What is the future of legal cannabis from a retail / e-commerce perspective?  Today's guest, Socrates Rosenfeld, Co-Founder and CEO of Jane Technologies explains.  Jane is an e-commerce solution for the Cannabis space that supports nearly 3,000 dispensaries and handles more than 20% of the legal Cannabis transactions in the U.S. each year. 

Alyson Watson is CEO and co-founder of Modern Health, a mental health unicorn!  Modern Health is a global mental health benefits solution for employers that covers the spectrum of mental wellbeing needs from tech enabled solutions to professional support solutions on one platform.

April Koh is the youngest female founder to ever take a startup from just an idea to unicorn status.  We are so excited that she’s accomplished this in the mental health space, and we are excited for you to meet her and learn more about her Company, Spring Health!  For those who may not be familiar, Spring Health is a provider of mental health benefits to employers for their employees, and their employees’ families. 

Dr. Amit Etkin is pioneering a revolution in the way mental health medications are designed, developed, prescribed, and brought to market.  Precision psychiatry is the future of mental health treatment and Dr. Etkin is leading the way with his drug development platform, Alto Neuroscience.  In this episode, Dr. Etkin explains why psychiatric drugs have failed, what he is doing about it and why it will work. 

Amanda Eilian, Founding Partner of _able Partners joins us to talk all things mental health startup investing. _able Partners is an early-stage VC firm supporting visionary founders in the positive living space. Their investments focus on companies that improve the daily lives of people, making them healthier, happier, and making their lives more meaningful. Some specific investment areas include mental health, addiction, women’s health, sexual wellness, & coaching among others.

Today’s guest is John Donoghue. He is well known for his groundbreaking work developing Brain Computer Interfaces (BCIs) to restore movement for people with paralysis, known as ‘BrainGate’. BrainGate was the original BCI system created by a company called Cyberkinetics, of which John was a co-founder. In this episode, John gives us a primer on BCIs.  What are they? How do they work? When will they be widely adopted?  Are they safe?  How do we know?  We cover these questions and much more.

Today’s guest is Elyse Cohen, VP of Social Impact and Inclusion at Rare Beauty by Selena Gomez.  Elyse is an expert on purpose driven brands, social impact, and has been hand selected by Selena Gomez to lead the impact efforts at Rare Beauty.  Previously Elyse worked at the White House for First Lady Michelle Obama as Deputy Director of the Let’s Move effort. She has worked on social impact and policy initiatives at the Public Health Institute and in a variety of other social impact roles. 

You can’t fix what you don’t measure.  Measurement and testing of our mental health lags the same capabilities in physical health care.  Dr. Nick Allen, our guest today, is building a mental health measurement solution for clinical use.  Today we talk to him about the challenges, and opportunity for his startup, Ksana Health.

Dr. Anthony Hassan, President and CEO of the Cohen Veterans Network (CVN) joins us today.  CVN is a network of 25 non-profit mental health clinics providing care to veterans and their families.  The facilities are located in or around historically dense veteran and active duty military communities.

Jon Kostakopoulos was the first study participant in the NYU Psilocybin clinical trial. After years of struggling with alcoholism and after trying other options including in-patient programs, out-patient programs, AA, and pharmaceutical treatments, nothing was working for him. Finally, at age 25, Jon joined the clinical trial and underwent three different Psilocybin treatment sessions and has not craved alcohol since his first treatment session.

Today’s guest is Dan Housman. He’s the co-founder and CTO of Courage Therapeutics. We met Dan when he came through our first cohort of the What If Fellowship Program. His startup is a biopharma drug development business focused on eating disorders (anorexia nervosa specifically).

Today’s guest is Ali Abramovitz. She is the co-founder of Chorus Meditation and she is here to talk about the work she is doing to make meditation a group activity. In this episode, we will talk about why group meditation is beneficial, how to do it, and what exactly the benefits are.

Sean McBride, VP Partnerships at Lyra Health joins us in this episode to talk about Lyra, behavioral health care broadly, and he experience working to reform the healthcare system throughout his career. Sean was the first employee at Lyra Health and shares with us about how the Company has scaled into a unicorn over the last 6 years.

In this episode, we are talking about entrepreneur mental health.  Our guest, Matthew Cooper, stepped down from his role as CEO of EarnUp after growing the business successfully for 7 years after creating it.  When he stepped down, he cited mental health as the primary driver and wrote an incredibly authentic, vulnerable and amazing blog post about his decision on December 18, 2020.

In this episode we chat with long time healthcare startup investor, Esther Dyson.  Esther has been very influential in the healthcare investing space for quite some time.  It’s very hard to run into anyone doing anything meaningful in the broader healthcare space and not find a connection to Esther in some way.

In this episode we learn how drugs are developed for treating mental health differences (Central Nervous System) and specifically how a cutting edge PTSD drug is being developed today by Bionomics. Our guest is Dr. Errol De Souza, PhD, Executive Chairman of the Board of Directors at Bionomics.  Bionomics just raised nearly $16mm to conduct clinical trials on their revolutionary drug to treat PTSD. 

In this episode, we chat with Doug Drysdale, CEO of Cybin. Cybin, is a life sciences company advancing mushroom based psychedelic pharmaceuticals and non-psychedelic nutraceutical products as potential therapies for psychiatric and neurological conditions. Doug has more than 30 years of experience in the healthcare sector broadly and brings a level of expertise to the psychedelics space that is truly incredible.

In this mental health market update episode, we are covering valuation trends, investor sentiment, and our 9 key takeaways from the mental health startup market heading into 2021 based on our 2020 experience investing $5.4mm dollars into 9 startups in the space at What If Ventures.

Steve Gatena is the founder of Pray.com, the word’s #1 app for daily prayer and faith-based audio content. Prior to becoming an American Entrepreneur, Steve was an NCAA Champion. He played football for the University of Southern California where he won a Rose Bowl Championship. Steve talks to us about building a company built on mental health and faith post COVID.

Tom Insel is the mental health “czar” of the State of California, he’s a co-founder of Mindstrong Health, and formerly Director of the NIMH. In this episode, Tom is addressing a crowd of 2 dozen mental health startup founders as part of the What If Fellowship program in October 2020 giving them advice as they look to build their own mental health startups.

Headspace's Chief Strategy and Science Officer, Megan Jones Bell, joins us. She directs a team focused on global corporate strategy, technology strategy, and new ventures including Headspace’s digital therapeutics subsidiary, Headspace Health. She also oversees medical and clinical affairs, behavioral science and clinical research, and design research including implementation of a human-centered design process in product and content development at Headspace.

Michael Acton Smith, co-Founder of Calm joins us to talk about building the #1 app for sleep, meditation and relaxation, with over 75 million downloads and over 700,000 5-star reviews.

Ronan Levy is co-founder and the Executive Chairman of Field Trip Health, a psychedelic assisted treatment business.  Ronan joins us to talk about how psychedelic treatments work, what all the hype is about, where we are by way of regulation in the industry and the future use cases of psychedelic treatments.

Aimee-Louisse Carton, founder of KeepAppy, shares her story with us which includes getting cornered in a bathroom by an investor at a startup event, where the investor called her “suicide girl.” This investor continued to tell Aimee she would never be able to raise money because of her past suicide attempt.