There aren’t many startups that can say they make a meaningful difference to the lives of their customers. Sonder is one of those. They deliver an employee assistance service on steroids to hundreds of thousands of users.
Co-founder and CEO Craig Cowdrey explains how Sonder came to be, how it operates and how its planning to go global.
Welcome to the Fear and Greed Daily Interview. I'm Sean Aylmer. In the local startup scene, there are plenty of companies reporting pretty incredible growth, but there aren't as many that can say they're making a meaningful difference to the lives of their customers. Sonder is one of those. It's primarily a health and safety business with companies, including Woolworths, signing up to give their own employees access to the service, but it's a blend of technology and real- world responders that enable Sonder to help with a range of problems, from mental health challenges to physical danger. The mental health aspect of the platform is particularly relevant at the moment as we emerge from lockdowns. According to the Black Dog Institute, mentally unhealthy workplaces are costing Australia up to $39 billion dollars each year due to lost participation and productivity. Craig Cowdrey is the co-founder and CEO of Sonder. Craig, welcome to Fear and Greed.
Hi, Sean. Thanks for having me.
First, take me through how Sonder works. If a company signs up with you guys, what happens then?
Sure. So, we really operate in the student and employee assistance space and so tackling the employee assistance area. So, the traditional approach, I think it's important to understand that first, how things were done previously and how that compares to how we operate. So, really, when it comes to support for mental health, physical safety, medical issues for employees, the traditional approach was really siloed. Organisations, service providers would treat issues quite separately. They were largely quite passive, so support would only kick in once people reached out for assistance, and typically, when somebody was already critical, and even then, support was actually pretty non- responsive. So, when an employee, for example, might need help with a mental health issue like anxiety, or depression, or extreme stress, then they would often be waiting days or even weeks, sometimes months, to see a counsellor or a psychologist. So, at Sonder, we take a really different approach where we are broad in the nature of our support and we're really proactive as well. So, when a company does sign on to Sonder, their staff receive a significantly different experience in levels of support. So, first of all, they get access to the Sonder app. That's a critical part of the piece, and that's really their ticket to broad and comprehensive systems across three key pillars, physical safety, medical health, and mental wellness. There's a range of features and content in the app that provides, really, every day and personalised on- demand support across those areas. The app also securely connects those members by chat and phone to our 24/ 7 operations centre in Sydney, and that allows them to speak to nurses, doctors, mental health professionals within seconds, any time of the day or night. Those experts will assist that person to triage and understand the issue that they're facing, provide immediate support, and then ongoing support for that person going forward. And finally, the critical part of the support platform and service that we provide that you touched on is our ability to have physical responders on the ground by someone's side. So, we can get one of our people by someone's side within 20 minutes across 90% of the population. And that's using our own on- demand network of Sonder responders. These are highly trained professionals, largely ex- or off-duty emergency services people. So, when you put all that together, our partners, you mentioned Woolworths, a number of others, we have about 40 large organisations, corporates, government, as well as about half of Australia's universities through our Allianz Insurance partnership that really gain access to this one- stop solution to care for their people in every scenario you can imagine.
Okay. So, if we take an example, and what you're talking about just seems a lot more comprehensive than anything that I've heard of previously. Domestic violence is a scourge on Australian society at the moment, unfortunately, but is that the sort of thing, which is often unrelated to the workplace, that if I was an employee of an organisation that was with Sonder and involved in a domestic violence dispute, they could reach out to you?
That's right. It is, unfortunately, an all too common occurrence and it is something that we help with on a daily basis. Often, when somebody contacts us, what they're contacting us about isn't the actual issue that is underlying. So, it might present initially, for example, as a financial strain issue or financial concerns, once we unpack that, then we discover that they've got financial concerns because they've left the primary home with their children, so they have a domestic violence situation, they're in temporary accommodation, so suddenly now it's also a physical safety issue, it's a mental health issue as well as financial, and so it's multi- layered. So, when people contact us, we really unpack and triage and understand what's occurring. Of course, if it's at the threshold of emergency services, we don't get in the way and we'll facilitate that contact, but we'll also be there to provide ongoing support to that member. For example, if a domestic violence offender is apprehended by the authorities, we'll be there with the victim to provide support to them, for example, taking them to temporary accommodation, making sure that they're cared for and feel safe and secure.
Stay with me, Craig. We'll be back in a minute.
I'm speaking to Craig Cowdrey, co-founder and CEO of Sonder. Okay. More broadly, 90% of the population within 20 minutes, you must have a fairly big on-call workforce.
We do. We have many hundreds of Sonder responders. These are men and women who are in the community, our force for good, we call them. They've spent decades serving the community in a variety of emergency services roles. They're available on- demand through the Sonder respond to app. They're our employees, they're not contractors, and that allows us a high level of confidence to be able to meet that objective of rapid response on the ground. And we find that it's really high impact to be able to get into the field. We are a technology enabled company, so technology is really important, but sometimes nothing really beats getting out of the digital world into the physical world by someone's side, to impact a situation on the ground.
I'm scared to ask this. How much demand is there for your services?
Well, traditionally in the employee assistance space, you would see about 5-6% engagement or utilisation of services.
So, that's 5-6% of the employees engage in the services, is that what that means?
That's correct, Sean. So, about 5-6% of employees would engage with that employee assistance program or EAP as they're traditionally called. Our engagement rates are more around 40%, they're upwards of 70 to 80% for some of our clients. And the reason for that is because we have such a broad offering that provides a really every day value proposition. For example, we have proactive notifications that send alerts and content to people on a personalised basis, it might be everything from a mental health check- in, to telling them about the severe weather that's approaching, or a police operation that's nearby. And that builds high contact and high trust and familiarity with Sonder, and that also then allows us to tap into those groups of people who wouldn't typically engage with a support program because we start with low threshold use cases and then the relationship builds from there, and then we can tap into more critical issues they might be facing and assist them with that as well.
Okay. Now, I mentioned Woolworths, you've been managing their workers throughout the COVID crisis. Did COVID, in that instance, change how people wanted to use Sonder?
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we kicked off our partnership with Woolworths last year and they're just so big, I mean, 200,000 employees, we cover their families as well. So, it really is a cross- section of the whole Australian population, so that's pretty representative of all sorts of walks of life that we have in the country. So, every interaction we have with them is different that matches out well with our broad offering. In terms of COVID specifically, that has really caused, for obvious reasons, a lot of pressure and strain on everybody, but for Woolworths, I mean, they've been feeding the country, working through really complex and difficult conditions. And our role in supporting them has been early rapid comprehensive support for the mental health issues that are really sparked because of COVID anxiety, stress, fatigue related conditions, but right through to also helping their frontline workers to have the tools to deal with abusive or even violent customers, particularly in the early stages of the pandemic, who were stressed out themselves. And right through to also supporting COVID positive staff, other staff in mandated isolation, wellbeing check- ins, physical check- ins on those people as well. We've also recently expanded our psychological supports to Woolworths staff and our other customers in recognition of those increased needs. And they've done an amazing job over the last 18 months and we're pretty proud to play a role in supporting them behind the scenes.
Okay. Now, you work alongside police and other emergency services. You said before you get out of their way when need be. I've also read that your technology was used to contact people after the Bourke Street attack in Melbourne back in 2017 when a car was driven at pedestrians and killed six people. Tell me about that and how that technology was used and how you do interact with the police and other emergency services.
Sure. So yeah, physical safety is one of the core pillars that we assist with. It's really Maslow's hierarchy of needs, if not physically safe, it's hard to do anything else. And a part of our offering is a location- based alert system, and that's what we used for the Bourke Street attack that you referenced. So, we have our own Sonder monitor system, we call it, that scans the environment, open- source information and feeds looking for any incident that could impact the safety and wellbeing of our members. In that instance, the system flagged that attack unfolding in its early stages. Our operation center here in Sydney then took rapid action. We sent an alert to all of our members in the Melbourne CBD. So, we geo- fenced the area. We had about 100 people in proximity to that attack, and I think they were from across about five customers. We sent an alert to those people that tells them what's happening and also requires them to report in via the app whether they are safe or not safe. We had about 90% report within a few minutes that they were safe, and in our operation centre on our map with real- time locations, we could see those people in real- time moving away from the incident site. But we had about 10% who didn't respond at all. No one had said not safe, but 10%, they hadn't looked at their phone or weren’t fast enough. We'd already mobilised responders in the area. These off duty or former emergency services and physical on the ground capability, so we deployed them to the hospitals where we knew that the deceased and injured were being taken. So, those responders were able to engage with the emergency departments. Of course, the hospitals wouldn't release any information about who had been admitted for privacy reasons, but our responders could say, " I only have these people in there," and the outstanding number of people that we couldn't get hold of, and they quickly were able to say, "No, they're not." So, within about an hour or just under from the attack commencing, we had comfort that all of our members within the area were not impacted and to let those customers know straight away as well.
Wow. So, how many people on the platform do you have?
So, we have about 400,000 people that we support across Australia and New Zealand across about 40 large organizations, as I mentioned, as well as about half of Australia's universities. And so we have about 130 staff full- time here in Sydney in our operations centre and supporting functions, and then we have our responder network on the ground as well.
Okay. So, what's next for Sonder? Is it continued growth in Australia, that's the goal?
Absolutely. It is continued growth and consolidation in Australia and New Zealand. There's no shortage of organisations that we want to help to better support their people, but we do have a global ambition. Our ultimate vision is to provide global access on- demand and personalised support across safety, medical, and mental health. We're obviously on our way in Australia and New Zealand, but the problems we're tackling here exist globally. And so we were keen to launch into the Northern hemisphere next year and beyond, and that will be part of our strategy going forward. So, we really think that we're in the box seat to be that health, safety, and wellbeing tool that organisations can't live without. We've proven that out here, now it's about scaling it globally.
Okay. Now, you're a lawyer and then a diplomat, Craig, and I think that's probably a great background for what you're doing. Your co- founders were army officers. Where did the idea of Sonder come from? I suppose it's such an all encompassing service, far more so than an EAP, the traditional EAP. I'm just interested in where the idea came from, and then obviously, the army officers, logistics is such a big part of what you do, having people with that background must help.
Yeah. I mean, ultimately, we'd spent careers in service being complex problem solvers. My two co- founders were special forces commanders for a number of years. I had finished up, when we started the business, a posting overseas they were finishing up in special forces command appointments. And the problem that we started out solving was really actually around the physical safety of government officials. I was a diplomat who was travelling the world, often on my own, and if I ever got into some sort of trouble, it would actually be the guys in their roles who would be the ones to come and look for me and rescue me. And so we started off looking at location tracking, and alerts, and rapid response for government officials, but we really quickly realised there was a use case for that in the civilian population, that everybody should be entitled to that sort of capability to be able to provide support to them. And then we started off with that physical safety piece, but quickly, once we started engaging with members, and it started with students and then employees, we realized that there was a lot more going on than just safety. Issues were multi- level. Over 50% of the cases we deal with are multi- issue, meaning it cuts across physical or safety or medical. And so we really broadened out our capability and took it from there.
Craig, thank you for talking to Fear and Greed.
Thanks for having me, Sean.
That was Craig Cowdrey, co-founder and CEO of Sonder. This is the Fear and Greed daily interview. Join me every morning for the full Fear and Greed podcast, with all the business news that you need to know. I'm Sean Aylmer. Enjoy your day.