The company OpenAI and Google call when a user is in a crisis: Elliot Taylor, Founder of Throughline

25:36Elliot Taylor:And that actually is a product question. That is at the heart of like what ThruLine does. Like when I think of ThruLine, ultimately we are trying to be a mental health and online harms user experience company. That's the intent, is the best user experiences in the world that reduce barriers between people and distress and being able to get help. It puts you in a really phenomenally interesting position to have massive impact on the people that touch your product. But I imagine, as you've alluded to, it has lots of very interesting and challenging product questions associated with it. Maybe let's turn to ThruLine 1.0.

26:14So, you've alluded already that ThruLine is already in its 2.0 phase and no doubt your product roadmap goes to 3.0. But I wanted to sort of ground us in what you have learnt over the years, building out the sort of part of ThruLine that people may know best, which is actually your integration with platforms like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Roblox, Discord, and kind of that first piece where you're just sort of taking a person in this moment of crisis and handing them off to a valuable local service that might be available to them. I'm really interested because it's obviously deeply political, this work now, right?

26:52It's in the media literally today, this kind of work that you're involved with. And I'm really interested in what it feels like also to be a product business interfacing with some of the largest product businesses in the world. How did you get into those rooms? How did you even get the partnerships that allowed you to have the scale that you already have as a relatively small team working out of New Zealand?

27:20Elliot Taylor:Probably like anyone, stubbornness and persistence. Did you write them letters with a stamp at the top? no but i would say that the teams that we work with the the kind of the department's called trust and safety and that is like a surprisingly small community and so if you can build meaningful connections and and build a modicum of trust then you can leverage that in a lot of ways and so for us the the core strategy in terms of like working with platforms has been to i i guess build some like core trusted relationships and then to be able to leverage those through warm introductions and then to be able to see if we can solve problems.

28:01Elliot Taylor:I think the approach that we've taken in those conversations has been really important. In the early days, you know, I didn't really know how to sell and, you know, I would go into conversations and, you know, I'd have this, like what I thought was a really pretty deck and jump on a call and, you know, and talk about what we do and you know try and convince people that it's a really good idea i've learned a lot since then and and probably the first things i one of the first things i learned was like how valuable it is to start a conversation by asking for their perspective or their advice so a number of years back now i went to the us um on like a three month trip and just like went around the us trying to find like as many people working in trust and safety as possible and having conversations with them but i like stopped myself from having sales conversations like i had a product but i wasn't going there trying to sell like i i went there and essentially like a journalist and i was just trying to learn and so i'd have conversations with people and um and just trying to understand their problems and in fact one of them i had a coffee and at the back of it um you know i was walking to my next thing and they said you're not a journalist are you because like that's that's like that's kind of like such the positioning i was taking was just really trying to understand understand their problems and the core of that is like you're you're getting to know someone so you're like you're you're building trust like as a person and they get to know me and they go like oh wow like elec he really cares about these problems and he's really he's intrigued he's learning fast and that builds a foundation that you can then work from and so you know then as the product matured we were able to you know reach back out to folk and and say like hey like you know this is what we've been working on do you think it could be helpful that really really helped a lot and then that's also kind of informed a lot of how we we sell today i've built kind of really strong philosophies uh you know i guess around like you know what enterprise enterprise selling looks like and and at the heart of that is like just never talk about my solution until i've really understood someone problem someone's problem so like my dream state is getting on a discovery call with a company and you know getting to the end of half an hour and looking at the time going oh my gosh oh well um we're at time i haven't even had a chance to talk to you about what we do you know i think we could be helpful should we you know jump on another call in a week i want to understand as much about their world as possible because people buy things when they want to solve their problems like they don't care they do not care about me or my product or my company, they care about solving their problem.

30:33Elliot Taylor:And so, yeah, we've just become very obsessed with centering the customer and centering the user. And I think that's gone a long, long way. So that's interesting. I mean, you've alluded to the famous discovery call that all salespeople, founders and otherwise need to learn. Of the sort of three things that can come off a discovery call, one is the typical version is that it sits firmly within a sales process. And the idea is extract information from, you know, in the transactional version of this, right? Extract information from a potential customer that allows you to better tailor what your product already does, you know, change slide seven to slide one, because that's the thing that they care most about and, you know, power it back to them.

31:19I mean, there's all that sort of mirroring stuff, you know, there's loads of science in selling, right? So one version of the version of a disco call is transactional. It's still with an intent to sell. And it's just how do I do that better version of selling? Another might be that discovery is actually part of the product evolution input process, which sounds like you were using that a little bit. And then the third, which I think is quite intriguing, is you've just gone after it as a trust building exercise and relationship building exercise. How would you sort of place each of those three things in terms of what it's given you?

31:54And maybe on the product side, you know, in your three months, did it radically change the way that you were approaching the problem to take that approach with customers? Or was it really that it just helped you have a second version of that conversation?

32:05Elliot Taylor:Yeah, I actually came to the end of that three months thinking there's not a business here. Really? Yeah. What were you trying to build at the time that was different? I mean, we were doing, you know, Thrilline V1, you know, which was like a help line network integrated into online platforms. But I came away feeling like, yeah, like there's a problem to solve here, but, you know, there needs to be, you know, a level of pain in terms of like how to solve that. And I just didn't feel like I came off the back of that and that the pain was acute enough for anyone to be able to pay for a solution. What's interesting about that is like I turned out to be wrong probably in quite a matter of months.

32:44Elliot Taylor:But I think that kind of proves the point is that like I went in with enough openness and humility to really try and genuinely understand someone else's world. So then I can figure out like how what I'm doing might be able to to meet it. And I think I probably have that temperament to do that because ultimately what I really care about is like making a meaningful difference in people's lives. And so like if it's just not going to work, like I just just don't want to do it. um i'll go do something else like life is really really short i don't want to waste my time yeah i mean i i certainly think for us a part of the insight like i you know i gathered on that trip and continue together over time is is just understanding like what the particular motivations and levers are like amongst amongst our buyers yeah you just i think as a as a company you always want to be getting more color on that you know it's like it starts off as a sketch on a napkin and hopefully your company at full strength, it's a beautiful Monet or something, you know?

33:49Elliot Taylor:And so I think that really helped, you know, because of my background, you know, I came from this from a perspective of really wanting to help people in crisis, but, you know, recognizing that there are, there's a whole range of levers, there's reputational risk, there's regulatory risk, there's duty of care, that there's all different types of roles and motivations even within companies and figuring out who might be your relevant sponsor. Yeah, so learned a lot. So, I mean, I think probably anybody listening to this may be asking themselves the question. We're talking about some of the biggest, best well-resourced platforms in the world.

34:23They already do the identification piece, as you alluded to earlier. Why is there actually still a market for ThruLine to do anything for these big platforms? Like, why wouldn't they just build it themselves?

34:36Elliot Taylor:so it's hard to be able to build a global network that is reliable and that you can trust and then to be able to get that into product despite these platforms being very large in the user base and large in their teams they're actually the amount of people that are tasked with solving that problem is quite small so you know oftentimes when we're talking with a platform you know i'm talking with like one or two people who are trying to solve this who have like no product and engineering resource available to them so trust and safety is often seen as a cost center it can be challenging to try and get the resource to do the the things that these team members want to do and so if we can shortcut that for them and basically say like hey you're not going to have to build this you're not going to have to maintain it and it's going to be infinitely better than anything you would do and it's going to save you money.

35:32Elliot Taylor:Like then it just, I guess it becomes like any other type of value proposition where it's like, well, yeah, like this is better, quicker, faster. It makes sense. I wanted to then pick up, I guess you alluded earlier to different platforms and even within organizations, you're dealing with different motivators. You're thinking about enterprise sales, which often involves, you know, who's the sponsor, who's a potential impediment to the yes. How much of getting through line over the line, as it were, is about someone championing because they deeply care about the problem? Like, does it matter if your partner is like, I'm doing this because the reputational risk is there or the regulatory risk, or it feels like a compliance easy, but it's not a passion area for them?

36:14Like, does that matter to you? How does that show up in sales processes for you? And what do you make of it?

36:19Elliot Taylor:So because we work with trust and safety teams, like it's littered with those types of people, you know like trust and safety folk are often people that have come from civil society i know people that work in trust and safety who think the internet is net negative and that's why they work for like a large platform because they're trying to like make the whole thing better you have that benefit you get on a call with a trust and safety person and they already really care and so you're you're actually on like the same side of the aisle where you're you're both standing there going like hey we we we want to solve this problem obviously we want to solve this problem you know we just need to find a way to be able to do that you know and and they're trying to use their levers as well because they might not be the ultimate decision maker or the budget holder they may have recognized a duty of care we may have been talking with them for like six to twelve months where they really want to do something but then there becomes like a reputational risk moment for that platform and so then they come back to you and they say hey this has actually happened and so you know finally we've been able to get some executive sponsorship on this.

37:23And so I think we can do something now.

37:25Elliot Taylor:It's recognizing that the people we're talking to are on our team. We have to work with them on understanding what the levers are for them. And it depends on the person, depends on the platform about how overt or opaque that messaging might be. But the more you can really get on site and understand this is the problem that you're trying to solve and here's the motivations and the drivers behind it, the more you can enable that sponsor to have everything they need in order to to get it over the line and like our our job is to make them the hero like we're not yeah we're not we're not Skywalker you know they're Skywalker we're Yoda um and so our our job is to make make them the hero and they were like this is the thing like when when you when you integrate through line and you get something in your product it's like we can help a lot of people and it can be some of the most impactful work that you do Yeah.

38:22Well, I'd love to get into, you know, the reality is that ThruLine is building right in the heat of some of the most interesting regulatory developments happening around the world. So, obviously, here in Australia, we, you know, relatively recently implemented an under-16 ban on social media. There's a UK Online Safety Act in play. The EU, US are all looking at this, some open court cases. I'm really curious, what does it feel like building product worked so deeply in the heart of one of the sort of most clickbait worthy sort of discussions that is happening in technology? Like, is it a thing that you're very aware of as a team or are you sort of just used to it and keep your heads down and keep doing what you do?

39:05Elliot Taylor:No, I mean, we're very aware of it. Yeah, it's got benefits and challenges. It certainly provides a lever and there's a wave of regulation that's happening globally and also reputational risk certainly ai companies have seen what has happened with social media and have attempted to be a lot more front-footed and trust and safety and that kind of makes them rhetorically trapped you know like you you set yourself up as a b corp or you you have a narrative around you know wanting to build safe general purpose ai and if you say that like you then kind of have to invest in it yeah that's certainly like been very useful and it's and it's it's created a lot of opportunity for us also like like regulation is generally quite a like a blunt instrument that the challenge that we find is that especially in the ai space is that there is not enough understanding of how platforms work how this technology works how user psychology works in order to legislate effectively and so what's happening especially in like the the mental health space with ai is there's this kind of conflating of consumer llms with like llm technology so it's like it's like saying that the internal combustion engine is like the equivalent of ford or the ford motorcar like like those things are different like like llm is a particular technology that has like far-reaching potential in use cases and chat GPT and Claude and Gemini and Grok or whatever are particular applications of that technology and so that simplistic understanding then results in the in legislation that tries to solve for risks that might be present on like a consumer LLM standpoint but then walls us off from the potential of this technology to actually make a difference to the very things we care about.

41:06Elliot Taylor:And so, you know, for us, that's one of the things that we have to wrestle with a lot. Like we're building AI for mental health. We're not building therapy. We're not building a coach. We're not building a companion. We're building something to help a person in distress navigate to the right information or support for whatever they're going through. There is incredible opportunity to address fears and barriers and to smooth the path for a person to get help using this technology. We live in our stories. To be able to tell us my story, like a teenager doesn't know what sextortion is. A teenager says, I share my notes and now they're asking for money.

41:47Elliot Taylor:And so there's amazing opportunity to use this technology to help a person be able to get to the right support just by talking. If the legislation just views AI as just being like consumer LLMs and then, you know, legislates against those products. Like we can end up in a situation where we can't even develop the types of innovations that we need to solve these problems. And so that's one of the things that like concerns me and we have to stay abreast of is like, you know, when we're launching products in certain jurisdictions, it's like, does our product break this legislation or not? Even though it's fundamentally different to what the legislation was purpose built for.

42:26Yeah, interesting. I mean, it puts pressure on you to engage in a kind of regulatory conversation or at least be aware of it where other products in less sort of hotbed areas don't have to. How does that sort of affect your product strategy or the sort of go to market strategy for you? Do you actively engage with policymakers before getting in or do you decide to be one of the voices trying to educate policymakers on the difference between the fundamental underlying technology that creates and makes possible an LLM that could save lives and the wrapper layer of like how it's deployed, yes, you may have views on how it approaches that.

43:05Elliot Taylor:We're trying to do more of it. It hasn't historically been a main focus, you know, largely because we've been obsessed with our users and our customers and our product. So, you know, having the capacity to maybe like do that upstream work hasn't, you know, we just haven't really had it. We did have one scenario where we like, we chased down the people who are tasked with implementing SB243, which is like a Senate bill in California around like suicide risk on companion chatbots. And like for a lot of connections, we ended up talking to like a Department of Health in California or something who were basically like given this legislation and they were told like, hey, you're the ones that are, you know, tasked with implementing it.

43:44Elliot Taylor:And we were asking them like, okay, so what are you going to do? And they're kind of going like, we don't know, we've just been given this. You know, and it's like, it's completely toothless. platforms are supposed to report on what they're doing, but they don't have to. And if they don't, then nothing bad happens. Like that's part of like where we've had these frustrating moments. We're definitely trying to do a little bit more upstream stuff. Like one of the things that we've learned is that like platforms want to solve these things globally. So regulation in one jurisdiction actually ends up having a domino effect.

44:20Yeah. I mean, the social media ban seems to be having a bit of that effect.

44:23Elliot Taylor:There's a bit of nuance there because that's slightly different. Because if you have a social media ban in one country, then that provides a precedent for another country to say, hey, we want to do the same thing. When it comes to AI products, AI companies don't really want to have 200 versions of their product. And so the thing is, when you solve that safety issue, once you've solved it, it's like marginal cost to then solve it for the rest of the world. Like all the effort is actually in the product and policy work to solve that particular problem. So if you take something like suicide risk and you go like, okay, cool, we want to do a better job of solving this problem.

45:03Elliot Taylor:Like once you have done it in one place, like there's no reason why that platform doesn't then just roll it out to the rest of the world. That then creates this useful lever where if you could have legislation in one jurisdiction that effectively creates the requirement for like a better approach to say something like source-side risk. Yeah. And then the companies then enact that. They're then going to do that for the rest of the world. Like it's just the dominoes just fall. And so that's one of the things we've been thinking about, you know, particularly in the US because, you know, that's where, you know, the public companies or, you know, investors in private companies are based.

45:42Elliot Taylor:You know, you can also have the lever of state legislation versus federal legislation there. And so there's an opportunity here where, you know, if you could get something over the line that is well scoped and appropriate, you know, and it's built for someone in Nevada, you could, you know, have that making a meaningful impact to someone in Brazil or the Philippines or something like that. Yeah. Do you have a guess about the direction of travel of all of these pieces of regulation and legislation? In what space? Because I guess you've got AI, you've got social media, and my opinions probably diverge depending on the type.

46:16Elliot Taylor:because the police platforms are very different. Yeah. Well, maybe let's start with social media because they are the ones that have been sort of first hit as it were. And, you know, longstanding court cases that have led to regulatory approaches that some would describe as overly paternalistic and simplistic to deal with what's much more complex. And other people would say, well, they've been waiting for the industry to step up in self-regulation and they haven't. And so, they've chosen to take a blunt lever. Like what's your take on how all that stuff is likely to play out yeah i mean we're seeing it already right i think there's a is about a dozen countries in the world that are considering social media bans as as they're called and i i think we're just going to see more and more of that like i said i think it's a little bit of a blunt instrument like from what we've seen in australia as well it's like you know we're still we've still got young people that are like they're adept at using technology you know like they're still able to kind of get on these platforms and they want to connect, they want to be entertained.

47:13Elliot Taylor:And so whilst it may have some impact in terms of like lowering risk for some populations, I think what it does is like it creates a simplistic answer to a very complex problem. But it's also hard to create, it's hard to have the appropriate solution or answer because these bans happen because of groundswell, because of simplistic media narratives, because they're easy wins for government if they have a constituency that's really asking for that. What I'm hearing you not say is that it's inaction on the part of platforms that have a capacity to design technology away from the harms. I mean, I imagine that comes from a knowledge that it is genuinely difficult for these large social media platforms to eliminate the risk that this sort of community thinking about it for 25 seconds believes they should be in a position to do so.

48:06Elliot Taylor:Yeah, I mean, these are societies. I think that's what we have to recognize is that when you're talking about like a large social media platform, it's the equivalent of the people in your country, you know, and trust and safety team members are like the policy people. They're like the social development ministry. They're like the police, like they're the ones that are trying to figure out like how to make this thing safe but the police will never completely make your community safe you know like there's always going to be bad stuff that happens and so of course regulation is a lever and it's a really important one and so if particular harms are happening in our society we want to make sure that you know we legislate against those in order to reduce that harm the same thing that happens with platforms but i think i think that's kind of the point is that like Because these are societies, your instruments need to be as specific to the harms that are happening.

49:02Elliot Taylor:But often they're incredibly blunt. The equivalent of saying, just don't go to that part of town anymore because bad things happen in that part of town. It just does not work like that. You have to think about, what is that part of town? And what are the particular challenges there? And how do we solve those particular challenges? I think the challenge here is that someone that worked in trust and safety said to me a year or so ago, we have got a lot better at building platforms with a billion users than we have in building the human infrastructure to support them. whilst technology and online platforms have eaten our lives and we spend our lives on them the rest of our institutions are still the same as they kind of essentially were 30 40 50 years ago but the the fundamental way that we move and be in the world and connect with others is inherently digitally connected right now but none of the institutions are caught up with that and so what that means is that when we look at the problems that are happening we can't have nuanced graded instruments to try and solve for those specific problems we just reach for really blunt ones we go like oh well this is like this is a really bad problem we should get rid of it it's like i think with with online platforms like the metaphor of cars is like is a really clean one because when when cars first came out you know there was all kinds of crises of like crashes and harms and all these problems and it took like 50 years for us to get seatbelts but people recognize that like well cars have this incredible inherent value and so we need to have very specific types of legislation to make sure that they are safe so we need to have seat belts we need to have airbags you know we need to have licenses where people earn the right to be able to drive we need to have speed limits like you know if you think about all the different types of legislation that exists when you're on the road it's very nuanced compared to like the legislation that exists when we talk about doing things online, which is often very blunt.

51:05Elliot Taylor:My fear is I kind of don't know how we come back from it because once you've put those blunt instruments in... No one wants to be the person that was like, I removed it and then some horrific singular event happened the next day, right? The story writes itself. Yeah. If we wipe the slate clean right now and we went, hey, this is what society looks like in terms of online behavior and these platforms, the way we build our institutions and everything, like we just look fundamentally different but we're having to retrofit and i understand there's a reason for that but it means that we we basically do it imperfectly all the time and i think i mean this also leads to why freeline does what we do is because like my belief is that well the the best way we can make a difference here then is like using market levers you know the the government will never lead it will always follow and so if i really want to make a meaningful difference where the most people are in need, which is online, then I need to figure out how to use market forces.

52:02Elliot, we've talked about ThruLine 1.0 and through that, you're already touching tens of millions of lives on an ongoing basis, which is pretty extraordinary. But I know you to be very ambitious about what ThruLine can be in the future and you don't want to stop at what you've built so far. What are you doing now and what gets you most excited?

52:20Elliot Taylor:So this kind of tracks back to like my thesis around like building a startup, which is that building a startup is all about earning the right to solve the next problem. You might start working on a particular problem, but you know, that's not what the ultimate vision is. But you know that like you have nothing like you have no product, you have no customers, like you've got to earn a right to get to the next one. And so for us doing the work that we did with online platforms and connecting people to crisis resources around the world was like solving a very obvious problem. But the thing that I have like always been aware of is that it actually does quite little to address the fears and concerns that people have about accessing help.

53:02Elliot Taylor:And it doesn't recognize the different types of help that might be available to a person. It's like it's quite a one size fits all answer. and also that a person in distress crops up anywhere that's whether that's an online platform or through a health system or through an insurer or an advocacy organization or an employer or an education provider and that person in distress like doesn't really care about where their entry point is they just want it to be easy to be able to figure out how to get support the thesis was always to earn the right to be able to like work on a really more gnarly problem which really is about making it easier for people to get to the right help the metaphor i use to share this is like imagine you're standing at the edge of a ravine and uh out in front of you stretches a dozen bridges and you want to get to the other side on top of that you have a debilitating fear of heights.

54:02Elliot Taylor:That is what it is like for most people in distress to figure out how to get help. If you are struggling with your mental health, if you have experienced an online harm, that's the experience. You just do not know what bridge to walk across. And you're also just really, really scared to do any of it. What has really excited us is that the advent of AI technology enables people to just come with their story and come with their lived experience and start with that. And then it's our job to try and understand that and then to try and point them in the right direction. And so that's what the future of what we're doing with our first step product is, is building a platform that enables like customizable instances to solve that across anywhere someone might be in distress online platforms and anywhere else.

55:00So what might that look like? You mentioned earlier through healthcare providers. Imagine I kind of walk into a GP. One would hope that they are trained to know how to redirect me to services, but we all know that's not uniform across the world and access to those services, they may not know even who best to send you to. Could ThruLine be involved in that interaction and how would they be? Yeah.

55:24Elliot Taylor:So we're thinking predominantly about that like online moment it's that sense of like where someone is in distress and they want to maintain anonymity so it's it's maybe looks a little bit more like you're you're struggling with your mental health but you don't really know what to do but you land on a website that you trust whether that's like a website that is a large government funded promoted one, you know, or whether that is a direct-to-consumer therapy website or an organization that you trust, or it might be that you're a student at a university, or it might be through your employer, that whatever that entry point is, you just have a struggle and you're trying to figure out what your next step is.

56:09Elliot Taylor:And so what a first step does is it basically gives the opportunity to be able to start with your story. And then we unpack that story with you. And then we work with our customers to plug in different types of support pathways. And so those support pathways aren't just things that we bring to the table. They're things that they might bring to the table. So like in the case of like an education provider, that might be like, well, here's the different types of counseling options or support group options, or here's even maybe products that we've built that, you know, we've purchased that can support you.

56:41Elliot Taylor:And so to be able to plug all of those into like a singular front door where a person can have a conversation and they don't have to unpick it themselves. It's the same, Kate, as if you were telling me about something that was really hard for you that you were struggling with. And in my brain, I know all the stuff in your area that might be able to help you. But you don't. You just have your story. That's all you're bringing. And so if I as a friend was to help you, then I would recognize my place. I'm not I'm not a therapist or I'm not a psychologist. I'm here to help navigate you, to help you figure out what is the next meaningful next step.

57:20Elliot Taylor:And so there would be a couple of agents doing some work, right? There would be the part of me that's talking to you, that's trying to hear your story, that's empathizing with it, that's asking questions, that's trying to get some clarity on your situation. But then I would also have some agents in my brain that are mapping what you're telling me to what might be some support options available to you. And then I'm going to weave those in and I'm going to talk to you about what those options might be and see what you might feel confident to do or not confident to do. You're going to have particular constraints.

57:53Elliot Taylor:You're going to have particular needs. You're going to have particular fears. And so my job is to make you feel confident that by the end of this conversation, you feel like you have a meaningful next step. And if you take like any organization that represents people experiencing that, they care about making that as seamless as possible. Absolutely. But how do you think about prioritizing which customers you go after first? Like how do you know where online outside of the platforms you're already integrated into, people are more likely to share the first tidbit that triggers, hey, first step might be the right.

58:37you know, interface for this person at this time? Yeah.

58:40Elliot Taylor:So for us, like we've, I guess what we're trying to do is like hunt down the markets that are already feeling this pain acutely and already have like a high duty of care to be able to solve for that. You know, we're seeing a lot of that momentum in like the community and public services space. You know, these are organizations or sometimes even government entities who their like expressed mission is that navigation. Like that's why they exist is to try and figure out how to help people get to the right support and information. And go from a sort of static website with some information onto it.

59:17That's right. To, hey, you can actually use us as a portal to get where you need to go.

59:21Elliot Taylor:Yeah. And it's generally like there's thousands upon thousands of these all around the world that governments have funded or that organizations have spun up. And that's like one of the key things they celebrate in the annual reports is like, hey, look how many people came to our website and went through this flow. and they ended up reading these articles because that is what the internet used to be where like user behavior has fundamentally changed and AI affords an opportunity for a person to be able to like have more input into the way that they access support. And so, yeah, that for us is like a really significant beachhead.

59:55Elliot Taylor:The other kind of one here is there's lots of service provider organizations that do struggle with having enough supply to like meet the demand. And so our technology has the ability to solve in that space as well, where it can function as a kind of intake layer to kind of keep someone warm or even to provide someone support, you know, when there's like lower risk presentations. Yeah. And so like doing that in like the mental health space or the online harm space in and of itself is like a very significant opportunity. And so like we're quite squarely focused on being the best in the world at that bit.

1:00:33so i mean a overly simplified version is like the 1.0 is a sort of redirection service to a really sophisticated triaging layer uh in between those two parts of the market the place where people find themselves presenting with something and the place where they can get the best help is that a fair description of the evolution yeah i mean it's the difference between like a yellow pages and a conversation nice if i'm landing in a new city and i don't know where

1:01:01Elliot Taylor:to eat it's like back in the day you open up your lonely planet and you go like okay what are the restaurants here this is a guide it's you know it's it's having someone that's walking around with you and talking to you about what you feel like eating yep and you know understands your dietary needs and and then it's like well opens up your wallet and figures out whether you can actually afford it that's right and i've like i've got the place for you you know um and so like it's a user experience problem right and people are solving similar user experience problems with conversational AI like across dozens of markets.

1:01:32Elliot Taylor:For us like the differentiator for ThruLine is that like it takes a particular type of product experience to do that well for people who are experiencing emotional distress. Yeah. It's far less transactional and the risk management piece is like is foundational and so it's very very hard to solve for and so like our bet is that there is enough of that problem for us to be able to basically like build the biggest mental health intervention the world's ever seen ain't no thing and what do you what do you make of the kind of can you imagine yourself moving into and then we pick up more of the clinical support on the other side i mean there's obviously this huge boom in AI psychologists and various therapeutic manifestations of AI.

1:02:22It sounds like you're not doing that right now. You're still focused on how do we connect these people to these trusted networks of suppliers, but do you imagine that changing?

1:02:31Elliot Taylor:Plausibly, but I think there's two reasons we've taken the approach we've had. One is I actually believe this is a significant overlooked market opportunity. The kind of the therapy ai builder it's almost an obvious way to use this technology but if you're trying to build like a really meaningful company you have to have a buyer and the risk profile of people choosing to like buy ai therapy you know whether that's like a an individual consumer right through to like a company like you're not going to see enterprise platforms anytime soon like stop the eap subscriptions and just say, just talk to this bot.

1:03:08Elliot Taylor:There's just too much risk profile there. So like pragmatically, like there's a really significant market opportunity there. And so we're like, well, we want to make the biggest difference we can in the shortest amount of time. So let's do that. The second thing is that like this, this navigation piece is a far kind of lower risk and safer play than doing like the therapy play. Like for us, like we don't maintain memory there's no ongoing relationship you know that that in and of itself like lowers the risk profile significantly where on the therapy side like it is still largely unproven and you know we've only really got one rct on generative ai like applied in a therapy context that is like shown some early results but we've got like a long long way to go i think before we can really really prove that out.

1:04:00Elliot Taylor:And I think there's also like, it creates a heck of a lot of risk as well. If you are trying to bite off, like I'm having an ongoing relationship with this person and I'm, and this is an AI, like the, the duty of care is like very, very, very high. And clinicians are trained to be able to deal with that. And there's, there's all kinds of kind of structures and accountabilities to make sure that's done well. Trying to solve for that in an AI context is very, very challenging. So when I kind of look at it, you know, it's like, well, actually like, why are we overlooking the significant market opportunity that is available to us right now?

1:04:33Elliot Taylor:And for us using the earn the right image again, that could be a part of the future of throughline, but we'd have to earn the right to get there. And I would have to see the market need for it in order for us to feel like it's going to be a meaningful area of growth. Awesome. Anyone listening to this is probably thinking, what on earth does it feel like dealing in every day in the sort of themes and content that you and your team deal in. Can you share a bit about like, how do you cope with that reality? It's incredibly motivating. And I don't have a single day where I think, what's all this for?

1:05:09Elliot Taylor:But it can also be paralyzing because you know the extent of the need and you feel so far away from the destination. As a leader, trying to strike that balance with my team is hard. I see it as my role to have my team feel an appropriate level of grief and empathy for the suffering of others, coupled with a high sense of agency that they can do something about it. We have a number of rhythms at our work to try and do that. And I'm sure that we will learn more about how to do that better. Where did you get the inspiration for those? What are they? I think what it is, because I worked in community services for a long time, building meaningful connection with other people at a human level is like bread and butter for me.

1:06:02Elliot Taylor:And I want to be in a workplace where we know each other at a human level. And my fundamental belief is that you can't achieve anything meaningful together unless you have genuine human relationships with one another. And so like by design from day one, I've made sure that through line centers the person and our team, not just their role. So some of those rhythms, you know, for us look like the way that we do team meetings and check-ins. When we come to a weekly team meeting, like we start with an individual check-in, like every single person. It's not, we don't go straight with the agenda oftentimes it's like you know a question about something you did on the weekend you know how are you feeling you know at this moment in time and some people are really struggling and some people are doing really really good that's a kind of key part of our like one-on-one culture as well like it's making sure that we give oxygen to that person's life not just to their work and so that means that like a lot of times with team members like i'm not talking to them about the work stuff like if i'm like i might do it i might have a one-on-one and like two-thirds of it is is talking about what's happening at home like to me that's really really important because that builds a sense of trust that like hey this is this is like really hard what we're doing and it can be really affecting and then i've also got like my own stuff going on but like i i believe leadership is like here in the trenches with me and and has my back and and can can listen to me and can can empathize and yeah and so having the person at the center like has has been one of the the biggest things for us and i think we see the fruit of it you know and our team you know consistently people talk about through line being like no other workplace that they've ever had and i think that's because like when you walk in the doors at through line you walk in as kate or you walk in as elliot and we interact at that level as opposed to our roles or our functions or our hierarchy.

1:08:03Elliot Taylor:If I've got crap going on, like I can bring that into the room and I can trust that people will hold it. And culture replicates, you know. So it's my job to be able to set that culture from the top and make sure that my leadership, you know, also sets that culture. And then the things that's most joyous is when you see, you know, new team members just replicating their culture themselves. That's incredible. Elliot, our final question is always, what's something you've changed your mind about? I spent 15 years working in the non-profit because my North Star is to reduce suffering in our world. And I applaud anyone, whatever you're doing, if your attention is given to those that are in pain or hurting or in need.

1:08:56Elliot Taylor:For a long time, my belief was the best way to do that was under a non-profit model. I came to realize that the incentive structures that exist not always but in many cases in non-profits disincentivize innovation and iteration and the ability to actually solve problems at a meaningful scale. and so my journey into startups was actually because i i wanted a better vehicle to be able to solve the types of problems that i want to solve if you talked to me 15 years ago and you like like 15 years ago me talking to me now would be like i don't really know that guy like but why is he doing what he's doing but you know for me it's actually like it's like it's a deeper level of mission alignment.

1:09:49Elliot Taylor:You know, I feel like I'm finally at a position where, yeah, I'm able to be obsessed about aligning all the incentives from me right down to our users and everyone in between to make the biggest difference in the world. And because of that, I'm making more impact than I ever have. Congratulations, Elliot. Thank you so much for being on Wild Hearts. Thank you, Kate. It's been a joy.

1:10:13Thank you so much for joining us for another episode of Wild Hearts. If you want to learn more from other ambitious people building, designing and creating the world that we all want to live in, then please hit the subscribe and follow button. This podcast is produced by Camilla Herring from Blackbird. Our marketing genius is Laura Cofford. And our editor is Andy Jones from Colour and Sound Creative. Thank you all so much for listening and I'll talk to you next week.