Long Journey To Realize a Vision: Limeade CEO Henry Albrecht (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Basically, these are forcing functions that are in the hands of corporations or enterprises that if you were trying to do it directly with individuals, you wouldn’t have access to.

Henry Albrecht: Yes. Most importantly, work is where most people get the real meaning in their lives. Work is a core part of life. What you do in your work and what you decide to do should be very aligned with what you are about as a human being.

Sramana Mitra: It should be aligned with your values otherwise, you’re never happy.

Henry Albrecht: The best companies get this and they actually recruit and attract people who are fundamentally drawn to the core mission of their role or of the company. Companies that don’t get it tend to hire people who are there for a paycheck. The ultimate success of those companies depends on how more aligned they are on that culture. I had seen the way Intuit had done that and I was always blown away by that. I didn’t know that companies could be like that. I know I wanted to build something as intentional as Intuit.

Sramana Mitra: Just to complete the product discussion, can you give us a couple of examples of these stories that you built just to illustrate the kinds of things that you were trying to address.

Henry Albrecht: The first was our well-being assessment. In doing the research, we found that it’s not just physical health or stress that drive well-being. It was also these interesting concepts that were coming out like optimism, resilience, sense of team, and the psychological concept of self-efficacy, which means belief in your abilities. We had a professional rigorous assessment designed. We built these questions into an online quiz. At the end, you get a personalized dashboard of your well-being. What are your top three strengths that you can leverage or improve and what are the top three areas that the system that can then be improved? We have this assessment with a personal recommendation engine that gives you this.

Another example is social support. We developed what we call challenges. Challenges can be from the company to everyone such as when you have a meeting, do a walking meeting. Take 10,000 steps a day, or be trained on company values. They can also be tailored to just one department or region. It can also be just a challenge for women over 50 to have a mammogram or it could be for software developers. Then there’s personal challenges where I can challenge a few of my friends to improve our diet. We have this concept that peer support works on multiple different levels. We have top-down challenges, targeted challenges, peer-to-peer challenges, team versus team challenges, and a whole array of things that we built and other elements that help people connect with their colleagues.

Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to come up with something with which you could go to market?

Henry Albrecht: We probably had an alpha product after a full year because it was a new idea. Now, the concept of improving well-being is a very popular corporate theme. There were no responses in 2006. It took another year to go through the beta phase and have paying customers.

Sramana Mitra: While you were developing the alpha, were there customers in the loop?

Henry Albrecht: We brought on a product manager and a chief technical officer. We were iterating.

Sramana Mitra: Were there customers involved?

Henry Albrecht: Yes, we were doing usability research. We were running these by actual users. We would go to coffee shops and pay people in coffee or a $25 gift card to spend an hour doing usability research.

Sramana Mitra: Were there people from HR at enterprises who would eventually be the buyers of this system?

Henry Albrecht: Yes. That started when we were beta ready. That was late in 2007 and early 2008.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Long Journey To Realize a Vision: Limeade CEO Henry Albrecht
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