- Lucia Huang, co-founder and CEO of Osmind, shares her journey from majoring in chemistry to transitioning into finance, where she focused on healthcare companies and discovered the potential of better software for clinicians.
- Huang met her co-founder at Stanford, where their shared passion for mental health and firsthand experiences with mental health challenges inspired them to start Osmind.
- Osmind's journey accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic, as the co-founders identified the urgent need for better mental health support and swiftly moved to build a product that could transform psychiatric care.
- Lucia emphasizes the importance of a bold vision, staying close to customers, and integrating user feedback early on, which has been instrumental in Osmind's rapid growth and success in the mental health technology space.
- Osmind aims to transform mental health and psychiatry by making it more data-driven, ultimately becoming the number one software for private practice psychiatrists and playing a significant role in future drug approvals.
In this podcast with Kyriakos the CEO of Terra, Lucia Huang, co-founder and CEO of Osmind, shares her journey from a background in chemistry and healthcare finance to creating Osmind. After gaining experience in investment banking and a neuroscience biotech startup, she founded Osmind to address the data challenges in Psychiatry and improve mental health treatment through innovative software.
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Lucia Huang’s Path Leading Up to Osmind
Kyriakos: Lucia, it's good to see you again. Excited to do this discussion together. Let's start with, what is Osmind? And then the timeline of how you started.
Lucia: Thank you so much for having me. Excited to chat about our journey today. So yeah, I'm Lucia, co-founder and CEO here at Osmind. We offer software for clinicians and researchers in Psychiatry. We fundamentally believe that the entire industry of Psychiatry and mental health are changing and we're trying to help the frontline clinicians that are trying to provide better care, and also help researchers discover better treatments.
Kyriakos: What were you doing before starting Osmind?
Lucia: I've been in healthcare my entire career. I was one of those people that went into undergrad thinking that we’re going to become a doctor. I actually really loved chemistry so I ended up majoring in chemistry, but I felt like I could make a bigger impact on the business side of healthcare. And honestly, I didn't love standing up all the time in lab and chem so those are like the two honest reasons. I ended up going into Finance right after college, focusing on Healthcare companies. I was in Investment Banking, and investing all the while focused on helping large biopharma companies and then investing in healthcare IT companies. That was an amazing experience I got to work with both huge companies and smaller companies that were looking to scale, and really deeply began to understand the problems and opportunities in the healthcare system. Specifically, when I was on the investing side, I had the opportunity to invest in a specialty-based EHR, which is what we are now building. So it was definitely inspiring to see how much clinicians got improvement in their workflows and reduced burnout by using better software.
Despite all that and the awesome experience I had, I really wanted to build something and I felt like being even closer to the patient would mean a lot more to me. So I ended up leaving my finance job in New York City, I took a huge pay cut, I came out to the Bay Area which is where I'm from, and I joined an early stage Neuroscience biotech startup called Verge Genomics. I got to work hand-in-hand with the CEO there and it was really inspiring and honestly like a great kind of backseat view into what it's like to build a company from the early stages. It also inspired me with seeing firsthand how much the science and neuroscience is really changing. And ultimately, that combined with my prior experience made me realize that I wanted to start Osmind a few years later.
Meeting the Co-Founder and the Shared Passion for Mental Health
Kyriakos: And did you join Stanford after that? And how did you meet your co-founder? I believe you met there as well?
Lucia: Yeah. It was an awesome experience. GSB (Graduate School of Business) is like an incredible, magical place where everyone can dream big, so it was a great breeding ground for starting a company too. So, after Verge, I was at Stanford in their business school for two years and that's also where I met my co-founder. We met in a healthcare IT class—very nerdy—that cross-listed between the GSB and the med school. So my co-founder was in medical school at the time, we randomly were paired up on a final project and then we stayed friends after. So in the months that followed, we got to hang out a lot, and essentially we talked a lot about the things that we cared about. We both had our own perspectives on the Health Care system, and mental health came up as a frequent topic. Both of us grew up in the Bay Area and there are mental health challenges everywhere. Especially in the Bay area, it's something that's so stigmatized because children growing up have a lot of pressure. And for me had a lot of I saw a lot of really unfortunate incidents. There were a lot of suicides and suicide attempts both within my immediate social circle and at the in the Bay Area Community at large. And my co-founder had seen that as well and so we really wanted to better understand why our Mental Health Care system was this way. And that set us off on this journey to like deeply understand and talk to a bunch of people what we could do to help solve the problem.
Kyriakos: At the point, were you considering starting a business? Or was it more of a ‘let me discover what's going on’?
Lucia: Yeah, more of a latter. Good question! I think I had seen both the pros and cons of starting a business being at a startup beforehand. I saw like some of the downsides too. Like, oh man, talking to investors and having to do that song and dance, and having to do everything yourself like that. You know there were a lot of like difficulties too. So on my end, I was open to just like really trying to understand the problem first and I wasn't tied to like I need to start a company to solve this. I was open to finding another company or you know another early stage venture that might have been tackling it too. But as we continued to look into it, it became clear that no one was addressing it in the way that we thought it should be addressed. And that like, starting our own company was the best way to really take matters into our own hands and build the company that we wanted to build.
The Serendipitous Timing of Starting Osmind During COVID-19
Kyriakos: Very interesting. And then what was the next immediate step? Was it getting into Ycombinator or launching a product?
Lucia: Yeah. At the time, it was very serendipitous. We met in 2019 and then we like started thinking about mental health and space and earnest in early 2020. And so you know early 2020 like very fortuitous timing because COVID hit in March. So it was like this wild time where our problem at hand all of a sudden was magnified by like 10x because people were in so much suffering across the world. And actually the first thing that we did was has nothing to do with the product that we have right now. We spun up a community for patients to find peer support for each other. Now it's actually linked in our products because we have we serve providers who serve patients and those patients have access to our like our private and Anonymous Community. But that was like the first thing that we decided to do because Covid was such a big need. So I think the learning from there was, even though that wasn't part of our product, it was like truly about needs finding and like taking needs finding to the extreme of what is the most immediate and pressing need.
We really tried to talk to as many people as possible. We talked to all the researchers at Stanford for the most part. We talked to a lot of psychiatrists in the community, and we triangulated on the problem statement and ultimately what we thought our best solution was. And as soon as we had an idea for a solution, we like mocked things up. We really tried to prioritize quote, unquote speed to Market or speed to validation. And we started to see if people would be interested in buying what we perceived as a great Software System to allow providers to treat patients in a more data driven way. Again, we don't even have a product we had just a figma mockup. We would go and we literally sat with doctors in their offices walked them through the mockup and said “Hey, is this solving your needs? How much would you pay for this?”
I'm a big believer in like trying to get to the dollars not not because like you know we're capitalists or whatever but like because you really need to understand, what is the true willingness to pay? And like is your solution really resonating? I think the pit fall of need-finding is people are really nice, and they don't want to shoot your idea down. They're going to be like “oh this is great, yeah I would buy it.” But like, get them to sign something that's like if I build it you're gonna have to buy it for me. You know, and that's when the rubber really meets the road. So, that's what we tried to do and we actually got a lot of those signed LOI’s that stated that people really wanted us build this thing. At that point is when the timing matched up and we applied to Y combinator with those LOI’s in hand. Again didn't have a product yet and then we did Y combinator in the summer of 2020.
The Data Problem in Psychiatry and the Role of Osmind
Kyriakos: If we go a bit deeper there, why is there less availability of data in this space?
Lucia: Yeah. Oh my gosh. Okay, a lot of different reasons. I would frame it in two different ways. One is Clinical Behavior. I think Behavior can never be separated from technology because I truly believe that if you have better technology, you can influence behavior. You can't always completely change it, but you can influence it. And so, psychiatrists and mental health providers aren't logging all the right all the information that would be helpful to understand from a research perspective. The concept for example of treatment resistant depression, that's like a a highly used term in the Life Sciences space, that's often times indications on drugs, but there's no official TRD diagnosis in reality. And our whole diagnostic framework in mental health is based off of the DSM, which is a you know diagnostic manual that doesn't perfectly. Like we don't know enough about how to describe mental health conditions, and so we're kind of making these guesses that are very broad and very loose in in description. Clinicians are doing their best trying to diagnose patients, trying to treat patients, but there isn't enough like granular ways to describe what is happening with patients. Therefore, we don't have good data there. And then the second is the technology perspective. There's nowhere to put that either. The way that systems are designed now, isn't for data capture. Most systems are like free texts, you know. The conversations between providers and patients, like that's what they record or maybe they don't even record at all, or maybe they put it on paper. And so, it's both the quality of information within the data, and the ability to capture it that are broken in the space.
The Evolution of Osmind's Product and Joining Y Combinator
Kyriakos: Very interesting. So it's also limitation about the technology we have about understanding the brain. Super interesting. And then you mentioned you went to Y combinator with all the LOI’s. How was your experience?
Lucia: Yeah. It was great. I think the biggest thing we got out of it was really that like urgency mindset and accountability of everyone racing towards demo day. And everyone wants to crush demo day, so we're all like working around the clock. I think my co-founder and I at one point had near like 24-hour shifts because he's a night owl and I'm like a morning person. We would just like overlap for a few hours at certain parts of the day, and then cover the rest of it. We were working around the clock to built we built our MVP during that time. We had brought on a founding engineer, so we had some the specs that she started building out. Then toward the end of the summer, we actually did have some of our first customers on. So it was a really productive time. We got great advice from the partners, heard some great talks, and then we ended up reading our seed round before demo day happened.
Kyriakos: Can we speak about the product of evolution over time? How did the product evolve until what it is?
Lucia: Yeah. So, we started with that and it was a point solution. It’s very focus was on tracking outcomes for patients. What we saw over time was that clinicians were reluctant to use a solution that didn't integrate with their existing electronic medical records. And secondly, providers didn't like their existing EHRs. They kept on saying “can you guys offer more, like I'd love to use you instead of our EHR. And so over time we like kept on hearing these things. I think probably over the span of six months of being in the market, hearing these things that it would be better for us to build the whole thing simultaneously, we had started talking with Life sciences companies so biotech and pharmaceutical companies. And they were really interested in better understanding the outcomes too. So they wanted to know how patients were responding to certain treatments, so they could advocate for better insurance coverage of let's say this new drug that got approved. Because they're showing that patients actually get better, maybe even better than they had had in clinical trial settings. We could get even more data to prove that point because what we were collecting was only outcomes data. If we could better understand their prescription information, medical history, a deeper understanding of their diagnosis, what happens during the visits, and we can paint more of a holistic picture. And so those two learnings of providers made us realize that we should be building the full thing. And so that's what we embarked to do is to build a full EHR. That's what we have now, it's the full EHR that does everything that I just described for independent practices in Psychiatry.
Taking Advantage of the Market Tailwinds and Fundraising
Kyriakos: Super! And at the time like, how were you thinking about fundraising? I believe you did a seed round after YC. How did you think about this, and what can founders learn from your experience?
Lucia: Yeah, totally! So, we did a seed round at the end of YC, and then we raised our Series A about nine months later, and then we did our Series B about a year later. So, really fast journey for sure. Definitely kind of took advantage of the the market tailwinds, and were able to like be well capitalized. I think what really resonated with investors was like this big bold Vision that we had, like that we want to transform mental health and Psychiatry by making it more data driven. I think people really appreciated that we were taking this really big swing, and I think that goes back to how VC investors are motivated. Like they want to go for something that's going to be that 100x. The second was like the general Tailwinds of the space. We were working in this mental health space which got a lot of attention during COVID, in addition a lot of our providers are offering novel treatments. So there was a lot of excitement around that and we were able to really play into that. so yeah what I would tell other Founders is to if they want to go to the VC backroute is really think big about Vision. Especially if you're an early stage founder, vision and team are really all that matter at that point. So you have to have the credibility to go after your big vision. And then second is like to the extent you can position yourself in a growing market. You know that quote of like, ‘I would rather pick a bad idea or bad team in a great Market than vice versa’ because like Market is all ‘Rising Tides lift all boats’ so try to position yourself in that direction.
Building the Product and Hiring Technical Team
Kyriakos: Let's speak a bit about the team. I believe youmentioned that you hired the first person during your time in YC. How did you grow the the team over time, and what positions were you filling over time?
Lucia: Yeah. We brought on mostly technical hires early on to build the product. That was really important for us because my co-founder and I are not technical. It's a big choice too if you want to bring on a technical co-founder and I definitely think that that's like a good path to take and one that I would have considered more seriously back in the day. What we did though was bring on a number of Engineers early on to help build the product, and my co-founder and I are the ones that stayed really close to customers. I would definitely recommend that Founders should stay close to the business at least through 1 million in AR. You want to start bringing people on when you're in more of that scaling phase. But when you're trying to find product Market fit and really validate that what you have is a real thing, it's only the founders that can do that. Your superpower is like truly understanding your user. So you've got to stay close until then. Uniquely for our business on the health tech side, we brought on clinicians really early in our journey. Our first consultants were clinicians. Sub 10 employees we brought on one clinician fulltime. I thought that was really important for us specifically the reasons why are multifold. My co-founder again was in medical school so he had some of that training but we really wanted someone who was dog suiting like truly voice of the user in our organization. That changes the entire ethos of your company when you have your clinician user sitting with you at lunch. You really deeply understand their problems. I have my CMO’s like you know P&L from her Clinic. I understand every dollar that she's paying for because like I can parachute into a clinic and truly understand what's happening. So like those are really important things the other the other big thing aside from user empathy and voice of the customer within your organization is that same ethos outward too. It depends on your kind of business but for us because we are selling to clinicians and because we're selling to Life Sciences having a credibility of having multiple clinicians full-time I think set us apart from a lot of other companies. Many other companies had like amazing tech minds, but I think having clinicians on top of that really gave us that extra layer of “we're built for you, we're built by you, and we're clinician” first so it's a really core part of our brand too.
The Future of Osmind and Psychiatry
Kyriakos: Where is Osmind going to be in five years time?
Lucia: Our goal, our vision, is to be the number one software for private practice psychiatrists and to be a part of every future drug approval in some way in Psychiatry. I know that there are so many new treatments that are in the pipeline right now that will be approved hopefully in the next couple of years. And I think Osmind can play a big role in helping to provide better data to inform those treatments to help get those treatments to commercialization and to help providers be able to more easily administer them. My goal in five years is to be part of every single drug approval and to be the most popular and most useful software for providers as well.
Kyriakos: Super! For my last question if we go a 100 years into the future and we look backwards, what are the things that we're going to say in Psychiatry that are totally wrong in what we're doing today?
Lucia: Oh my gosh, so many things, all the things. First off, using anti-depressant as first line treatment, using SSRIs as first line treatment. Like I think we will be much more open to saying like “hey, you should go straight to spado” or “you should go straight to TMS” versus right now usually what providers have to do is show that patient has tried like four different antidepressants, failed them, and then only then does insurance cover all these other Interventional Treatments. So, I think our whole treatment Paradigm will change. I think we're going to use a lot more data. So that first intake where you go and talk to your psychiatrist and you're just talking for an hour, instead we're going to go plug our phones in and our psychiatrists are going to see “oh hey you've been using your socials in a certain way”, “you haven't been exercising”, “you haven't been sleeping”, I know exactly what kind of depression you have. Of course tell me your story because that's going to add to the data that we have, but we're going to have a much more rich picture using both objective and subjective data. I think those are the two big changes that I foresee among many others in 100 years.