For Lauren, the sign was that Good Mind's entire original thesis — psilocybin and MDMA therapy — depended on a regulator moving: "you can't bet on what the TGA is gonna maybe do in the next five years... you can't build a business on an idea that maybe something will change."
See Lauren Barker's full take
Good Mind's shell company was originally set up around psilocybin and potentially MDMA therapy — Australia being the only western country with that legalised therapy pathway. But the regulation was an "incredibly governance heavy model," the research still "very very early doors" and "inconclusive about what those results will look like for patients." Lauren's test was brutal in its simplicity: if the business only works when a regulator changes its mind on an uncertain timeline, it isn't a business yet.
It took "quite a long time and sort of gentle messaging" to bring the existing team around — her framing was "it's not that I don't like this idea," but that it's "a very exciting potential vertical for the future... not one that we're exploring today." The pivot question became: what can we make accessible now? The answer was ketamine — a treatment that was already available in Australia, where Lauren saw an underexplored first-mover opportunity.