The Beginnings of BetterUp

I'll keep it short because the origin really does actually go back to high school for me. I find that I've been extremely fortunate and it felt like I was stumbling, but eventually stumbling upon a venture or an endeavor in life that really combined what had emerged as two great passions and sustained from high school. And the first chronologically was actually programming and coding. We moved to England my freshman year. It's a rainy place if you haven't been there. It was dark at 4pm half the year and my little brother and I basically picked up web programming, HTML, php, cold fusion was still a thing back then, asp and started making websites for my dad's friends companies. And when we came back through that I started to get involved in some other school activities and I had a buddy who had this idea for an after school club where we essentially would do peer to peer coaching on what we called at the time Life Skills. And he had been reading a ton of Steve Covey and Napoleon Hill, Dale Carnegie, kind of some of the classic self help literature and was disenchanted. He had founded the Kiwanis Club at our school or the Key Club and was disenchanted with just the volunteerism, loved volunteerism, but just going to conferences and hearing speakers and not being able to put this stuff into practice. And so they needed someone to build a website. So I got looped in, I helped work on the website, helped start this organization that eventually would become Youth Leadership America. And that just ignited in me this passion for this whole world of helping people realize their potential and the power of coaching and mentorship and practice. And so fast forward, I ended up.

In my career following the first passion and ended up in Silicon Valley doing software. Was very fortunate to join my first startup, socialcast and we were, you know, fortunate enough to get acquired by VMware. And I became a very young executive at VMware and was really, I think at the time I was probably 26 at the most. I was pretty over tasked and under skilled. I would say it was a huge opportunity. They were integrating a couple different acquisitions. They were trying to build a social enterprise team. I was helping to lead product and design for that. And I learned a ton during the integration in 18 months. But I also got extremely burnt out. I remember driving down from the SF to Palo Alto for these executive meetings.

With like the CIOs of some of.

The world's largest companies and the CEO of VMware and you know, just being completely nauseous, overwhelmed. And so I eventually hit a point where I Was like, hey, this isn't a great headspace for me. I need to go do something else. And in type A fashion, I, you know, joined a YC company the next week and went into Y Combinator. So I was not in a great mind space to do that either and suffice it to say, was, you know, a little overwhelmed and burnt out and was able to take some time off and figure out what I should do next. And I kept coming back to the kids and coaching them and came back to this insight of they have me helping them through their life transitions, which is like college apps or first job resume building, first breakup at that age. And I was going through something significant in my life and I didn't really have anyone to help me. I could call my parents, but they live in Dallas. You know, a lot of the stuff in Silicon Valley, while they're empathetic and supportive, they didn't have the context for. And so that started me in finding help. And I didn't know what that was. So I tried everything from coaching to therapy to life coaching, executive coaching. The Landmark Forum in Los Angeles. I walked the Camino de Santiago in Spain and really was at this tension of I kind of want the evidence based scientific rigor and expertise of a clinician, but I want the business context of an executive coach. And I felt pulled, like I had to pick between the two. And I eventually found a coach who was a therapist by training who did executive coaching. And it was game changing. And that was the seed of the idea for BetterUp. It just kind of hit me of like, how did I miss this? We should be doing what we did for these high school students, but upgrading it. And if we did this, I had also been geeking out on all this positive psychology. This would really be the missing equation of mental health today, which is there's not a powerful preventative layer. Most of mental health is secondary healthcare. And we're not actually helping people preventatively develop the skills that buffer from anxiety.

Or depression or stress or stress, high.

Blood pressure, all these things that I had experienced. And so with that, I pulled in my buddy Eddie, who had been building a nonprofit with me, had went undergrad with me to usc. He was at Haas, your friendly rival, doing his MBA there. And he had a lot of conviction around social enterprise and ed tech. And we had already been working together. And so we just started hacking on what I was pretty convinced would be one of the coolest products I had seen and potentially the world's worst business, and went nowhere for two years, as I like to say. So, yeah, that was the story, and.

We can pick up on the rest later.