Jake Cooper on Grow Therapy, Why AI Won't Displace Therapists, and Starting with $20

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Will human therapists still have jobs in ten years?

Jake Cooper, co-founder and CEO of Grow Therapy, says: "Oh, 100%." The numbers inside of Grow Therapy back that up: human therapy visits rose about seven percent year-over-year in the United States despite the fact that forty percent of the patients who get care through Grow also use an LLM for mental health, wellness, or relationship advice. Asked how both trends can be true at once, Cooper's answer is simple: "Well, it's different use cases. Fields that are relational versus functional, and fields where the objective is more nebulous versus defined, are intrinsically better suited for humans," he says.

This episode of the Village Global Podcast, hosted by Ben Casnocha, partner at Village Global, is one of the rare public conversations Cooper has given since co-founding Grow Therapy, one of the fastest growing companies in America, which has scaled to a million patient visits a month and past a billion dollars in annual revenue.

Key Insights

Ten interviews a week gave Cooper a specific playbook for reading candidates

Cooper interviews about ten candidates a week as Grow Therapy scales, and running that volume has produced three concrete habits for cutting through a candidate's prepared answers.

Weigh stated motivation against actual choices: Cooper compares what a candidate says about why they want the job to what their career has actually shown. "If someone's like, 'I wanted to work here for the mission,' and it's like, you work at Dunder Mifflin," he says, "there's no possible way this is true."

Start with a strategic question, then dig six layers deep: Cooper follows an answer down through what someone did to advance it, how they conceived it, what metrics they looked at, what they got wrong. "You'll start to lose them at like layer two or three," he says of candidates who can't sustain the depth.

Know where the signal runs out: "Interview time versus signal goes asymptotic relatively quickly," Cooper says. After five or six cumulative hours with someone, he has learned most of what he is going to learn.

To resolve disagreements, argue about premises, not conclusions

All co-founders face disagreements, and learning how to manage them well matters more as a company scales. "If you say we should go right and I say we should go left, those sound like disagreements," says Cooper, "but what's more interesting is what are the premises that underpin your point of view, and can you validate or invalidate any of those premises." Instead of debating the conclusion, Cooper and his co-founders isolate the assumptions feeding it and test those directly. A disagreement about direction becomes a disagreement about one specific, checkable claim, a much smaller problem to solve.

Cooper pairs that habit with what he calls low pride of ownership. He, Manoj Kanagaraj, and Alan Ni have traded functional scope across the company's life. None of them treats a function as personal territory. Cooper leads marketing, finance, and operations today. Kanagaraj leads partnerships and clinical strategy. Ni started as an engineer and now runs product, design, and data as CTO.

Any founding team can use the same move: when a disagreement stalls, find the specific, checkable premise underneath it and test that instead of re-arguing the conclusion.

Virtual care turned a five-option search into a five-hundred-option search

Virtual care unlocked several structural changes for Grow Therapy at once. One showed up directly in matching: patients stopped choosing among the therapists they could reach by car and started choosing among every therapist licensed in their state.

"If you were matching on a hyperlocal basis, you might have five options that you could possibly commute to," Cooper says. "Now you had five hundred, because you can match on a state basis." A hundredfold jump in the size of the market on each side of a match is the kind of leverage that turns a referral service into a system.

Virtual care carried other structural effects with it. Providers could open a practice without paying for office space or locating in a dense metro area. Paper workflows moved onto software, which let Grow build scheduling, records, and billing as one connected system instead of three separate vendors. Patients started entering care through a client portal instead of a provider's office door, which gave Grow a direct relationship with the person receiving care for the first time.

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Listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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About the Guest

Jake Cooper is co-founder and CEO of Grow Therapy, a company he started with co-founders Manoj and Alan during the COVID pandemic to address fragmentation across mental health patients, providers, and payers. Grow Therapy now serves roughly a million patient visits a month across 26,000 providers, passed a billion dollars in top-line revenue last year, and has operated profitably since its second year.

About the Host

Ben Casnocha is co-founder and general partner at Village Global, a network-driven, early-stage venture fund that backs founders on Day 0. He is co-author of two New York Times bestsellers with Reid Hoffman, "The Alliance" (also with Chris Yeh) and "The Start-Up of You," and writes regularly on entrepreneurship and venture investing.