Kayla Rodriguez Graff and the case for choosing Memphis

Kayla Rodriguez Graff had already made the move that an aspiring technology entrepreneur was supposed to make. She had gone to San Francisco. She wanted to start a company. She was learning to code. In one account of that period, she remembers selling her car to get there. This was a fairly thorough commitment to a future that would eventually require a different address.

The choice that followed was harder. She could stay in California, with its familiar promise of entrepreneurial possibility, or go to Memphis, where an accelerator offered expertise she and her brother needed. Memphis also offered something she was unwilling to treat as a footnote: the possibility of owning a house, getting married, raising children, and having a backyard. A backyard rarely makes the first slide of an investor presentation. It can still change the decision.

Today, Rodriguez Graff is the co-founder and CEO of SweetBio, the company she started in 2015 with her brother Isaac Rodriguez and her now-husband Kevin Graff. Her story follows a sequence of practical questions: Who will buy this? Who can help us understand it? Where can we build it? And what sort of life will remain around the edges of the work?

Before the pitch deck, a bridal business

Her first example of entrepreneurship came from her grandmother, whose bridal business in Puerto Rico showed her a woman running something of her own. The appeal was personal as well as commercial. A business could bring people joy. It could also belong to someone in her family. Long before there was a startup to explain, there was an example to watch.

Rodriguez Graff was born and raised in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Her family's roots are in Guayanilla, in southwestern Puerto Rico, with family connections extending through New York and New Jersey. College took her to the University of Minnesota. An MBA at Hult International Business School followed, with her public education record listing 2013 to 2014.

Those moves gave her a geography broader than the usual two-coast startup map. Virginia, Minnesota, California, Tennessee: each place belongs to the account she gives of becoming an entrepreneur. The family business supplied an early picture of independence. Corporate work would supply some of the machinery.

Target was part of the preparation

Her background included six years at Target in customer experience and operations strategy. She began as a college intern, moved into merchandising, and later worked in the company's Innovation Office in San Francisco. Large retail organizations offer a particular education in consequences. A decision has to survive customers, systems, colleagues, and the arithmetic that holds the enterprise together.

Rodriguez Graff has described her fascination with consumer behavior: why people select one brand, why they choose a product, and what makes them care. That interest would remain useful even when the company she wanted to build changed direction. An invention still needs someone to understand why another person might choose it.

In 2014, Isaac brought her an idea from his research. Her response was recognizably commercial. She wanted to know whether someone would buy it, whether its uses could extend beyond the first application, and whether they could make it for less than its selling price. These are unromantic questions with excellent survival value. They gave the siblings a way to begin talking about a company.

A city that left room for a backyard

SweetBio went through the ZeroTo510 accelerator in Memphis in 2015. The move put the siblings in a place where they could find specialist knowledge and build relationships around a young venture. Isaac brought the research background. Kayla brought business experience. Their different strengths gave them a starting division of labor, while the accelerator gave them people to ask.

In conversation with Alicia Menendez, Rodriguez Graff described choosing Memphis as a decision about her whole life. She believed they could succeed in San Francisco. Memphis offered a way to pursue the company alongside marriage, children, and a home. It was a difficult choice, and one she said she would make again.

There is a useful precision in that account. She did not describe family as a reward to collect once the company had succeeded. Family belonged inside the decision from the beginning. The location of the business had to accommodate the person running it. Memphis became the place where those ambitions could share an address.

Learning which work belonged to her

By 2019, Rodriguez Graff was describing a change in her own job. Earlier work had involved putting processes in place and helping operations run efficiently. With chief operating officer Axel Strombergsson handling operations, she could devote more attention to the company's future, its people, and its culture. Isaac, the chief science officer, could concentrate on his own strengths.

Her account of the transition is an unusually useful picture of a founder learning to delegate. The work did not disappear when someone else took responsibility for it. Her attention moved. She increasingly thought about identifying the right work, aligning it with the company's objectives, and finding the right person to do it.

She also learned to be more decisive about business relationships. Her retrospective advice was to bring focused, capable consultants in earlier and to part sooner with partners whose aims did not align with the company's. A relationship can be pleasant and still be poorly suited to the task. Running the company required her to act on that distinction.

Eight interviews, one unexpected commercial

A national Prudential commercial arrived through a route she had not planned. Its team selected Memphis because of the growth in women-owned businesses and approached SweetBio. Rodriguez Graff recalled eight rounds of interviews before the company was chosen. Even an unexpected invitation, apparently, can come with a substantial application process.

She connected that opportunity to the work she had been doing outside the office: serving on boards, mentoring, participating in community activities, and making herself useful in the city's entrepreneurial circles. Her explanation centered on the value of service and the connections made outside the office.

The distinction she drew was about motive. Community participation should come from a desire to serve, without an immediate result to count. In SweetBio's case, those relationships eventually contributed introductions, resources, and visibility. By 2021, the company was also receiving national attention through VamosVentures, an investor supported by Apple's Racial Equity and Justice Initiative. The investment relationship ran through the venture fund.

“What I can bring to the board is empathy.”

Kayla Rodriguez Graff

Keeping an entrepreneur in the room

Rodriguez Graff joined Epicenter's board in 2019. Her reason for bringing a founder's perspective to the table was concrete: people running companies know the daily difficulty of fundraising and keeping a business moving. Organizations that support entrepreneurs can drift away from that experience. She could bring it into the room because she was still living it.

She has described wanting that work to benefit companies that come after SweetBio, whether or not her own business receives all the rewards. Her public service has extended to organizations including LifeScience Tennessee, Shelby Farms Park Conservancy, and Agape Child & Family Services. These affiliations put her in conversations beyond her company's immediate commercial needs.

Her advocacy also reaches national audiences. She has presented at the U.S. Senate on women's entrepreneurship. In September 2023, she joined a USPTO event in Nashville about funding, mentorship, and intellectual property, alongside founders and executives from other industries. In 2020, she had been named to Inc.'s Female Founders 100. Recognition and participation appear together in her career, with the practical work continuing between the announcements.

The founder who still joined the class

Eight years after SweetBio began, Rodriguez Graff participated in the 2023 L'ATTITUDE Ventures Match-Up program and Visible Hands' inaugural VHLV fellowship for Latino founders. The fellowship gave her a place to revisit the company's pitch, test assumptions, and make its value more specific. Experience had not made the work of explaining the business unnecessary.

She valued the weekly sessions for another reason: they created a regular pause to reflect. Fellow founders could offer feedback from businesses in different fields. Knowing members of the group in person helped make the virtual conversations more comfortable. The useful part was partly the program and partly the willingness to speak openly with people who understood the work.

That willingness gives her public account some texture. She has described distributing hundreds of promotional pens that did not work. It is an excellent small-business embarrassment: a useful object rendered useless at the exact moment it is supposed to advertise your competence. The story keeps an ordinary mistake in view alongside the fundraising, the boards, and the awards.

The next decision is already on the calendar

On October 1, 2026, SweetBio announced an exclusive national commercial distribution agreement with HARTMANN USA. Distribution through that partnership was scheduled to begin November 1. For Rodriguez Graff, it marked another change in the work of running the company: building a business that could extend its reach through an established national partner.

The date matters. A company founded in 2015 was still making consequential decisions eleven years later. The familiar compressed account of entrepreneurship, in which an idea becomes a business and then becomes a success, leaves little room for those intervening years. Her career contains repeated rounds of learning, asking, explaining, and choosing.

Outside that work, she has a black belt in taekwondo and has named Saturday Night Live, macaroons, and outdoor walks among her favorites. Her affection for Memphis includes Shelby Farms and the variety of people her children meet. These details belong to the same life as the company. She chose a place where she could keep building both. The backyard was in the calculation all along.