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16W Media Group Presents The Branding Highway Podcast
Bringing Together Local Businesses & Neighbors.
16W Media Group Presents The Branding Highway Podcast
Richard Nilsson: Revolutionizing Pet Health Care - From Wearable Technology to Personalized Wellness Plans and Navigating Entrepreneurial Ventures in the Pet Industry
Ever wondered how technology is transforming pet care? Join us on the Good Neighbor Podcast as we sit down with Richard Nilsson, the visionary founder of My Pet Go. Richard introduces us to his groundbreaking wearable device designed to monitor the health and emotional well-being of our furry friends. From tracking vital signs like temperature and pulse rate to observing behaviors such as itching and sleep patterns, this episode will enlighten you on how real-time data can deepen your bond with your pet and address health issues more effectively.
Get ready to explore a revolution in pet health monitoring. Richard delves into the unique needs of different breeds and how the My Pet Go collar is tailored to address specific issues like anxiety in toy breeds and respiratory problems in bulldogs. He also gives us an inside look at the four-year journey of developing this innovative device, upcoming improvements set for 2026, and how it integrates with an app and subscription service to support long-term pet health. Learn how predictive insights from sensor data can empower you to make informed decisions about your pet's care.
But that's not all—Richard also shares his entrepreneurial journey, from co-founding Lifestyle Hong Kong to pivoting into the pet industry with My Pet Go. Discover how his personal experiences with his anxious dog, Caesar, fueled his passion for pet wellness. Plus, hear about the strategic partnerships and global market differences shaping the future of My Pet Go. Don't miss this episode if you're keen to understand how meaningful data use can revolutionize pet wellness and care.
To get your pet monitor TODAY go to:
https://mypetgo.com/shop-health-pet-monitor
This is the Good Neighbor Podcast, the place where local businesses and neighbors come together. Here's your host.
Speaker 2:Mike Sedita. Welcome to the Good Neighbor Podcast. I'm your host, mike Sedita. Today we're joined. This is one of my favorite topics. Everybody who knows me knows I'm a pet guy. Norman is in my graphics, he's on my cartoon graphics. He's on my picture, my graphics. I love learning about different things that are going on that pertain to our pets and our animals, and we have the pleasure of being joined by Richard Nilsson. He is, at heart, an entrepreneur, but his company is my Pet Go. Richard, how are you doing today?
Speaker 1:Yeah, thank you, Mike, for having me. Yeah, I'm pretty good. I'm in sunny Spain and I always enjoy discussing how we can improve the lives of our beloved pets, like your own.
Speaker 2:You know, what's funny is the Good Neighbor podcast is generally we're dealing with a lot of small to medium-sized business owners and talking about their brand. I will tell you this is a first for me doing my first international interview, but hopefully you're going to be in the U? S relatively soon and we'll get into some of that now. But world traveling this is the first international good neighbor podcast, so tell us a little bit specifically about what is my pet go?
Speaker 1:What is my Pet, go yeah. So look, I mean the idea for me. I'm actually going to show you my inspiration to it.
Speaker 2:Let me ask you this oh very nice, awesome.
Speaker 1:That's the little guy.
Speaker 2:What is his name?
Speaker 1:So here's what he got.
Speaker 1:He's wearing a my Pet Go, which is essentially a wearable, and I think what people might have come across in the pet space is a lot of GPS trackers and different types of wearables.
Speaker 1:When we started this some four years ago, the whole kind of notion was what else can be done with a wearable and how can we take the data, extrapolate that data and explain how the pet is feeling physically and emotionally, which is obviously very different from the location or whereabouts of the pet. Right, and my sort of selfish approach here was how can I understand Caesar, my little dog, better, how he's doing physically and emotionally? I know he has anxiety, I know he is a stressed out little guy that if you leave him behind he'll bark until we come back again, Right, but at the same time he's the most happy, chappy little guy who gives you know like so many other dogs and cats, I suppose a lot of love and lots back. So it was kind of for me to give something back where the pet owner can better understand their pet and therefore bond with them better and understand how they can address, you know, certain health issues that are potentially creeping up.
Speaker 2:So, and again, correct me if I'm wrong because I just did, you know, some research looking at your website and trying to understand some specifics. Some research looking at your website and trying to understand some specifics, and and you, like I said, you could correct my thought process, but I kind of envision it as, besides the tracking part issue, but more like a Fitbit for my pet to kind of track their health and their wellness and they're like is that a fair correlation or am I completely out of whack with that?
Speaker 1:No, no, you're, you're, I think, spot on. I think you know this is a whoop strap, a Boston based American company, yeah, Um, which is, you know, fantastic, and I think that's another inspiration to what we're doing. Um, they are mainly tracking your sleep and strain and and certain, uh, health markers that will help to indicate whether you should exercise today, whether you should rest more, whether you are rested, whether you are sleep deficient or whether you, you know. So it's very sort of big on sleep and we looked at it and said, look, what are the things that we could try to explain in terms of our pet? And that for us, is four vitals It's's temperature. So we look at ambient and body temperature right, which could help with stuff like, you know, hyperthermia or heat stroke or you know other things that could be sort of um happening right, but there is a lot of other important factors. When you look at a temperature right, that correlates with other data points and therefore you can then kind of draw conclusions with that. We look at pulse rate, we look at respiration and we look at HRV, which is a health marker that we humans understand for ourselves but not for our pets so much. So we're trying to own that marker. And then we look at all sorts of behavior traits itching, licking, scratching, resting position, sleeping, step count, which is obviously very a la Fitbit.
Speaker 1:But the whole idea is to kind of paint a picture of your pet's health in the same way that we, as data-driven individuals can look at. You know, use an Oura Ring or a Whoop Strap or an Apple Watch or whatever it may be, and that kind of gets translated into our smartphone to an interface and you look at it. But because pet do not, they don't tend to talk, we just don't know. So how do we figure it out? And it's kind of data, and then all that goes into AI models and it's a lot of trial and error. And you know we work with some of the leading cardiologists and sort of on the veterinary side to kind of ensure that we are very close to the ground truth.
Speaker 1:But yes, what you just said is pretty spot on. We aspire to be, you know, 100% correct. We're maybe at 85, 80, 85%, depending on which health marker you're looking at, and we're looking at adding more things right. So as you start to get these right, you can then start to kind of put two and two together and that then concludes that certain things you know, certain other health risks are there and other things are creeping up.
Speaker 2:Well, you know so, like, I've owned English Bulldogs for 20 years. So they're like the model. Forget the step part of it. I'd probably have four steps a day, like going through the food bowl and to the bed. But the rest of it, all the different things you're talking about is definitely something that, again, you can't read your dog's mind. You pick up on markers and the way they react and some of the things that are going on. So, with this and thinking of that in mind, you had mentioned, you know, vet cardiologists Do you have, like I'm assuming you know you're, you're I mean you're mainly you're a VC guy, right, I mean, that's kind of your like. Is that your? You go in and look at this area and say, look, I want to develop that area. Do you bring in a team of vets that that kind of dissect the data to make sure it's picking up the right, the right tracks?
Speaker 1:yeah, so. So we have, you know, our sort of chief veterinary officer, or cvo as as we call her, um. She comes from, I mean, she's both, both a doctor and veteran in medicine, but she's also a biologist, which I think is is is helpful and and you know she's quite the brainiac and and and and, so she has tentacles to a lot of other peers that she obviously talks to and and and and tries to get everything correct with but, but we're using her mainly. And then she goes out to the veterinary board that we're using, which are other people that look at the same thing, and what they do is what she does to start with is she's testing the monitor on an array of healthy, unhealthy dogs we're a canine only at the moment offering, and you know, different breeds, different ages, different genders, but also different health conditions.
Speaker 1:And then we're comparing that to veterinary medical equipment that are FDA approved or, you know, otherwise regulated, and then also to the stethoscope, which is obviously the old fashioned analog way of doing it, but it tends to be the most accurate.
Speaker 1:So it's kind of benchmarking our product, the wearable, the data for the same timestamp, for the same marker, versus the medical equipment, versus the stethoscope and then kind of going backwards to where is the truth there and how can we calibrate so that we get closer to the truth.
Speaker 1:And that's where we are at that 85%. But the way we function is that we don't have to be 100% accurate, because we look at the rate of change so as we see fluctuations, we can be 100% accurate in terms of fluctuations of data. And so when we spot these health markers going either beyond or below what's a healthy marker, that's when we notify with a push notification and we say, hey, look, hrv is elevated and don't panic, because it could be your dog is running towards you because you just came through the door and he's missing you and therefore heart rate is elevated. So that's all fine. But if that marker is then elevated for, say, a 30-minute period, we then send you a second notification telling you that we're giving you some suggestions of what you can do and why this marker is now possibly elevated for a longer period of time. So it's a bit like having a veterinary friend in the pocket that educates you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's you know on your phone and it helps to educate you. It helps to get you to understand your individual pet, because they are very different from one to another, right they to get you to understand your individual pet because they are very different. What from one to another, right they're? You know, broadly speaking there is a lot of similarities, but but then again, they're individual, right, some are very anxious. I got a toy breed, um, you know, uh, super anxious you, you, you know. You said you've had a lot of bulldogs, so obviously a lot of respiratory issues, breathing and other things, coughing, sounds and things that you can pick up on. So yeah, it's very much a. You know, we want to be as close to the ground truth as we can. We use BCG as the underlying science. So everything is science. It's, it's technology married with medicine, married with science.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So a couple of quick questions off of that, like from a, from a logistics standpoint, how long has this been in development? Like, where are we? Are we 18 months in? Are we, you know, 36 months in? Like, when was the brainchild happen to where we're at now?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah right, good question. So we're about four years in give or take and I think you know, six months from now we're probably very close to 95% accuracy. This is what we call our generation one, right, we know. It has a temperature gauge on the back and all the others kind of sensor tech sits inside of it. So everything is non-intrusive. Nothing goes into the body or doesn't harm the pet. There is no electroshocks. There is nothing of that nature.
Speaker 2:Well, that's kind of what it looks like. It kind of looks like I had a dog that I had not shock, but like a vibration. It kind of looks like that, but it's more of a monitor than a corrective thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's correct. So we don't do any of that right, and there are great products for that if that's what you're looking for. We do, however, feel that it's a little bit cruel. I think there are other, better ways to make your dog more obedient, right, to make your dog more obedient, Right. And so look we to get to it. Improve generation two, which will come out in probably early part of 26. So that's Q1, 2026. We're currently working on that, but you need to have a gen one to get to a gen two.
Speaker 2:Of course I mean the initial Garmin. The initial Garmin in your car was like the size of a small television. Yeah, I mean so and if I understand from doing my research, the goal is essentially this is kind of like a continuity program. You buy the product, you download the app, the app is on your phone and you pay your subscription annually and then it just kind of runs and it's keeping you in tune with what's going on with your pet.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that's right. So it's a, you know, buy a monitor. I mean, we do work with quite a lot of insurance companies, pet insurance so it's like you get an insurance plan, you get a monitor together and that's kind of the ultimate package. But usually we sell it to them. They run it on our tech, so we're the tech enabler. We have a program in our application that we call my pet go longevity and it's a kind of. We give you daily tasks, what you should do as a pet owner or pet caretaker, and if you do these in a timely way, then you will, by default, have healthier pets.
Speaker 1:And it's like it's hard for us to understand. First of all, we're not vets, we're not educated on what to feed them, how much to feed them. I think in the US, if we look at that market, 55% of the dogs are obese right, where humans are at 43%. So the dogs are more obese than the humans, which is a big problem because it leads to a lot of other issues down the road. So I think you know what we're doing with the longevity program is we have three pillars. We have, first and foremost, you know what you would call exercise when we call that sort of activity right, and it's about the right amount of step count and walking and moving, but also the right amount of resting, right.
Speaker 1:You have an aging pet. That pet needs to rest, like us humans. You know rest is super important to look at longevity. The second one is nutrition, and you know the second part to that is hygiene. Right, you cut the nails, you clean the ears, you clean the tear channels, you groom the dog, you look after them, and it's like something that goes for a month without proper hygiene is something that at some point is going to have certain issues right, especially as they age. So it's really simple stuff.
Speaker 1:And the third one is health screenings and essentially engaging with our next step recommendations. As we spot abnormalities, we give you a next step recommendation. It could be to talk to a televet, it could be to speed dial your own vet and we then share all that data so the person that sits on the other end can understand what's going on with your pet. So we don't force you to buy a product or do something you don't want to do. It's completely up to you. But we're giving you the insights that you can act upon so that you know your pet can get another one, two, three, possibly four more years on planet earth.
Speaker 2:Right. Well, you know it is the predictive nature of the product. I mean, look, your target audience. There's two types of pet owners In my experience. There's the people that buy a pet because they want an animal in the house and it's something to have there as a as, like a accessory, and then there's neurotic people like me that have had dogs that literally have baby wipes on the counter and wipe his butt when he comes in the house, and he's literally my brand, I mean norman is. People know norman where I am locally here in tampa as much as they know me. If I go places without him, it's kind of like where is he? So there's me. So I'm more on the scale, closer to your target audience. I mean, not that everybody can't use it, but the person that's going to invest that extra money, like me, who has the $300 a month health insurance, wants to monitor because, as a bulldog owner, every vet visit is two to three hundred dollars. There's just there is no $60 vet visit when you have an English bulldog. It just doesn't happen. So the predictive nature of it to kind of get to some of that stuff and maybe catch it.
Speaker 2:My question to you, though, is there are certain things. Like you know, like you mentioned it a minute ago, the, the pushed in nose creates that brachialis, that issue with the breathing. Um, we've corrected that with surgery. We've done that. But Norman has allergies so he does take medication for his allergies. Um, there's no real work around with. I mean, I've changed his food. He's on all like fresh food and all this other stuff to kind of mitigate that. So I'm assuming some of the stuff you're going to see in like an obese animal that is eating grain processed food. When you start to see some of those things and the monitors going off, the first step is, hey, maybe switch to a more natural, like. Those are kind of the recommendations, as you're seeing the monitoring. Is that kind of what I'm understanding?
Speaker 1:Yeah, look, mike, great question. So I think we have to be very careful with how we recommend particular products out there, right? And so we wouldn't recommend a product, we would recommend a solution, and then that solution may be look, you should, um, maybe have a look at your diet. Here are some of the things that we think the diet should include, and and and and again. You know it's. It's important to understand that if we don't know everything about your pet, as your vet would, then it's very dangerous to give recommendations just out of the blue, right? So I think it's important for us to understand underlying medical conditions. Of course we have a journal. We would ask you all these questions as you set up the application and as you sort of fire up the monitor and put the monitor on. But if you tell us that you have a chihuahua when you actually have a great Dane Might get a different reading. There might be a slightly different reading.
Speaker 1:We are not going to be helpful. We're going to do more harm probably to you than good. So, to counterbalance all of these issues, we have put a lot of safety parameters in place. And again, our chief veterinary officer she's worked for some of the big pet pharmas, including Suetis, which is the largest globally, but also Pfizer, and then, of course, before that she was practicing, but she was head of digital diagnostics, and so she comes from this pharma where you have to have a lot of safety red tape in there, right? And so we're trying to be.
Speaker 1:Look, the whole notion of what we're doing is sensor data that you couldn't get otherwise. Right, you actually have to have this on in order to get it, otherwise you need to be in the vet in person with medical equipment or a stethoscope. And then we have the self-assessment, which is something that's coming into the program, which is asking you a bunch of questions. If you truthfully answer these questions, there are takeaways for us to kind of come back to you with. So, if we take sensor data with self-assessment, and then the third one is neural image recognition, and now we kind of deep dive into the whole of artificial intelligence here. But it's where you can take a picture of a stool sample and the stool looks pretty bad.
Speaker 1:As an obedient pet owner, you probably pick up stool twice a day, right Morning and evening, maybe three times. And so stool? For those that don't know what it means, it's essentially poop. And so you snap a picture of it, you upload it into the app. The app will then chug through a database of tons of healthy and unhealthy pictures of poop and then, with machine learning, be able to kind of in a quantifiable way, tell you whether that poop is healthy or not healthy, and whether it's, you know, all sorts of bacteria or or different type of worms in it, um, or parasites, I should say, uh, if there is any red poison, if there is blood, all these different things, and and so um, and and. With that you can do the same thing with fur, to look at different kind of, what type of skin disease you may have. With the teeth, you know oral bacteria, you know of all kinds, and then also the eyes, where you tend to get a lot of issues as they age.
Speaker 1:With self-assessment, with sensor data and then having a rigorous profile of the pet to begin with, you can very accurately paint the status quo of one's pet and their health and you will be able to do all these sort of recommendations right, and I think the more we know, the better the recommendations can be. But the whole idea is to be able to, at the right time, recommend an obese pet a special food program and have a good local partner in the market, let's say in the US, that can deliver a product that we have tested ourselves with our vets on a degree of pet. We can't just take their mumbo-jumbo and believe everything they say. So I think our job to be done is to recommend things that we know are science-backed and has been clinically tested and, as a matter of fact, we have partners like this that are being embedded into our ecosystem. So we're a data company.
Speaker 2:Well, that was kind of the question I was going to next. The first question is is there currently distribution anywhere, or are we still months away from Gen 1 being readily available?
Speaker 1:So anyone can buy it on mypetgocom right, and we can ship it worldwide right. So we have distribution partners in India, in Colombia, in all sorts of markets. We have a bunch of investors in the US market that have spent 30 years in the pet distribution business right, so they really know that business. I think for us, the US market is the market for us and we need to really do it right. So there is a lot of things that will happen towards the end of this year, and 2025 will probably do a really big push into the US market and I'll spend a lot of time down there. Our CBO is in New York. We have quite a few distributed staff members there. We have a US company, we have US investors. As I said, we just brought on another AI investor. So there's going to be a very big push into the US market.
Speaker 1:But if your question is, will we find it in our neighborhood pet store anytime soon? Honestly speaking, I don't know. I don't know if that's our model. I mean, our model has been B2B2C, where we kind of partner with the most fit, like pet insurance, because we think it's very synergistic, we think pet longevity companies they might sell the supplements and it's kind of like okay, how do we quantify that the supplements we're giving the pet is helping to make them more active? Let's say that they're inactive. I mean, this would certainly tell you whether they are moving more, whether they are doing more things. So it's about finding those good partners and then leveraging the fact that they have a big existing base of pet owners that might have a need and a want for a product like this. And then we usually white label that. So we are in the market in the US, but you don't know, it's us Right.
Speaker 2:I mean there's a couple of things from that. I mean you guys really are a direct response player. I mean you don't need to be on a shelf of a store or need to be in the veterinarian's office to promote that product. I looked at your website. It's very user-friendly, it's very e-commerce. It's here's what we have, here's the product, here's how it ships and here's how you sign up for the app. It's just getting the eyeballs on it.
Speaker 2:And the question I was going to ask where I was going with that is I would think the pet market in the U? S is a little bit more robust than maybe South, maybe not like Spain or England, but like maybe India. I don't think the pet I don't. I mean it may be completely wrong, but even though there's a billion people in India, I don't think pets are as valued at the level as they are where there's people crazy like me in the United States. So I would think that would kind of be like the gold standard to get into the U? S and reach that target audience the right way, because all they got to do you got to run an ad with a QR code, sign up and take them right to the website to buy and it's done.
Speaker 2:Um, but the question I really had was and you kind of touched on it a little bit was the partnerships. You are essentially what pet meds did for going to your local vet for your medication, or what Chewy does for food and toys. You are that. I mean, you guys are that for the preemptive. That's the same business model. Those products are in stores but they're not there. So it's kind of that same business model, but just on the preventive medical side, as opposed to the food or as opposed to the medication on the back end. So there is kind of a blueprint for how to do that. It's just getting to the right people the right way where it resonates. Do you really what? How for you? Did something happen with Caesar that you were like I like how does this idea just come up? Like was there an issue? Like he was freaking out when you left the house and you didn't know what was going on? Like how do you come up with this? The genesis of this?
Speaker 1:yeah, I mean, look, it's a good question. So, um, yeah, so so Caesar would freak out as we leave the house and leave him behind, which we don't do very often. I mean, we were fortunate enough to have help that lives in the house, or at least they used to here in Spain. It's a little bit different now. We will have that in due course, but we try not to leave him alone because he's very anxious. He will yap until we come back, I mean, and he would yap until his windpipe almost collapses and he would pass out because he can't get any oxygen and therefore he can't get any oxygen up to his brain and so, and so it's quite horrific. So he's with me now where I am and he kind of goes where we go, and thankfully he's a small little guy so you can put him in a bag and that's okay, and just people that I would meet at random if they think a product like this would be helpful.
Speaker 1:But it has morphed as well. It didn't start with the whole sort of layman data, next step recommendation connecting to a product or a service, that ecosystem kind of was. You know, you start with something and bigger. But, um, it was partly him and it was partly because I'm opportunistic. I saw this opportunity where you have tons of GPS trackers but very little for health, very little for wellness, nothing for longevity.
Speaker 1:We think, I think, that longevity is going to shape the pet care industry over the coming 10 years. I think it's going to be the big thing and it's going to be. You know, if you have a pet, you love it, it's part of the family. Of course, you want that pet to live as long as possible and to be you know, to be part of the family as long as possible, and so you're going to invest more in longevity, moving forward. And so, from a financial standpoint, I think, I think there are a lot of people like you and me out there, mike, that are concerned and are willing to spend and go over and beyond and more than you think. And they are in India, they are in Hong Kong, they're in Singapore, they're all over the place.
Speaker 1:I think, the Gen Z and millennials. They identify their pet truly as a fur baby and many of them not all, obviously, but many of them do not want to have human kids, so they are going to spend $1,000, $1,500 a month on their pet, be it luxury spas, be it specialized hotels that have a special bed with a special food menu for the pet, and the list goes on and on.
Speaker 2:You know it's funny, is you're you're? I mean it's $200 a month for food, $300 a month for health insurance. You know, um, if I go out of town, when I plan a vacation, I have to plan for the arrangements to have coverage. So my dog never, like I've never, put one of my dogs in a boarding, I mean as much as there's some beautiful ones here in Tampa, I just don't do that. I have a bulldog. He's kind of an instigator. Like he's not really an instigator, but bulldogs in general have that instigation. Um, so he, I don't put them there. Um, so like I could plan a vacation but I got to allocate an extra $1,500 of my vacation to have somebody come and stay at my house every night or whatever it is. So it is.
Speaker 2:That is a big part of people's lives and I agree 100%. Like Gen Z, millennials, like these younger generations, truly like pets are as vital to them as anything else. Like I'm not, I'm more of a Gen X, but I will tell you I've ended relationships with women because of their reaction to my dog and I've told, I've told women up front, he's my guy, like he's not going anywhere. If you don't like shedding, if you don't like a little bit of drool if you, I can appreciate it. As much as I like spending time with you, he's not going anywhere, no matter what's going on, and it has ended some relationships, so there is that component to where people will spend.
Speaker 2:So the question I have saying all that is do you think you're underpriced? Because I looked at your price point and it seems like it's low.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, look, I think you're right. Yeah, no, look, I think you're right. It is low, but we want as many pets as possible to get a collar. And sometimes you know, look, we've looked at the Whoop model also. Nothing, you pay nothing for the wearable, you get it, it's free, but you commit to a longer subscription and maybe it's slightly higher per month, right, and so we might move into that model with Gen 2.
Speaker 1:We are looking at it and I think when Whoop went from 500 bucks down to that model, it changed the dynamics of the company. They truly got out there. So it's like do you want to be very niche? Do you want to be broader? Do you want to help as many pets and pet owners as you can? And I think for us it's the latter. We want to help as many as we can. There's also power in the data. The more data we have, the more users we have, the more accurate we can become and the better we can get at predicting certain things, giving you insights, ensuring that the recommendations are more spot on and are truly helping you and your pet to live a more joyous life together.
Speaker 2:Well, you did say it. I mean you started this whole thing by saying I'm a data guy, I'm a data company. Data is king for anything and everything. I mean we see this every single day. Everything you click on on your computer creates a data point. That creates a profile for Richard and a profile for Mike, where now you only see the things that are similar, likes to build you in. So data is truly the king. So I understand getting as many people on the platform as rapidly as possible. So you have ways to fine tune generation two and generation three. Let me take a step to the side here for a second, because you know we've talked for 32 minutes about you know this type of stuff. Give me a little bit of like your background and some of the other ventures. Maybe you've had some success with and grown to kind of give people an understanding that while you're in this space and it's new because of what happened with your dog- this isn't your first rodeo, like, tell us a little bit about that.
Speaker 1:Sure, all right. So I'm born in an entrepreneurial family. My dad has been in the yacht industry his whole life. So everything from building them with his hands like wooden wooden boats to having factories down in Sarasota, not far from where you are yeah, I spent a lot of time as a you know from, I guess, the age of four up until the age of 20 in Fort Lauderdale and in Naples, down in your neck of the woods, and also Sarasota where we built our Amiga yacht. So I've had that entrepreneurial kind of bloodline, both from my father, who was in yachts and boats and in all sorts of new boats representing we were representing Bayliner and Limestone and Don C in the northern part of Europe. So we brought those boats there in the 80s and that was a beautiful time, until there were the saying that there are the eighties, and that was kind of a beautiful time, until there were the saying that there are three things you can't get rid of it's HIV, it's a Bayliner and it's, um, it's a house in the North of Sweden which you know I'm not trying to make fun of HIV in any way, you know and and so, and so those those glory days were over there. But but you know, so I have that and I guess, as you know, I helped him out.
Speaker 1:I helped my mother she's in the mice and travel industry and an entrepreneur in her own right and so I helped them out a lot as a child and that was what I did after school and what I did on weekends, and so you kind of, for me it was, you know, probably entrepreneurship, and I guess, as a 21-year-old I moved to Hong Kong, I went to the Swedish School of Entrepreneurship, I studied it when it was not a topic that anybody wanted to study, right? And then, as a 21-year-old, me and two buddies, we moved to Hong Kong and started what was Lifestyle Hong Kong, which became Lifestyle Asia later on, and it was, I guess, the first digital magazine for luxury and lifestyle in sort of Southeast Asia, north Asia, you know, fast forward. I sold that 11 years later to Hubert Berda Media, which is a German tech and media conglomerate, and stayed with them. Then, by that point, we had expanded from Hong Kong to Singapore, singapore, to Thailand, thailand, to Malaysia, sold it to them this is December 2017. And then I stayed with them for a couple of years, sat on the board, helped them with digital transformation. They had tons of glossy print magazines that I had to take online and create the online versions, do a lot of knowledge transfer from myself and my team to their sort of static print team.
Speaker 1:And then at some point I realized that you know, we're losing out to Meta and Google and all the big guys because we don't have the type of data that they have. And so I told myself I probably have to leave the publishing industry and go into something else. And I liked the pet space. I had Cesar and an opportunistic entrepreneur, and then that sort of happened that way and I kind of told myself I have to do something where I can leverage data in a meaningful way.
Speaker 1:So it was kind of like I've been hit on the nose by Meta, google and all the guys. So we had incredible viewers and readers and some of the richest people the creme de la creme of asia but we could never compete on the data. We knew where they lived, we knew right address, we knew what they were earning, we knew all this stuff and we could meet them in the physical sense. We could do very sexy, nice events for car cheer or for rolex or whatever right, but we just didn't have the reach and and and the type of data that google and facebook and the other guys have so different components.
Speaker 2:I mean like there is the luxury and the cachet of that type of medium, but from the data standpoint it's just not there.
Speaker 1:You're right yeah, it's not there. I mean it kind of it was, you know, I guess instagram was popping up 17, 18 and it wasn't brand safe so the luxury brands didn't want to go there, right, because you don't know where your ad would be next to and whatnot. But that kind of changed 19 and everybody was on Instagram. All of a sudden, everybody took their budgets away from a lot of other credible niche publishers like us, and so I realized that you know I need to get into, you know data, but data in a meaningful way, data in a non evil way. You know where.
Speaker 2:You don't sign away your data for life and someone else is making tons of money and so I said so that when you talk into your phone they're like oh, all of a sudden he wants this and you get ads for that. I mean, mean, it's the world we live in. Unfortunately, it's just the world we live in. You just kind of have to roll with it retargeting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, sure, they have not listening, they have not, they're predicting, they just. They just mysteriously know that no, yeah, listen, my alexa.
Speaker 2:My alexa is the nosiest woman on the planet. She listens to everything. I say so as we wrap this up, because I do love this type of stuff. I'm clearly a pet guy. I mean, I have tattoos of all my dogs on my arm. I'm that's it. I'm like that guy, um. So I love learning about this stuff and I and I think it's something definitely, um, that I would be interested in, in being an adopter of this product. So the best way, the best entry point, is, you know, mypetgocom. Everything can be found there for people.
Speaker 1:Sure, yeah, I mean, look, we'll send you a device for your dog for sure. So just send me the address where you want it to later on. But for anybody else, you can go to wwwmypetgocom and you can buy a monitor there. The site will be rebuilt. It's going to get a little bit better, I think. But look, it works. If you want one, you can buy one. It's inexpensive.
Speaker 1:There will be for everybody that buys a Gen 1, you will get a free upgrade to a Gen 2 as long as you commit to more subscription plans. So for those that are thinking maybe I hold out for the next one, you'll get next one as well. Come in early, help to shape the product, because your data is valuable. It helps us to, I would say, your data and your feedback. So a lot of the early adopters are also giving us feedback and kind of saying, look, it would be neat if you could do this, or it would be cool if you could do that, and I think I'm missing this a little bit. So once we get consensus of this, we can sort of tackle better what does a Gen 2, what does a Gen 3 look like? How can we improve? Again, you've got to start somewhere and there is really no reference point for what we're doing. So we've got to be that early company.
Speaker 2:Being an entrepreneur and setting trends. It's not for the faint of heart. I mean, there's a lot that goes, like you said it a few minutes ago, like an idea starts as A but by the time you get to F, it's already morphed into multiple different things and you have to have the flexibility and the ability to kind of roll with it, and the data plays a big part in it. Richard, thank you so much for coming on and educating us about the product. I'm looking forward to seeing how it works. And you know, listen, we appreciate it. I'd love to have you back on another time as the product evolves, to kind of get an update to see what's happening, if you would be cool with that. Sure, look anytime. Thank you for having me get an update to see what's happening, if you, if you, would be cool with that sure, look anytime.
Speaker 1:Thank you for having me and uh, yeah, send me your address. I'll send one over to you, or two, uh, whatever you need so, folks, if you're listening to this or watching it on our