BONUS CONTENT: The {Closed} Session Spotlight Series showcases a different co-founder from the super{set} portfolio every episode! Andrew Marshak is Co-founder and Head of Product at Headlamp Health (Headlamp.com), a healthtech company bringing greater precision to mental health care. From multiple stints in the early-stage trenches to co-founding Headlamp Health, Andrew Marshak's journey is marked by serious startup scar tissue. He's deeply driven by Headlamp Health's mission: transforming mental health care through precision psychiatry and data. At super{set}, Andrew sheds light on the unique freedom he's been given, underscoring what it truly means to be a "co-founder for real." Dive in to hear his compelling story.
Headlamp makes it easy for clinicians and their patients to access their universal medical records, while also providing advanced AI tools to support more personalized health insights and decision-making.
Lean more about Headlamp Health at Headlamp.com: https://www.headlamp.com/
Find Andrew Marshak on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-marshak/
Welcome to the closed session! How to get paid in Silicon Valley with your host, Tom Chavez and Vivek Vaidya.
Vivek: Boy, so that was fun with Gal, wasn't it, Tom?
Tom: I, I, that was awesome.
Vivek: So continuing in that tradition and, uh, part two of our spotlight series for this episode, we have another Superset, co-founder, Andrew Marshak, with us. Welcome, Andrew.
Andrew: Yeah. Hey, thanks for having me.
Vivek: Yeah. So tell us a bit more about your story. How did you come to be at Superset and, uh, your, your whole journey?
Andrew: Yeah, you know, I'm a, I'm a startup guy. And when I say I'm a startup guy, that doesn't mean I worked at Google, which is a late stage startup. I mean, I was employee number six, and then I was employee number five. And. I wanted to keep moving up the chain, and this was a unique opportunity to be employee number one.
Tom: Nice.
Andrew: I've always been in the healthcare Space, uh, specifically working in software as well as genomics and diagnostics.
Vivek: Great. So tell us a bit more about what our company, Headlamp Health, does.
Andrew: Yeah. So, Headlamp is a precision psychiatry data platform. What does that mean? When we think about mental health and psychiatry, one in five Americans has either depression or anxiety or a combination of the two. And our strong hypothesis is that those people don't all have the same thing. And our goal is to understand with data, what are the different types of depression? What are the different types of anxiety? And uh, really enable us to treat it more precisely.
Tom: I love this premise and it's glistened for all of us for some time, but Vivek and I especially where we look at Headlamp and it reminds us of a place we've been before. So in a prior build out, there was this company called Crux and in that context, we were helping brands like L'Oreal and Ticketmaster, changed the conversation. Instead of going after women between the ages of 18 to 45, no, no, no, I want to meet, I want to target women over the age of 40 with three kids on the Eastern Seaboard who buy cream cheese for cooking and not for bagels, right? And so we actually brought that level of precision there too, to that undertaking. We spent some time in the early paces over here at Headlamp. I remember Vivek and I were like, it can't be the same, it's got to be a different thing. And then we kind of, with your help, realized, oh no, it's the same playbook, it's the same structure of the problem, right? And what's inspiring is, instead of just as with mental health where people say depression. Well. No, I mean, that's, that's, that's much too broad. If we can, through data, transform that to an undertaking wherein you're actually treating, you know, DMN positive locus three defeatism, right? Totally. That's exciting. That's inspiring. A lot of work to be done, but it feels at its core like a data management problem to us.
Andrew: Yeah and you know, there's precedents for this, right, in Healthcare, where Oncology, 30 years ago, you used to have people get diagnosed with breast cancer and they get treated with broad based chemo, blunt tools, right? And you fast forward to today, no one gets breast cancer anymore. You get diagnosed with a type of breast cancer and you get specific treatments designed for those subtypes. And when, when we talk about what we're doing in psychiatry, It's largely the same, but then people say, wait, wait, wait, there's no tumor in psychiatry, right? There's no tumor in mental health conditions, right? It's a data management issue, it's a data play, it's not a biology play that much. So that's where I think, you know, you guys bring the talent to the table on the data side and, you know, world's our oyster here.
Tom: Well, and, and we learn a ton from you every day about the dynamics of this industry. It is, this is an, also an interesting opportunity for us because, you know, unlike, for example, with Gal, okay, we've been at Checksum and we see this problem, we deal with this problem every day. Headlamp is a much more, it's a different kind of leap certainly for, for me and Vivek. There is an interesting precedent also in the space, right? Sometimes people say, well, you know, how much health experience do you have? Or in our business, how much, you know, go-to-market experience do you have and such and such? Well, sometimes decades of experiences, decades of bad habits...
Andrew: Totally.
Tom: Right? So it's cool for us to be able to start to show up with the chocolate, you've got the peanut butter, let's do something awesome.
Andrew: Yep.
Vivek: So who are the customers of Headlamp?
Andrew: Yeah, so I kind of explained what our vision is, right? and it all starts with the data. How do you get the data? And, you know, one way we could go about it is we could say, Hey, let's go out there and try to buy different data sets that exist today and put them together and see what we find. And we're doing that. So don't get me wrong, we're doing that but we're walking in saying that's not going to be good enough. We want more shots on goal. And so we actually looked at the market and said, what are problems that frontline mental health providers and patients are facing today, and maybe we can solve for those and build a data set and sort of a flywheel mechanism. So we did that, we looked at that space and what do you know, there are tons of problems you can solve in that space, right? You know, it starts with a patient walks in the door and I'm sure we can all relate to this. You walk in, you're seeing a new doctor and it's pretty much, hey, how can I help you today moment when you walk in? Absolutely ridiculous concept since there's a ton of data out there on you, who you are, etc. That's just not making it to the doctor at that time. So the first part of our product was aimed to solve that. We connect out to about 80% of EHRs across the US, we organize all of the data about a patient, and then we service it both for that patient, so they have access to the record, but then also for that doctor, so that when the patient walks in, they have a good picture of who that patient is up to that point.
Tom: Well, and I, I've taken to copying your line, Andrew, when I describe Headlamp to other people. If you're getting treated for depression, or regardless, what was your mood 22 days ago?
Andrew: Right.
Tom: I have no idea.
Andrew: Right.
Tom: Right. But it, the premise here is, it is a knowable fact, it can be recorded and captured in concert with, what did I eat, how did I sleep? If I play chess and that's a kind of a centering calming, did I play chess that day and so on, right? In concert with all of the other kinds of pharmacokinetics and biological and genomic information that could be flown into a single system of intelligence like the one we're building.
Andrew: Right.
Tom: To make it more possible for the clinician to develop treatments that are better for the patient. But how, let's talk a little bit about the longer arc of this and what do we do for pharma companies after we've built that data moat?
Andrew: Yeah. So before I get to that,
Tom: Okay
Andrew: real quick, it's not just about the doctor, the patient's in the driver's seat and the way we think about our value for the patient, any patient with depression, anxiety, they are banging their head against the wall trying to figure out why do I feel this way?
Tom: Mm-hmm.
Andrew: Right? And so the whole model we have with our product is the more you tell us about yourself, the better we can answer why you might be feeling this way and what you can do about it, right? And so we really think we've got, we're onto something there with the model, the UX model. And if you think about combining that sort of soft data along with medical records and some other data that we're capturing as well. Our end game is to work with pharma to do what they did in Oncology, to ignite a renaissance of partnerships on drug development.
Tom: Well, and since we're not, so on our way still to the pharma point, we should note that it's not just another tracker app, right, thousands of tracker apps in the app store. This is an experience that is authored and shaped by the clinician tuned to the individual needs of the patient, right?
Andrew: Right.
Tom: My earlier example, like chess. Well, if chess is something that this patient is a good marker of their overall mental health that day, we can author that into the system. So the patient is able to create that awareness that you're talking about Andrew but there's something really important in it here for the clinic, for the clinicians as well.
Andrew: Yeah. I think the customizability is huge, right? Because all these apps out there today, you know, make you track your sleep. Well, what if I'm sleeping just fine?
Tom: Right.
Andrew: Right? I don't actually need to track my sleep. My sleep isn't the problem here. We come at it and we say, what do you think might be the problem? Let's track those things. And that's, that can be authored, like you said, by either the provider or the patient themselves.
Tom: Right. And so in the longer arc, what's in it for the pharma companies? What, what are they going to be doing on Headlamp?
Andrew: Well, you think about 20% of Americans have one of these conditions that I mentioned. Right now they're not doing a very good job serving this market, you know in the 90s we had SSRIs. That was the last big leap that this segment really took. And when we look at it today all of those drugs are off patent, Pharma frankly isn't making money off these things anymore. They're looking to replace those with new drugs, new compounds, and they can't really find anything, right? Literally, the most promising new compounds are mushrooms.
Tom: Right. Well, it was instructive for me tagging along. in some of our early conversations with the pharma companies where you're setting the table and leveraging networks and connections that you have with those folks. But for me to just listen in and see the degree to which these pharma companies are flying blind, there's no data.
Andrew: Right.
Tom: There's no clinical data that gives them even the tiniest clue, right, as to how, which molecule could exert what kind of effect on the mental states of a patient.
Andrew: And it's, it's not that they're bad at coming up with compounds. It's that they're bad at testing those compounds in right populations, right? So they keep throwing out new compounds and then trying it in these very diverse patient populations, right? But as we said at the beginning not all depression not all anxiety is created equally, right? So if they can understand maybe this compound works really well for these types of depressed people and this other compound We have works really well with these other depressed people
Vivek: Yeah. Coming back to something you said earlier, Andrew, you were your startup guy, right? And uh, employee number six, and now you're a co-founder. What's the, for our listeners, you know, who also might be interested in learning more about what that journey looks like. What are some of the differences between when you operate as employee number six, which is early, and you're a co-founder, what does that look like?
Andrew: Loneliness. I mean, when, when you're going from one or in our case three, um, I think that that's a huge advantage here. You're going from that point where you're just trying to figure it out and you're banging your head against your, against the wall and you don't have as many people to kind of play ping pong with, so to speak, that's tough. Honestly, once you're at that sort of 6-10 spot. I think that's the sweet spot. That's where the world's your oyster. You have a core team where you're running like a family. And yeah, I think that's the key difference.
Tom: What's the biggest surprise since, since joining up over here with us at Superset and getting this company built?
Andrew: Ooh, biggest surprise, biggest surprise. This might sound a little weird, but. I didn't think I'd have as long of a leash as I have, uh, you know, I was, I was worried that I...
I was worried I'd sort of get pigeonholed into different routes and, uh, you know, I mean, you guys are wide open to ideas, um, and you're willing to take risks and, uh, I appreciate that. I mean, it, it really does feel like we're doing this in a garage, but we have more resources and stuff than we would in a garage.
Vivek: Yeah, we're, you know, I think one of the things that I've been talking about with a lot of people outside, we keep saying we're true co-founders for real, which means, yes, you get a lot of autonomy and, and we were serious about it, right. And so I'm glad to hear you kind of say that. It's, it's, it's gratifying.
Andrew: You know, you're a real co-founder when we still fight.
Vivek: Yeah. Yeah.
Tom: That's right. You got to have the debates and you got to have the struggles, but yeah, no, it's important. And this is the difference between employee number six and the co-founder. If I've said, if there's something going on in the company, there's no opportunity to externalize it. It's not somebody else's problem. It's your problem, right? So you, you bleed and sleep and think and eat and drink the company. That's the way it should be. But I'm, you know, we can't, the other piece of, of a true co founder for real is like, no, I mean, you got to go, you can't be helicoptered over, you can't be neener neener to death.
Andrew: Right.
Tom: Just go.
Andrew: I love what you just said cause one of my friends asked me recently, what's the work life balance like in a early startup? And I said, it's work life integration, man.
Vivek: Yeah, absolutely.
Tom: Well, and I think, look, as we close out, that's for listeners, you know, everybody I've said, you know, they've seen the movies and oh my God, everyone, there's a Hackathon and people are doing shots at midnight and then suddenly everyone's rich. Nah, it ain't like that. It's a pride swallowing, soul sucking, long journey with imperfect work life balance, right? So it requires maniacal commitment and obsessive intensity over, over the course of the company. But, oh my goodness, it's so worth it. There's nothing better.
Andrew: Yeah. I mean, you get to be in the driver's seat that's the coolest part. I mean, you get to work passionately on what you like to do. So, you know, do you work a lot? Yes. But you also aren't working because it's...
Tom: See, that's
Andrew: ...your life.
Tom: the thing, it's really not when you get to that point and work isn't the right word for it, right, you know, it's a vocation. It's um, it's a...
Vivek: Passion.
Tom: It's a passion.
Andrew: Yeah. Yeah.
Vivek: Well, I think it's a great note to end on for the listeners who are aspiring to be co-founders, check us out. It's a lot of fun. You have a lot of autonomy and, and, uh, and if you're curious about what Headlamp does, go to our website and or reach out. We're happy to talk to you as well. Thanks everyone for listening. Thank you, Andrew.
Andrew: Thanks.
Tom: Thanks Andrew!.