 All right. Good morning everyone. We're up against Doug Leone and Ev Williams So we thought it was just gonna be our parents in the audience, but a couple of you have found your way out here So thank you for putting your trust in us I'm here with a fantastic founder in in in Adam check route So Adam over the next few days this stage will be filled with founders and operators sharing their most important lessons and Painful learnings about building technology companies and personally you've been building spring health for six and a half years now And today it's a fantastic company. You know valued at two billion dollars more than 750 employees and somewhere around a thousand customers So let's start with some context. Why is what we're discussing here today important? Like why is it worth building a tech company? I think I think for me it's important because it's There's two reasons one is that you should always just follow your dream, right? And I think that founding your own company is the ultimate expression of following your dream And then the second for me personally as well is that founding a company It's it's a job or a career that really pushes you in every way, right? It's physically challenging. It's emotionally challenging It's mentally challenging. It's you know, it pushes you in every dimension So if you're a person who likes to be pushed, then I think it's a it's an exciting path, right regardless of the domain That's a fantastic answer So let's dive into the topic it's hand where we're kicking off this stage today Disgusting the foundational step that every company has to go through right Putting together a founding team. Let's start with a very broad question. Like which things are non-negotiable in in great founding teams We've um, it's the funny the backstory around this is that we actually met in Norway and we talked about this over breakfast Because I I had a very strong belief that the only thing that matters is trust And and I honestly I kind of lucked out. So when we founded spring, there was three of us We we met as students at Yale. I was getting my phd and and we you know, it started with a cold email It was one of those stories and so I really lucked out because in hindsight when I look back that was an extremely irresponsible decision And and now I believe strongly that the only thing that matters is trust And you know Miko and lots and lots of other people will were saying at the time Look that you know, it's really important that you have a balance someone who understands sales Someone who understands technology that kind of stuff and and I think um, I still stand by my answer You know, many people say that you need balance I think balance is okay, but I think that trust is really the most important thing. All right. So it's all about trust Yes, hand to that All right So you already referred to the fact you were three people when you when you found a spring yourself your CEO to this day april and then your technical co-founder abhishek and you you Allude to the fact that you met at Yale and it started with a cold email But can you describe that process in a bit more detail and specifically can you touch on like How did the three of you become convinced that like we're going to go on this crazy ride together? Yeah, I mean the interesting thing about founding a company is that at the beginning there's really no risk, right? There's nothing at stake. There's no customers. There's no product. There's no team. There's no employees There's no, you know investment and so in the early days It's such a very simple decision because you can unwind that commitment with It's an equally, you know trivial statement to say that you're going to found a company and equally trivial to unwind it Because it's almost no consequences. And so, you know in the early days I think it didn't really feel like a huge decision We met, you know, we we converged around this idea, you know I was getting my phd on on treatment selection algorithms and basically developing machine learning tools that would help us make better decisions in psychiatry And you know, and we all had this, you know, this this passion and this excitement to to bring this kind of technology to patients Right and so in an academia You kind of incentivize to keep on publishing papers and Industry for us was a faster way of bringing that technology to market And so we converged around that idea and that excitement, but at the beginning it was it's a pretty trivial statement to say, okay Well, let's make it a company. Okay, fine Yeah, obviously it ultimately becomes very important, right once the company grows big So like I don't know looking back if you were to found again, would you have like gone through a deeper due diligence process? Yeah, I It's one of those things where the, you know, the frog is boiling in water and they never jump out if they if it starts cold The the the consequences really grow and snowball in the background Again, you never say it was never a day where you say, okay, it's a two billion dollar company We're gonna have a thousand employees and five million patients that you know that day doesn't just emerge And so these things kind of creep up on you and you realize over time that the consequences are big Um, I think the naivety really helps though, right like when you found a company You say, okay, we're gonna found it and you have no idea how much work It's going to be how much stress is going to be the emotions, you know the The strain it's going to take and so I think that the naivety kind of helps You just say I want to find a company and you just do it and and you live with the consequences and you get better at managing it All right And it sounds like, you know spring's founding team is is pretty much a textbook example of how you should find your Find your co-founders So like, you know three people find each other at university serendipitously because they have this shared passion for a problem Which is a big problem shared by many people and they happen to bring in sort of complementary skills Like you had a deep understanding of the problem space and maybe some of the solution space as well April had a drive to basically just go out and build a generational tech company and then abhishek I think you described him as the most talented A technical person you had you had ever met Um, however, not all people stumble across potential co-founders that complement them. Many people's networks are pretty homogenous So which one is more important fun with people, you know and sort of trust from before Or with someone who with whom you have like perfectly complementary skills It's definitely trust. I don't know whether you trust them beforehand Right. I think trust is something that builds over time and is definitely earned Um, and so I would say that either someone that you do already deeply trust and think that you can You know ride out the next 10 years with them Or it's someone where you've both are committed to building that trust. I think is the most important the skill set Look, it matters in the first one year Maybe the first six months maybe but as soon as you've managed to raise any money as soon as you start hiring people You can hire people to cover the gaps So if if no one knows how to code hire someone who knows how to code if no one understands fpna hire Someone who understands fpna now for every kind of every kind of skill set You'll be able to hire people who who are way better than any of these founders at that At that specific vertical or that specific role. And so I don't worry too much about skill set I worry a lot about trust and whether Whether all of the founders are equally committed And are on the same page about what this is going to take and how long you're willing to dedicate and What your exit criteria are going to be. Yeah, I'll still push you a bit on that point Can you describe sort of your own skill set and you as a as a human being? Can you describe which things in in april or abhi sort of we're not necessarily sort of vital But certainly important in in complimenting how you are like which skills that's needed to be there. Yeah, the um Well, again though, this is a great example So, you know in the in the history books, it's going to say adam is the domain guy He undersert psychiatry in practice I basically ran sales and and spend most of my time with customers And so it's like, okay Well, if you wanted to hire an ideal first sales rep You're probably not going to go and find a guy with a phd of machine learning So it's like already the domain thing is kind of challenged. I would say that Each the most important thing that you're going to bring is commitment, right? It's that you're actually going to be dedicated to trying to solve this problem and that you're willing to write out The pain I would say I think in april's case, you know that she she is the the the The battery pack for spring health like she brings energy to everything and she I've you know I've never met anyone that has that same drive that possessed that persistence that focus that dedication and you know, she She has bigger batteries than anyone you will ever meet and so I think that there are you know, there are elements of that I think she's also very optimistic both of us are highly critical But also optimistic and I think that's an interesting balance that is pretty helpful For at least someone on the founding team should be able to to criticize and to You know to to really evaluate and analyze what you're doing But you have to be optimistic because there's a million reasons why this is not going to work out So if you know you you'll feel smart by identifying the reasons why it's not going to work out But you do have to do something about it and I think that you know some combination of trust dedication and optimism I think is really the only The only criteria that I would look for in a in a founder or if if I was evaluating a founding team sure Um, well so far in this discussion, we've assumed that every company has a founding team But that's not obviously not true I think out of sort of one white combinators matches 10 percent of companies tend to be solo founded And there are some fantastic success stories that have been built by solo founders So in general, would you advise the audience like against founding alone? Or can there be some people or situations in which in which that actually makes sense? I mean, there's definitely cases where it makes sense, right? I think the history books have shown Um, I could never do it. I don't know how they can do it. I think it's it's a it's a crazy ask The the thing that that worked really well about about me in april particularly over the years is that When you have a co-founder that's equally dedicated and equally in it You're you're writing these ups and downs right the ups and downs at the beginning You know, they're relatively minor and they maybe change once once every day or once every week and then As as the company grows the ups and downs get bigger and bigger the wins get crazy The losses get crazy and and the time between the two of them really narrows and so It's very helpful amongst the founding team just to balance that emotional load so that you're not both You know if there's two of you it's rare that both of you are hyper negative on one day And so it's helpful to have a little bit of balance between the two of you So if there's a day where i'm really, you know frustrated because something has happened and I you know I want x and I didn't get y or you know, there's a day when the same thing happens with april I think that that buffering is really helpful because you know If it's just you on your own, you know, you can be in you can have a A run of losses or a run of wins that can kind of tilt you and and you start behaving irrationally, right? You either start to believe your own hype if things keep going well Or you start to believe that you're dying when you're not dying and this is just what it looks like and so A bit of balance is very helpful. Yeah Absolutely We did talk to a little bit about skills in in founding teams And I think a specific skill gap and something that I asked you about the trip to narva that you mentioned Is a technical co-founder like there's a lot of people who want to build companies But aren't themselves technical or aren't sufficiently technical for the problem space in in question So like a bunch of people going around saying like I want to find a company, but I don't have a technical co-founder How would you advise them to think about that? Like is a technical co-founder always necessary? And if so, like how should you find them when you don't know anyone who can code that well? Yeah, I I think that you have to be extraordinarily critical of your own company What company are you really really building, right? If it's another vertical sass company You probably don't need a technical co-founder. You really don't like if it's some blue sky problem It's really never been done before extraordinarily complicated hardware or software technology Maybe but if it's another hardware sass come, you know another vertical sass company That's hosted in the cloud and it does some crud stuff Then you don't really need a technical co-founder, right? That's the kind of skill gap that you can hire for down the line You'll be able to find much more senior people much more experienced people You know people who have been through the ringer many times and so I think that You know for me I think you have to be very critical of whether you really need a technical co-founder These days if I was going to build a second company I would do it all on pre-sales I would build prototypes in figma or in vision and I would forward sell on the prototypes I wouldn't even touch a line of code. I think we spent the first two years of spring Writing code that ended up being rewritten maybe six months down the line anyways And so it's You know, I don't know how helpful we had a technical co-founder And yet still we spent two years building something that we didn't sell and then six months later We spent a year rebuilding it once we had sold it So it's like was that useful probably not and so I don't I think there are cases where a technical co-founder is necessary I think that most people, you know for for another yet another b2b SaaS company I don't think you need one interesting. So if I was I mean, let's pretend I'm not technical actually. Let's not pretend I'm not technical if I was to found like a an HR tech company like I'll go after work day What you'd advising me to do is to go out draw a product in figman actually start selling the product Just that view definitely sell it go out see if you can convince someone to buy it from you And that's the ultimate test of whether you should do it because it's very easy to build something It's very easy to find technical co-founders. You can go and work with outsource agencies You can build whatever you want. There's no there's no like fundamental barrier But you're also not de-risking anything because you're just building the thing you haven't sold it Ultimately, your company is only real if you have revenue The only way to get revenue is by selling not by building Not by it's a Simple thing to get wrong, but you actually don't need the product to sell it You need customers to justify building it and so it's an interesting I think it's a mistake that we make don't get me wrong We spent two years building something that barely anyone used that was a mistake that was wasteful, but um Yeah, and that again is not to say that to build the next workday I think to build the next workday you have to have an incredibly technical company You have to make a lot of really good architecture decisions without a doubt But I don't think that you need a technical co-founder to do that I think you need to hire a lot of really good engineers interesting Right, let's switch gears and let's talk about roles in in founding teams because that's obviously another decision You have to make it's like what am I going to work on? What are you going to work on? I guess in your case in the in the early days of spring It was kind of pretty clear that abhi was going to be cto But you in april like had a sufficient overlap where you probably need to make a very intentional decision About what you're going to focus on you mentioned like you focused on sales Even if you had this like deep understanding of the problem space which probably would have allowed you to do other things So like uh, so how did you choose your early roles and why and like why and how have you kind of adapted them since yeah So, um, this is a tricky one and I don't know how representative our case is for what other companies would experience But so, uh, you know april and I uh have had highly interchangeable roles throughout the history of spring You know in the early days, you know, I came out of grad school with my phd designed the original version of the product You know talked about how it would work You know we put together the first version of the product and then when we needed to sell it I was the natural person to sell it because it was kind of my idea And so I was just explaining how it works and how it could solve You know these enterprise mental health problems and it didn't really feel like sales It felt like I was just explaining it But then I was the natural first sales rep and then you know if I'm the first sales rep It makes sense for me to train the next ones and make sense for me to hire them out And then so I ended up running sales for a pretty long time Then we got to a point where there are just people who are better at running sales And so we hired that person and I moved back over into product and while I was running sales April was running products and then we switched back and now april runs products and engineering And I'm just doing sales and so the whole time we've been very flexible in in in changing those roles and it's interesting You know because it doesn't It really emphasizes that your initial skill set is kind of irrelevant for where the company is going to go And the needs of the company also emerge and evolve over time Quite considerably and so I think you have to stay flexible to that You have to you have to be open about what you're good at and what you're bad at You have to be willing to change that and put in the work You know to to grow in areas where you're weak and and that might take sustained effort And you have to be willing to you know, there's that amazing article about give up your Legos, right? You have to be willing to give up your Legos at certain points There are people out there in the world who are going to be way better at that job than you were Even if it's your baby and even if it was your idea and so you have to be willing to bring those people in for the For the good of the company. So I think that You know in even in the early days, I think the It's it's so variable And it's it can people can play different roles as long as they have low ego As long as they stay humble as long as they have that growth mindset And they they know that they don't know everything and that they have to learn things I think that as long as everyone stays flexible then the changing roles over time It was not a big deal for us. April is very low ego though So I don't know if it maybe other companies find it harder, but in our case it was pretty easy And a specific role that most companies are going to have to decide on pretty early on or some founding teams Do try and push it back is like who's going to be CEO and and like Statistically in most companies the person who's CEO Initially is going to be CEO for like a very long time and obviously the CEO role What likes of immaterial in the early days eventually you become the face of the company Probably have more influence and so on so how do you make that decision? Isn't that like super hard to decide who's going to be like the the front person? Yeah I mean again in the early days there's like nothing at stake and so for us it was like a two minute conversation April wanted to do it. She'd already founded a company before she'd sold it to fox. She'd come back She wanted to find a new company, you know, I was still getting my phd. I hadn't dropped out I was still, you know wrapping up my phd. April said she wanted to be CEO. I was like, aye sounds good That was really how long the conversation lasted it didn't last much longer and I think it again Why did that work? I think it worked because she wasn't in it for the ego It was an expression of how committed she was to the company and that she was really dedicated to spend the next 10 15 maybe 20 years on this problem And so I think you know, that's how it worked out but I've seen a lot of people they do stuff like co-CEO and all that kind of stuff I think I think it kind of points to maybe some like either ego issues that are going on or unresolved tensions in the company It's like, okay, you have two CEOs. Okay, you know Probably you should resolve that and you should have one CEO. Yeah. Yeah, it's loud and clear All right Let's let's hit off one very practical question Which is you know one more decision that you're going to have to make is how much equity is each founder going to get So would you always advise founders to go for an equal equity split or would you sometimes in kind of some circumstances? Split equity unequally um, I think There's always nuance I think that you should just split equally you should have a one-year cliff and you should have a four-year vest I think that there's always nuance and like there are certainly going to be cases where you might want to vary things If someone started working on it long before the rest of the team joined Maybe you can talk about back dating the vest to the point where that person had started if one person joins late Maybe the other person starts vesting beforehand, but ultimately like imbalances amongst co-founders In terms of the cap table, I think it can it can again it can it can erode trust, right? And I think it erodes trust because one person is like Literally not as bought in as the other person And so it then you'll start to wonder like is this person less bought in than me is this person less committed Are they putting in a certain percentage less work less time less emotional investment? And you know, maybe they are because they are literally incentivized less than you So I think anything that can erode trust over time. I think is a is not worth it I think for me I would always split it keep it clean and and keep it equal if you know Especially because you know when you go into these situations if you say that you're co-founding a company together But one person deserves more equity again. I think it speaks to like a A thing that's going to blow up in the future. Does one person really think they're worth more than the other person? Why should one person? You know unless they brought in a lot of angel investing unless one person has funded the company Which again is different. I think ultimately your co-founders should be equal All right, well, then let's talk about decision making within the founding team So, you know these days I doubt you and able April are able to like make every single decision together You probably don't even strive to do that But in the early days you conceivably could like the complexity of the company's so small that you could be involved in every single decision Should you do that? For like buying and cohesion or should you move into like independent decision making within the roles you've decided on? We kept it together for a really long time I think for as long as you can fit all the people in a room I mean like it's a little bit different now with remote work But I think for as long as everyone's in the same room or if everyone's working together I think the the As to to the extent that you can reduce communication overhead and reduce communication barriers You should just do that and I think that it was nice in the early days We were always in the same room. You always knew what was going on on everything You would always have input into decision doesn't mean that you have to make every decision together Doesn't mean that you have to agree on every single thing But I think that it was helpful and definitely especially amongst an early core team I would say don't even make it just about the founders making the early decisions get your early employees in as well because The the more you can spread that context the better, right? Like it your first 10 people are going to hire your first 30 people Your first 30 people are going to hire the first 50 people and the first 50 people are going to lock in culture for basically the Next thousand people and so it's really important that those first 10 people Do do a good job of understanding the business and hiring the next 10 that those first 20 Do a good job of understanding the business and hiring the next 50 because those 50 are incredibly influential down the line and so yeah, I think Eventually you split right there's only so many places you can be I know april is in vegas right now I know it's just too and she knows i'm here. You know at some point you have to just trust each other and and go and do stuff, but But but yeah, I would say for as long as possible I wouldn't shy away from having too many cooks in the kitchen All right Now springs fighting team is kind of famously Diverse, I mean already talked about how it's diverse in in in skill sets like a fighting game should be but then it's also diverse in a bunch of like demographical factors um and and What I want to ask you about is like to what extent is kind of co-founder diversity? Whether in skill set in mindset in attitude in perspective Like to what extent is a good thing and in what areas do you have to be aligned in what areas? Do you have to be like carbon copies of each other? Yeah, it's um, it is important, right? I think it is really important. I think that The process of founding a company is just de-risking a bunch of things Like you have this conviction that companies should give out free mental health care to people and To their employees and to their family members who work that like you have conviction in this statement and the whole point of founding a company is to continually de-risk that statement, right and so um It's important, right? I would say Diversity helps you accomplish that because there will be blind spots and there'll be things that you could each You can you can spread the load I I think I think the thing that you have to be crystal clear on is On is trust and I think is also this kind of this growth mindset You have to be incredibly clear on and I think We didn't do this conversation in hindsight, but I kind of wish we did I think you have to be crystal clear on What are your exit criteria? I think you have to agree upfront like this is how long I'm going to work on it If this happens I'm going to keep working on it and if this happens We're going to fold and and until that exit criteria has been met You don't quit because there's going to be a million times where you want to quit almost every day You'll have a pretty good reason to quit without a doubt And so you but you have to say like this is the line in the sand that we're going to draw And until we reach that line we don't quit all of your customers concerned that might not be the line For me that wasn't the line actually losing a you know a seven figure deal is not the line for me at all For me the day is the day that I quit is the day that april breaks trust if I don't trust april anymore I'm out and I'm sure that should probably give you a pretty similar answer, you know on On the inverse so I think that you know the thing that you have to be You have to be aligned on is At what point will you quit and that you're not going to quit up until that point Let's have a bit deeper there Like are there other questions that should be asked in that conversation Like if I wanted to found a company with you now, and I don't know you very well from before Like what is the list of questions? I should ask you on like a zero and make sure you give like a certain answer before I trust that this is going to work out Why do you want to find a company? Yeah, what's the goal? Do you want to get rich? Do you want to be famous? Do you want to hire a lot of people? Do you want to be powerful? Do you want to Are you obsessed with building this thing? Whatever the thing is that you want to build is it because you're excited by the the problem? Is it intellectually challenging? I would need to really understand your motivation for founding the company Again in hindsight, this is all stuff that I'm saying now that we never did right? We were just like all right. Let's do it and we just started doing it and see what happens, which Don't do that by the way, but um But yeah, I would I would really need to understand your motivation and then again What when will you quit? Because it's so easy to quit and the number one reason why companies ultimately die Is because of founders either fighting or quitting right and so to the extent that you can Remove as much risk as possible from a founder quitting or a founder fighting each other Then I think that that's probably the most helpful thing you can do to de-risk The company's long-term success. So yeah, really try and understand their motivation Understand them as a person understand where they came from understand where they want to get to Understand why they're doing this and if you think that you're compatible You don't have to agree by the way You just have to be compatible and you just have to understand each other. Okay. I think we have two minutes left I'll try and clear two questions. So first of all, we talked about like the early days of the founding team But obviously when a company becomes as big as spring is today Like you're you're you're sort of coupon relationship evolves and you have to sort of nurture it So I'm curious to hear like how has doors in april's relationship evolved and what habits have you found for like keeping it together to a sufficient extent? Yeah april's now my longest relationship When we're not dating at all, but the um, you really should think of it like a marriage You it is a marriage no matter whatever people say it is literally a marriage many founders go through Counseling together in the same way that you would if you if you were married I would totally recommend that for people regardless of whether the relationship is good or bad or You think it might be good in the future or bad in the future. You should always consider investing in that um It's really a relationship it grows it changes a lot over time Like now I understand april in a way deeper way than I used to in the early days We would scream at each other all the time walk out of the room like it, you know It was crazy. It was crazy and you know, you learn over time. Okay. This is you know This is how what makes her happy. This is what makes her sad if I say this she's gonna be you know This is gonna rub her the wrong way. She knows the exact same thing about me And so you learn a lot of balance in the relationship, but you have to invest in it You have to work on it. You have to work on on your professional relationship You have to work on being friends You have to work on really investing in understanding that person so that you It's important not just because of the this is the person that I've spent the most time in my life with You will spend more time with that person than anyone else in your life. And so you should probably be Open to that and you should you should probably make that as pleasant as possible And it's also important professionally as well because I think the the stronger the bond that the founders have The better, you know, longevity you'll have as a company. Okay Very quickly. Let's end on a high high note. What's your favorite memory of you and April working together on spring 20 seconds? 20 seconds. It was probably like 2016 2017 We were in south park in san francisco, which is a little uh, a little area where all of the vcs are and We'd probably just been rejected by like 20 people as usual And it was a beautiful day. We finished. We were about to get a taxi back to the airport April was like laying in this children's playground and she's like rolling on the floor and she's like, do you want to just take some selfies? And I was like, yeah We'd taken an absolute pounding all day all these vcs were the million reasons to say no and they'd all said no We're like, all right, whatever and we were going to go home And I think it was that's that's a great example in my head at the point I was pretty pissed off, you know, I'm sitting there thinking these vcs don't get it I hate this this sucks And she was you know, she was just in a different phase at that point And we got through it wonderful. All right. Thanks adam. Thanks everyone who came out to listen to us. I hope you learned something