🫠 Psychonaut POV

Welcome to Tricycle Day. We’re the psychedelics newsletter that’s here to remind you that life itself is a mystical experience. Seriously tho, how is consciousness a thing. 🤯

Niko Skievaski left the venture-backed startup he founded because the mushrooms told him so. But he wasn’t opting out of the system; he’s still very much in the arena. With his new company, Niko’s on a mission to improve access and outcomes in psychedelic therapy.

We asked Niko what psychedelics have taught him about leadership, how psychedelic therapists are using tech to serve clients better, and why Althea’s software products are free.

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As the cofounder of two healthcare startups, how have psychedelics influenced your leadership style and decision-making?

It all started about a decade ago when I had my first psilocybin journey in the woods with friends. It was profound and put everything about my work into perspective. I could see the potential impact our healthcare company could have in the world, but at the same time, it also felt kind of trivial. It was like, wow, we could save lives here, we could improve healthcare for countless people... and we're also just making software. The experience allowed this duality to exist.

I started turning to psilocybin regularly to help gain perspective on what were the most important things we should be working on and what bigger impact we could have in the world. Doing that helped me stay focused and aligned on the mission of the organization. For me, it wasn't about making money so much as it was about impact, and that ethos permeated the culture of Redox. We became very much a purpose-driven organization that differentiated itself because every single employee understood what mattered. We literally made one of our values "give a shit" because we cared so much about the impact of our work, and our customers could feel that.

How did you realize it was time to move on from Redox, and what led to founding Althea? What problem are you trying to solve now?

Last year during a journey, I had this epiphany that my time at Redox was complete. After a decade of leading the company, I grappled with questions like "who am I if not working on this company?" and "would I be okay if I wasn't leading Redox?". It was a very pointed ego death around my identity as the founder.

While I was working through that identity shift, I found out my dad had cancer. I put work aside to be with him and actually encouraged him to do his first psilocybin journey. Through that experience, he realized he wasn't going to quit drinking and smoking—the very things that gave him cancer. Instead, he chose to continue living life on his own terms and died the same way he lived. To be a part of that process was healing for me and beautiful in a lot of ways. I thought I was going to help him navigate the healthcare system, but instead, we drank beers on the beach and listened to rock and roll. He had a very peaceful last few weeks.

After seeing my dad go through his experience at the end of his life, I realized I wanted to devote myself and my skill set to this space. That's why I founded Althea. We saw an opportunity to create purpose-built software for psychedelic therapy and do it in a way that can hopefully improve access and outcomes. We're set up as a public benefit corporation, so we have a stated public benefit purpose that we can prioritize over shareholder profits, focused on understanding the impact of psychedelics on human health and consciousness.

How are practitioners currently using Althea's software, and what benefits are they seeing?

As we've worked with practitioners, we've seen a general workflow emerge around psychedelic therapy. There's a preparation process where you're gathering information from clients, understanding their intentions, and making sure you're screening appropriately for safety. We facilitate that upfront process by managing intake and medical screening. A practitioner can use our system to send out intake forms, and we generate reports that help them understand what to focus on during preparation—things like medication interactions they should be concerned about or medical conditions they need to consider.

On the backend, we're collecting outcomes measures. We use validated medical screeners to gather baseline data, and then post-journey, we can collect follow-up outcomes to compare pre and post results. We also administer psychedelic-specific screeners to help make sense of the journey itself. There’s one for people who've had a difficult experience, and we also use the Mystical Experience Questionnaire, which has been shown to correlate with positive health outcomes. Facilitators use all this in their integration work to help clients make sense of what happened and decide what next steps might be necessary.

We're also gearing up to work with researchers at a few universities on their trials, helping to prescreen and get people enrolled with informed consent. The software isn't just openly sharing data with researchers, though. We're giving clients and facilitators an opportunity to participate in clinical trials and allowing researchers to ask their specific questions based on their protocols.

What are some surprising insights you've gained from the data so far?

Every time we get an outcomes result, we create a report and share it with the facilitator. One question we ask is "To what degree did you realize your goals for the psychedelic experience?" I've been encouraged by how positive those results have been. On a one-to-five scale, our average is 3.9 across all outcomes we've collected. That's pretty high, especially considering how wide-ranging these goals can be. A client could be dealing with serious mental illness, exploring consciousness, or seeking a spiritual experience.

What's been particularly interesting is how facilitators use this data when scores aren't very high. They take it seriously and dig into why. Was it that the medicine didn't do what they wanted? Was their mindset not in the right place? Could they prepare better next time? Should they try different medicine or dosing? It helps quantify the journey so they can figure out how to improve.

What's your vision for Althea's future impact?

Right now the market is small. We have two states with regulated programs, and even within these states, it's probably not where the majority of journeys are happening. Oregon had fewer than 5,000 journeys in the regulated program last year. What we're hoping to do is help these programs become more effective. Colorado learned a lot from Oregon, and we believe future states will continue to improve upon their foundation. By measuring outcomes and processes, we should be able to drive that improvement as more states come online.

We're committed to providing our core software free to practitioners to measure outcomes and stay compliant. We have funding to support this for the next couple years, but long-term sustainability will likely come from two channels. First, as new regions implement programs, we hope to generate revenue by having regulators adopt our system to run these programs, similar to how cannabis track-and-trace systems work. Second, while keeping our core features free, we might charge for additional practice management tools specific to psychedelic practices, replacing generic software they're already paying for with something tailored to their needs.

The ultimate goal is increasing access by driving public policy through real-world evidence and facilitating more payment options, whether through insurance programs or philanthropy. If we can help demonstrate the effectiveness of these programs and make them easier to implement and manage, we believe we can help make psychedelic therapy more accessible to those who need it.

Want more from Niko?

Take the Mystical Experience Questionnaire and get a report on your last journey, or start using Althea’s free tools for psychedelic facilitators and service centers.

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DISCLAIMER: This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice. The use, possession, and distribution of psychedelic drugs are illegal in most countries and may result in criminal prosecution.