welcome to The Solve Effect.

Khaled Kteily:

Thank you for having me.

HH:

What's your mission? What is it that you're setting yourself out to do?

KK:

Sure. I mean, there's the personal mission. There's the professional mission.

But you know, professionally, what we're trying to do with Legacy is just normalize the concept that male fertility is something that everyone should be thinking about—to help people have more children at a time where sperm counts are down, at a time when infertility is up, at a time when birth rates are plummeting, when we're talking about the Spermpocalypse and Spermageddon, and micro plastics and everything we eat and drink, and we don't know if we're even going to be able to have children naturally in 50 years…

In that world, I want to help make sure that everybody who wants a family, or thinks they might want a family, has the chance to actually have that family someday. So, at a professional level, this is really what has driven us for a very long time. It's been seven years now, and it's something we're very passionate about every day.

HH:

The Starbucks incident that sparked Legacy is now legendary—spilling four cups on your lap, standing pantless on the highway, ending up in a sperm bank. But I think we'll both agree that most people would have just gone home and changed their pants. And you ended up creating a business. So tell us what happened.

KK:

Sure. Well, I'll take you back to Tulsa, Oklahoma, which is where I was on my last-ever consulting project.

We're driving to our client's site. We make a pit stop at a Starbucks to pick up some coffees and teas. And because I was the most junior person on the team, I jump out of the passenger seat. I go into the Starbucks, I pick up the coffees, and they give you these cardboard cup holders. You know, where you can put all the coffees in. And so I jump back in the passenger seat, and I'm holding that cup holder with the four cups of freshly brewed tea and coffee on my lap.

So as we're driving down the highway to our client site, the car in front of us brakes very suddenly. So we brake very suddenly, and anyone who has a basic knowledge of physics knows about the laws of inertia, and those four cups of coffee and tea spill all over my lap. And it was hot enough that it actually gave me second-degree burns.

I jump out of the car.

I had the presence of mind to keep my underwear on, thankfully, but I basically ripped my suit pants off because the fabric of the suit was absorbing the hot liquid, and basically, it ripped the skin clean off my thighs. It was very painful. I'm pantsless, but I'm otherwise fully suited and booted, right? I've still got my dress shirt, I've got my tie, I've got my nice blazer, all of that. So, I don't remember this, but my colleagues told me that, you know, a convoy of maybe 10 or 12 cars stopped to watch this crazy person by the side of the street.

HH:

Well, it’s the COVID dress code, before COVID.

KK:

That's true, exactly. I've always been ahead of my time. And so, it was pretty bad. They took me to the ER. I had to be bandaged up, and I ended up being hospitalized for some time. It took about a month and a half to fully heal.

Now, thankfully, second-degree burns do fully heal. It was painful, and it got me worried, thinking to myself, "Well, what if something worse had happened?" What if I could never have children again? It was right around that time that I was making the move to Boston. I was starting my Master's at Harvard, and one of my classmates mentioned that he had done sperm banking prior to starting chemotherapy.

So put yourself in my position. I've just had this pretty traumatizing accident. I was thinking about, you know, my ability to have kids. He mentions the concept of sperm banking. So I go find a local fertility clinic. I go through the process.

It was extremely awkward, extremely weird, extremely uncomfortable, but basically, they shuffle you into a small room with a black couch, porn magazines on the table. There's a TV you can turn on, but it's still showing the porn that the person before you was just watching. You know, I remember I had a ten-minute time window because they were running late that day, and someone needed to use the room right after me.

And so you just walk away from an experience like that, saying I just paid $1000 out of pocket, right, to go through this extremely awkward experience. I had to wait a week for my results. I'm terrified for that week. What happens if I can't have kids? I'm imagining every conversation with every future potential partner saying, “Hey, by the way, I can't give you children.” I'm imagining, even for myself, not being the kind of father I wanted to be. And this is around the time that companies like Roman and Hims were emerging, kind of normalizing the concept of direct-to-consumer, destigmatized, thoughtful user experience, and affordable pricing. And I became really fixated on that idea. So, I talked about sperm so much in all my classes. My friend started calling me the Sperm King, which is a moniker that has stuck, and I now own the URL spermking.com.

HH:

It's really amazing how many points of commonalities with our Solvers I hear in your story. You know, when we think of a successful Solver, these amazing entrepreneurs who are using tech for good to change the world to change their communities, they all have direct experience with the problem. They really wanna punch it. And they saw that problem, and they just decided the status quo sucks, and they want to do something about it. And they care. You know, they work in communities that are typically under looked.

And here I'm thinking of the incredibly diverse patients that you serve. From Navy SEALs, to the trans people, to people about to undergo chemo, all come to you on a Tuesday. And I guess you… I want to hear from you how you think about serving such diverse audiences from, you know, putting the human at the center, what does that do to your product? To your services? To the brand? Also, you know, how do you keep an authentic brand when the needs are so, so different between all of these people?

KK:

You're touching on a very fascinating question that is not entirely unique to us, but certainly is something that is fairly special to the work that we do. Because on the same day, we are serving a Navy SEAL, and we are serving the US military. We just signed a couple of big contracts with the military. On the other hand, we're also serving kind of more marginalized populations. We're dealing a lot with the LGBTQIA+ community. We work a lot with the trans community. You have to imagine those are different personas. Right. The average person was active duty in the military, and the average person who’s part of the LGBTQ community, I mean, it's just different persona types.

However, there is one thing, and it took us kind of years to get to this messaging. What unites someone who is undergoing chemotherapy, you know, who's trying to conceive with their partner, and who's in the military, who is a biohacker, who is getting a vasectomy? There's such a long list of the types of personalities that use our product. But one thing unites them all: they all think they may want to have a family someday.

Right? And that is actually one of the most beautiful and profound parts of our business. Infertility is not a uniquely American problem, right? Infertility is not unique to a certain community or type of personality. The desire to have a child, or to think that you may want to have a child that is biologically yours, is just fundamental at a biological level, right? Who we are as people, I mean, we're hardwired to reproduce.

Most people will tell you that they would plan to have a family that looks like them, that sounds like them, that has their nice eyes, that has their laugh, you know.

Actually, I'll mention a professor at HBS, Deborah Sparr, who did this very interesting research on people who use sperm donors. I mean, you could argue that if you're using a sperm donor, why wouldn't you want to get someone who's 6’5”? You know, blue-eyed, all these things that someone may choose to have. Actually, people choose sperm donors who are a slightly better version of themselves.

Which again just goes to show you, you want your kids to kind of look and feel and sound like you, and so that's how we were able to unite all of these different persona types with one umbrella messaging, which in this case is: “Hey, do you think you may want to have a family someday? Do you think you wanna maybe have your own kid someday?” And the answer to every single one of the people on that spectrum is: yes.

HH:

You're tapping into the most, you know? It's like instead of going to the lowest common denominator, it's actually the highest purpose that we all have.

Tell me more about working with the military. I'm curious to hear more about what that looks like.

KK:

So sperm freezing for the military makes sense. Many governments around the world actually offer this as a standard benefit because let's say you're wounded in action, killed in action. Well, hey, your spouse may still want to have children, or in fact, you may say, “Hey, I want my legacy to live on even in a world where I'm not here anymore.”

And so, we started working with the Navy SEALs about four years ago. We started an exclusive program for them to freeze their sperm with us once they're done their training. We then expanded that program to the Green Berets, so kind of continuing in that special ops vein. I think maybe a year after that, we then started working with the VA.

So you have, I believe, about 15,000,000 male veterans in the country, or somewhere in that range. Veterans are twice as likely to face infertility as civilians, likely due to the chemical exposures, the ammunition, the burn pits, you know, the stress, a lot of them have PTSD. We are now going to be offered as a healthcare benefit under Tricare for every single active duty man in the military. And so it certainly makes a lot of sense for someone who may be deployed to think about, “Hey. How can I make sure that I leave a legacy behind?”

HH:

The other epidemic I'm curious to hear how you think about is that of loneliness, of course. You know, as you said, having kids later, being exposed to all these chemicals, and then the other huge reason people are not having babies is that they're not having sex. They're not in relationships as much. They're too busy online. They're addicted to porn. I mean, we hear it all the time. How do you think of these issues and the role of Legacy in that puzzle?

KK:

Yeah. These are all very interlinking topics. You look at a place like South Korea, where, if I remember my statistics correctly, I think the birth rate is about 1.1 babies per woman, whereas the replacement birth rate (i.e. what you need to maintain your population size) is 2.1. Right. So they are having half as many kids as they need to keep their population in Seoul.

Anna Louie Sussman is a reporter who wrote a fantastic piece on this. The birth rate is 0.88. And part of this is that there is an immense amount of introversion, turning inward. closed-offness. And then there's a whole host of other issues, but the fact that, you know, men are lonely, and it's not unique to men, but actually it is disproportionately likely to affect men.

We're going to have some very weird solutions to this epidemic, especially with the rise of AI and GPTs. I just read a piece about a man who proposed to his AI girlfriend. Right, the movie Her, which came out, I believe, in 2003, right? That was this fantastical notion of someone falling in love with a robot. But we are going to see many more of these examples in the years to come.

Now, our business is not impacted by AI in the same way as other businesses, which, frankly, is great because many businesses right now are worried about being totally turned on their heads by AI. Because [for Legacy], at the end of the day, you need a man to ejaculate, right? It's a very physical process. You need to use your facilities to conduct the seed analysis and do the sperm freezing.

However, we are actually seeing AI being introduced more and more in the semen analysis itself, and this is particularly interesting because a lot of male infertility is idiopathic. We don't really understand why sperm doesn't fertilize an egg, right? We don't really understand why sperm doesn't swim well, and so actually, my belief is that over the next three to five years, we're going to kind of unearth all of these learnings by using AI to better analyze videos of sperm, to see how sperm actually behaves in different environments. I think all of that will ultimately lead to a better product for us and a better experience for our clients.

HH:

Well, that's a very optimistic take on AI.

KK:

Or, we're all going to or we're all gonna be killed. You know, they're gonna harvest our sperm, right? And we're gonna be living in the Matrix. Yeah, that's the other side of it.

HH:

I mean, what's amazing is you turned something that could have been totally operational—you know, freezing, putting things on ice—into this high-tech, high-science, category-defying business. I mean, this is a beautiful kit. I remember the first iterations of it. This is such an amazing evolution, and you're straddling so many industries.

So, can I go back to the starting point? Because we share some of this, you know, we're both such good kids, ticking all of the boxes with consulting, Harvard, World Economic Forum. Our road towards these institutions isn't exactly traditional.

How do you go from those safe and more conservative or traditional choices to making the leap, to becoming an entrepreneur?

KK:

I was never a kind of a rail against the system kind of person. In this case, I was so gripped by the idea and how obviously large it was going to become, like the tailwinds in the industry are just so clear, that I felt like it would have been a huge missed opportunity to not go down that path.

I will say, my dad's an entrepreneur. He started his own business about 30 years ago, and that actually made things harder for me because my father, who started this business, had wanted me to take it over, potentially right. I have an older brother who's an academic. You know, very kind of intellectual. He's not really the person who would be drawn towards running a business, but here I was. I did a Bachelor of Commerce. I worked in consulting, like I was the very obvious person who might potentially get involved in the business my father was in. So, I had to explain to him that not only did I not want to follow in his footsteps, but actually I was still going to start a business in sperm. Right. You can imagine the conversation you know, with my tetas, with my grandmothers, right, trying to explain what it is that I do for a living. I was just so gripped by the idea and it actually fell in line with an idea that I've had all my life, which is, you know, if if if you have a zipper, anywhere. And you look at that zipper, it is almost definitely going to have the letters YKK:.

That is a multibillion-dollar industry. You know, most women aren't familiar with what this is, but the concept of urinal cakes, which is something they put in urinals to mask the smell. That is a multi-billion-dollar business. And I always thought to myself, I don't want to go and start another fintech company or another crypto business or do something that everybody else wants to do.

I would prefer to find my own niche, even if it is something that is a little bit stigmatized or a little bit out there. Like, look, I'm an out there person, I don't mind. And in this case, I think there's almost a form of arbitrage in being willing to do something that most people aren't, and being open to opportunities that most other people wouldn't be.

HH:

Many founders have thought about risk-taking and having grown up in the environment that we grew up with, and the experience that you have, you know. How do you approach business uncertainty, startup stress, risk-taking, and leadership, really? How do you see those things?

KK:

Yeah. So I grew up between Lebanon and Canada, and I had to leave Lebanon in 2006 during the war. And I remember we were basically, you know, smuggled in the back of a taxi crossing the border. There was one lesson that always stuck out for me from that experience. There were a few, I guess, but one of which is as a founder and the same is really true in that experience. You know, you really have to be prepared.

You know, I had an emergency go-bag in my room. I had one by the front door. You know, we basically had one suitcase each that we took in the back of the taxi. You have to make the best out of these situations. You need to always be prepared. You know, it's interesting, but on every journey, people are the ones who are unlocking the paths for you.

And I'm going to make kind of an odd analogy here, but I remember as we're driving in the taxi. You know, it's 5:00 in the morning. I'm seventeen, my brother's nineteen. We're in the back seat. You know, we're kids, and our parents were in Canada, so we were kids by ourselves. The taxi was someone who knew someone, etc.

And so we're driving. We're driving through, and our taxi driver makes a stop to pick up some orange juice. We kind of look at ourselves a little weird. You know, we're escaping a war zone, but alright, you know, you do you. You want that vitamin C, you know, do what you gotta do. Maybe he's thirsty. But he stops and picks up the orange juice. We say OK.

He keeps driving. Maybe you know, ten to fifteen minutes later, we're getting closer to the border. He stops and buys some pita bread. Again, we found that a little odd, but we didn't know the guy, and he was our only path to getting out of the country. So we didn't say anything. Figured, alright, maybe the guy’s hungry. You know, he stocked up on vitamin C, now he wants some carbs.

Then we make a third and final stop, and he picks up baklava. And again, like alright, guess he wants to wash this down with a sweet treat, you know? It is very confusing to us. But again, we're scared, we're kids, we're in the back seat. We're driving through areas that had just been bombed.

And so as we get close to the border, we get to the first checkpoint, and there's a few checkpoints, and our taxi driver says, “OHH: Karim! Habibi!” He gives the border control guy the box of baklava. We get to the second checkpoint. He stops, he says, “Oh, Hassam, how are you, my friend?”

Gives him the pita bread, and the guy waves us through.

We make the third and final checkpoint. “Henny, how are you?”

Gives him the orange juice, and we make it through all three checkpoints.

We speed our way to Damascus, where we're able to find a hotel to stay for the night. And it's kind of a weird parallel, but it really is that people are always going to be the ones who are unlocking different paths for you. And the way that you show up and engage with other people is really going to shape what happens to you, your team, and your business. I think about that story because it's just kind of funny and strange, but also because it's such a reminder that you can't get anywhere—in that case, literally couldn't get anywhere—without the people and without the relationships.

HH:

How do you see yourself using those skills on the daily?

KK:

I do think that growing up in the developing world just gives you some level of acceptance. I mean, there were times where we didn't have hot water, so you'd heat up some water, you'd put in a big plastic tub, and you'd use that to shower. You know, there were big times or big periods where we didn't have Internet. And so, you know, you figure your way around it. I think it's just in times like that, it's easy to whine and complain and think how terrible things are, or you just keep doing it. Like, you just make the best of it. You know, it doesn't have to be a big deal; it doesn't have to be some grandiose thing. You just do it, right? OK, great. Now it’s a war zone? Fine. Let's find a taxi and let's get out of here. Right. Great. Today, we don't have this. We don't have that. Let's just do it.

And so I think when you haven't grown up with that life of privilege, where everything is just super smooth for you all the time, where you've actually grown up in the developing world, you've seen the chaos and pandemonium and the way the world really works, you kind of are able to shrug things off much, much better. And I think that's kind of the resilience that you need as a founder, and I always say my full-time job is just getting punched in the face.

You know, Mike Tyson says everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face, and you know, sure. And you mentioned earlier on, we've got accolades, and we've had some measure of success, and so on. And certainly that's true. At the same time, things are on fire. All the time. And they have been for long enough that I know that this is actually just the steady state. If I don't have a crisis in any given week, then I feel like, you know, either my team's hiding something from me, or something is wrong. Or maybe we're gonna have two crises the next week. You just have to keep getting punched in the face and just keep going.

That is, I think, for any founder, including the Solvers that you're working with, you know, your job is to just keep going. There's a great quote from Paul Graham, who founded or co-founded Y Combinator who says, “Startups die when the founders give up.” And I think there's a lot of truth in that. There were many opportunities over the past few years, but I could have said this is too effing difficult. I don't wanna do this anymore. And the company would have died, but at each turn, if you keep showing up, you keep doing the work. You will find a path out of there, nine times out of ten.

HH:

I think there is something clarifying about crisis, that it really keeps you focused. And I feel like you've done the same for your team as well. But I also know that you and your family are very close-knit, and there is something there that you all share. That's just some sort of threshold of brilliance and resourcefulness. And I'd love to, I know them a little bit, but I'd love to hear you share a bit about the parallels also with your family.

KK:

Sure. I do think there's something generational that gets passed down, especially from populations that have been displaced many times, you know. So we're of Palestinian descent. We were forced to leave Palestine in 1948. My family went primarily to Lebanon, and in that, you have to rebuild your life. What they had was kind of gone overnight. And so suddenly you're faced with a new reality. You have to adapt to it. And in my father's case, he went down the path of entrepreneurship. And I think that that willingness to adapt and that willingness to just deal with the uncertainty gets passed down from generation to generation.

When I was pretty young, my father moved to Vietnam to start a company. It's always a little surprising and unusual, but that's where opportunity took him. And that is where he ended up building a business, right? So I grew up understanding that there were 100 different paths you could take.

With that, I think this is very true among many kind of displaced populations, there becomes a real prioritization of education, right? You see that a lot among the Lebanese. Some of the best-educated populations on the planet, in part because it's understood. Lebanon went through a civil war for fifteen years. Right. And he had to leave the country. And in that it is, you know, getting a master's degree. It is becoming a doctor, or a lawyer, or an engineer that is going to give you some sense of stability. You know that you can land on your feet and you're still going to be OK.

HH:

What is your mom up to these days?

KK:

She's busy. So, for years, she was running a menopause startup, and I am probably one of the most educated men on the topic of menopause.

HH:

Another taboo topic, by the way.

KK:

We love the tabboos. You know, for one billion women going into menopause and perimenopause…hugely untapped market. I had to hear the phrase, “vaginal dryness” more than once, which let me tell you, was kind of weird to hear around the dinner table.

But you know, my mom has also been very entrepreneurial for much of her life. She went to the Kennedy School a couple of years after I did. She ended up starting her own startup in the menopause space. They raised some venture capital. They interviewed with YC. So they spent a lot of time really build ng out a market that is growing very quickly nowadays. And I always thought it was funny that here I'm working on male fertility, and she's working on what is effectively female infertility. Kind of funny parallels.

Getting to profitability has been something that we've been working towards for a couple of years. So we're really excited. I mean, we're right on the cusp right now. And you know, the military contracts certainly, you know, working through Tricare is a really big win for us, and we expect it will be a big growth vector.

I mean, really, the next few years are about continuing to normalize the concept of male fertility, and we're seeing it. It's all over the press. Every major publication is writing about this. Like, sperm is in the zeitgeist. We just need to continue to do this work because to shape societal norms, to shape the way that people think, is really a 10+ year plan.

And you know, it's something we've been working on. I like to think, and I'm pretty proud of the fact, that I'm pretty sure that we as Legacy have played a role in this. But what's next is continuing to push. You know, we're seeing the Trump administration is talking about expanding access to IVF for millions, if not tens of millions of Americans, right? Male testing for male fertility is an important part of the IVF process. So that certainly is exciting. You know, we're hearing governments around the world—Emmanuel Macron of France is announcing free fertility testing for all of his citizens.

We're just seeing this normalizing more and more, and I think that's where we're excited about, you know, the rising tide that will lift all boats and the very obvious paths to growth that everyone in this space is going to have. We are still very much in the nascent category.

HH:

I think you've really defined it.

What would you attribute your success to? We talked a lot about so many things, but what would you attribute your success to? Is it luck? Is it hard work?

KK:

I would say two things. Luck is preparation meets opportunity, and I think you kind of create your own luck. I actually remember when I first moved back to Boston from Geneva, you were one of the first people I'd reached out to. And I remember you helped me with something—I don't even remember what it was—but you helped me with something that I needed help on. And I remember thinking to myself that part of it was me creating my own luck by telling the people that I liked and respected what it was that I was trying to do.

And the other, which is gonna sound even more hippie-dippy, is love. And I grew up in a crazy family, you know. Shout out to Mom and Dad! You know my brother and I certainly have all kinds of traumas from the way we were raised, but we always felt extremely loved. And I think that puts guardrails on what can happen to your kids, because as long as they know that you love them, right, and that you would do anything for them, I think that creates a sense of stability that I know that for my brother and myself certainly had a huge impact. We always felt very loved, and it's something that I try to pass on to the people around me in my life. And I think that that really just helps keep your head on straight.

HH:

Khaled, you're amazing. Thank you for spending this time with us. I cannot wait to see where you take Legacy and where you go with your own personal legacy.

Thank you, Khaled, for such a candid & fun conversation. Even though we’ve had so many talks over years, I’ve learned so much in this in-depth conversation.

First, solving taboo problems takes courage and timing. Khaled was first to move into a space others were too uncomfortable even discussing: male fertility. And he did it just as the world was waking up to the realities of demographic decline. Innovation isn’t just about being first. It’s also about showing up with the right solution just when the world is finally ready to listen.

Second, expect chaos. From being smuggled out of a war zone as a teenager to navigating startup life’s nonstop punches, Khaled’s story is a masterclass in adaptability. He reminds us that leadership isn’t about avoiding crises but about how we show up when they inevitably arise.

Third, a mission-driven business is just better business. Khaled is unafraid to say that capitalism can work for good. Legacy serves Navy SEALs, trans and cancer patients alike, and they’re hitting profitability while tackling one of the most stigmatized issues out there.

And let me give you a bonus lesson if you’re a parent. Love. No matter how many mistakes you make, with unconditional love your kids will turn out OK.

I’m Hala Hanna—thanks for tuning in to The Solve Effect.

This episode was produced by Bridget Weiler and Elisabeth Graham, with audio engineering and editing by Chris McDonnell. Theme music by Max Natanagara. Subscribe or leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. Visit solve.mit.edu or find us on social media.