A new app called The Way is aiming to help people explore the deeper side of meditation through a single, structured path guided by an authorized Zen Master. Founded by uncle-and-nephew duo Henry Shukman and Jack Shukman, The Way wants to help people move beyond modern mindfulness practices offered by popular meditation apps like Headspace and Calm, and guide them deeper into the teaching of millennia-old meditation traditions.
Henry, who is one of five authorized Zen Masters in the Sanbo Zen lineage in the world, had to pivot to online meditation teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. He found that he was able to create a digital foundation for meditation practice, and that people were responding well to it.
One of his students happened to be Kevin Rose, a tech founder and partner at True Ventures. Rose floated the idea of creating a meditation app that featured Henry’s teachings. Since Henry didn’t have an idea for a candidate for CEO at the time, the idea was put on the back burner.
Around the same time, Henry started connecting with his nephew Jack around meditation after he had left his job after spending 10 years in investment banking and consulting. Jack, who originally believed that meditation was a waste of time, started to embrace meditation and saw it had a positive impact on his life.
“Henry went from being just my boring Uncle Henry to someone I could turn to for guidance and advice,” Jack told TechCrunch. “I have an uncle who is not only a meditation teacher, but actually a Zen Master. It was a privilege, but at the time, I was also searching for the right tool and was trying different meditation apps and I couldn’t find anything that really would consistently develop my practice over the long term.”
Jack was turning to Henry more and more for guidance and wanted to share this clarity and reassurance he was getting from his uncle with more people.
The duo decided to create the app in 2022, and now The Way has closed a $1.4 million seed funding round led by Rose and True Ventures, with participation from a few angel investors.
The core idea behind The Way is to allow you to have the experience of studying with a Zen Master every day for a year as if you were sitting side-by-side. Once you open up the app, you’re greeted by Henry sitting in his Zen school, welcoming you with an overview of how the teachings will work and progress. From there, you get access to a series of daily guided meditations interspersed with a few talks.
Unlike popular meditation apps like Calm and Headspace, The Way focuses on a linear, step-by-step idea when it comes to meditation.
“The big gamble that we took in our UX design was that all of that content would appear in a linear step by step path, so the user never has to make a choice,” Jack said. “That was inspired by all the user research we did at the start of the project where we spoke to meditators who use different meditation apps. Every single one reported feeling some degree of decision paralysis with the apps that they already use, because every meditation app on the market uses what we call the Netflix model, where you open it and there’s just a thousand options presented to you, different teachers, different courses, different styles, and it can just be really overwhelming.”
The Way strips all of that away and guides you sequentially through a curriculum led by Henry that is designed to lead you into deeper aspects of mediation.
And while the duo believes that apps like Calm and Headspace are great for introducing people to a basic level of meditation, The Way can help people graduate from that introductory level and take the next step in deepening their practice.
“A lot of modern mindfulness, which is of course a fantastic thing, focuses on stress reduction and finding states of calm and balance, but there is further to go than that,” Henry told TechCrunch. “What that looks like is discovering an incredible kind of interconnectedness that we’re all part of. It’s finding flow states in meditation where time goes quiet. We don’t feel effort so much it becomes effortless, very easy and very kind of fulfilling in and of itself, just just to be. So those deeper kinds of discoveries from practice, we really wanted them to be in the app.”
The Way offers the first 30 meditation sessions for free. Users who want to unlock the entire curriculum can do so through a $9.99 monthly or $74.99 yearly subscription. People who are interested in the app but can’t afford the subscription can apply for The Way’s scholarship program.
