My experience with Lyra was the most insulting, misleading, and frankly sinister one I’ve ever had in my professional life. I spent several weeks working with the Lyra team. A recruiter found me and attempted poaching me from my current position. The recruiter was very aggressive which I appreciated because I liked Lyra’s mental health mission (what a sham that whole “mental health” angle ended up being). I was incredibly accommodating to Lyra, always responding to them quickly. I signed on for multiple interviews, and executed a writing exercise for them. I had in total something like 15 discussions with the whole team and the recruiter on several occasions, from multi-hour sessions to short catch-up calls. The plot thickens. Lyra deliberated for 2 weeks, while I waited (which was fine), and finally came back to me with a job offer. I actually appreciated the offer but wasn’t wild about it, and advocated for something slightly different. Then (we’re about 8 weeks into the process at this point), I spent my entire weekend working with my family to arrange for my coming career at Lyra Health, especially since the offer tweaks I suggested to the team were not deal breakers, which the recruiter understood to be the case; we were on the same page. After the weekend, the recruiter got back to me again and shared the good news: They were improving my offer, and threw in some perks that she informed me were almost never done at Lyra. Truly, the team clearly wanted me to join, and I was appreciative and excited. It had been a long process, but we were finally near the end. Only one more thing to do: share my professional references with Lyra. Here’s where things turn irredeemably corrupt, politicized, and discriminatory at Lyra Health, and prove that they don’t give a lick for “mental health”—they care about playing along in the far left-leaning Silicon Valley culture of Marxism in the workplace, and resentment for any opinion they don’t hold—all while claiming to be “inclusive,” of course. One of my references, an ex-manager of mine, is a vocal conservative on LinkedIn. Lyra took one look at his profile, saw that he leaned right, contacted me the next day in the eleventh hour, right before the day was up, at 4:50 PM, and told me the whole deal was off. What was worse, they refused—absolutely refused under any circumstances—to say why, though of course, given that the only new piece of information they had after countless hours of resources and time spent working out a deal, was my conservative reference. What’s so disgusting about Lyra’s behavior is that, of course, they are unsurprisingly discriminatory against anyone who doesn’t have far left-leaning politics. What’s more, though, is that they “guilted” me by association with my ex-manager, just assuming I’m some kind of “racist white supremacist, etc etc etc” for being associated with someone who doesn’t agree with their political views. What’s more, Lyra, like most of the frauds and cowards and hacks in Silicon Valley, pretends to be enlightened and virtuous and inclusive while gutting anyone they might not agree with them from the conversation. The last added irony is that this is all coming from a company who purports to care so genuinely and deeply for mental health. How about the mental health of the millions upon millions upon millions of people around the world who don’t live in Silicon Valley, and might actually prefer limited government rather than far left radicalism? Lyra Health is obviously a gang of political hacks working in Silicon Valley trying to make a buck. Everyone involved in what they did to me should be absolutely ashamed of themselves, and given the fact that none of them will respond to me, and all of them refuse to offer even the slightest bit of common courtesy with an explanation of why they pulled the rug out from me in the final hour (even though I already know why), they clearly are deeply embarrassed, and would rather just not talk about it. Lyra Health is not an organization that practices what they preach about inclusivity and mental health. Just like other big tech companies in Silicon Valley, they’re far left activists, and they’re on the wrong side of history, and sooner or later, they’ll find out.