How to Pitch a Mental Health Startup: 10 Lessons Learned From 150 Pitches

In 2018, I almost lost my life to addiction and untreated bipolar disorder.

In 2019, I tried to raise a seed fund to invest in mental health startups. Investors laughed at me and told me they would never give money to someone who, at that time, only had a few months of sobriety. So, I launched What If Ventures as a syndicate.

In January 2020, we invested in our first mental health startup (Foresight Mental Health) with 15 investors in our syndicate. As we near the end of 2020, we have invested in eight mental health startups, deploying a total of $4.6mm, and we have grown our investor base to over 3,000 investors.

We have talked to more than 1,000 founders who are building in the mental health space. Many of them ask for help and advice around similar things. While we can’t stop what we are doing and help everyone one-on-one, we did realize we could build a program to help accelerate company building in this sector.

So, we launched the What If Fellowship — a cohort-based program to help entrepreneurs accelerate their startups toward their end goals (which could be raising money, or not, depending on the business).

At the time of this writing, the first cohort is coming to a close. Over the last two months, we hosted…