Our Team
Turning science into better mental health.
Dave Morin
Co-founder and Chairman
At Sunrise he is focused on bringing together science, spirituality, technology, and design to revolutionize how humans experience depression.
He serves on the Boards of Esalen and Dwell. He served on the Board of Eventbrite through IPO on the New York Stock Exchange, the Board of Hinge through merger with IAC, the United States Ski Team through two Olympic Games, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through the three year $300M Snohetta expansion.
He founded Slow Ventures in 2009. Slow is leading Silicon Valley early stage venture capital firm that champions long term thinking and innovation. Slow serves a community of over 300 of the most innovative startups in the world and close to 1000 founders. Including Slack, Pinterest, Evernote, NextDoor, Robinhood, Classpass, Allbirds, Casper, Blue Bottle, Postmates, and more. Today, Slow manages over $500M in capital.
Previously, he was Co-Founder & CEO of Path whose mission was to be a source of happiness, meaning, and connection through simplicity, quality, and privacy in social networking technology. He led Path to over 50 million users, 10 million monthly active users, and 5 million daily active users, making it one of the largest independent social networks of all time. Path was acquired in 2015 by Kakao.
He was also a member of the first 150 people at Facebook. There he was co-creator of Facebook Platform, the world’s first social operating system. Since launch, the multi-billion dollar Facebook Platform ecosystem has grown to include millions of social apps developed in every country in the world. He was then the co-creator of Facebook Connect, intended to make the Internet more social and connected. Facebook Connect is now used by Facebook’s over 2 billion users to connect with millions of websites, apps, devices, and more. If you’ve ever logged into something with Facebook, you’ve used Facebook Connect.
He started his career at Apple in the Steve Jobs era. Learning product, marketing, and design thinking while contributing to Mac, iPod, iTunes, iTunes U, iLife, iWork, Education, and Mac OS X.
Dave has had a lifelong passion for technology, entrepreneurship, culture, spirituality, design, photography, nature, skiing, and improving society. He holds a degree in Economics and Business from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
He grew up under the big sky of Montana where he was ranked as one of the top downhill ski racers in America. Today, he lives and works in the beautiful San Francisco Bay Area with his wife Brit, sons Ansel & Austin, and dog Pixel.
Dr. REBECCA BRACHMAN
CO-FOUNDER AND CHIEF SCIENCE OFFICER
Dr. Rebecca Brachman is a neuroscientist, TED Fellow, NYCEDC Entrepreneurship Lab Fellow, and member of the Helena Brain Trust pioneering the field of preventative psychopharmacology. She and her colleagues aim to create drugs which enhance psychological resilience against stress and prevent mental illness.
Current treatments for mood disorders only suppress symptoms without addressing the underlying disease, and there are no known cures. The drugs Dr. Brachman is developing would be the first to prevent psychiatric disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression. Brachman's research has been featured in The Atlantic, WIRED and Business Insider, and her work was recently described by Dr. George Slavich on NPR as a "moonshot project that is very much needed in the mental health arena."
Dr. Brachman is also co-founder and director of the Social Outcomes Initiative—a social impact organization that, in partnership with Sunrise and Helena, repurposes generic drugs for the treatment of PTSD, traumatic brain injury, and other unmet medical needs.
Dr. Brachman obtained her PhD in Neuroscience from Columbia University, prior to which she was a fellow at the National Institutes of Health, where she discovered that immune cells carry a memory of psychological stress and that white blood cells can act as antidepressants and resilience-enhancers.
She is also a playwright and screenwriter and previously served as the director of NeuWrite, a national network of science-writing groups that fosters ongoing collaboration between scientists, writers, and artists.