Lauren spent nearly a decade as a doctor before she joined an early-stage mental-health startup. When the model stopped working, she rebuilt the company herself, teaching herself Google Ads off YouTube. That became Good Mind Therapeutics: five ketamine clinics across Australia, break-even, heading for fifty.
Lauren Barker is the co-founder of Good Mind Therapeutics, a clinic network for people with treatment-resistant depression. We talk about walking away from a prestigious career, rebuilding solo after a co-founder leaves, and what it takes to keep going.
Chapters
0:00 Intro 0:47 Leaving Medicine 2:08 Joining The Startup 3:21 The Seasons 5:00 The Psilocybin Pivot 6:33 Not A Niche 7:53 Inside A Clinic 8:36 How Ketamine Works 10:17 What Patients Pay 11:57 Going It Alone 13:03 Peptides & YouTube 14:06 Five To Fifty 15:46 LinkedIn vs Reality 18:01 Do It Again? Transcript Search or select a timestamp to jump ▾ 0:00 Lauren Barker: That is the price that I'm willing to pay to have my life back. 0:03 Thea Ngo: Lauren left medicine to build ketamine clinics for people whose past treatments have all failed them. Then her co-founder left. She was all alone. 0:13 Lauren Barker: I did a lot of crying. It was so lonely. And I think I had moved from always being an employee and the difference between being an employee and being responsible for other people's jobs. If people can sell peptides, surely I can make a business off something that actually works. You want to change a habit? That's bloody hard to do. Like, as an individual, individual. And then you get ketamine and you get this burst of fertility for growing new pathways. Hi, I'm Lauren. I'm the founder of Good Mind Therapeutics, and this is Founders in Motion. 0:43 Thea Ngo: You were a certified medical doctor in New Zealand, spending your time working across mental health and emergency medicine settings. You had this insanely prestigious career that took years of education, sweat, and pain to build up, but at one point you decided to leave medicine. What was the moment? 1:06 Lauren Barker: I do actually— now that you say it, I do actually really remember the sweat and the tears. It was 6 years of university, and then I did 3 years after I had qualified. And I guess that's almost a decade of my life. There was no specific moment. I had always known from quite early on in university that I wanted to work outside of the hospital. For me, that was about the way that medicine is designed and the necessity of the system to minimize risk and to be really protocol-driven. So what you're optimizing for is that the patient gets the right outcome the first time and then subsequently every single time. And so that reduces the scope for creativity and innovation and trying something new. And I really wanted to be in an environment that was like, I want to try that and see if it works. I need to flex the creative side of my brain. 1:59 Thea Ngo: You were a medical doctor for 3 years. Worked at a consulting firm for 18 months, a few startup scale-ups in the health space for 3 years. At one point, you decided to join Goodmind Therapeutics. You didn't start Goodmind from day one, you joined an existing team. So talk to me, what was the company back then? And what made you say yes? 2:22 Lauren Barker: The reason why I went to that meeting was I always wanted to get back into the mental health space. think it's like a fertile ground for opportunity. And I went to that first meeting and they had a slide and the top of the slide said something like novel treatments. And then they had this kind of idea that maybe they'd do something with a platform or maybe they'd do something with clinics. And there was like this 4 by 4 of, hey, where can we do something? And I was like, oh, this is pretty, this is like chaotic. Can this company be running? I think it had been probably 6 months or a year before I got there. And you could see that there was a group of investors who saw an opportunity with novel treatments but didn't know what that opportunity was. And so what made me say yes was actually that I'd been reading around the lobbying for ketamine treatment, and that was something that I was really excited about and wasn't big in Australia. And so I thought, if I can be a first mover here, that'll be a really interesting business to build. 3:21 Thea Ngo: Okay, so you are now the co-founder and navigating current-day Goodmind through all the ups and downs. Talk to me, from the moment you joined to now, like April 2026, what are the seasons that Goodmind have been through? And what is it today? 3:38 Lauren Barker: At the moment, Goodmind, we have a hybrid sort of telehealth and in-person delivery system for novel mental health treatments. And we have 5 clinic sites across the country at the minute. The first season was kind of, oh my God, what the hell am I going to do here? There was nothing there. And so I turned up and I was like, right, let's do this. That was really, really fun and creative. 4:05 Thea Ngo: Yeah. 4:05 Lauren Barker: So that was great. That was like summer, yes, seasons-wise. And then it was hard because then we had 6 months where we were like, if we build it, will they come? 4:15 Thea Ngo: Yeah. 4:15 Lauren Barker: And before you know the answer to that question, you're essentially just spending a lot of time and energy with a lot of self-doubt. And so there was probably 6 to 9 months where I was like, I have no idea. Like, I've got a hypothesis, but until we've built it, we won't know. And there were a lot of dark nights of the soul. And then it's only probably in the last couple of months where, I would say the last 3 or 4 months, where we have had the signal that what we're doing is right. And that's given us a lot of confidence and relief for where we are today. The shell company was originally set up around psilocybin, potentially MDMA therapy? Which Australia is well known as being the only country in, you know, in the Western world where that's a legalized therapy pathway. Um, if you don't know much about it, the way that it's been regulated here is an incredibly governance-heavy model. And again, rightly or wrongly so, from a safety perspective. Very, very early doors. The research is still inconclusive about what those results will look like for patients. 5:37 Thea Ngo: Yeah. 5:38 Lauren Barker: And I think if you're not used to working in the regulatory space in Australia, there is a long journey to change. And so it took quite a long time and sort of gentle messaging towards the team there at the minute to be like, look, it's not that I don't like this idea, it's that you can't bet on what the TGA is going to maybe do in the next 5 years. You can't build a business on an idea that maybe something will change. And so that would— that's a very exciting potential vertical for the future, but it's not one that we're exploring today. And so that's when we pivoted into what's accessible, what can we make accessible from now. 6:17 Thea Ngo: We spoke a lot about these kind of novel therapeutic treatments for mental health. So for someone who has no idea what ketamine treatment for mental health actually looks like, what happens from the moment that they call you to the moment that they walk out of a clinic. 6:33 Lauren Barker: People think of treatment-resistant depression as a niche illness, and it is so far from, from the truth. Because if you think about the fact that, like, probably 1 in 5, depending on which statistics you read, Australians will have depression in their life. Um, the first-line treatment for depression is tablet antidepressants. They work for about half of people who have depression. If you take one and it doesn't work for you, the chances of the second one working are significantly diminished. And then by the time you're trying a third one, it's not going to work, essentially. And so it's by the time we get towards that third antidepressant, we're talking people who are treatment resistant. So the idea of treatment resistance came around before we had other therapies. So before we had ECT and TMS brain stimulation type therapies, these patients could not be treated. So they were treatment resistant. So it's kind of like, it's a hangover from a system that's not today's system. And so when we talk about treatment-resistant depression, we're talking about millions and millions of Australians. We're not talking about like a few people who have this weird disorder. We're talking about a huge group of Australians today who aren't getting the best care for them. So in terms of what happens when people find us, um, often patients reach out to us directly. We tell them all about the treatment that we offer. We get a GP referral, we do the patient psychiatry assessment, and then that patient comes to us for a series of in-person treatment sessions in one of our clinics, um, over the course of 3 to 6 months. 8:17 Thea Ngo: Yeah. 8:18 Lauren Barker: And then over that period of time, they have a really positive neuroplastic effect in their brain, as well as a direct antidepressant effect from the ketamine. And, you know, again, depending on which literature you read, about 70% of those people will have their depression treated or cured. 8:35 Speaker: And could you talk to me maybe very broadly a bit about the science behind how ketamine helps with So ketamine's got 2 actions. 8:48 Lauren Barker: Its first action is it's got a direct antidepressant effect on neurotransmitters in your brain. And the neurotransmitters that ketamine targets are different to the ones that are targeted by tablet antidepressants. So that's why when people sort of fail tablet antidepressants, ketamine will still work for them. The other thing is that tablet antidepressants take a really long time to work. Ketamine will work for most people within sort of 48 hours of treatment. And so it can be a really fast intervention. And the second really, really sexy thing about ketamine, really exciting thing about ketamine, is that it stimulates the growth of new pathways in the brain. So this is an area of research that is just kind of burgeoning around how our thought patterns over a period of time become ingrained in our brain networks. And so if you want to change a habit, that's bloody hard to do, like, as an individual. And then you get ketamine and you get this burst of fertility for growing new pathways. And that is the most exciting thing about this drug. And so then you find these research things where you're having the ketamine and it's combined with a behavioural activation or psychotherapy, and suddenly your therapy actually works for you because you're like, oh no, shit, that thing happened and maybe I should change my behaviour and all of that kind of stuff that is actually really difficult to generate in a brain that's hard chronic pathways for a really long time. 10:17 Thea Ngo: Australia made a pretty specific regulation call to subsidise medication through Medicare. Patients still bear the nursing costs. So, so with that, how much does a patient actually pay? 10:30 Lauren Barker: When we started, the only people that were really funding this was the Department of Veterans Affairs, because they saw the benefit for their veterans who were coming back with sort of PTSD, and depression really difficult to treat. So they have been funding this since before it was on the PBS, and the medication itself costs between $800 and $1,000 a dose. So hugely expensive. It was put on the PBS halfway through last year, and then suddenly all patients are paying for is coming into a supervised setting and having it, having it given to you under the care of nurses to make sure that you're safe. 11:03 Thea Ngo: Yes. 11:04 Lauren Barker: Um, so over a course of 3 to 6 months of treatment, a patient would pay privately About $3,000 to $5,000 out of pocket, which is getting towards the stage where that's actually achievable for a group of people. So we see, we have seen like a huge number of private patients who are now coming to our doors and being like, that is, that is the price that I'm willing to pay to have my life back, essentially. So we're finding a lot of insurers are getting on board now being like, I can see the ROI on treating these patients. Um, because we can get them back into our, into our workforce. 11:39 Thea Ngo: Goodmind was originally, like you mentioned, built around, uh, psychocybin. 11:45 Lauren Barker: Psilocybin. 11:46 Thea Ngo: Psilocybin and MDMA therapy. Um, then Australia legalized it and then added significant regulatory rigor. Then you did a big pivot of the business, and around the same time, the original co-founder left. You're sitting there With angel funding, your co-founder left, broken model. Like, how did that feel? Like, how was those first few weeks? 12:15 Lauren Barker: I did a lot of crying. It was really lonely. It was so lonely. And I think I had moved from always being an employee. And the difference between being an employee and being responsible for other people's jobs and like— 12:30 Thea Ngo: It's a big shift. 12:31 Lauren Barker: It's a huge shift. And I am naturally a positive person. So I was like, to everyone, I was like, this is great. I'm so excited. We've got a model that can work. And then all of a sudden I was like, oh God. That was a tough few months. And the other thing that I really struggled with was, you know, I think the perennial imposter syndrome. I was like, what qualification do I have? That was tough because I was like, I was doubting myself at that point because I was like, do I have the skills to make this work? And then I think that actually gave way to a lot of clarity that was like, well, actually, you know, If people can sell peptides, surely I can make a business off something that actually works. Like, I didn't have any skills in performance marketing. I did not know what a Google Ads dashboard looked like. Yeah, you can learn that shit on YouTube. 13:17 Thea Ngo: Like, learn a lot through YouTube. 13:19 Lauren Barker: So that was the thing. I've picked up so many skills in the last 6 months. I now know how to do like backend website design. 13:25 Thea Ngo: One thing I'm really curious to understand, so from a medical doctor perspective, What's your beef against peptides? 13:34 Lauren Barker: This is the hill that I will die on, is people being sold things that do not work. There's probably 2 of them that have some evidence, and then there's this whole bunch of shit out there that you're like, why, why would anybody believe that that works? When I talk about peptides, to clarify, I don't mean like the scientific term. I mean like the pop culture term of peptides, which is like a number of libido-enhancing, appetite-reducing, sleep-enhancing skin rejuvenating. 14:04 Thea Ngo: Back to Goodmind. So you're at 5 clinics, you are at breakeven. What's the next problem that you're actively trying to solve right now? 14:14 Lauren Barker: Yeah, we're at the end of phase 1. And the phase 1 question for us was, if we build it, will they come? And they have come, which is great. And so I think there's an interesting bifurcation that will happen in healthcare, and specifically mental health, where you'll have everything that is low acuity that can be done by telehealth and potentially somewhat subsidized by AI. Well, that will all be cannibalized very quickly, commoditized, and there'll still be a telehealth model in that, but whatever will happen there. And then you'll have this layer, which is just beyond that, which is in-person instances of care that somebody needs to build the way to integrate an interface between those 2 effectively. 15:04 Thea Ngo: Yeah. 15:05 Lauren Barker: And then also have enough centers to make it a really easy and pleasant experience for patients. So for us, we've built that. That's great. Now we've got to scale from 5 to 50 clinics without breaking a really nice customer experience. And so I think for us is trying to find the platform that enables us to stay as like a really lean team, make sure that we don't erode our margins, make sure that there's still like 4 or 5 people, and then thousands and thousands of instances of really standardized, pleasant patient care. 15:42 Thea Ngo: We touch on this throughout the podcast. The founder journey is really tough. What do you remember as one of the lowest days? 15:53 Lauren Barker: When I was talking about the very first season, when things were getting kind of hard and quite lonely, and I was literally by myself trying to run this business. And I remember one day I was at home with my parents in New Zealand, and I was scrolling through my Instagram feed. Oh, it's— no, no, it wasn't Instagram, it was LinkedIn. And I was going through and I was reading everybody else's stories about what they were building and how they were building it. And I think that environment can be quite competitive. 16:35 Thea Ngo: Agree. 16:36 Lauren Barker: And so I remember sitting there and being like, everybody is doing so much cooler stuff than I'm doing. And they're so much more qualified to do it. And they've got this experience or that experience, and they know this person or that person. They've raised this many million dollars or that many million dollars. And I was just like, you can get on there. And it's almost like the same as Instagram where you see Instagram versus reality. And I think there's this thing which is LinkedIn versus reality. And after that day, I was like, I'm not going to be on LinkedIn in an active way because I know that for my mental health, I need to just be like, what am I doing in my lane? I'm trying to do it like this and I'm trying my best and that's all I can do. And yeah, I may not be as smart or as qualified as this person or whatever, but, you know, you actually, if you can get over those thoughts and questions about your own ability, then I think you actually like, you try your hardest, you actually can get a really good outcome. And I don't think you necessarily need to have this, you know, this great background of I've been at this company or that company, and I know all these people in order to actually deliver something pretty cool. 17:46 Thea Ngo: So the only person you should be comparing yourself to is you of yesterday, and trying to be 1% better every day, rather than anyone else on this universe. I feel like you've went through so many seasons within the last year. Maybe you signed up for something that you didn't expect it was going to be this way. If you were to come back to that moment when you made the decision to join good mind in the first place, would you still have done it? 18:13 Lauren Barker: Oh, absolutely. I think even if, even if our hypothesis had been wrong, even if I was sitting here today and I built these 5 clinics and nothing had worked, I would have grown and gained so much in the past year that unless you've done it and you've tried it and you've tried to build something by yourself, like, I couldn't have got those skills elsewhere. 18:38 Thea Ngo: Yeah. 18:38 Lauren Barker: And so that for me was an invaluable experience. And the fact that we've come out the other side with, you know, quite a cool little idea is just kind of a bit of a cherry on the top. 18:47 Thea Ngo: I'm really excited for what's next, and I'm just excited for more novel therapies in medicine and just more innovation within the medicine space in general. Thank you for coming on the podcast. 19:00 Lauren Barker: Thank you. 19:00 Thea Ngo: That's a wrap. If you like this episode, please hit the like and subscribe button. It helps us bring on more awesome guests, level up production, and bring on new series you'll want to watch. And if you want to hear more early-stage builder stories, check out our other episodes. Okay, see you next time. No transcript lines match that phrase. Try fewer words.
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