Why is Talkspace down 45%?

Marc Herson (Hersie)
17 min readJul 1, 2021

Talkspace recently IPO’d by way of SPAC onto NASDAQ.

I’ve long been intrigued by Talkspace, and wondering why the price is down so significantly since it was SPAC’d.

The share is currently trading at around $5.77, for a market cap of $880 million. If I had purchased shares in the SPAC in January (which were going for north of $11), I would be down 45% (or -60%, had I rather invested in the S&P in January).

The company had short interest (as of end-May) of 6.5% (i.e. of shares outstanding, 6.5% have been sold short), and there seem to be a significant number of options and shares in lock-up mode, which does not bode well for the share price. (Short interest is now 1.6% as of June 30).

  • Has the D2C model failed (only 35k active users), and the company is still only now pivoting and PMF for its B2B model (25k users)?
  • Is it an investor trust issue? There have been previous negative press and negative online reviews a factor. Note: Talkspace recently changed its marketing language since I last updated this post (website no longer indicates “millions” of users, but “60,000”), although SEO still shows 1 Million+ Users.
  • Are investors just underwhelmed by the Talkspace numbers, market share, size and level of competition?
  • Does the SPAC structure (and…

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Marc Herson (Hersie)

Investor & Coach. Fueled by making a difference. Proud husband and father of 3. NYC. www.linkedin.com/in/marcherson