What do you do when the model you spent years building isn’t working economically, and the only way forward is to drastically change the shape of the business?

Naomi Allen is the co-founder of Brightline, a pediatric mental health company. She previously held leadership positions at Castlight and Livongo. In this conversation, Naomi talks about leading through profound uncertainty as both a parent and a CEO, especially in the early days of building Brightline during COVID. She shares the "art and science" of making big calls from incomplete data.

Naomi walks through the hardest chapter at Brightline: after building out a 50 state virtual model to support employers and scaling from nine customers to over 430 in under two years, she realized that the unit economics didn’t work. She got her team into gear, first running experiments and measuring impact week over week and then decided to drastically shift the model to focus on key locations, which led to a rapid four-week wind-down process. She opens up about the deeply personal side of a public pivot, and realizing that even while running a mission driven company you need to be financially viable to continue serving the mission.

About Naomi Allen

Naomi Allen is an entrepreneur and health care executive with more than 20 years of experience building high-growth health technology companies. She is the co-founder and executive chair of Brightline, an award-winning therapy and psychiatry practice that provides pediatric, teen, and parental mental health care to families and children up to age 18.

A mother of three, Naomi co-founded Brightline in 2019 after experiencing firsthand how difficult it can be for families to access timely, high-quality mental health care for children. Since then, Brightline has served hundreds of thousands of families with evidence-based mental health care and support. Today, Brightline serves families through virtual and in-person care across New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Washington.

In addition to Brightline’s clinical services, the company offers BrightLife Kids, a CalHOPE program delivered in partnership with the California Department of Health Care Services. BrightLife Kids provides free online coaching, resources, and support for California families with children up to age 12.

Before Brightline, Naomi served as chief growth officer at Livongo, where she led strategic growth initiatives, including market expansions, acquisitions, and IPO preparation. She was a founding team member at Castlight Health, helping guide the company from startup through its public offering, and worked at McKinsey & Company’s Silicon Valley office, where she helped build the firm’s health care technology practice. Naomi earned an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business and a bachelor’s degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Presented by Aytza