Automation for addiction recovery: Family Dinner with Kyle Jung

Kyle Jung’s company started in a cigar lounge. Now it’s transforming the behavioral health space.

Jung, an alum of Y Combinator and The Garage, co-founded Perspectives Health, a startup that automates medical notes and audits charts to streamline the management of addiction recovery clinics.

Jung’s entrepreneurship journey began at The Garage, when he joined the Unfound team in 2022. After completing his internship, he started his own technology consulting company with a friend from his competitive programming class. The company’s first client came from an unexpected encounter with a man he met at a cigar lounge in Evanston.

“This guy came up to us and started rambling about his business. He was like, ‘I bought this trucking company recently, and I really don’t know what to do with it,’” Jung said. “We said, ‘Hey, if you give us five grand right now, we’ll automate this in 30 days.’ And then we just shook hands, and that’s how I got started.”

Jung eventually completed over ten projects with the trucking company, and the connection he built led him to other clients. Jung and his co-founder expanded their team to 10 students in their first year.

Although he interviewed with Google, Jung was “tempted not to work corporate” and continued building his startup instead. Jung found his company’s niche when he visited a Chicago substance use treatment clinic. He discovered that the clinic’s chaotic management was impeding its success.

“There are too many problems here, but we can solve the easiest problem, which is clinical documentation,” Jung said. “Everyone was struggling to write notes. We were thinking if we solve this problem, it will probably make a lot of money.”

The startup team applied for an accelerator called Founder Team. While on a New Orleans trip with his friends, Jung received the news that he was accepted. He left the trip early to head to San Francisco immediately.

Within three days at Founder Team, the startup received an investment offer. “We didn’t actually take it because we thought we could raise more money, which was insane, because we didn’t have an idea,” Jung said. “We didn’t have a product. We had nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

Instead of accepting the Founder Team offer, Jung sought San Francisco investors and eventually raised the company’s first round of funding. Jung’s next step was to secure more healthcare clients.

“We were able to land a pilot, luckily, at this clinic in Colorado,” Jung said. “We went there, we lived in this motel and just iterated on the product for a few weeks.”

Jung also reapplied to Y Combinator, acknowledged as the most prestigious startup accelerator in the world. After an intensive three hour interview, Jung found out that Perspectives Health was accepted. 

At Y Combinator, Jung joined alums from NASA, NVIDIA, and other organizations for a ten-week program in San Francisco. 

“It was, I think, the most intense sprint that I’ve done in my life,” Jung said. “I work hard, but I don’t work that hard. This was very intense. I was working probably 16-hour days every single day for ten weeks. I did not take a single break.”

Jung raised another round of funding at Y Combinator’s Demo Day. One year later, about 70% of the companies in his batch failed. 

Jung said the demands of building a startup are often overlooked and that having a coping outlet matters. 

“It doesn’t matter how smart you are. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done in the past,” Jung said. “The amount of pressure that you have to deal with every day is pretty insane. I got to a point where I would wake up with anxiety attacks, sweating like crazy, every single day. And I would get random anxiety attacks throughout the day too.”

Perspectives Health now works with about 10 clinics and is in the process of securing its largest client yet. The company has developed its product-market fit, Jung said, and has found success in their sales messaging.

“We compile a report and say, ‘This is how messed up your clinic is and how dire your situation is, so you better fix it. Otherwise, you’re probably going to run into these issues and you’re going to lose a lot of money. You’re leaking millions right now,’” Jung said. “That’s the sell that actually won. It’s pretty easy once you get to that stage.”