We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Nisha Desai. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Nisha below.

Nisha, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What were some of the most unexpected problems you’ve faced in your business and how did you resolve those issues?

Being a female entrepreneur of color brings its fair share of challenges above and beyond the normal difficulties of starting your own company. Anise’s philosophy that culture impacts the way we think, emote and behave is proven true in our daily work – we are expected to fit the mold of a traditional / Western entrepreneur and often struggle to do so given the Eastern values we adopted while growing up. For example, my parents placed a heavy emphasis on academic success and stable careers to prevent me from having to endure similar economic hardships as they did when immigrating to the States. The pressure to achieve and uphold the “Model Minority Myth” is something that is deeply ingrained in me and others in my Asian American community. As a result, I often find myself trying to mitigate risk and anchor on deadlines, processes and goals, when the reality of an early stage business is that things are fluid and the biggest risks yield the biggest rewards. My co-founder and I have had to break down deep-rooted anxiety stemming from this cultural context in order to get comfortable with the concepts of risk and failure and to overcome people-pleasing tendencies to put our business first.

One particular example comes to mind around this notion of having to build unnaturally thick skin and assertiveness. While presenting at a world-renowned entrepreneurship pitch competition, we received feedback that was a reminder that our country, though progressive, is still fighting an uphill battle when it comes to truly accepting racial and ethnic equality. We were told “if your services are for Asians, why not go to Asia instead of launching here” and “I don’t really see why Asians need special mental health care” despite the hundreds of data points we presented to make our case. I was initially overridden by shame after feeling like our idea had just failed. I then spiraled into wanting to smile and thank the judge for their insights just to stay on their good side. However, my teammate reminded me that we needed to be resilient and prove them wrong. So, we took a risk by actually using their feedback in our pitch as an example of the magnitude of the problem we’re seeking to address and it paid off. Our resiliency earned us a spot as one of 7 finalists out of 400+ participants and exemplified to the audience that culture matters.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?

I grew up in a traditional South Asian household where mental health was never talked about. I’m a generally emotional person, but this was viewed as “weak-hearted” and I was always told to get over my problems. It wasn’t until college that I realized others experienced similar things, and that it was ok to not always be ok. I was never formally diagnosed with depression, partially because of my fear of seeking out professional help, but I struggled with things like imposter syndrome, self-doubt, relationship issues, etc. Unfortunately, my school had a very broken mental health system and, like me, many of my classmates weren’t able to get the help they needed. There was a tragic loss of lives – 14 suicides – and I noticed many of them were people of color and Asian Americans, specifically. This rang alarm bells for me and left me asking the question: if we had better treatment options to help process our emotions, could the outcome be different?

Since then, I’ve been passionate about dedicating my career and voice to mental health and bringing conversations around destigmatizing mental health in our community to the forefront. I got to do some research around “why” so many individuals are dissatisfied with mental healthcare solutions during my last job. I learned that there are a ton of cultural barriers (i.e. stigma, language, provider incompatibility) that prevent people of color from seeking mental health support and there’s a gap in the market when it comes to addressing their unique needs. When my co-founder, Alice Zhang, and I met during business school and identified the unmet need, we felt the importance of building the first culturally-responsive digital mental health platform for the Asian American community – Anise Health!

We’re so proud to be bringing a solution to the market that expands accessibility of high quality interventions and clinicians to the most underserved populations and that actually helps them get better. While there are other digital mental health players out there, they simply match therapists of color to clients of color and call themselves “culturally competent,” which research shows to have no correlation with outcomes. We are putting in the work to actually change the standard of care at the intervention level and training clinicians on how to adapt traditional evidence-based psychotherapy for culture, which is proven to be 5x more effective. We believe that, in the long run, our holistic and culturally-responsive care model and our curated clinician network will make us the gold standard and go-to-brand for BIPOC mental health.

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

When my co-founder and I decided to start Anise Health, we were both pursuing our MBAs at Harvard Business School (HBS). With nothing more than an idea, we applied and were admitted to the HBS Arthur Rock Accelerator and Harvard University’s Innovation Labs Venture Program, through which we received the initial non-dilutive funding to get our idea off the ground. These programs also provided us with the mentorship and resources to turn our idea into a business, including identifying our business model, go-to-market strategy, target customers and customer journeys, fundraising milestones, incorporation, and so much more. This prepared us for a number of pitch competitions, where we won prize money that supported our MVP launch (i.e. John E Martin Mental Healthcare Challenge sponsored by Google and the Rice Business Plan Competition). We operated our business in a lean and scrappy manner, bootstrapping where we needed to, finding volunteers to join our team, negotiating discounts with vendors, and more to minimize cash burn until we had enough data in hand to demonstrate traction. Once my co-founder and I committed to pursuing Anise Health full-time, we decided it was a good time to leverage the momentum to raise our pre-seed round. We started by putting together a target list of investors who had experience in digital health and specifically focused on the earliest stages of investing (e.g. pre-seed / seed). We then ranked these investors, tracked down any contacts we may have that would be able to facilitate a warm introduction, and begin scheduling introduction calls in order from lowest to highest priority so we could get plenty of practice in for our pitch. We ultimately ended up closing our round with the support of one institutional venture fund and several angel investors, which gives us enough capital to grow our team and hit our milestones for the next 9-12 months.

Any advice for managing a team?

Managing a team is probably the hardest part of my job and I never would’ve expected that since I’m generally a people person. However, as a co-founder it’s easy to get wrapped up in the million workstreams you’re managing and to undermine the importance of team morale. Getting this advice in the early days helped me and my co-founder be intentional about setting a culture that aligned with our mission-oriented company. We feel a lot of responsibility to keep our teammates happy because without them we wouldn’t be able to keep our clients happy and healthy.

Specifically, working in the mental health industry has made us mindful of the fact that mental health of our own team has to come first. So, when we sat down to write our company values, we decided to practice what we preach by making our #1 value “Empathy and Respect: Hold compassion for oneself and show respect to all stakeholders.” By creating this foundation, we set the tone for all the norms and rituals that our business observes in our day to day. We start every meeting by checking in on how people are doing, we do weekly retros to reflect on how things are going both at work and in the world around us, we do weekly yoga sessions, and we offer free behavioral coaching as a benefit to our employees. Most importantly, however, we try to encourage our teammates to set boundaries so that work, life, and health can co-exist and offer mental health days when needed – no questions asked. In short, my advice is to do everything you can to lift your people up because without it the business will crumble. Spend lots of time on hiring the right talent, establish a regular cadence for receiving and giving feedback, celebrate the good moments while holding individuals accountable for their work, and be intentional about creating a culture that is true to your brand.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.anisehealth.co
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/anise_health/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/anisehealth
• Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/company/anisehealth
• Other: We are live in California and accepting new clients, no matter how large or small your need, who are Asian-identifying adults (ages 18+) or partners looking for culturally-responsive mental health care. Get started by filling out our short intake form via the direct link below or on our website (click “Get Started“).