[EO San Francisco] Creating Meaningful Surrogacy Journeys for Diverse Families With Brooke Kimbrough

Brooke Kimbrough is the Agency Owner of Roots Surrogacy, a boutique agency that facilitates ethical, relationship-driven surrogacy journeys for intended parents and gestational carriers. A former surrogate, Brooke co-founded the agency in 2015 to create a personalized and compassionate experience grounded in transparency and mutual respect. With over a decade of experience in the field, she leads an all-female team dedicated to supporting diverse families, including LGBTQ+ and single parents, throughout their path to parenthood. Brooke also founded Families Without Borders, an agency offering affordable surrogacy options in Mexico to make family-building more accessible.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [3:10] Brooke Kimbrough shares how she left home at 16 and developed early entrepreneurial skills
• [9:00] Why Brooke decided to become a surrogate to help LGBTQ+ and single parents
• [10:17] The emotional delivery experience with the intended father during Brooke’s surrogate pregnancy
• [12:41] How Brooke’s personal surrogacy journey inspired her to start Roots Surrogacy
• [15:58] The strict qualifications and current shortage of surrogates in the United States
• [18:49] How surrogates approach carrying a baby without developing parental attachment
• [26:19] Brooke’s process for building and retaining an emotionally resilient team at Roots Surrogacy

In this episode…

Surrogacy offers a life-changing path to parenthood, but it also comes with emotional, legal, and medical complexities that many don’t fully understand. What makes a surrogacy journey successful, and how can intended parents and surrogates navigate these challenges together?

According to Brooke Kimbrough, a leading expert with firsthand experience as a surrogate and agency founder, success begins by building deep trust and clear expectations between all parties. She highlights the importance of emotional support, careful surrogate screening, and understanding the medical realities that impact pregnancy success rates. While surrogacy creates beautiful new families, it can also involve loss, complicated legal landscapes, and the challenge of matching intended parents with surrogates. By prioritizing relationships over transactions, Brooke helps intended parents overcome these obstacles and experience the joy of growing their families.

In this episode of the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast, John Corcoran is joined by Brooke Kimbrough, Agency Owner of Roots Surrogacy, to discuss creating meaningful surrogacy journeys for diverse families. They explore the emotional highs and lows of surrogacy, how to match surrogates with intended parents, and the evolving legal landscape of surrogacy. Brooke also shares how her personal experience inspired her to launch her agency.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• EO San Francisco
• EO Accelerator
• Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO)
• John Corcoran on LinkedIn
• Rise25
• Brooke Kimbrough on LinkedIn
• Roots Surrogacy

Quotable Moments:

• “I always knew it was a part of who I was. I’ve always been a big advocate.”
• “We are definitely the family that has the extra kids and the open door policy.”
• “I have a very unique job in a very emotionally charged environment, right? So high highs and low lows.”
• “You always enter into this space knowing that you’re carrying somebody else’s child.”
• “We hire with intention and really, really protect our team about who is a good fit.”

Action Steps:

1. Carefully vet surrogates before matching: Ensuring surrogates meet strict qualifications reduces legal risks and improves successful pregnancy outcomes.
2. Prioritize relationship-building between parents and surrogates: Strong, trusting connections help navigate emotional highs and lows throughout the surrogacy journey.
3. Stay informed on evolving surrogacy laws: Understanding state-specific regulations ensures legal protections for intended parents, surrogates, and the child.
4. Educate intended parents on medical realities: Managing expectations about embryo success rates prepares parents for possible challenges and emotional resilience.
5. Build an emotionally resilient team: Hiring staff aligned with agency values minimizes burnout and fosters long-term, compassionate client support.

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Episode Transcript:

Intro: 00:03

Welcome to the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast, where we feature top founders and entrepreneurs and their journey. Now let’s get started with the show.

John Corcoran: 00:12

All right. Welcome everyone. John Corcoran here I am, the co-host of this show. And if you have listened before, every week we have smart CEOs, founders and entrepreneurs from all kinds of companies. You can check out the archives to hear some of those past episodes that we’ve done.

And this episode is brought to you by EO San Francisco, which is a global is the San Francisco chapter of a global peer to peer network called Entrepreneurs Organization, which has 20,000 influential business owners across 200 chapters, 60 countries. And if you are the founder, co founder, owner or controlling shareholder of a company that generates over $1 million a year in revenues, and you want to connect with other like minded successful entrepreneurs, EO is for you and you can go and learn more at eonetwork.org/SanFrancisco or email us at admin@eonetwork.org. And I am a member of the board at EO San Francisco. And I’m also the co-founder of Rise25, where we help B2B businesses get clients referrals and strategic partnerships with done-for-you podcast and content marketing.

And you can learn more about us at rise25.com. All right. My guest today is Brooke Kimbrough. She is the Co-founder and CEO of Roots Surrogacy.

It is a boutique surrogacy agency based in California. She’s a former surrogate herself, and she brings over a decade of firsthand experience guiding intended parents and surrogates through one of the most meaningful journeys of their lives. She’s been doing it for about ten years now, and we’re going to get into the whole story of how she got into that. Brooke, such a pleasure to have you here today. And I love to dive into people’s backgrounds before we get into the present day.

But you have an unusual story. You see over my shoulder here. I’ve got a Grateful Dead album, a bit of a Deadhead myself. But you left home at 15 and never went home again. And a bit of that stint was following the dead around the country.

So tell us the story. You were 15. You were. Your parents wanted you to go to boarding school. Grew up in LA where that is not a thing.

I say that having grown up in LA myself, not not many people are going off to boarding school from Los Angeles, much less to Massachusetts, which is freezing, right?

Brooke Kimbrough: 02:16

Hi, John, thanks so much for having me. Yes, correct. So I grew up in LA in a little town on the Glendale, La Canada border, and two parents and I have four siblings who are younger than I am, and I was always sort of a smart and a little bit sassy teenager. And my parents decided that it was the best choice for me or for them or for my family to send me to boarding school my junior year of high school in Berkshire, Massachusetts, which yes, is a big culture shock from growing up in LA, where I never had taken off a pair of Birkenstocks to freezing cold Massachusetts winters, so I did not last very long in that school. I left before my junior year was over and kind of just abandoned everything and just walked off campus and never went back.

John Corcoran: 03:08

And where’d you go?

Brooke Kimbrough: 03:10

I went to a friend’s house, and then we all kind of made a plan, and we were going to be in Connecticut, but we were going to follow the dad as much as possible and see as many Phish shows as we could. And we were going to make money by selling hemp and string necklaces and glass beads and connected the glass blower. So that’s what I did for several months as I was couch surfing and trying to figure out my life and wanting to be something more steady, more stable, but also not really staying home as an option.

John Corcoran: 03:55

You know, it’s funny, there’s this community within the dead culture called Shakedown Street, where it gathers at each show and there’s a group of really entrepreneurs, businesses that are kind of funding, traveling around the country by selling different items. And that’s where where you made money in order to be able to follow them around.

Brooke Kimbrough: 04:17

That’s correct. I also did it outside of that environment. So was learning how to hone my entrepreneurial skills in a bunch of different ways, and looking for niche environments where people were not doing the same thing or I could do something differently. The goal was originally to, you know, the big finger to my parents, but also to like, kind of live this sort of hippie life. I realized pretty quickly that I needed a balance there and to understand, like I really needed some more stability and to kind of figure out what I wanted to do with my life.

And I knew that included school, given that I was only 16 and 3000 miles away from home and and had no parents and no support system at all. So eventually made my way back to LA, but not home and and started. I was going to have to repeat my junior year because I did not finish it and I was like, we’re not going to do that. So I had some random jobs for a few months, and then I figured out that I could take the California High School Proficiency exam, which is essentially a diploma from the state of Cal. It’s different than GED, but it’s like a diploma from the state of California.

John Corcoran: 05:36

Okay.

Brooke Kimbrough: 05:37

As opposed to a particular school, and then ended up going to community college, where I entered into their honors program. And then that got me into UCLA. And so with Went to UCLA and then transferred over to oxy, where I felt like I was a better fit and ended up graduating from Occidental and then entered into corporate America, where I always felt like I could do things better and was sort of stifled by all of this red tape and bureaucracy involved in, in the way corporate America worked.

John Corcoran: 06:09

So your, your parents eventually had four other kids or five kids, which is extremely unusual in Southern California. What was the relationship like with your parents after you walked off of the boarding school?

Brooke Kimbrough: 06:24

They weren’t pleased, that’s for sure. I have a super good relationship with my dad now. Mom is fine. I’m very close to my siblings, so my siblings and next in order are the top 3 or 3 in 30 months. So we’re all very close in age.

And then there’s a ten year gap between my brothers and then my little brother and sister, who are adopted at birth. Just an interesting kind of side note, because I’m in family building and so there’s all this, like kind of connection to my I.

John Corcoran: 06:54

Mean, I was going to make that observation. I mean, given the, the area work that you’re in, you come from five, you have four kids, you know, blended family. So you you definitely seem like you traffic in large families.

Brooke Kimbrough: 07:09

Correct. Yes, absolutely.

Brooke Kimbrough: 07:12

That is true. I come from a big family. I thrive in our big family. We are definitely the family that has the extra kids and the open door policy. And we always have.

We had ten kids at dinner last night. Just wow. Regular Monday. We always have enough food and there’s always a seat at our table. So yeah, that’s true for everybody.

John Corcoran: 07:33

And is that inspired by your upbringing? Like, do you feel like you deliberately make your home that kind of culture?

Brooke Kimbrough: 07:40

Yeah, of course I.

Brooke Kimbrough: 07:42

I feel like family and I feel most happiness when I’m with my family and I feel like, you know, there’s a lot of opportunity to provide that to kids that maybe don’t have it or maybe that need different kinds of support systems. So they may have a fine family structure at home, but there’s a lot of pressure or they’re nobody’s paying attention or whatever it may be. And so we just have my husband and I, bless his ever loving heart because, you know, there’s a lot of chaos in our family. We have four teenagers. So you can imagine what that looks like with all of the.

John Corcoran: 08:18

Yes.

Brooke Kimbrough: 08:18

On and lots of food and lots of that stuff. But I feel like there’s so much joy, and I, I love this, I know I’m probably alone in this, but I absolutely, absolutely love this kind of season of life where my kids are learning about the world and and having to navigate things as young adults.

Brooke Kimbrough: 08:39

So yeah. Yeah.

John Corcoran: 08:41

And so you you had three. You gave birth to three kids, correct?

Brooke Kimbrough: 08:48

You have three.

Brooke Kimbrough: 08:48

Of my kids?

Brooke Kimbrough: 08:49

Yes.

John Corcoran: 08:49

You have your kids. Your. Your husband had a daughter from a previous marriage. And then after that, you decided to be a surrogate. So tell me about that.

Brooke Kimbrough: 09:00

Yeah. So my husband had when we got together, he had a two year old. I subsequently adopted her. So she’s actually my my kiddo. And then I had we had three other kids together. So we have a blended family, but not so much anymore because they’re all mine.

And then when my littlest guy was one, I just I had known about surrogacy. I was definitely done having kids. I had at that point four kids under seven. And so I was like pretty inundated. But I really wanted to help another family.

I always knew it was a part of who I was. I’ve always been a big advocate in the LGBTQ plus space, and so I really wanted to help, you know, a single gay couple, Single gay human or couple and.

John Corcoran: 09:47

And what drove that? Was there a personal experience or something? Was there.

Brooke Kimbrough: 09:51

Something inspiring?

Brooke Kimbrough: 09:52

I’ve always no, it’s I mean, we’ve always been surrounded by a bunch of different cultures and, and climates in my life. It’s never just it’s never been any different. It’s just always been that way. And I don’t know, I felt like I was called to do it. I definitely when I was talking to the agency, I did, I was kind of a bad surrogate in this way.

I did no research. I did like I didn’t do a bunch of, like, all the agencies.

John Corcoran: 10:15

You went through a surrogacy, a surrogacy.

Brooke Kimbrough: 10:17

I went through an agency.

But typically what should happen is you talk to a bunch of agencies and you see kind of who their parent population is and you know, how many clients they’ve supported and you know what their background is and all that stuff. I did not have that. I both my parents are lawyers. I called their friend who’s in the adoptive space and he said, yeah, I know this agency. It’s all I know about them.

And I said, great, they’re mine. So this agency and Was matched with a single gay intended father who was a little bit older. And he was perfect. He was. He is amazing.

And we immediately connected. We had a really wonderful, trusting, loving relationship throughout the pregnancy and lived geographically pretty close to one another, which was much more common back then. This was back in 2015 and then baby was born. I had had prior C-sections, and when you have C-sections in the past, generally you have a repeat C-section, which I needed to do. I had to choose between who was going to be in the operating room with me, because you cannot have multiple people in there.

So I chose to have Patrick, my intended father, instead of my husband. And there was a really beautiful story of him. I was laying on the operating table. He was above my head and he was holding my hands. And when the baby was born, she started to cry and I like my face got all wet and I was like, I don’t understand what’s going on.

But I was, you know, under like a lot of drugs and drugs and all this stuff. Yeah.

But it turns out that I was like, I’m not crying, I don’t understand. And I looked up and he was crying. And so his tears were falling on my face.

And he was so happy. It was so beautiful. So he. When Olivia was born, he went with her. My husband came in for the rest of the surgery.

So I was supported the whole time. And. Yeah, so that’s kind of how it all started. I was going to go back to work after that, and my intended father was actually had been in HR two, and I was like, oh, I don’t want to go back into that. And he said, I hear you.

We did not have the best or agency relationship like we he and I got along really well, but we didn’t have a great agency support system. So he said, you should open an agency. And that’s kind of how it all started. I put in my son’s nursery. He was two ish and I said, I can do this.

And that’s how it started.

John Corcoran: 12:41

So. And you had a business partner, right?

Brooke Kimbrough: 12:45

So in the first year I did a bunch of research, and then I told my husband I wanted to do 4 or 5 cases just to get my feet wet and see how it went. And then I ended up doing ten cases my first year and I said, oh, okay, this is a whole thing. And so at that point, I reached out and brought in a business partner. And that was in 20 the end of 2016. And yeah, now we manage 150 surrogacy cases a year across the globe.

John Corcoran: 13:14

Wow.

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