A series of interviews with pioneers bringing the world of wellness and technology to make meaningful change.

From her work on the initial Sephora team to her experiences in manufacturing, consulting, and brand strategy for companies like Gap Inc., Cisco, and Landor, Melody Mortazavi has been passionate about creating brands her entire career. Mortazavi is an entrepreneur who believes in the power of connection, and she founded UME in Menlo Park with that vision in mind. After UME was acquired, Mortazavi continued to pursue her love of brands and human connection by co-founding Longwalks with Trishla Jain.

Trishla Jain is an author, artist, and entrepreneur. Throughout her career, Trishla’s work has focused on helping people communicate and connect mindfully. She is an author of a mindful children’s book series and an accomplished artist with exhibitions exploring the intersection of joy, gratitude, and minimalism. Trishla sought to build a better way to spark meaningful conversations and deepen personal relationships online, co-founding Longwalks with Melody Mortazavi.

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Amitha: So I downloaded Longwalks back in December, and I can’t remember where I had first heard about it – it might have been through Oprah magazine or a tweet she posted? It’s so well designed, and I love the concept. What got you motivated to create it? And what spurred the interest in well-being and self-care?

Melody: I think that we approached this in a very personal way to start with. We (Trishla and I) met quite serendipitously, and she had invited me to a conversation, sort of a Jeffersonian type dinner, at her home, where she had crafted a really beautiful conversation for the evening. The conversation was designed to bring 10 women together who had never met before in the most optimal way possible. And yes, that's very “Silicon Valley,” but like everywhere else in the world we're all quite pressed for time and so she wanted to create the perfect environment for us to really get to know each other. And that meant getting to know each other outside of what we do or what our significant others do or where our children go to school, which are the typical things you generally hear from each other when you first get to know someone. There was a question that was posed about a poem that grounded the conversation, and each person just shared, one at a time, as we went around the table, about a story that that poem reminded them of. It was a very new way to have a conversation because you actually got to sit there and really listen to what the other person was saying. And then when it was your turn, you could speak essentially your truth. And so, this form of uninterrupted one-direction type of sharing was really beautiful. It was really transformative for me, and I had never been in a conversation with someone else or a group of people where I didn't actually have to work very hard to keep the conversation going. And this was just a really beautiful way of connecting with other people at the table, and after the third or fourth time we had done this, I started thinking about the ways people are connecting with each other now digitally. So we started thinking about how to deliver this same sort of experience to others. I think, when social media was designed and developed, people didn't really think about the negative impact on mental health. They didn't think about the impact on people's relationships or attention spans, and all the things that you very well know. So we embarked on this very ambitious mission of creating a truly supportive and kind social platform where people can share their stories in a way that I was alluding to, to really tell the things about themselves that really matter to them and make up who they are: like the really the good juicy stuff of who you are. And so I think what we did really beautifully was really utilize psychology, Eastern philosophy and a lot of really mindful meditation practices to create a platform that not only provides the content that's that really helps people connect, but also create this really beautiful safe space which we hear about time and time again.

Trishla: I mean your question was really why we started Longwalks, and in essence I think the quality of our human relationships, the depth and intimacy of them is one of the primary indicators of lifelong long-lasting happiness and kind of what the Harvard Study of Adult Development says.
When you look back, a fulfilled life is one with beautiful deep relationships. So that's really kind of the vector where we wanted to focus. It all came together in this beautiful way. And the way Longwalks is really different is that in some sense it's not open-ended, unlike every other social platform where you can kind of share whatever it is you want to share, using various formats. We've really created a little bit of a cocoon around the user using our prompt. So, we provide one single piece of content, which is a fill-in-the blank question every day. And that's it. It's very simple. It's very equalizing pretty much being a human. I've had a lot families say that they do it with their kids. They do it on their phone with adults and then at night they use it at the dinner table, and they make all their little kids like six year old, seven year old, kids fill it out. So it’s kind of just like a moment where you get to share something and then we anchor we map out the whole year. In 365 days we kind of cover a large aspect of what the human experience. And it's beautiful because you don't really have to think about what you're sharing and get yet if you're doing this with people on the platform. You get to experience humanity and living together.

I think that I've been practicing this formula of sort of asking a question and then making everyone answer it in the fill-in-the-blank model for a very long time, since high school, so it's just kind of my modus operandi. This was the first time I had kind of done this in Silicon Valley and Melody happened to be there, and then with serendipity, one thing led to the other and in 2017 Melody started to think of this as like a full-fledged business rather than just a private kind of experience with friends, but by then we must have had over, 250 of such dinners like that. And the digital format kind of coincided with COVID, even though it started way before COVID it just, there's so there's a lot of serendipity in our journey.

Melody: What matters is that the question has to be supportive enough for people to want to access that as a nugget to share it with somebody else, so 2017 was a year of focus grouping, really, essentially, and then figuring out how we want to how we want to deliver this what it would look like, as a feeling to bottle up. I think one of the beautiful parts of the digital platform is that you can have that feeling with someone, all the way across the world, who has like a completely different socio economic background is of a different race and gender and every everything is different about them, but you can actually have that exchange of that feeling with that person. And that's what's happened to me a lot -- I've randomly met probably 20 or 30 people who are now my friends on Longwalks, that I share with, and I don't even know where they live!

Amitha: That's amazing. I was just talking to someone about on most apps or social media there aren’t really incentives to be civil. And I’ve likened it to a dinner party, where if you aren’t civil, even if you have opposing views, you won’t get invited again. But there’s this feeling where it's almost invigorating when you have a really interesting discussion or debate, or you know that feeling of being connected. So you're, totally right – it’s super hard to get that online with a lot of the apps that are out there right now that are being used.

Trishla: I read that you're also Yogi and you love yoga. And I think with Longwalks it’s that synchronicity that sometimes gets missed. Like when you're in a yoga class, the entire class is participating in a series of motions, everybody's on the same page and moving together. And that creates a very harmonious flow. It's not like everybody's doing their own thing. One of the most unique things about our platform is that everybody's doing the same ‘pose’ as in answering the same prompt. So you feel you're not alone, like you're just all different rays of the same sun.

Amitha: I love that analogy. So the actual digital element was that rolled out in 2020 then you're saying just around the pandemic?

Melody: The first version of the app was launched in August of 2018. We had been working towards a solution for a couple years before the pandemic hit.. What we've done really mindfully is that we are building this app for our users, and we have a big cohort of users who really love this app. And so we build and we iterate based on their needs, that you know of course are aligned with, with the mission. So we have taken quite a few updates and changes to the app in order to best align with our with our users, and when COVID happened and we all went into lockdown in March, had just launched our best MVP (minimum viable product) to date. And so we saw this really beautiful alignment of user with product. And that's when we had a significant uptake in users, and we have really great App Store reviews that are all organic and just people's real experiences. So, the alignment was really great, during a time where it was so uncertain for everybody. We were providing a tool that was helping people feel better. That was helping people feel connected to each other not as far apart, was giving them something to anchor their daily practices so that they could answer something with the people in their lives. And it was really helping them stay close to the people they couldn't be close to. And so that really gave us a whole big lift in order to kind of keep going and keep building and keep doing what we're doing

Amitha: Why the name Longwalks?

Trishla: Many reasons. Some of them are practical, you know, in the sense of wanting to have a name that's unique and all of that, but really Melody and I are just nature lovers who love to walk and we think of human relationships as kind of like walking hand in hand. And we think that sometimes the best conversations you can have is when you're on a long walk with a friend. Because the conversation just organically flows, and you're enjoying the earth, so there's many different kind of connotations. I don't know -- Melody what does the name mean exactly?

Melody: I will just embellish a little bit more in that I think that the experience we try to mimic on Longwalks, is really that kind of those special moments that you have during a long walk, you know those really those heartfelt conversations that you really get to know people that's essentially I think what we hope toreplicate.

Amitha: How do you feel like, like how is the uptake been so you obviously launched in 2018, you were saying, um, have you seen an uptake. I mean, as I mentioned, I've heard about it. I think through either Oprah Magazine or something, some something over related.

Melody: She gave us a shout out! Oprah’s a gifted conversationalist and gifted person at making anybody feel important and worth listening to. And I think we've always just reached out to her along the way when we've needed guidance or calibration or just talking to someone whose life's work has been about helping people connect meaningfully.The shout out was definitely a big surprise to us- we had no idea it was coming. And I think I was on a long walk at the time because I hike a lot on the weekends, and our biggest concern was ‘oh my God are the server's gonna crash?’ Luckily they didn't and our tech team, they're all just incredible. So, it was a great shout out from her that kind of validated the experience that all the users were having. They were really grateful for Longwalks during a time where there wasn't a lot to be grateful for.

Amitha: Definitely. So have you found during this pandemic that uptake has increased like? Because apps are tough in terms of getting people to stay on them. But I think that what you're offering is unique, so I would hope that there's more people are more incentivized to like stick to it.

Melody: I mean I think that's where we started the conversation is ‘How do you have social wellness’ and ‘what does that even look like’ as in having a healthy relationship with this phone and the things we do on it. And I think that one thing we try to do as we definitely don't hold ourselves accountable to the same vanity metrics that other social companies, hold themselves accountable to. So for us time spent on app is measured a little bit differently for us, because it's important to have a depth of relationship. We don't make it about Facebook likes or friend counts or friends lists and things like that because it's just, it's a different platform it's a more niche platform and I think our goal is to empower the depth of relationships and authentic connections, and helping people find like-minded people on Longwalks. When we are looking at acquiring users we unfortunately have to use the same mediums that other people use, and do your standard performance marketing things but the way I sleep at night is to think that I am leveraging these other social media platforms to bring people to Longwalks. It’s a healthier and better way to communicate with the people that they want to communicate with.We don't expect to take over. So the time that you spend on Instagram or Facebook we just hope to kind of counterbalance it with things that fill your bucket and make you feel really good about the people that you're talking to.

Amitha: I'm sure you both watch The Social Dilemma. I'm sure it's not a surprise, in terms of what they presented, but do you have any thoughts on sort of how Longwalks fits in? I guess you've sort of answered that question as it being a buffer or counterbalance?

Trishla: Tristan is one of the early attendees to dinners. And at the end of the dinner he shared a very profound experience about his mother and said ‘I challenge you to bring this to tech as I've never seen it.’ And at the end of The Social Dilemma they pose a question, you know, as in ‘what is the solution?’ They don't offer solutions. So we really feel like Longwalks is very sustainable, because it only takes a few minutes maybe 5-10 minutes a day. It's a very sustainable solution to create social wellness in your life, using your phone.

Melody: I think it's just a really actionable solution. So that's how we think of it as well, in relation to The Social Dilemma, and Longwalks is literally designed as an antithesis to all of the problems of social media. So, it's designed to not feel like a popularity contest -- we don't display any kind of counts. We don't publicly display how many people have liked your post. We don't let you know how many friends people have or any kind of numerical things like that. The way that our commenting works is that it's pre-scripted to be extremely supportive and kind. So it really eliminates that culture of bullying or negative commenting that occurs in other platforms. It's very unified like I said and has synchronicity because everybody's on the same page and answering the same questions. You don't get a lot of distortion or distraction there's no ads. There, nobody's trying to sell you anything. So a lot of the problems associated with social media just don't happen on our Longwalks: we've created a situation where they won't happen. But we always have our eyes open, just to see if things are creeping into that territory.

Amitha: Do you feel you're also sort of self-selecting as well for people that are not going to be that way maybe?

Trishla: We have the very committed and sticky users who use both regular social media and Longwalks, and then there are of course the people who doing a detox off other social media, so only doing Longwalks. So we find that it works really for anyone who wants to have a kind of new social wellness habit in their day.

Amitha: Got it. And then so you were mentioning I mean it sounds like when you, when you mentioned like Tristan Harris, for example, it sounds like you're pretty plugged into the Silicon Valley community so I'm curious to know like what your, what both of your backgrounds are in in tech, like a different form of tech before you could work for, you know, big tech before this like without a motivator. Tell me a little bit about that.

Melody: I actually come from a retail background and brand strategy background but during the latest part of my career I worked for Cisco and I did Internet Business Solutions consulting so I do come from a slight tech background but my specialty is really optimizing retail solutions for consumers. And then after I got pregnant with my first child I didn't want to consult anymore. I was not going to get on a plane every week, and so I decided I came up with this idea for a children's play space, and this was at the time where there were no other really placed bases around, so we raised a seed round and opened a 15,000 square foot children's indoor play space in Menlo Park called U-Me, so that I could work, and do something with my brain but also bring my kids to work. And so I did that for about seven or eight years and then that was acquired. Then I decided to go back into the corporate world.

Amitha: I'm just trying to imagine what it would look like in Silicon Valley like a big play space I imagine all of the, all of the activities are planned intentional and…

Trishla: Very. It was so beautiful I mean she has an unbelievable eye for design, they have this kind of minimal Scandinavian aesthetic where everything had a purpose, there wasn't any like random stuff and it was really the child was at the center of the experience and the child could direct it to play very well so, and she used a lot of that learning. I can see how she applies that user experience design in Longwalks.

Amitha: What about you Trishla?

Trishla: I grew up in India, and my family runs the Times of India group. So I kind of grew up
enmeshed in those walls. And then I went to an American school and then I came to the U.S. for college (Stanford) during college and fell in love with English literature, so I had a circuitous path where [I then attended Columbia University to do graduate work in education then] worked in brand marketing in New York. And after that, I went back to India and just worked at times in different capacities, learning about print. And then also learning a lot about how to embark into the digital world. I did that, and then I became a full-time artist, which is kind of my deeper love, where I had three solo exhibitions in India while having children.

Amitha: What sort of art?

Trishla: Painting. But during that time, I would say my main real job is being a full time Yogi. I did so many maybe 50 silent retreats like Vipassana. Yeah. Even a few 60-day ones where I left my husband with my parents. And I think that was just a time of profound growth intellectually, emotionally, physically and every way. And then we both moved here to America about four years ago. But we were thinking of it as coming back to Stanford, where me and my husband met. He runs the digital business of Times of India. Tristan is really more of a Stanford connection than a Silicon Valley connection.

Amitha: Got it. It sounds like you've had some really interesting experiences, both in India as well as in the US, and that blending of Eastern and Western practices in the sense?

Trishla: When you have profound meditation, it's almost like you just want to give back to the world in whatever way you can and then I found Melody.

Amitha: Yes, serendipitously! I'm such a fan of serendipity and have noticed that in my life as well. So obviously you both women of color – Melody you have Persian (Iranian) heritage, and Trishla you were born in India. How does that sort of affect or impact your experience in Silicon Valley as founders, anything that you want to share about that, like, in terms of opportunities or barriers?

Melody: So I think that if I had to talk for a moment about whenever I feel inadequate or when I feel that maybe I am not. I am not on par with the audience that I'm keeping has not necessarily been ever because I'm a woman, I think, for me it has always been a feeling that because I don't come from that so called White, tech, engineer, or a certain pedigree, I think that feels very heavy for women. I think that there's a certain level of...I think Trishla and I just don’t let it get to us, otherwise it becomes very demoralizing. So I think we do a very good job of tuning those things out and really making it about the product that we're building, and the solution where it could do with the solution we're giving to people. And because we are in a space of wellness, it makes it a little bit more comfortable, but for sure I would say it's very hard to maintain your confidence and not feel adequate being in the Valley and being women who are not from a pure tech background.

Trishla: I think one of the things my dad always taught me is that you have to turn your disadvantages into your greatest advantages. So in some ways, I like to think of it as this idea that we're fresh blood, like we never think of a solution on the product the way a veteran Facebook person or someone who spent 10 years at Google. And I think being mothers what matters is we care so much about building a future for our children. So we both have two young children, each and Melody's kids are older and she sees them already interacting with social media, and she wants to create a new alternative, kind of like a different way for her daughter to portray herself in the world. One option is for her to take a beautiful picture glowing skin and maybe comment on how sunny and beautiful it is in California on Instagram, and the other is to talk about maybe something totally different, something meaningful or something she's focusing on or, which is more Longwalks’ aim.

Melody: And people gravitate towards Longwalks generally are pretty open minded.

Amitha: One the things I’ve noticed when about individuals that are trying to make a difference in healthcare, almost all of them are described themselves as like outsiders. So people that early in life might have felt like they needed to fit in for one reason or another, because of their background or their way of thinking or whatever but over time they realize that those differences were actually an asset, and that was what sort of fueled them to think differently and make changes because as you can appreciate health care and the health system which is a very antiquated system. But the people that are actually making change are the ones that can actually see the solutions because they have an outsider sort of perspective. And I think, you know, it's our perspective and I also think it's a bit of grit as well like if you're someone that's used to adapting but you're also sort of like you're maybe a little bit grittier as well. I think that that's super interesting that you both seem to identify with that as well. Was there anything that I didn't ask you that you think is really important.

Ok my last question! Because I have an epidemiology I'm always interested in research. Have you thought about looking at the data in terms of assessing how people are feeling using the app? Could it be an intervention or studied in some way in terms of short and long-term impacts on mental and emotional health? Or do you have a sense of this already?

Trishla: I would say intuitively, qualitatively, the feedback indicates a resounding yes, that people see a kind of marked uplift in their emotional states, reduction in depression, reduction in anxiety, and loneliness. However, it would be a dream come true I think for Melody and I to have that documented in a way that's actually scientific with rigor.

Melody: We're looking at a way actually to incorporate these questions into the user journey to get a sense of how it has impacted them and the main reason we wanted to do that was just so we can make sure that we are staying true to their needs and really able to satisfy kind of those things so we are looking into it right now. I think given the pandemic and everything that's happening, I just feel a little uneasy asking users to fill in those questions. But definitely I think going down the line, it’s something we will be doing.