Before she became a nationwide force in mental health care, Erin Pash was the kid in the middle—literally, the middle child—who instinctively understood that everyone carries something unseen. That quiet empathy set her on a path from child psychology student to licensed marriage and family therapist, and ultimately, to co-founder of Ellie Mental Health: a model of care that made therapy feel less clinical and more human through approachable design, accessible services, and a hybrid business structure that empowered both clients and clinicians.
Photo by Brad Crnobrna
Alongside her co-founder, Kyle Keller, Pash saw Ellie rapidly expand from a single clinic in St. Paul to hundreds of locations across 43 states. But Pash isn’t done being a founder yet. Having exited her role as CEO of Ellie after guiding it from what she calls “a canoe to a cruise ship,” she’s now channeling her creative energy into Pash Co., a new incubator for mission-driven businesses. Her ventures span a range of services: There’s a women-focused cannabis brand called Pot Mama’s, which will open in Edina, Woodbury, and Mendota Heights in 2026; Caveman to Casanova, a men’s relationship app with the slogan “Less Stress, More Sex;” and a social platform designed to help college students connect face to face.
After a decade of success as a therapist and founder of a clinic franchise, Pash is ready to embrace being a serial entrepreneur for a new generation, one where mental and social health is always part of the conversation. Here’s Pash’s take on entrepreneurship, mental health, and how technology can be leveraged to make more time for things that matter.
Courtesy of Pot Mama's Boutique Dispensary
After so much success with Ellie Mental Health, why did you decide to pursue a different direction?
When I started, it was like being in my own little canoe—I could stick the paddle in the water and go any direction I wanted. And at the end of the day, if we had capsized,
I would have been the only person who got wet. But then, as I got bigger, and I got a couple of people in the canoe, I had to be more responsible—I didn’t have as much creative control and freedom. That was like being in a speed boat, where I could move fast and have a lot of fun, and bring a group of people with, but I could still pivot in whatever direction I wanted.
By the time I decided to step away from my role as CEO of Ellie, we were like a cruise ship. And I think I stayed in that role as long as I did to prove to myself that I could, in fact, run a company that was the size of a cruise ship. But then I had to ask myself, do I want to be the captain of a cruise ship? I took some really intentional time and realized that my sweet spot is the speed boat. I want to go hard and fast and build something and have my people close with me.
Being a therapist and a business owner, how do those two aspects of your career influence each other?
I think that most people would agree that if more businesspeople had training as therapists, things could be different and better. I’ve literally had to fire my best friends—and we’re still best friends—and that’s because I’m a therapist. I learned the skill of putting relationships first and realizing that we can exist through the hard and come out better on the other side.
Photo by Brad Crnobrna
I know that life doesn’t happen in time, it happens over time. So, when things chip away at you in a moment and you feel so low in business, you know that it’s a moment and it’s not the whole story.
I think being a therapist has been absolutely integral to my ability to handle the extreme highs and lows of being an entrepreneur.
We often hear about there being a crisis of connection between people. What can we be doing to fix those relationships?
With the way that technology has been advancing and how busy we are as a society, we don’t get enough recreational time. We get our connection from dopamine because we’re getting quick hits—we get likes, we get follows, and we think we’re connecting. I mean, people even name and talk to ChatGPT and think it is their friend, which is not good.
What I realized over the last 10 years is that we’re so throttled and busy that we’re using technology for more efficiency gain, instead of an opportunity to be more efficient and more recreational. For every 30 minutes you’re using ChatGPT or something else, you should be getting back 30 minutes of recreation. The hormone that keeps us connected is called oxytocin, and it is the antidote to dopamine. But you can’t fake it—it has to be through a genuine human connection. Actually, you can get it by connecting with a pet, but it has to be with another living creature.
What is Pash Co. to you?
Pash Co., as it sits right now, is an incubator of my brain children. I have thousands of lists of business concepts and ideas. So, Pash Co. is a play on my last name: ‘People Advancing Social Health.’ One of the biggest things I saw [as a therapist] is that everything in our mental health comes down to our social health and the way we interact and connect with our environment… And so, over the last several years, as I was growing Ellie, a lot of these brain babies were growing alongside it. Like what if social media looked like that? Or what if we took what we know about why most people fail couples therapy, and we created a solution?
We have to be leveraging what makes us special as people alongside our technology journey. Instead of trying to intervene as a mental health professional and help people who have been missing out on connection, I’m going to spend this next decade trying to help prevent it from happening in the first place.
