First Investment After Closing Our Series A? Mental Health.
Ultranauts Inc. just closed our Series A financing. The first investment we’re making is in our team’s mental health. Here’s why.
Ultranauts Inc (formerly Ultra Testing) is six years old, growing fast, and accelerating. In Q4 ’18, we grew over 70% YOY, and in Q1 ’19 we grew over 100% YOY. We just closed our Series A financing, and we’re ready to scale. I’ve been waiting for this day impatiently, and am beyond excited to get to work with my fellow Ultranauts and kickstart the next phase of our journey.
But before we ramp up sales and marketing to accelerate growth, or overhaul training and development to upskill our team, the very first investment we’re making is in something that will have a far greater impact on the company’s future — our team’s mental health.
At Ultranauts, a software and data quality engineering startup with team members in 20 states across the US, 75% of whom are on the autism spectrum, addressing mental health issues is especially important, and doing so while we pursue growth is mission critical. Among autistic individuals, anxiety and depression are more common than in the general population — half of autistic adults will experience anxiety in a way that has a significant impact on their everyday lives, and nearly half of autistic adults will experience clinical depression in their lifetime.
But these are issues that every organization needs to address, not just neurodiverse startups.
Depression is now the #1 cause of disability worldwide, affecting over 300 million people, and anxiety is one of the most common forms of mental illness, impacting over 260 million people.
Meanwhile, quality therapists are in short supply, out of network, and very expensive, leaving most people, including most employees, without access to the support they need. As a result, mental health issues can be a major driver of lost productivity in the workplace, undermining the performance of any organization and having potentially disastrous consequences for startups pursuing hypergrowth.
So what can you do? Lots, including two things that won’t cost you much:
- Measure what matters
- Make help accessible
Measure what matters: at Ultranauts, we don’t have all the answers vis-a-vis improving employee mental health, and we can, should and will do more to support our team. But we took the first step two years ago when we started polling our team’s wellbeing, daily, using a Slackbot affectionately named Smilecorp. One of our daily polls measures social isolation in the workplace and has been adopted as a KPI for the company — the team Net Loneliness Score, recently named a FastCompany World Changing Idea.
Do you measure your team’s wellbeing? If not, its as easy as adding a free bot like Polly.ai.
Make help accessible: in the past, we’ve provided resources and conducted workshops on mental wellbeing, including managing stress and anxiety. We steered away from engaging an external service provider, because when we started out six years ago, the options were limited. The delivery models were rigid, the quality questionable, and the fees unaffordable. But a lot has changed since then. After evaluating 15 service providers including traditional Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs) and specialized mental health platforms, we’ve decided to engage a partner that fits our team’s particular needs — Modern Health (see the postscript below for the criteria we used).
Does your team have flexible, accessible mental health support? If not, you can engage a high quality service provider for under $200 per employee annually.
For a company of 50 employees, a $10K investment in mental health could have a meaningful impact on your entire team’s wellbeing, and pay back manyfold almost immediately.
Leaving aside the positive impact on wellbeing, based on our internal analysis, a single mental health episode prevented can save the company over $5K in lost time and revenue, so investing in engaging the right mental health service provider makes economic sense.
As we close our Series A round and invest in accelerating our trajectory, of course we’re going to invest in ramping up sales and marketing — we’re hiring a head of sales right now. We’re also planning ahead for the stress and anxiety that hypergrowth can bring. By providing our team with access to flexible, high quality mental health support, we’re ensuring we make the most out of every other investment we make.
We hope you’ll consider doing the same.
P.S. Below are the criteria we used at Ultranauts to select a mental health service provider.
Must-haves:
- Crisis response: 1st (call) responder capable of handling, diffusing a crisis, and escalating if needed
- Flexibility: Employee can choose different methods of access (phone, chat, video)
- Autism experience: network has >10 therapists who have expertise working with adults on the spectrum
Nice-to-haves:
- Availability: therapists are available, e.g. session scheduled in <1 week
- Consistency: Employee has access to same therapist for multiple sessions, and staff turnover <20%
- Choice: Employee can change therapist
- Multiple event access: no limit to # of events employees can seek help for (even if there is a per event session limit)
