Erica Simon, PhD
Erica Simon, the Founder of Series Be, is a clinical psychologist, healthcare consultant, speaker, and tech industry advisor. She has provided services to a number of forward-thinking leaders and organizations, ranging from 2-person startups as they scale, like Heard, Earkick, and PixlBank, to tech unicorns like Modern Health and Twitter. Erica has provided hundreds of webinar trainings to startups and industry leaders like EA, Lyft, Intel, and Pixar on addressing the most pressing well-being needs of employees.
Across her work in private practice, she’s witnessed the impact that problematic work environments can have on the people within them, and the inherent problem with making workplace systems problems into ones that must be solved at the individual level.
“You cannot create a system that is perfectly engineered for poor health and functioning and then expect employees to brute-force counter its effects through self-care while hopelessly attempting to maintain work boundaries. If the system creates burnout, then the system has to address the burnout. I have made it my mission to take a preventative and proactive approach to the problem by focusing on startups and teams that want to get the best out of their team members and are willing to follow what the science says.” ~ Dr. Erica Simon
Erica has spent the last 8 years gaining experience in design thinking, systems thinking, and lean methodology with the goal of creating change in deeply entrenched problematic environments. She worked for the Dissemination & Training Division of the National Center for PTSD, a research group within the VA dedicated to taking innovative, systems thinking approaches to mental healthcare. She continued to deepen her knowledge through an immersive course in design thinking for social systems at Stanford’s d.school, where she practiced how to apply human-centered design principles to innovate within existing systems and environments. Erica has also collaborated on a number of projects with Stanford’s medical school and d.school to use human-centered design to radically re-imagine what mental health and healthcare can look like.
“Erica has been a trusted advisor from early on in our company. Her collaboration and partnership has always helped us to trust, but verify, strongly-held beliefs and assumptions, and her support and design thinking prowess through our many ups, downs, and pivots together have been a critical part of our company getting to where we are today.”
~ Andrew Riesen, Co-Founder and CEO @ Heard
"Dr. Simon worked diligently with me to understand the needs of my organization to create a training that was tailored and targeted. In addition, she is always looking for feedback, and continued to make improvements to each version of the training thereafter. Dr. Simon is a pleasure to work with and I would highly recommend her!"
~ Candice Schaefer, PhD, ABPP, Global Head of Employee Wellness @ Twitter
"Dr. Erica impressed me from the first moment I met her. She was tremendously helpful in crafting content for our organization during the height of the pandemic, and truly demonstrated empathy and compassion when speaking to our employees. Most importantly, she opened up a safe space for individuals to really speak up about the emotions they were having at the time. Dr. Erica ended up hosting numerous sessions for us and was one of the most loved providers we've ever had!"
~ My Nguyen, Benefits Program Manager @ Lyft