Building the Company Behind 1 Million Therapy Visits a Month | Jake Cooper (Grow Therapy)

**Ben Casnocha** (0:00)
I'm curious to show hands for folks here, who has used an LLM essentially as a therapist going back and forth talking about a personal or a professional challenge you've had? Okay, so this feels like a trillion dollar question for you, which is, are all these mental health therapists as humans still gonna have jobs in tenure?

**Jake Cooper** (0:18)
100%, so a couple stats just to level set on the plane, on like where we're at empirically. 40% of the folks that receive care for your grow, they're using an LM for health, wellness and relationship advice. Visits in 2025 were up around 7% year over year industry-wide for therapy.

**Ben Casnocha** (0:39)
In America?

**Jake Cooper** (0:40)
In America, yeah. So the, like how do those things both simultaneously make sense?

**Ben Casnocha** (0:53)
We're really excited to have Jake here with us.
Many of you probably know about the kind of remarkable success of Grow Therapy, but today we're going to dig in a little bit to the founding story and some of the key lessons learned from Jake's journey. Jake rarely actually does interviews, conversations, appearances, speaking gigs. He's not very active on social media, extremely humble guy. Encourage everyone to listen carefully to some of the depth of wisdom that he's accumulated these past few years. He's really one of the most talented operators in the tech industry today. I was talking to someone who knows him well a few days ago, thinking about this conversation and he said, Jake's insights on how to run a business at scale are truly singular. So we're honored and delighted to have you with us, Jake, and why don't we just start to level set with everyone. Tell us the founding story of Grow and give us a sense of your current scale and what the business does.

**Jake Cooper** (1:50)
Of course. And first off, thank you for having me. It's great to be here to meet every one of you guys. I hope it was a very generous introduction. I hope that everyone here can lower their expectations a bit. But of course, I'd love to tell you that. So just a little bit of background.
I'm Jake, one of the co-founders and CEO of Grow Therapy. I'm actually here with my other two co-founders, Manoj who's in the audience. Alan just stepped out, but you'll see him around as well.
So in terms of how we got started, we started Grow in the middle of Covid because we saw that mental health really wasn't working for the three stakeholders that comprised the industry, patients, providers, and payers. And I saw this firsthand as a patient. I struggled to find a mental health provider who took my insurance let alone was a good fit. My co-founder Manoj saw this from the other side. I was training to become a doctor, looking at psychiatry amongst other areas and just seeing the immense amount of really just operational friction and business building that you need to go through to run a private practice. And in diving into what we saw was a challenge, we diagnosed it as two things. One, the industry was totally analog, and two, it was extremely fragmented, both in terms of its participants, where you had primary care doctors diagnosing folks separate from therapists, separate from psychiatrists, and also in terms of the software and services, where you'd have maybe three different directories you list yourself on to get leads, you'd have a different EHR, a different scheduling system, you'd have an independent person hopefully submitting your claims, not always as a biller. And we felt that if we could build an end-to-end system to support every one of these stakeholders, we could advance the most important mission in the world, helping people live happier, healthier, more content lives.

**Ben Casnocha** (4:01)
And there is a business model insight, which by the way, if those who don't track healthcare services has been replicated in many different businesses, and we at Village Global have backed many Grow Therapy for X companies, some of them are in this room. But the business model insight about how this all comes together as a system was really profound and has spawned tons of copycats and imitators.
Did that come naturally to you? Was that just you and your co-founders got in a room and thought hard about how these pieces work together or did you have to iterate your way to this business?

**Jake Cooper** (4:32)
There was definitely iteration along the way, but I think we took a fairly first principle approach to start, which was, does it make sense for everyone to independently apply to insurance companies? Does it make sense for everyone to independently build their own revenue cycle management functions? Does it make sense from a discovery standpoint for patients to really find who is a great provider just by asking a couple people that they know, versus going to a place that not only aggregates all the different options, but serves as a quality control mechanism. So I think from that perspective, what we did anticipate the kind of systems level approach we took, it wasn't possible really to do what we did pre-Covid.