Transcript

Why happier vets mean healthier pets, with Modern Animal CEO Steven Eidelman

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0:53 Hey folks, Jeff Berman here. I am thrilled to share some of the new names who will be joining us at this year's Masters of Scale summit. This may be our biggest stage yet. Reed Hastings, Meredith Whitaker, Van Jones, Amjad Masad, and more. Will be there with us October 20th through 22nd in San Francisco. If you're building something great, or you want to build something great, We want you there with us too.

1:20 Join us at masters of scale dot com slash apply twenty six. That's mastersofscom slash apply. Twenty six. The thing that you're looking for as an entrepreneur is the inevitability. of demand for the product or service you're offering.

1:41 And if you're pushing a rock uphill. You don't have it. Steven Idelman is the CEO and co-founder of Modern Animal. It's a fascinating disruptor in the pet care industry. Стівен сам іre need of change. And he wanted to help.

1:59 The veterinarian was really struggling. And the consumer or the pet owner, the customer was being left behind as well. We're talking about animals. Ба і с теплу. And obviously if they're suffering. The animal's probably not getting the care that they need to. So

2:16 It was the core veterinary care delivery system that was broken. I was starting to get really close to the problems in this industry and I started to really deeply care about them. And once you see Problems as an entrepreneur, it's really hard to turn away from them. Modern Animal now has about six hundred employees and a rapidly expanding footprint of pet care clinics.

2:40 This week, Steven Eidelman reveals the lessons learned by scaling his revolutionary approach. to veterinary care. You gotta have incredible talent at every position. Huge push. There are fires burning when you're going out. Can you believe it? Such an idiot. And then you go back to this is truly gonna be amazing. There are so many easy ways. Sorry, we made a mistake. But you have to time it right.

3:12 Nutball ten years later be like, well that's just how you do it. We haven't made it just how you do it. This is masters of scale. I'm Jeff Berman. Your host.

3:27 Steven Eidelman's scale journey with modern animal is an inspiring entrepreneurial story. But Steven didn't grow up with the rosiest picture of being your own boss. Steven, welcome to Masters of Scale. Thanks, Chef. Great to be here. As a first generation American with parents from the former Soviet Union

3:48 Стівен вач із да вор інкредило. He saw every drop of his dad's sweat and the late nights toiling at the kitchen table along the way. So Steven opted to start his career in a more traditional office environment. As a consultant at Bain. But a few years in

4:08 He started to wonder if he'd been wrong. About the life of an entrepreneur. The hardest part about watching sort of you know, the the immigrant entrepreneur journey and trying to make sense of it as a you know first generation aspiring entrepreneur is what my father

4:26 did was he fought for survival. It wasn't a career choice. For them it was, hey, this is about security and stability and having the best opportunities and and taking advantage of them. But for me the the entrepreneurial thing that I was experiencing, you know, with my father was really building something. Like what does it feel like to build something? And I was seeing that as an investor

4:44 And what I learned was, you know, I'm never gonna take that leap. If I just use my rational part of my brain, right. There's always gonna be some reason why It's not a good enough idea while there why there's a risk. So or this is around two thousand twelve. I'm about five years into my career. And the itch is is is starting to get more like a severe, you know, burning sensation. And you might need to see a doctor for that. Yeah, yeah.

5:08 And uh Bain has the investing arm, Bain Capital, and then there's the consulting and they're even arms, they're separate separate companies. So I was at the consulting firm. Gotcha. At the time I'm looking at businesses, you know, every day, dozens of businesses, right? So I don't really know anything about anything. I don't have a business that I'm deeply passionate about. I've been a generalist my whole career. As a student and as a professional now. And so that is a difficult place to know that there's a problem you deeply want to solve, right? And so just desperately wanting to be an entrepreneur. Well that's not what my

5:39 Father did. Right. That's not what most great entrepreneurs have done. So it's a tough place to actually pursue that dream from. But at some point I had to take the leap. And so it it happened pretty organically just my roommate of the time who at this point become you know one of my closest friends. He was a a colleague of mine from Bain. He also worked at an investing firm. We had a whiteboard and this is like an episode out of Silicon Valley, right? Whiteboard, ideas on the whiteboard. It just so happens that when we were at Bain together There were a number of pet care companies that were clients.

6:09 And my first case that I ever worked on. was actually A pecker claims. And so what I learned at that time was you know, this is a much bigger industry than people realize. There's a lot of emotional Connection to it. And what we were thinking about at the time was this industry is about to change dramatically.

6:27 With a younger pet owner. Coming in. Millennials are different. So I think the way that Ben, my co founder, and I came to end up in this industry was We couldn't agree on anything else and we both have been dog lovers our whole lives. And we grew up with dogs

6:42 And There was just a much deeper connection. to that relationship that we were both able to access is very sort of emotive people than anything else on that whiteboard. And so the investor actually That

6:54 Ben worked for He's a great entrepreneur himself and he and he he really encouraged us to to pursue something that we were both excited about and to work together. He said, You need to work with someone that you really trust and you will go to war with. What was it about what was changing with millennials growing into pet ownership where you saw the opportunity and what what became that that first entrepreneurial dive for you? The thing that we were most interested in was the shift around specifically pet health. And the tailwinds that were supporting sort of that shift were you think about generations ago

7:26 The dog used to live outside. Right. More recently the dog started to live inside. Even more recently, the dog is no longer, you know, just inside and, you know, in their dog bed. They're In your bed. Right. So that has a lot of implications. You know, what are you expecting?

7:41 of a service provider or a product that you're purchasing for your pet. How much are you willing to spend on your pet? And in parallel, what's been happening is medicine just gotten better. Right. I mean the the way animal health works is that It benefits from all innovation and improvement to human health. And so greater medicine is becoming available.

7:59 And people want Access to that. and the willingness to spend on on on pets has increased. So the the expectations of what's available in the market have changed. Now in twenty twelve what we Saw was mostly Yeah.

8:12 It seemed as though the whole world was gonna revolve around devices that captured information in our world, right? I'm wearing an order ring now, but back then it was Fitbit. And I was always interested in that category because we're in type one diabetic And uh I'm somewhat of a robot. I have an insulin pump. I have a you know continuous glucose monitor on my arm

8:31 And so for me the idea of capturing this data to improve Health was something I'd been fascinated by for a long time. And Yeah, essentially we took those ideas of you know devices for health. Pet care.

8:42 the trends around pet health and smash them together. And that was our first company. It was called Whistle. And I am inferring that there was also an understanding that for people with disposable income, there is a you know like not a lot of price sensitivity when it comes to doing right by your pet. That's right. Okay. So what exactly was Whistle and and how how did you get it off the ground? So whistle was the idea that we want to connect the pet uh the pet owner with the veterinarian. And so what's the best way to do that? Because the veterinarian used to always be the most trusted resource if if you're a pet owner. And this was around a time where

9:15 We're starting to now. Google everything, right? And in in parallel, the veterinarians sort of losing that sway and that uh role of influence And so we thought hey

9:26 Let's capture this valuable data. And you know, we're dreaming big. We're thinking we're gonna put a device on an animal, we're gonna be able to tell everything that's going on with them. Right. Whether or not the technology existed at the time is a separate point, but that was the vision we put a device on. capture all this information and translate it for the veterinarian. So that there's this connection between the veterinarian and the and the and the client, the pet owner, uh when they're at home. So it's a pet wearable where the vet can log on and see the vitals, see any key key data point that they need to see to help diagnose what's happening with the pet. And so the most interesting thing of that building that company, beyond sort of all the entrepreneurial journeys of Raising capital, hiring.

10:01 firing, pushing yourself as a as an entrepreneur to grow. The most interesting part about it was that dynamic that you just described. That's what invited us into the veterinary practice for the first time. And What we saw was that

10:14 Giving a veterinarian more data isn't helping their day to day. Which is already almost an impossible task to get through. I mean if you just take Let's step back and think about it. At the base level, what is a veterinarian doing? First of all, a veterinarian goes to medical school for four years. Comes out with a load of debt.

10:28 Right. They have to study multiple species. They're doing everything at a general practice veterinary practice, right? There's emergency hospitals and there's specialists, but let's just talk about a general practice, which is what modern animal does. At a small animal hospital during dog and cat.

10:42 Maybe you're even doing exotics, but let's say we're doing dog and cat. You're doing everything from Wellness care, preventative care, vaccines Lab work. To urgent care.

10:52 You're doing surgery, soft tissue surgery. You're doing dentistry, you're doing radiology. You're doing euthanasia? Mm-hmm. So you're going from one moment where you're You've got a family who's excited about their first appointment with their new puppy and then the next you've got, you know

11:07 A euthanasia appointment. And you're doing that fifteen, twenty, twenty five times a day. You've got clients who they're not the actual patient, right? So you have this sort of interesting dynamic that is more akin to sort of if you have a child and you go to a pediatrician where you're talking about this third party who is the recipient of the care. But you're kinda negotiating between these two other people, the practitioner and the in our case the client. Who cares?

11:31 So deeply about this. Being that can't communicate. And it can get antagonistic pretty quickly. And what you have is a population of people veterinarians who

11:42 The only motivation to become a veterinarian. Is to care for animals. Like all of the rest of us may have all these ulterior motives. I have some deep seated sort of thing from my childhood about becoming an entrepreneur and proving myself to my parents, probably. Veterinarians just love animals. They're like the most pure noble

11:59 people I've ever met. So You have this. person, right, who is there purely to solve For the Issues that that animal has

12:08 But now they have to negotiate cost. Mm-hmm. Veterinary care is Yeah, it's expensive because you're paying full freight. Like we all forget for our own health care, somebody's usually paying part of the way. Yeah. Whether it's you know Medicare and the government's

12:21 Paying for it. Your employer. You're paying your copay or your you know, your premiums. So with Venery Care. As medicine becomes more available, it's just getting more expensive. And inflation and costs get higher. So so you have now a relationship between the pet owner.

12:34 And the veterinarian where They have to negotiate on all these things. What choices are we gonna make? Are we gonna do the full gamut? Are we gonna just See what's going on. Hey, maybe we can't even afford to do the diagnostic test to see what's going on. Let's just take our best guess of what's going on.

12:47 And keep the cost as low as possible. There's issues around oh, Chewy is charging five dollars less for the same drug. You're ripping me off. Right. Um, there's a lack of transparency. So The pet owner's experiencing a pretty suboptimal experience oftentimes. But the veterinarian is really struggling, especially today. A lot has changed.

13:07 Super helpful framework. So when you come up with this idea, this wearable for the pets, and you've got your co-founder, you've got the whiteboard business plan, et cetera. Do you bootstrap it? Are you able to raise some seed capital? How do you actually start the company? So the idea was really born in partnership with one of these partners that my co founder worked with, who himself had built a great hardware company uh called Slingbox Slinger. Sure. And He loved the vision and so

13:33 In our mid twenties, aspiring entrepreneurs He says, Hey, I will find this idea. Let's go for it. Really difficult to say no to that. Especially someone with a with a deep background in hardware. Software connected hardware at that, right? I mean, that's uh that that's an extraordinary advantage to have starting a company. Absolutely. Yeah. And so that was it. We went out to the races. Great. Fantastic. What happened?

13:56 We spent about a year building the product. Lot of fun. Yeah to work with. Incredible industrial designers. As a young entrepreneur

14:06 It feels like Everything is about building, right? So you get to You get to flex these muscles you've never Flex before and About a year in we launched the product.

14:16 And As an investor, you know, I'm looking at the data, right? And it's obvious to me. I don't think people want this thing. So the wearable that we built at first was health tracking in theory, but really it was activity tracking. Right. It was the same way Fitbit was meant to be a a health monitor, but we're really a step counter, right?

14:35 And We learned pretty quickly that what people expected the device to do was not something we could do yet. Which was what? a broader array of features and specifically location tracking was something that people assumed if I'm putting a device on my dog, I wanna know where they are. So we ended up pivoting to that and and we built a decent business around that. But the vision around health was really important to us. That was what got us excited, and that's what excited the industry. And so we got a lot of strategic interest.

15:00 And as we saw this path of diverging decided to sell the business, because we thought that we would be able to fulfill that vision. Much more quickly being a part of a business that actually owned veterinary practices. And so you you sold it to Mars, which I knew only as a candy company until I was prepping for our conversation, realized they're actually huge in pet as well. a lot of founders who had that experience would stay the minimum amount of time and then leave and go do the next thing. You I think you stayed a little bit longer. I almost made it the whole time. Okay. So tell us about the journey at Mars once once you send the company to them. So Mars is an incredible business.

15:35 It's one of the largest private businesses in America. It's still owned by the family, one hundred percent. And the family cares deeply. About animals. And that's how they got into it.

15:44 A hundred years ago. And when they bought the business they had made the decision to to really go into the veteran space. They had already We know the candy business, right? But they had already been the largest pet pet care company in the world for a long time. And they saw the opportunity in animal health much to the the same way that we did.

16:02 That the the customers changing. And creating opportunities and that the Environment. to create something more interesting as an ecosystem was there. So the the vision's very much aligned.

16:14 And so we joined In twenty sixteen And I was excited to sort of see can we build the vision out here. So

16:22 What we learned was you know the device is probably not the the vessel. And for me it got really Clear that to solve the problems this industry had Not just the exciting opportunity of how if you connect all these things.

16:38 How might you create a better experience? But There's a lot of problems and I didn't I wasn't aware of them. And as we got closer It was really hard to turn away from them. And this is going back to sort of the whiteboard moment as a young entrepreneur who doesn't really know anything about anything. I was starting to get really close to the problems in this industry and I started to really deeply

16:55 Care about them. And once you see problems as an entrepreneur, it's really hard to turn away from them. Yeah. So what did you see? The veterinarian was really struggling and the consumer or the pet owner, the customer was being left behind as well. And so interestingly we're

17:11 We're talking about animals. But it's the people who are suffering. And obviously if they're suffering. The animal's probably not getting the care that they need to. So It was the core veterinary care delivery system that was broken.

17:25 And What was happening? More broadly in the industry was a huge wave of consolidation. Specifically private equity firms who were buying up. Mom and pop vet clinics. Yeah. Everything in the in the veterinary space is a little bit behind. Yeah. And and so that wave was a little bit behind as well. But exactly the same concept. And and it basically was that people figured out veterinary care is a good business. It's a hundred percent cash pay. And you have this sort of emotionally driven

17:51 Spend. With a Especially a demographic that's changing and wants Cares more and wants to spend more. So it attracted a lot of I would say opportunistic.

18:03 Capital. And I would say opportunistic tourists. Who came in to extract value from the industry. Yeah, that's pretty kindly said, I'm I'm inferring there. Opportunistic and and tourist suggest maybe exploitative and didn't really deeply know the the category. And this is where I think the di you know what I was thinking at Mars was a uh

18:22 A family who cared very deeply. And how to A really exciting vision. But a huge company. Yep. And so I tried

18:30 internally to to drive some of the change I saw. Specifically My background being more in technology. I'm a techno optimist. There's a lot of downsides to technology as well. But I believe the technology can really drive change in positive ways. And so I wanted to bring technology into the industry, but it's tough to do at that large of a scale. Sure. And so I ultimately decided to go do it outside. But

18:50 The private equity roll ups in that model that were happening in parallel elsewhere. Where you would have sort of shadow private equity firms buying up mom and pop clinics.

19:01 The motto of the one of the largest ones was Join us, stay you. Which was basically a nice way to say, We're not gonna do anything once we buy you. And it was all under the guys that we'll preserve your legacy. Dr. Jeff's That clinic. We're gonna leave your clinic as it is. You'll stick around, we're gonna preserve your legacy. But what happens when you

19:20 Leave and retire after you've sold your practice. It all starts to fall apart a little bit. And they would congregate All of these different practices together. And really do nothing more than try to optimize the economic model. Yeah. And

19:33 We're now really thirty years into when this wave started, but it really accelerated over the last decade or so. And a lot of the problems started to get Amplified. Still ahead, how Steven turned a mission making vet jobs more humane.

19:51 Into a rapidly scaling business. Wired Newsroom is known for award winning reporting on how technology shapes our world. On Wire's Uncanny Valley, we take that curiosity even further. Each week, journalists from Wired break down the biggest stories in tech while speaking directly with the people building, challenging, and reshaping the future. Is the AI boom sustainable?

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21:23 That is human centered. I'm Rana El Calyubi. And on my podcast Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone. Every week, I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future. And we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives.

21:49 Find pioneers of AI wherever you tune in. Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find this conversation and more. On our YouTube channel. I imagine you looked at a lot of different areas of opportunity. What became the idea that led to to Modern Animal?

22:12 About twenty eighteen is when I started to see what was a pretty clear picture in my mind of What the future of Energy Kerr should look like. We're not gonna go backwards into a world where every veterinary practice is owned by The veterinarian.

22:26 And so if we could, I think that's probably a better future going backwards, but that's not how the world works. So if we're looking forward Well What role does technology have? How might we actually achieve that relationship that I wanted to build?

22:40 With whistle, between the veteran and the pet owner. And so a lot of these pieces started coming together. And so the vision was Let's use technology. Let's build a brand that people can trust and let's build this thing from scratch. To bring the pet owner

22:52 And the veterinarian together. To streamline the work in the practice so that this very difficult job A veterinarian with more ease. More consistency. The pet owner has more transparency, more accessibility. And

23:07 How might we Create an alternative future. for this industry that is not purely a value extraction. private equity roll up game. Mm-hmm. It would require a long term focus.

23:19 It would require Capital and would require You know, I think the wherewithal to sustain what is a difficult business. So what happened? So in twenty eighteen I approached one of the Mars family members who had been a great supporter.

23:34 I can't do it here. I've really tried. And I really wanted to achieve it there and I thought I'd go back to the whiteboard and do something totally different. And at this point I've really fallen in love with the people in the industry. I've Fallen in love with and quite obsessed with the problem.

23:48 And I wanted to go do it. And so to to their credit, is it Yeah, we get it. So go for it. And did they want to fund you? Did they did they want to be a part of it? I felt it was important to not have that relationship.

24:01 I felt that we needed to not be encumbered by anyone. With a pre existing Point of view on the industry. And so One of my old Bane colleagues was now

24:12 very successful venture capitalists who I've goaded for advice. And I didn't expect him to want to fund it. He was a Former SpaceX engineer. This is not exactly his Cup of tea.

24:24 But He saw the opportunity and believed in in us and and said Let's do it. Yeah. You want you want money, ask for advice. What exactly was the opportunity?

24:34 So at the most like emotional level I would say is to bring humanity back to veteran medicine. That human relationship. The animal is the beneficiary of the strength and the trust that it that relationship uh is is founded on. So What will enable that? For us it was really controlling the environment that the doctor works in.

24:53 Providing twenty four seven access. To the pet owner. Whether that be to the information, the pet's medical record, history. to telemedicine, to triage, to support

25:04 But then also making it much more sustainable for the veterinarian. If we go back to like who is the person who becomes a veterinarian, right? Someone who deeply cares. About the animal. And they're put into this environment where Ironically, they have to deal with people. who are more likely to yell at them than they are to their own doctor.

25:20 negotiate cost. They're dealing with this broad range of care. Right. And that's hard. So Steven, how how do you make it better for the vet? How do you make that experience better for them and how do you build a business around that? It used to be that you'd have typically male

25:36 uh veterinarian who would buy his own practice or build it, run it for many years and then eventually sell it. Maybe to an associate veterinarian who worked with with him typically. Now the cost of doing that because of so much private equity money that's come in is unattainable for a veterinarian to buy their Boss's practice. And the challenge of Coming out of school.

25:58 having now a lot of debt as the cost of schooling has gone up dramatically. For us, when we started the business, we said, Okay, great, we we're gonna build a better experience for the pet owner. That's easy for me just as an entrepreneur. I know what I would want. But for the veterinarian, that was from spending a ton of time with them and going, you know, watching them. Day in and day out, do that work. Mm-hmm.

26:17 And it's a mess. So how do we clean up the mess? What can we use technology for to streamline the work, to um automate the work, to eliminate some of the redundancy or the admin work, um, to create a deeper relationship with the pedigre so when they come in, they don't Assume. That you're out to rip them off.

26:34 So for people who aren't yet. modern animal subscribers or members, break it down. I mean, you launch your own clinics, right? I mean just just take us through like what the whole thing is end to end. So we build our own clinics from scratch. Mm-hmm They're about three thousand square feet on average. have about six to seven doctors when they're full.

26:51 And about five or six thousand. Members. Can go there. So we have a membership based model. Every one of our members Uh pays an annual

27:00 fee or they can still pay per exam. And the annual fee is about two hundred dollars. Two hundred dollars. And we're actually about to roll out a tier that lets people who don't want to come as much still be able to come and join as members. And that'll be ninety nine dollars. But Membership is more about the idea that you are part of Modern Animal and you can access Modern Animal anywhere. So you can go to any of our locations. Everybody has their mobile app on their phone. We have twenty four seven. virtual care available, which is access to our team.

27:28 Through phone, chat, video. You have full access to your pet's medical history, medical records in the app. You can book appointments through there. Pay through there, every you know, pharmacy is available through there. So it's a very accessible experience. And Stephen, if my dog needs a checkup, is that covered by the two hundred dollars, but then if if the checkup determines they need something else, that's a la carte. Like how does it how does it actually work? So what I saw was more and more people being reluctant to go to the veterinarian. We had been in a downward trend of people going to the bet less.

27:58 And this was a I think reflective of this trust being broken and eroding. But it was also, hey, I can go on Google. I'm gonna text my dog walker. Hey, veterinary care is expensive. I'm just not gonna go. So what I saw was friction and I wanted to remove friction. So whether the friction was telemedicine and virtual care or it was just the exam fee. So the idea of membership was we're gonna remove the exam fee. So if you typically, let's say in LA may you may pay eighty dollars, ninety dollars, even a hundred dollars just to step foot in the door. If you're a member, you don't pay exam fees. It's a big deal just starting there. And I think it changes what we see is our members come twice as much on average to the practice.

28:34 If you ask any of our doctors, they'll tell you We detect disease earlier in the disease cycle at modern animal. earlier than they'd ever seen in their careers. Because we've removed that friction. So Whether that's happening virtually through a triage

28:47 Video chat at eleven o'clock at night. Hey, do I need to rush to the ER right now or Are we okay? So that's a huge deal, right? Or is it just hey, I don't know if something's wrong. But this is happening.

28:58 our virtual care team says, Hey, you know what, Jeff, you should head in. And if nothing's wrong, you don't pay anything, right? And then it's really a choice. Hey, we don't know if something's wrong. Maybe something's wrong. Do you want to do the test? Do we want to do the x-rays? Right. There's some choice, and this is where it starts to get complicated. But that's the idea of membership. And so you have the physical clinics that we build, and they're beautiful because human beings spend 10 hours a day doing really difficult work there. That's the number one reason why they're beautiful. And you as a customer, if you're gonna come and spend hundreds of dollars, if not more, with us. It also should be a good experience. So we we have these clinics that we build from scratch.

29:29 We build our own technology. The ecosystem of technology has been dramatically underinvested in. And so We built our own electronic medical record system. We built our own booking system, payment system, communication system. That's been wildly

29:43 Valuable today with AI. Yeah. Where we are able to now point. AI at a lot of different problems to eliminate a lot of the work or streamline or automate or summarize. Your ten years of history for your dog and all the complex issues that it's had.

29:58 What is the information you need to know. in the two minutes before you go into that appointment. Yeah. So that's been a really strategic investment for us. And then The important piece is that all of this is one network. This is not

30:11 an amalgamation of a thousand disparate hospitals where they joined us and they stay themselves, right? You join Modern Animal as a veterinarian, as a veterinary technician, as an employee. You were buying into our mission, our values You're buying into our point of view on we are building the future of this industry. We're gonna that means we're gonna constantly be changing things. Every week we roll out changes. That means it will be hard because we are trying to solve hard problems. But we are also

30:38 unabashedly trying to Eliminate the past. model that has been, I think, hurting the industry. So it has created a very much a shared culture. And a stance towards the future. How did you find the first customers?

30:51 We did a bunch of different marketing stuff. I don't know which of it actually mattered or worked. Um yeah, we would go to the local farmers markets, we would do some influencer events, we put up billboards, which ironically stayed up for months during Covid because they were no one's buying billboards. Yeah. So it's hard to know which of these variables actually Worked? But within about a month we had to stop doing Everything to get more customers'cause we were full. Couldn't handle the demand. We had a phone number up on the website. We had to take that down. Well

31:18 We ended up having the ph number basically say if you remember. Contact us through the app. Yeah, sorry. How big are you now? We're about six hundred employees. Wow. How many markets are you in? So we're in LA, Orange County, Bay Area, Dallas, Austin, Houston. And how many clinics?

31:34 We are opening our twenty ninth in Denver. So this brings me to my next question about scale, because you've seen the private equity roll up, you understand the the pros and largely cons to that you've built all the software. Sure, it's great to control this experience end to end, but there's a theory of scale of like we're we're a software company and we can go out and provide a service to all sorts of existing vets and pet care hospitals and sites, right? Clinics Or we could buy them, but like y you keep building them. Right.

32:07 Is is that the answer? I think it's the the vision that we have. is one that we are able to be the agent of change. In a way that requires us having our hands on it. Mm.

32:20 And that doesn't just mean me. That doesn't just mean my executive team or even our support team. It means Even one of our nurses in our clinics being able to say, This needs to change and I would like to test it. And so building the mechanism of change is one of the biggest things I think that we built.

32:38 And That is really hard. And it requires everyone rowing in the same direction. I think otherwise software alone is not gonna change. What is an incredibly human experience.

32:50 Building great clinics, you know, that is a feature. It's really not that important. It's just that we can have a lot more control in the in the consistency of your work environment. If we build it versus we bought an old one. And the challenge if we just went and started buying hospitals and said, Well, Modern Animals Way is great. Well, not every doctor there is gonna agree. Not every customer's gonna agree.

33:11 So We are very clear about what we stand for. What our values are. What does it mean to be a modern animal? Yeah. And so we want people who

33:20 Wanna join us to do that. Before I let Steven go. I wanted to hear where he found the most meaningful insights for building his business, and he mentioned a book. It's not a business title and probably not a book you've heard of. But it is considered a classic from nineteen fifty one by the philosopher Alan Watts.

33:44 The most impactful book I ever read as an entrepreneur was The Wisdom of Insecurity. When I was building Whistle I hit A real low point. Doing From

33:54 This great stable career. Two The trials and tribulations of an entrepreneur is trying to Prove that a business should exist. was really tough. Mm-hmm.

34:03 Um there's a lot of ego. Death that happens. I'm thinking very highly of myself and my career and everything is coming with ease and all of a sudden I'm fighting for my survival, but not the way my father did. I've done this to myself.

34:16 There's a lot of insecurity. There's a lot of Self doubt. And I had listened to some of Alan Watts's

34:24 Talks. But I had never read any of his books. And so a friend of mine had recommended that I read it and it really struck a chord and it had nothing to do with being an entrepreneur. Right. Just the idea that In the book he talks about

34:36 Anxiety is not knowing how you get from point A to point B. And as human beings All we're trying to do is figure out how do I get to point B. And it's a false illusion. Like you're on this journey and you might have the most well intentioned plans. But it almost never works that way. And if it does, what a boring journey. And so I think w for me it struck a chord Oh, I've been building this career trying to figure out if I do this and I do this and I get here, and that's the whole point of life. Yeah.

35:01 Okay, great. I took this leap. Well now what? Like I'm suffering. And so finding a way to just let it happen. Do my best. And release that ego. The releasing the

35:11 The FOMO of Well. I have other friends who are more successful than me. What could I have been doing instead if I wasn't Dealing with this. I am on the journey from point A to point B, and it might suck. But through it I'm gonna learn a lot.

35:26 So I think the advice I give is to any entrepreneur, it's like you've gotta love that feeling of I'm gonna experience pain. And it's not that it's like love pain. But I have to love that I

35:37 and going to grow and that's how I'm gonna grow. You have to really buy into the idea that this is about pushing yourself to the brink of failure so that you can improve yourself. And that's probably the most important thing. The the second thing I would say is and this has been a this is a more recent Learning from me. When I don't know the answer.

35:56 I either Lie to myself. And tell myself that I do. Or I wake up and realize I need to go get advice. And so I used to go seek advice and I would Ask people for advice to get the answer.

36:07 And I think that's wrong. Yeah. My lesson has been There's a lot of wisdom in the world. Go get wisdom from people, but only I can I have to make those choices. I have to be accountable to those choices. I can't outsource it if I ask you for advice.

36:21 Right, Jeff. You don't know modern animal. You don't know the situations no matter how much I might unload on you to try to give me the answer, I have to be accountable to that. So I think my mantra now is you know seek wisdom. Not advice. I love that. What a great place to wrap. Thanks so much for being with us. Thanks for having me Jeff.

36:40 Steven Edelman's efforts to upend the outdated and inefficient issues plaguing vet medicine have made modern animal a beacon of hope for the humans who love their pets. It's a powerful illustration of what happens when you take the time to uncover the disease in the status quo and not just treat the symptoms. That's where true disruption. can make lasting and meaningful change. I'm Jeff Berman.

37:10 Thank you for listening. Masters of Scales await what original. Our executive producer is Eve Tro. Our senior producer is Trisha Bobida. The production team includes Tucker Legirski, Masha Makutunina, and Brandon Klein. Our senior town executive is Stephanie Stern.

37:45 Mixing and mastering by Aaron Bastanelli and Brian Pew. Original music by Ryan Holiday. Our head of podcasts is the tallad. Visit mastersofscale.com to find the transcript for this episode and to subscribe to our newsletter.