Lauren was left alone right as Good Mind pivoted from psilocybin/MDMA to ketamine therapy — angel funding in, clinics not yet built. "I did a lot of crying... it was so lonely." The shift from employee to "being responsible for other people's jobs" was the hardest part, and she filled the gaps by teaching herself the missing skills.
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The departure landed at the worst possible moment: the original business model had just been abandoned, the angel funding was already in, and the ketamine clinic model existed only as a hypothesis. Lauren describes moving from "always being an employee" to being responsible for other people's jobs as "a big shift" — and, being a naturally positive person who'd been telling everyone "this is great, I'm so excited, we got a model that can work," the crash into "oh god, that was a tough few months" was steep.
What got her through was reframing the skill gaps as learnable rather than disqualifying. She had no performance marketing background — "I did not know what a Google Ads dashboard looked like" — and her answer was that it was all learnable ("you can learn that shit on YouTube"), picking up Google Ads and backend website design among "so many skills in the last 6 months." The imposter syndrome ("what qualification do I have?") gave way to clarity: "if people can sell peptides, surely I can make a business of something that actually works."