Startup life might sound glamorous but the reality is often far from it — just ask Jonny Mirkin.
Mr Mirkin founded successful tech business Nomos One in 2011 but, during his tenure at the startup, all his energy went into building the business and he failed to look after himself.
Landing in hospital badly burned out was a “massive wake-up call” for the Dunedin man and it kicked off a transformation of his life and ultimately led to launching another startup, a team wellbeing platform called Givenwell, on the back of his own experiences.
It was his wife Nicola who encouraged him to initially see a therapist, even just for one or two sessions. That was the beginning of seven or eight years of weekly therapy.
For a self-described Kiwi bloke, Mr Mirkin acknowledged making that move was a big shift but he was now one of therapy’s biggest advocates.
In tandem with sorting out his mental health, he also focused on his physical health. He started going to the gym, working out with a personal trainer, and sought advice from a nutritionist.
His life transformed, he lost weight and not only did his personal experience of life improve but so did his relationships and his work life.
“I remember at the time thinking to myself, why does everybody else not do this stuff? I quickly realised I’m in a position of privilege … I had the money to do these things. Most people simply can’t afford to care for themselves in the way I was.
“A lot of people feel really guilty, including myself, for looking after themselves. I mentally parked it as something that needed to be investigated in the future,” he said.
When he finished as chief executive of Nomos One, he promised his wife a two-year break from startups. He took some time out, taught at the University of Otago and did some governance and consulting work, but then started obsessing over the idea of burnout.
Born in Dunedin, Mr Mirkin has spent most of his life in the city. He studied law at the University of Otago and then returned to do his MBA. A scholarship to the United States saw him finish the degree at Duke University and he then did a technology ventures programme at Stanford University.
Keen on business, he got the bug for startups and started Nomos One while he was finishing his MBA and working as a commercial lawyer.
It started as a legal document company and went through several iterations to specialise in lease management and lease accounting software, designed to streamline and simplify complex lease processes for businesses.
Mr Mirkin later stepped down as chief executive and joined the company’s board before it was sold earlier this year to EXA Capital, the global finance and technology firm’s first acquisition outside the United States.
When it came to Givenwell, Mr Mirkin said he tackled his latest startup “back to front” , launching after two years of research and development, rather than rushing out, building it and pushing it into the market.
He spent six months touring New Zealand interviewing hundreds of people and culture leaders “from every kind of organisation”. From big public departments and airlines to not-for-profits and teams with three or four people, he asked his interview subjects about their own experiences of team wellbeing.
Virtually every conversation had the same answer and what he learned was that there was mostly an ambulance-at-the-bottom-of-the-cliff approach when people were already sick, such as EAPs and even health insurance. While that was important, it was not stopping people getting unwell, he said.
So what were organisations doing to be proactive? It tended to fall into two camps — either “tick box stuff”, like a fruit bowl or something else that ticked the box of wellbeing but did not mean anything, and employee perks which were called wellbeing, or they brought in something like an app, speaker series or other initiative that only a small percentage of people engaged with.
On the back of that, Mr Mirkin started talking to a few organisations who were doing wellbeing allowances, giving employees money to look after themselves as cash or on a credit card.
On principle, that sounded good but businesses could pick and choose what was wellbeing and there was also a lot of administration. Giving money also did not work too well as it was often spent on other things.
He pulled together a pitch to speak to investors which also highlighted suicide and depression rates per capita and the upward trend, and burnout rates despite all the different things that were supposedly being done to solve wellbeing, as well as his own personal experience.
“Whatever we’re doing isn’t working,” he said.
Over the past 18 months to two years, Mr Mirkin has been assembling a team and building a new way to hopefully meaningfully impact wellbeing. The approach was novel, he believed it had not been done anywhere in the world.
Wellbeing was an individual thing; for him, having access to therapy, gym, a nutritionist and massage had worked. For someone else, that could be yoga or talking to a finance coach.
Givenwell involved employers giving their team wellbeing allowances in the form of digital tokens. Employees then accessed a marketplace, where various offerings from around the country — which had been curated and vetted — were available and they could spend their tokens confidentially on whatever they chose.
It was a win-win approach; for them, it was about impactful and meaningful individual wellbeing while, for employers, it was about having a happy, healthy and more engaged team, he said.
Givenwell’s ambitions were high; it was a global issue and the startup was on track to make it a global marketplace. Already it had employers dotted around the country and the first staff members had spent tokens.
There was a team of 10 and the company was not trying to grow for growth’s sake, rather it was trying to be very intentional with its growth. There was an opportunity to look at other markets.
Lessons from Nomos One had been taken and having a second attempt at building a business had been different. A point had also been made this time of celebrating the wins.
Dunedin was an “amazing” place to start a business. When he started Givenwell, he had a big decision to make; two years ago, it was the height of remote working post-Covid-19.
But building a company, he questioned why he would go remote when he could build an in-person team in Dunedin with all the collaboration, energy and excitement that came with that, along with other people’s points of view.
“We were very anti-trend when we made that decision,” he said.
There had also been shareholders from the city and support from groups like Startup Dunedin which had also helped. It was an “awesome community”, he said.
And the number of good wins coming out of Dunedin, including the stories of the likes of Timely and Education Perfect, had also been really good for the city.
New Zealand might be “at the bottom of the world” but founders in the city recognised that their own patch was only a small part of the market opportunity.
Looking to the future, Mr Mirkin said Givenwell wanted to impact hundreds of thousands of people’s lives. It was in the market now and ready to go and it was looking for employers or groups who wanted to do something with a positive impact for their team or organisation.
And as the business grew and scaled, he hoped to give tokens to people, communities and groups that might not ordinarily access wellbeing initiatives. There was provision in the shareholder agreement to allow a percentage of profit and revenue over time to be funnelled into charitable initiatives.
As for his own wellbeing, Mr Mirkin was both well and excited, although he was probably ready to spend some of his own tokens, he said.
Getting ready for launch had been exhausting and with his third child turning 1 in September, probably part of that was to do with lack of sleep.
