Melissa Perri

Our new episode of Between the Guidelines with Tim Chong (Co-Founder & CEO of Yonder) is live! We go deep into the messy middle of building: productive paranoia, learning by breaking things, and the mindset shifts that actually move teams closer to product market fit. If you are building a product or leading a team through uncertainty, this one is worth your time! Full episode is now on Spotify, link in the comments.

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Lyra Health ’s $4.7B play isn’t a just a leadership shuffle. It’s a Industry reset. David Ebersman built it. Jennifer Schulz will turn it into a infrastructure. When David Ebersman launched with a guarantee CFOs called impossible, and Jennifer Schulz left Experian Health to scale it. That's not a leadership transition. That's a category shift signal. Lyra Health isn't competing for wellness budgets anymore. This isn't a mental health platform competing for employer benefits budgets. It's healthcare infrastructure disguised as wellness. And the strategic implications are bigger than most realize. Here's what's unfolding: 1/ Their outcomes aren't theater, they're actuarial ammunition. • Clinical gold standard. • PHQ-9 and GAD-7 reductions. • Tracked over 12-week protocols, not surveys. • Every claim they process becomes training data. In five years, they won't guarantee ROI, they'll underwrite mental health risk like an insurance actuary. 2/ Outcomes-based pricing inverts the entire incentive structure. • They want utilization, not recovery. • Traditional EAPs profit from volume. • Lyra only makes money when employees recover. • That single inversion is why they'll own this category. They're not choosing between vendors, they're choosing between cost centers and performance assets. 3/ Their matching system solves what manual networks can't. • Clinical staging, not availability. • Mild anxiety goes to high-volume therapists. • Severe depression with SI escalates to crisis-trained seniors immediately. • This is how they maintain zero waitlists AND clinical quality simultaneously. Most platforms optimize for speed or quality but Lyra did both at enterprise scale. 4/ Jennifer Schulz didn't join to run a mental health platform. • She came from Experian Health. • She built B2B healthcare infrastructure at scale. • David Ebersman proved the clinical model works. • Jennifer scales it into employer risk infrastructure. Watch what happens next: Lyra starts underwriting mental health spend. Not "here's a benefit" but "we'll guarantee your costs won't exceed X per employee annually." Here's the strategic blind spot: boards think mental health is an HR decision. It's not. It's capital allocation. If your mental health vendor can't guarantee ROI, you're not buying healthcare you're buying hope. Hope doesn't belong in a budget line. The companies moving first aren't getting better benefits. Five years from now, Lyra won't be a mental health platform. They'll be the clinical data layer that prices workforce health risk across categories. What's the mental health ROI at your company? If you don't know the number, your board should be asking why. P.S. As a Premium Ghostwriter I help wellness founders and execs turn complex strategy into stories that cut through the noise. If your insight deserves more than a scroll-by, let’s make it unforgettable. #HealthcareInfrastructure #MentalHealthROI #ClinicalInnovation

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Strategy around AI requires space to think. I’ve led through the chaos of scale: three successful exits, unicorn stages, and full org transformations. And here’s the truth: AI will only create value if your leadership team makes space to think strategically. “Strategic thinking is nonnegotiable. It requires uninterrupted time for deep thought.” The AI-Driven Leader Right now, most executives are reacting. Tinkering. Delegating AI to “innovation teams.” But the companies making real gains? → They’re rearchitecting workflows. → Redefining roles. → And building a culture of orchestration, not execution. That doesn’t come from a vendor. It comes from vision. At Chiri, we don’t just implement AI. We help leaders design the infrastructure that unlocks 10X across their teams. Where do you need more thinking time in your org? (Picture for today is me with one of my other “nieces” that used to think I was cool. I cant quite remember why she wanted to put post it notes all over me, but I love this pic of her)

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When I started consulting, I had no idea what to charge. So I'd finish a diagnostic call, dump the transcript into Claude, and say "I don't know what to charge, you tell me. Go benchmark it." And it would come back with a solid recommendation. That tiny moment captures everything I believe about AI: you don't need to have all the answers. You just need to ask the right tool the right question. I sat down with Stuart Willson on Just Curious and we talked about all of it — how I actually work with clients, the specific tools I use every day, and why most AI "failures" aren't really about the technology at all. A few things we got into: ➡️ Why I ignore what the developers are building and just watch what the humans are doing — that's where every good automation starts ➡️ The 1 transcript to 10 assets workflow I run through Granola after almost every call (sometimes I post the LinkedIn drafts with zero edits) ➡️ Why a 90-minute diagnostic replaced a dev shop that had been spinning for 5 months ➡️ My take on "return on data invested" — most people are way too cautious about what they share with AI, and it's costing them If you're a small team feeling pressure to "do something with AI" but everything feels too expensive or too technical, it's not. Period. That's the one thing I want you to walk away with. 🎧 Spotify link in comments. Go Seahawks 🏈

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𝗦𝗲𝗰𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗬𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗮𝗻𝘆’𝘀 𝗙𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 Mindful, selective hiring at the executive level transforms your growth from sporadic to systematic. Take the time to find those foundational leaders who can carry the mission forward and build a resilient organization. Great guidance from Kyle Holm at Sequoia. #ExecutiveHiring #StartupGrowth #LeadershipDevelopment #Sequoia #KyleHolm #FoundersAdvice #TalentAcquisition #PreMidMarket

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