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The Accidental Entrepreneurs
Two different innovators that stumbled on ideas in the veterinary field, built a company, then sold for millions........ without having any idea what they were doing.
Each week, Ira and Stacee will spin the wheel of start-up questions and share the knowledge they wish they had back then.
The Accidental Entrepreneurs
Ep 15: Guest spotlight Dr. Adam Little, Founder of GoFetch
Glance behind the curtain with Dr. Adam Little as he chats with Ira about his startup journey including the highs of innovation and the lows of layoffs. Adam shares the hard knock lessons he learned with brutal honesty showing that integrity and compassion always win. You won't want to miss this episode with one of the most brilliant innovators in veterinary medicine.
Learn more about Adam on LinkedIn
Welcome to the Accidental Entrepreneur's Podcast. I'm your host. Ira Gordon. Stacee is out this week, so I'm extremely excited to be joined by our guest, Dr. Adam Little. Adam's also a veterinarian and one of the true thought leaders in the world of innovation in animal health. He's also very much an entrepreneur in his own right, so today we're going to hear about his topsy-turvy journey at his own startup. With that, it is a pleasure to welcome you to the Accidental Entrepreneur's Podcast. Thanks for being on the show, Adam.
Adam:Yeah, thanks for having me, Ira.
Ira:Yeah, I'm excited. So tell me a little bit about kind of how you went from being someone that wanted to go to vet school and become a veterinarian to developing an interest in being an entrepreneur.
Adam:Yeah for sure. So I think this will probably be a pretty consistent theme when we kind of unpack some of the moments in my career. But a lot of it came through like exposure to interesting kind of people, ideas and just maybe a different lens on where veterinary medicine was heading and the role that we could play in helping to provide solutions around that. So I went to the Ontario Veterinary College, graduated 2013. I wanted to be a clinician. When I got into the program I spent some time in the oncology service and the neurology service and that was kind of the path that I was particularly interested in and maybe kind of the first moment which ended up maybe being the first domino in falling towards this new path.
Adam:When I was in my first year of veterinary school, there was two summer job opportunities that I applied for, and one was to volunteer or spend some time with the neurology service and the other was that I applied for veterinarians without borders and I desperately wanted to do both. And I remember trying to convince the, the dean, uh, the associate dean of research at the time, um, that I could, from tanzania, actually perform the research project for neurology um remotely, and I I remember like actually sending him the cell maps showing that I would get service enough in southern tanzania to be able to uh this project, and he basically was like look, dude, absolutely not, you're going to have to choose one or the other. And I ended up choosing Tanzania. And so I think for me that was kind of three months working with poultry farmers and being able to, I think, see a completely different way in which veterinary medicine could be used to help society, a completely different way in which veterinary medicine could be used to help society. It was really fun, it was interesting, it was challenging and the other thing that it did is it gave me a lot of free time in the evening to start to read and just kind of explore some other interests.
Adam:So it was also at that time where, when the Bayer Animal Usage report came out, which was one of the first research reports that I'm aware of, that kind of looked at the impact that the internet was having on pet owners and their attitudes towards veterinary care and some of these maybe relatively early pieces of evidence that, hey, this was going to really change the way that people discovered veterinary services, how they interacted with providers, and, I think, create a huge opportunity for practices to start to implement these tools. So, coming out of that, I said I'm going to start to build an app for pet owners to help them connect with their vets and I called it Pet Connect and I started making these wireframes and I would take them to mentors of mine and contacts through the college and I would probably reach out to 50 people or so in the final couple of years of veterinary school basically saying, hey, like I'm a vet student, I want to build this app. Here's a bunch of wireframes and they kind of sit down with me and they gave me a lot of good advice, but a lot of it focused on like, hey, this idea is kind of cool and interesting, but like, who are you and why do you care about these things and why are you passionate about this? And I think what many people maybe saw at that time that I didn't see was that you know, this particular idea might come and go and and maybe it was that thing, but they were really interested and really trying to support me in this kind of journey to to my background in education in some unique ways, and that was ultimately what led to my first job with LifeLearn.
Adam:So it was a really interesting kind of arc through veterinary school because by the time I actually left school I then spent, I went right to work with this company, lifelearn, after spending a little bit of time in Silicon Valley at an institution called Singularity University, kind of being further exposed to some of these new technologies. So it was a combination of like hey, you know, maybe one or two decisions in first year kind of led to a bunch of other decisions and opportunities down the road. But I do think back sometimes about like what would have happened if I just took the job in neuro that summer. But in many ways it kind of compounded in ways that I couldn't necessarily anticipate at the time.
Ira:Well, you know, potentially because you're smarter than the two of us, but you know, so you skip this step that Stacee and I had along the way of being a practicing veterinarian, for the most part right, and so like how do you feel about that? Or how did I mean, how did that sort of happen?
Adam:Yeah, it's a good question. I think that wasn't necessarily a deliberate choice. I think for me, what I was really driven by was and I remember thinking about this in fourth year because obviously at that point you have people that basically get categorized into buckets are you large or small animal? I remember we'd go for like like a dinner, like a sponsored dinner, and they'd ask people like, raise your hands if you're going to go to small animal, raise your hands if you're going to go to large animal. And I'd be sitting there and I'd be like I don't necessarily feel like I'm in the right place.
Adam:But I think for me what I was really driven by was actually, ironically enough, like helping pets. And from my perspective I was thinking, hey, if my goal is to help as many animals as I can, the best way to do that would be to be able to build systems or create systems or upgrade the systems of care to help all my colleagues practice at the best level possible. And I was really driven by and to this day still am this idea that by working on those problems you can have a really significant impact on patient care. Now, at times do I wish I would have gone into practice, I think at times I think it would have been an advantage, but I do think that it didn't necessarily become a deterrent or to the detriment of my career and it allowed me to kind of pursue opportunities that might otherwise been difficult to have pursued.
Ira:That's really interesting. Certainly, I think it's something that is in common with my story and Stacee's and maybe most entrepreneurs, but this realization that you have at some point that if I build something that everybody can use, that can have a much bigger impact than me providing services that only a limited number of people actually can have access to yeah, I, I think so and I think that there's like a degree of empathy maybe for the veterinary experience that, while I haven't practiced, I think is shared between people who have spent significant time in this industry.
Adam:um, that I think when you take a step back now and you see kind of the flood of capital, new players, is sometimes maybe lacking, um, about what it's really like to be in some of those environments. So you know, my wife sometimes jokes, um, she's like, oh yeah, you can go in there and, like you know, spay a dog or kind of get there. I'm like, look, it's kind of like riding your bike, like I never. It's not like I'm going back and like picking up a bike. It's like I never built the muscle memory of actually providing care in that way, and so it's not so much like, hey, I took a couple of years off.
Adam:It's that during that really impactful time for people, when they first are kind of put into clinics and spend a lot of time with patients and with their teams, they just grow so much and they build a level of confidence and a level of competency that I think if I was to go back, I'd need a lot of shadowing. But on the other side, I do consider myself very fortunate that I get to work with veterinarians every single day, consider myself very fortunate that I get to work with veterinarians every single day, and I think it's one of the greatest professions and industries out there, with some really special people and some things that make it particularly fun to work in. So, yeah, it's just maybe a different part of it, I think, by maybe going this route.
Ira:Yeah, no, I certainly agree that we have the best people in this field by and large. So tell me a little bit about how you went from working at LifeLearn and sort of being involved in innovation there to actually taking the leap and getting involved with your own startup own startup, yeah, so.
Adam:So I think maybe the kind of the connective tissue between or the thread between those two things was that when I was at Lifeline I was doing a lot of business development work and we brought in this, this project with IBM Watson. We were building a decision support tool and LifeLearn at the time had done a lot more like kind of services work and they had some products, but I think they weren't kind of the traditional kind of product building technology force. They had a vibrant kind of industry services business. So it was a bit of a different process to be able to kind of go zero to one with this technology. And I remember kind of going through that process and thinking like you just need everybody kind of focused on this one thing, and and it was maybe difficult in that environment to really birth this completely new product, which is something that happens a lot in in in you know, larger companies with more established lines of business. So after that I decided you know, do some consulting kind of play around, look at some other ideas.
Adam:I was starting, let's say, get on the periphery of some of these startups. I was doing some advising, talking to some folks, but I was always kind of looking at that point, saying I want to find something to start myself. And ironically enough, I ended up meeting my co-founder through that program at Singularity University, where he was a VC on the climate side, who from his journey he was getting increasingly active as a board member, as an investor and really kind of getting to the point in his own career where he was ready to start something. He wanted to actually be a builder and I was kind of doing the same. And so we kind of met at a time in both our lives where we were really interested in starting something together or starting something and then kind of found each other.
Adam:And I would go to a lot of those meetings and a lot of those kind of community events saying, hey, we should be looking at the animal health space, we should be looking at veterinary medicine.
Adam:This is an amazing industry.
Adam:It's got all these kind of problems, but there's an opportunity to build businesses to solve those problems and I think if we can find the right team and the right people, we can do something special. And so that's how Mike and I met and we kind of embarked on this journey and one of the things I'm particularly proud of which I'm sure we'll revisit towards the end when we talk about you know how that business ended up going is that many of the early backers of our business were people that I had built relationships with throughout my entire career and in school. We had my first dean, my first boss, the chair of the board of my first company I worked for, and so it was a reflection for me personally that there was a lot of people that were willing to bet on me, not just kind of metaphorically, but actually, like you know, with their own dollars, um, and we're really big believers, I think, in me as a co-founder of this business, and that was something I took very seriously, um, throughout the entire time in that company.
Ira:Uh, that's. That's great and awesome to have such supportive backers at the beginning, for sure. So why don't you tell me about kind of what the initial vision was when you started? Future Pet.
Adam:Yeah.
Adam:So it's really interesting because it did.
Adam:The product changed, but I think the vision was always pretty consistent, which was, if we can find a way to create a great experience for clients around a visit, within a visit, we can make the lives of veterinarians a lot easier, we can lead to those appointments being better from an efficiency standpoint, from a compliance standpoint standpoint, from a compliance standpoint, and the idea is to really take away, or kind of, you know, take on the responsibility of adding value to those appointments in a way that didn't require the vets to have to manage all those tasks.
Adam:So what we started with was intake. We thought, hey, you know, if we can gather as complete a history as possible while also helping to set expectations with owners ahead of that visit, you could ideally, in theory, create these veterinary visits that were much quicker, that were more personal, and by setting expectations up front we thought that you could drive an increase in compliance. So we set out to build this intake software that would integrate with practice management software systems and, practically speaking, what that would do is, hey, we'd read all these appointments, we'd text the owners and we would then try to build that complete medical history to the best of our ability behind those exams. So that was kind of like the vision, this idea that can we kind of wrap technology around a practice, upgrade the experience through technology? And where we focus initially was intake.
Ira:Got it, and what did you? Learn trying to build that solution.
Adam:It was a really interesting story and one that, yeah, almost the naivety of what we were kind of working on, I think now today is kind of funny to look back on. So I think the first thing that we really ran into was which is something that I think a lot of businesses, whether or not they recognize it, face face today is that for us to create that value, we needed an integration with the practice management software system. And those integrations are cumbersome, they're expensive and they can be unreliable. And one of the things that I never really appreciated until we kind of got in there is that you can have, like a great product and you can be doing everything on your side, right, but if, like, that integration leads to an experience that is not just not ideal but can actually be harmful, it kind of doesn't matter how good your part of the puzzle is.
Adam:Um, people are going to be upset. Um, I kind of and a comparison to this is like, imagine you rent an Airbnb and the pipes burst. If you're the guest of that Airbnb, you don't really care about the plumber or who they are, you just blame the host. You're like look, you have to solve this problem, even if the host is saying, well, I'm not the plumber, right, it's the idea that you're buying into this experience.
Adam:So in our case, what that manifested as was that we couldn't reliably at the time what that manifested as was that we couldn't reliably at the time really gain an understanding of who these appointments were for, what types of appointments there were, and one issue kind of really manifested itself that ultimately caused us to pivot that business. So we had a large and kind of like anchor pilot agreement with this new practice group and they were in the process of also acquiring clinics. So you got to appreciate, like they're going through their own process, they're trying to sell these practices on. Hey, you know, this is going to be the group we're going to and we are now the solution, one of the solutions that they are kind of bringing first to the table, to try to get these practices to adopt.
Ira:No pressure.
Adam:Yeah, exactly. So we found out through some of the integrations that, through kind of our onboarding, that there was a particularly sticky integration issue where, for this particular practice, we were reading or integrations were kind of reading these phantom appointments. And for those people who might not be as familiar with them, these are appointments that don't kind of exist on the user interface but in the database do exist and so, for example, they can be with like a recurring appointment that's sent into the future because you have like a vaccine appointment scheduled for every single year. And so we we, practically speaking, what it meant was we got to the point that we were sending appointment reminders for an appointment that didn't exist, for doctors who didn't work there anymore, for pets who were no longer alive.
Adam:It was awful and and we are like in firefighting mode at this point, right, and our technical team is saying like we don't, we can't distinguish this, we don't know what's going on, there's only so much that we can do. And it got to the point where we just said, look, we can't, if we can't fix this problem, we can't provide this solution. And you can imagine the willingness to kind of wait through this, for for those clinics, like it doesn't exist right and clients exactly right and so we just pulled the plug, we gave them back all their money and we pivoted the company.
Adam:Um, to be honest, in part because that kind of real-time reading of the practice data from the integration partner we were working with at the time was so unreliable that it basically cratered our business or at least created that particular product, and so that was really tough because it felt like, as a founder, there was this very specific technical problem that maybe I didn't fully understand at the time or didn't really know how to solve our team's getting frustrated.
Adam:Obviously our customers are incredibly frustrated, but it really taught me a very important but kind of tough lesson about the sensitivity of those client relationships and the care that practice has kind of put into cultivating that relationship. You know, in these cases these are people at times that have been with the practice for five or 10 years, right, and the last thing they want is even one phone call from somebody complaining about something, let alone an issue like this. So it was a tough period for that business or for our business, but you know, we navigated it the best that we could, I think, by, you know, taking responsibility, refunding it and basically shutting that part down.
Ira:Well, let me give you a quote which might or might not make you feel any better. It's not mine, it's taken from a friend of mine named Trip Stewart, and he said, and he said I have seen so many great companies die on the mountain of practice management system integration.
Adam:It's, it's a, it's a good one like, and this has been for for for for me, um, I think a lesson I had to learn a couple different times but that reliance again of those integrations as an essential building block for your product. Hey, we're going to be great if A, b and C comes together. And then you quickly realize, hey, wait a second, we can't control A, b and C, or it doesn't work like that or it's too expensive. So, yeah, I can certainly relate to that quote.
Ira:So you had to shut down this major part of your business and look to make a shift.
Adam:What did you do? So there's two times in our company's history that we had to lay off 50% of the team, and that was one of the times we ended up pivoting towards this consumer-facing rewards program, this loyalty program, and we ended up building this loyalty and rewards membership model that we partnered with Vet Clinics to provide but ultimately was sold to pet owners. And so we ended up really trying to focus on a bit of a different part of the journey. We again kind of getting back to that vision, we thought, hey, could we create incentives that would allow people to, that would allow us to drive the right behaviors for pet owners? And we started rolling out this loyalty program, which would basically consist of a couple of components, out this loyalty program, which would basically consist of a couple of components, one was like 5% back on your pet's spending, which would then have to be spent back at the clinic, and so this idea that you could kind of build up a bit of a pet savings account coupled with a 24/7 support, and we provided that we'd sell that to pet owners and we'd promote that through clinics and we'd have kind of a network of clinics that would uh, honor and support that, uh, that, that reward plan, um, so that.
Adam:So that took us for the next couple years and at that time we were starting to bring on industry partners. Uh, covid happened, um, and so there was some minor modifications there, but that really became the initial building block towards what we then began to roll out, towards kind of the second half of GoFetch, I would say, which was these wellness plans, so kind of taking that core technology and actually building out these subscription services, which brought us back into that integration game a little bit, maybe a little bit more informed but certainly not bulletproof. But that became the direction of the business. And it was at that time then that we also began to bring on some new investors and partners, some strategic partners that ended up playing a very significant, at times really positive, at times challenging role to the business, times challenging role to the business. But that was basically kind of the journey where you know loyalty rewards, wellness plans and kind of continuing to build in that direction.
Ira:Did you guys have a moment where it just kind of really felt like you know, what we're doing is working and sort of people are kind of getting this and things are starting to feel good?
Adam:Yeah, I think that's maybe one of the problems is that we felt that moment a lot and I think in some ways that's positive because you need those moments to kind of convince yourself to kind of keep going.
Adam:But at times those moments weren't necessarily driven by like customer success. So it would be like the release of a feature, not necessarily like the widespread adoption of it. At times those moments weren't necessarily driven by customer success. So it would be like the release of a feature, not necessarily the widespread adoption of it, getting an investment but not necessarily securing a customer contract. There was a couple of moments, looking back now, when we launched our wellness plans, where we started to really see that going, when we crossed some kind of financial milestones plans where we started to really see that going when we crossed some kind of financial milestones.
Adam:But I think, looking back, I think the reality is like we just never got product market fit throughout the entire seven-year history of the company and I think there was many times that we felt like we were close to having it and and I think that proved to be a bit challenging like, in some ways, one of one of our, one of our former employees. He's a our CTO. He's a great guy and he says you guys always know how to turn lemons into lemonade. And I think that was that, was that was true, in that we were able to find a way to just kind of keep going through like three or four different versions of the business and there's something about that kind of grit and resilience that I think is like an essential ingredient, but it has to be paired with kind of a more singular pursuit in that, like what you're building is making a difference. You can't just like stay in the ring To just stay in the ring, you have to be working towards something, and it took us a long, long time for us to realize that we needed to like really significantly simplify our business and really almost drive an engine that was just geared towards product market fit. And so the way that I look at like our company is a little bit in these two components, where at least two these two parts, where that intake to loyalty, to wellness plans, that was this kind of like continuous stream where we just kind of kept adding stuff and kind of trying to find our way and convincing ourselves that by adding more we were somehow making the business better.
Adam:But in reality, when I took a step back, I'm like I think we just made the business way more complicated and we ended up having to deal with that complexity when, ultimately, about a year before we went out of business, we ended up having to deal with that complexity when, ultimately, about a year before we went out of business, we ended up making another really significant pivot and having to shut that part of the business down to pursue another direction, which we can talk about in a second.
Adam:But I think it was this idea that we were able to kind of find a way to keep going. We thought that adding more stuff was going to help us get the product market fit or really just kind of blurred the lines where people were like I get all these things, but I'm not really sure that I need any of them, and ultimately we were able to kind of celebrate these milestones that we were hitting. That for us felt really impressive. But I think, objectively, we just weren't on the right trajectory and that that became pretty clear as well. So there was certainly a bit of a painful period when you start realizing like, hey, you know, we're just not on a path to being able to get to that next horizon a little bit.
Ira:Yeah, let me ask you about this, which is this. It's kind of like this entrepreneurial conundrum On the one hand, you need to have this personality and drive to you know, not let bad news stop you or slow you down and to be able to be able to overcome a variety of types of hardships and somehow, at the same time, you have to have a personality and sort of analytical piece that's able to look and say you know what, like this isn't working and we can't keep doing it. We have to shift our, our thinking or our strategy a little bit. And, like, I don't know, how do you think about that? That sort of conflict?
Adam:Yeah, it's, it's a really good question. So I think, from for me now, what I didn't do at the time which I wish I would have done was be really focused, almost like just personally. Like what metrics do I need to see in the business so that I'm confident that we're on the right track, to, at the same time, hold this like really compelling vision that can like evangelize your team, can evangelize your investors, can give you the direction worth going, but kind of knowing that on a day-to-day basis, we are focused on the right things. And I think for us, where we really struggled was that we ended up hiring way too early for roles that we didn't need, in part because we thought that that would kind of solve maybe some of those those problems and and and and, at the same time, be able to, okay, we don't understand this thing. So let's go hire somebody to like help us figure it out. But the problem is, like when you're really early and you haven't figured it out yourself, like if you hire a salesperson and, as a founder, you haven't figured it out yourself. Like if you hire a salesperson and, as a founder, you haven't figured out how to sell this, like how are you supposed to train that person right, if you are? And so we ended up hiring people that ultimately, I think we didn't necessarily set them up for success, in part because we hadn't gotten the clarity in our business in terms of what we actually need, what were the drivers of our growth, what skill sets we wanted.
Adam:And that was when, I think, the times were the worst where we had kind of this combination of. We have this vision that people seem excited about, but we have a lot of people now. They are either doing things that I don't necessarily know if they're all aligned, or they're looking for direction what they should do, and we're not seeing the growth of the business from like just a dollars and cents perspective. And and I think that I do wonder, like if it's like for me, we almost have to learn these lessons the hard way in order to like get, get the learning right. And so, like I've read almost like every startup book you can have and I remember thinking how do people make these mistakes? It seems so much more straightforward, but it's almost made worse by the fact that I've read those books and then still made those same mistakes.
Adam:Your point you have to have this like unbridled enthusiasm and belief and confidence that at time, can maybe distract from some some of that sober reality.
Adam:Um, and I think back to some of the best advisors that we've had in the business, and some of them were like very experienced entrepreneurs and they were never afraid to say like hey, like this doesn't seem like it's working, like you guys can make all the excuses you want, you can blame a bunch of people or a bunch of reasons, you can blame these integrations, but, putting that all aside, like you're just not making the progress.
Adam:And I think at times that, yeah, sense of almost like fatigue senses as well, because at this point you're like several years into it, you feel like you've given 110 and you're like, look, I, I don't know why it's, we're just not seeing that growth, um, and so that was that was particularly challenging, for sure. And so that ability to have to simultaneously hold this incredible clarity on what you need to achieve in a short period of time, such that you give people direction and they know what success looks like, while also painting this like super compelling vision about the way that the world could be that evangelizes everybody I think it's very difficult to be a leader that can do both of those things.
Ira:You almost need two different personalities, right.
Adam:Yeah, exactly, it's really, really, really hard, um, and we ended up getting that lesson, and maybe this is kind of the final chapter of the story. So I mentioned that there was two moments in the company that we laid off 50 of the people, and the last time we did that was um December 2022. We had, at that point, we had um two products. We had this kind of wellness, let's say, frankensteinian product that we had been, we threw so much into and just to kind of paint a picture of all the things that we developed, we had a pet owner app. We had a clinic-facing dashboard. We could build these custom plans for any of the clinic services. We sold them direct to pet owners. We were the first business to sell wellness plans direct to Pat owners. We were the first business to sell wellness plans directly to Pat owners in association with that clinic. We had baked in financing and telehealth. We had this new checkout process. We built so much stuff that we thought was necessary to get going which spoiler alert, it wasn't.
Adam:But we have this really complex product with customers that we've been working for a long time. And on the other side, we had this really simple payment app that was using some of the technology that we built for the wellness plan, but this was focused on point of sale financing and payments for veterans that had insurance, and that product was called GoFetch Pay. So we had GoFetch Plus on the wellness side and then we had GoFetch Pay, and we looked at our business and we said we can't, we have two products in one business and we're not like, we have to get one right Right. And GoFetch Plus was something that was burning a lot of cash. It was really difficult to support, there was a lot of technical challenges, and so basically, we wound that down, and so that day we laid off half the company. We called you know, I called every single one of our customers in Canada to let them know that. Hey, you know, I know that we've been following these wellness plans for a while, but we're going to have to shut those down.
Adam:That was a particularly tough day, I would say. And then we doubled down on this go fetch pay direction and we said we're just going to do this and honestly, I think the heartbreaking part of it is like I feel like that was still the right decision at the time. It was a product that was far simpler. It was a much clearer value proposition. We had an anchor customer for it.
Adam:We can talk about what happened there, but it was the first time in our company's history that I felt like we were actually shedding some of the complexity that we had created and we finally began to understand, like, what we needed to do to get to that next level. But, like, as you know, like I don't have a business background, like I went to vet school, and so the idea of like having employees and like letting people go is not something that is is enjoyable at all. And having done that now twice, virtually on zoom, you know you, you bear a lot of, you carry a lot of weight for that, and you start to realize that, at the end of the day, there's a lot of people involved in these businesses. And, and so that was kind of another kind of unfortunate milestone in the business when we made that tough decision to basically wind down one product and, as a consequence of that, really simplify our operations.
Ira:I want to ask you more about that, but maybe I'll save that for our next episode Adam, if that's all right. But yeah, I would like to hear about you know sort of the next year after sort of that and sort of how things sort of transpire.
Adam:Yeah. So you got to imagine, at this point we're like six years in or close to that We've now doubled down in one direction. One of our strategic partners and insurance companies is kind of the anchor customer for this product. The way that this product worked just so kind of the audience is aware is that, um, the insurance space is a reimbursement model, and one of the things that people don't realize about that is the reason it's that way, or part of the reason is because one insurance company, trupanian, has ip that prevents other insurance companies from integrating with the practice management software systems for the purposes of kind of adjudicating claims, and so it's a reimbursement model. And the way that that manifests in a problematic way is that you know you can be a pet owner who's done everything right. Right, you got your insurance, you're there, you go in and you're faced with like a $2,000, $3,000, $4,000 bill and you're saying, look, I have coverage, I just don't have four grand at this exact moment. And what are those pet owners supposed to do? And so we thought that we could build this new kind of payment experience around that use case, and so what we did was we unlocked the ability for any pet insurance company to be able to provide upfront, to eliminate upfront out-of-pocket expenses, and what that would actually do is, if you're a pet owner that had this app and you had one of our connected insurance policies, you'd be able to generate in real time a virtual visa card that would work at any clinic. We didn't need any integration, so we started shedding some of that complexity and you could pay for that care and then the insurance claim would be reimbursed to your balance on the card and anything that insurance didn't cover would be rolled over into a low interest payment plan. That's what we had been working on. That's what we began to roll out. That's the direction that we doubled down on.
Adam:We signed a contract for a particular brand that we were growing quickly with, and I mentioned that we had kind of two strategic partners as investors. Obviously, this one was a customer. That strategic partner had been acquired themselves the previous summer and, and so we had been working on this project with them for kind of a couple of years. They get a new owner. That owner's got a lot of other relationships, a lot of other priorities, and it just became very clear that they had a different vision of what they wanted to do and where their new insurance company kind of fit amongst their portfolio. And so it was really a hard pillow to swallow, because it wasn't so much like pet owners saying I don't like this product, or us dealing with technical integrations, it was our main customer basically saying look, we are not in a position anymore to continue this relationship and us feeling like we never necessarily got a chance to basically bring that out and really scale it. And so that was really challenging.
Adam:And ultimately, when that became clear for us it was a bit of a death blow, because at that point, to take a step back six months earlier, we've shut down one product and doubled down in this direction.
Adam:We've laid off half the company, evangelized people around this new direction and now kind of feel like our feet have been taken out from underneath us.
Adam:And at that point we kind of looked at the options for the business and my co-founder you know rightfully so was like look, like we've been through a lot at this point. Right, we found a way to kind of keep going, but we now have a situation where one of our core partners and investors has basically said like look, I'm not going to be able to support this company logistically and, practically speaking, there's no way, like, what are we supposed to do with this kind of gap? How do we at all, you know, navigate through that? And also, I think our shared belief and confidence in the business was low and we felt that if we couldn't present a direction that we believed into the team, they were probably going to walk anyway. But we couldn't confidently be able to do that, and so we made the decision, with the remaining cash, to basically wind down the business, repay our last round of investment, our bridge round, and provide our team with the softest landing possible given the circumstances. And that's what, ultimately, we decided to do.
Ira:Yeah, it reminds me a little bit of a lesson that I only learned more recently related to kind of building a product and then selling it to a potentially larger population of individual end users, versus having a key component of your business be dependent on another large business or a really large customer.
Ira:because while it seems like a shortcut to getting a lot of traction to make a relationship with a big partner. You just have so much risk tied up in that partner and if you just don't work out for random reasons like in this case the acquisition of that business by somebody else all of a sudden everything you've been building towards can be kind of cut out from under you, which is just a big risk.
Adam:Yeah, 100%. There's like kind of a couple of phrases that I remember people telling me or laying out when we were building. One was like customer concentration risk, and I remember when we were talking to somebody about this, I think they could see much more clearly than us at the time that like, hey, guys, like you think that this is an advantage, but it's not. It's like a huge flag. Um, so that was one thing. And then the other thing too was an investor at the time that we were trying to to get on board. He says something really interesting and this was the picture on the wellness plans he goes. He asked did this business used to be something else? And I said, well, actually, 100. Yeah, like from my perspective it felt like we were just kind of adding or whatever. But the reality is like we have different chapters of the story and and for him it was kind of like I think he could tell like this business had become a purpose and these capabilities had been kind of re-bundled to try to find, you know, something that would work. And and for him, you know that was obviously not a good sign. But I think I don't look back at it at the time it just kind of felt like almost like a continuous stream, right. We just kind of went on to the next thing, but and I think, had we maybe done a better job of like doing a like more of a reset at times that would have been a little bit more clear, or maybe articulating to like our team, like what we've learned that would allow us to kind of go in this direction. What success would need to look like? Moving forward, we were just really good at finding a way to kind of keep going. Um, and and I think in part that's why it really stung when it ended the way it did, it was because it kind of felt like we had learned so many hard lessons. We'd taken a lot of our you know, a healthy dose of medicine to get to the point where we could be successful, and it just wasn't the right time.
Adam:Now, that being said, you know, you take a step back now and you're like we were about to bring into the market a financing solution, not like a 0% interest environment, right, and the reality is maybe the business would have struggled. It probably would have struggled in some different ways. And so I think there was a quote or something I was reading. It was kind of like you know, good founders are able to like in, like, like basically no one situations like make great decisions and the failure.
Adam:I don't regret it. I don't really feel bad about it in the way that I might have maybe earlier in my career and I can be proud of the way that we handled things, and part of the reason I feel comfortable saying that is because I went back to all those investors who wrote us small checks that had known me and I was like look, I'm sorry, this is what happened, and none of them. They all reacted with like such grace and support that it actually made me like emotional and maybe even higher with them and and and. So that helped me feel okay about the way things that ultimately ended up.
Ira:Yeah, as somebody that's sort of become a bit of a angel investor in early stage businesses, it's not surprising to hear I'm glad to hear it that that was your experience. But, as I think about the investments that I wanna make, it's usually mostly investments in people and teams and believing in them and wanting to see them, support them and see them do well and and so ultimately, you know, I want to be able to feel good that, even if this didn't turn out to be the right idea at the right time, that you know you work with good people, you tried hard, you all learned, and that you're sort of in this together and it's not like me versus them, like I've given you this and now it's your job to sort of give me something back in return. It is your job to do that. But yeah, I think I try to look at it a little bit differently and I'm glad that was your experience as well.
Ira:I did want to ask you about just sort of the yeah, kind of like the aftermath of winding down your company that you'd worked on for all these years. And, you know, maybe now you have the perspective to say, hey, you know, this was, this was great and we, you know, tried hard and tried to do some good things. And some of these problems you know progress has been made on them, but yeah, I guess, like, how did? How did you do, like how did you sort of feel in the more you know the weeks and months immediately following that, and how about?
Adam:Yeah, the weeks and months immediately following that and how about it, it was strange. To be honest, I kind of didn't really appreciate how much of my life was just plugged into this business right All your routines like, all your kind of like, just like how you, you know how you set up your desktop, all the accounts that you're logged in, like there's you're so ingrained on on so many levels and one day the kind of the train kind of stops, right. Um, you know, we had a period like a wind down period where a couple of us stayed on just to kind of close off some accounts, and that was a bit of a weird limbo period. Um, I think for me being able you know, I wrote a little bit about it, I wrote some stuff to myself as well just to kind of, I think, preserve some of the learnings and also just how I felt and give myself a little bit of an outlet, I think for me, one of the things that's kind of kept me motivated is that I think the problems that we were trying to solve were like meaningful ones, and I still am passionate about trying to solve them, and I think that there has been a lot of progress that other folks have made and there's kind of new. You know, a little bit like a whack-a-mole and we got whacked, but there's a whole bunch of new folks that you know are saying, hey, these are good. So I can kind of maybe contribute or explore some of those opportunities from a slightly more informed and experienced position than before.
Adam:Um, I think it gave me an opportunity to also be more deliberate about um building relationships with like friends and family. You know we have a young son that you know he kind of came into this world in the in the thick of a lot of this, and so it's been really nice to be able to be more present in his life and and kind of realize and maybe recalibrate what the next phase of my career looks like around those commitments and the desire to be really present with with both my wife and him. It kind of felt like almost I needed to talk to other founders as well, like you know people who had kind of been through it and I I think that for me the relationship to to like work and career is something that's really different. When you've been like a founder, like you can't you can't just go back to a job. You'll never go back to a job At least I won't Right In the traditional way, like I'm always going to try to find projects and people that I can do more with.
Adam:I don't work well in environments where people are just kind of like not trying to take big swings or don't really care about the work that they're doing. And I think for me, the thing that I really miss most is the team, right, the team of people that we built, the team that worked their butts off, the team that really brought the best out of me at times, and it is kind of strange to go and say like, look, those people exist and we've been very supportive, and one of my, again, one of the things I'm proud about is that almost all of them have kind of found roles that I think are well suited for them and they've kind of been roles that I think are well-suited for them and they've kind of been able to move on to the next thing. But you know, it's kind of like you know, the band going away and I think for some of them, having spoken directly, there's a sense too that like, hey, you know that was a fun time and we did a lot of good work and it was really meaningful, even if it didn't work out. So that's a bit of a recalibration where you know it's not like we have this big office where we kind of shut the doors. It's like you close your laptop and and those relationships not necessarily done, but look considerably different.
Adam:Um, my co-founder and I still kind of catch up every once in a while. He's talking the climate space and doing some meaningful work there. Um, and and yeah, I'm really grateful for the opportunity I recognize the position that we were in to even have an opportunity where people were willing to take a shot on this and take a shot on us. And so, yeah, it's been, it's been an interesting period and it's it's almost coming up on a year which kind of feels like it's been a bit of a wild time. Time feels very different.
Ira:I'm sure, I'm sure. Thank you very much, adam, for sharing your story and your journey with us. I think, a little bit like science, I think entrepreneurship and business, like you tend to see and hear the stories of the things that went well, and there's probably at least as many interesting, if not more interesting, things to learn and think about related to the experiments that did not go as well, and they're still yeah, I mean, they're still really important work and they're valuable. So thank you for sharing that all with me. I'm going to have you on for another episode soon, and we have a tradition here that we spin this wheel and it will give us a question that we are going to tackle at that next episode. So just give me a minute here, all right. What is some key advice you would give a new startup? So think about that a little bit and we will answer it at our next episode. Thanks everyone for joining us.
Adam:Awesome. Thank you everyone.
