Lessons from Karan Singh, Headspace Health, Reinventing new GTMs and business models in mental health

This week, we’re super excited to have Karan Singh, COO and Co-Founder of Headspace Health, a leading provider of mental health and wellbeing solutions, touching the lives of over 100 million people in 190 countries

As Co-Founder & Chief Operating Officer, Karan drives clinical strategy, business development, research, and oversees daily operations for Ginger. He has worked across the healthcare ecosystem, from consulting with leading bio-pharma clients at ZS Associates to commercializing a health data analytics solution at Humedica. Karan holds his MBA from MIT Sloan and graduated with his Bachelors from UC Berkeley.

Founded in 2011, Ginger provides personalized mental health support from behavioral health coaching, therapy, psychiatry, and self-care resources, all from the privacy of a smartphone.

Last year, Headspace and Ginger merged to form Headspace Health, which is valued at $3B. Before Ginger was acquired, Ginger had raised $220M+ in funding. Now Headspace Health combines Ginger’s therapy, psychiatry and coaching offerings together with Headspace’s mindfulness and meditation services. Mindfulness by Headspace, human-to-human support by Ginger. Through their flagship Headspace brand, they have touched the lives of over 100 million people in 190 countries through mindfulness tools for managing stress, sleep, and focus. Headspace for Work and Ginger is distributed through over 3,500 enterprises today.

In this episode, we talk about what it was like founding Ginger, and establishing new business models (one of the first digital health companies that sold to employers at scale), and the incredible journey a decade later touching over 100m lives globally. Karan is extremely humble and grounded and I think we can learn a lot from his leadership style and his perspectives and philosophy on founder work-life balance.