Bea Arthur, LMHC is a Columbia University-trained psychotherapist, award-winning entrepreneur, TEDx speaker, and pioneer in the field of mental health. Bea has been named an Entrepreneur to Bet On by Newsweek Magazine and one of the 100 Most Inspirational New Yorkers by Bumble. Her career started as a social worker, where she served addicts in recovery, survivors of domestic violence, and students in the New York City public school system. 

Bea has always been passionate about lifting people up and decided to scale this gift in the tech world. In 2011, her career took off at the intersection of psychology and technology, when her first startup Pretty Padded Room competed on ABC’s Shark Tank, putting “online therapy” on the map! The visionary company was profiled by NPR, MTV, BuzzFeed, NPR, NBC, Refinery29, The Huffington Post, Elle, Cosmopolitan, and Women’s Health Magazine, and more. As CEO, she was called “innovative and inspiring” by the American Counseling Association and became a popular advocate for mental health and women’s entrepreneurship. In 2014, she became the first African-American female founder accepted by the prestigious Y Combinator accelerator program where she was mentored by the likes of Twitch founder Justin Kan and Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian.

In addition to her business acumen, people began to take notice of her magnetic personality, which soon got her featured as on-screen talent for Fox News and a featured talent for Forbes, where she wrote as an editorial contributor for ForbesWomen and also hosted their digital series Office Hours. While her media career took on a life of its own, she remained committed to her dream of affordable, accessible mental healthcare. So in 2018, she launched her second startup The Difference, which was the very first Alexa Skill for easy access therapy. With this company, she was chosen by the TechStars accelerator to build out a mental health product as a voluntary benefit for MetLife in 2019. 

The same year, her sharp insights and quick wit were recognized by Sonos and she was tapped for their inaugural podcast program to host her very own call-in talk show, Bea The Change. Then in 2021, she was cast as co-host on Tribulations, a live stand up/therapy show with comedy legend Roy Wood Jr. Many media platforms have tracked her rise including Bustle, Entrepreneur Magazine, Fast Company, Inc, and the Tamron Hall Show. Now with The White Man Within, this book marks her literary debut–a culmination of over a decade of valuable life lessons presented with her one-of-a-kind humor. Now she tells her story as a first time author, revealing how she created her own path to success and how you can too!