STEVEN EIDELMAN: The thing that you’re looking for as an entrepreneur is the inevitability of demand for the product or service you’re offering. And if you’re pushing a rock uphill, you don’t have it.

JEFF BERMAN: Steven Eidelman is the CEO and co-founder of Modern Animal. It’s a fascinating disruptor in the pet care industry. Steven saw a noble profession in dire need of change, and he wanted to help.

EIDELMAN: The veterinarian was really struggling, and the consumer or the pet owner — the customer — was being left behind as well. We’re talking about animals, but it’s the people who are suffering, and obviously if they’re suffering, the animal’s probably not getting the care that they need too. So it was the core veterinary care delivery system that was broken. I was starting to get really close to the problems in this industry, and I started to really deeply care about them. And once you see problems as an entrepreneur, it’s really hard to turn away from them.

BERMAN: Modern Animal now has about 600 employees and a rapidly expanding footprint of pet care clinics. This week, Steven Eidelman reveals the lessons learned by scaling his revolutionary approach to veterinary care.

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I’m Jeff Berman, your host. Steven Eidelman’s scale journey with Modern Animal is an inspiring entrepreneurial story, but Steven didn’t grow up with the rosiest picture of being your own boss. Steven, welcome to Masters of Scale.

EIDELMAN: Thanks, Jeff. Great to be here.

Steven Eidelman’s entrepreneurial leap

BERMAN: As a first-generation American with parents from the former Soviet Union, Steven watched his dad work incredibly long hours running a business. He saw every drop of his dad’s sweat and the late nights toiling at the kitchen table along the way. So Steven opted to start his career in a more traditional office environment as a consultant at Bain. But a few years in, he started to wonder if he’d been wrong about the life of an entrepreneur.

EIDELMAN: The hardest part about watching, sort of, the immigrant entrepreneur journey and trying to make sense of it as a first-generation aspiring entrepreneur is what my father did was he fought for survival. It wasn’t a career choice. For them it was, hey, this is about security and stability and having the best opportunities and taking advantage of them. But for me, the entrepreneurial thing that I was experiencing with my father was really building something. Like what does it feel like to build something? And I was seeing that as an investor, and what I learned was I’m never going to take that leap if I just use my rational part of my brain. There’s always going to be some reason why it’s not a good enough idea, why there’s a risk. So this is around 2012. I’m about five years into my career, and the itch is starting to get more like a severe burning sensation.

BERMAN: You might need to see a doctor for that.

EIDELMAN: Probably. And Bain has the investing arm, Bain Capital, and then there’s the consulting. And they aren’t even arms, they’re separate companies. So I was at the consulting firm.

BERMAN: Got you.

EIDELMAN: At the time, I’m looking at businesses every day, dozens of businesses. So I don’t really know anything about anything. I don’t have a business that I’m deeply passionate about. I’ve been a generalist my whole career as a student and as a professional now. And so that is a difficult place to know that there’s a problem you deeply want to solve. And so just desperately wanting to be an entrepreneur — well, that’s not what my father did. That’s not what most great entrepreneurs have done. So it’s a tough place to actually pursue that dream from. But at some point I had to take the leap.

And so it happened pretty organically. Just my roommate at the time, who at this point become one of my closest friends, he was a colleague of mine from Bain. He also worked at an investing firm. We had a whiteboard, and this is an episode out of Silicon Valley, whiteboard, ideas on the whiteboard. It just so happens that when we were at Bain together, there were a number of pet care companies that were clients. And my first case that I ever worked on was actually a pet care place. And so what I learned at that time was this is a much bigger industry than people realized. There’s a lot of emotional connection to it. And what we were thinking about at the time was this industry is about to change dramatically with a younger pet owner coming in.

BERMAN: Why is that?

EIDELMAN: Millennials are different. So I think the way that Ben, my co-founder, and I came to end up in this industry was we couldn’t agree on anything else. And we both have been dog lovers our whole lives, and we grow up with dogs. And there was just a much deeper connection to that relationship that we were both able to access as very, sort of, emotive people than anything else on that whiteboard. And so the investor actually that Ben worked for was a great entrepreneur himself, and he really encouraged us to pursue something that we were both excited about and to work together. He said, “You need to work with someone that you really trust, and you’ll go to war with.”

BERMAN: What was it about what was changing with millennials growing into pet ownership, where you saw the opportunity, and what became that first entrepreneurial dive for you?

EIDELMAN: The thing that we were most interested in was the shift around specifically pet health, and the tailwinds that were supporting that shift were, you think about generations ago, the dog used to live outside. More recently, the dog started to live inside. Even more recently, the dog is no longer just inside and in their dog bed, they’re in your bed. So that has a lot of implications. What are you expecting of a service provider or a product that you’re purchasing for your pet? How much are you willing to spend on your pet?

And in parallel, what’s been happening is medicine’s just gotten better. I mean, the way animal health works is that it benefits from all innovation and improvement to human health. And so greater medicine is becoming available, and people want access to that. And the willingness to spend on pets has increased. So the expectations of what’s available in the market have changed. Now, in 2012, what we saw was mostly that it seemed as though the whole world was going to revolve around devices that captured information in our world, right?

I’m wearing an Oura Ring now, but back then it was Fitbit. And I was always interested in that category because I’m a type one diabetic, and I’m somewhat of a robot, I have an insulin pump, I have a continuous glucose monitor on my arm. And so for me, the idea of capturing this data to improve health was something I had been fascinated by for a long time. And essentially we took those ideas of devices for health pet care, the trends around pet health and smash them together. And that was our first company. It was called Whistle.

BERMAN: And I am inferring that there was also an understanding that for people with disposable income, there is not a lot of price sensitivity when it comes to doing right by your pet.

EIDELMAN: That’s right.

The origin story of Whistle

BERMAN: Okay. So what exactly was Whistle and how did you get it off the ground?

EIDELMAN: So Whistle was the idea that we want to connect the pet owner with the veterinarian. And so what’s the best way to do that? Because the veterinarian used to always be the most trusted resource if you’re a pet owner — and this was around the time where we’re starting to now Google everything and, in parallel, the veterinarian sort of losing that sway and that role of influence — and so we thought, “Hey, let’s capture this valuable data.” And we’re dreaming big. We’re thinking we’re going to put a device on an animal. We’re going to be able to tell everything that’s going on with them, whether or not the technology existed at the time is a separate point. But that was the vision. We put a device on, capture all this information, and translate it for the veterinarian so that there’s this connection between the veterinarian and the client, the pet owner when they’re at home.

BERMAN: So it’s a pet wearable where the vet can log on and see the vitals.

EIDELMAN: Right.

BERMAN: See any key data point that they need to see to help diagnose what’s happening with the pet.

EIDELMAN: And so the most interesting thing of building that company beyond all the entrepreneurial journeys of raising capital, hiring, firing, pushing yourself as an entrepreneur to grow, the most interesting part about it was that dynamic that you just described. That’s what invited us into the veterinary practice for the first time. And what we saw was that giving a veterinarian more data isn’t helping their day-to-day, which is already almost an impossible task to get through.

I mean, if you just take a step back and think about at the base level, what is a veterinarian doing? First of all, a veterinarian goes to medical school for four years, comes out with a load of debt, they have to study multiple species. They’re doing everything at a general practice, veterinary practice. There’s emergency hospitals, and there’s specialists. But let’s just talk about a general practice, which is what Modern Animal does. At a small animal hospital, you’re doing dog and cat, maybe you’re even doing exotics, but let’s say we’re just doing dog and cat. You’re doing everything from wellness care, preventative care, vaccines, lab work to urgent care. You’re doing surgery, soft tissue surgery, you’re doing dentistry, you’re doing radiology, you’re doing euthanasia.

So you’re going from one moment where you’ve got a family who’s excited about their first appointment with their new puppy, and then the next you’ve got a euthanasia appointment and you’re doing that 15, 20, 25 times a day. You’ve got clients who they’re not the actual patient. So you have this sort of interesting dynamic that is more akin to sort of if you have a child and you go to pediatrician where you’re talking about this third party who is the recipient of the care, but you’re kind of negotiating between these two other people, the practitioner and, in our case, the client who cares so deeply about this being they can’t communicate with, and it can get antagonistic pretty quickly.

And what you have is a population of people, veterinarians, who the only motivation to become a veterinarian is to care for animals. All of the rest of us may have all these ulterior motives. I have some deep-seated sort of thing for my childhood about becoming an entrepreneur and proving myself to my parents, probably. Veterinarians just love animals. They’re the most pure, noble people I’ve ever met. So you have this person who is there purely to solve for the issues that that animal has, but now they have to negotiate cost. Veterinary care is expensive because you’re paying full freight. We all forget for our own healthcare somebody is usually paying part of the way, whether it’s Medicare and the government’s paying for it, your employer, you’re paying your copay, or your premiums. So with veterinary care, as medicine becomes more available, it’s just getting more expensive.

And inflation and costs get higher. So you have now a relationship between the pet owner and the veterinarian where they have to negotiate on all these things. What choices are we going to make? Are we going to do the full gamut? Are we going to just see what’s going on? Hey, maybe we can’t even afford to do the diagnostic test to see what’s going on. Let’s just take our best guess at what’s going on and keep the cost as low as possible. There’s issues around, “Oh, Chewy is charging $5 less for this same drug. You’re ripping me off.” There’s a lack of transparency. So the pet owner is experiencing a pretty suboptimal experience oftentimes, but the veterinarian is really struggling, especially today. A lot has changed.

Overcoming initial entrepreneurial challenges

BERMAN: Super helpful framework. So when you come up with this idea, this wearable for the pets, and you’ve got your co-founder, you’ve got the whiteboard business plan, et cetera, do you bootstrap it? Are you able to raise some seed capital? How do you actually start the company?

EIDELMAN: So the idea was really born in partnership with one of these partners that my co-founder worked with who himself had built a great hardware company called Slingbox, Sling Media, and he loved the vision. And so in our mid-20s, aspiring entrepreneurs, he says, “Hey, I will fund this idea. Let’s go for it.” Really difficult to say no to that.

BERMAN: Especially someone with a deep background in hardware.

EIDELMAN: Exactly.

BERMAN: Software-connected hardware at that, right? I mean, that’s an extraordinary advantage to have starting a company.

EIDELMAN: Absolutely. And so that was it. We went off to the races.

BERMAN: Great, fantastic. What happened?

EIDELMAN: We spent about a year building the product, a lot of fun, got to work with incredible industrial designers. As a young entrepreneur, it feels like everything is about building. So you get to flex these muscles you’ve never flexed before. And about a year in, we launched the product. And as an investor, I’m looking at the data, and it’s obvious to me, “I don’t think people want this thing.”

So the wearable that we built at first was health tracking in theory, but really it was activity tracking. It was the same way Fitbit was meant to be a health monitor, but was really a step counter. And we learned pretty quickly that what people expected the device to do was not something we could do yet.

BERMAN: Which was what?

EIDELMAN: A broader array of features. And specifically location tracking was something that people assumed. “If I’m putting a device on my dog, I want to know where they are.” So we ended up pivoting to that, and we built a decent business around that. But the vision around health was really important to us. That was what got us excited, and that’s what excited the industry. And so we got a lot of strategic interest, and as we saw those paths diverging, we decided to sell the business because we thought that we would be able to fulfill that vision much more quickly being a part of a business that actually owned veterinary practices.

Inside Whistle’s acquisition to Mars

BERMAN: And so you sold it to Mars, which I knew only as a candy company until I was prepping for our conversation, realized they’re actually huge in pet as well. A lot of founders who had that experience would stay the minimum amount of time and then leave and go do the next thing. I think you stayed a little bit longer.

EIDELMAN: I almost made it the whole time.

BERMAN: Okay. So tell us about the journey at Mars once you sold the company to them.

EIDELMAN: So Mars an incredible business. It’s one of the largest private businesses in America. It’s still owned by the family, 100%. The family cares deeply about animals, and that’s how they got into it a hundred years ago. When they bought the business, they had made the decision to really go into the veterinary space. We know the candy business, but they had already been the largest pet care company in the world for a long time. And they saw the opportunity in animal health much to the same way that we did, that the customers changing and creating opportunities, and that the environment to create something more interesting as an ecosystem was there. So the vision’s very much aligned. And so we joined in 2016, and I was excited to sort of see, can we build the vision out here? So what we learned was the device is probably not the vessel.

And for me, it got really clear that to solve the problems this industry had — not just the exciting opportunity of how, if you connect all these things, how might you create a better experience? — but there’s a lot of problems. And I wasn’t aware of them. And as we got closer, it was really hard to turn away from them. And this is going back to sort of the whiteboard moment as a young entrepreneur who doesn’t really know anything about anything, I was starting to get really close to the problems in this industry, and I started to really deeply care about them. And once you see problems as an entrepreneur, it’s really hard to turn away from them.

BERMAN: Yeah. So what did you see?

The existing problems in the veterinarian business

EIDELMAN: The veterinarian was really struggling, and the consumer or the pet owner — the customer — was being left behind as well. And so interestingly, we’re talking about animals, but it’s the people who are suffering. And obviously if they’re suffering, the animal’s probably not getting the care that they need too. So it was the core veterinary care delivery system that was broken. And what was happening more broadly in the industry was a huge wave of consolidation, specifically private equity firms who were buying up mom-and-pop vet clinics. Everything in the veterinary space is a little bit behind. And so that wave was a little bit behind as well, but exactly the same concept. And it basically was that people figured out veterinary care is a good business. It’s 100 percent cash pay, and you have this, sort of, emotionally-driven spend with especially a demographic that’s changing and cares more and wants to spend more. So it attracted a lot of, I would say, opportunistic capital and I would say opportunistic tourists who came in to extract value from the industry.

BERMAN: Yeah, that’s pretty kindly said, inferring they’re opportunistic and tourists suggest maybe exploitative and didn’t really deeply know the category.

EIDELMAN: And this is where I think what I was seeing at Mars was a family who cared very deeply and had a really exciting vision, but a huge company. And so I tried internally to drive some of the change I saw, specifically from my background being more in technology. I’m a techno optimist. There’s a lot of downsides to technology as well, but I believe that technology can really drive change in positive ways. And so I wanted to bring technology into the industry, but it’s tough to do it that large of a scale.

BERMAN: Sure.

EIDELMAN: And so I ultimately decided to go do it outside. But the private equity roll-ups and that model that were happening in parallel elsewhere, where you would have, sort of, shadow private equity firms buying up mom-and-pop clinics, the motto of one of the largest ones was, Join Us, Stay You, which was basically a nice way to say, “We’re not going to do anything once we buy you.” And it was all under the guise of, “We’ll preserve your legacy. Dr. Jeff’s vet clinic, we’re going to leave your clinic as it is, you’ll stick around. We’re going to preserve your legacy.” But what happens when you leave and retire after you’ve sold your practice? It all starts to fall apart a little bit. And they would congregate all of these different practices together and really do nothing more than try to optimize the economic model. And we’re now really 30 years into when this wave started, but it really accelerated over the last decade or so. And a lot of the problems started to get amplified.

BERMAN: Still ahead, how Steven turned a mission making vet jobs more humane into a rapidly scaling business.

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The idea that led to Modern Animal

BERMAN: Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find this conversation and more on our YouTube channel. I imagine you looked at a lot of different areas of opportunity. What became the idea that led to Modern Animal?

EIDELMAN: About 2018 is when I started to see what was a pretty clear picture in my mind of what the future of veterinary care should look like. We’re not going to go backwards into a world where every veterinary practice is owned by the veterinarian. And so if we could, I think that’s probably a better future going backwards. But that’s not how the world works. So if we’re looking forward, well, what role does technology have? How might we actually achieve that relationship that I wanted to build with Whistle between the veterinarian and the pet owner? And so a lot of these pieces started coming together. And so the vision was, let’s use technology. Let’s build a brand that people can trust, and let’s build this thing from scratch to bring the pet owner and the veterinarian together, to streamline the work in the practice, so that this very difficult job a veterinarian can do with more ease, more consistency, the pet owner has more transparency, more accessibility, and how might we create an alternative future for this industry that is not purely a value extraction, private equity roll up game?

It would require a long-term focus. It would require capital. It would require, I think, the wherewithal to sustain what is a difficult business.

BERMAN: So what happened?

EIDELMAN: So in 2018, I approached one of the Mars family members who had been a great supporter, said, “I can’t do it here. I’ve really tried,” and I really wanted to achieve it there. And I thought I’d go back to the whiteboard and do something totally different. And at this point, I’ve really fallen in love with the people in the industry. I’ve fallen in love with and quite obsessed with the problem, and I wanted to go do it. And so to their credit, they said, “Hey, we get it. So go for it.”

BERMAN: Did they want to fund you? Did they want to be a part of it?

EIDELMAN: I felt it was important to not have that relationship.

BERMAN: Why is that?

EIDELMAN: I felt that we needed to not be encumbered by anyone with a preexisting point of view on the industry. And so, one of my old Bain colleagues was now a very successful venture capitalist who I’ve goaded for advice, and I didn’t expect him to want to fund it. He was a former SpaceX engineer. This is not exactly his cup of tea, but he saw the opportunity and believed in us and said, “Let’s do it.”

Steven’s vision for Modern Animal

BERMAN: Yeah, you want money, ask for advice. What exactly was the opportunity?

EIDELMAN: So at the most emotional level, I would say it’s to bring humanity back to veterinary medicine. That human relationship, the animal, is the beneficiary of the strength and the trust that that relationship is founded on. So what will enable that? For us, it was really controlling the environment that the doctor works in providing 24/7 access to the pet owner, whether that be to the information, the pet’s medical record, history, to telemedicine, to triage, to support, but then also making it much more sustainable for the veterinarian. If we go back to who is the person who becomes a veterinarian, someone who deeply cares about the animal, and they’re put into this environment where ironically, they have to deal with people who are more likely to yell at them than they are to their own doctor. They have to negotiate cost. They’re dealing with this broad range of care, and that’s hard.

BERMAN: So Steven, how do you make it better for the vet? How do you make that experience better for them? And how do you build a business around that?

EIDELMAN: It used to be that you’d have typically a male veterinarian who would buy his own practice or build it, run it for many years, and then eventually sell it, maybe to an associate veterinarian who worked with him, typically. Now, the cost of doing that, because of so much private equity money that’s come in, is unattainable for a veterinarian to buy their boss’s practice. And the challenge of coming out of school, having now a lot of debt as the cost of schooling has gone up dramatically. For us, when we started the business, we said, “Okay, great. We are going to build a better experience with a pet owner.”

That’s easy. For me, just as an entrepreneur, I know what I would want, but for the veterinarian that was from spending a ton of time with them and watching them day in and day out, do that work, and it’s a mess. So how do we clean up the mess, what can we use technology for to streamline the work, to automate the work, to eliminate some of the redundancy or the admin work, to create a deeper relationship with the pet owners so when they come in, they don’t assume that you’re out to rip them off?

BERMAN: So for people who aren’t yet Modern Animals subscribers or members, break it down. I mean, you launch your own clinics, right? I mean, just take us through what the whole thing is end to end.

EIDELMAN: So we build our own clinics from scratch. They’re about 3,000 square feet on average, have about six to seven doctors when they’re full, and about 5 or 6,000 members can go there. So we have a membership-based model. Every one of our members pays an annual fee, or they can still pay per exam.

BERMAN: And the annual fee is about $200?

EIDELMAN: $200. And we’re actually about to roll out a tier that lets people who don’t want to come as much still be able to come and join as members, and that’ll be $99. But membership is more about the idea that you are part of Modern Animal, and you can access Modern Animal anywhere. So you can go to any of our locations. Everybody has our mobile app on their phone. We have 24/7 virtual care available, which is access to our team through phone, chat, video. You have full access to your pet’s medical history, medical records in the app. You can book appointments through there, pay through there, pharmacies available through there. So it’s a very accessible experience.

BERMAN: Steven, if my dog needs a checkup, is that covered by the $200? But then if the checkup determines they need something else, that’s a la carte, how does it actually work?

EIDELMAN: So what I saw was more and more people being reluctant to go to the veterinarian. We had been in a downward trend of people going to vet less. And this was, I think, reflective of this trust being broken in eroding. But it was also, “Hey, I can go on Google. I’m going to text my dog walker. Hey, veterinary care is expensive. I’m just not going to go.” So what I saw was friction, and I wanted to remove friction — whether the friction was telemedicine and virtual care, or it was just the exam fee. So the idea of membership was we’re going to remove the exam fee. So if you typically, let’s say in LA, you may pay $80, $90, even $100 just to step foot in the door. If you’re a member, you don’t pay exam fees.

BERMAN: It’s a big deal just starting there.

EIDELMAN: And I think it changes… What we see is our members come twice as much on average to the practice. If you ask any of our doctors, they’ll tell you, we detect disease earlier in the disease cycle at Modern Animal, earlier than they’d ever seen in their careers because we’ve removed that friction. So whether that’s happening virtually, through a triage video chat at 11 o’clock at night, “Hey, do I need to rush to the ER right now? Or are we okay?” So that’s a huge deal. Or is it just, “Hey, I don’t know if something’s wrong, but this is happening.” Our virtual care team says, “Hey, you know what, Jeff? You should head in, and, if nothing’s wrong, you don’t pay anything.” And then it’s really a choice. “Hey, we don’t know if something’s wrong. Maybe something’s wrong. Do you want to do the test? Do we want to do the x-rays?” There’s some choice. And this is where it starts to get complicated.

But that’s the idea of membership. And so you have the physical clinics that we build, and they’re beautiful because human beings spend 10 hours a day doing really difficult work there. That’s the number one reason why they’re beautiful. And you as a customer, if you’re going to come and spend hundreds of dollars, if not more with us, it also should be a good experience. So we have these clinics that we build from scratch. We build our own technology. The ecosystem of technology has been dramatically under invested in. And so we built our own electronic medical record system. We built our own booking system, payment system, communication system. That’s been wildly valuable today with AI.

Where we are able to now point AI at a lot of different problems to eliminate a lot of the work or streamline or automate or summarize your 10 years of history for your dog and all the complex issues that it’s had to distill down for our doctor — what is the information you need to know in the two minutes before you go into that appointment? So that’s been a really strategic investment for us. And then the important piece is that all of this is one network. This is not an amalgamation of a thousand disparate hospitals where they joined us and they stay themselves.

You join Modern Animal as a veterinarian, as a veterinary technician, as an employee, you are buying into our mission, our values. You’re buying into our point of view on we are building the future of this industry. That means we’re going to constantly be changing things. Every week we roll out changes. That means it will be hard because we are trying to solve hard problems, but we are also unabashedly trying to eliminate the past model that has been, I think, hurting the industry. So it has created a very much a shared culture and a stance towards the future.

Handling rapid growth out of the gate

BERMAN: How did you find the first customers?

EIDELMAN: We did a bunch of different marketing stuff. I don’t know which of it actually mattered or worked. We would go to the local farmer’s markets, we would do some influencer events. We put up billboards, which ironically stayed up for months during COVID because they weren’t replacing—

BERMAN: Right, no one’s buying billboards.

EIDELMAN: So it’s hard to know which of these variables actually worked. But within about a month, we had to stop doing everything to get more customers because we were full.

BERMAN: Couldn’t handle the demand.

EIDELMAN: We had a phone number up on the website. We had to take that down.

BERMAN: Wow.

EIDELMAN: We ended up having the phone number, basically say, if you’re a member, contact us through the app. Otherwise, sorry.

BERMAN: How big are you now?

EIDELMAN: We’re about 600 employees.

BERMAN: Wow. How many markets are you in?

EIDELMAN: So we’re in LA, Orange County, the Bay Area, Dallas, Austin, Houston.

BERMAN: And how many clinics?

EIDELMAN: We are opening our 29th in Denver.

The importance of controlled expansion for Modern Animal

BERMAN: So this brings me to my next question about scale. Because you’ve seen the private equity roll up, you understand the pros and largely cons to that. You’ve built all this software. Sure, it’s great to control this experience end to end, but there’s a theory of scale of like, we’re a software company and we can go out and provide a service to all sorts of existing vets and pet care hospitals and sites, clinics, or we could buy them, but you keep building them, right?

EIDELMAN: I’m a control freak.

BERMAN: Is that the answer?

EIDELMAN: I think it’s that the vision that we have is one that we are able to be the agent of change in a way that requires us having our hands on it. And that doesn’t just mean me. That doesn’t just mean my executive team or even our support team. It means even one of our nurses in our clinics being able to say, “This needs to change, and I would like to test it.” And so building the mechanism of change is one of the biggest things I think that we’ve built.

And that is really hard, and it requires everyone rowing in the same direction. I think otherwise, software alone is not going to change. What is an incredibly human experience, building great clinics, that is a feature. It’s really not that important. It’s just that we can have a lot more control in the consistency of your work environment if we build it versus we bought an old one. And the challenge if we just went and started buying a hospital and said, “Well, Modern Animal’s way is great.” Well, not every doctor there is going to agree. Not every customer is going to agree. So we are very clear about what we stand for, what our values are, what does it mean to be a modern animal? And so we want people who want to join us to do that.

How an Alan Watts book inspired Steven Eidelman

BERMAN: Before I let Steven go, I wanted to hear where he found the most meaningful insights for building his business. And he mentioned a book. It’s not a business title and probably not a book you’ve heard of, but it is considered a classic from 1951 by the philosopher Alan Watts.

EIDELMAN: The most impactful book I ever read as an entrepreneur was The Wisdom of Insecurity. When I was building Whistle, I hit a real low point going from this great stable career to the trials and tribulations of an entrepreneur, trying to prove that a business should exist was really tough. There’s a lot of ego death that happens. I’m thinking very highly of myself in my career. Everything is coming with ease, and, all of a sudden, I’m fighting for my survival, but not the way my father did. I’ve done this to myself. There’s a lot of insecurity. There’s a lot of self-doubt. And I had listened to some of Alan Watts’ talks, but I had never read any of his books. And so a friend of mine had recommended that I read it, and it really struck a chord, and it had nothing to do with being an entrepreneur, but just the idea that in the book he talks about anxiety is not knowing how you get from point A to point B.

And as human beings, all we’re trying to do is figure out how do I get to point B? And it’s a false illusion. You’re on this journey, and you might have the most well-intentioned plans, but it almost never works that way. And if it does, what a boring journey. And so I think for me, it struck a chord. “Oh, I’ve been building this career trying to figure out if I do this and I do this, and I get here,” and that’s the whole point of life. “Okay, great. I took this leap. Well, now what? I’m suffering.” And so finding a way to just let it happen, do my best, and release that ego, releasing the FOMO of, “Well, I have other friends who are more successful than me. What could I have been doing instead if I wasn’t dealing with this?” And instead learning to love that I am on the journey from point A to point B, and it might suck, but through it, I’m going to learn a lot.

So I think the advice I give is, to any entrepreneur, it’s like you’ve got to love that feeling of “I’m going to experience pain.” And it’s not that I have to love pain, but I have to love that I am going to grow, and that’s how I’m going to grow. You have to really buy into the idea that this is about pushing yourself to the brink of failure so that you can improve yourself. And that’s probably the most important thing. The second thing I would say is, and this is a more recent learning for me: When I don’t know the answer, I either lie to myself and tell myself that I do, or I wake up and realize I need to go get advice.

And so I used to go seek advice, and I would ask people for advice to get the answer, and I think that’s wrong. My lesson has been, there’s a lot of wisdom in the world. Go get wisdom from people, but only I have to make those choices. I have to be accountable to those choices. I can’t outsource it if I ask you for advice, right, Jeff? You don’t know Modern Animal. You don’t know the situations. No matter how much I might unload on you to try to give me the answer, I have to be accountable to that. So I think my mantra now is seek wisdom, not advice.

BERMAN: I love that. What a great place to wrap. Thanks so much for being with us.

EIDELMAN: Thanks for having me, Jeff.

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