Health Tech: David Ronick On How Minded’s Technology Can Make An Important Impact On Our Overall Wellness

An Interview With Dave Philistin

Building a new venture with a mission to make a positive impact on the world benefits you, your customers, and your team. In addition to improving the lives of your customers, it gives you a sense of purpose that gets you through the tough times, makes success more meaningful, and helps attract and motivate top talent and partners.

In recent years, Big Tech has gotten a bad rep. But of course many tech companies are doing important work making monumental positive changes to society, health, and the environment. To highlight these, we started a new interview series about “Technology Making An Important Positive Social Impact”. We are interviewing leaders of tech companies who are creating or have created a tech product that is helping to make a positive change in people’s lives or the environment.

David Ronick is a serial entrepreneur based in New York. He is currently co-founder and CEO of Minded. Previously, Ronick co-founded and served as CEO of Stash, a consumer app for personal finance with over 7 million users. David is a graduate of Harvard Business School and Brown University, and actively mentors student and alumni entrepreneurs from both schools.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory and how you grew up?

I grew up in Greenwich, CT, a suburb of NYC, and had a happy childhood with a loving family. My father worked for Macy’s. He started at the very bottom, and worked his way up to the C-Suite and Board of Directors over the course of 40 years. My mother was a public school teacher. She taught children with learning disabilities, and volunteered to help children with cancer. I was very fortunate, with one small exception I’ll get into later: I always suffered from anxiety.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?

When we started Stash, we thought our customers were people who were early in their careers, but who would ultimately make a lot of money. But a few months after launching, we learned that assumption was wrong. Over the course of a weekend, about one hundred people signed up for Stash, and they were all from the same geographic location. It didn’t make any sense, and we were concerned about fraud. On Monday we called them all and found out they were sailors on a submarine. They told us they wanted to start investing, but didn’t have enough money to meet the minimum requirements at most financial institutions. They were angry, because they worked hard to serve their country, and were trying to invest for their future, but weren’t allowed. When they learned they could start investing with only $5 using Stash, they were excited. That’s when we realized our customers probably weren’t on career paths that would let them earn a lot of money — they were teachers, military families, police and firefighters, people who worked at stores like Walmart, etc. But there are a *lot* more people like that. So we changed our pricing and our marketing to focus on them. With direct-to-consumer businesses, you have to constantly watch, listen and talk to your customers to learn who they are and what they want.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

So many people helped me over the years, including Barrett Hazeltine, the professor at Brown who inspired me to go into business, Lee Newman, my close friend and first business partner, now Dean of IE Business School in Madrid. But the person who has helped me the most in recent years is Jenny Fielding. We met when she was a mentor and Managing Director of TechStars, an accelerator I went through as a founder and which I have mentored myself for the past ten years. I started Stash sitting at a desk with Jenny, and she supported me through my entire journey there. Later she started TheFund, a venture capital firm backed exclusively by founders, and invited me to be an investor. Jenny and TheFund have invested in Minded. But the help Jenny has provided goes way beyond money — she has been a mentor, a connector and a friend who has supported me through all the ups and downs of entrepreneurship for nearly a decade. I can’t put into words how truly grateful I am to Jenny.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

Timing is everything. In 1995, I made some money trading stocks, and quit my job to start my first venture with a buddy from college. Back then, the Internet was just starting, and it was an exciting time. Our company was a social network before that was a thing, and we even started it at Ivy League schools like Facebook did years later. We had the right idea, but it was too early, which is about as useless as being too late, except it makes for a better story. The importance of timing has stuck with me over the years. You can change your strategy and your team, but you can’t succeed if you get the timing wrong.

You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

To be an entrepreneur, you need to have an observer’s mindset. You look for frustrating problems in day-to-day life, on a micro-level, and also think about structural changes in business and society, on a macro level. When those come together, it’s time to start sniffing around — talking to customers, business insiders, investors, etc. You also have to work the problem before you come up with a solution, and avoid falling in love with your idea, because it’s usually mostly wrong — or just right enough so you can keep adjusting it until you get it right.

Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about the tech tools that you are helping to create that can make a positive impact on our wellness. To begin, which particular problems are you aiming to solve?

America’s mental health is the worst it has been in over twenty years, and it’s gotten much worse during the pandemic, with 2 in 5 adults now reporting symptoms of anxiety or depression based on a CDC study. Mental health medication has the potential to change people’s lives for the better. As someone who suffers from insomnia, I’ve found that medication like antidepressants can work wonders. And I’m not alone — over 60 million Americans take mental health medications, totaling more than 500 million prescriptions per year. But it’s very hard to find an expert to prescribe mental health medication because there’s a severe shortage. Over 60% of counties in the US have zero psychiatrists, and as few as 7% of psychiatrists in large health networks take new patients and have available appointments within a two-week period. Unfortunately, over 70% of antidepressants are prescribed not by experts, but by primary care physicians.

How do you think your technology can address this?

Telehealth an ideal tech solution for this problem. That’s why psychiatry is the number one use case for telehealth. Instead of driving to see a doctor nearby who may not be an expert, you can get on a zoom with an expert hundreds or even thousands of miles away.

Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about this cause?

Many years ago my parents died of cancer, and I went through a painful divorce. My anxiety became intolerable, so I sought help from a psychiatrist, who helped me find an antidepressant that really helped. But like nearly half of psychiatrists, he didn’t accept insurance, so it was frightfully expensive. Also, I had to visit him in person every 1–3 months, which was very inconvenient.

How do you think this might change the world?

The ability to access experts in mental health medication online within a reasonable time frame and with affordable prices has the potential to improve the lives of millions of people, many of whom desperately need help.

Here is the main question for our discussion. Based on your experience and success, can you please share “Five things you need to know to successfully create technology that can make a positive social impact”? (Please share a story or an example, for each.)

Build in flexibility. Build a minimum value product, because you will get things wrong, and you need to be nimble.

Stay focused. To get big, you need to start small. Find something that even just a few people love so much they can’t imagine living without it.

Listen to customers. Constantly interview them, survey them, watch the data — and marry the quantitative and qualitative insights.

Test the riskiest assumptions first. What are the things that could sink your business if you’re wrong? Test them early — don’t wait.

Get great people around you. Employees, investors, advisors, co-founders… You’re only as good as the network that’s pulling for you.

If you could tell other young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?

Building a new venture with a mission to make a positive impact on the world benefits you, your customers, and your team. In addition to improving the lives of your customers, it gives you a sense of purpose that gets you through the tough times, makes success more meaningful, and helps attract and motivate top talent and partners.

Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. :-)

Mental health medication changed my life, and our mission at Minded is to help the millions of people in the US who need mental health medication, too. To that end, I’d love to meet someone like Lady Gaga, who has done so much to fight the stigma around mental health medication.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

Visit www.tryminded.com

Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success in your important work.