Village Global Podcast - Building the Company Behind 1 Million Therapy Visits a Month _ Jake Cooper _Grow Therapy_

0:00Ben CasnochaFirst, a show of hands for folks here. Who has used an LLM essentially as a therapist going back and forth talking about a personal or professional challenge you've had? Okay. So this feels like a trillion dollar question for you, which is, are all these mental health therapists as humans still going to have jobs in tenure? 100%. So a couple of stats just to like level set on the plane, on like where we're at empirically, 40% of the folks that we

0:26Jake Cooperthat receive care if you grow. They're using an LM for health, wellness, and relationship advice. Visits in 2025 were up around 7% year-over-year and issue-wide for therapy. In America? In America, yeah. So how do those things both simultaneously make sense? We're really excited to have Jake here with us. Many of you probably know about the kind of remarkable success of growth therapy, but today we're going to dig in a little bit to the founding story.

1:03Ben Casnochaand some of the key lessons learned from Jake's journey. Jake rarely actually does interviews, conversations, appearances, speaking gigs. He's not very active on social media, extremely humble guy. Encourage everyone to listen carefully to some of the depth of wisdom that he's accumulated these past few years. He's really one of the most talented operators in the tech industry today. I was talking to someone who knew him who knows him well a few days ago thinking about this conversation and he said Jake's insights on how to run a business at scale are truly singular. So we're honored and delighted to have you with us, Jake. And why don't we just start to kind of level set with everyone?

1:45Jake CooperTell us the founding story of grow and and give us a sense of your current scale and what the business does of course and first off Thank you for having me and it's great to be here to meet every one of you guys. I hope it was a very generous introduction I hope that everyone here can lower their expectations a bit But um, of course, yeah, you know, I'd love to tell you that so just a little bit of background I'm Jake, one of the co-founders and CEO of growth therapy. I'm actually here with my other two co-founders, Manoj, who's in the audience. Alan just stepped out, but you'll see him around as well.

2:21Jake CooperSo in terms of how we got started, we started grow in the middle of COVID because we saw that mental health really wasn't working for the three stakeholders that comprised the industry, patients, providers, and payers. And I saw this firsthand as a patient. I struggled to find a mental health provider.

2:41Jake Cooperwho took my insurance, let alone was a good fit. My co-founder Manoj saw this from the other side. He was training to become a doctor, looking at psychiatry amongst other areas, and just seeing the immense amount of really just operational friction and business building that you need to go through to run a private practice. And in diving into...

3:07Jake CooperWhat we saw was a challenge. We diagnosed it as two things. One, the industry was totally analog. And two, it was extremely fragmented, both in terms of its participants, where you had primary care doctors diagnosing folks separate from therapists, separate from psychiatrists, and also in terms of the software and services where you'd have maybe three different directories you list yourself on to get leads. You'd have a different EHR, a different scheduling system.

3:37Jake Cooperan independent person, hopefully submitting your claims, not always as a biller. And we felt that if we could build an end to end system to support every one of these stakeholders, we could advance the most important.

3:57Ben Casnochamission in the world, helping people live happier, healthier, more content lives. And you had a, there was a business model insight, which by the way, if those who don't track healthcare services has been replicated in many different businesses, and we at Village Global have backed many growth therapy for X companies, some of them are in this room. But the business model insight about how this all comes together as a system was really the, was really profound and has spawned tons of copycats and imitators.

4:23Jake CooperDid that come naturally to you? Was that just you and your co-founders got in a room and thought hard about how all these pieces work together? Or did you have to iterate your way to this business? There was definitely iteration along the way, but I think we took a fairly first principle approach to start, which was, you know, does it make sense for everyone to independently...

4:46Jake Cooperapply to insurance companies. Does it make sense for everyone to independently build their own revenue cycle management functions? Does it make sense from a discovery standpoint for patients to really find who is a great provider just by asking a couple people that they know versus going to a place that not only aggregates all the different options, but serves as a quality control mechanism. So I think from that perspective, what we did anticipate this, the kind of systems level approach we took, it wasn't possible really to do what we did pre COVID. COVID drove practice from in-person to virtual, which had huge second order consequences. It meant that providers

5:31Jake Coopercould start practices without paying for office space or without having to be in an area that was very population dense, it meant that matching now had real leverage. If you were matching on a hyper-local basis, you might have five options that you could possibly commute to. Now you had 500 because you can match on a state basis. It meant workflows went from pen and paper to...

5:58Jake Cooperdigital, which meant that we really had workflow leverage. You had a direct access point to patients as well as they enter through client portals instead of through a provider's office door. So give us a sense of the current scale, how many patients. Yeah, so we do around a million visits a month across 26,000 providers. Some of the financials we will keep private, but in terms of what we've disclosed so far, we past at the end of last year a billion dollars of top-line revenue and we've been operating profitably every year since since year two which has enabled us to really double our investment in our on our team our product in our expansion.

6:41Ben CasnochaNow, you started a cleaning company in college. I did. That Duke that's been passed to new student leaders every year is my understanding. You've separately credited that experience of starting a business in college as teaching you more about entrepreneurship than a lot of other things. Like, what was that entrepreneurship education for you? Yeah, so to be clear, this is not something you would quit your day job for. But there's a couple, I think, in college. And I'm sure this is the case for many folks here or potentially

7:10Jake Cooperway earlier parts in their life. You know, I'd met great people. I'd cared about school and applied there. But the area that I really felt that I learned the most and personally found the most contentment was in starting a few different small businesses. Cleaning was one. Bed rentals was another summer storage, things like that. And I think it was... So bed rentals was one? Bed rentals. Bed rental summer storage. There is...

7:36Jake CooperThey have pretty, you know, I won't get into the details, but basically I think the, I had in many ways been on tracks where, you know, progress was very linear and kind of step by step. I think high school colleges like that, I wanted to finance afterwards, and it's again like year by year progression, and I think.

7:59Jake CooperIn starting a company, you really see that the aperture opens in terms of what you're able to do. You're able to work with fantastic people. And some of the early experiences, I mean, even just hiring people for the first time, dealing with situations where things go wrong, dealing with some interpersonal conflict if you have to part ways with someone. Those were, I would say, more formative.

8:28Ben Casnochaexperiences than anything I was learning in the classroom. So you're starting different companies, kind of a classic entrepreneurial instinct, seeing business opportunity. But with Grow, you founded a business that was deeply aligned to a mission that's incredibly inspiring and changing the world of mental health and health care. And it's a mission that's personal to you.

8:50Jake Coopershare a little bit about why you care so much about this. Yeah, so I mentioned to start that the catalyst for grow from my standpoint was was first my own challenge in finding a mental health provider and my co-founders challenge and anticipated challenge and really starting and building up a practice and those were the two catalysts but more off the record you know my Mental health was personally in a deeper way. I think I am not I am unfortunately similar to many people are growing probably many people in this room where I had a family member in this case my sister who Really struggled with severe mental health challenges since she was a teen unfortunately passed away a few years ago and I think that

9:43Jake CooperFor us, we have the opportunity on the one hand to, if we do our job well, really change the lives of the people that we touch. And on the other hand, it's a huge responsibility to actually deliver, because these are people's lives that we have a degree of impact on. And in a small ways, it can change the trajectory of how they shape out.

10:12Ben CasnochaLet's talk about you and your co-founders in in in the early days So you there's three of you started the business together. How do you divide and conquer and think through that co-founder dynamic? And how has that evolved as the company has scaled? What have you learned through the process of being great co-founders? Yeah, so I think We have a business model that is inherently

10:37Jake CooperVast and complex. I mean you could have a marketplace as a company you could have any HR as a company you could have revenue cycle management as a company care delivery that like those are effectively Four different companies and there's other ones. I think it can name other areas And you know the rationale for having it all under one roof is there's a real one plus one equals three aspects of being able to own the full infrastructure rails and end what has really enabled us to run at that more expansive scope comprehensively is the relationship that me and my co-founders have had since day one and you know it's I think the simple way of describing how we have operated is on the

11:30Jake Coopermarketing finance operations side I've taken more of the lead there on the partnerships side that really underpins all of our payer relationships all of our ecosystem relationships.

11:41Jake CooperIn addition to the clinical research side, Manoj has really taken the lead. And then across tech, Alan, who started as engineer, then it was PM, as design jobs as well, as operators or CTO cutting across engineering, product design, and data.

12:04Jake CooperWhile those are the general flavors of division, I think just as important as our relatives skill sets and strengths is the fact that we're all just operating from how can we make this successful with very low pride of ownership over any given area. So we've kind of traded.

12:23Ben Casnochaareas and scopes all throughout and how do you build like your co-founders have been there with you and for you during some incredible professional milestones and some real personal challenges and milestones like how did you build trust and how do you invest in those relationships so that they can show up for you and you can show up for them at some of these crucible moments. Yeah it's I mean there's there's some things that you can do deliberately in terms of making time and space to connect but a lot of it is not

12:53Jake Cooperso much we did this off-site or we did like this dinner or we have this ritual. It's more that I think we have had. Manoj was the first person I reached out to when I was struggling to find a mental health provider because I just respected the heck out of him. Alan was the first person we both reached out to when we were looking to really when we saw that if we go from having this be a services business to really building a platform, we can have a huge impact because he was the person who, both professionally and personally, we most respected. So I would say a shared value set. We were all friends or connected through others in college. I think a shared value set is probably the most important thing.

13:49Jake CooperAs you've scaled the business, have you had to have sort of difficult conversations with each other or roles had to change? And how do you kind of approach that? Yeah, we've definitely had roles change and scope change. But you know, we're always just working backwards from what the right answer is for our company. And again, we're operating with low.

14:14Jake Cooperpride of ownership. I think, and this is not just for Manoj, Allen and I, you know, I think it's... important to not only have a point of view that you express, but express the premises that underpin that point of view. Because if you say, you know, Ben, you say, you know, we should go right, and I say we should go left. Like, those sound like disagreements, but really, if what's more interesting is one of the premises that underpin your point of view, and then can you validate or invalidate any of those premises, you can go about it a little bit more.

14:53Ben Casnochamethodically to actually figure out the core point of disagreement and then I plan to reconcile it. Yeah well and I will say at dinner last night I saw that in action in a segment of the conversation in which there's a small disagreement on some topic although I don't think there is actually really meaningful disagreement but I actually watched you in real time come back to curiosity and literally ask the question I'm curious to learn more I'm curious to learn more I'm curious to learn more as as kind of a

15:21Jake Cooperback and forth was unfolded, and I think that's an incredibly powerful habit to have built of it. Yeah, and it's one you have to... So that is something that takes practice, because I think all of us, you know, we have strong points of view that's kind of intrinsic to, like, founder archetypes broadly, but I do think that there's real ask questions first, value, even just to understand someone's frame of thought in terms of how to... So Jake, you're a master at building teams.

15:49Ben CasnochaI wouldn't necessarily say that. The growth therapy, you know, Glassdoor scores are some of the best in the industry. It's kind of just fascinating. So many of the companies in the category have really shitty employee MPS, but you've recruited some incredible people, you've retained some incredible people, and you've retained MPS even after folks have left. What do you believe on the topic of hiring and team cultivation that many other CEOs do not believe? Yeah. So just a couple of prophecies.

16:18Jake CooperI have seen a lot of companies that I do deeply respect that have just terrible glass door reviews. So just as a preface, I don't know. I wouldn't use that as a singular barometer. I think the hard thing is, and this is known, is just finding the right person for for each role, making hard decisions quickly and creating a connected and communicative culture where folks are both pushed but also feel appreciated and heard. I think there are tactical things you can do in terms of like to actually operationalize this just as an example of one of the things we're talking through over dinner. You know, there's one of the questions over dinner was like, what are areas where you're like,

17:09Jake Cooperirrationally stingy in areas where you're, like, irrationally generous or over-sporage excessive swag and events, by the way, are two that I've heard from Village Global, which I love. I'm going to be wearing this, whether it's Village Global winner or dissocially, it's a great, great swim. It's a koi event, Village Event. It's all, you know, better spiders for sure.

17:38Jake CooperI think for us, the areas that we mentioned that I do think makes sense to go above and beyond, like severance, like if you're going to depart with someone, even just having to have a policy where you can do that. Generously, it's not going to be a super large percentage of your folks in a given year. You don't want to create mountain incentives to hold on to someone for a prolonged time. There's ways that even after someone departs, just shooting them a note of appreciation. There's small things like that in, I would say, like...

18:15Ben Casnochathe inflection point moments that are disproportionately valuable. So how many how many employees do you have now 600? 620, could say 130-ish. So double click a little bit on the tactics. You said kind of casually, oh build alignment, make sure everyone's on the same page. But how do you actually do that across such a large organization? Like what are your communication patterns? How are you pinging people? If you guys run on Slack, is this like all hands every week? Are you emailing? How many directs do you have? Like what's the operating playbook?

18:44Jake CooperYeah, so this is something where I don't feel like an expert in, in that I feel like you're kind of learning how to do this a little bit better each day. And necessarily so, particularly as you're changing faces, I would say that, or stages, I would say that a couple of things that have worked well for us. I do think that cascading, like top line, vision and objectives at a company department and then team level are useful. You don't need, I think, while it's not taken to extreme, it can be very restrictive, but done well. It can just create scaffolding for folks to innovate within their core area in a way that they can articulate.

19:39Jake Cooperladders back to the core company. You mean defining the top-level objectives? Yeah, exactly. But I think candidly the biggest thing is manager level effectiveness. If you do MPS surveys, the question that's most correlative with team and employee retention is what they think of their manager. And I think that that is emblematic of the leverage that you have in just having strong leaders. There's the cannon versus cannonball or something like that metaphor of you're mostly ray constrained by how many folks can operate with reasonably high degrees of autonomy.

20:24Ben Casnochadirect in power efforts. So we've seen, even with the same company planning and the same rituals, just very different outcomes across, depending on the leader in the function or seed. Yeah, it reminds me of the phrase, employees join companies and they leave managers. Yeah, exactly. Right. And that's why the manager relationship was so powerful. How do you select for people that are more likely to be the cannons or the people that have high throughput and high agency, like what do you interview? You mentioned that today, some days you'll do 40 or 50 interviews, you know, over the course of the week, or maybe the day. I'm not doing that many, but I do. How many interviews do you do a week, would you say? A typical week at Grow? I think, you know, 10 would be maybe like. 10 interviews a week. That would be, I would say around, call it somewhere around there.

21:25Jake CooperAnd what are you asking to try to get at this question of are they going to be the person that can? Yeah, there's a couple different lines. I think one, you want to understand their motivation. So even if you just step through each layer of here's the three different steps you've made, what drove you to take the next step to understand are they running away from something? Are they running towards it? If they're running towards it, what are they solving for? Are they solving for?

21:51Jake CooperMoney, are they solving for prestige? Are they solving for a learning experience? Are they solving for a specific interest? I think that that is useful. Being able to see if they are actually a doer and can operate at multiple altitudes. So there's a couple different ways to test this. I think for a leadership level.

22:11Jake Cooperlike, even starting with a big strategic question, see how they answer that and say, OK, well, what did you do to advance this? And then they'll give you an answer, and then you'll go, OK, well, like, what specifically, how did you conceive of this? What were the initial metrics that you looked at? Like, what did you get wrong? What was like, and basically clicking, like, six layers down, what you will find is, and this is not new advice. I think DoorDash, in particular, does this. And Tony, who I think is one of the.

22:39Jake Cooperbest leaders at hiring. at scale does this really well. We found that to be effective. The doing it is the double clicking down. So there's a couple of ways you can do this. One, you can give someone like an actual test to do. And the DoorDash test, as an example for people who are launching markets, was here's 25 bucks, you have five hours, go get 200 customers. No one would get 200 customers, but seeing how they would respond to a very amorphous challenge was indicative of their perseverance, creativity.

23:11Jake CooperYou can't do that with everyone, though. So if it's a top level leader, if it's someone who's in a production type role, you can say, OK, what's a recent side project that you've done? And you basically just click down into that to the decisions they made at each part of the journey. If it's someone who's won a leadership role, who was on a couple side project, you can Start a strategic level of something they've taken down they've taken on and really click a few layers down but but the point of all this is to basically get from the strategic conception to like very tactical execution and Seeing their their depth of understanding that at each different layer And the folks you aren't really can't really go that deep on you'll start to lose them at like layer

23:59Jake Coopertwo or three. How long are these interviews when you're when you're double clicking like how over what period of time I think I think you can do this and it interview time versus signal like goes asymptotic like relatively quickly like I think if you I'm not sure after like more than five to six like cumulative hours of interviewing someone you learn that much more if you use those five to six hours effectively.

24:30Ben CasnochaAnd this is cumulative. This isn't like one interview. It's like five hours. That would be a long interview. So you're trying to probe someone's motivations? Yes. What drives them? Are they running towards something? Do you trust their answers? Because can't people game this a little bit? They know what you want to hear. I think that you can compare their answers to their actions. And if someone's like, you know, I wanted to work here,

24:59Jake Cooperfor the mission. It's like you work at Dunder Meflin, like you make paper. There's no possible way that this is true. If you're like, you know, I don't care about title, but you saw it every step up was a title role. And you're saying, you know, this is a bigger scope, but it's a it's a title down and they're like, what's my title? Do you actually do that? Because I heard that's what Zuckerbergs did earlier as a Facebook is intentionally give people a lower title than they had the previous job, just a test for title obsessions. Yeah, I think it's so we had probably skewed

25:29Ben Casnochain the early days, in tech particularly, title deflationary, but on the margin, we try to just do it accurately. I think that we don't have an extreme tactic there, I would say. Let's talk about AI inside GLO. We have a lot of people here who are building vertical AI applications. You're a prospective customer in a sense of the scale you operate on these different functional areas. You've been thinking a lot about You were born pre-chat GPT and you're on the quest to become an AI native operating business and you're thinking a lot about what products can transform different parts of your business. What's your current sense for where you can get the most leverage out of AI? And as you look and pilot different products and vendor pitches, where do you get excited about the potential and where do you think there might be too much hype? Yeah.

26:23Jake CooperOn AI native, I do think it's like anything a spectrum, not binary. I think though, so a couple of high level statements and then I'll answer specifically. So I think that's yeah, I think it's spectrum, not binary. I think generally speaking, anything that improves distribution or experience, which ultimately feeds back to distribution, will have a greater impact than things that are cost-reductive.

26:53Jake Coopera limit to how much you can reduce a cost, it goes to, you're not gonna get, you can't go below zero, whereas for distribution and scale, which we're all in the business of, there's not as much of a limit. So I... So you're saying don't pitch cost savings, pitch... Well, I think you should pitch what you are delivering, but in terms of areas that are focus areas for us, I think what gets us most excited about, what gets us most excited are things that improve Increasing number of people we serve or improve how we serve them now going one layer deeper a couple areas that are Top of mind for us in particular You know matching for us So there's certain surface areas where you don't even really need to break existing user paradigms to get the leverage to get full leverage in the user experience from from AI in the last area is actually

27:50Jake Cooperor AI coaching tool which folks use between their sessions to support care. I would think about this today as in some ways like to a interactive journaling where it's informed by the session you share with the providers at the end of the session or you share with the providers before the next session. You could also set intentions in the session that then you revisit it in between. First show of hands for folks here. Who has used an LLM?

28:17Jake Cooperessentially as a therapist going back and forth talking about a personal or professional challenge. Okay. So this feels like a trillion dollar question for you, which is, are all these mental health therapists as humans still going to have jobs in tenure? 100%. So a couple of stats just to level set on the plane, on like where we're at empirically, you know, 40% of the folks that we that receive care if you grow will raise their hand if we ask this question.

28:45Jake CooperThey're using an LM as well. Well, they're using an LM for health, wellness, and relationship advice. Visits in 2025 were up around 7% year-over-year industry-wide for therapy. In America? In America, yeah. So how do those things both simultaneously make sense? Well, it's different use cases. If you think about fields, and again, very high level. What areas do we think will forever stay in the demand of humans? I mean, just speaking very generally, fields that are relational versus functional and fields where the objective is more nebulous versus defined are ones that are just intrinsically better suited for humans. And we see that in actual preferences.

29:40Jake CooperWe haven't seen any change this as models have. There was a step function improvement for 4.0 when 4.0 came out. But since then, you're not seeing changes in how folks are using it in a material way. It's still incredibly useful as a supplement. I think that being able to, with no latency, have thoughtfully structured your thinking and interaction if it's informed with full clinical context and in a system where there's an escalatory pathway is inherently valuable and can help end the cost curve in health care. We don't see this being net reductive to the fundamentally human aspect of navigating your life. I mean, it seems like one of the key things people get from therapy is the sense of feeling of being heard and someone listening. And the question is, can that be replicated? Directive accountability. I mean, I think

30:38Jake CooperI know there's a lot of sweeping statements that are around in terms of where we will go and I understand them because the pace of progress is so extreme but like for me it's more akin to like you know will you no longer have like a romantic relationship because they'll be in LLM and like it's it's well maybe maybe some people I mean you know you know to each their own but I think it's like very niche like right yeah and I haven't I haven't other areas that are like simulative of like romantic context like you know there's there's nothing we're fundamentally wired in a given way as humans and I don't see that I don't see that so let's say I want to

31:28Jake Cooperwork on my mental health. What types of questions should I ask the LLM and what questions should I say for the human therapist? Like where is the comparative, other than being heard and listening? What an LLM is useful for is if you have an existing directive for it and you are looking to have adherence to that directive, it will help you stretch your thoughts. What it is not great for is if you're like, you know, here's this fundamental relationship challenge I'm having.

31:57Jake CooperAnd that's multidimensional. Like, what should I do here? Like, there's so much at play there. And in a similar way, as other relational nebulous fields are, if everyone here can say, what should I do as CEO for my company? And maybe it can help brainstorm. But it's not an iterate in.

32:25Jake Coopera closed system with a defined objective where you can goal it around, okay, how do you optimize support responses to improve CSAT? It's like closed loop, like low permutation complexity. That's very different from how do I navigate my life. One of the reasons your mission is so amazing is you guys probably more than any other company in America have the ability to shape how mental health care is delivered and you can up level therapists.

32:52Jake CooperTotally. To have an AI co-pilot and help people much more dramatically. Yeah. Our mission is to help everyone in need lead a meaningful life. And I think if you think about the way to do that at scale, there's zero sum components of how do we offer better value proposition to folks than our competitors, all that. But I think the very positive some aspects relate to ways in which we Can actually make the system of care more effective or may in a component of that would be helping empower individual providers or providing a kind of triage pathway where you have support in between your sessions that can complement the the directive that you're receiving from care and those we see as all Expansive or expanding our overall impact to the company and so well if you guys have questions or comments for Jake I'm going to turn to you in a couple minutes Jake you mentioned Tony from DoorDash. Yeah

33:50Jake CooperWho are other entrepreneurs you admire, and even if from afar, and what do you admire about them? I think that I'm trying to think of ones that are not just totally commonplace and it's tough because the commonplace ones are compelling. You know, I think that the reason I picked Tony at DoorDash is because I think just the level of operating rigor is just, which really started with the way that they hire is just extremely high. And they were able to systematize that in a way that is really challenging to do at the scale that they're at. I think there's certainly other folks, I think, for Zuckerberg just operating with like

35:03Jake Cooperno sunk cost bias whatsoever, and the most kind of maximally expected value type function. And I think those are like... There's some cost buys. Is that like moving away from VR? Well, yeah, yeah, there's there's definitely a shoot. How many money do they spend on like a hundred billion or something? Some 70 billion. Some ridiculous 70 billion. It's like that didn't work. Some ridiculous. Some ridiculous amount of money. But I think it comes down to like if you are always curious and you're operating with intellectual humility and you're thinking on a like reasonable time horizon like if those three things are true.

35:45Jake Cooperthen you will not operate with some cost bias. Then you will be open to not having to be right a high percentage of time, knowing that for the ones that high percentage, basically maximizing expected value versus percentage win rate, it comes from, I think, those values. I've never worked at Meta, and there are so many other aspects that you could draw.

36:14Jake Coopera different point of view on, but those aspects, character-wise, I admire. Why don't you have an EA? So we talked about this a little bit at dinner, and I think one preface I would have is I don't travel that much, and Minosia's holding on the fort for a lot of the sales. So Minosia's their calendar? No, Minosia's greater need probably for an EA than I do in many ways.

36:42Jake CooperBecause I think those two things lead to it. But in terms of, if most of the meetings I'm having are with candidates or internally, I do think it's a feature, not a bug, that there's a layer of friction to book. And I have a little bit higher control over. It's harder to get on the calendar. Yes. I have more discussion if he makes it on my calendar. And I think I also have a more immediately direct relationship with folks.

37:11Jake Cooperthat I am meeting, I'm not going to live or die on this belief. I think it certainly makes sense for a lot of folks. Well, it is a funny thing. It reminds me of, like, Sergey Greene. Yeah. There's also, like, you try to do things that said reasonable precedence. And I think, like, we have to be clear and debated at some point, like, having to share DA. But I think we have this, like, core story where it's, like, we get one, then you have, like, the exec team get one, and then you get, like, The VP folks get one and then it's like a bunch of just EA is just like... Conspiring to take over the company. Not doing that, but more just like spending so much time just coordinating meetings and it's like, this is not what we... Yeah, we're not here to have meetings, we're here to do incredible work. It certainly makes sense for people in other circumstances. And then one more for me, then I'll open it up.

38:07Ben CasnochaEveryone's to think about questions for Jake. Jake, you're a fairly private person. You're pretty heads down and focused. You said you don't travel much. You don't give talks much. If you Google your name on YouTube, there's literally not a single interview you've given that's on YouTube in the last five or six years, despite running one of the fastest growing companies in America. What's the pro and con of this posture? What do you get from this heads down nature and what are you missing out on? Yeah. So I would say that

38:39Jake CooperThere are pros and cons, I think. So I think part of this is rational, and part of this is just personality style. I think the rational part is, I think, just generally speaking, we could have a bigger impact just focusing on the work directly. I do think some of this was probably more personal preference. I'm a bit shy. I don't derive any, like...

39:07Jake Cooperpersonal meeting from notoriety, Minouche, and I even down to this presentation are all kind of like... You're enjoying this one. I'm enjoying this one for sure. This one is very nice. It's completely different. But we're always trying to, like jokingly, volunteer each other for stuff.

39:30Jake CooperIt only took us seven years to get you here. I would say that where it has started to have a negative impact, and I am going to try to do a little bit more to change this, is if you Google us, we are greater in scale than we are known. And while that doesn't matter intrinsically, it does matter for recruitment, which is the main way that we can build.

39:58Jake Cooperachieve our mission. I do think actually having even if it's just like one and I will do one of these publicly like one podcast type. I personally watch a ton of them. I think it's a really interesting form of content where you have it's engaging but long form so you can get a sense of Thanks. And I think it's useful to have even just one of those out for potential folks. Maybe they won't discover you through it. But once they discover you, they'll Google your company and have a better sense of you from it. That's a great line. I might do one podcast. I mean, it's really remarkable. I can't think of another CEO who's at the last press. I will eat my broccoli. Questions for Jake.

40:40Speaker 4Hi, thank you for sharing your story reying. I'm a founder of term blocks. We're building an AI analyst for capital markets I'm curious about your day zero go to market What it what it was like specifically? How do you prevent present value proposition to providers when you don't have patients? How do you present value proposition to patients when you don't have providers? I'm curious how you solve this problem. I'll tell you exactly what we did so

41:09Jake CooperGross started with a job ad we posted on indeed Do you want to start your own practice in exchange for revenue share? We'll partner with you every step of the way We had 58 providers apply this job ad that we spent $20 on that was just a website I quit my job three days later. Where were you working at the time? I was at Blackstone at the time private equity company and my nose dropped out of med school, pretty much right after that as well. His parents were very supportive. One of the funnier stories, and I may be embalishing a bit, but my dad was like, you know, he dropped out of medical school. Like, you guys don't even have a dot-com email address. This is terrible. And then we ended up buying like growththerapy.com for like...

42:02Speaker 2It's like, this is better. Time for one more question. Let's go to Ed here. Hi. Thank you, Jake. Incredible story. I'm Ed, the CEO and co-founder of Flower. We are building the most ergonomic database for agents to use, Barnon. I think the question that Ergonomic meaning comfortable to sit in all the rest ergonomic. Yeah comfortable and easy to understand It's it's just a pure code. No impedance mismatch It's going to be the easiest database for agents to use Anyways, I was really inspired by the mission-oriented nature of your company The fact that the three of you all as founders sort of like had this really strong through line through which everything else was expressed I'm really curious how the mission has both

43:00Speaker 2Remained the same but also how it's changed in the face of you know kind of the dual Sited the dual-edged nature of LLMs and how they both promote psychosis in a certain respect But also how there is this sort of ray of light and how they could advance therapies. I'm really curious if Yall's mission has changed in that way. Yeah great great question and great to meet you I For what it's worth. I don't think capability changes have had

43:30Jake Cooperwhich is how I review LLMs, a direct impact on our mission. We view those as more like inputs for achieving it. I think one evolution that we had over time was you, for multi-sided marketplaces, it is important that every stakeholder succeeds for the overall mission and system to succeed.

43:59Jake CooperSo there's often not direct trade-offs. It's much more common that what's good for one is good for another. There are some instances where there are direct trade-offs. And I think having a priority rank across those stakeholders is valuable. I would say when we started, and again, we weren't patient-facing, we were like psyched. As I mentioned, like psyched today, that was patients' relationship was possibly even more with psyched today, let alone the individual provider than it was us.

44:28Jake CooperIt was probably providers, patients, payers, or something in that order. I think today, we kind of flipped a year or two in, particularly when folks started to come to our site directly for care. It really flipped a little bit more to patients, providers, and payers. And to be clear, that is, I think, objectively the right order. At the end of the day, all participants are here to help support people living more, meaningful, healthy, content lives. But it came with a series of the way that that would manifest in terms of trade-offs, just as an example, for reviews. Like, I think they're very valuable in many aspects. You can imagine some providers were not...

45:17Jake Cooperhappy with even the idea, even if they're getting five stars with the idea that a patient could review them, what if the patient was in a reliable narrator? What if it had a real impact on their business? And you know, the way we'd go about this was one, we'd stick with what we think is right for care, but then two, we'd go about it in a nuanced way where we had an objective, objection handling process where we'd review every review. If you raised an objection, we would look into it further. We'd have a response mechanism. So there's ways you can mitigate it. But I think that that's probably the biggest value linemanship that we had over time. Jake, you've built an incredible company. We're honored to have you in the village. And you're obviously honoring the legacy of your sister and changing the lives of millions of people. So thank you for everything. Of course.

46:09Ben CasnochaHey, this is Ben Keznoka, co-founder of Village Global. Thanks so much for tuning into the Village Global podcast, where we go deep on all of the biggest topics in tech. If you enjoyed this conversation, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. You can check us out on Spotify, Apple, wherever you get your podcasts. We'd love to see you for the next one.