S12E8: Direct-to-Consumer Pioneer to AI Psychology with Neil Parikh, Co-Founder of Casper and Slingshot

What happens when all of our jobs change, right? Whether you're a truck driver or a software developer, or like my mom is a microbiologist, or my dad who's a doctor, my sister, everything is going to change. How are we going to make it through this as a society? Because we definitely don't have enough therapists today. And if we think the problem is going to get worse, where almost everybody's going to need more help, the answer is AI. We have to figure out how do we use technology to serve way more people.

Welcome to The Room Podcast. I'm Claudia Laurie, the founder.

And I'm Madison McIlwain, the funder. We are on a mission to open the door to the room where it happens, sharing the stories of some of the world's most iconic builders.

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This podcast is brought to you by Mercury, the banking platform businesses like The Room Podcast use to simplify their finances. It's time banking did more than hold your money. Now it can. With Mercury, you can pay bills in seconds, close the books faster, and even send invoices. Not only does Mercury do away with a patchwork of tools, it eliminates guesswork, giving you complete and accurate visibility into your business's finances, all from one account. Apply in minutes at mercury.com. Welcome back to The Room podcast for our season 12 finale. Today we're excited to take you inside The Room with Anil Parikh, co-founder of Casper and now founder and CEO of Slingshot, an AI startup building a foundational model for psychology. Neil's journey is anything but conventional. After attending Brown for both undergrad and med school, he made the bold decision to drop out and launch Casper, redefining an entire category with a direct-to-consumer mattress brand at a time when few believed that sleep could be venture scale. He helped grow Casper into a household name and took it all the way through IPO. Now Neil is tackling something even more ambitious and more personal with Slingshot. The company is on a mission to reimagine how people understand and care for their mental health, using AI to build tools grounded in psychological insight and ethical care. Backed by over $40 million from A16z and Felicis, Slingshot has already reached tens of thousands of users in its early days. In this episode, we dive into Neil's path from medical school to startup life, the lessons he carried from Casper into Slingshot, and the future of AI as it enters deeply human territory, our minds, our relationships, and our emotional wellbeing. This conversation is a powerful reflection on ambition, founder responsibility, and what it means to build with care. So with that, let's open the door.

Neil, thank you so much for joining us in the room today. We're thrilled to have you. Although I guess like in some ways we could be doing this with a mattress behind us, this is getting a more visual experience, but here we are in our virtual space. Let's start at the very beginning. Where did you grow up and how has that shaped your view of the world?

I grew up in New Jersey. My family are Indian immigrants, so they're from Bombay and Ahmedabad. My mom came here when she was in college, and so I grew up on the Rutgers campus in New Brunswick, New Jersey. I grew up working in my grandparents' convenience store because that was probably the only job they could get when you didn't speak a lot of English and you're new to the country, but taught me a lot. I learned how to sell things from a very early age. I joke about how I used to sell cigarettes to adults when I was probably like 6 years old or something. All kinds of things you shouldn't be doing as a kid and spent a lot of time in central Jersey.

Yeah, this is a bit foreshadowing of the career path that you tried to go down for a second with medical school. We'll touch on that shortly, but before we get there, did you always think you were gonna become a founder?

No, I didn't even know what that was, to be honest. The reason I ended up going to medical school, and we could talk about it later, it's the only thing I ever knew. My dad's a doctor, my sister is now a doctor, my mom's a microbiologist. Almost everybody in my family is in the healthcare field in some way. And it was like the only profession I guess I was exposed to aside from my grandparents who owned this convenience store. So I had these like two things, people owned stores or they become doctors. And so it didn't really occur to me and I didn't— it's interesting because now that I look back on it, I'm like, oh yeah, obviously my grandfather was a founder in his own way. It was a different kind of founding journey perhaps than mine. And then it wasn't until college that I really started thinking about entrepreneurship and starting things. I got to college and thought I was going to be a doctor and did the traditional pre-med things along with many other things. And then I got the bug. I met friends who I talked to about starting different projects and had started 2 or 3 different companies in college. And then, yeah, the rest is history.

Can you talk to us a little bit about that? The people we surround ourselves with inevitably influence us in hopefully good, sometimes bad, but mostly good ways. I definitely felt that with Claudia. Mostly good. We had this debate. She went to Harvard. I went to Dartmouth for undergrad. I didn't really know a lot of people at Dartmouth starting companies. I back some Dartmouth founders now, but it wasn't in the water in the same way. And she feels differently about Harvard. Was that true at Brown?

I would say it was not in the water like it is today. If you're at Stanford or Harvard or even Brown, definitely more rare, but there were some examples. It's not like it was a zero thing. It kind of comes down to the energy of the people you surround yourself with. I was very lucky in that I ended up having a lot of free time because I got into medical school when I was in high school. I clicked the like one extra application. I did the one extra essay and I got into med school. And so I didn't have to take the MCATs or do any of the hard stuff to get into med school, which meant that there was this whole like legion of people that had a ton extra free time to go and study what they wanted to and mess around and do other things. I ended up having a bunch of friends who were similar and said, hey, let's go explore. What are other things that we could do? And so we were always getting up to some different hijinks. My junior year, we thought, okay, we're bored. We want to make a big impact in the world. And so we sat and we literally Googled. We're like, okay, what are the biggest things in the world that we can have an impact on? This is like the dumb things you do when you're in college, right? And it came up clean water. And we're like, okay, We're going to go work on clean water. We convinced the university to give us tickets to go to India. We bought one-way tickets and we spent 3 months there and went and worked in the slums and tried to figure out, you know, how could we increase access to clean water by helping people start little companies in slums where the product of both the environment that we're in and the circumstances and the cards that were dealt. And so I got lucky in that way.

Absolutely. I'm really seeing from an early age this thread of being mission-oriented and ultimately you did take brown up on that admission to medical school by going for a brief time. But spoiler alert, you dropped out. So talk to us about that life decision. Like a scary one, if you ask me.

That was never the plan. And I will hold to it if my mom watches this one day. The thing is that, okay, so going into med school, I thought it was going to be completely different, to be honest, because I had not had experience. I knew people who were doctors, but I didn't know that many people that went through medical school, if that makes sense. So. I get to medical school and I have a very rude awakening, to be totally honest, because I went from a very open-ended exploratory experience. I took like 16 independent study courses in college ranging from biomedical engineering and cellular engineering to like Russian literature.

That's so Brown-coded. I can't even start.

Like, it is, it is totally. And then I get to medical school and it's like the complete opposite. Brown Medical School. And Brown are completely different because I was like, oh, med school's going to be chill, right? It's going to be the same thing. I can ask lots of questions. I can philosophize. I get there and I'm like, this is like the army. You're in class 50 or 60 hours a week. You're then expected to go study another 8 hours a day on top of that. And the pace is insane. And I'm like surrounded by people who have all spent their entire life working to try to get to this moment. And they are not here to fuck around. And so I'm like in a very weird mismatch scenario where I'm thinking about, oh, we should start companies, we should do interesting things. Why is everything in medicine done the way it's done? And I'm asking all these ridiculous questions and my professors are not having any of it, right? I'm getting the like, you need to just memorize what your textbooks say, not ask all these questions. There'll be time for that later. I was lucky. I made a few friends in medical school and I probably had 2 or 3 or 4 people of my like 120-person class that liked me because most people were like, Dude, just shut up. And then what happened is at the end of my first year, you have to make a decision, which is like, are you going to do research? Which is what almost everybody wants to do. Because if you want to get into a good residency program, you have to go do research. And I made the mistake of my first year of medical school of living with my friends who were seniors in college because they were one year younger than me. So the whole year they're out partying and doing interesting stuff and I'm in medical school. And when they're graduating from college, one of my friends, Luke, was like, hey, you sure you want to do this med school thing? Why don't you just move to New York for a summer? We'll like work on some ideas and then we'll figure it out. And so instead of doing research, I ended up moving to New York for a summer. We lived in this third floor walk-up tiny apartment that we were paying like $400, $500 a month for making no money. And then I never went back.

Let's chat a little bit around what you did after dropping out of medical school. And there's a little bit of a tie-in here. In your first startup, you were very much working in the sleep space and really helping solve problems there in maybe a different way. So let's talk about Casper, really a ubiquitous name in all things mattress delivery, innovation. I think everyone has slept on a Casper at some point. I certainly have as well. Tell us, what is the aha moment behind Casper coming out of medical school after that summer in New York?

Okay. So it was a little bit of an accident. So what happened is we moved to New York and we are trying to come up with different business ideas. The intermediate one was this business called Consigned where we were trying to build an online consignment store where essentially it was like all virtual. You could sell things to each other. It was like a three-sided marketplace. It was not working. It was way too hard to build. We're sitting in a coworking space next to this guy who was telling me about how he used to sell mattresses online from his dorm room. He's working on a different business. I'm like, such a dumb idea. Who would buy a mattress on the internet? Like, don't you have to sleep on it? I went through all the same customer thoughts that our future customers would probably end up thinking, but we were enjoying what we were working on. We were trying to decide, like, should I go back to medical school, shut down that business, or try something else? We had just seen Warby Parker come out, which is, I think, probably one of the first pioneers in the DTC era. And we had this thought of like, what if you could build a business that is not just about selling mattresses online, but actually is more like the Nike of sleep, where if you can figure out how to disrupt both the business model itself, the actual products, and wrap it all together, and then try to create a brand that stands for something bigger that would actually get people excited about sleep, then maybe we could build something that's way more interesting over time and build more of a platform-style business where we could do many other things related to sleep. So we ended up trying out different variants of this idea, and then it kind of connects back to medical school in two ways. A few of us had gotten together, we started noodling on it, and then we thought, okay, we want to design a better product because we don't want to just sell the same thing that's available now on the internet, but we had no idea how. And so by luck, my best friend from medical school who sat next to me the whole time, her boyfriend was at IDEO. In Boston, which is a big product development agency. So I called up Jeff and I was like, hey Jeff, I have this idea for a company. We want to design a product, but none of us have ever built a physical product. Like, how do you do that? And he was like, that's so funny. I've been working on this very problem for years because a lot of big mattress companies outsource their product development work to IDEO. And so I've been thinking about it and I have a bunch of ideas about things that we could do differently. And I'm like, that's crazy. I don't know if I believe in manifesting things, but sometimes crazy things happen to you. So we, and Jeff hated it, you know, he didn't hate his job, but he was like, okay, cool, I'm ready to do something else. And so Jeff joined us as a co-founder, which meant that we ended up building this really strong capability around design thinking. And we ended up having quite a lot of people within the company who thought about everything from a design thinking angle. And then yeah, we worked on it for about 7 or 8 months and ended up launching in April of 2014.

Wow. Part of that story resonates so much to, I think, Madison, myself, because we were both independently manifesting the podcast and then we texted each other the same day asking if we wanted to do a podcast together and it came out of nowhere. So we are firm believers that the best ideas come out of circumstances like this. Let's zoom in on 2014 a little bit. D2C is really reaching a bit of a peak here. Venture investors are starting to think about D2C as an investable space, but at the end of the day, it is mattresses. In physical goods. I think Warby Parker set the stage here, but I'm sure there were a ton of skeptics around, hey, is a mattress company actually venture-backable? Tell us a little bit about this time in direct-to-consumer and what made you believe that VC was the right route?

Great question. Going back to 2013, '14, there was DTC, but it wasn't like we see it today or even in the era afterwards. There was the era of the, like, go down the CVS aisle and then rebrandify everything from toothpaste to razors to whatever. This is a little bit before then where the concept of selling things direct to consumer was still relatively new. I think Harry's had launched at that point. There was Dollar Shave Club and perhaps Warby Parker. And so there were a few companies that had started, but VC had not really caught on to this at all. And so when we were pitching investors, At least the first 50 or 60 people we talked to were all like, this is a terrible idea. This is never going to work. Nobody's ever going to buy this stuff on the internet. Margins will never work. Pretty much everybody said no. And so we were like ready to give up. There was definitely a moment and we at this point were levered to the hilt because first of all, we were all like young and broke. We had no real money. So we maxed out our credit cards. We had convinced some of our suppliers to actually like give us free samples to help us prototype. And so they'd given us a bunch of stuff and we're thinking, okay, we can't even raise like $750,000 or $1 million. Like, what are we doing here? And then we got lucky. Two things happened that were really important. One, we met this branding agency called Red Antler that was incredible. And we worked with them. They were almost like a co-founder to us for a long time. We worked with them for a long time and they took a bet on us and said, okay, even before you guys raise money, we'll do the branding work and you have to agree to pay us back later and give us some equity. But then taking a bet on us really helped because we could basically translate our brand story from our previous name, which was not always Casper, which we could talk about, into Casper. And secondly, we ended up meeting Ben Lear at Lear Hippo Ventures, who totally changed it for us. And this is another example of serendipity. Everybody said no. We walk into Ben's office and he's like, guys, I've been thinking about the same idea. And I was even incubating a business in this category because I thought that somebody should do it. And then he walked into my office. And so Ben was the first person who got it and wrote us a check to lead our round. We were lucky in that the pre-launch phase was very difficult because nobody believed. And then once we launched, it was like a rocket ship. We ended up doing $1 million in sales in our first month and then grew very quickly thereafter.

I have to ask, what was the name before Casper?

It's a story most people don't know. It was actually called Dukes. So we were like, okay, we're thinking we need to come up with like a witty name. Like, why are mattresses called after kings and queens? We're going to be like the rogue duke. We came up with this like backstory. We had a whole deck. And the thing is nobody got it until we told them the story and there was no way we were ever going to get duke.com because of the university and the energy company. And there was like a bunch of other people that had trademark issues with it. And so when we're looking for a name, we were like agonizing over it. We could, we had tried dozens to hundreds of names. And then one day our branding agency just locks us in a room and says, guys, we're like a few months from launch. We have to pick a name. And so we ended up just writing like 100 names on a wall and we ended up picking Casper because it was the name of one of our roommates. And we're like, oh, Casper. He actually was Casper with a K, but we love the name and he was really tall and he didn't fit properly on the mattress. And we were like, that's a cool thing.

I thought it was the ghost. I thought it was the Friendly Ghost, like when you said that was the name.

I think everybody does. The thing is, we thought we were going to get in trouble the whole time because obviously, like, people do make the association with the Friendly Ghost, but that wasn't the intention.

Yeah. Also, I'm laughing at the Duke thing. I don't know if you're watching White Lotus. I don't want to ruin anything, but yes, the t-shirt.

Season 3. Yeah.

And I've seen all this blowback from Duke University. So I think they take their naming very seriously.

Let's not mess around with Duke from a copyright standpoint. Well, let's talk a little bit around staying mission-oriented and getting believers in the room with you to scale a company. I think what's incredible is we're on this rocket ship of D2C being a pretty hyped market, but obviously with privacy regulation and CACs going up over the last few years, and then of course everyone's talking about tariffs today, a lot of investors are starting to step away from investing in physical goods direct to consumer. What advice What advice would you have for DDC founders in persevering and growing during this current climate?

There's two first questions, which I think you brought up earlier. And the first one is people use this idea of is it VC backable in like a pejorative sense, as if a non-VC backable business is not a good business. And look, I know plenty of people that have not taken VC money that have done extraordinarily well in their lives and built incredible businesses. I start there because I think there is such a focus on like, oh, I have to build a VC backable business. And I think almost everybody that has raised a lot of VC, and we've raised hundreds of millions of dollars, but probably give you the advice of go back and be like, ask yourself, do you really need the cash? It's like not some badge of honor of like, welcome to the club. I raised the VC money or whatever. The second question is, we talk about is why do you need it and what's going on? And I think it depends on the environment that you're in. In a very competitive environment, if you believe that you have some sort of a disruptive product, innovation, service, whatever, where it makes sense to pull forward that growth, that can make sense. And sometimes it's the common wisdom. So back then, I think people did believe that these businesses had probably more distribution and moats than they actually ended up having. And so early on, there's a lot of VC money that went into most of these businesses because people thought the first mover advantage and like brand pseudo network effect would actually end up creating some sort of a long-term differentiated advantage, which I'm not sure is true today. We could debate that. So the question today when the VC money is basically dried up for most of these brands is why and how, and I'd probably say For the most part, most of the businesses that I see doing really well, especially in like CPG or other physical goods categories, have raised very little money doing $20 to $50 million in revenue with sub-$5 million raised because they've figured out better distribution mechanisms, better arbitrage on CAC. They figured out how to operate the business with way fewer employees, figure out how to transfer not only a lot more operating leverage, but really figure out how do you get a negative cash conversion cycle? And so you could float the business for longer. I think sometimes a lack of capital creates creativity and better businesses.

Yeah. My startup, I'm in the billing and payment space selling into e-commerce businesses, and we've just seen some insane growth stories of a team of 3 operating out of their garage. It started as a $500K business and now they're doing $100 million and they didn't raise anything. And it's like, well, I'd love to be one of those 3 founders, right?

And also like the time is so different today. That's what's amazing. When we launched, Shopify wasn't even really a thing. And so we ended up having a 100-person product and engineering org that was responsible for running our e-commerce engine and our digital product and our website. And when we think about like data and analytics, back in 2014, there were no like data and analytics suites. This idea of even a marketing data analyst was relatively new. And so we ended up hiring a bunch of consultants who came in, had to build media mix models to try to understand our marketing spend and stuff because there was nothing out there. These days you can use SaaS for almost everything. And so a founder can sit there and say, I can automate everything from my media spend to my customer service and keep the team a lot leaner.

Totally. It's a very different ecosystem today. Before we dive into what you're working on now in a very different market, and it's a very interesting time for that market, I'd love to chat a little bit around Casper's IPO. Casper made it to IPO, which is really a capstone unknown for most founders. I don't know who's starting a VC-backed company that isn't hoping to go public at some point. Tell us, what did you learn from the later stages of fundraising, especially as you prepared for the IPO? And with kind of 20/20 hindsight, would you have done anything differently?

It's a complicated question. They talk about in fundraising that like early stage it's all storytelling and later stage it's all math. I think that's true. The storytelling is important when you get to later stage, don't get me wrong. But for the most part, people are looking at your metrics, right? They're looking at gross margin, operating margin. They're looking at your EBITDA if there is some, or your community adjusted EBITDA or whatever metric you want to use, because people are trying to understand the physics of a business, right? Is this thing going to get lift and essentially become more and more profitable over time or not? The danger, or the thing you've got to figure out is where in the cycle of the maturity of your business are you in relation to that conversion from being a private late-stage company to a public company? And I think there's a reason why SpaceX, Stripe, most of these companies have not gone public, right? Maybe Airbnb and DoorDash are the exception, and they did it at still very late stage relative to where we did it because building a plane and flying it while you're public is a bad idea. That is a very high-stress environment that very few people make it out of alive. And so, yeah, I think that's the first question is trying to figure out where are you in that cycle of the maturity of your business. And for us, we were mid-cycle, like we actually had a lot of stuff that was working. We were just early and we ended up getting caught in a bunch of really weird, hairy things that ended up happening. So for us, we essentially started as an e-commerce business and we did our first few hundred million dollars in revenue. And by the time we'd gone public, I think we had done maybe $1 or $2 billion in cumulative revenue already. And so the business was pretty big. We were doing like $500 million a year plus in revenue, but we were going through a shift in mix because we started e-commerce. We realized that actually that channel is going to saturate at some point because of, you know, increasing CAC. And so we said, okay, then let's go after wholesale. So we started going after a bunch of wholesale partnerships. And then we also decided, because we were drinking a lot of the Kool-Aid, we're like, let's go build our own retail stores too. We want to have this awesome branded experience. And so within 18 months, we ended up building something like 90 or 100 retail stores alongside our traditional business. And what ended up happening is then when you look at our numbers, we were very unprofitable for a while, but it's because we were stuck in that J curve. We had just opened a bunch of these stores and these stores take about 12 months to hit maturity before you start paying them back. And so the reason I bring this up is that we were in that moment come February 2020 when we decided to go public because we wanted to raise more capital to keep financing the business. But what ended up happening was we ended up having a mixed story because we had some parts of our business that were mature and working slower growth, but working relatively well. We had other parts that had very high velocity. We had these stores, but we were telling people like, ah, they've been open for 6 months. We didn't have year-over-year comp data. And so it ended up being very challenging. And then it didn't help that like we went public 3 weeks before the world shut down and we were in the midst of basically trying to figure out how do we run a nearly 500 or 1,000 person company remotely while being public and managing all this other stuff. So, I don't know if I have advice other than think very carefully about when you want to do it. Oh my gosh.

First of all, thank you for sharing some of that. We don't mean to bring up past traumas and hardships and journeys that you put your heart and soul into, but so many helpful nuggets in there and learnings for founders who are either contemplating an IPO in this crazy market where they've been effectively closed closed for nearly 2 years, and furthermore thinking about how to continue keeping their businesses alive against macro uncertainty, which Claudio alluded to.

Yeah, agreed. Like the best part of going public is like we were talking about is ringing the bell. Everything else sucks. You know, you're like, you have to get a report on a quarterly basis. You have analysts that are always asking you crazy questions. You have employees that are looking at the stock price every day. And the thing is that what's hard sometimes is that when you're a private company, everything you're seeing internally, that like excitement and that motivation stuff, you're doing future thinking stuff, but there's no like present moment time marker every day in your face to tell you what other people think of you. When you're public, you're working on all this cool stuff, but if your stock price isn't doing as well as you want, it's this weird like cognitive dissonance. Cause you're like, no, no, but I'm working so hard, but our stock price isn't moving. And often it's because of exogenous factors or other things going on. And so helping people understand that and manage that is very complicated.

I love you saying that. Honestly, one of the journeys I've been on in my early career is navigating what people think of you and what you're thinking about yourself, right? Figuring out that dissonance and being comfortable with it is, I think, something that is absolutely essential for being a business leader because people are not always gonna like you every day, and it can be reflected in your IPO price, right? That is a bit of a mental health journey that you have to go on, and I'm gonna use that segue to talk about your next act, which is Slingshot, which has the goal of building a foundational model for psychology. Ambitious, personal. Would love if you could invite us in to how that became the idea for you in this next exciting phase.

It is exactly connected into that, into my journey with Casper and my life before that. So I never knew that much about mental health. It's not something that was discussed in my family. I didn't grow up going to therapy. Even though I know lots of people with mental health issues, I just assumed that's just the way it is, right? I didn't even know it was called that. I've never really even teach you in medical school about these kinds of things because it's such a focus on often pharmaceutical interventions or things that you can do in a hospital. So in my CASPer time, I am sitting there having like a meltdown. I have no idea how to manage my personal life, my professional life. It's crazy things that are going on. And my friends are like, hey, you should go see a therapist. And I'm like, what? That's like, what? Why would I do that? And I ended up finding somebody who was incredible, who really opened my eyes and helped me pretty significantly. It was like one of those aha moments that like when you see the matrix or you see the other side, you're like, oh wait, life doesn't have to be that miserable. Like there's this whole other thing that you could do around like processing your trauma and your emotions, learning how to have better relationships with people and work through your avoidance and all kinds of other things that you could do. And I'm like, that's amazing. Why doesn't everybody do this? And then you start thinking about it and you start putting together the pieces. And so for me, it was a long journey. I started investing in mental health companies and digital health companies. I wanted to try to advise and invest and help. And then when GPT-3 came out, two things clicked for me. One was that these models are capable of doing truly incredible things. When I saw that demo, I'm like, I was like, holy crap, this is going to change everything. And so I was late to the game on AI, even though I'd had some family friends that even studied with Marvin Minsky back in the day. So I'd always been keeping track of it. I hadn't quite woken up to what the latest progress was. And then the second thing that happened was as I started trying to figure out how to make this happen, I was going to meet computational psychiatrists around the world to try to understand somebody has to be doing this. I could just invest in this company and help them out, right? Because it's like, The most obvious idea in the world. People have been trying to do AI therapy since ELIZA in the 1950s. Literally, it's called ELIZA, right? And so to me, it was just like, oh, duh, like there have to be like 50 people doing this. I'm just going to go find the best team and go invest a bunch of money into it. And so I started meeting a bunch of people and nobody was doing it. And I was like, okay, this is kind of weird. I don't know what's going on here. And so then I started meeting the bigger companies, the big therapy companies. I was like, they must be doing it, right? Because they have access to all this data. And turns out nobody was doing it. I kind of came around to this conclusion. It's like one of those ideas that kept haunting me because I really didn't want to do this. It would've been so much easier if I was like, I could just find the people that were doing this, that maybe I have to figure out some way to make it happen. And from then it took a while because it wasn't until I met my co-founder Daniel, to be honest, where speaking of manifesting, I was working with a coach and I was like, I really want to meet somebody who's brilliant and super technical and understands this space way better than I do because I just want a co-founder and a partner in this. My coach was like, all right, you're going to this conference next week. Why don't you just manifest it? You're like, you want to go meet your co-founder? And I was like, all right, whatever. So we do this exercise and I'm at the conference, it's called Cerebral Valley in San Francisco. And I'm like bored with the talks that are going on. So I go stand outside at the coffee bar and I'm meeting this guy and I didn't even know what he did, but we ended up talking for like a few hours. Super interesting guy. At the end of it, I find out he's both a partner at Sequoia and his brother actually is really deeply interested in this. So he connected me with Daniel, who's my co-founder today, over text. Daniel also lives in New York. And so we went for a walk around Union Square the next day. Then we went to a whiteboard like a few hours into our walk and we were like, we realized we had the exact same vision for what we wanted to build. And we basically started working together full-time like the day after that.

Dude, this is Amazing. I love this thread in your life of things just being in front of you. I'm totally gonna like try out this new concept I've been thinking about, which I'm calling it the nudge effect, which is sometimes in life we get these nudges and Claudia alluded to our nudge with the pod. I've just had a few of them recently with like friends for other people, like helping someone get a job, super random stuff. They were just like option values. I didn't have to do anything with the nudge. It just was there. Sending one email, going to one conference, sending one text. Burst this whole thing? Like, how did you get the confidence to take the nudge?

I think sometimes it's about having enough shots on goal. Like, I don't know if there was any one of them that made sense. You just have to keep relentlessly trying and keeping an open mindset to things and showing up with an open presence. And I really do believe good ideas are not invented. They're in the water. It was the same with Casper. There's a reason why many people end up working on often really good ideas at the same time. It's because there's like something going on in the world that often posits this idea that should exist and making it happen is really hard because I think building a company, it's very much like Sisyphus. You're continuously moving this boulder up the hill, like it does not want to exist and you are desperately trying to get it to go up the hill. But the ideas themselves or the idea that it should exist is, I don't know, sometimes there's just like a right time and you have to listen for it.

Yeah. Keep people should be keeping their ears open. It's exciting. Let's talk a little bit though about this space itself and to your point, it is in the water. Foundation models, are popping up. There's been an active debate about should you build your own? Are we just going to be using the hyperscalers, et cetera, et cetera? And you really taken the plunge on building this out for this really specific vertical of psychology and mental health. And so how are you thinking about data sources, model training, ethical guardrails, given this is a sensitive topic?

Let's maybe first start with the problem. Not only is it a personal problem, but this is like a societal-level problem that I didn't realize and put together for two reasons. One, we're 50,000 psychologists short in the United States alone. Like, this is super effed up. I didn't notice the waitlist at Harvard and at UCSF to get to a psychologist is a year. If you're in Texas, you have to wait a year to get to therapy. And this is just like given the problem that we have today, which is getting worse because of social media, right? You hear Jonathan Haidt talk about these crazy statistics of anxiety with college students. So this is not like a 5% of people problem anymore. This is like a 95% of people had some sort of issue related to their mental health, whether it's mental illness or ranges all the way down to relationship anxiety, stress, or something. But all of us are experiencing something. So if you layer on top of that, what is about to change over the next 5 or 10 years because of AGI and ASI, we're big believers that so much of our mental health comes from the purpose that we get from what we do for a living. We show up to work, we think about our position in society, what we do, what we've accomplished, how we provide for our families. It is deeply integrated in our sense of who we are and how we fit into the world. And if all of that is about to change, that's awesome that we're going to do like UBI and we have plans to like give everybody some money. But like what happens when all of our jobs change, right? Whether you're a truck driver or a software developer, or like my mom is a microbiologist or my dad who's a doctor and my sister, everything is going to change. If we layer on these two trends that are about to intersect in a big way in the next 5 or 10 years, Then the question is, how are we going to make it through this as a society? Because we definitely don't have enough therapists today. There's an enormous waiting list. And if we think the problem is going to get worse, where almost everybody's going to need more help navigating this and figuring this out over the next 5 or 10 years, the answer is AI, because we have to figure out how do we use technology to serve way more people because we can't train 50 million more people. There's just no way we're trying desperately, but there's no way. Okay, so we understood the problem space. Then to me, the reason to go build a foundation model for psychology is to try to figure out what would a unique and novel approach to solving this problem look like. That's not just what everybody's done before, because what we've done before doesn't work. And I'm saying not just teletherapy and scaling access to people, because if you can get a person, it could be awesome. But the people that have tried to build AI in the space before, and this was the limit of the technology at the time, to be fair. Often said, I'm a psychologist, I developed some protocol or some methodology, and because my way is the right way, I'm basically just going to build an app on top of it. And if everybody just uses my app, the whole world will be healed and fixed. And it's basically the same thing from when people wrote self-help books. It's just that they translated into apps and then said, everybody just use my therapy to self-help that everybody should ascribe to. And I don't think that makes sense because I think all of us have a completely different journey. The reason therapists work is because they're able to meet you are, not how am I running a protocol on you. If you often go to therapy, it's not just like a CBT workbook that you're doing in the therapy session. They're like getting to know you, what's important to you. You're building this idea of the therapeutic alliance, right? This relationship that you're building together on something. If we believe that, then our hypothesis was, what if we could just learn from how humans do it? Because rather than trying to understand from the textbooks and literature, which are trying to understand how humans do it. If you can actually just go and model after how humans do it directly, it's kind of like in self-driving cars, right? You don't teach a self-driving car how to drive a car from a driving manual. You teach it by essentially mimicking how humans do it in the real world. That's how you bootstrap and you get the first set of information. Then you put it out into the wild and then you use reinforcement learning to essentially see how is it doing in all these new circumstances it hasn't seen before. And how is it continuously making itself better? That's our approach. We learn from human therapy data that we get through partnerships. We're building one of the world's largest datasets with partners that are helping us collect that. Then we basically put that into production. We have 20,000 people using our product in the wild today that are essentially giving us feedback on how to continuously make it better. And then the idea is that over time we'll be able to create models or a model that will essentially create, in a way, the perfect therapy experience for you because it'll meet you where you are and figure out what you need.

Wow. My brain is reeling. This is fascinating. Thank you for walking us through both this journey of a crisis that we have in our country, and then really where you think the solution side is going and how technology can be used for good, which is super nice to hear because everyone does get a little doomsday on the AI stuff. And I'm loving this use case of really serving an acute need that the internet created with this. And just a little personal story, you know, I've gone through therapy, so I'm proud of it. And then I've been taking this class at HBS on leadership and happiness. With Arthur Brooks. I don't know if you're familiar with his thinking. He's a big Jonathan Haidt fan. Great class. We've taken a ton of these collaborative assessments. So like everything from Myers-Briggs or Enneagram to like PANES, which is like, are you a mad scientist? I'm a mad scientist.

Yeah.

Borderline cheerleader on PANES. I can give my whole rundown.

We can talk for a long time.

Claudia is going to like be like, okay, I'll leave you guys to this. But what I will say has been interesting is I've always been a little like, eh, on like the giving my data to GPT on this kind of stuff, but I actually have been doing it because it's been so helpful. If you give it your Myers-Briggs, your PANES, your Enneagram in a situation, it can analyze it so well. And it'll be like, because of this part of your Enneagram and this part of this, blah, blah, blah. And I've done enough work that I genuinely feel like it's right. Like, I do think there's a resonant personality. So anyway, I'm rambling, but how are you guys seeing the actual specificity of your model? Be even better than that? Like, what is getting leveled up here?

That's a great question, and it's something we get asked about a lot. So for one, there's like tens of millions of people going to ChatGPT and asking it to be their therapist or coach, right? Almost everybody's had that experience of saying, I want help with this. And in some ways it's awesome because you're like, what an incredible resource that the world has. The downside is it's not designed to be a therapist or to do therapy because it's actually never been trained on that. And the architecture of the model is actually designed to do something that's actually not that great for you. I don't know if you've had this experience. If you say to it, I'm angry, it's almost always going to say, I'm so sorry that you're angry. It's totally normal to be angry. And here are 3 resources for your anger because it's just validating you. You could say anything you want and it's basically going to say, no, Madison, you're right. That person has wronged you and you're in the right here and you should cut them out of your life or whatever. And it's actually an architectural problem. It's because the way the models are designed, they're trained through human annotators that essentially are picking the better message of the two options. That's how they do the reinforcement learning. And human annotators will never pick the more difficult message. They're always going to pick the easier one that the humans like more, which is almost always the validating one. And that's why we end up with these models that say like, it's totally normal, you're, you should, whatever. What we're trying to do is actually design a model that would actually say something like, well, why is anger a problem? We talk about that, dig in with you and create some emotional heat and be able to push you in the right moment, which is what you need to do to actually work through emotions.

I love that you're bringing that up because I realized the model I use, GPT, I don't know, dozens of times a day. It knows a lot about me now, and sometimes it uses information I didn't want it to use, not in a good way or a bad way, but like I'll ask it a question and it'll be like, oh yeah, it sounds like your personality and the intersection should be a venture capitalist. And I'm like, wait, are you saying that because it's true or because you know I'm a venture capitalist? And it'll be like, oh, well, sorry. Yeah, I do know that you're a venture capitalist. Did you not want me to use that information? I'm like, of course I wanted you to create a new thought. And sometimes the models are playing back to us our own insecurities in ways that actually are not serving you.

100%. And so I think what's cool is that the world is now wide open to these things. I think versus 5 years, you know, we used to call them like chatbots and that was like a derogatory term in a way. You're like, oh, that's just a chatbot. And now we can see that these things can do incredible things. The number of people We have every day that are writing in saying, I'm crying. I never thought I would be able to talk to AI and be able to move through emotion. Somebody just wrote in saying they processed a trauma that happened in their childhood and they never thought they were going to be able to do that with AI. And I was like, holy crap, I never thought where we are in the development cycle that would be possible. It's a wild time to be alive.

It really is. And at risk at coming across as having too much of a parasocial relationship with my ChatGPT, I'm going to move us on to briefly touch on the incredible success of the business to date. You've raised $40 million. $1 million in seed funding from incredible partners such as Andreessen and Felicis. Who's the first person to say yes to backing Slingshot?

Yeah, so we actually, we haven't launched yet. We've told people about what we're doing, but we're still in a private beta.

Private beta. Okay, let's go.

We have 250,000 people on the waitlist, but we're very lucky. We have Felicis, Andreessen. Andreessen had both their consumer and their bio funds invest, which is, they were the dream partner for From the first moment we met them, they have this thesis that healthcare is going to be disrupted from the outside and that the largest company in the world will end up being a consumer health company. And so when we met, it was like a mind meld in terms of trying to figure out how do we tackle a big problem from the outside. We also have like Scottie Barnes, Aaron Gordon, NBA players. We've got 40 other athletes from around the world. And so our goal is just to try to build a cap table of people that really care about mental health, that want to help us tell the story about How do we destigmatize this? How do we do this in a totally different way? Because this is one of those categories that I think we're mid-shift. The world is like getting ready to go there. A lot more of us are talking about mental health. We're getting to that point. And so I think we're about to hit that acceleration curve where a lot more people are ready to actually work on it.

Amazing. Amazing. Well, we've spoken a bit about your past founding journey and just the incredible time and place that Slingshot's at currently. As we look to later this year in 2025, maybe even 5 to 10 years away. I know that's pretty far out for an early-stage founder. What do you think's next for Slingshot and what are you excited for?

I think you always have to be thinking 5 or 10 years out because you're trying to create a new version of the world. For us, it's pretty simple. Like, you want to help people around the world change their minds and their lives in the ways that they want to, which basically means everybody should have access to care. We should think about about what care means differently to not just encompass things like clinical depression. You can imagine a world where all of us have things in our lives that we want to improve. We want to improve our relationships. We want to get a new job. We want to make sense of the world. We want to figure out who we're meant to be. We were trying to figure out our sense of purpose, and everybody should have access to resources to help that, to help us figure out who we're meant to be and how we are better citizens in this world. And I think one of the unique things about AI is like, imagine a world where instead of it being $150 an hour and a severely limited resource that was unlimited, that everybody could have it for essentially rounding to free, that we didn't have to think about metering it for people, but that we could think about self-actualization as well as improving our emotional states as something that's almost like a human right, just like we think about other things within our healthcare system or around the world. So yeah, that's what we're working towards. And I think that there's going to be be a lot of, I'm sure, roadblocks to that when we think about the rollout of this technology, but we're committed to it. We want to find a way that we can help everyone.

Well, that is an incredibly inspiring and obviously exciting mission and vision. Neil, what's next for you personally? What are you excited for this year?

Oh, what am I excited for this year? Mm.

This is always the hardest question we ask. Founders are so focused on the company.

I myself fall into that trap as My nerdy answer is from a machine learning perspective, I think the new techniques that are obviously, I'm going to give the ML answer, which is like, for me, this is like dark arts, right? The new techniques that are coming out last year, we spent so much of the year trying to get these models to be better and it was like hitting a wall. We just could not do it. And since then, because of a bunch of the new techniques that have come out, like you guys, I'm sure have seen the DeepSeq work. The rate of improvement is off the charts. And so it's not just that the current stuff is working, it's that the new stuff that's being discovered is getting so much better that I'm very excited for that. Tariffs, love that. Just kidding. But the thing I'm excited about is it feels like we're about to enter an era of a lot of change. And I actually think that feels deeply uncomfortable sometimes because it feels so nice to be in a place where like, I understand how everything is working. I'm on steady footing and whatnot. But I don't know, I'm kind of like ready for the energy. Like I want things to change. It will be a little bit uncomfortable, but imagine a world in which 5 years from now I'm trying to think what would be the equivalent, you know, change to what ChatGPT did to us for what the world is gonna look like. Like it's gonna be crazy. I'm excited for it.

We're excited for it as well. Can't wait for season 24 of The Room Podcast and what we'll be talking about then. As we come up on time today, we were gonna ask you the hero question of the podcast. We ask this to all of our guests. And that question is, who is a woman in your life that has had a profound impact on yourself and your career?

That's a great question. The first that comes to mind is Taryn Laban. So Taryn was our Chief Experience Officer at Casper. She's a dear friend of mine. She is one of the most incredible business leaders and operators that I know. And in a way, she was like the adult that we brought in to help run the company when we were the kids. And I remember thinking I was like probably 27 and she must have been like 30 or 32 and we're Oh, like that's what grownups are supposed to act like. But she taught me a lot about business and she's both an incredible leader, a mom, a business operator, investor, just dear friend.

Thank you for that shout out. We'll have to tag her. And Neil, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. This was a blast.

Thanks for having me.

Thank you so much for joining us at The Room Podcast. If you want more from The Room every week, subscribe to our newsletter at theroompodcast.com/newsletter. Podcast.com/newsletter. We'll be back next week with a new episode, an inspirational guest, Tuesday, 10:00 AM Eastern, 7:00 AM Pacific. See you in the room. Perkins Coie supports the most innovative entrepreneurs and investors in fast-moving and high-growth sectors, addressing their myriad of legal needs. But the firm doesn't just provide end-to-end legal and business counseling to its startup clients. It also facilitates introductions to key advisors and sources of capital. Perkins Coie's interactive website, Startup Percolator, offers access to programs, resources, and rich dynamic content designed to assist entrepreneurs on their startup journey. To learn more, go to startuppercolator.com and perkinscoie.com.

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