Hemingway Sessions - What Evaluating 1K+ Mental Health Startups Taught Me About What Works and What Doesn't, with Carmine Di Maro
Founders rarely get an honest, pattern-level view of what separates lasting mental health companies from ones that struggle, and this session comes from someone who's evaluated that landscape at scale and worked closely with dozens of leading companies in the space.
In this Hemingway session, Carmine Di Maro will draw on evaluating 1,000+ behavioral health startups and working directly with 51 of the top mental health companies as Executive Director of the One Mind Accelerator to break down the traits, decisions, and inflection points that consistently separate companies that build lasting success from those that don't.
What you will learn
The early-stage decisions that most reliably predict long-term company success or failure
How the strongest mental health companies build durable relationships with payers and provider systems
The team, product, and go-to-market patterns shared by companies that scale versus those that plateau
Common blind spots founders don't see coming until it's too late
Practical steps to build a company that's resilient as the behavioral health landscape evolves
About Carmine Di Maro
Carmine is an impact investor, entrepreneur and community builder working to combine innovative finance, business and breakthrough science to transform how we treat mental health and addiction. His work sits at the intersection of capital and care, building the infrastructure that lets the most promising mental health innovators reach the people who need them.
Carmine started his career managing projects for Rock Ventures, family office of Dan Gilbert, founder of Quicken Loans, supporting Gilbert's investment in revitalizing Detroit's downtown core, alongside a portfolio spanning the Cleveland Cavaliers, StockX and other ventures. That experience brought him to Los Angeles, where he joined the investing team at Techstars, sourcing healthcare, B2B SaaS and aerospace investments for the LA office.
In February 2023, Carmine launched The One Mind Accelerator (OMA), a nonprofit startup accelerator dedicated to advancing behavioral health innovation. Since then, OMA has run four cohorts supporting 51 companies across life sciences, digital health and AI, which have collectively raised $1.45 billion, building better tools for prevention, treatment access, workforce capacity and long-term recovery support. OMA gives Carmine the chance to combine his passion for backing founders with his deeper commitment to fixing a system that too often fails the people who need it most.