Lauren joined Good Mind when it was a chaotic slide deck — "novel treatments" at the top, a 4-by-4 of "maybe they do something with a platform or maybe they do something with clinics." She said yes not because the company had shape, but because she saw a first-mover opportunity in ketamine treatment in Australia.
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The company had existed "probably six months or a year" before she arrived, and what she found was "a group of investors who saw an opportunity with novel treatments but didn't know what that opportunity was." Her honest read in the meeting: "this is like chaotic in this company." The decision to join anyway came from her own thesis, not theirs — she'd "been reading around the lobbying for ketamine treatment," it "wasn't big in Australia," and "if I can be a first mover here, that'll be a really interesting business to build."
The lesson: joining an ambiguous early-stage company works when you bring the conviction yourself. The chaos was the opportunity — "there was nothing there, and so I turned up and I was like, right, let's do this" — and that first season was "really really fun and creative."