Has The Time Has Come for a Psychedelic Psychotherapy Startup Incubator?

What if we could sew a thousand seeds — right now?

This post is written specifically for the slack channel that spun out of the Microdose Virtual Conference event on April 14–15, 2020.

It’s time to build a psychedelic psychotherapy incubator. Incubators and accelerators can’t guarantee success, but they do build critical networks.

Listening to conference speakers, I’m inspired to think about the third way between corporatism and communal ventures. Social entrepreneurship has changed the way the world works in many fields, from finance to agriculture; from things like college loans to the way we shop at farmer’s markets. The emergent psychedelic psychotherapy and psychedelic-compatible market offerings like hospitality, performance, therapy, and medical services will all need sustainable business models, especially with what’s likely to be a dearth of philanthropic funding for new ventures post-COVID.

To dispel a meme that makes it into conversations: not all businesses are structured to have their equity and power structures aggregate to a few players at the top. From b corps to collectives to plain good contract terms, there are ample and ubiquitous models that serve all participants in corporations. Please don’t conflate what I’m talking about with a model of accelerator or incubator that’s designed to leech IP or aggregate young talent. I’m proposing a third way. Something that an entrepreneur can feel like meaningfully helps them handle the basic building blocks of business and also feels like the right thing to do in their heart and mind — even if they were to check in, for example, with their own medicine work, and ask if they were being a good person in building this business.

That being said, I want to quickly make the case that the timing is right for a psychedelic psychotherapy incubator right now. I’m happy to provide detailed research links if there is more interest, but I think for now I have made broad enough statements that they stand on their own.

8 Reasons Now Is the Time To Build an Incubator

1. No social institutional event has happened like COVID. It makes a unique set of circumstances where we both must act and have a unique incentive to act because so many of our institutions have gone back to wet clay right now.
2. Effective trauma therapies may become social institutions on the scale of dentistry or yoga. There was already ample demand for mental health services, but there is a wave of impending trauma related issues from COVID19 / SARS2 unlike anything our species has experienced.
3. Traditional philanthropy, corporate infrastructure, and venture investing are all experiencing profound disruption and early ideas are likely to need to be much further along to get funding in a much more competitive landscape that will emerge amidst economic devastation.
4. People have free time and are investing in self-education. Potential co-founders, partners, mentors, board members, advisors, and customers all are in a position where they mostly have more free time than they’ve ever had before.
5. Legislative policy is likely to continue to thaw and could, conceivably, be sped up by this crisis.
6. My own anecdotal research speaking with physicians, entrepreneurs, and investors in psychedelic psychotherapy and cannabis suggest strongly that there is tremendous interest in de-risking startups and “getting it right.”
7. My anecdotal research also suggests that high-level executives, investors, corporate leaders, and “innovation groups” are ready and willing to be mentors and advisors to above-ground entrepreneurs.
8. Incubators and accelerators can provide a much-needed structure for interactions between two groups: established leaders, mentors, and elders; and early stage, first time, or even seasoned entrepreneurs.

If you’re interested in talking more, please find me on slack or use this form.

What would it look like?

It’s fairly easy to model at this point. Heroes like Y Combinator have built the contractual and educational infrastructure already. The basic building blocks would be that cohorts of entrepreneurs would be provided:

1. Entrepreneurial curriculum and training.
2. Mentorship and one-on-one advice from experts in the field.
3. Access to capital through introductions and pipelines.
4. Context and cover to do market research and customer outreach.
5. Team and camaraderie, and opportunities to find co-founders.
6. “Events” — whatever that may mean.

From there, it’s up to the community of people who build it, not me. I’m happy to be a part of that community, but my CEO days are done. I have two little kids and I’m working on turning our AirBNB into a Dignity Garden.

It could also be a specific cohort at an existing incubator. I would hedge against doing it within a single fund, as that is a different set of goals and will be highly discriminating against ideas not yet vetted for product market fit.

My story & bona fides for this post: I have started two social impact driven companies. Both raised angel and venture funding. The most recent was Bitwater, now closed, which built agricultural automation systems to produce insects for chicken feed. We were able to reduce carbon footprint and economic volatility in the poultry sector with a quick retrofit.

I’ve also been able to watch hundreds of entrepreneurs launch, thrive, and crash, through my partner’s career. My wife is the former CEO, and Vice Chair of Seed Spot which has helped over 1,000 entrepreneurs launch their companies. She and I met working on the board of HATCH, which empowers socially conscious entrepreneurs and creatives through mentorship and community.