Starting & Scaling Airvet As A Leading Pet Care Marketplace With Brandon Werber | EM Group Chat #189

Welcome back to Everything Marketplaces, where we talk with founders and leaders from some of today's top marketplaces. So this is episode 189, which is a really great group chat we just had with Brandon Werber, who's the founder and CEO of AirVet. AirVet is a leading platform for virtual veterinary and pet care. They scale to being used by thousands of veterinary practices. They've also raised over $45 million in capital from top investors like Headline, Burst Capital, and Highland X. So Brandon was a group chat guest when we first started the community, so it's great to welcome him back on. And we started off by going back to the founding story and first steps to starting AirVet. Some of the early challenges got to learn what led to their enterprise offering. We did a deep dive into his leading platform for veterinary and pet care today. Got to learn about the growth. Brendan shared some of his key fundraising learnings after raising over $45 million in capital from top investors, and we also had a great group Q&A. I really enjoyed this conversation. You're going to find it a great watch to the end. So Brendan, it's been a few years since your past group chat, so we're long overdue for the follow-up here. I want to start off by saying, you know, huge thanks for taking the time to join us here again today. And we have a lot that we're going to dive into with Airvet and the latest, but I thought it'd be great if you can start off our brief with sharing your background as a quick refresher, and also for those that have more recently joined us here.

Happy to.

Yeah.

So I'm Brandon Werber, founder of a company called Airvet. And for those not familiar with it, best way to think about what Airvet is, is it's Teladoc for pets. So if anyone has pets, you know that it's a taking them to the vet and getting in with the vet and paying the vet bills is a lot. And we've seen a huge paradigm shift and kind of more accessible and affordable care on the human side. And we thought it'd be high time that people started being able to care for their pets in the same way that they care for themselves and their kids and their family members. So that's what AirVet is. A little bit about just my quick background on my side. So I grew up here in LA. I'm about 2 blocks from where Mike lives, actually, is where I lived with my wife at the time, girlfriend, now wife, and then we moved into Beverlywood. I have 3 kids, all boys, 5 and under. So I accept all prayers of any kind all the time. So we live here in LA now. AirVet is my, I would say, second and a half company. The first one was my MBA, so to speak, where I got all the learnings and made a whole bunch of mistakes. I still make a lot of mistakes, just not nearly as many, at least not the same ones. And I would say I grew up in the pet space. My dad is a veterinarian. I wanted to be a veterinarian my entire life, always thought that's what I would do. And I worked in his hospital for 15 years. And then I graduated, I went to USC undergrad, and I studied, I went to Marshall and did business. I apply absolutely none of it to my day-to-day building a business. So I guess that was just, basically I use more networking than I do any business thing that I learned in a textbook from school. But the best way to, I think, to learn about building a business is just to build one. It doesn't really matter if it succeeds or not. You just get all those learnings way more than, you know, Accounting 250A. So that is a little bit about me. Started Airvet in 2018. As a consumer business, we made a big pivot a few years ago to B2B, and that's really where the training wheels came off and we went into hypergrowth mode. So that's just a little bit about me, the company. I have a French bulldog named Carlos who was my first kid, still around today, and he's being a lazy French bulldog over there, weighing in at a staggering 40 pounds. So you might meet him before the chat is over.

That's awesome. And really great background. So thanks for sharing with us on that. And a lot that we're gonna get into, but, you know, going back to the very beginning, you know, what was the founding story for Airbit? And what were the first steps that you took to start at the time?

So as I mentioned, I grew up in the pet space. My dad's a veterinarian and of course he lives, and he lives a block away from where we live in Beverlywood. And my sister lives a block the other way. So whenever people ask like, what's it like being a block away from your parents? I say it's like Everybody Loves Raymond, but it's not funny. So that is the easiest way to understand that. And so I grew up always having pets. I went to USC and had a pet. I got a French bulldog that we recently lost, but he made it to 14, which is, which is a heck of a long life for a Frenchie. And my dad was my vet, of course. So anytime I had an issue, I never had to think about what something costs, right, at the vet. I never had to think about, you know, do I have to go to an ER or can I wait 10 days for my appointment? Um, to, uh, to go in with my vet. I just never had to think about access and cost. It was never a consideration. Uh, and I didn't actually realize how fortunate I was because it was so normal for me to just be able to drive a block and have my dad take a look at something, or him come to me. And it was just, it was amazing. But I, I took it very much for granted because I didn't know the other, uh, the way the other 99.9% of pet parents live. where those— when your pet gets sick, like when your kid gets sick, it's really stressful and you do have to think about the costs and you don't know if you need to go in. So one day, and this is all a terrifying but true story, my dad and mom were on safari in South Africa. They went on a safari. And Carlos comes into the house one day and just acting all weird and he just starts just violently throwing up like out of nowhere. And in his throw-up were these perfectly not chewed plants. And in the throw-up, when I went to clean it, very perfectly preserved, right? And he did not chew them at all, as Frenchies do with their food. And I took a picture of it and I put it into Google Image Recognition to see what is this plant. And it was a plant called asparagus fern, which I had in the backyard, apparently. Of course, my next Google, uh, was, is asparagus fern toxic for dogs? Yes, it is. So that clearly, that's what was going on. I don't know how much he ate. I don't know if he threw it all up or if there was more in his system or if I needed to induce vomiting or go to the ER. So I called my dad, um, straight to voicemail. Text him, wait 5 minutes, no response. Uh, call him again, text him, 911, need help ASAP, Carlos ate something toxic. No response. And it was like, in that moment, for the very first time, I knew, kind of felt exactly what it felt like to be the average pet owner, because these were not concerns I ever had. My dad was always available. If he didn't answer his cell, I called his office and the office went, oh yeah, Jeff's in surgery. And they would hold the speaker up to him, right? And then I had no access to him and I didn't know any other vets, right? My dad has been my vet my entire life. And it was in that moment I really felt the stress and just the fear that a pet parent has when their pets eat something toxic, or we don't know if their life's in danger or at risk at all. Do I go to an emergency? That's going to be $1,000+ just to walk in the door. And keep in mind, I've never paid a vet bill before. So it's like I didn't know what to expect because my dad's my vet. So that was the kind of impetus Of I want every single pet parent to have the level of access to a veterinarian that I've had my entire life and was so spoiled with. I want them to be able to pick up the phone, tap a button, and in seconds, not days or hours, being able to talk to a veterinarian and give guidance and support. And that's what we built AirVet based off of. And we do one thing that's really unique, which is we're actually the only on-demand care platform, human or pet, in the world. So what I mean by on-demand is You tap a button in the AirVet app, it's 24/7, and you will be FaceTiming with a US-based licensed vet in 15 seconds. It could be 11 o'clock at night, 3 AM. I did not want to build something that people had to book an appointment for 3 hours from now, because yes, 3 hours is a whole lot better than 10 days, right? But when your dog or cat or pet might have a life-threatening issue, talking to someone 3 hours from now is not helpful. at all. So it needed to be instantaneous. And that's what we ended up building. So that was the kind of impetus for why we built Airvet and why we built it in the way that we did.

Yeah, that's great to hear about. And, you know, as marketplaces, we face lots of challenges. But, you know, one of the big ones in the very beginning is the chicken and the egg or cold start problem. So how did you initially solve for this with Airvet?

Yeah, well, it's interesting. I would love to have so much more insight on how we solved the cold start. But the answer is we got really lucky. The answer is, I think for a lot of success with startups, it's just a mixture of preparation and timing and a whole lot of luck. Our luck, if you want to look at it that way, because it wasn't lucky for a lot of people in a lot of ways, but we launched Airvet out of our pilot about 90 days before COVID hit. So we, the way we were building first, the cold start is we said, well, how do you get thousands of doctors on a platform without millions of patients? And how do you get millions of patients without thousands of doctors, right? Especially if it's an on-demand service. So what we did is we said, well, let's go to the supply side first because it doesn't matter how many pet parents you have. If you don't have any vets helping them, then it doesn't matter. So we decided to go to the supply side first. So we were selling AirVet into hospitals, vet hospitals, so that they could use telemedicine with their own clientele. their own clients and patients so they could use it. We were doing about 18 demos a month for that. And we were building and selling at the same time, as it tends to be. So selling a lot of features we didn't have, but mostly to listen to the market about what they wanted. Like, what did vets want? Sometimes people asked for things or demanded things that they had to have, and then we built it and they didn't use it. And that's a very frustrating thing that we happen to have a whole separate session on that, but that happens. It's very frustrating because you spend a lot of money and time and end resources building things the market says it wants, and then you build it and they don't use it. But when COVID hit, 90 days after, we went from doing 18 demos a month to doing 100 a day. It was just insane. So that built our whole vet network because veterinarians had no choice but to adopt very quickly, like literally overnight, virtual care tools because pet parents were no longer allowed physically in the office. So they had no choice and AirVet was the one in the space. So we were very lucky and we brought thousands of vets on in a very short period of time. And like literally a few months after that, we closed a Series A that Canvas Ventures led. And they were, they've been fantastic to work with. But yeah, That was the cold start problem is we just got really, really lucky.

Yeah, it's definitely incredible to hear about the growth. And another topic that I wanted to spend some time discussing a little bit, and you briefly mentioned it, was shifting from consumer to having an enterprise kind of offering. So could you share a little bit more about what led to that? And then maybe also how that kind of changed the trajectory of your business as well?

Yeah, it turns out when the markets all shifted, the economy took a big hit. And it turned out that startups needed to make money and profitable revenue, not just revenue that costs $300 to make $100, but there needed to be line of sight and a clear path to profitability. As a D2C business, we didn't have that. The cost of acquiring customers one by one, one pet parent at a time, we found to be very difficult. It was costing anywhere from $100 to $250 a person to acquire them. But the problem is we had a lot of selection criteria that the people that were downloading and using AirVet were people that already had sick pets. People with healthy pets didn't sign up for AirVet. And so they would download AirVet because they were searching virtual vet or online vet. They would see AirVet. I think it was like 94% of people who signed up for an AirVet subscription, it was 30, it's $35 a month. would use it and do a doctor's visit with like within 2 hours of subscribing. So like we were finding the people that had sick pets. We are also, to our detriment at the time, so good at providing care and diagnosing and treating virtually that 2 days later their pet wasn't sick anymore. They had, or they had a whole care plan beyond that and they didn't need Air Vet anymore as a subscription. Because they got what they came for, so to speak. So they would cancel as soon as we cared for their pet and their pet was healthy. They no longer needed to pay every month. So what they would do is they would cancel and they would just resubscribe the next time their pet was sick. So we had a big leaky bucket and it just, the unit economics didn't work. And it was clear that we would be sinking millions and millions into acquiring customers and then trying to fill that leaky bucket. So We knew that wasn't going to work. We took a step back and looked for other, I would say at the time, just additional, not, not, not to replace D2C, but to add to it. So we decided that we would pitch something called the Silicon Valley Employer Forum because B2B was an idea that we had that could work because there's literally twice as many households with pets in the house than there are with kids in the house. So 70% of every household in America is a pet family. It'll be 83% over the next 4.5 years. Only about 35 or so percent of households have human kids in the house. So if you're an employer and you offer all these amazing family benefits to people with human kids, from childcare and backup care to insurance and healthcare to, you know, pediatrics to online tutoring and all these things, but you offer nothing to pet families. which is interesting because there's twice as many of them and they get nothing, no recognition, no support, and they're struggling. So we pitched Silicon Valley Employer Forum. We get 15 minutes to pitch and there's a bunch of employers on the other line. You don't know who they are. They don't tell you. And about 7 or 8 minutes into my pitch, I had an email pop up from Adobe and it said, hey, this is Amber at Adobe. We're on this pitch right now. This is exactly what we've been waiting for. Call me as soon as your pitch is over. 90 days later, we had a signed contract with Adobe where they would pay a couple hundred thousand dollars a year and all of their employees get unlimited care for free on AirVet. And that ended up being so successful. Our utilization as a benefit on AirVet was about 5 times higher than Teladoc on the human side. So no surprise to anyone with pets, you get free care, no copays, no deductibles, no premiums, no exclusions, nothing. You just tap a button, you talk to a vet whenever you want at no cost. That's gonna be pretty popular. And then we did the same thing with Samsung and Coca-Cola and Activision and Synchrony Financial and PepsiCo and all these huge companies that signed up for AirVet. And that's what gave us the freedom to go and all the validation we needed to fully pivot the company to B2B. And all we do today is support pet families and it's a great high margin business, will be profitable pretty soon. And we were able to raise a lot of venture capital off of that pivot because it was so successful and the growth rate was crazy.

That's really great to learn more about. And I know this is a topic too that's coming up quite often with founders in the community more recently, which is thinking, you know, some of the kind of considerations, you know, going down that potential path, you know, going from B2C to kind of B2B2C, right? On that note, do you have any maybe kind of tips for founders on how to approach thinking about that and some of the key considerations?

Totally. The way we did it before figuring out where to dump resources, because resources and time, right? Those are the constraints for a startup. We can't do all of it. So we have to figure out like, where do I, where do I have reason to believe? And you don't want to just guess there. So what we did is we didn't just choose employer because it sounded great. We took a step back. We were running out of money. It was clear that in this market, we weren't just gonna raise more money to go lose all of it going D2C and having a very unprofitable business. So we took a step back and we looked on the human side at a whole bunch of digital health companies and tried to— and the ones that we admired, right? So ones that have either become unicorns, ones that—

Yeah.

have sold, ones that have IPO'd, whatever it is, the ones that we admired. And we wanted to look for a common thread between all of them. Like, what did they do? What do they look like? How do they serve the market? And see if there were commonalities that we could apply. And what we found, we took about 10 companies we just chose as a team that we just thought were doing great, unique, cool things. So companies like Teladoc and Doctor on Demand, companies like Oscar Health and others, and tried to find what that common thread was. And the common thread was they were either all B2B, so they launched B2B, or like Doctor on Demand, they launched D2C and then pivoted to B2B. And that's when 10 out of 10 companies that you admire all have that common thread that they're not D2C companies. You start to realize that This just healthcare is really just, there are very few exceptions, but healthcare is not really a D2C business, at least not in the way that we see it with profitable, high margin businesses. So that's what gave us the validation that B2B is where we needed to take it. Then it was just a matter of how and who, right? Because B could mean a lot of types of businesses. We chose employer, but B2B could mean health plans. It can mean insurance providers. It could mean a lot of different things for us. We focused on employer because that's where we saw the biggest opportunity.

That's going to be really helpful. Probably lead to a few questions during the group Q&A. Also realize that before we dive into a few more topics, it might be helpful. Can you give us an overview of Airvet today and maybe kind of walk us through, you know, what that platform experience is like for each side?

Yeah. So we have thousands of doctors on Airvet, and the way we structured it is we don't hire any of them. So they're like Uber drivers. So they're vet on AirVet could be your vet, right? And they have in their vet app, they could swipe online whenever they want, swipe offline whenever they want and take visits from pet owners all over the country. So that's what the vet side looks like. On the consumer side, like I said, it could be anything. You could want to do a nutrition consult, end-of-life consult, chronic condition management. So if you have anybody here have a dog with Chronic allergies, for example, they're always paw licking or panting. They, their skin always has dandruff or like little bacterial sores that go on it, right? These are hard things that you can't solve in one visit for humans. You can't solve it in one visit for pets. So we have different types of solutions for people with chronic condition management, all the way to like, you know, my dog threw up and there's a little blood in it, and I'm panicked because I went on Google and Google said it could be A ruptured organ, or it could be a laceration in the esophagus, or it could be absolutely nothing and everything in between. So that's what it looks like 24/7. You tap a button, you're FaceTiming with a vet. We don't do like 15-minute consults. You talk as long as you need to until your situation's resolved. And yeah, we work with about a— right now, about 100 different Employers, typically very large employers. The employer pays a fixed rate for AirVet, and all employees get unlimited care for free for their pets.

And then are you still, as far as on the consumer side, are you still acquiring consumers directly, or is this primarily through enterprise and employers?

It exists, right? If somebody needs care for their pet and they can't get into a vet, like, I'm not going to turn them away for care. It's $35 a month. They could pay for it themselves, but we don't market it. at all, right? It exists on the website, but we literally don't spend $1 on the D2C side. It's just not profitable for us because people use it so— I mean, we had an employee at Adobe last year that used Airvet over 100 times. Like, it's just people use it so much. It's really bananas.

Yeah, that's pretty incredible to hear. And then as far as like when it comes to, you know, expansion and growth, you know, how have you approached that more recently at Airvet?

Well, I had to hire people substantially smarter than I am. And that's, it turns out that's not so hard. The hard thing sometimes for founders is to acknowledge the things you don't know, because we need to, like, you sit in front of a VC, you feel like you need to have all the answers and you need to know everything. You need to come off as an expert, the expert in the space. I think the reality is, You don't have to be, you just have to be convincing that you are resourceful and that you know what you don't know and to be able to hire great teams. That was probably the hardest part about AirVet was figuring out our leadership team. I'm a solo founder. I don't know that I would do that again, but so being a solo founder is hard. I highly recommend co-founders, but figuring out our leadership team was probably the biggest struggle. we had that we only relatively recently solved after our Series B. It's just, it's extremely hard to figure that out. We went through a lot of iterations of the leadership team. That's hard for the team. It's hard for the culture. But ultimately, I hired people like Taryn Bronca as our Chief Commercial Officer because founder-led sales, it's great. And we do a hell of a job. No one's ever gonna sell it the way The founder does, but to have someone that then can put structure to what we do, because as founders, we're oftentimes very unstructured because we're just out there on the road moving at 100 miles an hour. So I hired an absolute animal, right? Taryn is— she is just extraordinary. She's a beast. She can run circles around me when it comes to building sales teams specifically in the employee benefit sales space. She is brilliant. She is like a cultural phenomenon. Everybody wants to work with Taryn. And she was at a women's health startup before. She personally brought them leading commercial from $750,000 in ARR to $80 million in 3.5 years. She is just extraordinary. And I get to learn from her a ton. People like Mootz who run product and eng, at Airoved and Kathy, who runs people and culture, and Paul, who runs finance, all the things that we do, because we do all of it as founders, to be able to know when it's time to let someone else come in and take it to that next level. That was our big thing as we were starting to scale, is founder-led sales is great. It's fun. It never really goes away. But Figuring out how to turn that into a machine so you can hire people and be and sell in places that you can't, never expecting they're gonna be able to sell as well as the founder. And that's okay. But it has to be scalable. So that's how we have approached growth as we went from founder-led sales to building a very refined and well-oiled sales team with a dedicated sales leader in Taryn that has become more so my partner. In all of this.

That's, that's great to hear. And you got a few head nods when you mentioned that founder-led sales a few times. So, you know, on that note, do you have any tips for founders when it comes to team building and hiring at the earlier stages?

I only from my own experience. And so don't take any of these as rules because every experience is different. My personal experience was don't hire on paper. Some people look perfect on paper, right? They might have an Ivy League undergrad, an MBA from another Ivy League. They might have worked at a company before this. before you hired them that was very tangential to your company. And so you're like, oh my God, this person's going to be amazing. I think hire really smart people that fit the culture. That's number one. And then also the hire needs to fit the stage, right? So hiring somebody who's too experienced, too senior, or who's people, the biggest mistakes I've made were hiring people away from big companies. thinking that, oh, they're at a big, amazing company, they're a unicorn, they are gonna be perfect, take everything they've learned and they've done and they know and bring it to my company. They typically don't last long. And then when they don't last long, you find that they go back to a big company. If you're a zero-to-one stage, right, you're at less than a million in revenue and you wanna get that first million or the first $5 million, you have to hire someone that has personally taken a company from 0 to 1 or 0 to 5, because that's a different hire than the 10 to 100 person. That 0 to 10 million is a very different hire than the 10 to 100. The biggest mistakes I've made were hiring the 10 to 100 people when I was at the 0 to 10 million phase.

Give me a really helpful, definitely can relate with some of that myself.

So yeah, and they're great people, by the way. Many of them that haven't worked out as partners to me, right? Whether it was a COO or a president or whoever, whoever it is who left for any myriad of reasons who aren't at the company anymore, I still talk to today. They're great people, but culturally and what they know and the type of process or over-process that they want to put in at an early phase just breaks everything. It just, it's hard.

Definitely. Then another topic that we wanted to talk about here, and we couldn't have a conversation now without bringing up, is AI. So how is AI impacting AirBet and how are you potentially leveraging it as well?

Well, that conversation's ongoing internally. AI is not just a new technology that's going to be really cool. It's not like a come and go. Like we saw that happen, I don't know, 2020, 2021 with like AR/VR, right? It was like here and then Facebook or Meta and Google and Snapchat, they all tried to come up with their different AR/VR, their glasses and their this and their that, and they all tanked. And, you know, it's just, The real-world application and making it part of our fabric of our culture and society versus the hypothetical implications didn't really align, right? I don't think Google thought that if someone wore their glasses at a bar, someone would beat the crap out of them, right? That just wasn't expected. So that happened a few times and people didn't like being recorded 24/7 when they're at a bar. So what the technology itself could do and then actually integrating that technology into culture, right? Practically just didn't add up. So that came and went in many ways. AI is not that. AI is going to help people. It's going to help doctors. It's going to help businesses with their efficiency. It's going to very much be part of our culture. So we do have to think about that. We are still at the stage and under the belief at Airvet That when a pet or a person or whoever gets sick, you would rather just talk to a doctor, a human being that you can see, that could see your pet. It's not about, like my dad always says, people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care, right? As a doctor, as a vet, that's what he always believed in. He built an extraordinary practice, one of the biggest in the country, and he did it based off of that. So yes, AI probably knows more, definitely knows more than any one doctor. But AI doesn't care. And I think when it comes to healthcare, the care is a huge part of that. And people want to talk to a real person, a real doctor, and have that interaction. I think AI will play a role, maybe for diagnostic or differential support in AirVet, or listening to the conversations that people are having with doctors and automatically synthesizing that data and giving a list of— potential health issues that could be going on. It could be wearables where we track a dog's or an animal's sleep and their behavior and their heart rate, their blood pressure, their temperature. And then it takes any changes in those things and it proactively— like, you get an alert to your phone. Imagine something that pops up on your phone that says, hey— my dog is Carlos— hey, Carlos's sleep has decreased 22% over the last week. here are some things that might be causing that. Do you want to talk to a vet? Right? Be really proactive about our animals' health instead of reactive, where I wait until Carlos is exhibiting signs of a health issue, and then we go to the vet reactively. So I think there's a lot of places for it, but our core is connecting people with human healthcare providers when they need care. But I do think internally, whether it's from an efficiency standpoint or a diagnostic support standpoint, AI will play a role, but we're just not, we're still very focused on, on humans helping humans right now.

Yeah, it's definitely, definitely still early.

So cool.

We're going to get into the group Q&A here in a little bit because I know our founders want to come on and ask some questions. But, you know, right before we do, so you've of course raised from some pretty awesome investors like Headline, Burst Capital, and Candace Ventures. You know, so what is the more recent fundraising journey, you know, been like? And what are some of your key learnings when it comes to fundraising?

Choose your investors wisely. Not all money is the same. I would say we've been very fortunate in almost all cases that the investors we brought on are just extraordinary. Our last round we closed about 2 months ago. We took in another, it was our Series B-2. So we took in another $11 million And again, extraordinary investors. We brought in Highland Capital Partners and we brought in High Post through Hipster. That's their earlier stage fund. That's Bezos. So Mark Bezos, Jeff's brother, founded the firm. That was a, I just fell in love with those people. Really get to know the VCs first. It's a very virtual world, but Don't throw someone on your board and take $10 million from them until you've met them in person and had drinks with them or broken bread. That's really important because they in many ways become your partners. We've been very fortunate. So many of the earliest investors we had in 2018 are still investors and active investors today. People I call for support and mentorship and guidance still sit on the board. But it's a big decision. So I think from a fundraising standpoint, absolutely focus when you are having those conversations, if you're at that stage on the numbers and show a strong path to becoming profitable in today's market, that really matters. 5 years ago or so, that didn't matter as much. So if you're in AI, it doesn't even matter. If you're, you've got AI in what you do right now, that's just a very hot time. People will fund anything in AI. But yeah, I would say that's the biggest thing is treat your early investors like husbands and wives and partners or whatever it is. You don't just choose them because of one thing or another. You have to spend time with them or you have to live with them for a little bit, or you certainly have to go on more than one or two dates. But sometimes founders don't have a choice. It's that or death. And so, You know, you got to make those, weigh those decisions as they happen. But yeah, that would be the best advice is choose them wisely because not all money is the same.

Yeah, those are gonna be helpful tips. So something that we're often discussing in the community is the importance of finding a founder-investor fit if possible, as you mentioned.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Cool.

So we're gonna get into the group Q&A. Hey, Dimitri, I saw you raise your hand. You want to come on?

I have a question for you about how do you navigate the relationship with the offline providers that are sort of, you know, near your pet parent's house. Are there any surprises there? Are there any, like, kind of trade-offs that you've had to face?

For—

just give you an example, like, I have a friend who's a business school professor. He started doing online education, and his dean cut off his access to executive education courses.

Hmm.

So are there such conflicts with, like, the employers or the vets, or how do you— or do they see you as sort of a complementary Like service? How does that work?

Yeah, well, that's a great question. In the, in the olden days of AirVet, what we did is we created a 50-mile geofence. What that means is if you were connected with a doctor, when you set up AirVet, you select who your home hospital is, like who's your primary vet. And then from there, if you use AirVet to get connected with a vet, we won't connect you with a vet within 50, with another vet within 50 miles of your primary vet. So those doctors that were like, oh, we don't want to give AirVet to our patients because they're gonna get connected with a vet theoretically a mile away or less, and then they're gonna go to their hospital and we've lost a client. So we created that kind of op— I would say like a, a geofence or an inverse geofence where we wouldn't connect them with anyone inside of 50 miles. And then as we scaled, we removed the geofence once that wasn't an issue anymore. And now we actually use those vets and vets love us because about 20% of the time, 30% of the time, people need in-person care, just like with human. Like, I can't take x-rays virtually or blood work, so we have to refer them in. So we ended up partnering with a lot of the big groups because they want those referrals. So it became a win-win.

Hey, Brandon, I actually had a question I want to ask that a founder sent me, which is around trust and safety. So, you know, how did you initially build trust? And, you know, what is like trust and safety? What does that kind of entail today for AirVet?

Yeah, a great question. So I guess it depends how you look at trust and safety, if it's trusting AirVet versus trusting the providers. But there's— I can quickly touch on both. For trusting AirVet, it all comes down— we're maniacal with customer experience, right? It just has to be the best out there. So from a security standpoint, for example, we're SOC 2 Type 1 and SOC 2 Type 2 certified. which is a big security requirement around data and whatnot. We, at the end of every AirVet visit, the— just like an Uber ride, when you get out of an Uber, it's like rate this out of 5 stars. How was your driver? What'd you like about them? What didn't you like? We do the exact same thing. So at the end of every visit, you get a screen that pops up that says, you know, rate your, you know, veterinary provider and all that. Anytime somebody rates it less than 5 stars, it flags it in our system and our customer support team looks at what it is, what didn't they like. Sometimes it's wonky. Someone will do like 1 star and they'll write under the comments like, best app in the world. Like, okay, we need to talk about how stars work. But that's people for you sometimes. But yeah, we're the highest rated telehealth Veteran telehealth product in the market. So we have, I don't know, 7,000, 8,000 reviews on just iOS and we still have a 4.9 out of 5, which is pretty tough. And our 90, our NPS is 93. We lead the category of healthcare on NPS as well. And so we do that. We also record every single call and chat that happens on Airvet. So when someone rates it a 1, a 2, a 3, and they say, oh, the person said this, We can go back to the video. We can, we have our team review the video, see what happened. Sometimes it's like the bedside manner of the vet, right? They were just too quick, too quick to diagnose. My dad says all the time, even if you know the answer, ask questions. And before you say what the answer is, just ask questions because it's not because of how quick you can get to the answer. It's how much did the person feel that you were interested and cared? And so my dad, all the time, as an example, he's done thousands of visits himself on Arivet. Um, he'll say typically within 30 seconds of them telling me what's wrong, I already know the answer. But I'm not just going to tell them this is what, this is what's going on. I'm going to ask more questions. How long has this been going on? What kind of dog is it? How old is the dog? Have they gotten into anything? And questions, because questions show that you are interested in the pet and that you care about the pet and them. And then you just share the answer. So sometimes we have to go back to some of the doctors on our platform and remind them of some of those SOPs that, yes, you're a great doctor and you know the answer right away, but you still have to ask questions. You still have. So we remind them of that and they get better and better. And out of thousands of vets, I think we've only had to kick 2 or 3 vets off the platform for just not being coachable. Not that their medicine was bad, but we have a very specific experience we want people to have that builds that trust. And that's more important than anything to us, especially as a B2B business, because it's different. If you're a D2C business and you acquire 5,000 customers a month and you lose 30, that's a great business. If 30 employees complain in a month to their HR teams about their dissatisfaction with a benefit, That you're in hot water with that company. So you have to be as close to perfect. So that was a big change for us to be that maniacal about things. So yeah, hopefully that answers building trust and safety. It's just everyone expects you to do the little things or the big things well. If you're a healthcare company, right? People expect you to do the healthcare well. They expect you're a healthcare company. It's not a matter of doing the big things well, that's expected. It's doing the little things that no one else is doing that will set you apart. And I'll give you an example of that because you can apply these to your own businesses. We are a veterinary telehealth company. People expect that we're going to do the healthcare stuff great. But what nobody really does great on the human side is continuity of care, right? You go to one doctor, they say one thing. A week later, you go to another doctor, they have no idea what that doctor— you have to explain it, right? There's no continuity of care. It's tough. And with AirVet, one of the things that we did is I said, after every visit within 24 hours, I want AirVet's doctor to proactively reach out to the pet parent 24 hours later just to check in through the chat. So let's say, Demetri, your dog had a skin issue, you used AirVet, they told you, hey, this looks like an acute allergic reaction. How much does he weigh? You say 22 pounds. And they say, all right, give him half a Benadryl, and in about 12 hours that should clear up, right? The next day you'll get a chat from that doctor saying, hey Dimitri, how's Fido doing? Has that allergy cleared up, or do you want to chat some more and come up with another diagnosis or differential? Whatever it is, you can go into our App Store reviews. Search by recency and you can probably find the exact date we launched that feature because it's like all people were talking about, like, oh my God, the doctor checked in with me the next day. Like that doesn't happen. So it's not the big things, that's table stakes. But when you do those little things like proactive reachouts the next day to check in on a patient that no one else is doing, it blows people's minds.

That's gonna be a really helpful, really great example of focusing on the small details.

So yeah, absolutely.

Hey, Michael, do you wanna come on?

So my question is around the vets, and I've been in the services marketplace space for a while. I did dabble in pets for a bit, so I'm familiar with the vets themselves. How did you get them to embrace the technology, you know, use the platform? Is it— did you profile like a certain kind of vet that would be more open to being on call and using your technology? To me, that seems like that would be one of the biggest challenges.

It wasn't easy, Michael. And if it weren't for COVID, I don't know that this entire sector— I just don't think it would exist because that's really hard to do. I mean, it took a long time in human healthcare to get doctors to embrace virtual care and all the compliance that comes along with it, the regulations, the doctors that we found. I mean, you would think that like young tech savvy doctors would be the first ones and sure, to an extent they were, but there's a lot of doctors on our platform that really broke that mold. And the reality, I think, is you have to make it stupid simple. Every single thing you need a doctor to do in order to do a visit, every step, imagine you lose 10% of them. So with AirVet, people are like, oh, like, so are you going to have it where it goes out to a lot of vets and then the vets have to go in a queue and then they join a room and there's really efficient ways to do it. But the way we did it is they swipe on, literally they swipe on in the app and they're online. When a call comes in, it literally just comes in like a phone call, like a FaceTime. And it says, what's your, what's your dog's name, Michael? Poppy?

Poppy, yes.

All right. It will say Michael and Poppy, right? The pet's, the person's name and, and then the pet's name. And all they do is answer the call and you're on a FaceTime. Anything more than that was not going to get utilized. So it wasn't about convincing doctors to learn a new product, a new experience. It was about taking something they already knew, which is answering a FaceTime call. That's all they have to do, right? And making it so simple. So instead of trying to get them to learn a new product, learn a new workflow, learn it, because we tried all that stuff when we were embedding it in their hospitals and it doesn't work. It just does not work. Taking something they already knew and making it as simple as answering a call worked. So it wasn't about necessarily who we went after or how we went after them. It was making sure the product was simple and intuitive enough that mirrored something they already knew and giving it to them. And so they go, okay, how do I use this? So just answer the call when it comes in. That's it. It's beautiful.

Awesome.

We'll try again. And one last question. I think, Raj, you sent me a question as far as balancing, you know, building out features and functionality and kind of sales. Do you wanna ask?

Yeah. My question was that when you started building the product, which was probably B2C in the beginning, and then you totally pivoted to B2B, what did you do with the product? Like when you built B2C, did you see, before building B2B, did you see, okay, let me wait because I have received a lot of feedback on that and I cannot sell it as it is, you know, let me build my amazing product first and then worry about the sales because, so this is my question here, you know, that Did you stop, not stop, or you kind of continued all the time, you know, and more focused on this part than selling?

We were, it's a great question, Raj, right? We were lucky. So as much as we are a B2B company, we fall into more of like a B2B2C category, which is we sell B2B, but the end user is in either B2C or B2B. In either way, the end user is the pet parent. And 99% of what we build is for the pet parent because in the end, whether you're paying $35 a month or you're an employee of a company and you're getting it for free, either way, your experience needs to be exceptional. So everything we were building for when we were a direct-to-consumer company for the end user, end user being the pet parent, was almost all the same things that we were building. So At the fundamental level, we didn't need to change so much of the product for the end user, right? For the employee, when we pivoted, what we needed to do was not change stuff, but add new things that the employer would care about so that they could see or visualize the way people were using it. So we had to build reporting. We had to build a dashboard. We had to build security measures in because they have to send us eligibility files with people's names, sometimes their phone number, whatever it is that they want people to be eligible based off of. So we needed to get SOC 2 certified for that. We needed to do a lot of things for the employer, present data. So at the end of the visit, instead of just saying, hey, did you like your AirVet visit, rate out of 5 stars? We also had to ask questions like, what would you have done if you hadn't used AirVet? And they can choose like, I would have gone to the ER or I would have gone to the urgent care because that means that they would have taken time off work to go do these in-person visits. And that's data and ROI qualifications and quantification that we want to send to the employer. So we can say to an employer, hey, you spend $318,000 on air vet, but just on avoided employee absenteeism this year, you made 4 times that by being able to resolve things virtually so your employees didn't have to go in person. And we also saved your employees an average of $950 this year on vet bills. Right? That's the stuff employers want to know that employees don't necessarily care about. So it was like adding new things for them while we continued to build out as many features as we could. And then the second part of that is a lot of market feedback from employers. So where are they struggling? And if they bring Airbed in, what box, right? Which, what Pandora's box does that open? So the SVP of Global Total Rewards. Total Rewards is like benefits and comp and all these things is a guy named Duncan McCallum from PepsiCo. PepsiCo, he was one of our first advisors and he said to me, so we can have a whole separate session, Mike, on building advisory councils because that was probably the single greatest unlock for us. Making the pivot was having incredible market leaders, people who, you know, the CHRO of Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, the chief people officer of UnitedHealthcare, the SVP at Coca-Cola and Pepsi, the CHRO of Levi's, right? We took these huge people, the SVP at Starbucks, right? Just amazing benefits leaders, put them on an advisory board, and they helped shape our product. So we didn't have to wait 6 months to get market feedback. We just, we can pick up the phone and say, hey, I want you to look at this and tell me what you think as the buyer. So that was a huge unlock for us. And they— and Duncan from Pepsi said, well, if we bring AirVet in as a benefit for telehealth, then that's going to open the door. Someone else is going to come in and they're going to be the navigation for pet care company. And then there's going to be a pharmaceutical online pharmacy company that comes in and says, we're going to help all your employees save on pet meds. Then there's going to be the pet insurance company and then the wellness plan company and blah, blah, blah. You're opening the door to 7 or 8 different point solutions. Employers have huge point solution fatigue. They don't want 7 or 8-point solutions. So if AirVet can slowly just build all of those things into the product and you are just the one solution that we're going to need for pet families and you do all of it, that's the holy grail. So that's what we did, right? So we built slowly, right, all of those different things. So now a huge part of our pitch to employers and why the market's so excited is, hey, you work with AirVet, you don't ever have to work with another pet company again. We are the vendor, the full digital front door for pet care, whether you need a wellness plan, whether your employees need insurance, whether they need pharmacy, you know, medications, home delivery, palliative care, navigation, online training, whatever it is, we got it on Arivet. And that was a big unlock for us as well. But that was through market feedback through our advisory board.

We're almost out of time here, Brandon, but I, you know, really appreciate, you know, taking the time to join us here today for the follow-up group chat. One last question before we wrap things up. And this is my, I think it's a little bit newer question since your last group chat. Which is that if you could go right back before you started at AirBet, what would you tell yourself about marketplaces?

This probably isn't the obvious answer because I think marketplaces are, there's so much opportunity and there's so many nuances and complexities to what side do I build first and all of that. And I don't think, I think it's industry or company specific, market trend specific, something that wasn't cool 6 months ago could be cool, right? So I don't think there's like rules. I would just say none of it matters if you don't have a good leadership team. Like, the nuances, all of it, none of it matters. How smart you are, how resourceful, none of it matters. It's all about getting your leadership team right as early as you can, because we wasted so many wrong turns, so many cultural issues that could have been avoided if we were more rigorous around the types of people that we brought on, not focusing on, you know, their resume, so to speak, but really who they are, where they've been, and if it matches the stage that you're at. So I would just say team is everything. And then when you're done with everything, team is more than that. And then when you're done with that, it's even more team, team, team. Your leadership team sets the tone. They set the culture. They make it whether or not you're going to have high turnover in your company. I don't think AirVet lost a single employee last year. Like we, people love working at AirVet. Even our average engineer tenure at AirVet is like 4 years, which is really high for an early stage startup for an engineer, because there's a lot of places they can go and make more money, right? A lot as a really skilled engineer. But they're at AirVet because they're obsessed with our culture, our team, our path for growth within the org, leadership opportunities, mentorship. We give it all. One bad hire at the top could ruin everything. So no matter what you've figured out in the marketplace, no matter what your market is, no matter how fast you're growing, it all comes down to the leadership team.

That's gonna be really great parting advice for us. And then last but not least, time for a quick plug. Where can we all keep up with you at?

LinkedIn, I would say, would probably be the best place. I don't post on anything.

Well, we really appreciate it once again. Thanks. Thanks for joining us for the group chat and thanks everyone for the questions.