Episode 13: Startup, Merger, and Mental Health Advice from CEO of Headspace Health, Russ Glass
If you’re a startup founder, investor, mental health advocate, or want to learn more about selling to employers, you won’t want to miss this conversation.
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In this episode you’ll discover:
Why Headspace and Ginger merged into Headspace Health (and how that partnership came to be)
Why Russ ventured into the digital health space after success in more traditional tech startups like Bizo (acquired by LinkedIn)
What Headspace Health is doing to improve adolescent mental health—and how it impacts society
Why Headspace Health decided to target the employer market before payers and direct-to-consumer models—and how those markets are expanding
What unexpected benefits you’ll get from a mentor if you’re open to it (and other founder advice!)
Learn more from Carrie and Rebecca:
Healthcare insights (monthly email) | Telehealth/Virtual Care Mgmt Update (biweekly LinkedIn update)
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“As a society, we have to start thinking about our brain health much earlier.”
Read the transcript:
Russ Glass (00:00):
We recognized as a society, we have to start thinking about our brain health much earlier.
Carrie Nixon (00:09):
Absolutely.
Russ Glass (00:10):
And thinking about just like we think about our physical health, just like we think about why do we brush and floss our teeth every day? Yep. Because we need them to last our whole life. Right.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
You're listening to Decoding Healthcare Innovation with Carrie Nixon and Rebecca Gwilt. A podcast for novel and destructive business leaders seeking to transform how we receive and experience healthcare.
Carrie Nixon (00:36):
Hi everyone. I'm Carrie Nixon with Decoding Healthcare Innovation. Today for this episode, I'm joined by Russ Glass, who is the newly named CEO of Headspace Health, formerly known as the CEO of Ginger. Russ, I'm so glad you're with us today.
Russ Glass (00:52):
Thanks for having me. Good to see you.
Carrie Nixon (00:54):
Absolutely. So there has been a much talked about merger between Headspace and Ginger and the new entity is Headspace Health. You were originally involved with Ginger, and I'm wondering if you could start off by telling us a little bit about Ginger's mission and how it evolved and merged with Headspace Health.
Russ Glass (01:17):
Sure. Ginger is one of those companies that has recognized for a lot, I think a lot longer than the general public, just how important mental health is. And they saw, they were founded in, I guess, 2011, and the founders just saw this huge issue where people had this set of mental health needs but didn't find enough support. There weren't enough providers out there to deliver the care people needed. Now what we've seen since then is obviously the world has caught up to the understanding of just how important mental health is and how it affects downstream health issues and how our kids are having more and more anxiety, depression, suicidality, and Ginger's whole reason for being is to solve this problem, solve this supply demand imbalance. And so coming together with Headspace is for a number of reasons, extremely exciting for us.
Carrie Nixon (02:18):
So I want to dive into that a little bit more shortly. But before we do so, I want to talk a little bit about you as an innovator in particular. So you come from a background in Silicon Valley where you've had significant success with a number of startup companies. I think you are wearing the t-shirt of one of those companies today. So tell me, first of all what made you decide to get involved with involved with a health tech company, very different space than some of your previous endeavors?
Russ Glass (02:53):
This t-shirt's a little bit of a giveaway.
Carrie Nixon (02:55):
It is, but I like it.
Russ Glass (02:56):
Tech entrepreneurs. Yeah. So I mean, it actually kind of goes back to this period I sold my last company, which was a company called Bizo in the B2B marketing and data space. Sold it to LinkedIn. I was running the marketing solutions business at LinkedIn for about three years, left to be dad. And I've got three young daughters and had been doing startups the entire time. They were infancy all the way to now my eldest is 12. And I wanted to spend time with them and I wanted to get to know them better. And as I was learning about them learning how to be a great dad and cook dinner and pick them up from school and all that stuff, I recognized that I still had a thirst for entrepreneurship and I still had energy to put into something, but I didn't want to leave them unless it was for something that really needed to exist in the world. I didn't want to leave every day and go work really hard. These startups are hard. It's always a full-time job as, and so that really set me on this journey to find things that mattered and find problems to solve that the world needed solved. And that led me to Ginger.
Carrie Nixon (04:29):
So I know that Ginger has had a particular focus in recent months as has Headspace Health on adolescent mental health. And I think that is fantastic. As the mother of a 15 year old daughter myself, I certainly saw firsthand the toll that Covid and the associated isolation took on my daughter. And I know that it impacted many others very, very deeply. So can you talk a little bit about the focus on adolescent teen health and what you all are doing there?
Russ Glass (05:12):
We started in the adult space and have built a system designed to deliver far more care than the traditional system. I mean, one of the biggest problems we see in the traditional system today is that, you know, have this huge amount of stigma. So people show up to the system too late, and by the time they get there, they're acute, they have serious needs, but they're just enough providers. The time it takes someone to find a therapist that whether it takes their insurance or not, is that's almost like you're lucky to find anyone, let alone someone who takes your insurance. Absolutely. Let alone someone who's a good fit for what you're doing. Right. And as we were continuing to scale that system, we just continue to hear stories again and again about people who are struggling to find their adolescents support. And as we dug further into that, two things really struck us. One was, it's even worse for adolescent support than it is for adult support. So the fact it takes six weeks to find somebody on average in the adult world, it's even worse in the adolescent world. But two is, as you look at the most, mental health conditions start in adolescence,
(06:39):
But it starts in that sort of 13 to early twenties time range. And so we realized just how important it was, both because the supply demand imbalance is worse, but also because this is when you really have to get ahold of these things before they get worse. It was super important that we started to support this population.
Carrie Nixon (06:58):
It's really an opportunity, I think, to help people learn early how to manage their mental health.
Russ Glass (07:08):
That's exactly right. And as we get into why did we bring Ginger together with Headspace to create Headspace Health, that's a huge part of it that we recognized as a society, we have to start thinking about our brain health much earlier.
Carrie Nixon (07:27):
Absolutely.
Russ Glass (07:28):
And thinking about, we think about our physical health, just like we think about why do we brush and floss our teeth every day? Cause we need them to last our whole life. Same thing with mental health, same thing with resilience and meditation and mindfulness. It's all about preparing ourselves for life, for the ups and downs that exist in life and making sure that we've built the mechanisms to manage through all those things.
Carrie Nixon (07:59):
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, as I understand it, and please correct me if I'm wrong, Headspace really focuses on prevention a bit in the behavioral health realm and helping to build and develop skills around resilience. Is that right? And how did that sort of begin?
Russ Glass (08:20):
That's correct. The vast majority of why people use Headspace today is to build resilience, to build a mindfulness practice that help them manage mild to moderate anxiety, stress, depression, and you see it in the results. So it's a been science-based company from the beginning, and people who even only meditate for 10 days already start to see significant reduction in depression, reduction in anxiety. Those who use it for 30 days or more, they're seeing 30, 40% reductions in anxiety levels mean this is an amazing ability for your brain to manage some of these needs with a little bit of practice. It doesn't take much. People use it for sleep reasons. So there's a huge percent of the population that uses it to help them sleep better. And that creates a forward loop where if you're sleeping better, you're better able to manage stress and anxiety, which helps you sleep better, which helps you better manage stress and anxiety. And some of those positive reinforcement loops are what mindfulness resilience it's all about. It's all about creating the habits that through your life allow you to stay healthy and allow you to keep anxiety, depression, other mental health illnesses from getting acute, which once they get acute it, it's very difficult to manage. It takes a lot more work to help support that.
Carrie Nixon (10:03):
Just like any other chronic condition. Right? Correct. Once it becomes acute, it's much more difficult to manage. Yeah. So that really resonates with me. For years I had trouble sleeping, and it was not until I focused very significant attention on sleep hygiene and how to be consistent around that, that started to improve and therefore my sort of stress levels and anxiety levels throughout the day, I think started to improve.
Russ Glass (10:31):
I was exactly the same way, but my first startup, I did not have the right sleep habits. I stayed up too late. I would think about the company right before I'd go to sleep and I'd be crossing and turning all night, and then the next day I was much less able to manage the ups and downs of all of the information you deal with as an entrepreneur. And same goes for anybody who's dealing with stress throughout their day-to-day lives, like all of us. Right. The better you sleep, the more able you are to cope, the more mindful you are able to be and stay in the present and not think about the past or the future, you're able to really manage these things better. And this goes back thousands of years. So Headspace was created by a guy named Andy Puddicombe, who became literally a Buddhist monk. He went, he was a Brit that went to Tibet and spent multiple years becoming a monk and realized just how incredible the practice of mindfulness was and how this has been used by humanity for literally thousands of years. It's almost like the most proven ability to keep yourself healthy throughout all these difficulties that life present and his mission became, teach the world about this, make sure that everybody understands that this is something that can improve their lives.
Carrie Nixon (12:03):
Yeah, I mean, you're right. It's deeply rooted in history. I think there was a period of time, particularly here in the US where we sort of forgot those lessons. We overlooked those lessons, and it's a bit of a time to relearn them.
Russ Glass (12:18):
A hundred percent. It was never forgotten by the Eastern cultures. The Western culture is the Western cultures for whatever reason, left these behind. And it's great that we're starting to recognize some of our sort of ancestors understanding, because we certainly can benefit from it.
Carrie Nixon (12:40):
Yeah. So you mentioned, Andy, how the combination between Headspace and Ginger now, Headspace Health seems to be a pretty obvious combination in retrospect, right? You mentioned Andy, did you know him previously? Talk to me a little bit about how that combination evolved. Right. Were you introduced to each other? Did you already know each other? What did your conversations look like in terms of whatever you're comfortable sharing? I think that this is type of thing, searching for the right partnership and the right combination to grow a company to the next level is something that a lot of innovators grapple with. And I'm interested in hearing how this happened.
Russ Glass (13:31):
This one was one of those meant to be kind of stories. I think one of my mentors and advisors has become Jeff Weiner through the experience. He was the CEO of LinkedIn. And so he was both an investor in Ginger and someone who I had reached out to with some, when I had thoughts or strategic ideas. He also happened to be very early in Headspace and one of the early, both investors and people who recognized how important this was going to be. In fact, little sidetrack. I discovered Headspace when Andy was brought to LinkedIn as a speaker in 2014.
Carrie Nixon (14:18):
Oh wow.
Russ Glass (14:19):
And it was right after I was acquired. So right after the business joined LinkedIn and I was feeling, let's just say anxious about the integration and not being the CEO anymore and trying to figure out how to operate in this big thing. And I went to Andy's talk and I started a meditation practice and it helped me immensely. I probably meditated 300 straight days or something like that. It was a game changer for me. Fast forward though, I was telling Jeff about some of the things I was thinking about strategically, about how I felt like Ginger had this incredible capability, but we needed to get farther upstream. We needed to destigmatize, we needed to get people starting earlier. And he said he should really talk to the founders of Headspace. It was about a year ago, probably mid 2020, during the pandemic, things were, as you, you remember, kind of crazy. Anyway, talked to Rich who co-founded it with Andy, and it was one of those mind meld moments, the clear cultural alignment, clear mission alignment, really interesting fit between what they were thinking about, which was wanting to get into more serious mental health support, so actual clinical support and our needs, which was to get earlier in the process, more preventative care.
(15:50):
And that started a year long set of conversations, and it wasn't initially obvious that we'd want to do anything. The timing didn't felt, feel right early on. But eventually we both got there and once we did, we moved pretty quickly.
Carrie Nixon (16:06):
It's pretty amazing when those mind meld moments happen. They don't happen all the time. So I think it, it's always smart to keep your eye out them and eye out for them and seize the moment when they do happen. But you know, mentioned your relationship with Jeff as a longtime mentor, and I have found that in my experience in working with early stage companies working with me, with leaders who have a mentor and who explicitly understand the importance of a mentor and lean into that and rely on that is incredibly important. Any other sort of thoughts about the role that a mentor can play? I'm sure you serve as a mentor to companies now yourself.
Russ Glass (16:55):
I think obviously entrepreneurship, anything else is a constant set of learnings. If you're open to learning, you're constantly learning, you're constantly experiencing new things. And what a mentor or mentors can do for you is help you recognize patterns, things they've seen before. They can bring examples of how they've managed different situations. But I think more than that, at least for me, is someone like a Jeff who sat in this seat can come in and bring how he felt about these things. So how he was able to internalize some of these things, how he brought teams together around some of these problems. So that's really valuable, again, for my own mental health and for my own ability to manage these things, is having a mentor that's been through it before and is sat in the seat. The second piece though that I think is really valuable is the ability to just come in emotionless. You look at a problem with fresh eyes, not as attached to it. And often I'm thinking about a decision and it feels hard until I'll talk to a mentor, talk to Jeff and Jeff will make it so obvious that what I'm thinking is right, or what I'm thinking is wrong, but I've been struggling with it because I'm too close to it.
Carrie Nixon (18:41):
Yeah. You're too deep to recognize it.
Russ Glass (18:43):
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And that I find incredibly helpful. Someone that can just come in and say, look, why are you thinking so hard about this?
Carrie Nixon (18:49):
Yeah, no, absolutely. I've had the exact same experience. When you're struggling, struggling, struggling, and you talk it through with someone and you go at the end, you go, oh, that wasn't actually as hard as I was making it.
Russ Glass (19:05):
Totally, that's, and that's invaluable, that kind of support.
Carrie Nixon (19:10):
Yeah, totally. So tell us a little bit about the latest and greatest with the Ginger and the Headspace merger now Headspace Health. What are you most excited about doing right now? What do you see coming down the road?
Russ Glass (19:30):
Well, right now we've been closed for just under a month at this point. And so right now it's all about bringing two cultures together and how do we create the best environment for success, for growth, for distributing our capabilities and awareness around the world. It's such an important problem to solve, but it has to start with us building a team and infrastructure that can scale and can work together effectively. So that's a lot of the focus right now.
Carrie Nixon (20:00):
Yeah. No small task mean, how do you approach that mean? You said initially when you and Andy talked, or you and Eric talked, it was or Rich talked, it was very much alignment. You shared a lot of the same values even. So I suspect that a combination that has its challenges. How do you think about that? How do you approach it?
Russ Glass (20:23):
Yeah, it's very insightful. That's right. I mean, the starting point of having two cultures and missions and being so aligned, it creates a foundation for success. It, it's kind of like a marriage. If you have two people that are really effective together, they get along really well, they have the foundational values in alignment. Then when you go through the hard times, you have things to lean on. You've got that core alignment to lean on. And that's very similar here where we have really strong, the reasons that our employees are at each company before the merger are the same, right?
Carrie Nixon (21:08):
Yeah.
Russ Glass (21:09):
They're here for the right reasons. They're here because they want to change the world in a positive way. Then when you get into the merger itself, it's complicated. It's messy. There are lots of people who are going to have different titles. There are lots of people who might have a similar role today, and one of them is going to have to take slightly different role, and they may not want that different role as much as they wanted this role. And we're fortunate that this is a merger of growth, not of synergy. We're not looking to call pull costs out of the system. We're looking to figure out how we best grow. So that makes it easier because you don't have a bunch of people that need to lose their jobs or anything, but they're still going to have to take on some different roles, and that hits ego, that hits what they thought they would be doing. Change is always hard. So that's right. We're in the middle of right now. So how getting people into the best seat for the company, hopefully the best seat for them moving forward. But sometimes that's tough.
Carrie Nixon (22:16):
So I love the fact that that was the first thing you said. That was the number one important thing because it's really the foundation. It wasn't like we're going to hit, we're expand into this new market and we're going to hit this revenue target. It was, we're going to get this integration from a culture and a values perspective because the rest comes from that. Right?
Russ Glass (22:39):
Totally. And we're going to make mistakes, right? We're trying to not overthink it early and early days. Let's put the two teams together and integrate the things we know need to be integrated, but try to be careful about everything else because we want to learn. We want to understand what the needs are and what's going to work and what's, once we figure that out, then move quickly to integrate properly once we have the answers. But so important to me that there's full alignment on where are we going, so what's the joint mission and vision? What are our cultural tenets and our values? Because if you get all that right and get everybody aligned around that, you can accomplish incredible things.
Carrie Nixon (23:28):
That's right. So before we wrap up, tell me about your view of some of the biggest challenges that innovators in the healthcare space in particular face.
Russ Glass (23:48):
There are a number of them. Yes. My wife has been in healthcare her whole career, and when I was like, I'm thinking of this company that's in the health tech space, which I've never done before. She's like, Hey, yeah. She's like, it's twice as hard and you can totally do it. But it's challenging. And I would say what I've learned in the last sort of three plus years doing it is one in, if you're doing something that requires both technology and delivery of care, those two things are often at odds.
Carrie Nixon (24:34):
That's right.
Russ Glass (24:35):
Right. So managing growth. Ginger alone has grown three x per year, multiple years running. So managing growth in that tech and traditional delivery at the same time is hard. It's hard to match that. The sort of supply demand, it's hard to match the step functioning growth in particular. It's hard when you have regulatory environments that don't align with fast growth. Right? The state by state regulations that we have to deal with makes our supply demand our supply chain extremely complicated.
Carrie Nixon (25:23):
It's incredibly burdensome. Incredibly burdensome.
Russ Glass (25:26):
It's incredibly burdensome.
Carrie Nixon (25:26):
The infrastructure, the regulatory infrastructure just does not keep up with the technology and the demands of innovators.
Russ Glass (25:37):
And part of the reason that's so hard is we spend so much time, energy, money solving for that, and all of that could go to care if the system was set up more elegantly, if that's
Carrie Nixon (25:53):
That's a great point.
Russ Glass (25:55):
And so there's all these people that aren't getting care today, and so much of it is that our system just isn't designed properly, which is, it's frustrating, and that's the world we live in. So we have to innovate through that, around that, within that, right, to make sure that we're doing things legally, but we're doing things in a way that help us make sure we can deliver more care. So I would say one is the combination of tech and care is complicated. The regulatory environment's complicated. And then I think anytime you're dealing with people who have a healthcare need, that's complicated. Also, it's kind of like in the tech world, when we were trying to solve B2B marketer problems, it's like, who? Okay, so there's a bug that makes it not quite as effective. It's like, all right. So they're not
Carrie Nixon (27:00):
Not impacting an individual a very
Russ Glass (27:02):
Exactly right. When somebody, for whatever reason doesn't get connected to their therapist, it can have significant outcome
Carrie Nixon (27:13):
It's high stakes.
Russ Glass (27:15):
So yeah, much higher stakes. And that's also a challenge in healthcare that you're dealing with people in their lives and their happiness. And so to me, it just implies a next level of members to what we're doing. We have to make sure that we're always thinking about what is the experience that our members are going through right now?
Carrie Nixon (27:39):
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Any small piece of advice or large piece of advice that you would give to a brand new healthcare innovator in entering the space?
Russ Glass (27:57):
I give them a lot of advice. One is, I'd say make sure that you focus. I see a lot of healthcare innovators try to go too broad, too fast, and dilute their core value props. So stay focused. It's a huge industry with huge amount of need. So there's no reason to go too broad, too fast, be really good at that one thing that you're trying to be really good at, and get that to scale.
Carrie Nixon (28:26):
Yeah. I like it. I like it. All right, Russ, thank you so much for joining us today. This has been a great conversation. I wish you and Headspace Health all the best, and I'm really looking forward to staying in touch.
Russ Glass (28:39):
Same here. Thank you so much for having me.
Carrie Nixon (28:42):
All right. Till next time, everyone.