mental health
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Revery gets $2M to improve mental health with mobile gaming techniques
In “Macbeth,” Shakespeare described sleep as the “chief nourisher in life’s feast.” But like his titular character, many adults aren’t sleeping well. Revery wants to help with an app that combines cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for insomnia with mobile gaming concepts.
Founded in March 2021, Revery is currently in beta stealth mode and plans to launch its app in the United States later this year. The company announced today it has raised $2 million, led by Sequoia Capital India’s Surge program. Participants included GGV Capital, Pascal Capital, zVentures (Razer’s corporate venture arm) and angel investors like MyFitnessPal co-founder Albert Lee; gaming entrepreneur Juha Paananen; CRED founder Kunal Shah; Mobile Premier League founder Sai Srinivas; Carolin Krenzer; and Josh Lee.
Lee, a mutual friend, first introduced Revery’s founders, Tammie Siew and Khoa Tran, to one another. Before launching the startup, Siew worked at Sequoia Capital India, Boston Consulting Group and CRED, while Tran was a former product manager at Google.
Revery plans to focus on other mental health issues in the future, but it’s starting with sleep because “it has such a strong correlation with mental health and we’re leveraging protocols, cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, that’s robust and have been tried and tested for 30 years,” Siew told TechCrunch. “That is the first indication, but the goal is to build multiple games for other wellness indications as well.”
A study by research firm Infinium found that about 30% to 45% of adults in the world experience insomnia, a problem exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Chronic lack of sleep is linked to a host of health issues, including high blood pressure, strokes, depression and lowered immunity.
For Revery’s team, which also includes former Zynga and King lead game designer Kriti Sawa and software engineer Stephanie Wong, their focus on sleep is personal.
Revery’s team on a Zoom call
“Everyone on our team has a deeply personal connection to the mission, because everyone on our team has experienced, or had a family member or friends go through challenges in mental health,” said Siew. “They’ve seen how late intervention creates consequences that could have been avoided if they had gotten help earlier.”
When Tran was 15, he was diagnosed with hypertension and several other health conditions that needed medication. It wasn’t until he was 26 that Tran found out that sleep apnea was at the root of his medical issues. After getting surgery, Tran’s blood pressure became normal and many of his other conditions also improved.
“When I finally got treatment for my sleep disorder, only then did I realize the impact of sleep on mental health,” Tran said. “For me, I was really lucky that a doctor caught my sleep disorder and super lucky to have the time and resources to get treatment. For many people, it’s incredibly inaccessible.”
Revery’s medical advisory team includes the doctor who performed Tran’s surgery, Stanford Sleep Surgery Fellowship director Dr. Stanley Liu; Stanford professor and behavioral sleep medicine expert Dr. Fiona Barwick; and Dr. Ryan Kelly, a clinical psychologist who researches how video games can be used in therapy.
When people think of sleeping apps, ones that focus on meditation (Calm and Headspace, for example) or soothing noises usually come to mind. The Revery team isn’t sharing a lot of details about its app before launch, but says it draws from casual mobile games, which are designed to get people to return for short play sessions over a long period of time. The goal is to use gamification to make CBT practices interactive and fun, so it becomes part of users’ daily routines.
“That’s the same kind of gameplay that Zynga and King have used, which is why Kriti’s experience is super helpful,” said Siew. Casual games revolve around rewarding people for small actions, and for the Revery app, that means positive reinforcement for habits that contribute to better sleep. For example, it will reward people for putting down their phones.
“I think a lot of people have the misconception that solving sleep is only at the time you fall asleep. They don’t realize that sleep is impacted by what you do throughout the day,” Siew said. “A big part is also what are your thoughts, behavior and the other things that you do, so in order to effectively and sustainably improve sleep, we also have to change your thoughts and behaviors outside of the time you’re trying to fall asleep.”
In a statement, GGV Capital managing director Jenny Lee said, “We are excited about the growing mental wellness market, and believe that Revery’s unique mobile game-based approach has the opportunity to create immense impact. We are happy to back such a mission-driven team in this space.”
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Yana’s mental health tool for Spanish speakers nears 5 million users
Andrea Campos has struggled with depression since she was eight years old. Over the years, she’s tried all sorts of therapies — from behavioral to pharmacotherapy.
In 2017, when Campos was in her early 20s, she learned to program and created a system to help manage her mental health. It started as a personal project, but as she talked to more people, Campos realized that many others might benefit from the system as well.
So she built an application to provide access to mental health tools for Spanish-speaking people and began testing it with a small group. At first, Campos herself was her own chatbot, texting with users who were tired of dealing with depression.
“During the month, I was pretending I was an app, and would send these people a list of activities they had to complete during the day, such as writing in a gratitude journal, and then asking them how those activities made them feel,” Campos recalls.
Her thinking was that sometimes with depression and anxiety comes “a lot of avoidance,” where people resist potential treatment out of fear.
The results from her small experiment were encouraging. So, Campos set out to conduct a bigger sample of experiments, and raised about $10,000 via a crowdfunding campaign. With that money, she hired a developer to build a chatbot for her app, which was mostly being used via Facebook Messenger.
Then an earthquake hit Mexico City and that developer lost everything — including his home and computer — and had to relocate.
“I was left with nothing,” Campos says. But that developer introduced her to another, who disappeared with his payment, and again, left Campos, “with nothing.”
“I realized at the beginning of 2019, I was going to have to do this by myself,” Campos said. So she used a site that she described as a “Wix for chatbots,” and created one herself.
After experimenting with the app with a sample of 700 people, Campos was even more encouraged and raised an angel round of funding for Yana, the startup behind her app. (Yana is an acronym for “You Are Not Alone.”) By early 2020, with just three months of runway left, she pivoted to create an app with chatbot integration that wasn’t just limited to use via Facebook Messenger.
Campos ended up launching the app more broadly during the same week that her city in Mexico went into quarantine.
Image Credits: Yana
At first, she said, she saw “normal, steady growth.” But then on October 10, 2020, Apple’s App Store highlighted Yana for International Mental Health Day, and the response was overwhelming.
“It was also my birthday so I was at a spa in a nearby town, relaxing, when I started hearing my cell phone go crazy,” Campos recalls. “Everything went nuts. I had to go back to Mexico City because our servers were exploding since they were not used to having that kind of volume.”
As a result of that exposure, Yana went from having around 80,000 users to reaching 1 million users two weeks later. Soon after that, Google highlighted the app as one of best for personal growth in 2020, and that too led to another spike in users. Today, Yana is about to hit the 5 million-user mark and is also announcing it has raised $1.5 million in funding led by Mexico’s ALLVP, which has also invested in the likes of Cornershop, Flink and Nuvocargo.
When the pandemic hit last year, six of Yana’s nine-person team decided to quarantine together in a “startup house” in Cancun to focus on building the company. Earlier this year, the company had raised $315,000 from investors such as 500 Startups, Magma and Hustle Fund. The company had pitched ALLVP, which was intrigued but wanted to wait until it could write a bigger check.
That time is now, and Yana is now among the top three downloaded apps in Mexico and 12 countries, including Spain, Chile, Ecuador and Venezuela.
With its new capital, Yana is planning to “move away from the depression/anxiety narrative,” according to Campos.
“We want to compete in the wellness space,” she told TechCrunch. “A lot of people were looking for us to deal with crises such as a breakup or a loss but then they didn’t always see a necessity to keep using Yana for longer than the crisis lasted.”
Some of those people would download the app again months later when hit with another crisis.
“We don’t want to be that app anymore,” Campos said. “We want to focus on whole wellness and mental health and transmit something that needs to be built every single day, just like we do with exercise.”
Moving forward, Yana aims to help people with their mental health not just during a crisis but with activities they can do on a daily basis, including a gratitude journal, a mood tracker and meditation — “things that prevent depression and anxiety,” Campos said.
“We want to be a vitamin for our soul, and keeping people mentally healthy on an ongoing basis,” she said. “We also want to include a community inside our application.”
ALLVP’s Federico Antoni is enthusiastic about the startup’s potential. He first met Campos when she was participating in an accelerator program in 2017, and then again recently.
The firm led Yana’s latest round because it “wanted to be on her team.”
“She [Campos] has turned into an amazing leader, and we realized her potential and strength,” he said. “Plus, Yana is an amazing product. When you download it, it’s almost like you can see a soul in there.”
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Facebook and Instagram will now allow users to hide ‘Like’ counts on posts
Facebook this week will begin to publicly roll out the option to hide Likes on posts across both Facebook and Instagram, following earlier tests beginning in 2019. The project, which puts the decision about Likes in the hands of the company’s global user base, had been in development for years, but was deprioritized due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the response work required on Facebook’s part, the company says.
Originally, the idea to hide Like counts on Facebook’s social networks was focused on depressurizing the experience for users. Often, users faced anxiety and embarrassment around their posts if they didn’t receive enough Likes to be considered “popular.” This problem was particularly difficult for younger users who highly value what peers think of them — so much so that they would take down posts that didn’t receive enough Likes.
Like-chasing on Instagram, especially, also helped create an environment where people posted to gain clout and notoriety, which can be a less authentic experience. On Facebook, gaining Likes or other forms of engagement could also be associated with posting polarizing content that required a reaction.
As a result of this pressure to perform, some users grew hungry for a “Like-free” safer space, where they could engage with friends or the wider public without trying to earn these popularity points. That, in turn, gave rise to a new crop of social networking and photo-sharing apps such as Minutiae, Vero, Dayflash, Oggl and, now, newcomers like Dispo and newly viral Poparazzi.
Though Facebook and Instagram could have chosen to remove Likes entirely and take its social networks in a new direction, the company soon found that the metric was too deeply integrated into the product experience to be fully removed. One key issue was how the influencer community today trades on Likes as a form of currency that allows them to exchange their online popularity for brand deals and job opportunities. Removing Likes, then, is not necessarily an option for these users.
Instagram realized that if it made a decision for its users, it would anger one side or the other — even if the move in either direction didn’t really impact other core metrics, like app usage.
Image Credits: Instagram
“How many likes [users] got, or other people got — it turned out that it didn’t actually change nearly as much about the experience, in terms of how people felt or how much they use the experience, as we thought it would. But it did end up being pretty polarizing,” admitted Instagram head, Adam Mosseri. “Some people really liked it and some people really didn’t.”
“For those who liked it, it was mostly what we had hoped — which is that it depressurized the experience. And, for those who didn’t, they used Likes to get a sense for what was trending or was relevant on Instagram and on Facebook. And they were just super annoyed that we took it away,” he added. This latter group sometimes included smaller creators still working on establishing a presence across social media, though larger influencers were sometimes in favor of Like removals. (Mosseri name-checked Katy Perry as being pro Like removals, in fact.)
Ultimately, the company decided to split the difference. Instead of making a hard choice about the future of its online communities, it’s rolling out the “no Likes” option as a user-controlled setting on both platforms.
On Instagram, both content consumers and content producers can turn on or off Like and View counts on posts — which means you can choose to not see these metrics when scrolling your own Feed and you can choose whether to allow Likes to be viewed by others when you’re posting. These are configured as two different settings, which provides for more flexibility and control.
Image Credits: Instagram
On Facebook, meanwhile, users access the new setting from the “Settings & Privacy” area under News Feed Settings (or News Feed Preferences on desktop). From here, you’ll find an option to “Hide number of reactions” to turn this setting off for both your own posts and for posts from others in News Feed, groups and Pages.
The feature will be made available to both public and private profiles, Facebook tells us, and will include posts you’ve published previously.
Image Credits: Facebook
Instagram last month restarted its tests on this feature in order to work out any final bugs before making the new settings live for global users, and said a Facebook test would come soon. But it’s now forging ahead with making the feature available publicly. When asked why such a short test, Instagram told TechCrunch it had been testing various iterations on this experience since 2019, so it felt it had enough data to proceed with a global launch.
Mosseri also pushed back at the idea that a decision on Likes would have majorly impacted the network. While removal of Likes on Instagram had some impact on user behavior, he said, it was not enough to be concerning. In some groups, users posted more — signaling that they felt less pressure to perform, perhaps. But others engaged less, Mosseri said.
Image Credits: Facebook
“Often people say, ‘oh, this has a bunch of Likes. I’m gonna go check it out,’ ” the exec explained. “Then they read the comments, or go deeper, or swipe to the carousel. There’s been some small effects — some positive, some negative — but they’ve all been small,” he noted. Instagram also believes users may toggle on and off the feature at various times, based on how they’re feeling.
In addition, Mosseri pointed out, “there’s no rigorous research that suggests Likes are bad for people’s well-being” — a statement that pushes back over the growing concerns that a gamified social media space is bad for users’ mental health. Instead, he argued that Instagram is still a small part of people’s day, so how Likes function doesn’t affect people’s overall well-being.
“As big as we are, we have to be careful not to overestimate our influence,” Mosseri said.
He also dismissed some of the current research pointing to negative impacts of social media use as being overly reliant on methodologies that ask users to self-report their use, rather than measure it directly.
In other words, this is not a company that feels motivated to remove Likes entirely due to the negative mental health outcomes attributed to its popularity metrics.
It’s worth mentioning that another factor that could have come into play here is Instagram’s plan to make a version of its app available to children under the age of 13, as competitor TikTok did following its FTC settlement. In that case, hiding Likes by default — or perhaps adding a parental control option — would necessitate such a setting. Instagram tells TechCrunch that, while it’s too soon to know what it would do with a kids app, it will “definitely explore” a no Likes by default option.
Facebook and Instagram both told TechCrunch the feature will roll out starting on Wednesday but will reach global users over time. On Instagram, that may take a matter of days.
Facebook, meanwhile, says a small percentage of users will have the feature Wednesday — notified through an alert on News Feed — but it will reach Facebook’s global audience “over the next few weeks.”
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Mental health app Wysa raises $5.5M for ’emotionally intelligent’ AI
It’s hard enough to talk about your feelings to a person; Jo Aggarwal, the founder and CEO of Wysa, is hoping you’ll find it easier to confide in a robot. Or, put more specifically, “emotionally intelligent” artificial intelligence.
Wysa is an AI-powered mental health app designed by Touchkin eServices, Aggarwal’s company that currently maintains headquarters in Bangalore, Boston and London. Wysa is something like a chatbot that can respond with words of affirmation, or guide a user through one of 150 different therapeutic techniques.
Wysa is Aggarwal’s second venture. The first was an elder care company that failed to find market fit, she says. Aggarwal found herself falling into a deep depression, from which, she says, the idea of Wysa was born in 2016.
In March, Wysa became one of 17 apps in the Google Assistant Investment Program, and in May, closed a Series A funding round of $5.5 million led by Boston’s W Health Ventures, the Google Assistant Investment Program, pi Ventures and Kae Capital.
Wysa has raised a total of $9 million in funding, says Aggarwal, and the company has 60 full-time employees and about three million users.
The ultimate goal, she says, is not to diagnose mental health conditions. Wysa is largely aimed at people who just want to vent. Most Wysa users are there to improve their sleep, anxiety or relationships, she says.
“Out of the 3 million people that use Wysa, we find that only about 10% actually need a medical diagnosis,” says Aggarwal. If a user’s conversations with Wysa equate with high scores on traditional depression questionnaires like the PHQ-9 or the anxiety disorder questionnaire GAD-7, Wysa will suggest talking to a human therapist.
Naturally, you don’t need to have a clinical mental health diagnosis to benefit from therapy.
Wysa isn’t intended to be a replacement, says Aggarwal (whether users view it as a replacement remains to be seen), but an additional tool that a user can interact with on a daily basis.
“Sixty percent of the people who come and talk to Wysa need to feel heard and validated, but if they’re given techniques of self help, they can actually work on it themselves and feel better,” Aggarwal continues.
Wysa’s approach has been refined through conversations with users and through input from therapists, says Aggarwal.
For instance, while having a conversation with a user, Wysa will first categorize their statements and then assign a type of therapy, like cognitive behavioral therapy or acceptance and commitment therapy, based on those responses. It would then select a line of questioning or therapeutic technique written ahead of time by a therapist and begin to converse with the user.
Wysa, says Aggarwal, has been gleaning its own insights from more than 100 million conversations that have unfolded this way.
“Take for instance a situation where you’re angry at somebody else. Originally our therapists would come up with a technique called the empty chair technique where you’re trying to look at it from the other person’s perspective. We found that when a person felt powerless or there were trust issues, like teens and parents, the techniques the therapists were giving weren’t actually working,” she says.
“There are 10,000 people facing trust issues who are actually refusing to do the empty chair exercise. So we have to find another way of helping them. These insights have built Wysa.”
Although Wysa has been refined in the field, research institutions have played a role in Wysa’s ongoing development. Pediatricians at the University of Cincinnati helped develop a module specifically targeted toward COVID-19 anxiety. There are also ongoing studies of Wysa’s ability to help people cope with mental health consequences from chronic pain, arthritis and diabetes at The Washington University in St. Louis and The University of New Brunswick.
Still, Wysa has had several tests in the real world. In 2020, the government of Singapore licensed Wysa, and provided the service for free to help cope with the emotional fallout of the coronavirus pandemic. Wysa is also offered through the health insurance company Aetna as a supplement to Aetna’s Employee Assistance Program.
The biggest concern about mental health apps, naturally, is that they might accidentally trigger an incident, or mistake signs of self harm. To address this, the U.K.’s National Health Service (NHS) offers specific compliance standards. Wysa is compliant with the NHS’ DCB0129 standard for clinical safety, the first AI-based mental health app to earn the distinction.
To meet those guidelines, Wysa appointed a clinical safety officer, and was required to create “escalation paths” for people who show signs of self harm.
Wysa, says Aggarwal, is also designed to flag responses to self-harm, abuse, suicidal thoughts or trauma. If a user’s responses fall into those categories Wysa will prompt the user to call a crisis line.
In the U.S., the Wysa app that anyone can download, says Aggarwal, fits the FDA’s definition of a general wellness app or a “low risk device.” That’s relevant because, during the pandemic, the FDA has created guidance to accelerate distribution of these apps.
Still, Wysa may not perfectly categorize each person’s response. A 2018 BBC investigation, for instance, noted that the app didn’t appear to appreciate the severity of a proposed underage sexual encounter. Wysa responded by updating the app to handle more instances of coercive sex.
Aggarwal also notes that Wysa contains a manual list of sentences, often containing slang, that they know the AI won’t catch or accurately categorize as harmful on its own. Those are manually updated to ensure that Wysa responds appropriately. “Our rule is that [the response] can be 80%, appropriate, but 0% triggering,” she says.
In the immediate future, Aggarwal says the goal is to become a full-stack service. Rather than having to refer patients who do receive a diagnosis to Employee Assistant Programs (as the Aetna partnership might) or outside therapists, Wysa aims to build out its own network of mental health suppliers.
On the tech side they’re planning expansion into Spanish, and will start investigating a voice-based system based on guidance from the Google Assistant Investment Fund.
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Headway raises $70M at a $750M valuation to help connect therapists with people and insurance schemes
Mental health, and how it is getting addressed, has been one of the major leitmotifs of the past year of pandemic living. COVID-19 not only has led to a lot of people getting ill or worse; it has increased isolation, economic uncertainty and led to a lot of other kinds of disappointments, and that all has had a knock-on effect on our collective and individual state of mind.
Today a startup called Headway, which has been working on building a better way for people to attend to themselves — by way of a three-sided marketplace of sorts, by helping a person to find and afford a therapist via a free-to-use portal, by making it possible for those therapists to accept a wider range of insurance plans and by helping those insurance plans facilitate more therapy appointments for their patient networks — is announcing a major round of funding on the heels of strong growth.
The startup has raised $70 million, money that it will be using to continue expanding its platform with more partnerships, more hiring for its team (it wants to have 300 people this year) and opening in new regions, aiming to be nationwide this year in the U.S. This round, a Series B, has a number of big names attached to it: It is being led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Thrive, GV and Accel also participating. (The latter three are repeat investors: Thrive and GV led its Series A, while Accel led its seed.) This Series B is coming in at a $750 million valuation.
The rapid pace of funding, the backers and that valuation all underscore the timeliness of the concept, and also the traction that Headway is getting for its approach.
When we last covered Headway — it raised $26 million just last November, six months ago — it said it had registered some 1,800 therapists on its platform in the New York metro area, where it is based. Now that number is up to more than 3,000 with its network now covering not just NYC, but also New Jersey, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, Georgia, Michigan, Virginia, Washington, Illinois and Colorado. It has more than 2,000 patients joining the platform each month and has so far helped facilitate 300,000 appointments, with a current average of 30,000 appointments each month. Revenues have in the last year, meanwhile, grown nine-fold.
The approach that Headway is taking — creating not just a vertical search portal for therapists, but building a back-end system to help those therapists grow their business by making it easier for them to accept insurance coverage — comes directly out of the experiences faced by one of the startup’s co-founders.
Andrew Adams, the CEO of Headway, told me last year he came up with the idea after he moved to New York from California several years ago to take a job. In seeking a therapist, he found most unwilling to accept his insurance plan as payment, making getting therapy unaffordable.
This is a very typical problem, he said. Some 70% of therapists do not accept insurance today because it’s too complicated for them to integrate, since about 85% of all therapists happen to be solo practitioners. So something that should be accessible to everyone becomes something typically only used by those who can afford it, or have entered into social care programs that might provide it. But that leaves a massive gap in the middle.
“This is the defining problem in the space,” he said at the time. “Health insurance is built around a medical world dominated by billers and admins, but therapists are small practitioners and don’t have the bandwidth to handle that, so they don’t. So we thought if we could make it easier for them to, they would, and they have.”
And indeed, if you are needing to see a therapist, the very last thing you need or want to be doing is spending your time trying to work out the economics of doing so: You need to be focused on finding someone you feel you can talk to; someone who can help you.
The problem is a huge one. In the U.S. alone it’s estimated that there are some 82 million people who have treatable health conditions. Headway was founded on the premise that most of them currently do not seek that treatment because of cost or accessibility.
A lot of therapy has traditionally been about seeing people in person — and arguably the fact that we’ve had so much reduced contact with people has contributed to mental health issues this past year — but in the event, Headway has definitely adapted to the current climate.
The company says that some 89% of its appointments at the moment are being carried out remotely. This is down from 97% at the peak of the pandemic in the U.S., and has been slowly starting to taper off, the company said. Some of the increased volume, meanwhile, is a direct result of therapists working remotely — they can fit more people in to a daily schedule as a result.
In terms of insurers, the company currently works with Aetna, Cigna, United Healthcare, Oscar and Oxford and says the list will be growing. One interesting detail is that Headway has not only built out a bigger funnel for these insurers in terms of the practitioners they work with and individuals who can subsequently use insurance to pay for therapy, but conversely has served to be a conduit for those insurance groups in bringing more patients through to those therapists, who are now a part of their networks, by way of Headway’s platform.
Headway says that using its system can help a patient get an appointment within five days, versus the the 30-day average you typically face when using an insurance directory.
It’s the kind of scale and “software eating the world” efficiency that has attracted Andreessen Horowitz to backing companies before, with the added detail of this being particularly relevant to the time we are living in.
“By getting the mental health provider community on the same page with insurance companies for the first time, Headway unlocks affordable mental healthcare for millions of Americans,” said Scott Kupor, managing partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “We’re incredibly excited to work alongside the Headway team.” Kupor is also joining Headway’s board with this round.
Cherry Miao, a former partner at Accel and Headway’s lead seed investor, is also joining as head of Finance & Data.
“I’ve been fortunate to work with some of the world’s most influential startups, and know that being part of Headway’s meaningful mission, robust business model, and incredibly talented team is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” she said. “I’m thrilled to be helping rebuild America’s mental healthcare system for access and affordability.”
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Investors and business leaders: It’s time to take coaching mainstream
The business world has a love-hate relationship with coaching. Founders are visionaries: They start with an idea, a talent, a dream, but not necessarily the business know-how. Because being an entrepreneur doesn’t require a license or training — Jeff Bezos is an engineer and computer scientist; Elon Musk is an economist and physicist, and so on.
In any other industry, when someone with raw talent — an athlete, a singer, an actor — furthers their career, the first thing they receive is a coach. And it doesn’t stop once they get their first Olympic gold or Grammy.
Coaches don’t leave their side until they hang up their gloves. Tiger Woods is famous for having worked with many coaches to switch up his tactics and keep exceeding in his performance.
In any other industry, when someone with raw talent — an athlete, a singer, an actor — furthers their career, the first thing they receive is a coach.
Despite a culture that pushes founders to the edge of their physical, mental and personal limits as they build their company, we insist that they fly solo. They’re led to believe that reaching out for support is a sign of weakness.
That stigma is a huge part of the problem. We look up to business magnates, believing that they sailed from a college dorm to the C-suite without breaking a sweat. But we don’t see the vigorous kicking that goes on beneath the surface. As a client of mine once mused, even the best leaders are self-sabotaging themselves at least 30% of the time. I know for a fact that top Silicon Valley billionaires have nutrition, parenting, meditation and life coaches, but they — like half of my own clients — are reluctant to embrace this out in the open.
VCs know that they don’t invest in the business; they invest in the person. Record amounts of money are being funneled into mental wellness startups right now, but investors also need to direct that awareness toward their founders’ well-being. By offering access to a coach to all your portfolio founders, you’ll be tackling the real problems stopping them from pouring their energy into their business, and you’ll without a doubt improve your returns.
1. Business is not always a founder’s main problem
I coach founders and CEOs of startups, and more than half their main life challenges are not work related. They’re getting pulled in multiple directions — some have cancer, others are having an affair, a few are going through IVF, others still are dealing with past grief and traumas.
And when a problem is work related, it’s often a communication or psychological issue: How do I face my fear of failure? How do I lead a team of 50 for the first time? Should I trust my gut?
All this is happening in the midst of Series A raises, hiring and firing employees, acquisitions, and deciding whether to bridge or shut down the business. Imagine how much emotional energy and hours it takes for founders — or anyone, really — to face those intimate issues in isolation while putting on a brave face with investors or at board meetings.
One of the most recurring concerns founders share with me is that they feel alone.
VCs, when you choose to fund someone, you’re also marrying into their past, their family, their personal issues. The full package. Ask yourself — do you currently know the major distractions in the lives of all your portfolio founders? If you don’t, start with the assumption that something is going on in their life other than work and make coaching available to them at any time.
If you commit to helping founders manage their fears, limiting beliefs and blind spots, you’re committing to their potential as a company and industry leader. A healthy leadership is a healthy company.
2. Return on coaching (ROC)
As with elite soccer coaches, the benefits of business coaching are highly visible, without the million-dollar expense. Founders start to make better decisions the first time around. They hire the right talent, rather than hiring, onboarding and firing someone within a month.
They have more honest conversations with stakeholders, avoiding conflict and allowing more people to contribute meaningfully to the business’ growth. They have the proper mindset to fundraise, and their attitude matches the money they’re asking for.
That’s before getting to the physical improvements. My founders have lost weight, stopped smoking and drinking, and have more energy to build a business. If a founder works with chronic fatigue, which many are, it won’t be long before their body cracks. I get calls from clients caught in panic attacks before big meetings, struggling to steady their frayed nerves.
You can fund your founders’ well-being in a variety of ways. In the same way your firm might offer marketing or PR services to portfolio companies, coaching should be part of the package. Firms can make executive coaches available on retainer. You may choose to have a full-time resident coach, available whenever someone needs them.
At the very least, firms should make available a list of recommended coaches. Some coaches specialize in leadership coaching, female founders or health specifically, while others cover various personal and professional skills.
Investors will sometimes offer a handful of free sessions to their founders, but if they want to continue, they are then forced to decide between their personal health and the health of the business — which other people (including your firm) have staked millions of dollars on. It should never be a case of one or the other.
My hope is that in the future, VCs will set aside a percentage of their funds exclusively for mental wellness for founders and executives.
A few VCs have already taken a 1% pledge, but it’s the Europeans who are leading the charge here, with funds from Estonia to Ireland generously covering all founder coaching fees and other support programs. Those I know talk about how 10x growth is possible without burnout.
3. Cut through the stigma to enable founders to make the most of coaching
Founders are resistant to hiring a coach themselves because they’re worried about what their investors and board will think of them. They tell themselves: “If I were normal, and good enough, I wouldn’t need one.”
It’s not just their inner voice talking. When a client of mine joined a Silicon Valley startup, he asked his superiors if coaching could be part of his comp package. They wondered why he needed a coach.
In other industries, connecting someone with a coach is proof of their worth. That’s the conversation investors should be having: You’re good enough for us to give you money, so we’re going to give you someone to accompany you on your journey, so you don’t pretend you can figure it out at every step.
There’s also a negative connotation around the term “mental health” that we should be reframing. Those two words tend to make people think about depression, suicidal thoughts or addiction. Which is mental unhealth. Let’s talk more about mental wellness and founder well-being, which focuses us on the goal we’re working toward.
Eliminating the stigma can start with open conversations about well-being between investors and executives, as well as inviting a coach to talk to your founders about what these sessions entail, and why everyone has something to gain. By shattering the taboo, you’ll enable founders to make the absolute most of that experience, rather than hold back to keep up appearances.
If we start making coaching mainstream today, we might eventually see it as obligatory for all founders.
4. Lead by example
Finally, business leaders and investors need to set an example for the startup community, and especially people at the start of their journeys, that it’s OK to ask for assistance in bettering yourself.
Many VCs, like top CEOs, have coaches. If more simply owned it, they’d have so much power to normalize coaching, and even make #IHaveACoach fashionable. After all, we’re talking about the same industry that made meditation rooms trendy and kombucha an office feature.
Why not make coaching a central topic in future investor conferences, or, as a VC firm, publish a study on how portfolio founders who followed a coaching program saw greater business success?
For example: For years, Union Square Ventures has invested in providing value to their founders and has built a team whose responsibilities include developing leadership training, fostering mentorship circles and connecting founders to coaches. If you let founders see your commitment to human issues, it won’t occur to them that being human is being weak.
These approaches are also important self-promotion for VCs positioning themselves as the next generation of ethical investors. With so many alternative funding options becoming available, founders are seeking VCs who give them more than just capital and who see wellness and diversity and inclusion as inextricable from success.
Founder health and startup health can’t be separated from each other. On some level, all investors know this. So let’s give the people shaping tomorrow’s world the tools to be more comfortable in their own skin and more masterful in leading teams to achieve greatness and incredible returns.
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Moka.care is a European mental healthcare solution for employees
Meet moka.care, a French startup that has built several services that should help you improve your psychological well-being. The company sells its solution to employers directly. They can then offer access to moka.care to their employees.
The startup raised a $3 million (€2.5 million) funding round from Singular, the VC firm founded by former Alven partners Jeremy Uzan and Raffi Kamber. A long list of business angels are also participating in today’s round, such as Nicolas Dessaigne (Algolia), Ning Li (Made.com, Typology), Florian Douetteau (Dataiku), Céline Lazorthes (Leetchi, MangoPay), Pierre Dubuc (OpenClassrooms), Marc-Antoine de Longevialle (LeCab), Adrien Ledoux (JobTeaser), Roxanne Varza (Station F), Thibault Lamarque (CASTALIE) and Côme Fouques (Indy).
Moka.care believes that companies aren’t doing enough when it comes to mental health. Many companies give you a phone number and tell you that you can call that number to get mental support. But few employees actually call those helplines.
That’s why the startup is taking a completely different approach. The most important principle is that people are looking for different things. And you don’t necessarily know what you’re looking for when you’re feeling down. When you first contact moka.care, the company spends roughly half an hour talking with you to understand what you’re looking for.
There are three main options after that. Moka.care could send you some recommendations for a practitioner — it can be a psychologist, a certified coach or a licensed therapist. Moka.care also organizes group sessions around a specific topic. It could be focused on remote work, work-life balance, self-confidence, etc. Finally, moka.care also provides content on some of those topics. You can access that content and learn more about yourself.
With this granular approach, the company hopes it can tackle mental health conditions before it’s too late — you don’t want to recommend a therapist when an employee is already suffering from excessive stress, fatigue or burnout.
Employees don’t pay for the first sessions as it’s part of moka.care’s plans. This way, the barrier to entry should be much lower for employees. Of course, if you want to book further appointments, you’ll have to pay at some point.
For employers, moka.care tries to lower the barrier to entry as well. Clients agree on a per-employee-per-month subscription plan based on some usage rate. If your employees end up using moka.care more than that, you don’t pay more. If your employees don’t use the service at all and you’re overpaying, the startup pays you back.
There are 30 companies currently using moka.care — it represents thousands of employees that could potentially create an account and access the service. The startup currently works with around 50 practitioners.
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Pace launches out of private beta with a plan to scale virtual group therapy
One in five people have a mental health illness. Pace, a new startup founded by Pinterest and Affirm executives, wants to pay attention to the other four in that statistic.
“Nobody is perfectly mentally healthy all the time,” said Jack Chou, Pace co-founder. “It’s a non-existent idea, everyone is sort of swimming in between being clinically mentally unhealthy and perfectly mentally happy.”
While diagnosable mental health conditions might get an individual medication or therapy, those that live in a grey space might still need resources to stay afloat. After Chou experienced the detrimental effects of burnout while working for Pinterest and Affirm, and co-founder Cat Lee, formerly of Pinterest and Maveron, experienced a personal travesty, the former colleagues realized there needed to be a way to help people who didn’t fit squarely into one bucket.
So Pace, which launched out of private beta today, wants to address this fallacy by creating small-group training classes for people interested in taking care of their emotional and mental health. It is launching with $1.9 million in seed funding. Investors include Nellie and Max Levchin, Jeff Weiner, Emilie Choi, Ben Silbermann, Box Group, and SV Angel.
The core of the product is a 90-minute live video group session once a week, delivered through Pace’s platform. The video component integrates with Twilio and Agora (and interestingly, not Zoom, because its SDK lacks personalization options). Users can attend the sessions on Web, iOS or Android.
Image Credits: Pace
Pace forms cohorts of eight to 10 people around shared interest or identities, such as a founder group or parent group. Then, Pace interviews a new user for 15 to 30 minutes to learn about what they hope to get out of the experience.
Once a group is formed, they meet weekly with a facilitator at the helm. While it’s not trying to be a therapy replacement, the startup is looking for facilitators who are licensed in mental health practice. To help them do this, Pace secured two founding members who are psychologists: Dr. Kerry Makin-Byrd and Dr. Vivian Oberling.
When users sign on, they are prompted to pick three words that describe themselves from dozens of options. Those words show up under their video as they talk, and help skip some small talk in the beginning of the sessions.
The group talks about a variety of topics, from how to manage stress to how to adapt to a remote world. There is no formal curriculum, but each class has a takeaway for participants to leave with.
Pace doesn’t follow any specific curriculum during the meetings, but instead uses the time for people to talk through their feelings. Facilitators are licensed mental health clinicians, with the majority of the leaders being part-time or freelancers. It plans to introduce asynchronous ways for group members to chat and stay in touch beyond the weekly class, as well as spend time building out a product that feels beyond a Zoom call.
Mental health software startups are on a tear right now. Last month, Lyra Health raised $175 million at a $2.25 billion valuation to connect employees to therapists and mental health services. Another telehealth provider, Talkspace, announced today that it was going public through a SPAC. There’s also Calm, last valued at $2 billion, and Headspace, its biggest competitor in the mindfulness app space.
Pace’s focus is more similar to the latter than the former: It’s avoiding the telehealth label and positioning itself more as supplementary to formal health services.
“Our hope is that as [therapists] have individual patients who they’d like to incorporate some group work, or need a next thing, that we’re here for that too,” says Chou.
One of Pace’s closest competitors is Coa, which launched with $3 million in seed funding in October 2020. The startup is similarly using small-group fitness culture and applying it to mental health. It mixes lecture-style teaching with breakout sessions to breed conversation.
Pace wouldn’t expand on how it differentiates from Coa beyond alluding to upcoming product features and community investments. Coa charges $25 for drop-in classes (sticking to that fitness class theme) while Pace charges $45 per week for the same group to meet for months at a time. While Coa has licensed therapists, Pace has licensed mental health clinicians.
Coa co-founders Alexa Meyer and Dr. Emily Anhalt say their service is unique from Pace in a curriculum perspective.
“Although all of Coa’s classes are facilitated by licensed therapists, Coa’s classes are different from group therapy,” Meyer said. Coa uses Anhalt’s research around mental happiness to create programming. Both companies are still pre-launch, but Coa says it has 6,000 people on its waitlist.
For both startups, the hurdles ahead are common for any startup: customer acquisition, effectiveness in tracking outcomes and scaling an innately emotional and personalized experience. As Homebrew’s Hunter Walk pointed out in a recent blog post, vulnerable populations being exposed to venture-level risk is a difficult phenomenon. Startups fail often, and in this case, that could mean leaving without once-critical support people who are depending on group therapy.
Going forward, the real winner in the mental health fitness space will come down to a thoughtful curriculum and a user experience that brings out vulnerability in people even over a virtual setting. Regardless, innovation pouring into the sector couldn’t come at a better time.
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The hidden cost of being a founder
If I were to pick one thing that unites the global tech scene in terms of culture I would point to the respect and reverence accorded to startup founders.
After all, creating your own company is an ambition many of us harbor. It can bring with it unparalleled freedom, a lasting legacy, prestige, wealth and the ability to do good. Across social and traditional media the feats of founders big and small are lauded for their genius on a daily basis. Many entrepreneurs go to great lengths to showcase their backbreaking hard work and eye-popping success. An outsider would be forgiven for believing that every founder is living the dream as a result of their talent and toil.
Of course, as with nearly every image projected online, the reality is quite different. There is a seldom talked about price of being a founder — the impact on one’s mental health.
A recent study by the National Institute of Mental Health found that 72% of entrepreneurs are directly or indirectly impacted by mental health issues. This compares to 48% of the general population. The damage can also affect loved ones — 23% of entrepreneurs report that they have family members with problems, which is 7% higher than the relations of nonentrepreneurs.
I am in no way a mental health expert. But what I do know from both my own experience and speaking to scores of business owners I work with is that being a founder is an inherently lonely job. Pressure is high and uncertainty pervades every decision. Fear of failure is ever present. Unaddressed, these issues can take a serious toll.
The unpalatable truth is that the situation appears to be getting worse. A similar study conducted in 2015 by Dr. Michael A. Freeman found the rate of mental health issues among founders to be lower — at 50%. While comparing different research pieces is inexact, we only need to look at how the global recession has damaged many companies and how working from home has contributed to feelings of isolation, to know that the environment for startups has got harder this year. Added to this mix is how social media continues to promote an unhealthy fetishization of hustle culture and founding myths.
A number of founders have told me that they have constant feelings of inadequacy and guilt when they compare themselves to the startup gurus who celebrate working 24/7, are constantly selling, raising money or making their millions. They feel they should be working harder or be doing better — just like all the people they read about.
So how do we address this? The first step is talking about it. This means having an environment where we can be honest that not everything is always fine. Speaking to a fellow founder, not about commercial concerns, but about personal worries can be revelatory. I’ve seen it happen in our community. It’s like an “Emperor’s New Clothes” moment.
The myth of the bulletproof, genius, hustling founder can disappear in a puff of smoke as people suddenly realize they are not alone. They find that the concerns, anxieties and uncertainties they feel are almost universal.
Experienced founders can provide invaluable support to people new to the startup scene. They can share their experiences, both failures and success, and reveal some of their coping mechanisms. I would strongly advise founders who are experiencing some of the worries I’ve outlined to actively seek out advice from both their peers and potential mentors — much in the way they may seek out commercial guidance.
Next, we need to address how we tackle the culture and myths around being a founder. Business owners need to know that many of the extraordinary “success stories” they see celebrated online are exactly that — extraordinary.
Similarly, those that promote the principle that working all hours is the only way to be successful are at best talking about what works for them, and are at worst, engaging in a performance to achieve attention. We need to think carefully about how we respond to these posts. There is a fine line between being supportive and enabling unhealthy or damaging behavior and philosophy.
After all, success in the startup scene is all relative. For some owning a small business that makes them a decent income with a good work-life balance is the goal. For others, it is simply being able to do what they love in the way that they want. Very few will get the exit that makes them a millionaire, and an infinitesimally small minority will build the next Facebook . I cannot stress enough how important it is for founders to keep their aims and ambitions in perspective and ignore the noise they hear online.
More broadly, the industry, including the media, does need to get wiser about how it views and represents founders. For example, a pervasive myth is that some of the biggest tech companies in the world started in garages with no money, then through the genius and sheer bloodymindedness of their founder they were grown into a massive corporation.
The reality is that the vast majority of these tech companies benefited from substantial seed capital from family or connections almost from day one. These founders were also quickly surrounded by highly talented people who did a lot of the heavy lifting and, whisper it, a truckload of good luck. In short, the idea of the superhuman founder perpetuated in the industry is, in nearly all cases, nonsense.
In a similar vein, there are also issues around how we frame success and failure.
Success, as I’ve mentioned earlier, is nearly always couched in the most basic numerical terms. The “unicorn” label is bandied about so often that many people fail to realize that it’s simply a valuation that a few investors have given a company. It does not reflect whether the business is actually successful in the traditional sense, i.e., making money. Generally, the startup scene celebrates and idolizes founders who make big exits or achieve “unicorn status” — less is spoken about the thousands of SMEs that employ people, develop and patent new tech, make a tidy profit and pay taxes.
With failure, there is an altogether different problem. The startup scene downplays failure as par for the course. It is, on the face of it, one of the industry’s great virtues. It enables people to try without fear of embarrassment. However, in practice, it can actually minimize real-world fears nearly all founders have. Failure cannot just be brushed off if you’ve devoted years of your life, spent a lot of money and have staff who rely on you. By simply thinking of failure as part of the process we cannot address and talk about this real source of concern in an open way. “Fail fast” only works for those who can afford it.
Individually, these issues may seem like nothing but white noise and the cure for suffering founders may simply be to get off social media. Unfortunately, it isn’t that simple. Social and traditional media is amplifying startup culture, not creating it. The same tropes are on display at every tech conference and meetup. To fit in, the founder is expected to be a fearless, genius visionary. Deviation from this norm, such as by displaying vulnerability around mental health, is by inference, failure.
Despite its shortcomings in relation to diversity, the startup scene is generally one of the most progressive, collaborative and open industries in the world. These virtues are ideally suited to tackling the reluctance to discuss mental health and creating the network of support that ensures people don’t suffer alone.
To make this happen, we need to dispense with the myths and hagiography around being a founder and be more honest about what the reality of running a business actually entails.
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Singapore-based mental health app Intellect reaches one million users, closes seed funding
Theodoric Chew, co-founder and chief executive officer of mental health app Intellect
Intellect, a Singapore-based startup that wants to lower barriers to mental health care in Asia, says it has reached more than one million users just six months after launching. Google also announced today that the startup’s consumer app, also called Intellect, is one of its picks for best personal growth apps of 2020.
The company recently closed an undisclosed seed round led by Insignia Ventures Partners . Angel investors including e-commerce platform Carousell co-founder and chief executive officer Quek Siu Rui; former Sequoia partner Tim Lee; and startup consultancy xto10x’s Southeast Asia CEO J.J. Chai also participated.
In a statement, Insignia Ventures Partners principal Samir Chaibi said, “In Intellect, we see a fast-scaling platform addressing a pain that has become very obvious amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. We believe that pairing clinically-backed protocols with an efficient mobile-first delivery is the key to break down the barriers to access for millions of patients globally.”
Co-founder and chief executive officer Theodoric Chew launched Intellect earlier this year because while there is a growing pool of mental wellness apps in the United States and Europe that have attracted more funding during the COVID-19 pandemic, the space is still very young in Asia. Intellect’s goal is to encourage more people to incorporate mental health care into their daily routines by lowering barriers like high costs and social stigma.
Intellect offers two products. One is a consumer app with self-guided programs based on cognitive behavioral therapy techniques that center on issues like anxiety, self-esteem or relationship issues.
The other is a mental health platform for employers to offer as a benefit and includes a recently launched telehealth service called Behavioural Health Coaching that connects users with mental health professionals. The service, which includes one-on-one video sessions and unlimited text messaging, is now a core part of Intellect’s services, Chew told TechCrunch.
Intellect’s enterprise product now reaches 10,000 employees, and its clients include tech companies, regional operations for multinational corporations and hospitals. Most are located in Singapore, Hong Kong, Indonesia and India, and range in size from 100 to more than 3,000 employees.
For many small to mid-sized employers, Intellect is often the first mental health benefit they have offered. Larger clients may already have EAP (employee assistance programs), but Chew said those are often underutilized, with an average adoption rate of 1% to 2%. On the other hand, he said Intellect’s employee benefit program sees an average adoption rate of 30% in the first month after it is rolled out at a company.
Chew added that the COVID-19 pandemic has prompted more companies to address burnout and other mental health issues.
“In terms of larger trends, we’ve seen a huge spike in companies across the region having mental health and wellbeing of their employees being prioritized on their agenda,” said Chew. “In terms of user trends, we see a significantly higher utilization in work stress and burnout, anxiety and relationship-related programs.”
Intellect’s seed round will be used to expand in Asian markets and to help fund clinical research studies it is currently conducting with universities and organizations in Singapore, Australia and the United Kingdom.
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