Long Journey To Realize a Vision: Limeade CEO Henry Albrecht (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What year was that?

Henry Albrecht: I quit my job at the end of 2005 and founded the company at the beginning of 2006.

Sramana Mitra: This is Limeade, yes?

Henry Albrecht: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: You have a product management background. Walk me through the product management process that you came up with in turning this nebulous concept into a startup?

Henry Albrecht: Measuring and improving are the two anchors of the system. I felt we needed an assessment and we had to be able to assess well-being. I partnered with Laura Hammer who had a Ph.D. in Organizational Psychology but who was at Microsoft at that time developing all of their organizational models. I said, “Let’s build the world’s first well-being assessment.” We also needed improvement. How do people improve? I did some research on how people improve. I studied psychology, sociology, and medicine.

We basically built a set of user stories. At that time, we called them market requirements and functional requirements. Around those stories, we built a series of iterative paper and wireframe prototypes that transformed these evidence-based comprehensive assessments into personalized recommendations to a smaller set of recommended goals. Behavioral science would suggest that one is better than two, two is better than three if you’re trying to get people to improve. Peer support was a core element of it because we had learned that people need other people to help them stick to their commitment. We had a system of giving people periodic nudges and rewards, whether they be monetary or social.

That early concept has been through nine years of iteration. For the most part, our core philosophy has ultimately remained the same, which is that health and well-being and your performance in life and work are closely related things. If you put all those in the context of a culture that supports improvement, not only will that individual improve, but the company will benefit from that. The company will show they care about people, which helps them in terms of attracting and retaining talent.

Sramana Mitra: You decided to frame this whole thing in the context of organizational well-being?

Henry Albrecht: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: Your clients were enterprise customers?

Henry Albrecht: That is correct. There is a reason for that. The reason is, companies have such a unique and powerful role to play in people’s improvement. I saw that first-hand in Intuit. First of all, nowadays, people at companies are spending 8 to 12 hours a day. I think in terms of touch points, most of a human being’s touch point with other people occur at work as well. That’s where peer support can happen. You’re seeing, in many offices, 50 people with 100 different touch points. You have all this time but you also have meaningful touch points. You have long meetings and you have time together. The next thing was financial rewards and/or penalties. Having the ability to have some control of things in the form of mandates and rewards is really a powerful thing as well.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Long Journey To Realize a Vision: Limeade CEO Henry Albrecht
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