Told by a Teen / Female Founder Stories
From trauma to tech — building Stress Point Health for evidence-based mental care at scale
“Your biggest tool as an entrepreneur is self-confidence, you have to believe before anyone else does.”
Sheena Pirbhai, Stress Point Health
The conversation
Sheena Pirbhai was heading for law at Cambridge. She spent a year in hospital instead, and built a mental health company out of what she learned there.
Nobody really talked to me about my mental health
That is what she said about that period, and it is the reason Stress Point Health exists. She is building the thing that was not there for her.
The hot coal
She likens suppressing emotions to holding a hot coal. The further you push it down, the harder it’s going to burn.
I have not been able to shake that image since.
Funding, and the personality it takes
Less than 3% of female led businesses get funding. She said it without any heat at all, as a fact she works around rather than a grievance.
She also said that being an entrepreneur does require a certain personality, and that your biggest tool is going to be self confidence and self belief. Five years of clinical testing sit behind the product, which is a long time to keep believing something.
What I took from it
We think of those as negative things, but they almost always turn out to be positive.
We treat failure and rejection as bad things and they almost always turn out to be useful.
I say that as someone who hasn’t had many yet. But every founder I’ve spoken to describes the same shape. The thing that went wrong is the thing they learned from, and the thing that went right taught them nothing.
Sheena spent a year in hospital and built a company out of it.
