Communications Lead

The role

Millions of people already use AI for their mental health. Most of them use a general chatbot that was never built for it. We designed Ash for this, and we do the research on who it helps and why. Nobody else can tell that story. The people who decide what the public believes about AI therapy (reporters, lawmakers, payers, therapists, investors) mostly hear the fear scenarios, and they hear them from people who are not building the product or doing the research.

You will be our first in-house Comms Lead and the editor-in-chief of everything Slingshot says publicly. You tell the stories of our research, our safety work, our clinicians, and our users, and you turn them into pieces people read and share. This could take the form of written pieces, 90 second videos, headlines, LinkedIn posts, panel talks, pitches to reporters, and more.

We have an unusual amount of raw material: clinical trials with long follow up, research across hundreds of thousands of users, safety audits at a scale that is rare in this category, published papers, academic partners, a safety system and benchmarks we have never properly shown, and a growing number of users who want to tell their story. What we lack is the person with the taste to spot the story inside a research finding and the speed to ship it the same week.

You will own the publishing cadence and write most of the pieces yourself. Where it helps, you bring in outside help for pitching and placement, and you decide which pieces go out and in what order. You do not need to edit video, but you need to be able to brief a producer so the result is good.

What you will do

• Stay on top of early areas of interest internally and externally. Stay aware of internal teams developing a benchmark, model, study, safety feature, and more as well as what cultural conversations are taking place to curate a running list of what stories are worth telling externally.

• Build compelling stories. Pull out something that is new or surprising from our research, user stories, safety work, and more. Figure out how it connects with the audience we care about and the conversations they are already hearing. Write a headline a normal person would click, without dumbing it down.

• Publish consistently and quickly in relevant channels, including working with reporters. Blog posts, research write-ups, LinkedIn posts, short videos, press releases, etc. should be going out weekly. You are the best placed person to own relationships with reporters that we already have and make them useful for us. We work on a lot and work fast, so there’s always something interesting to say!

• Make our approach, people, and evidence visible. The stories we put out should include material about our safety approach, clinical frameworks, trial results that currently exist only internally. Also, our team is amazing and you can support our founders, researchers, and clinicians posting and speaking in their own areas.

• Own our core messages and the safety conversation. Figure out the most compelling core messages we want to tell and communicate them across surfaces, channels, and formats. Safety is the first thing many people we talk to in the field ask about and we have more evidence on it than anyone else. You own turning the evidence we have into answers we are ready to give when asked.

About you

• You balance taste with urgency. You know what makes a story compelling vs. marketing slop, but understand that comms needs to contribute to business goals (signups, B2B leads, or fundraising buzz).

• You can turn deep technical information into accessible stories. You can quickly understand how a complex safety system or intricate clinical study works and translate that into a story that is easy to understand. You can take a complex methods section from an academic paper and turn it into a sentence that would answer the key question a general reader would have.

• You use all the tools you need to tell a story, but are writing-forward. You can write a technical blog post in your sleep, but can also write a script for a video producer to create a clip that would accompany your article. You also can bring in freelancers, editors, or agencies to build on the work you do and manage them where appropriate.

• You are impact-oriented. You believe in the mission of making mental health accessible for people, think that technology can have a big impact on that, and want press coverage to reflect that conversation.

What we offer

• A chance to join a passionate tight knit team working on something to change the world

• Competitive compensation (top of personal market) and meaningful equity

• Travel between our NYC and London offices

• Usual startup perks like free lunch and coffee in office plus a generous learning budget

• We cover your personal therapy