 Boom, what's up everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host, Alan Sakyan. We are at the Transformative Technology Conference. We are speaking with Ophir Leidener now. Hello. Hi, Alan. Co-founder of Happify. Great to meet you. Great to be here. Thank you. I'm really excited to chat with you. So even before we get to everything that Happify is doing, I want to know about you. Who are you? How did you even get into the space? So my name is Ophir Leidener. I am the co-founder and president of Happify. I am based in New York, where a home has been for me for the past 20 years. Hard to believe. I grew up in Tel Aviv, moved to the U.S. and for the past six years with Happify. Prior to Happify, I spent a decade building a fairly large casual gaming company. So, you know, these experiences that people spend too much time on, get addicted to, and ultimately leave them in a sense of pleasure, but not much more than that. So we got a lot of people addicted to playing our games. And I've done it for a decade and prior to that, another company. So I've been an entrepreneur for the past 15 years. How I got here is that following my experience with a gaming company, I had a strong sense that we can boost something better with our expertise to engage people. Through digital devices, we did it at scale. Over 60 million people on our gaming platform back in the days. So I got really interested in kind of applying principles of engagement, habit formation with technology and evidence-based practice, and try to help people live better. And now, that's so interesting that you did the transition from the just games that were maybe less beneficial for humanity in some ways, or beneficial in some ways. They are beneficial. They are entertaining. You learn strategy and you learn teamwork and resource management in some ways. Yeah, with some games. They're educational. I wouldn't discount games completely. I think they're great. I love games. I'm a gamer by heart. But I do think that if you look at the trends of games and how they're ultimately trying to create highly optimized habit formation that are basically kind of messing around with your dopamine in various mechanics, color palette sounds, level progression mechanics, we thought that this dosage that games are designed for today, creating a negative impact on kids. I see it with my own kids. And there may be something better that we could do with that skill set to help people live better. Yes. And now, how did the transition come to Happify? How did you go, I want to do this now? So in 2010, actually in 2012, we started working on the idea and we knew that we're looking for a place where the engagement expertise and design of consumer-centric design would have a lot of impact. Living in New York, you see the demand all day long around you. People are working long hours. The stress overworked. A lot of folks on the street, unfortunately, was emotional, mental health challenges. And for us, it was never a question whether or not there's demand out there for this product. We just thought that people need different tools than what they have today to be able to get support that they need. Technology and mobile devices now allow us to put incredible computing powers in the hands of people and use this computing power for good to do something that helped them live better. So that's kind of the idea we had a thesis back then that if we match evidence-based practice that we got really interested in, beginning positive psychology, cognitive behavioral therapy, mindfulness, if we take all of these evidence-based interventions that has been sitting on the kind of academic shelf for years, but not reaching the mass market, if we take those and bring them with our expertise and create engaging experiences, destigmatized experiences, people would want to consume them and they'll see the benefit. So this was a thesis. It took us about two and a half years to build the product and optimize the experience from the get-go so that we got on something that people want to use and want to use the dosage that we felt that is more reasonable to achieve the result and the behavior change that we wanted. And from there, we spent time building a consumer offering at first, scaled it to three and a half million people. Wow, what was the offering for those consumers? It was a premium subscription. You could come in, we would offer you a variety of programs on the platform that allows us to essentially, on a global basis today because our platform is global, screen, very quickly understand what brings you to the platform, provide you evidence-based programs on a wide array of topics from preventative well-being all the way to diagnosable mental health conditions and really let you do these programs and interventions and design that is conscious of the amount of time that you have, your busy daily life, how you like to consume this, essentially apply a lot of the principles of designing good consumer-centric product but kind of create something that also was measurably delivering impact. So that's kind of the first phase of the progress and then in mid-2016, we started getting approached by a large organization, large employers, health plans, and other kind of population health management organizations. And that is that we have a lot of people that might need this product. So fast forward today, we're working. And tell us about the product quick. So Hapify.com, when I go and I get involved with your service, I am starting to do what? So on the product, it's a product that's available on the site, apps, native on the platform and essentially it would come in, it would quickly screen and try as you into one of for 60 different emotional health programs that are delivering highly interactive evidence-based interventions to help you improve your emotional health. Interesting. So then what are the, what is this, how long does it take for me to answer questions about who I am for you to get a good idea of these metrics? That's a great question because one of the challenges is that design-wise, we all eager to get as much data as we can, but engagement-wise, we know that if we ask you too many questions, you're going to go away. So we have an assessment today that has nine questions that give us very strong indications of where you are and what brings you to the platform. So some of them. So some of the interesting question is, for example, do you feel sometimes that your life is darn boring? So we know that when people are bored, it's often a signal for emotional health challenges, fatigue also, same thing. Interesting. The board question is very interesting because if you're doing something that you love every single day, there's no chance that you're bored. And so, well, fatigue is another interesting one as well. It's because how hard are you, do you ever relax your body? Do you ever meditate? Do you ever go to nature? Do you ever have blissful time with your friends and family? Yeah, so right there from the product design point of view, I think you lost many users because you asked too many questions. So we try to condense it to a number of questions that would give us really strong signals. For example, how... And I meant not so much about asking them those questions, but more so just on a point of just emotional health and well-being. Yeah. If you're answering the questions to fatigue and to boredom, either, you know, wherever you're answering those questions, and I'm curious, are you doing it like on a 1 to 10 scale? So the scales that helps us understand and get the right signal where you are. Another interesting question that we had on this assessment is how socially connected you are. We do know that one of the biggest health epidemic nowadays is social isolation. Internet addiction to social isolation. Yeah. But social isolation essentially, you know, people get the antidote by fake social interaction, but social isolation is a major signal for depressive symptoms, health symptoms. Yeah. So all of these questions, we put them on nine questions. We optimize this assessment to death. So cool. So cool. And then we, based on that, will prescribe you the program, wider-air programs will get you into the program, and then you start doing these interactive interventions. They're all evidence-based. So six years, three and a half million people? Yeah. That's on the consumer side. That's on the consumer side. That's incredible. You can get it. High five. Good job. And then so a quick question is, out of those, out of the last six years, now how many people are you funneling into the next, those interventions? Like which interventions are the most popular for the emotional side you're working with? So we have a variety of engines. We have over 3,000 different intervention experiences, if you will. Anywhere from classic self-reflection, journaling interventions, interventions that are involving light gaming, audio-visual relaxation experiences, we're measuring with sensors, objective stress level, and then provide you deep breathing exercises, all the way to classic CBT intervention and cognitive acceptance therapy and other accepted clinical modalities. The unique way about how we're delivering it is that the principle is that it has to be something that people would want to do. So it's got to be fun. It's got to be engaging. It's got to be destigmatized. It's got to be readily available and personalizable. Yeah. And when you get all of these, you get really good engagement and people use the product, which is what we didn't know when we started. It was a very interesting experiment. Hey, we put interventions, we digitize them and we create fun experiences around them. Will people use? Will it be effective? Will we see the clinical outcomes? And the first part of our journey, will people be willing to pay? And the answer was yes for all. That's so cool. Okay. So then someone that is logging in goes through the process of answering the questions. They get an assessment. You get their assessment. Can they access their assessment, like how you rank them in the different areas? Yeah. So the process of self-care for your emotional health goes through awareness, right? You've got to be aware about your condition. You've got to be feeling comfortable to look at the data. And we've created an interface that allows people to track how they're doing. Great. Unlike a product that would kind of attack it in a very negative, stigmatized way. Hey, if you're depressed, click here, or you're depressed, we have news for you. We have kind of destigmatized it and called the assessment happiness score. Happiness score. Happiness score. Usually after I finish an intervention, how can you tell if I'm happier? Do you, do I retake the... So the clinical protocol, you come on board, we measure your day two and then every other week and we track the... Every other week. And am I taking a different nine questions? Or same? The clinical assessment is different than the onboarding assessment. Yeah, yeah. And then you're taking that and every other week. These are the same questions. And the clinical assessment is, how many questions is that? Well, it depends on the type of clinical assessment. In more clinical settings, we work with health plans. You know, we would use PHQ-9, God-2, God-7. These are very clinical assessment tools in more kind of environment that we want to do population health. So we want to engage many people and by destigmatizing the whole process, we would use happiness score. Happiness score is a clinically validated assessment, highly correlated with PHQ-9. And in fact, it has been accepted by the health plan as a clinical tool that they're using now at this destigmatized engagement, clinical assessment tool that they're using. And then what does the... When I'm doing the interventions, do I do an intervention and then do I... It depends on the intervention probably if I do it again later or not. So we personalize the experience for you based on what we know works and kind of protocols that are working. We personalize it so, you know, if you come in and we're, for example, putting in front of intervention that is using journaling. But guess what? You didn't like journaling. There is no point in putting this intervention in front of you. That's exactly how we would send you away. If you are coming in and we ask you to meditate, but you're not a meditator. We lost you right there. So we would kind of personalize the tools on the journey. And then around this kind of experience, you know, we have community experience, we have psycho-educational. We kind of took a lot of the elements that make consumer products successful with behaviors that we know people like. So people like Pinterest. Let's have people kind of pin happy moments and things that they develop emotional attachment. Let's look at support groups. So we know that when it comes to feeling stronger, tied to a community, you get support. You know, the Weight Watcher model, the analog model, can we bring it online and support people that want to use, get some support and encouragement from a non-judgmental environment and people that go through different situations like theirs or other. But they're all dealing with something. Does Happify also help bring the communities of people in the local environments together that are working on their emotional health? So not at this point. We are a self-care technology tool. We went out to solve the enormous challenge of access convenience. You want to kind of, you know, we have one in five people dealing with mental health conditions here in markets other than the US, there are markets where there's simply a tremendous challenge in getting the right resources, you know. So the only way in our mind to solve it is by good self-care solution. And technology that can be easily accessible over the internet, just like that, is how much is the cost of the self-care tool? So it depends where we're selling it, right? So we're selling on the consumer side, you know, roughly speaking, $130 a year subscription, which if you compare it to any other modality of care, if you look at what it costs you, if you go to your therapy or other, this is very affordable, way cheaper. It's the same price as a beer a month or a Spotify, you know. So I used to like the analogy of, you know, a coffee at Starbucks once a month and it's basically covered and it provides you the ongoing support that you need, whatever that is. Yeah, that's cool, that's cool. Now where do you see this going in the next couple of years, increasing the amount of corporate clients that come on board as well as individual consumers and what other technologies are you aiming to manifest and how are you using all of the crazy biomarker information that we're learning, all this kind of stuff? Yeah, so first of all, you know, we have a lot of people coming to the consumer offering. It's essentially not where we're focusing our efforts. We're spending more time on working in the health plan, self-insured employers environment, so we're kind of more on the enterprise side. We're seeing great opportunities with pharmaceutical companies on digital therapeutics. These are components of the platform that would go through FDA clearance. And generally speaking, this is a giant opportunity, so there's a lot to do there. These are big markets, big problems to solve and technology would be the one to solve. The pre-condition is that you can engage people and deliver the outcomes which we can. Where is this all going? I think that the data that is building in our systems allows us to start kind of creating machine learning and interfaces that would allow us to even further improve the care. I do see a lot of opportunities to integrate AI. I do see a lot of opportunities to integrate sensors that matter for your emotional health. We're already doing it with heart rate variability, which is a clinical measurement of stress. Sleep is very important if you're sleep deprived. Your entire emotional regulation mechanism is just not there. We do see opportunities with stress, sleep and other sensors. I think that our point of view about the adoption of all these crazy sensors would like to see the market maturing and essentially the sensors that would become relevant in our point of view would ultimately be commercialized by the hardware companies. We're another hardware company. We understand software and we want to interact with hardware that is widespread. Okay, cool. The hardware that you interact with, thinking about the neuro-tech hardware and the biotech hardware, how would you then... I mean, integrating with that is very interesting, but then also trying to integrate with that and how you're working with the health plans. This is a whole new beast. So you have to... There's a tendency to kind of innovate and kind of stretch innovation. You have to realize that the mechanisms by which people getting the care today in the healthcare system are mechanisms and environments that are... They realize that innovation is important, but there's a pace of innovation that they can digest. This is a large complex healthcare system and you have to make sure that you innovate in a pace that you can commercialize. And we've had the moments where we kind of had so many cool things that we did. We would say this is too innovative. We should wait with that. The system is not ready yet for that. I like how you said innovate at a rate that can be digested. Most people don't think about that. That's a good point as well, is get to the market as the market is being ready for the services. There's a lot of red tape and bureaucracy to go through with health plans. So I also... I'm very grateful that you're pursuing that route because it's a tough route to pursue. And thank you for everything that you're doing. This is a really important project. Guys, everyone, check out Hapify. Link's in the bio. Check them out. Over what a pleasure. Thank you so much. Pleasure being here. Thank you for talking to us on the show. Everyone, thanks for tuning in. Like I said, check out the... Write us your thoughts in the comments. We'd love to hear from you. Embark on this. Go and manifest the future. Build the future. Build your destiny into the world. Thanks everyone and we'll see you soon. Peace.