Mantra Health is a digital mental health clinic on a mission to improve access to evidence-based mental healthcare for young adults

Mantra Health

“A man can have as many diseases as he damn well pleases” — Hickam’s Dictum Every profession has oral traditions you can’t find in textbooks. I was a doctor before I became an entrepreneur, and like every medic I have been steeped in the maxims and mantras of the craft. These memorable sayings are passed down through the generations, getting rather than studied, for example: absorbed “Common things are common.” “Put your finger in it, or you’ll put your foot in it.” (don’t skip the rectal exam) “Don’t f**k with the pancreas.” “ All bleeding stops eventually.” To anyone on the outside they can seem tautological or abstruse, but with context and experience you appreciate their wisdom and they become indispensable. Craft Wisdom As a founder I’ve often reflected on the parallels between the craft of medicine and business leadership. And over the years I’ve found myself collecting new sayings. For example: Optimise for alignment, not control. What’s the path to green? Great leaders serve. Some are quotes from wise colleagues, others are my attempt to capture lessons learned. As I've curated my collection they've started to feel less like a mélange of founder tips, and more like that signpost the way to deeper truth. They have become a cornerstone of my practice. mantras Below I’ll share 7 mantras for startups, accompanied by short commentaries. Mantra Health Warnings
(i) Your milage may vary: items might seem trite or irrelevant depending on your context; 
(ii) They are mantras not commandments, you're meant to reflect on them; 
(iii) No mantra is an authoritative ‘last word’ on any theme or subject; 
(iv) For best results it’s a good idea to create and curate your own list — it is a craft after all. My Startup Mantras 1-7 1. Ideas are easy, execution is hard. The world is overflowing with good ideas. We come across them every day: in our work, with our friends, in the news. But there's a reason why humanity hasn't cured cancer, solved climate or colonised space - execution is what matters. Successful companies understand this. They put their effort into the hard thing - building. Above all else, this requires focus. Our responsibility isn't to dream up big ideas, it's to realise them. 2. Great companies are defined by incredible teams, not heroic individuals. Optimise for your team. "Not finance. Not strategy. Not technology. It is teamwork that remains the ultimate Competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare." – Patrick Lencioni, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. The team is the basic unit of computation in a company, it gets the work done. A single developer might be able to code an app, but success and scale nearly always depends on the collaboration and contribution of many others: product managers, researchers, designers, marketing, finance, etc. Great companies optimise for teams at every level. They hire and promote people who are collaborative, they create cultures that are open and enabling, and when making decisions they consider the team. Great teams embrace responsibility, take ownership, and continuously push themselves to get better. 3. Great Leaders Serve . Steve Jobs and Elon Musk are extraordinary, but they are too often venerated in a way that shows no understanding of their actual gifts, and total ignorance of their weaknesses. The archetype of the all-seeing, all-powerful executive is bullsh*t The role of a leader isn't to wield power, but to distribute it. Effective leaders scale their time and impact by setting direction, empowering others, and making sure decisions are made at the right level - by the people with the right skills and context. 4. "What's the path to Green?" Complex problems create uncertainty and inertia. Instead of struggling for the elusive grand solution, you should consider: "what is the path towards a better outcome"? i.e. from red through amber to green. This framing can help you get moving in the right direction by inviting near-term pragmatic action rather than wistful big ideas. Once you identify the path you can start walking in the right direction. You won't know its exact route, and you may find new obstacles along the way, but you will move forward, step by step. 5. Your budget is your strategy expressed in numbers This mantra paraphrases James O. McKinsey, who understood that an organisation's accounts are a powerful source of truth. Understanding how much money you make, how much capital you spend, and where you spend it, will tell you what kind of business you have, and where it's going. To understand your business, get a grip of your budget. 6. A company is a -  not the sum of its parts, but the product of how those parts interact. system If Apple announces a new iPhone with a 10% faster CPU and a 20% better battery life, it doesn't follow that the new phone is better than the old model. In fact, if these changes increase the device's size, weight, charging time or price, the new phone may well be worse. An iPhone's appeal stems from the way in which its many parts work together to create a great experience - not in the performance of any one component. This is the central tenet of systems thinking. Improving individual components / teams / departments in isolation rarely improves the system itself. If you want to strengthen your company, then you need to tune the entire system to the outcomes you want. Make your goals clear, focus on interface points and handoffs, and ensure all incentives are pointing in the same direction. 7. Optimise for alignment, not control As teams scale communication becomes harder, coordination degrades and departments can slip into silos. A common response is for executives to create more processes, rules and meetings… but this causes even more damage. The way out of this swamp is to accept that scale has tradeoffs, and focus on . alignment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqEeIG8aPPk?embedable=true Featured image is Prompt of ‘What's the path to Green?’ HackerNoon Stable Diffusion

Optimize for Alignment, Not Control. Great Leaders Serve. And More Startup Mantras :-) 

Optimice para la alineación, no para el control. Los grandes líderes sirven. Y más mantras de inicio :-)

Optimisez pour l'alignement, pas pour le contrôle. Les grands leaders servent. Et plus de mantras de démarrage :-)

संरेखण के लिए अनुकूलित करें, नियंत्रण नहीं। महान नेता सेवा करते हैं। और अधिक स्टार्टअप मंत्र :-)

コントロールではなく、アライメントを最適化します。優れたリーダーは奉仕します。その他のスタートアップ マントラ :-)

Otimize para alinhamento, não controle. Grandes Líderes Servem. E mais mantras de inicialização :-)

Tối ưu hóa để căn chỉnh, không kiểm soát. Các nhà lãnh đạo vĩ đại phục vụ. Và nhiều câu thần chú khởi động hơn :-)

优化对齐，而不是控制。伟大的领袖服务。还有更多的创业咒语:-)

The long term efficiency requires you to do things the right way As a security professionals, the big chunk of our daily work is finding mistakes in work of others and pointing them out. It’s what we are paid for and what we are supposed to do, however the whole trouble comes from HOW we transfer the knowledge about identified issues. We know our things, we too often feel smarter than others and we can’t stand seeing the same bugs happening over and over again. Raise your hand if you’re not tired of OWASP TOP10 bugs showing up in new code even tho most of it has been known for over a decade at this point. The fact that people are uneducated is the origin of many of ours social problems and plenty of us are tired of playing it nice. It takes a lot of passion and anxiety tolerance to stay on a path and continue to be efficient by being effective i.e. by doing things in a right way. You just can’t make security cost effective if you’re not capable of integrating with coworkers to get stuff done. It’s easy to destroy relationships and hard to build them back It’s unbelievably important to do a gut check once in a while, because if you don’t observe your behavior to catch yourself on moments when your ego is way too inflated, someone else is going to spot that for you. Someone noticing your ego being out of check, is a situation that usually happens shortly after you’ve failed at your job. You must have had misbehaved in one way or another to make someone spend their energy on reflectin upon your actions. If you’re lucky, the person whom you’ve failed will be generous and courageous enough to provide you an honest feedback about your behavior but that’s a scarcity. Most of the time people will keep the negative experience for themselves, which will grow bigger when time goes by, and you’ll hear their thoughts only when emotions hit the roof and they’re bitter beyond limits when they happen to be in your surroundings. And you may think that it’s not that much of a deal, because if you notice harsh attitude, then you’ll apologize and by that fix it right away. However, it doesn’t work this way at all. When someone is emotionally invested and already bitter about you, they’re not going care much about your apologies because the lost trust and credibility is harder to regain, than it was to earn it in the first place. There is noone to blame for it, it’s just a self-defense mechanism of human beings, and it’s there for a good reason. This is why you’re the person responsible for you own ego check, because the last thing you want to happen is have coworkers dislike you. It starts with one person and spreads like a virus, because people love to gossip about negative stuff more than they like to make positivity louder. So make no mistake, because a single coworker having an attitude towards you can make whole departments turn their back on you. No place for ego in effective management Whatever your feelings may be, there is no place for anybody to have long lasting resentment in healthy corporate culture. Unspoken mantra of each healthy organisation should be that we’re all there to do good together instead of aggressively competing against each other and cherrypicking on each other mistakes — even if they’re truly dumb and basic, but hey, who are you to judge? Foremost important it to make sure you put your ego away and open yourself to listen suggestions from other people around you. … Let’s skip the part when we all claim we’re obviously not ego driven, and get back into reality… :)Ego is an incredibly robust thing, and aiming to get rid of it in its entirety is impossible so you’re better of trying to learn how to control it. I love the way Seth Godin contains war against fear — you can’t eliminate fear completely, because fear is a good evolutionary tool of human beings, so you should aim to master how to dance with fear. Most of us claim to be listening but the truth is that knowing how to listen and pull value from it isn’t an easy task that you can enable on demand, it’s more a skill which you need to train and do so regularly. Just look back and remind yourself from 2 years ago and notice how much — hopefully — you grew since then. Not once I wanted to bang my head against a wall couldn’t believe how naive and silly I was just those few months/years ago. Appreciate feedback every single time you get some If someone is giving you one, it’s because they expect you to act upon it. If they didn’t want you to change, they would not spend their time and mental energy on laying it down for you, so pay real attention despite what givers saying ‘you know, it’s not all serious, merely a thought’.“Take it or leave it” advice rarely exist, and that’s especially valid point in corporate world. The major problem is learning how do you get people to expose themselves when you’re around and share their thoughts with you, let alone admitting that they don’t know something. For some open people spitting words out is trivial, but it’s uncomfortable for vast majority to ask for help, so anytime someone aproaches you, show gratitude and acknowledge that your appreciate that person. Creating feedback loops can be priceless as long as you take action upon the data you collected from your peers. If someone is criticizing your work then there is some agenda behind those words which you should analyse whether it’s really yours or that person’s problem. Especially if you invite someone to share feedback with you, argumenting that you want to hear suggestions in order to improve yourself, you must take that conversation seriously because if your supporters don’t see things changing changing despite their involvement, they’ll stop wasting their time and won’t treat you seriously the next time you ask them for same favor.It’s frightening how often we’re blinfdolded by our ego creating so strong narrative that we treat voice of others as a nonsense and background noise without considering that we may indeed be doing something wrong. Watch your language and respect your peers Using aggressive a’ka “too verbosely passionate” language in emails — which is essentially your form of escapism and dealing with anxiety — to offend and publicly shame people who made a mistake is not helping anybody. While it may be a relief for your grief, it’s negatively contributing to your long term success at the company. Humility is one of the most critical qualities leader must possess. It’s a major dependency for building the trust that can be converted into long lasting relationships so don’t be too cocky just because you’ve found someone to be less educated than you in a given matter. They know things from their specialization that you have no clue about. How would you feel if they offended you when it was you who came asking for help? Can you for a moment stop yourself from acting like a corporate cog and behave like a decent human being who knows how it is to get hurt and made feel insecure? Concept of workplaces went that odd route and created very artificial and fake micro-societies, but there are very few reasons for you to continue playing that game, and there is plenty of counter arguments to act in a workplace like you act among your friends, collegues and other personal acquaintances. The winning corporations figured it out a long time ago, that it’s all about making people comfortable with their self-awareness and hunger for growth. You must make sure that people understand and feel that there is nothing wrong with not knowing something as long as they have a willingness and interest in learning, improving ang getting better in whatever they’re paid for. Leadership values and Emotional Intelligence Social skills are hard for everyone, not just Security Professionals and we struggle with it in our daily lives.In such niche field as infosec we’ve got plenty of great specialists, researchers, analysts and people who can hack almost anything, but how much attention do we pay in terms of their social skills and play with others? How much do we praise leadership in our field? It almost doesn’t exist in medias, and yes we all know Mitnick to be extremely socially “enabled” but can you name more of Mitnick-alikes with the same ease you can enumerate thru great security researchers? I’ve spent almost half a decade studying security management and leadership and I’m still don’t know as many great security leaders capable of creating robust security programmes as I know famous people working in appsec. Not even close. Technical work is exciting and tempting, technical skills are in great demand and people get compensated very well for their technical acumen, which makes noone surprised with how many people are socially incompetent or even disabled, because if you’re good enough on technical skills side you’ll find an employment regardless of social savviness. I’m not saying it’s bad or wrong, but it’s clear that we’re not spending enough time working on social side of things. You can be a great hacker and programming rockstar, but if you don’t know how to unite people and how to use their potential to make a difference you won’t secure the organisation or product yourself. One man army will take you only this far. Most people have no clue what emotional intelligence is, let alone heavily technical people who have beloved productivity so much that they prefer to work alone to focus on a deep work, and that isolation is both a correlation and causation. People who want to be great at their thing prefer to do the work alone and isolated from outside world tend to lose their social skills edge. The deal is that without leadership skills you can’t change corporate culture, especially when you’re joining existing organisation which had no exposure to security for years or even decades. Without you acting as a leader who knows how to instill security into employees’ value system, people won’t stay inspired to do their best in securing the code they ship. For years I myself used to be highly technical and avoided social interactions at all cost, because I wanted to be the most productive person ever who does not waste a single minute on redundant interactions which take away form me the opportunity to do something “important” at that time. But in order to be effective and truly productive as a security champion, I had to learn leadership business as well and I’m telling you about it only because it was really worth it. Sure, there are still days in which I’d prefer to stay in my condo, pentest all the things and fix as much code as possible, but learning how to make myself comfortable around people made me a better employee and to be transparent — it also made my personal life better. When you take extreme ownership and strive to be a great leader, you can achieve far greater results in your security initiatives, in your relationships or whatever you might be doing that involves working with other people. Learn to feel your people, understand what truly turns them on, give them what they need and share with them your motive in order to make great things happen. Be the leader you wished you had and remember to stay human, not a corporate cog who puts a despicable mask each time he must approach coworkers to give a relief of his anxiety and transfer the bitterness onto others.

Leave Your Ego At The Door And Study Empathetic Leadership

Last year I found I had ADD. This was somewhat of a shock to me. I had always struggled with studying and doing repetitive tasks but had never really had any issues with school or university that I couldn’t workaround. Entering the workforce, I excelled at first, until I was in a role where there were no workarounds — I had to stay focussed. Long story short, at the age of 28 I was diagnosed. Ritalin to me felt like sobering up from the longest pub crawl of my life. Why were diagnostics so poor, and how many people like me are there suffering in silence? Being diagnosed it struck me how poor diagnostics were. And being on Ritalin, and working out the right amount of medication to take, it became so obvious how much machine learning could do for people like me. Are mental health diagnoses from psychiatrists and psychologists accurate generally. Fundamentally there are two things doctors do diagnostically: Real Life Quizzes Look/Listen/Feel Prod you with stuff and investigate Now imagine. If your phone could look at your text, your voice, your app usage. I could easily identify better than the current system. Are medical treatments, like Ritalin or SSRI’s, effectively measured for their efficacy in individuals? To some extent they are. Yet — How we use technology could add so much value here. So, unleashing my new found focusing powers I built a tool to measure how Ritalin was effecting my text patterns and my Mood. This was not particularly difficult to do. Scrape my text. Applying sentiment analysis Building a NLP model based off of Reddit comments of people with ADHD I could easily see how Ritalin was effecting my mood and writing in general. Now — next step, I thought to myself, let’s release this to the public! So I posted it on reddit, actually getting a huge amount of interest. The response I got was very interesting. Now, this was from one post on Reddit… that got weirdly taken down by admins in a day. I had 5 people ask to work on it with me. Feeling validated, I started working out how this could really work. When pursuing a contract with a research body and then doing due diligence on the legal side, I realised, collecting peoples data in this way is ridiculously unethical and legally incredibly risky. I had hit a snag. Although not before looking into , which looks like a really good way of solving the data privacy issue in this space. Solid https://moodmap.app - This was the landing page for the business :) So — what does the future look like in this space? Well, it’s painfully clear that technology can make outcomes for mental health SO much better. Yet being able to execute the technology in a way that is legal, and doesn’t lead to other negative consequences? that’s another question. Here are some potential issues that became more obvious to me as I was doing this. It’s better to be 100% certain the model has a diagnosis correct, rather than getting a false positive. It’s very rare to achieve 100% specificity though and if you were using a screening tool, you would sacrifice specificity because you would want greater sensitivity, so e.g., specificity may only be 20%. To implement a tool like this requires a huge invasion of a persons privacy. , essentially a new way of using personal data and sharing it, seems like the obvious way around this. Specificity matters. Solid Surely looking at an individual when diagnosing someone with a mental illness is the wrong approach altogether. I can't see how one can be diagnosed with say depression, without taking into account the people around them. A graph of the patient, with the people around the patient, is likely a far better diagnosis avenue. and importantly, Diagnosing a patient has many cascading effects under our current health system. While it is just data, the way it could be used in medical practice has the potential to create real moral hazards, and incredibly negative outcomes for patients. Yet, it must be approached for that same reason.Because a simple diagnosis can be the difference between someone struggling with ADD; and a highly focussed person working towards a better future for mental health. MedTech cannot be approached in the "move fast and break things" silicon valley mantra of Uber et al. When the stakes involve human life, you move deliberately and with empathy. Thanks for reading. If you have any questions feel free to reach out to me on Linkedin. . https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelholborn/

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MANTRA HEALTH

mantrahealth.com

-- employees

Since n.d.

COMPANY RANKING

MANTRA HEALTH

EVERGREEN INDEX #7227

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