Co-founding Curio, Psychedelics for Health
After 5 and a half years at LinkedIn, I am excited to be returning to the startup world and joining Curio as the third Co-founder and CTO.
I am extremely proud of the work that we accomplished at LinkedIn over the last four years, building and launching LinkedIn’s first data enrichment tool for sales planning. I have always been drawn to the excitement and challenge of building something meaningful from the ground up, and I believe that the time is right for me to take those learnings and apply them to building something new and innovative in a domain that is close to my heart and increasingly more relevant for the world.
This is the blurb I came up with to announce the news:
As an engineer and avid meditator (going on 10+ years!), I’m super excited to join a team that’s transforming the mental health industry and innovating with clinical and scientific rigor. At Curio, we are going to build products and infrastructure to support and enhance our psychedelic-assisted coaching and therapy (PACT) protocol, which is aligned with my own personal mission to help change the world from the inside out.
Given the unexpected level of curiosity and interest I’ve received about Curio, I’m going to break down the motivations behind my decision to join the company as a co-founder, along with more context on psychedelic-assisted care.
There were 3 key factors that influenced my decision to join Curio: the problem & mission, the people, and the timing.
1) The Problem & Mission
First and foremost, I was drawn to the problem that the company is trying to solve and the mission that it is working towards.
Common startup wisdom recommends to “fall in love with the problem, not the solution”.
And Curio’s problem space is well-defined and ubiquitous: a fourth of the US population has a diagnosable mental health condition each year and the current best options are SSRIs, which come with troublesome side effects and were invented over 30 years ago. As a solution, Curio is building the clinical services and technology to bring psychedelic-assisted care to the healthcare system, starting from at-home ketamine treatment and coaching. The scientific research and regulatory framework for psychedelic-assisted care are moving fast (more on this later in the section about Timing) and they are showing that this modality of care can be very effective to treat a number of mental health conditions, including depression, anxiety, and PTSD.
It doesn’t stop here. Curio’s mission is very much aligned with my own personal life mission as well, which I currently identify as helping people improve their well-being from the inside out through tools like mindfulness, meditation, emotional intelligence, and compassion. These practices have been integral to my own journey towards self-improvement and have been the greatest driver of fulfillment and “happiness” both in my personal as well as professional life.
I’ve been meditating for more than 10 years, and for over the last 5 years, I had the opportunity to build mindfulness programs at work within LinkedIn (shout out to my mentor Scott Shute and the LinkedIn mindfulness crew!). Working on these programs has also shown me just how difficult it can be for people to make meditation a sustained habit, which requires discipline and commitment while yielding “intangible” (i.e. felt more so than observable) results and delayed gratification. In addition, meditation is an amazing preventative tool for building resilience, but it’s often not enough to treat medium to high acuity cases of mental disorders.
That’s where psychedelics come in. Growing up in a society that stigmatized these compounds and in a time where the scientific research around them was immature and for the most part outright banned, I was blinded to the potential benefits of psychedelics until very recently when I discovered that they can be extremely useful when used in a safe, clinical setting with proper guidance and integration. In fact, they may even be vital to solving some of the hardest mental health issues we increasingly see plaguing society. Similarly to how Sam Harris, Roland Griffiths, and others have articulated, I’ve come to consider the clinical use of psychedelics an extremely powerful and effective entry point to consciousness work that corroborates, complements, and expands the work done through meditation practice (more on this in a future post).
2) The People
In addition to the problem and mission, the people at Curio were another major factor in my decision to take this opportunity and make this important personal and professional bet. I was lucky to serendipitously meet Dr. Hillary Lin, a board-certified Stanford Medical School physician through friends last year and we immediately connected and kept in touch over the course of several months. With Hillary and Felix (COO and long-time health tech leader and operator) as co-founders, we are intentioned to build a mission-driven company that prioritizes doing good in the world over everything else. If we can do this while also doing well in business, we have the opportunity to attract a talent pool that resonates with these values and to make a significant change in the world.
In line with this, we are building a science team led by Dr. Jennifer Huberty, who previously led scientific research at Calm and a top-notch team of coaches trained in psychedelic-assisted care delivery and in Curio’s own protocol.
I am confident that the founding team’s diverse backgrounds and skills - blending medical and scientific rigor with technology and healthcare operations - will complement each other well as we work towards our shared goal of changing the paradigm and status quo in mental health.
As a side note, if the above resonates with you, the good news is that we are growing and expanding the team! We are looking for engineers, coaches, and science writers/coordinators. I am personally looking for a strong Founding Software Engineer to be my engineering partner in building the tech foundations and team that will enable Curio’s patient experiences, care delivery infrastructure, and operations at scale.
See our open roles at joincurio.com/careers and reach out to learn more.
3) The Timing
Finally, the timing of this opportunity felt uniquely right to me on two fronts: scientific/regulatory, and personal.
From a scientific and regulatory perspective, we are now experiencing what is sometimes referred to as a “psychedelic renaissance”. Over 300 institutions are now conducting over 600 studies on psychedelics [1]. Ketamine clinics are legal and live throughout the United States, and we're on track for MDMA and psilocybin to be approved by the FDA over the next few years for the treatment of a range of mental health conditions.
The interest in and acceptance of psychedelics as a valuable tool in the treatment of mental health issues is rapidly growing among clinicians, care providers, the general patient population, and even employers. At Curio, we are seeing an enormous amount of interest in psychedelic-assisted care and we are committed to leading the way in the creation of original scientific research as well as the curation of informational content backed by scientific evidence.
At the same time, we are experimenting and validating the use of modern and innovative technologies to assist and augment the delivery of digitally-assisted care.
From a more personal perspective, at this point in my career, I felt that I had accrued enough career capital as an engineer and engineering manager to take on a founding leadership role and I am excited to build something impactful while stretching the boundaries of my comfort zone and prior experience. Like most pivotal career changes, this transition wasn’t easy and it came with a rollercoaster of emotions. It was a good test for my resilience to navigate change and “trust the process”, knowing I would have to rely more than ever before on my gut instincts and alignment with the mission while letting go of the predictability and comfort of moving up the corporate ladder.
Join us along the journey!
If you’d like to learn more and follow along, feel free to subscribe to this newsletter here on Substack or on LinkedIn for my personal updates on psychedelic-assisted care, mindfulness, and more generally health & wellness with a focus on science.
You can also follow Curio on LinkedIn for blog posts and updates.
To learn more about psychedelics and psychedelic-assisted care, I recommend the following resources by Dr. Hillary Lin on our team:
Our Careers page for open roles at Curio is joincurio.com/careers.
References
Psychedelic trials. Blossom. (2022, December 5). Retrieved December 23, 2022, from https://blossomanalysis.com/trials.
"The way out is through!". Good luck with this amazing adventure.