A true American success story, Taryn has come a long way since escaping Vietnam at the young age of 7 for the United States. Born in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam in 1967 she narrowly escaped with her family three days before the fall of Saigon.
Amidst machine guns and artillery fire they boarded a plane to end up in Fort Smith, Arkansas. Her next move was to Southern California where after getting her undergraduate degree from the University of California at Irvine in Biology and Philosophy. She attended USC’s Medical School in order to become an orthopedic surgeon. Taryn has said that this decision was made for many reasons, some of which being that she wanted to follow in her Pathologist father’s footsteps of medicine which would avoid family drama from doing otherwise, as well as from a desire to “work with healthy people and get them back to their best”. Then she threw her entire family and life into upheaval by starting a shoe company. Ten years later she had built a 40 million dollar company. The reason she gave was “I would rather face failure than regret”
Bio from the period BIL record (source).