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It’s been said that a mind is a terrible thing to waste — but how do you grow the collective mental fortitude of a company's sales force?
One startup, which has been in the process of moving the heart of its operations from Seattle to Louisville, has tasked itself with discovering the answer to that question.
It’s called Limitless Minds — and most all sports fans and general observers of pop culture have heard of the name of one of the four co-founders. That would be Russell Wilson, the star quarterback of the National Football League’s Denver Broncos.
Wilson went from being what many thought was an undersized quarterback coming out of the University of Wisconsin in 2012, to a nine-time Pro Bowl selection and Super Bowl champion during the 2013-14 season with the Seattle Seahawks.
Harry Wilson IV — Russell’s older brother by five-and-a-half years — will tell you that aside from his brother’s athletic talents that the mental preparation he did beginning at during the NFL combine leading up the to 2012 NFL Draft with Trevor Moawad, a mental conditioning coach for elite athletes, is largely what got him to where is today.
“Russell thought it was a competitive advantage for himself, right? ... To train the mind,” said Harry, who serves as the company’s CEO and co-founder. “That’s the thing about my brother is that most people would say he has no business playing in the NFL. He’s way too short. He should be playing baseball — and then once you get there [he has proven to have] the ability to make it and withstand a long career.”
'Build a corporate athlete'
In 2017, Harry and a longtime colleague/friend named DJ Eidson approached Russell and Moawad about “taking what’s most effective to training the current athlete and build a corporate athlete,” in Harry’s words. The four would found the first iteration of the company a year later (more on that later). Moawad, who worked with many elite athletes, passed away from cancer in 2021.
The Wilsons know about athletes. Harry and Russell’s father played football and baseball at Dartmouth College and played wide receiver for the NFL’s then San Diego Chargers (now in Los Angeles).
Harry played football and baseball at the University of Richmond, where he met his wife Courtenay, a Louisville native who played on the school’s field hockey team (she now works as an attorney).
Russell also played baseball and football at North Carolina State University for two years. He was drafted by two different Major League Baseball teams in a four-year window. Then there’s the youngest sister, Anna, who played basketball at Stanford University, and won a national title with the Cardinals in 2021.
Harry and Eidson had been working in the sales departments at various pharmaceutical companies, after the two met in 2013 at Horizon Therapeutics.
“You become obsessed with building your team and what it takes to kind of build a sustainable, resilient organization,” Harry said.
In working in the corporate world Harry and Eidson saw how much resources were being spent on product development/knowledge and supporting data, but enough time spent on developing the overall workforce from a holistic approach.
“We realized that there may be a really big gap in how we train our human capital, how we develop people, and how we create resilient organizations,” said Harry, who moved to town in 2014 — and closed on his house in Anchorage the day after Russell won the Super Bowl in dominating fashion with a 43-8 victory over his current team.
The next step
When I met with Harry, he was joined by Antonio Melo, who joined the Limitless Minds team in October as its chief experience and product officer after working at Humana for eight years — most recently as the vice president of digital health and analytics.
Melo was first connected to Harry through Mack Shwab, the Louisville-based managing partner and co-founder at Future Labs Capital, which is one of several firms that have invested in the company.
“I’ve known him for a number of years, personally and professionally,” Melo said of Shwab. “He informed me that he has a wonderful company in his portfolio and that they’re really targeting great human impact … He thought that I would hit it off immediately with the leadership team — all of which turned out well.”
In addition to Melo, Catherine Graham, the company’s senior manager of client success, also calls the Louisville metro area home. The number of Louisville-based team members should continue to grow, Harry said, as he hopes to double the company’s headcount in the next couple of years.
“We’re going to continue to leverage the fact that we’re a virtual-first organization, in which we can seek the best and the brightest talent globally, certainly in the U.S. — but where there’s opportunity to hire locally, I think we’ll try to do that,” he said.
Melo and his direct reports are in charge of building the second version of the Limitless Minds app, which will help the company go from, in Harry’s words again, “mental fitness platform” to a “mental fitness insights organization” geared toward sales teams that is steeped in analytics to help client companies increase sales while lowering the amount of turnover. It’s a transition that started to begin following a need to recreate their collective mission following Moawad’s passing, Harry said.
In doing so, Limitless Minds has gone from essentially a consulting startup to a tech company.
“In a world where everybody wants to talk about health and wellness … a lot of companies still aren’t spending in the right areas about health and wellness, because they don’t always truly believe that it's going to impact the bottom line,” Harry said.
To prepare the next phase, Limitless Minds has been undergoing a series of rounds. It most recently closed a round of $4 million, which included money contributed by Russell and his wife, American recording artist Ciara. It is preparing for a pre-Series A round in 2024.
As of a recent date, the company had 60 corporate clients (and approximately 10,000 users via those clients), including nine of the 12 largest pharmaceutical companies. In addition, it had launched 33 trial-run pilots for companies — 23 of which were converted to year-long contracts. None of the companies Limitless Minds works with are based in the Louisville area.
Current services include the ability to have on-demand mindset training, take part in mental exercises and schedule virtual or in-person presentations from the Limitless Minds coaches and team members.
That, though, is just scratching the surface of what Harry and the rest of the leadership team has, well, in mind.
They envision a way to integrate data and analytics into mindset profile assessments to allow employees to create journeys catered to them to help them realize their full potential, while providing decision makers at companies insights on how the employees mindsets may be affecting their overall job performance — and predict future job performance of current and future employees..
“We see that being a catalyst for going across an entire organization over time — regardless of role and opportunities,” Harry said. “You can motivate people all day … We’re not a motivational company. We’re a peak-performance mindset and analytics platform."