Sixty percent of therapists don't accept insurance. Not because they don't want to help — because the paperwork makes them want to quit. We eliminated the paperwork.
We've facilitated over 10 million therapy sessions. That's 10 million times someone got help they might not have gotten otherwise.
The mental health crisis isn't a supply problem — there are plenty of therapists. It's an access problem. Insurance is the bottleneck and we're opening it.
Everyone talks about the mental health crisis. Very few people are building clinical infrastructure to actually treat it at the severity level where people are dying.
I watched someone I love almost die because there was nowhere for them to go between a weekly therapy appointment and a locked hospital unit. That gap shouldn't exist.
The mental health crisis isn't a supply problem. There are enough therapists. It's an infrastructure problem. The plumbing between therapists and insurance is broken.
The average Employee Assistance Program has a 5% utilization rate. That's not a benefit. That's a checkbox on an HR form that no one checks.
The stigma conversation is important but it's a distraction from the access conversation. Even when people want help, they can't find a good therapist who takes their insurance within 30 miles.
The mental health system treats everyone the same way: try something, wait six weeks, and if it doesn't work, try something else. We use data to skip the guessing.
Depression is the thing no one in venture talks about, which is insane given how many people it affects.
The stigma around therapy is real, but it's easier to overcome when you can do it from your couch in your pajamas. Privacy is the first step to honesty.
Therapy shouldn't require a waitlist, a commute, and $200 an hour. We wanted to remove every barrier between someone and help.
I built BetterHelp because someone I knew needed a therapist and couldn't find one. Not because of money — because of availability. There just weren't enough therapists.
We matched four million people with therapists. Four million. Most of them had never spoken to a therapist before. That's not a business metric. That's a public health outcome.
Mental health is not a feature. It's not a tab in a fitness app. It deserves its own company, its own brand, its own category. That's what Calm is.
We merged with Ginger, a mental health therapy platform. Meditation plus therapy plus psychiatry — all in one app. Nobody else has that full stack of mental health.
I stepped down as CEO because I was burned out. Completely. I'd been running at full speed for six years. The company was healthy. I wasn't. That's a bad combination.
After selling my company I felt lost for months. Nobody tells you that financial freedom can feel like an identity crisis.
What if you could text your therapist at 2 AM when the anxiety hits? That was the original idea.
Anxiety is a superpower if you channel it correctly. It makes you prepare harder than everyone else.
23 gold medals and I still struggled with depression. Success doesn't fix what's broken inside. Getting help does.
I had to go back in there for me. Not for the team, not for the medals, not for USA Gymnastics. For me. That was the first time I had ever done that.
I never wanted to be the spokesperson for mental health. I just wanted to protect my own. Then I realized protecting it publicly might protect someone else's too.
I was open about my struggles because I know someone out there is going through the same thing and thinking they are alone. No recovery is linear. No success story is clean.
I raced for 20 years and never really talked about how I was feeling. That was a mistake.
Mental health is real. I have struggled with it. I think the more people who say that publicly, the better for everyone.