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Slow Talk is a public benefit corporation headquartered in New York. We’re very proud of the team we have assembled including our Advisors, Partners and Investors.
Lucas Welch
Chief Executive Officer
Throughout Lucas's career, he has been drawn to conflict, particularly how the way we communicate amidst conflict can either exacerbate it or transform it into something generative. Three chapters in his career culminated in the founding of Slow Talk:
Chapter 1: He started as a journalist, becoming a producer for Peter Jennings at ABC News. For most of that time, he was based in Jerusalem, steeping himself in the dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and developing an appreciation for how profoundly the narratives we hold can fuel cycles of violence.
He was given a unique mandate by Jennings to produce interactive content for both the broadcast and the web. He developed a deep conviction that the more profound "interactivity" the Internet offered was not dynamic content — it was conversation with other people. But he also came to see how challenging it is to effect change within large institutions. (Being a young self-entitled jack-ass who thought he had all the answers may have also made it harder.)
Chapter 2: Soon after September 11, Lucas was lucky to meet Liza Chambers – an expert facilitator of small-group dialogue across conflict lines. Together they founded the nonprofit Soliya, pioneering the field of Virtual Exchange between Western and Muslim-majority college students. Soliya's online, semester-long, facilitated dialogue program has been integrated into well over 100 universities in 27 countries. Researchers have found that it consistently transforms the narratives participants hold about their relationships with “the other” and it has been recognized by institutions including the United Nations, TED and Echoing Green.
Soliya created a coalition with the family of the late Ambassador Chris Stevens killed in Benghazi based on a piece Lucas wrote. As a result of their advocacy, President Obama announced the Chris Stevens Virtual Exchange Initiative which has allocated ~$100M to grow the field of virtual exchange through a multi-national public-private partnership.
Chapter 3: With support from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and several other leading foundations Lucas shifted focus to the pernicious effects our communication and media platforms have on American democracy. With the convening power of the Aspen Institute, Lucas brought together experts in tech, media, political campaigning, civic engagement and more to devise creative approaches to improve the health of our public square.
The focus was particularly on Deliberative Democracy methodologies. Contrary to how social media amplifies the angriest fringes, Deliberative Democracy programs demonstrate that everyday people consistently produce constructive and broadly supported proposals if they deliberate well with diverse stakeholders and then share their views. The challenge is that those models as currently conducted are prohibitively resource intensive to be viable at scale.
Slow Talk is the culmination of those experiences. . . leveraging:
• tech to facilitate conversation (instead of disseminating content)
• the transformative power of structured, small-group conversation
• the collective wisdom that emerges from deliberation
Assembling these into a scalable platform has been made possible based on the profound advancements in AI and Lucas’s good fortune in finding the other extraordinary people that comprise Slow Talk’s leadership team.
Cynda Rushton
Strategic Facilitator
Cynda is one of the most revered thought leaders and moral anchors in the nursing profession. In addition to her work with Slow Talk, she still serves as an Endowed Professor at Johns Hopkins School of Nursing and is constantly in demand from the top health systems to rebuild trust in their nursing workforce and reinvigorate their purpose and commitment to the profession. There is rarely a major nursing association conference at which she is not a featured speaker. Cynda has published groundbreaking research on nursing resilience in respected peer-reviewed journals and puts those frameworks into practice through initiatives she created such as the Mindful Ethical Practice and Resilience Academy.
Her work with Slow Talk began when she hired the company to support her Resilient Nurses Initiative funded by the State of Maryland. That collaboration produced a report now regularly cited by leaders at major nursing associations, profoundly influencing Slow Talk to exclusively focus on the challenges nurses face today. Cynda has been Slow Talk's Sherpa into the world of American nursing, designing and recording much of the content provided to health systems.
Cynda co-chaired the American Nurses Association professional issues panel that created A Call to Action: Exploring Moral Resilience Toward a Culture of Ethical Practice. She was a member of the National Academies of Medicine, Science and Engineering Committee that produced the report: Taking Action Against Clinician Burnout: A Systems Approach to Professional Well-being. Cynda is a Trustee Emeritus and a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing and has received numerous awards including the Marguerite Rodgers Kinney Distinguished Career Award the the Distinguished Researcher award from American Association of Critical Care Nurses.
Kaizar Campwala
Chief Operating Officer
Kaizar is the operational glue ensuring that all aspects of Slow Talk move seamlessly and in lock-step toward advancing our mission. He also brings deep expertise in developing monetization strategies for emerging media & tech sectors. Early in his career, he led business development for Stitcher, the first major podcasting platform, later acquired by Sirius XM. In that role, he brokered the first deals with early podcasters ranging all the way from NPR to Joe Rogan.
He later became the Vice President of Business Operations at Disney, where he developed their streaming strategy for ABC News and grew streaming revenue 3x.
His passion for creating vibrant, equitable public spaces extends beyond corporate success. Kaizar co-founded CalMatters, California’s leading source for policy and political journalism, and serves as a Board Member for Internews, a global NGO dedicated to protecting at-risk journalists and promoting free and informed public discourse.
John Rutledge
Chief Technology Officer
John is happiest deep in the coding zone, building transformative AI-driven products and eagerly observing how users engage with them. At Slow Talk, he leads technological innovation with a primary focus on our proprietary AI-analysis engine. Nabu - as we affectionately call it - combines Agent oriented design with traditional data mining pipelines to perform the deep semantic analysis needed to power our interactive reporting. The results consistently blow people away with the depth and breadth of what they surface.
Previously, John served as CTO at Fluent City where he conceived and developed the Language Genome™ Project (LGP), an LLM powered educational content generation platform later acquired by Newsela and a robust video tutoring system supporting over 10,000 students and educators worldwide (later acquired by Cricket Media). After the acquisition John became the Principal Machine Learning Engineer and Director of Search and Data Science at Newsela, where he built groundbreaking AI solutions, including an Education Knowledge Graph, and an automatic content leveling system that drastically reduced editorial costs.
John’s extensive experience also includes significant roles at startups like Noodle and Hukkster, where he combined his expertise in semantic search and AI-driven systems to deliver impactful, user-centric products. Across all endeavors, John’s unwavering drive remains building technology that empowers learning, growth, and meaningful connection.
Waidehi Gokhale
Chief Program Officer
Waidehi works directly with our Chief Nursing Executive partners to ensure they can use Slow Talk in a way that is authentic to their voices and draws on her extensive experience designing and implementing constructive small-group discussions on difficult topics.
Waidehi and Lucas have collaborated closely for almost twenty years, with Waidehi starting at Soliya as a volunteer and ultimately becoming its Chief Executive Officer after Lucas transitioned out. Under her leadership, Soliya flourished, achieving extraordinary growth by expanding to engage 10,000 students annually, diversifying revenue sources, and advocacy that led to dedicated ongoing governmental support in the U.S. and Europe.
She has extensive experience building vibrant, resilient teams and navigating complex organizational dynamics across cultures and crises—from Egypt and Tunisia during periods of revolution to Ukraine amid ongoing conflict.
Nurses have a special place in Waidehi’s heart as she fell in love and married one. She feels profoundly privileged and inspired to serve them in their heroic and critical work.
The following are active advisors lending their talents, time and good names to our success:
Ian Bassin - Founder & Executive Director of Protect Democracy
Joyce Batcheller - Executive Nurse Advisor and former system Chief Nursing Officer
Adam Berrey - Leadership Coach & serial entrepreneur with 4 successful exits
Katie Boston-Leary - Senior Vice President at the American Nurses Association
Kit Colbert - former CTO of VMWare
Dan Erstad - Chief Operating Officer at Monument Health
David Fairman - Senior Mediator at Consensus Building Institute
Megan Friedman - VP of Business Development at CCA focused on Healthcare wellbeing
Theo Peterson - Chief Information Security Officer at ImagineX
Rosanne Raso - former Chief Nursing Officer at Weill Cornell, board member at AONL
We have signed MOUs with:
We are also grateful to:
We have the rare opportunity to be profitable enough to advance an ambitious mission. We need capital to get there, and we are committed to aligning incentives with all of our stakeholders. We believe an “exit or bust” strategy could risk mission integrity, constrain our operational flexibility and jeopardize trust with our customers and users. (More on that below.)
In the modern tech financing world, that puts us in an “unconventional” lane. So we’ve worked with our legal team at Orrick - a preeminent firm in impact investing and tech - to align incentives by developing a simple framework that offers the prospect of robust financial returns, regardless of whether an exit or a more old-fashioned approach - just build a great business - proves to be the best option.
For this financing round of $2.5 million, all investors will get:
This avoids locking us into an exit or bust endgame prematurely. If an exit opportunity emerges that advances our mission…. great. If we generate the revenue growth we envision and it makes more sense to stay the course… investors can still get venture scale returns through regular revenue-share payments over time.
We see this flexibility as critical. Both for mission integrity and because AI is radically changing both the way software companies can grow and the market itself.
And underneath all of this is a belief that who is on our cap table matters. We reject the “capital is capital” notion. We are seeking partners who share our values and want to be part of this journey with us.
Once we have reached $1M in monthly recurring revenue for 3 consecutive months, the “trigger” is activated. At that point, we notify all investors that they have up to a year to decide whether they want to participate in the revenue sharing or stay with the SAFE/equity. It is an either/or choice, and we want to make sure everyone makes an informed decision, which is why we’ve made that “election window” a full year.
For the investors opt into revenue sharing, we establish a “revenue share pool” that is 5% of all top-line revenue. That pool is disbursed to participants quarterly beginning 3 months after the trigger is reached. The total potential returns for investors has a “return cap.” All investors in this round will have a return cap of 5x, so their total “entitlement” would be 5x their original investment. Each investor’s portion of the quarterly disbursement is calculated based on the ratio of their outstanding entitlement/the total outstanding entitlements. Those payments would continue for each participant until their cap is reached.
To put that in terms of expected timelines and IRR, it’s important to remind ourselves of the quote: “All models are wrong. Some are useful.” So it most certainly will differ from this, but according to our current model, the payments would begin in Q4 of 2027 and the cap would be reached by the end of 2033 resulting in an IRR of just over 30%. That’s assuming all investors opt to participate in the pool. If some don’t, it would get paid out faster, resulting in a higher IRR.
The structures and accounting practices of most institutional venture mean they can’t provide the financial returns they’ve promised to their Limited Partners unless their portfolio companies exit. We see sustainable growth as a potential path forward and those institutional investors have to use whatever leverage they can to ensure their portfolio companies don’t pursue that if they want to serve their Limited Partners. In those cases, we’re just not a fit and shouldn’t waste time figuring that out.
Some venture firms have more flexibility either due to an impact orientation or a different LP structure and we’ll explore where we see a good potential fit.
It's hard, of course, to predict how AI will affect various markets. One thing seems clear, however: the cost of building very complex software solutions is plummeting. The productivity of our tech team has skyrocketed. Moreover, a lot of work that used to be the exclusive domain of expensive professional services can increasingly be automated.
We believe that a new crop of AI-native companies will leverage these developments to become wildly profitable with much less upfront capital. We are well positioned to be one of them.
The level of distrust frontline nurses have for those seeking to profit off of healthcare today cannot be overstated. The vast majority of nurses chose the profession because they derive meaning from caring for others. They are swimming in a world of venture-backed products designed to “optimize” them and are intimately aware of how different financial incentives can limit or undermine patient care.
So they are increasingly sophisticated in their understanding of those incentives. Even if they don’t know how different venture LP structures affect priorities, they have good noses. If a new product doesn’t smell right, they simply won’t use it. They don’t have a lot of power in decision-making but they do have de-facto veto power when it comes to new products. All executives understand this and so “Will my nurses trust you?” is a huge factor in purchasing decisions.
We are very proud of the success we have had cultivating trust with nurses on a short-timeline. That trust is critical, fragile and can’t be faked. Making that mission-aligned financing part of our narrative will help reinforce that trust and establish a robust competitive differentiator.
Yes, it does create additional complexity. Revenue based financing is not that common yet, but it’s growing in popularity primarily for the reasons we’re using it. And yes, with complexity come risks.
We’re lucky to have the legal team we do at Orrick who has extensive experience with both revenue based financing and conventional venture financing. We’ve looked closely with them at the common risks and would be happy to discuss those further.
One critical factor for us was to ensure we take a “back to the fundamentals” approach. We recognize that exits have been the norm for tech-based investment over the last 20 years, and that could still make the most sense for us, but we’re living in a time of profound change. Who really knows? Maybe the power law breaks down and the whole venture model gets disrupted. Regardless, we think its prudent to ensure our investors get their due however we grow.
So the bottom line is we recognize the risks but feel confident they are manageable and the benefits outweigh the costs.
to cultivate trust amongst the people who power critical institutions so they collectively earn the trust of those they serve
We do this by:
1) ensuring frontline workers:
2) supporting leaders to:
Healthcare provides an ideal starting point for impact assessment because the industry inherently prioritizes measurable outcomes. They regularly use standardized employee engagement tools, and the leading indicators associated with the bottom-line market pain we’re addressing are directly aligned with our mission. For example:
We are also exploring how we can integrate the Digital Trust Score (DTS) into our work to assess shifts in trust amongst participants.
It’s important to note that our product is an incredibly powerful analysis and assessment engine and we are developing custom assessment tools that will both provide value to our customers and help us measure intended outcomes more effectively.
That certainly has been the trend. We see current tech and media products like cigarettes in the 90s—yes, they’re highly addictive and effective at generating engagement, but we’re all increasingly aware of how profoundly they are harming our society and us as individuals. There are a few reasons why we believe we are approaching “peak dopamine,” and have conviction that Slow Talk generates the necessary engagement for our envisioned impact:
We aim for Slow Talk to become something people crave more akin to water than sugar. When you finish using it (which we will encourage people to do since our business model does not depend on capturing more of their time) you should feel better because you did, not worse.
The most important stuff is hard. Revitalizing trust in our institutions—critical to a functioning democracy—is one of the defining challenges for our generation. Unless we effect meaningful change in that domain, progress in so many other areas is in jeopardy.
There’s been no shortage of research or working groups tasked with making recommendations. The way we’re going to learn is by trying. We recognize that we are part of a broader ecosystem of people and institutions all bringing considerable talents to this challenge. So when we stumble, we commit to contributing to that broader ecosystem’s collective learning.
We also believe there has been too much focus on convincing the public that they should trust institutions without acknowledging the validity of their lived experiences. Many of the people who power these institutions will readily acknowledge that they need help to serve their constituents as they want to do. We are helping them.
It’s time to take some risks and empower inspired teams to confront the challenge directly.
