A letter from our founder on tangerines, a spreadsheet cell nobody should have believed, and the six years in between.
Written by Daniel Umfleet, Founder & CEO | 4 min read
Six years ago, Kindbridge was an idea, a laptop, and a level of confidence that in hindsight was not supported by anything.
It was also, briefly, called Therapinn.
Therapy plus innovation. Say it out loud. Go ahead. Nobody loved it. Nobody has ever loved it. But we needed a name to put on a deck, and a name nobody loves is still a name, so Therapinn it was.
While we’re here, let’s talk about the deck. The cover of our first draft was a large photograph of a bowl of tangerines. Not a metaphor. Not a stock photo of a therapist. Tangerines, in a bowl, shot from above, quite beautifully lit. To the right, in bold: THERAPINN HEALTH NETWORKS. Below that, the subtitle we chose to lead with: WHAT WE DO RIGHT.
At that point we had done nothing. Nothing had been done. The tangerines were, at best, aspirational.
We pitched our first investor under this banner and, against all odds and possibly against his better judgment, got the money locked up. I have never asked him what he thought he was investing in.
Then we went to buy the URL.
Taken. By a foreign marijuana grow operation. Somewhere out there is a cannabis company that looked at the word “Therapinn” and thought yes, that’s us, that’s our whole vibe. They got there first. I have made peace with maybe forty percent of this.
So there we were. Funded, named after a weed farm we didn’t own, fronting a fruit bowl, needing a new identity by roughly Tuesday. Kindbridge showed up in my head shortly after. Everyone liked it immediately and enormously, which in retrospect was less a verdict on Kindbridge than a referendum on Therapinn.
And honestly, Therapinn was accurate at the time. Therapy was the plan. The whole plan. One service line, delivered over video, and that was the business. If you had told me then what we’d be doing now, across the lines we do it in, with the partners we do it with, I would have nodded politely and gone back to my tangerines.
Then came the projections.
Our model had us seeing 25,000 patients in year two. This was not a stretch goal. Not the top of a range. That was the plan. That number sat in a spreadsheet, in a cell, with a border around it, and we all looked at it and nodded.
25,000 patients
Year Two Plan
We were not close. We were not in the same area code as close. If you had shown that spreadsheet to 2020 me, he would have defended it vigorously, and he would have been wrong about every line.
Here’s the thing though. Being that wrong about speed mattered far less than I feared, because we were right about the problem. What we were building was slower and harder and considerably bigger than I understood. It was also real.
Which brings us to now. Forty-eight states. Dozens of excellent clinicians. Seven commercial payers(and growing) plus Military OneSource. And Joint Commission accreditation pending, which is not a milestone typically reached by a company whose founding document was a fruit still life captioned WHAT WE DO RIGHT.
None of this happened because the early days were well planned. They weren’t. It happened because people decided this problem was worth solving before there was proof it could be, and then kept showing up while the proof slowly assembled itself. The company we built is nothing like the one I sketched out six years ago. It’s better, and that’s on all of you.
Thank you, whether you were here for the tangerine era or joined last month. The follies made the better stories. You made the company.
Here’s to year seven.
Daniel
P.S. therapinn.com is available again. I checked. We will not be buying it. Rest easy.