From Panic Attack to Groov Founder

Dan was jointly serving as chief of staff to the founder and CEO of a Fortune 100 company, the kind of role that looks impressive on a resume and quietly grinds a person down in the process. Then one day his body decided it had had enough and staged a full revolt. Chest tight. Heart racing. Convinced, genuinely, that this was the end. He went to the ER certain he was having a heart attack.

The tests came back clean. Every single one. The doctor told him what he’d actually experienced was a panic attack, and if you’ve never had one, that diagnosis can feel almost insulting at first. Nothing is “wrong,” and yet everything about your body is telling you otherwise.

He didn’t go back to his desk the next morning as if nothing had happened. He took six weeks off. Found a therapist. Did the unglamorous work of actually addressing what had built up. And here’s where the story stops looking like every other burnout narrative you’ve read on LinkedIn: he went back to the office and voluntarily stood in front of a room full of senior executives to talk about the whole thing. Not because HR asked him to. Not because a wellness initiative needed a case study. He just did it.

That kind of disclosure is still rare in corporate environments, and the data backs up why. Nearly half of employees worry they’d be judged by coworkers for sharing a mental health struggle at work, and stigma remains one of the biggest reasons people stay quiet even when a majority say these conversations should be acceptable (Source: NAMI/Ipsos, 2026). Most people calculate the risk and decide silence is safer. Dan ran the opposite calculation, and it changed the direction of his life.

The chain of events that followed is a little strange when you lay it out. The presentation led to Wharton. Wharton led to a class project. The class project, dreamed up under Serguei Netessine, eventually became a real company with a product that had nothing to do with mental health on the surface and everything to do with it underneath.

Groov exists because of a much older, much more boring problem: shoes are built for an average foot that belongs to nobody in particular, and the human beings actually wearing them have been quietly suffering for it. Roughly 77 percent of Americans report having experienced foot pain at some point (Source: APMA, 2014), and it’s not a minor inconvenience. Half of that group said the pain limited daily activities like walking, working, or exercising. People don’t talk about foot pain the way they talk about a bad back or a stiff neck. It gets treated as background noise, something you just live with, right up until it starts limiting what you can physically do with your day.

Part of the problem is that shoe sizing was never built around your feet specifically. It was built around lasts, which are essentially generic molds meant to represent an average foot for a given size. A study analyzing 1.2 million 3D foot scans collected across North America, Europe, and Asia found statistically significant differences in foot measurements between regions and between sexes, along with wide variation within every single group studied, and concluded that shoe brands need at least three width options per length just to fit 90 percent of customers properly (Source: Scientific Reports, 2019). A size 10 was never one shape. It was always a rough average standing in for millions of feet that don’t actually match it.

Groov’s answer is a 3D scan taken from an iPhone, no app, no lab visit, no foam box pressed against your foot in a strip mall store. Thirty thousand data points feed an AI model that determines the ideal surface for that specific foot, and the resulting insole gets built to slide into anything from a ski boot to a stiletto. Two minutes to scan. A week to receive it. The insole industry has existed for decades, and somehow nobody bothered to ask what an individual foot actually needed until fairly recently.

The company’s biggest break didn’t come from a pitch deck or an investor meeting. It came at the NFL Sack Summit in Las Vegas, where Dan had sixty seconds with Von Miller, a future Hall of Fame pass rusher with an audience most brands would kill for. No entourage, no elaborate setup, just a product and a pitch delivered in the time it takes to order a coffee.

Miller tried the insoles. Then he did something no amount of advertising budget can manufacture: he posted about them to his own following, which numbers in the millions, and he did it unpaid. Ten thousand people joined the waitlist overnight. That interaction was later cited in a Forbes roundup of founders who built brands without spending on marketing (Source: Forbes, 2026). Athletes tend to notice small mechanical advantages faster than anyone else, because their bodies are the product they’re managing daily, and a shift in how a foot sits inside a shoe registers immediately when your job depends on that foot.

The moment says more about how the product travels than any marketing copy could. Nobody signs up for a waitlist because a founder gave a good pitch. They sign up because someone whose judgment they trust chose to talk about it publicly.

Strip away the product details and what’s left is a much simpler story about what happens when a person stops performing stability and starts being honest about what’s actually going on. Dan didn’t build Groov because he had a five-year plan sitting in a drawer waiting for the right market conditions. He built it because a panic attack forced him to slow down long enough to notice a problem worth solving, and because he’d already proven to himself, in front of an audience of executives, that he was willing to say the uncomfortable thing out loud.

Feet have always been the most neglected part of the body, treated as an afterthought right up until they start hurting badly enough to interrupt everything else. Groov is betting that treating them as worth real engineering, rather than another generic foam insert, is long overdue. If sixty seconds with an NFL Hall of Famer was enough to generate ten thousand signups overnight, it’s worth finding out what two minutes with your own phone camera can do for the two feet you’ve been standing on this entire time.