#90 - Spring Health CEO April Koh - On Building a Mental Health Unicorn

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. 

Spring Health’s product is a "precision mental healthcare" platform that matches a company’s employees to the most effective care for each employee. These care solutions that employees are matched to include (but are not limited to) mindfulness and meditation applications, care navigation tools, access to coaching services, therapy, and medication management.

To date, Spring Health has raised $300mm of capital and April and her team are truly pioneers in the mental health benefits space.  Their recent funding round valued the company at $2 billion and April herself, is now the youngest female founder to lead a unicorn startup!  She’s truly amazing and I’m excited to share our conversation!

You can connect with April on LinkedIn: April’s LinkedIn Page

Spring Health Website:  https://www.springhealth.com/

What If Fellowship: https://whatif.vc/fellowship

 

HERE ARE SOME OF THE THINGS WE TALKED ABOUT:

1. April shares the founding story of Spring Health with us. She explains how she came up with the idea and tells the impressive story about how she put a minimum viable product (MVP) together in short order, impressed her soon to be co-founder to join her team, and brought a business to life at lighting speed.
   
   
   
2. April is the youngest female founder to grow a startup to unicorn status, EVER! We talked with her about what this accomplishment means for her, for female founders and for the mental health space in general.
   
   
   
3. April shares about her journey to realize there was a problem worth solving in this space, coming up with an idea, deciding to start a business and the path that she and the business took in the early days.
   
   
   
4. April talks with us about what Spring Health looked like in those early days including how she recruited her co-founder, which is quite an interesting and inspiring story.
   
   
   
5. We talked further about exactly what Spring Health is from a business point of view, how they win customers, what exactly they provide, and how they get paid.
   
   
   
6. April shared her vision for the future of the business and more broadly, the future of the mental health care landscape.
   
   
   
7. We always love to ask pioneers in the mental health space where they view the biggest opportunities in our space (of course, outside of what they are currently building) and April’s answers there were certainly insightful for anyone looking to build a mental health startup.
   
   
   
8. Finally, April provides advice and “lessons learned” that she wished she had known in the early days. I found her answers to be so helpful I believe every founder in this space could learn from April. 

Connect with the Stigma Podcast in the following ways: Website, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Email

Connect with host Stephen Hays here: Stephen Hays Personal Website, Twitter, LinkedIn, What If Ventures (Mental Health Venture Fund)