Mark Khavkin often finds his best ideas somewhere near the Golden Gate Bridge.
The Rula CFO tells us that he bikes from San Francisco across the bridge and into Marin County—not to compete, but to clear his mind, enjoy the view, and stop for a latte in Sausalito. “A lot of times great ideas come somewhere just before or after the bridge,” Khavkin says.
That preference for space and perspective also appears in how he leads. Compared with a decade ago, Khavkin says that he has become more comfortable trusting people to reach the right result, even when their path differs from the one he might have chosen. Rather than intervening with detailed instructions, he now tries to provide context. “I’m less prescriptive than I was ten years ago,” he tells us.
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The shift does not mean avoiding hard decisions. At Rula, Khavkin says that new investments require clearly defined checkpoints and agreement—made in advance—about when the company will increase its commitment or stop an initiative. Once teams, careers, and expectations form around an experiment, he explains, ending it becomes difficult at a human level.
The same discipline shapes his view of AI. Khavkin cautions finance leaders against evaluating the technology primarily through cost savings. According to Khavkin, the greater opportunity is enabling people to perform higher-level work, make decisions faster, and access more organizational context.
For Khavkin, leadership is not about directing every turn. It is about creating the conditions for others to navigate—then knowing when to provide context, when to challenge assumptions, and when to let the road produce the answer.
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CFOTL: Right now, we’d like to find out about Rula. How would you describe Rula’s business today? Tell us about it.
Khavkin: It’s a fantastic place. It’s by far the most mission-driven company that I have been a part of, and an eye-opening experience at that. Rula has an extremely important mission of making behavioral health work for everyone. As you mentioned in the opening, we are a mental health company. We connect patients who are brave enough to raise their hand and ask for help in the mental health domain with therapists and psychiatrists who are covered by insurance.
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We judge ourselves based on how quickly and how much better the clinical outcomes of the care on our platform are compared with different platforms or different ways to engage those professionals. We have also opened up access to the world of therapists in the virtual domain. It is extremely difficult to find somebody whom a patient would trust, who specializes in the symptoms that the patient has, who is available on a schedule that is convenient for the patient, and who accepts the insurance that the patient has. We have opened up that world, and it makes me very proud to be solving this particular problem.
CFOTL: Help us better understand what is driving this model.
Khavkin: The best way to think about it is as a three-sided marketplace. You have patients, who are at the center of our world. They are one side of the marketplace, economically speaking. You have the clinicians, who are the second side of the marketplace, and then you have the payers—the health insurance companies—who are the third side.
For the patient, they raise their hand, and they need to find somebody whom they will trust quickly and in a modern way. For the clinicians, the value is obviously matching them with patients as well. It’s lead generation for them. It’s a way for them not to worry about anything but providing care.
On our platform, clinicians don’t have to worry about registering with health insurance companies, getting their credentials, chasing claims, disputing claims that are not paid, scheduling, and all of those things that are not clinical—not something they went to school for or dedicated their lives to. Basically, everything that is not clinically taking care of patients, we do for those clinicians.
In today’s U.S. healthcare system, that is actually a lot. You either spend 20 or 30 percent of your time doing administrative work, or you need to hire somebody. In either case, it disrupts you from doing what you love, and it is economically very disadvantageous. In some cases, it just prevents people from running their practice. So that’s the value to the clinicians, or providers, as we sometimes call them.
The value for our payer partners is creating a network that allows their members or clients—people who are insured—to find the care they need at a reasonable price, in network, and on a platform that they trust. With the network that we provide, their members and clients can get consistent care for as long as they need it, but no longer.
That, of course, reduces the cost of care in general because it is well established that people who are in therapy and are being helped with their mental health conditions end up fewer times in the emergency room and have fewer complications from diabetes, cardiovascular ailments, and things like that.
In short, it’s access for patients, support for providers, and access for payers. One other very important thing I omitted is that we provide a huge body of support to clinicians who may have a professional question or need a community of other clinicians and experts. They may turn to them if a particular patient presents an interesting dilemma or something that they are not familiar with. It’s a way to ask for specific medical support. There is also a platform with AI tools for that.
Rula | www.rula.com | Santa Clara, CA