 Helsinki, it's great to be here. But do you know, as a matter of fact, there is an ongoing mental health crisis in the world? It's such severe that actually 35% of the population is suffering from moderate to severe anxiety or depression syndromes. 15% of the American population are eating antidepressants medication. And there is a sharp rise of teenage and young adult suicide rates that has actually risen by more than 60% over 10 years. Yet, our societies fund mental health with a mere or like a meager 4.4% of the total healthcare budget. And that is such a shame. But luckily, we have entrepreneurs who are addressing this tremendous challenge. And one of those is April Co here. Welcome. Thank you, PJ. So you are the CEO of Spring Health, one of the leaders in a platform for mental health in the US market. But there is more to that, and we will certainly start talking about that. You have a very interesting background. Being a musician myself, there's one particular part on your CV that really, really impresses me. And that I would die to have. She attended Juilliard School. I did. Isn't that awesome? For oboe. Yeah. Yeah, but anyway, apart from Juilliard School and Yale, that's where you founded Spring Health. Yes. And now April here is not only 30 under 30 on the Forbes list, but she's also the youngest female leader of a unicorn in the world. I think she deserves a applause for that. So and before we turn over to to April, there needs to be full disclosure here. The reason why I'm sitting here, it's because I'm on the board of directors of Spring because we invested in this phenomenal company. And why did we do that? Well, of course, exceptional founders in April and her co-founder, Adam. There was also a combination of a strong product that really was differentiated from from the rest in the market and obviously a huge need, huge need and where the product that Spring offered could actually demonstrate that it actually helped as opposed to many other products in the market. So that was the reason we invested and we're extremely happy we did that two years ago because we have seen change and the growth that we've seldom seen. And I know I've been close to many, many exceptional founders and founder stories, including the likes of Avito, Spotify and Isettle and Fubo TV and others. So I'm really, really proud to sit here next to you, April. So tell me, let's talk about founder market fit. Got it. And how did you get here? Yes. First of all, I love the framing of this conversation, the three fits, and so I'm really excited to talk about that. But before I do, I wanted to just comment on how surreal this is. Like when we first met, I asked you, you know, what kind of board member are you? And you said to me that you are generally the board therapist. And I was like, Oh, I wonder what that means. And and, you know, you really delivered on that. And, you know, some of the best conversations that I've ever had have been with you. And, you know, I think this is surreal for me because, you know, you have this uncanny ability to ask me like exactly the right questions and then leave me thinking about the questions for a very long time afterwards. And I just think it's amazing that, you know, we're having one of those conversations on stage here in Helsinki in front of all these people. So this is a really surreal moment for me. But let me start off by introducing the company and a little bit about how we're different and what we do. So I founded Spring with the founding idea that faster access to mental health care is meaningless if the care doesn't actually work for you. And, you know, most of the time, the care doesn't actually work. And it's not because the care is bad or because the providers are bad or the treatments don't work or it's not that necessarily. It's because the care is poorly matched to the individual. And so people have to try a bunch of different treatments, a bunch of different programs, a bunch of different apps, a bunch of different providers, provider after provider after provider after provider until they kind of randomly find something that works for them. And, you know, I went through that personally myself and I, you know, struggled with my mental health for over 10 years. And I personally went through this journey of trial and error, of trying to find, you know, the exact provider and resource that would work for me. And, you know, this is an incredibly painful problem. This causes so much suffering, unnecessary suffering in the world. But it's also an incredibly expensive problem. And, you know, when I started the company, no one was talking about mental health care in this way. Everyone was very obsessed with faster access. It was all about break down the barriers to access, faster care, faster, faster, faster. And, you know, faster care, as I was saying, is meaningless if it doesn't actually work for you. So I partnered with the world's foremost expert in computational psychiatry, Dr. Adam Shekrut, who is my co-founder. And he was actually the first to prove that we could use data and machine learning to outperform the average psychiatrist in matching people to the right treatment for them. And so we basically took that IP and embedded it into, initially, an employee benefit product. So we are a comprehensive mental health solution now for employers. And we are so fortunate to work with some of the largest and the most important employers in the world today, like Adobe, Pepsi, General Mills, Bain, Instacart. And it's just been an incredible journey so far. I think I've heard that we are Tiger's fastest growing healthcare portfolio company. And, you know, over the past three years, we've at least four X, we've four to six X every year over the past three years. And we now have the privilege and honor of, you know, covering the mental health care of millions of lives. And so it's just been an incredible journey. I'm sure there are entrepreneurs in the audience who are also curious to know, how did you know that you and Adam were, you know, a really strong founder team? Yeah. So, so the founding story, I love telling it, it started with a cold email. I, so I was at Yale, I had dropped out of school for a few years to start another company. And then I was back, I had one year left of school to finish my bachelors. And my co-founder Adam, he was finishing his PhD. And we're the same age because he's a child prodigy, like literally a genius and I was late. So we met in the middle, we're same age, and we met at Yale. And I came across a paper that he wrote. It was a landmark paper. It was a groundbreaking paper, and it made him famous, basically. And it was describing, you know, the first machine learning model proven to outperform psychiatrists. And so I just reached out to him cold. I just sent him an email and I said, Hey, I think that your research represents the future of mental health care. I think this is where mental health care is headed. Well, you meet with me? And he replied, saying, Why do you want to meet with me? And, but ultimately, you know, I guess I convinced him because we went for coffee. And, you know, we had a very long walk and we talked about his research and the ideas. And I talked about my startup experience. And there were three co-founders at the time at the, when we founded the company. And we were all technical. So in the early days, we kind of all kind of got together and hacked the early product together. And that's how we got started. But, you know, going back to your question around, like, how did I know Adam was the right co-founder? It was, I varied deliberately since this was my second company. And in my first company, I realized, like, co-founding relationships are everything. They will make or break your company. And so, you know, in the early days, even before we incorporated, even before we had, you know, official name, we very deliberately chose, like, mini projects together. So we would apply for grants or competitions or pitches. And we went out for all of these things. And it was an opportunity for us to experiment with working with each other and see if we were compatible. And we just won all of these, like, grants and prizes together. And so, and it was just a delight working with him. And so the chemistry was there very quickly. We're very complimentary in many ways. And he's just a brilliant, genius man. And I'm just so privileged to work with him. And I can attest that both of you are equally intense people, which I think has served me well as entrepreneurs in this very, very competitive space. So it's clear that you had strong, you know, founder market fit. Let's talk about product market fit for a while, which is a concept that I think most entrepreneurs know fairly well. And why do you think you found product market fit? And what sets it apart, you know, your product from from others? Yeah, so our journey to product market fit was a long one. And so basically we came together at school and incorporated May of 2016. And keep in mind, like, I had no, I had basically no professional experience. I didn't have any health care experience. And so the first two years was really just us, like, learning health care. It was obviously we had a subject meta expert in computational psychiatry or precision psychiatry in Adam, my co-founder. But none of us knew about the business of health care. And in the US, health care is a cluster. It's incredibly complex and it takes years to really understand the ins and outs of the US health care system. And so for two years, it was really an exploration of the business of health care and really understanding how we could package this incredible IP that we had to go to market. And so actually our first product looked very different from the product that exists today. So we had this algorithm that could predict what treatment would work for you. And we thought, OK, 80 percent of antidepressants are prescribed by primary care providers. And so why don't we go to primary care providers and sell them a clinical decision support tool that helps them make decisions for their patients who are struggling with mental health issues so that they can be better prescribers? Because we know that primary care providers don't specialize in behavioral health care and there's so much trial and error that goes into prescribing these medications. And so we created a software and we sold into health systems. And it was a slog. Like it was like people would fall asleep in sales pitches. Like people would just be on their phones all the time. Like it was clear like no one cared about the product. And and so, you know, but we kept at it because, you know, we're resilient and we just kept trying to make it work. And and and I don't have to get into the details of why it didn't work. But one in one pitch to a health system after, you know, the decision maker was like on their phone the entire meeting finally looks up. And he says, you know, you really should talk to our HR department because our physicians or nurses are burned out and we have a mental health crisis. And I think you're I think you're honest and something. But I think you should talk to our HR department. And, you know, at the time, we knew we did not have product market fit because there was like no momentum behind the business. And, you know, there's a lot of, you know, founders who say like you when you have product market fit, you know it. And we definitely we definitely didn't have it and we knew it. So we were open to anything. So we took the HR meeting and it was the first time in any sales pitch where they listened and where they leaned in and like actually listened to what I had to say. And it was like I knew that that was like we were on to something and that was like the the moment. And so it's so ironic that we were like selling the health system. They punted us over to HR and, you know, and then that's how it got started. And it's ironic because we never sold that HR health or sorry, we never sold into that health system to HR ultimately. But we immediately after that meeting tracked down every HR person we could find in our network. I begged all my angel investors and all my investors to give us any interest to any HR people that they knew. And we just started pitching and pitching and refining and refining and refining. And very quickly it was it was very clear that there was a tremendous need among employees for better mental health care. And so even with like an MVP, we were able to sell that very quickly. So then we took off and that's the story. And that leads automatically to the go to market. Yes, that you actually found relatively quickly as a consequence of this. Right. Yes. So go to market fit is not as well known as a concept as product market fit. But in enterprise sales, go to market fit. Well, in enterprise sales, especially, but generally in sales, go to market fit is imperative to driving a good business. And go to market fit is basically like a repeatable, predictable growth engine for your business. It's taking whatever your market wants in your product, which you've already proven out with your product market fit and figuring out like what is the repeatable, predictable way of getting this to as many people as possible. And I actually heard of a concept from one of my mentors, who's Bob Tinker, who actually wrote an entire book about go to market fit. But basically we we got to go to market fit by essentially reviewing every quarter or every month, even all of the conversations that we had in in our sales, like every single conversation, we would do a retro and we would say, who did we talk to? You know, who which conversations did we have? What worked? What didn't work? And we we went through every single deal in great detail. And it was so laborious and so just it just was so boring to do that. And like we had like a few sales reps at the time. And I'm sure they hated me for this process because it was like so boring. And we would just like drill into every single deal and try to understand and really dissect, you know, what each deal felt like and what the process was. And we tried to glean patterns from every single conversation. And especially what we were looking for was the wow. Like what is the moment of wow? Like when when in the sales conversation or when in the sales process does the the prospect kind of like have that wow moment? Like wow. Like when when you went when in the sales pitch does that appear because that's what you have to actually replicate because a lot of founders like they get product market fit through their magnetism as founders. And there's something called like fairy. Magic pixie dust founder sales, right? Like where the founder is so charismatic and they go on site and they give this amazing pitch and then, you know, the customer buys. And and that's that's OK in the early days, but we couldn't scale that. And so we needed to figure out, like, what are the those wow moments? What are the patterns in our sales cycles and processes that we could use to create a very defined playbook that we would then roll out? And that took, you know, a few quarters, I would say, to really establish and then once we got it was like, yeah. And the growth has been nothing short and remarkable. But let's also talk about your personal developer development as as a leader, because when we invest two years ago, since then you have 10 X the number of employees. And that puts great demands on you as a leader. How has that been for you? Yeah. Wow, there are so many ways I can answer this question. You know, first off, I think it's incredibly important to talk about how I'm a I'm a very different person from when I started the company. So I am the youngest female CEO of a unicorn. I'm twenty nine. I started the company when I was twenty four. And like, start up experience aside, it's just like a very different person, you know, I had different priorities. I wasn't married, like I and but even as a founder and a CEO, I was incredibly different. And I think that the the the mark of a successful founder and CEO as as you know, so well as such a successful early early stage VC is like the founder's ability to to essentially reinvent themselves every every year if you're hyper growth, right? Because every year you have a fundamentally different company. And so, you know, I have changed hugely. And like I would say, you know, I have two big reflections and like learnings from from the journey so far. And it's been five years. And I would say the first big learning that I came to about a year ago was that there is a natural tension between hyper growth and mental health. And I think that they are not incompatible, but they can live out of harmony with each other very easily and very naturally, unless you're incredibly intentional about harmonizing the two together. And intentional means throwing resources behind it and prioritizing it as as a CEO. And I think that I think that I didn't think about it enough, frankly. And I was so obsessed with our mission and I had such a sense of urgency around fixing a profoundly broken mental health system that, you know, I didn't I don't think that I stopped early enough to think about you know, how since we're growing so quickly, you know, since we've had the privilege of meeting the explosive demand for mental health care during the pandemic, like, how are we you know, making sure that our own employees are mentally healthy too? And I don't think that I part his day as I should have. And so, you know, now we've fundamentally changed the way that we run the company. You know, we explicitly stated as a goal that we want to be the mentally healthiest company in the world. And we want to be the highest performing company in the world. And, you know, I haven't seen any companies that really have kind of talked about those things together. They're usually talked about very separately, but we we have a new framework now, a whole framework around people operations or people philosophy that essentially tries to marry those things together. And so every time we have a people policy or a process or a benefit, we ask ourselves three questions. One, does it advance the mental health of our employees and the performance of our organization? Two, does it advance the performance of the organization while accidentally hurting the mental health of our employees? And three, vice versa. Does it actually advance the mental health of our employees while inadvertently hurting the performance of the company? And we asked those three questions now for every every decision. So, for example, we just changed our parental leave policy. And it was a really interesting exercise to approach parental leave from that lens. We asked ourselves, you know, what is the mental health impact of, you know, different lengths of parental leave? And like, what are what is the performance impact? And what is the turnover impact? So that's an example of something that we've changed. But yeah, that's an example of a learning. And I mean, having that kind of responsibility, you have now a two billion dollar valuation you have in hundreds of employees. You have lots of expectations on your shoulder. How do you recharge? How do you make sure that your your your superpowers aren't sort of spent too soon? Yeah. So I recently did something which was apparently very scandalous. I took a very long vacation and I auto archived every single email that hit my inbox during the vacation. And I didn't check email. Well, I did for one urgent thing for you. But I didn't check email and I didn't check Slack. And that was incredibly rejuvenating. And I had a number of breakthroughs on the business and on me personally, just because I was able to really tune out. So that was incredible. And I would highly recommend it of any founder and any CEO and any leader, frankly. So so that's one thing. I also kickbox love kickboxing. I have taken it up. And so who's also on the other side? Is that the investor or the customer? Or, you know, it depends on the day employees or, you know. No, it's it's an it's amazing way to, you know, you know, just take your mind off of work like completely for a second and just focus on punching like something. So I've been taking that up. I exercise a lot. I have one day a week for the entire company where we don't take meetings. We call them calm Fridays. And what else do I do? Oh, I hang out with my family. Like family is is everything to me. It's the most important thing. It's way more important than work for me. And I make sure to make it a priority. So these last minute here, do you have any advice to aspiring builders of billion dollar companies, what they should do? Yes, I give the same piece of advice to everyone every time I give any of these talks. But I read this life changing book called The Dip by Seth Godin. I think it's the last name I should know this. I recommend it to everybody. It's like this little it's very, very fast to read. And it changed my life because it told me how to quit. And it basically talks about how the most successful people quit often, but they quit very deliberately. And before people are not successful because they're not they're not successful because inevitably there's always a dip in the journey of whatever you're doing. And, you know, there's a hard place. It's you go through rough patches where you want to quit. And then most people just quit when it gets hard. But if you start a journey and anticipate that there will be the dip, then you can basically set for yourself in advance kind of parameters or criteria for when you will actually quit and you hold yourself to that. And I've held myself to that to this day. When I started Spring Halls, I made a promise to myself that I wouldn't quit unless this thing happened. And I'm not going to talk about what it is. And it hasn't happened and I haven't quit. And and so I recommend that for everybody. Well, thank you so much, April and a big round of applause to an entrepreneur that's really changed in the world for the better. Thank you.