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On the evening of October 12th, 2017, I boarded a plane from San Francisco International back to my hometown near Washington, DC. I was 21 years old and had just started my senior year in college at the University of California, Berkeley. But my college experience looked very different from those around me. For the second time in four years, I had withdrawn from school for the semester and put my life on hold.
What started as problems with severe anxiety and low self-esteem in my early teens gradually spiraled into a debilitating battle with disordered eating and addiction in my early 20s. For years, I went back and forth with recovery – spending time in and out of treatment programs, hospitals, and therapy, only to continue to repeatedly go down the same path of self-destruction.
As the months went on, I watched my life slip away from me. I had lost most of my friends, was in very poor health, and downright miserable as mental illness and addiction consumed me.
At 23 years old, broken and directionless, living with my parents, I was contemplating taking my own life.
To this day, I can’t say for certain why I chose to keep fighting at that time. I had hit my rock bottom, and for whatever reason, decided to commit myself to recovery in a way I never had before. I checked myself into a rehab center (again), but this time with an icy determination to see the other side. As of writing this in December 2025, I am six years sober, have a beautiful wife (who is a co-founder of Thrizer), and a loving group of friends, and beyond excited to live the rest of my life.
During all these years, I had an incredibly intimate experience with the world of mental and behavioral health. I’ve experienced every stage of mental health treatment, from inpatient hospitalization programs to residential treatment centers to intensive outpatient programs to standard outpatient therapy. I immersed myself in the recovery community and swore by a daily commitment to bettering myself. Everything I did ultimately was done to heal and grow into the best version of myself.
Therapy had an undeniably critical part in this process.
Recovery was the journey of identifying and healing from the underlying issues preventing me from living a happy life. Therapy was the biggest tool I used to advance in this journey. My therapists were my sounding boards, my right-hand persons, my mentors. Those experienced in the path I was on who could provide critical guidance in what was extremely challenging terrain for me. They filled gaps in my knowledge, held me accountable, connected me with helpful resources, showed grace and patience through all the ups and downs.
With every distorted thought, exposure task, limiting self-belief, relapse, daily challenge, AA meeting, withdrawal craving, and ‘aha’ moment, therapy was the central tool I used to digest, learn, and move forward in the journey.
As the months went on and I slowly reclaimed my life, I felt increasingly compelled to give back to this community – not just by sharing my story, but by truly finding ways to make this life-saving tool available to anyone who needs it.
At the height of my recovery efforts, a typical day looked something like this:
1. Wake up and attend a SMART Recovery meeting
2. Work my day job
3. Get in a therapy session
4. Attend an intensive outpatient rehab program for more therapy + psycho-education
5. Go to sleep
I was doing a minimum of 5 therapy sessions a week, not including the hours of other recovery-related activities. The financial cost of this level of treatment was astronomical. But it saved my life.
In the past decade, people have collectively realized the power of therapy. With that, we’ve had billions of dollars and tons of brilliant people flood the space looking to improve the current state.
And with newfound gratitude and passion for the space, I looked to do the same.
As with every type of healthcare service, health insurance is a central factor in decision-making when seeking mental health care, since it drives the end-cost to the patient. There are many, many mental health providers who are fully private pay or limit the insurances they accept. There are many good reasons for this. Mental health has a private-practice-heavy culture, and accepting insurance, which generally pays dismally to providers, is often not worth the additional stress and administrative load it brings on.
Those seeking care naturally want to limit the cost they pay out of pocket as much as possible but often find the provider that works best for them is not in-network with their insurance. This was my case for a large portion of my care team. Luckily, my insurance plan had out-of-network benefits, which meant they would reimburse me for the session costs if I could submit the invoices /claims for the appointment.
I found the process of getting reimbursement back from my insurance plan incredibly archaic. It involved manually typing in claim data in their online portal, facing arbitrary errors when trying to submit, having no clue about what the status of the claim was for weeks, and ultimately receiving a check in the mail 4-5 weeks later. If I didn’t, I had to call up the plan and often spend an hour or more trying to figure out what was going on. I knew shortly after that this was the problem I wanted to tackle.
I strongly believe that out-of-network services have huge potential in the future of healthcare. OON allows providers to better focus on delivering high-quality treatment without burning out. Healthcare providers who run small practices or clinics do their best work when less of their time goes into administrative or business duties.
The goal is to make the process of utilizing OON coverage as frictionless as possible, so that patients aren’t the ones that suffer financially and administratively.
Since Thrizer’s inception, our guiding principle has been to support mental healthcare providers in building a flourishing private practice. To rebuild the system around clinicians, knowing everyone in the system will benefit tremendously in the long run.
To stay aligned with this principle, we’ve made a few unique decisions as a company in our history.
The first is that we have never raised institutional investment. Owning our company wholly allows us to hold our values firmly and make business decisions purely to improve the lives and experiences of providers.
Two, to keep prices as low as we possibly can. Most people approach Thrizer with skepticism because of this – just another tech company that’s pulling a bait and switch. But for us, keeping costs low is a critical way to support clinicians in running their practice and providing excellent healthcare. Trying to profit mightily off of providers felt counterproductive. The goal is to always provide much more value than we ask for in return.
These two decisions made it incredibly hard to sustain the business. We needed a large amount of users and lean operations to make it happen. For a long time, it was just Malik and me running the show. A few years later, Sanjana joined. And only now, 3.5 years after launching, are we finally able to expand the core team and bring on more support to our mission.
Which brings us to the third unique decision we’ve taken as a company – to only hire people with personal experiences in the mental health space. The reason is simple - we need people who work very hard. They need to bring a level of passion and energy to their work that is hard to do without a great intrinsic motivation to improve the space. The team will always be forced to be leaner than we desire, which means the load is shouldered by those who genuinely want this to work.
Our commitment is that we, as a team, will continue to obsessively provide mental health clinicians with a set of non-clinical tools to build and run a thriving private-pay practice, with built-in ways for their patients to better access their care.
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This blog post is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended as legal, business, medical, or insurance advice. Laws relating to health insurance and coverage are complex, and their application can vary widely depending on individual circumstances and state laws. Similarly, decisions regarding mental health care should be made with the guidance of qualified health care providers. We strongly recommend consulting with a qualified attorney or legal advisor, insurance representative, and/or medical professional to discuss your specific situation and how the laws apply to you or your situation.
