How we unlocked growth and became a unicorn: The youngest CEO of a unicorn, April Koh, explains her strategy for finding Go to Market Fit

Speaker A: Thanks for tuning in to the Survival to Thrival podcast aimed at B2B startup leaders. Your co hosts Taehi Nam and Bob Tinker are the authors of the Survival to Thrival book series. They're an investor and entrepreneur duo who've worked together for more than 20 years. Taehi is co founder of Storm Ventures and Bob was the former founder of MobileIron, which Tahee's company invested in. This podcast is based on the topics covered in the three books in their Survival to Thrival series. If you like it, please like it, share it, review it and talk about it

Speaker B: in this episode. We are fortunate to have April Ko, the CEO of Spring Health. Spring Health is one of the fastest growing new companies, well into healthy nine figures of ARR and recently raised money at over $2 billion valuation. April, she is amazing. She is the youngest female CEO of a Unicorn, which also comes with its challenges, which we'll talk about as well. April is also a first time CEO. She's a fast learner. She put to work go to market fit to unlock growth and did amazingly well. And as a CEO, she's really living through the learning, unlearning curves at a blistering pace. And most importantly, her company, Spring Health is really making a difference in the mental health industry, which makes a difference to all of us with that. April, welcome. Glad to have you here.

Speaker C: Thank you so much for having me. What an honor.

Speaker B: Let's go ahead and just dive right in. So tell us about yourself. Tell us a little bit about your background. How did you get to where you are now?

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean I don't have much of a background because I started Spring Hull in school. My resume is very short, so I actually dropped out of Yale to. Well, I, I started off in high school thinking I'd be a professional oboist. So I went to Juilliard pre college for that.

Speaker B: Okay. Clearly very related to start technology based on mental health.

Speaker C: Exactly. And then I went to Yale and dropped the oboe entirely and studied computer science and sociology.

Speaker B: Where did Spring Health come from? What was the inspiration for starting Spring Health and the company it became?

Speaker C: Yeah, so I mentioned that I wanted to do something in mental health. The reason why I wanted to do something in mental health was because I struggled with my mental health for a very long time. So for over 10 years. Struggled pretty seriously through high school and college. And so, uh, I personally knew how broken mental health care was coming out of my journey. You know, thankfully and gratefully. I, I found things that worked for me and found mental health ultimately. But looking back on my journey, I was just so struck by just how much random guessing there was in my care and just how alone I was in pursuing or looking for something that would work for me. And I thought, you know, everything around us is so data driven, so personalized, and yet mental health care just felt so analog. It just felt so stuck in the dark ages and it just, there was just so much guessing. It was just really a random guessing game. And so I was back at Yale and I, I knew I wanted to fix this problem. And I came across my now co founder Adam's paper, which was published in one of the world's top medical journals called the Lancet. And it was describing the first ever machine learning model proven to outperform psychiatrists in matching people to the right treatment for them. So it was essentially saying, you know, you know, we can fix this guessing game that providers have to go through in treating patients through data and machine learning. And you, uh, know, the paper instantly resonated with me. I believed that it represented the future of mental healthcare. I believed that we could use big data and technology and machine learning to, to change the course of mental health care and eliminate a lot of waste and suffering from people's lives. And so I reached out to him cold. I literally just sent an email and I dug it up the other day and it's a pretty embarrassing email. It's like really formal and strange in my college celebrating, but I.

Speaker B: Sincerely, April Co.

Speaker D: Right.

Speaker C: Uh, no, actually though, like dear Adam. But yeah, I reached out to him cold and he miraculously agreed to meet with me. We took a walk and just talked about his research. And, and because I, I knew how to build products and I knew how to hack together things, I said, give me your algorithm, I'll put it online and let people use the algorithm and let me show you I can build products. So we did that. I whipped something together very quickly. I think he was impressed by that. And you know, from. From then on, we got on really well and then started the company together.

Speaker B: Wow, that's a great story. Thank you for sharing sort of your personal part of that. I think a lot of people out there share your journey on that. So that was the foundation of how you and Adam built Spring Health, which is a great story. Maybe if you could give the audience sort of a feel for maybe what did Spring Health look like just As a business, 18 months ago, let's say, or two years ago, whatever you think the right range is versus now, could you give everybody sort of A before and after of what you guys have been able to do over the last 12, 18, 24 months?

Speaker C: Yeah, for sure. So maybe to start, I can just explain quickly what Spring Health does.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great point. Yeah, we should do that.

Speaker C: We're a mental health care company. We serve employers and health plans. And essentially we make it really easy to access the right care for you. So we sell to, for example, Pfizer is one of our employer customers. A Pfizer employee might sign up for Spring Health. They take a quick questionnaire. It then connects them to a, uh, personalized care plan made specifically for them. And that care plan include anything from coaching, therapy, medication management through a psychiatrist or a physician, or, you know, just simple mindfulness and meditation exercises. It's really designed to meet the individual's needs. And then if we recommend therapy or coaching or any provider, we provide access to that provider through our own network within one day. So next day appointments are always available. Yeah. And so we have the privilege of serving millions of lives at this point. And we work with some of the most consequential, largest employers in the world. Really, really big companies that have really diverse workforces. So that's what Spring Health does today. Last year, I would say, or the last 12 to 18 months, spring health was a very different company. We were, you know, maybe a hundred people, like 58, 100 people. Now we're almost 600 people. And we're so very quickly, we were, you know, a million in revenue in, uh, 2018, then kind of quadrupled, quadrupled again, quadruple again. And now we're, you know, a healthy nine figures as, as we, we mentioned. And we're based in New York and we're a distributed workforce headquartered in New York. So that's what Spring Health looks like today.

Speaker B: One of the things I love about this story is the super fast growth of the business. But the other part of this story that's so amazing is that your frustration on sort of your personal journey here was the inspiration to build a company that's really making a difference. And I love one of the things that you do is you talk about your covered lives as a metric, because it is really all about the people that your customers are actually trying to serve, which is sort of their employees. So I just love that that's one of the key metrics you talk about in terms of making a difference in the world. So let's dive in on something you've done incredibly well, which is unlocking growth, like spectacularly well. And I'm sure there is a lot of people in the audience that are like, okay, how did April do that? You know, the very beginning of this is obviously finding product market fit. So maybe let's spend a minute or two on your first stage, which was finding product market fit. Tell us a little bit about how you found it, what worked, what didn't work.

Speaker C: Okay, so let's, let's take us back to 2016 when we started the company. I would say for a good two years there was a lot of no product market fit. So my co founders and I, we spent our time really just getting smart on the business of healthcare and really understanding where this revolutionary technology could fit, fit into the landscape and fit into the market. So I would say a good year was just getting smart on the space and under understanding how the money flows within healthcare.

Speaker B: And then, and then I find that amazingly, uh, complicated. By the way, like a couple of the healthcare companies, I'm still learning today. Understanding the whole healthcare payer thing just makes my head hurt. But. Oh my gosh.

Speaker C: Yeah. And so that was a, that was a good year. And then we started selling a product that didn't have product market fit and really.

Speaker B: Oh, really interesting.

Speaker C: Yeah. So we, we started selling a uh, product, a software product to, to health systems. And the thesis was that primary care providers, they prescribe 80% of all antidepressants in the U.S. because there's a shortage of behavioral health providers and access to be, well health providers is very limited. And so people end up using their PCPs or their primary care providers for antidepressants. And so we figured, you know, we can help primary care providers do a better job of prescribing these drugs and using our technology. So we created a uh, clinical decision support tool for those clinicians and we started selling that. And it, it just, there was a momentum behind it. We tried so hard, like we had a few pilots, they were free. We had maybe some revenue generating pilots, but the interest was very low. It just felt like everyone was, was doing me a favor all the time, you know, like they were just like, you know, taking pity on me. Cause I was like this young entrepreneur begging them to like, you know, take me on. And you could just feel it. And, and there was just no momentum behind the business. And it just felt like I was playing teeth. Is that the right idiom? Um, it just felt, it was, it just felt like an uphill battle. So, and all the, the things that people say around, you know, if you have product market fit, you know, it and you can feel it. So true. Like I just, I knew in my gut we didn't have it. Even though we did have progress. Like every month there would be something, you know, knew that would happen. There was progress, but it was slow. But we, we were pitching a health system and you know, it was again, one of those p was flopping and no one was listening and everyone was on their phones and they were just all ignoring me. Basically just imagine a bunch of like healthcare executives around the table and me pitching them and them not paying attention. And then at the end, you know, one of them picks their head up and says to me, you know, this is interesting, you should talk to our HR department because our employees, our physicians and nurses are really struggling with burnout and, and even you know, serious issues like suicidal ideation and suicide. And so maybe your tool can help them. And it was very random. But at that point I was desperate for product market fit because I knew I didn't have it. So I was open to any conversation. And so I took the intro and the first time anyone ever listened to my entire pitch without looking at their phones was a time I pitched to HR with a very early, very early pitch, which it was very rough, it was not polished, but it was the first time people actually listened. And so ah, we knew that we were onto something at that point. And then I just went out to all my angel investors and asked them to put me in front of every single HR person that they knew and just had potentially a hundred conversations with HR people trying to learn, pitching them iteratively.

Speaker B: Was it hard to switch gears from sort of your original founder vision idea that you had for your first version of your product to this idea of now you're going to start to go pitch to HR people. Was that hard to switch gears on?

Speaker C: You know what? No, because uh, okay, good. Mission, mission. And the vision of uh, the company has stayed remarkably consistent. So I look back at emails that I send, documents that we had at the founding stages of the company and the vision has stayed the same, which is to eliminate guessing and care, eliminate every barrier to mental health, including guessing through data. Right? Like that was like the big thesis and the, and the big idea. And so it was always a matter of finding a business model, right. And, and the right product that would enable that, that vision. And so, you know, initially we thought we were going to enable that vision through health systems and then, you know, that didn't work out and so we didn't have really that much attachment to us specific go to market. So we were very open from the start.

Speaker B: Yeah, okay, that's good, that's great. So you had this random conversation where they said, hey, go talk to our HR people. You went to go talk to other HR people and all of a sudden they were paying attention. So talk a little bit about, like, how did you change your story to go talk to HR people? Like, what did you have to do differently when you said, hey, we're going to go try and pitch to somebody else, Was that a big shift for you guys? A little shift for you guys? Like, there's a lot of the companies in the audience out there be like, oh, we have to pivot. We have to go try and pitch to somebody else. But for some it's hard, for some it's not. What was it like for you guys?

Speaker C: Ooh. I think looking back on the past six years, one of the best moments that I'm most proud of as CEO is a moment where I, I drafted a six page memo that said, you know, we have these health system customers and we have some progress on those customers. We have this employer opportunity that is, is very promising and there's a lot of momentum. And it was like maybe a month or two in to the employer opportunity. But I could already sense that there was something really strong there. And what I did was I took my co founders to a retreat, I took them to like an Airbnb upstate or something and you know, we hung out, it was fun. And then, and the last day we were there for like two days or something. And the last day I just handed them both a, uh, printed out copies of this six page memo that basically argued we should just stop doing everything with health systems and hard pivot the company into selling to employers. And I think that's the best thing that I ever did because I think that a lot of entrepreneurs, sometimes they find it hard to kill their darlings, right? And like kill ideas that just aren't working. Or maybe they are working and that's the hardest part about it. Like there, there is.

Speaker B: But not working that well.

Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. And so they don't, they don't kill it fast enough. They don't, they don't pivot hard and really narrow the focus ruthlessly in pursuit of product market fit. So I'm m really proud of having done that. So I would say there were dramatic changes that needed to happen with the company. We had to add quite a bit to our product. We had to add a provider network to our offering. We had to become a care delivery solution versus just a Software solution, big change. Yeah, we made those changes quickly.

Speaker B: Great insight. Clearly an insight that ended up mattering. Let's now talk about. Okay, so you got a bunch of customers who were interested. How did you unlock growth? Like, this is one of the things I think you guys have done spectacularly, and I think our audience could really learn from your journey on this. So I, uh, think you told a story about this at a conference recently about your journey to go to Market Fit, but just could you guys talk about how you found your urgency, how you found repeatability? Just get into the brass tacks for the audience here.

Speaker C: Well, I mean, I really. And I'm not just saying this because I'm on this podcast with you, Bob, I cannot praise your book enough. And I can't understate the importance of the book to our ultimate go to market fit and just the huge acceleration that we saw as a business. I read the book before meeting you. We got connected because of a mutual connection. And I was, like, so excited that I got to connect with you, Bob, because I was just a huge fan of your book. And it was like the bible for Spring Health for a period of time, like late 2019 or early 2020. And so I think that a lot of entrepreneurs find product market fit, but they don't find go to market fit, which really holds them back as a business. And I think, like, I look at our industry and Mental health is in the spotlight. There has been a huge shift in attitude and stigma around mental health, uh, past few years. Covid has obviously helped, and there have been lots of lookalike companies like Spring Health, like lots of fundamentally similar businesses, and they haven't seen that acceleration. Why, I would argue because they didn't read your book and because they didn't find go to market fit. So the thing that really resonated was, was two things. The first thing for me was using mapping out the Go to Market playbook in a very scientific way. So there's a template in Survival to Thrival that, that basically says, you know, this is how you get your lead. This is, you know, phase one of the Go to market playbook. This is phase two. This, phase three, this phase four. This is what you do. This is what you say. These are the wow moments for each phase. And you and the book recommended that we go through every single sales conversation that we were having and really go deep and lay out all the data points from who we were talking to, to, you know, when we talked to them, to what we talked to them about, to what Pain points. They were expressing all these data points. We would go through every single conversation and every single deal.

Speaker B: So how often were you doing that? Like, who are you doing that with? How often were you doing that with? We call that the deep dive.

Speaker C: Yeah, so yeah, we did like a deep dive every quarter. At the time I was managing the sales team, our very early spot, small sales team of like maybe three to four people. And I would gather them into a room and we would just do this exercise and it would take like two, two hours maybe to go through every single deal. It was very laborious and it was not fun at all. But it really started to to show the glaring patterns that existed in in sales process that weren't obvious necessarily to us. And so we basically documented those patterns into this kind of go to market playbook. And then I would hand this playbook to not only our existing sales team, but all of the new sales team members that, that would onboard, and we would tweak it based on new data points that, that we'd see every quarter. So that was the first thing. And then the second thing is what, what I kind of mentioned in there, but I think it's separate is, is really finding the wow moments. You know, other people might call it like the differentiators or whatever, but I think characterizing it as a wow was really important to us.

Speaker D: So what was a, uh, wow for you at the early days of when you were unlocking growth?

Speaker C: Yeah, so I think the wow moments changed every year because the market shifted every year and expectations from the market shifted every year. But I looked at one of our early go to market playbooks and I noticed that one of the wows at that time, it was like early 2020, was like flexibility. So just how flexible we could be in our sales process and then, or not at sales process, but in our product configuration and then the second wow. There were two wows. There was a wow that we asked the sales team to use in the first meeting and then there was a second wow for the second meeting. And then the second wow was around like integration capabilities across their health plan and their carrier.

Speaker D: Why do you think it was important to have a different wow for the first meeting?

Speaker C: Well, I don't know if it was my idea or it was in the book, but I think it's just important to build momentum and to like, with every conversation, impress and kind of change someone's, like, shift someone's mindset and really convince them of, you know, the urgency and the need for the product. I think that it's important at every stage to impress the customer. And it just builds momentum in the sales process. And the way that Bob talked about it, and maybe how the book talked about it too, was he basically said, you know, April, you have to find the moment when customers go like this. They go, wow. And he like very much emphasized it. And so. And it wasn't like just like, oh, yeah, wow, that's impressive. It'd be like a shift in the conversation, right? Where something would click. Recreating that is is actually quite hard, but it's doable if you just study when that happens in sales conversations. And then replicating that magic, I think is really important for sales.

Speaker B: The other thing you said that I think is interesting there is that the wows change over time. It's hard to find your initial one or two wows. Like it is, right, because people sort of think they know what they are, but you have to listen to the customers. So you guys did a really great job of like watching your customers and learning from that. But the other thing you guys did a nice job of was like recognizing that your wows can change and should change over time and to not be totally married to, uh, the wows of last year. So you found the wows. You got the go to market playbook moving. Then what? Then what happened? Like, how did you know you found go to market fit?

Speaker C: I knew. I found good a microfit. When a seven figure deal closed without any input from me, like literally any. It was like a surprise. Like someone was like, we, we closed this deal. And I was like, what? That was when I.

Speaker B: So your sales rep closed a giant deal without you, without me at all.

Speaker C: Like, uh, it hurt my pride a little bit. I was like, I don't need you anymore. Uh, yeah, no, it was, yeah, it was amazing, that feeling. And whenever that happens, even today, when there's like a 70 figure deal that closes without my involvement, I'm like, yes. Like, the business is healthy. It's running the way that it should be.

Speaker B: You know, that's. That's terrific. So was there anything you tried that didn't work in the effort to find go to market fit, Were there any speed bumps that are used worth sharing?

Speaker C: I think that, you know, it's not necessarily something that didn't work, but something that I wish I understood earlier on was that you need multiple go to market playbooks without like, you know, having too many, because too many can defeat the purpose. But I, I was very rigid. I was very, you know, I was like, this is the Go to market playbook. We have to play by this playbook. But it turns out that our SMB business had a very different playbook than our.

Speaker B: You have a different ideal customer profile. So you. Exactly.

Speaker C: And different like contracts and touch points and wow moments, you know.

Speaker B: So how many playbooks did you have

Speaker C: in the beginning I had one and then it turned into two. So one was just like generic one and then it turned into SMB and enterprise and then it turned into SMB enterprise and then separate one for an inbound spot specific inbound channel lead. So yeah, it's, it's. Yeah. And I wish I recognized that earlier on because my reps would tell me and I would just say like, no, you're not following the process. You're not following the playbook. Like where's your wow, all this stuff? They would just tell me, no, it's a different process. It's a different process. And I should have listened to that earlier.

Speaker D: Yeah, you need a different playbook for every ideal customer profile. You know, Go to market is an ultimate cross functional activity. You know, it's not just sales. You got sales, marketing, product, customer success. You know, everyone needs to work together, but each department tends to become very siloed. How did you use your playbook to like get coordination, alignment of different departments? You know, especially as the company got a little bigger and you have strong

Speaker C: VPs, I would say that that's actually something that we're still working through and I think it evolves with every stage. Right. I think the, the collaboration just looks very, very different. Early on it was as simple as putting the playbook down on paper. So we had two holy sheets of paper at Spain.

Speaker B: We had one was like holy, not like punched hole.

Speaker C: Oh, sorry, yeah, sacred. Sacred documents. One was the go to market playbook that like said like, this is phase one, these are the wild ones, et cetera. And, and, and then the second one was mantras. Mantras that the customer had to believe in order to buy. And if they didn't believe in the six mantras and they were unlikely to buy, so those are the two. And then just socializing those sheets to the entire company, it really aligned the entire company because then, you know, operations knew what, what we were selling. They knew the stages, they knew the likelihood of deals converting and they, they prepared themselves for deals coming through the pipeline. Marketing would kind of align themselves with those stages. So yeah, just having those two documents in the early days, it was just as simple as socializing and making sacred those two documents. And then now I Think it's more complex and we're still trying to figure it out.

Speaker B: So when you guys found your early go to market fit and started to feel the momentum and you know, your reps were closing deals without you, which is terrific. To move beyond founder selling. Talk about what happened over the next year. So, you know, great, you found your playbook, found your wows. That's hard. What happened over the next year?

Speaker C: I mean just insane growth.

Speaker B: You're so modest about that.

Speaker C: I mean it's not like what was

Speaker B: the what like what kind of growth. What did it would you go from to?

Speaker C: Yeah, so I, yeah, so we 4 to 6x every single year for the past four years. So remarkable top line growth. I would say my focus really shifted from go to market fit to really operationally and culturally holding the company together and helping it thrive through this, this massive growth. It's really unusual for a company to grow that quickly and to become a different company every six months and my focus has really turned to that.

Speaker B: So that is a terrific segue to the next bucket of things that would be really fun to talk about with you, which is shifting gears to your role as CEO and how that's changed as uh, spring health has changed and you're a first time CEO hyper growth company, the pace and unlearning that you must be going through has got to be like just crazy. What are some of the things that as the company changed, you felt like you had to do differently to hold the company together.

Speaker C: So I think this is a very common one that a lot of founders talk about. But I can't, it's just so important. So I would say going from doing everything myself and then now delegating to other people, that's like a big one that really needs to shift. So in the early days, you know, everything that's going on, you built basically every function yourself. So you know how to do everything. You basically did everything. And then it's just really unlearning that, that muscle of trying to dig into everything and, and fix everything yourself. So that's a, that's a big one. The second one is also cliche but really important is, you know, I'm known for my speed and I would say I am very proud of my speed. I'm a very fast paced, intense founder. As you know, founders of hypergrowth, uh, companies should be. But I think the major shift for me was really sometimes you have to slow down to go faster. And so whereas previously I move quickly in virtually every arena and move quickly to do Everything I would say now I am much more mindful about how I do things and maybe even, you know, taking a slower route to ultimately go faster in the long run. So I would say those are the two big things that I've unlearned. Yeah.

Speaker B: How'd you figure that out? Like, those are two big changes. Like when you sort of talked about letting go and no longer doing everything yourself, could you double click into there and be like, what exactly had to change and what was hard about it? You're right, it is kind of cliche. But it's cliche because lots of people struggle with this.

Speaker C: I think at every stage I asked myself, what does the company need from me? And the reality is, you know, as we scaled, as we hired experts and specialists, the company didn't need me to do things and fix things in a micro way. It needed me to provide direction and, you know, set strategy and communicate the strategy so that I could empower people to do the work in a, in a frictionless and energized way. And so I think the way that I unlearned this impulse to do everything myself is really confronting the fact that the company didn't need me to do that and needed me to stop doing that and instead get out of the weeds and be a lot more strategic and high level.

Speaker B: How did that make you feel?

Speaker C: Well, it's really interesting. I think founder CEOs are, they have like a unique psychology because at every juncture, if someone says they can't do something, founder CEOs I feel like, are way more skeptical than, than other types of CEOs because they've done it themselves. And so like when someone says, oh, this is not possible.

Speaker B: Somebody on your team says it's not possible.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. Someone says it's not possible. Someone says that's not how it's done, that, that can't be done. It's, you know, you have an example from like four or five years ago where you did it and you got it done. You know, so it's like, and people can't necessarily, they can't get away with that. And so I think that there's like, there's a maddening psychology that is associated with founder CEOs where you, you, you always think in the back of your mind, you know, like, I did that and I, I know you can do that. But then at the same time, you don't want to undermine the person and you want to empower them to, you know, lead their functions and do their work and do the work in the Best way possible.

Speaker B: So, so you talked about how your role as CEO is changing and, you know, how you're different as a leader. Maybe talk a little bit about operationally how you made that work, because, you know, some of these things tend to feel sort of conceptual. Look, I, uh, have to let go. You have to do these things. They're super important. Like, operationally, how do you make some of these things work? Like, what are some of the things that tactically you did to change the way you run the company?

Speaker C: Getting away from, uh, being prescriptive around the how and being very, very disciplined about aligning on goals and KPIs and metrics, that has been a, uh, really tactical way to get out of the weeds. So I have lots of opinions on how something can get done, but those opinions are probably worse than the opinions of people who are closer to the work and to the experts that we've hired. And so, you know, it's. It's not really my place anymore to be prescriptive around the how. Also, it's not empowering to my team if I'm constantly, you know, telling them how to do their job or what they should do to move a metric. So really removing myself from the planning around the how and the actual initiatives and more kind of holding people accountable and aligning around the specific metrics has been a really tactical way to get out of the weeds.

Speaker B: You shared something with me once that I actually now steal from you, which is your hack about saying something to yourself quietly in your head in a meeting. You want to share that one?

Speaker C: Yeah. And by the way, that, uh, that. That's a really good call out for another theme in my development as leader. So the, the hack is that I'll be in a meeting and I'll disagree with someone on something. And I sometimes just say it to myself in my head, but I don't say it aloud. It's very specific. It's not that I don't disagree openly. I, I do. But there's definitely a way to disagree that is, is much more effective. So we have a value at Spring Health called candor with care. And I think one of the ways that I've evolved as a CEO is that I have always been very honest and very direct, but I've realized that, that I need to modulate that, that directness for different contexts. And I need to modulate it based on the trust battery that I have with the person that I'm talking to. And as we've scaled, like, not everyone has that, uh, that direct onetoone relationship with me, they don't necessarily have this, like, full battery of trust that, you know, I've earned with them over time. And so the way that my words land with people who, who don't have, who have very low trust batteries with me, trust battery is like a metaphor that I use where it's like, trust is not binary. It's like, you know, it. It's a scale, it's a spectrum. So if, if the trust is low, then I have to be very careful and I have to emphasize, you know, the care part of candor with care. But if the trust is very high, I can be very candid without necessarily. I can be candid, I can be direct, I can be straightforward. So I think that's been a big evolution for me as CEO, really learning to modulate how I am candid and how I am direct and how I communicate based on my relationship with the person I'm talking to.

Speaker B: That's great. All right, let's shift to a, uh, another topic here, which is obviously one of the things that's different about you is you are the youngest female CEO of a unicorn, which is a terrific accomplishment. What advice you would have for other female CEOs out there that are looking to do what you've done?

Speaker C: Well, first off, I would say, like, be real about the fact that it is going to be a different experience. You know, there's just a lot of research and proof that female leaders are treated differently from male leaders. And, uh, it doesn't necessarily mean, like, we as women need to act differently or change based on the research or based on how others treat us, but we should at least know what the research shows when it comes to the treatment of female leaders and the perception of female leaders. So there's a lot of research to show that VCs ask women different questions that they ask women questions really based on their experience and evaluate female founder CEOs, uh, based on their experience versus their potential. Whereas with men, they ask them questions more about their potential. So just being aware of that and learning to speak to your experience in a very confident and concrete way as a female leader, I think will, will help. I think there's also a lot of research showing that criticism coming from a woman is received very, very differently than criticism coming from men by both men and women. And so just knowing that, you know, the way that we communicate is going to be received very differently just based on our gender and, you know, being, being real about that, understanding that, and then choosing what you do based on Those facts, I think, is really important as a female leader.

Speaker B: Great answer. Thank you for sharing that. All right, so let's go ahead and wrap up. April, this has been really fun to talk to you about your journey on this, and I love that you were able to dust off some of the. The history of spring health to, uh, have this conversation. But what final advice do you have for the audience out there trying to unlock growth, trying to, uh, unlearn their way to success? Like, what advice do you have?

Speaker C: Be curious. I think that my superpower is curiosity. I've really shown or proven that you don't need a background or you don't need really any experience to build something successful. You. You just need a lot of curiosity, and you need a lot of resilience. And those things combined, I think, will make you successful. So, yeah, I think curiosity is what led me to read your book, Bob, and hey. And it's what led me to reach out to you, Bob. It's what leads me to listen to you when you give me advice. And, yeah, I think it's. It's been a huge part of my success and the company's success. So stay curious and stay resilient.

Speaker B: April, thank you. This has been terrific. Great to spend time with you. And I know our audience thanks you as well.

Speaker D: Yeah, thank you very much, April. It was very good.

Speaker C: Thank you both.

Speaker A: Thanks for listening to the Survival to Thrival podcast with co authors Tahi um Nam and Bob Tinker. This podcast is aimed at enterprise enterprise startup leaders. So if there's someone you know who'd find it useful, please share it or leave a review. That's how others find us.