Kevin Williams on Lyme Disease, Startup Lessons, and Raising Money

In this episode of the Morning Upgrade Podcast, I talk with Kevin Williams, co-founder of Ravel Health, a virtual care platform for people living with complex chronic illness like Lyme disease, mold toxin illness, long COVID, ME/CFS, and fibromyalgia. Kevin spent more than a decade dealing with concussions and then Lyme disease before he turned that experience into a company built to help other patients. We talk about his simple morning routine, protecting your energy in startup mode, what it really takes to raise money, and how finding your purpose can quiet the “meaning of life” question.

Top Points in This Episode

• How serious soccer concussions and a 10 year search for a Lyme diagnosis changed the direction of Kevin’s life
• Kevin’s morning routine: 10 to 15 minutes of meditation and breathwork, coffee, feeding the pets, then straight into work
• Why he treats his energy as finite and builds in exercise and downtime, even while running a startup
• The biggest startup lesson: they learned more in the first month of their pilot than in a year and a half of research
• How bootstrapping, friends and family, an accelerator, and crowdfunding helped fund Ravel Health
• Why Kevin doesn’t dwell on the meaning of life anymore now that he’s living his purpose

From Journalist to Patient to Founder

Kevin grew up in Upstate New York and moved to Colorado in his early twenties to hike, bike, and play sports. He started his career as a reporter for the Boulder Daily Camera and later moved into web content management and user experience. Along the way, a couple of significant concussions from soccer put him in a really bad place for two to two and a half years, at a time when many providers didn’t take post-concussive syndrome seriously.

A few good years later, new symptoms showed up. It started with cramping in his hands and feet and grew into muscle pain, GI issues, and neurological problems. It took about 10 years to get a Lyme disease diagnosis. At his worst, Kevin had 25 to 30 bouts of dizziness a day, heavy brain fog, and maybe an hour or so of usable energy each morning. He told me that part of starting Ravel was wanting to help other people, and part of it was wanting those lost years to count for something.

A Simple Morning Routine

Kevin calls his routine “relatively mundane,” and I love that. He wakes up, does 10 to 15 minutes of meditation and breathwork, makes coffee, feeds the dog and the cats, and gets to work. He also tries to fit in a morning yoga class at least once a week. It’s a good reminder that a morning routine doesn’t need to be complicated to make a difference.

Protecting Your Energy in Startup Mode

Startups can be all-consuming, and Kevin doesn’t pretend otherwise. Still, he carves out time every week for volleyball, pickleball, and the gym, and he walks his dog for about an hour every day. Some days he works 10 hours, but he tries not to make that the norm. He knows that if he pushes too hard, he can crash for two or three days. As he put it, his energy reserves are finite, and he tries to respect that.

Just Get Started

Before launching, Kevin and his co-founder spent about a year and a half talking with doctors and organizations to figure out their model. Those conversations built good relationships, but when they finally launched a six month pilot in Colorado in October 2023, they learned more in the first month than in all of that prep time. If he could do it again, he’d cut the research phase to about three months and start sooner. Ravel later expanded to nine states and then decided to go national, without fully knowing what that would take. Sometimes a little ignorance is a blessing.

What Raising Money Really Looks Like

I don’t know much about fundraising, so I asked Kevin to walk us through it. Ravel started out bootstrapped, then raised from friends and family, received investment from Jumpstart Foundry, and ran crowdfunding rounds on Wefunder, where anyone can invest starting at $100. Kevin is open about the pressure that comes with taking money from people you know well. He feels it almost every day, and it pushes the team to do whatever it takes to make that investment worthwhile.

Living the Purpose

When I asked Kevin about the meaning of life, he said he used to think about purpose a lot when he was younger. Now he wakes up excited about his work and hopes to make a difference for the 30 to 40 million people in the US dealing with these conditions. We landed on an idea I really liked: when you’re busy working on something that means a lot to you, the big “what’s my purpose” question gets a lot quieter.

Connect with Kevin Williams

To learn more about Ravel Health, visit ravel.health. Kevin says he’s happy to chat with anyone, and you can email him directly at kevin@ravel.health.