When a CEO speaks publicly about grief and therapy, it can change more than a company's culture. For Terzo, an enterprise AI platform that extracts financial intelligence from contracts and supplier documents, that change is now part of its growth strategy. In a Business Insider essay published July 22, 2026, founder and CEO Brandon Card described how personal loss during Terzo's early years reshaped his definition of success and influenced his approach to leadership.
The implications extend beyond one executive's story. Card's openness about his own experience with therapy is intended to make it easier for employees to seek similar support, setting a tone that could influence how other startups handle mental health as they scale. "I'm hoping I can set a standard for mental health care within Terzo, and that Terzo can set off a domino effect for other companies," Card wrote in the essay. That ambition positions Terzo not just as an AI vendor but as a potential model for workplace mental health in the technology sector.
Card also outlined a longer-term goal of bringing in-house mental health professionals to Terzo, making that support available to all employees. He described the company's current stage as an asset, noting that Terzo is small and flexible enough to test new approaches to workplace mental health before the team grows larger. For a company founded in 2020 and operating across the United States, Canada, and India, that flexibility could be a competitive advantage in attracting and retaining talent. The full essay is available on Business Insider.
The timing matters. As Terzo serves enterprise customers in finance, legal, IT, supply chain, sales, and procurement, its workforce faces the same pressures as other high-growth tech firms. By tying mental health support to the company's expansion, Card is making a case that employee well-being is not a distraction from growth but a component of it. Current job openings are listed on Terzo's careers page, where the company's culture may become part of its recruitment pitch.
What Card says comes next is a test of whether a small company can institutionalize care before scale makes it harder. If Terzo succeeds, it could offer a blueprint for other founders who want to build mental health support into their companies from the start. If it fails, the essay still stands as a public commitment, one that employees and peers can hold the company to. Either way, Card's decision to share his personal experience has already made the topic harder to ignore in startup leadership circles.
