Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
July is Lost Pet Prevention Month. How can we keep our pets safe and get them home quickly if they do get lost? Brett speaks to Lorien Clemens the CEO of Pethub about how they have created a centralized digital identity for pets.
What does it take to found a globally important company in these times? We’re interested in what happens before universally-acknowledged success.
Join Brett Kistler as he engages in deep conversations with business leaders from emerging markets, being vulnerable about their experience in the early- to median-stage moments of their founding journey.
Intro: One of the things we had to be willing to do was to be willing to sacrifice those sacred cows and be willing to take some things we had said we would never do. We had to let that go. Is that helping us? Would it be more beneficial if we were willing to say no, we can change that, we can do something different than what we said we were going to do?
[music]
Brett: Everybody, welcome back to Founder Vision with Clearview. Today I am speaking with Lorien Clemens. She is the now CEO of PetHub. How are you doing, Lorien?
Lorien: I am doing fantastic. How are you doing, Brett?
Brett: Doing great. Just before we started recording, you had mentioned you just had a title shift at your company. Tell me more about that.
Lorien: Yes, so the shift is as of July 1 of this year, just a couple days ago, my co-founder or the founder of the company, Tom Arnold, who has been acting as the CEO and CTO of the company since 2010 has handed the reins of CEO over to me so he can fully focus on the CTO stuff. The bottom line is we are big believers in once you have the right people in the bus, they are not always in the right seats. Getting people in the right seat to really be doing what is best suited for their talent is critically important for the success of the company.
It become abundantly clear as we continued to grow that the direction that we are going for doing the CEO, the day-to-day running of the company, making sure all the teams are working with each other on our vision and making things happen, that Tom really needed to be able to fully focus on the development of the software platform that we are continuing to expand upon and then I was better suited for helping lead the sales and marketing and then just the overall direction of the company. We have decided this makes sense to do this shift, and so we did.
The funny thing is that internally everyone on the team knows the roles we are playing aren't that different. I am still basically doing the same work I was doing a week ago. There are a few shifts, a few little differences, but not really many. It is more about how we are putting ourselves out. We are talking to strategic partners or investors or folks that we are working with externally. The conversations tend to be a little bit different when you are talking to a CEO than when you are talking to a COO or a CTO. We just needed to make that make sense moving forward.
Brett: It's fascinating. We actually just went through a very similar shift. I am also aware that you are a husband and wife team. Is that right?
Lorien: Yes, we are.
Brett: A little bit about what just happened in ClearView is a partner of mine for 10 years. We are not romantically together, but we are still best friends. I just made her the CEO of ClearView, and I am stepping back to be just a founder, investor, board member, and take more time to do things like this podcast and networking. It was a similar thing. The roles had already shifted. She's living in the UK in a timezone that´s much closer to most of our team and closer to most of the action, and I am living in Hawaii, which is the worst time zone for all of our team to coordinate with. But it is great for me to be on calls with people in the Pacific Northwest and the Bay Area.
But this shift has been a long time coming, and once we just switched titles, internally it made very little difference at all. Everyone is just like okay, great, now we are calling it what it is. Then externally now we can present each other as people will know what to expect and who to talk to about what.
Lorien: Yeah. That's exactly what happened internally with us, too. This shift has been happening for about two years now. I mean we really started talking about it. We should maybe make this title change. It is really just a title change, not a function or responsibility change. There are a few things I am going to be doing now that I wasn't doing before, and it is really true to get those last things off Tom´s plate so he can fully focus. A lot of it has to do with talking with investors and going through a fundraise and doing that kind of face-to-face stuff that we you need to be able to do with investors. That needs to come off of his plate so he can fully work on what we are doing with the technology.
For me, too, some folks would always say I would like to talk to your CEO even though they were going to need to talk to me. It was what I do on a day-to-day basis. It is really just a mindset for some of the people we are talking to. That title means a lot. To us, internally, it doesn't mean anything to our team internally. It was like okay, awesome. We will just keep on moving forward with what we are doing.
Brett: That sounds very similar in so many ways to what we have been experiencing. So we haven't gotten yet into what PetHub is. Give me a 30 second elevator pitch about what you guys are doing.
Lorien: So PetHub is a centralized data platform to help you meet all the needs of your pet´s life throughout their lifetime. We built it on a mission of protect, share and nurture, so it is three service buckets.
We started off with our first application, which was protect, which is all about lost pets getting home. We used the data that people come and put on our website about their pets to facilitate multiple lost pet recovery tools to help them get home very quickly. We can go into that later if you want to about how successful that has been.
Now we are currently building the share and nurture parts of our platform, which are all about being quickly, safely share that data, your pet´s data, with products and services that you want to connect with and interact with, so you can keep all the data synced and current and in one place. Then also our nurture platform will provide recommendations that are curated just for you and your pet for all aspects of your pet´s life from trusted industry resources.
Brett: Fascinating. What are some of the integrations that you might share this information with? How would you benefit from it as a pet owner?
Lorien: Let me give you an example. That´s a great question. That's literally what we are building right now. So what we are building right now, for example, are integrations with pet insurance. Imagine that you are a brand new pet parent, and you don´t know much at all about the whole aspects of owning a pet and dealing with the day-to-day life of a pet. You have heard about pet insurance but you are not really sure what it is all about.
Through our integrations with pet insurance, you will not only be able to learn about pet insurance, learn what parts of pet insurance are going to be applicable to you and your life, what the best fit for you is, but you will also be able to get an instant quote and instantly sign up for pet insurance through our site, which that frankly exists out there in other places. But then beyond that, you will be able to keep that information up-to-date and connected with your pet´s identification platform.
Let's say, for example, your pet goes missing and unfortunately gets injured while they are missing. Through our platform, whoever finds them, if they need to take them to the emergency vet, they will be able to instantly connect that with your pet insurance so they can get instant care. There are no issues about worrying about who is going to pay for this. They know you are connected to this pet insurance, and it will be instantaneous with that record exchange in a safe way for you and your information.
Brett: That does sound very useful. It is kind of like a digital identity solution for pets.
Lorien: Exactly. It all stays in one place, so that´s why we named ourselves PetHub so it can be that central place. It is operating all the different connections you have with products and services across your pet´s life. I mean and that's just the start of it. I mean it is also going to be connections with telehealth, connections with your veterinarian, connections with the best nutrition and keeping up-to-date on all of that, all of these different opportunities that we can share with you as a pet parent and keep the latest, greatest, best practices for your pet so you are not having to constantly dig through the internet to figure out what it is.
Brett: Absolutely. So that sounds very useful. I am noticing that it is July, and it isn´t it some kind of pet loss prevention awareness month or something like that.
Lorien: Yeah, exactly. It is lost pet prevention month. We actually started lost pet prevention month back in 2014. That stemmed from a conversation, actually a repeated conversation, but one particular conversation that I was having with somebody who was in the industry. She was trying to get her mind wrapped around why would I want to have this digital QR code and pet ID tag. I've already got a tag that´s got my name and phone number on it, and then he has got a microchip. So he doesn't need anything else. I realized that this conversation that was taking place in the industry would always circle around that ID tag from before the Civil War, simple, one name, one phone number, metal ID tag and microchips.
That was the only conversation we were having about pet identification when really pet identification can be and should be so much more. Then beyond that, that's not the only part about keeping your pet safe, so there were all these things about keeping your microchip up-to-date and having an ID tag, but beyond that, it is about training health and wellness, anxiety treatment, and mitigating anxiety issues, Houdini proofing your home, and have travel tools that are keeping your pet safe, all these different aspects that go into your pet from getting lost in the first place, and then being prepared if they do get lost to find them quickly.
So many of us, if we are not thinking about it ahead of time, will be caught flat footed should our pet go missing, and time is of the essence when your pet does go missing, so we wanted to provide basically a month long of education for all those tools and resources so then you are prepared for the worst.
Brett: A lot of times these stories come from some kind of tragedy, and I am almost afraid to ask, but did you have an experience of a lost pet that led to this? Or what made you become PetHub?
Lorien: Right, it is actually not my story. I actually have had lost pets in my life, and thankfully all of them have turned out the best but they have all been nerve-wracking and deeply upsetting at the time. But thankfully all of them came home. The story is Tom´s story. Tom Arnold, my husband. His story is actually what started PetHub because he started PetHub and then I came along about a year later.
But it actually stemmed from a trip where he went to India. He was working for Microsoft at the time and he was leading a project that they needed done in India. They told him he was going to be gone a month, so he secured a pet sitter and all of the services he would need for a month for his two cats. Then he went to India. While he was there, Microsoft said hey, do you mind staying an extra two months because we really need to do this extension on this project? If you don´t mind, we would rather have you leading it rather than having to bring in somebody else. He said absolutely, love it, until he started to try to manage things back home in the States. He realized it was so difficult and so complicated to be able to communicate with a sitter who could not extend the contract beyond a month because they already had gigs from the next months and then trying to find a pet sitter, trying to get the information about medical stuff to the new pet sitter and then also coordinate that with the veterinarian, all these other things that went on.
All that was going on, and he was finding it very difficult, very stressful while he was in India, half a world away. He came home thinking about this should be easier. I work for Microsoft where we help people use all their information and data so easily with all these great tools. This should be easier. He had been thinking about all that, and then around that time, once he got home, his cat, Taz, got spooked one day and shot out of the garage where her litter box was. I mean their litter box had been in the garage forever. They had never once run out when the door was open. It was a thing they all accepted, but Taz, for whatever reason, shot out.
Tom, realized, oh my goodness, that Taz she has on, I don't know if that´s my correct cell phone number. I don´t know who my microchip provider is. I don't even know how I am supposed to update that information or how old it is, and I know it is from three condos ago and a phone number ago when I just got her. He had this panic of I don't know what I am supposed to do. If somebody finds Taz, they are not going to find me because it is not connected to any current information. Then he was scrambling trying to find a picture of her. He didn't know where the last picture of her was. This is pre, big, huge Facebook, so he couldn't go to Facebook and grab a picture. Trying to figure out where it was going to be, where am I supposed to call, what are my local shelters. It was just all of this panic of I don't know what to do, and he came back to this idea that he had had while he was in India. This should be easier. And so he said all right, that's it.
I´ve got to do something to help pet parents like me have all that information in one place so when I need to do things for my pet that are critical, I know where to go, and I have that all in one place. That´s what started PetHub, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Brett: I am curious to go back to.
Lorien: By the way, the cat came home. I´ve got to always say that because people are always did the cat come home. The cat came home at like 4 am the next morning.
Brett: Of course. I am curious to go back to this husband, wife, this very team. How has that been for you guys?
Lorien: Honestly, I think it has made our relationship stronger. In fact, the proof is in the pudding. We were just dating when he came up with the idea. When he first came up with the idea, when he was in India, we hadn't even met yet, but he hadn't done anything with it. He had just been thinking about it, bandying it about with some of his colleagues at Microsoft at the time. Then, we had just started dating, I don´t know, maybe a month or two, and we were on car trip. He said Lorien, I am thinking this idea. I am thinking about creating this thing. He told me the story about Taz getting lost and everything, and he said what do you think about this idea, this hub for your pets. He said oh my God, that's the name of the website that I just thought and I was thinking about calling the company PetHub. I was like there you go.
He left Microsoft, and worked on it with a small team out of UW, and along the way kept bringing ideas home. We eventually had moved in together, but still I was separate. I had my day job. He would bring home ideas and bounce them off of me, and I would give him feedback. Then I got a little bit more involved, me giving feedback, and at some point, I said hey, you know, as I was stuffing envelopes for these first customers that they were getting for the first beta tests. You know, you could pay me for this because I was actually looking for a career change at the time. I was in education, doing not only classroom teaching, but also curriculum development and alignments with state standards, and all of this government ilk that I was not really having fun with. I said you could bring me along because my background had been in design and the arts and things like that. He said I will think about it.
A couple weeks later, I got an official letter inviting me to join the PetHub team, which was great. We were living together, but it was endearing. So I did. I joined PetHub working on the marketing and customer service and it just kind of grew from there. Then our relationship only got stronger. We had to learn a lot about communicating with each other and how to have that separation. We have a couple of cues that we give each other. Some are private that I won´t share here, but we have one, for example, when we are both ready to be done with work for the day, we literally say hey, honey, I am home. That is absolutely you may not talk about anything PetHub related until the next day when work begins. Hey, honey, I am home is please stop talking about work, and we´ll talk about it tomorrow.
We have had to learn a lot of things along the way for communication, but it has actually been really a great experience. It´s a bit challenging, but it has also been really fun.
Brett: I love that hey, honey, I am home boundary, time box container, whatever it is called.
Lorien: We have to. Otherwise, it consumes your entire life.
Brett: I think it would be a good idea in general for remote employees, too. Anyone who is working remotely, and your home and your office are sort of blended. Slack is on a bunch of different time zones. Whether you are not married to a cofounder or something.
Lorien: Oh yeah, and you guys probably experience this a lot with ClearView because you guys are spread literally in every direction of the world. I mean we only have employees in 3 of the 4 US time zones, but we already see that. Just because I am working at 6 pm in Seattle time doesn´t mean that you need to be working at 9 pm Florida time. That work life balance, I think, is key for everybody to learn those cut off times.
Brett: Another thing there that happens is that when you are remote, and you are working together, it can become just natural that the only thing you ever talk about is work because you are on Zoom calls for work. Then you never really get personal check-ins and personal updates, and then that starts to fall away. You really have to keep that intention. So let's talk about personal stuff for a while. Let's leave the business. How are you? What´s up with you right now?
Lorien: We have two things we do here at PetHub because we are a very remote team. Only about a third of our team is actually here in Wananchi, Washington.
Brett: How big is your team?
Lorien: We are 15. Two things we do regularly. We have random coffee talks. We have a Slack thing you can do, and this is random acts of virtual coffee or something like that. But anyway, it pairs us each week with somebody, and then we schedule 15 minutes of just coffee. You are not allowed to talk about work during that time. It also helps us to get to know the team as we grow because we have grown from 8 to 15 in just the last year.
But then the other thing that we do is we are an EOS company, entrepreneur operating system company. One of the parts of EOS is to have standard meeting format called the L10. It is a level 10 meeting, and the very first 5 to 10 minutes, depending on how many people are coming to the meeting and how long the meeting is, is called the segue. The segue allows everybody one minute to give a personal good news. All you do is listen to the news everybody else is having in their world. We used to let people pass. We don´t let people pass anymore because people would say I can't think of anything good. Just tell me what your dog did yesterday. We find we get some really wonderful connections with each other. We also have a random channel where all we do is share goofy, silly stuff, often about our animals because we are all animal, pet parents. It really helps that connection when you are all disconnected.
We didn't lose much when COVID happened because we were already so remote with all these different remote workers, but it really helps you keep those connections.
Brett: I remember the first time I tried to introduce into whatever management call a closing with everyone saying something they are grateful for, and I was a little bit afraid to do it. It was a suggestion from my coach. I was like people are going to think is kind of sappy. It led to like tears and connection. Okay, this is great.
Lorien: No, it is. I am looking at some other tools right now as I am moving into the CEO position. I want to take a couple of things. I don´t know if you are familiar with Renee Brown´s Dare to Lead. Exactly. One of the things I love is permission slips that you give each other at the beginning of each meeting. It is something I am hoping to be able to really do with what we are doing here at PetHub. You are giving yourself permission for those moments of vulnerability, which again, even though they are not about necessarily personal things, it does help make it more personal with you and your teammates. We are just humans. CEO doesn't mean anything right now. We are just humans, and we are just solving problems for our customers.
Brett: I am curious to hear one story, and this could be related to having a partner that you are working with and building this business, but it could also just be something else, something in which you had a personal growth or transformation experience that impacted the business and/or vice versa, something that occurred in the business that really impacted you as a human.
Lorien: There's been a lot, actually. When I first started, I dealt with a lot of imposter syndrome. I would sit in the room surrounded by men, and all of them had a computer science degree or a master's of business, an MBA. I would listen, and I would feel very overwhelmed and very much like what am I doing here. At that time, I wasn't a C level at that time. I was just managing and directing the marketing, but I had a hard time being willing to stand up and say things. I would sit in these meetings a lot of times, and when I would talk, I would feel a lot of angst and passion. It was overwhelming to the gentlemen I was in the room with, and it was really not very conducive to getting things done. I would do a lot of things in the back end and then come and show what I could do. I was really into showing my value rather than in these meetings being able to have these big, open vulnerable discussions with these folks.
I did a lot of work on the business, and I was definitely moving things forward for the business and very proud of what I did. But then I went and joined a group called Women in the Pet Industry Network with some pushing from some friends of mine in the industry. They had a lot of really great interactions with other women, and they just kind of bounced things off of each other. I realized a lot of women had the same situation that I did. Even though they were really doing the bulk work of a lot of what was driving their company, when they sat down in that board room with a bunch of men who had a lot of titles behind their names, they felt very intimidated. Frankly, I was surrounded by people in the tech industry, not really in the pet industry. The tech industry is very male heavy.
I got a lot of advice from those ladies and everything, and then one of the things that I was pushed to do by my friends was to apply for the women in the pet industry network award. It was a long process. You have to go through a little different Q&A, and review, and you have to really dig deep and just really get a lot of who you really are out there as they evaluate. Then it is put out there for judging and evaluation. I was really excited about the process you went through to answer all these questions and to do the Q&A. It really helped me dig deep and find a lot of competence in myself. Oh my gosh, I really am doing this. This is awesome. It really proved to myself how much I knew.
I was shocked when I actually won the award. It was just amazing. What it was was a validation for not only myself but also validation within the company. So that was kind of a turning point for me, not because I was any more talented or anymore valid in what I was doing, but it really helped me get over that feeling of I am a fraud. It helped me be much more confident. It shifted the way I dealt with everything in the company. It really helped the company in so many ways. Again, not because of the title, but because of what it did for me and helping me put myself out there and being willing to take more risks, and being willing to speak up but also being confident that I can be wrong about these things, but I also have a very valid opinion here. I am going to share it. It was really instrumental.
There were a lot of things along the way that have been like that, but it was a huge growth moment for me. It made me feel like a grown up, I guess.
Brett: I am curious about that particular moment, when you first heard about the award, and I am sure some resistance set in, some complex showed up. You are like no, that couldn´t be me. I am curious about the moment of transition you experienced between there´s this award I am not good for to I can apply for this. I am good enough to put in this effort and see what happens.
Lorien: I think if anything, it was that moment when I realized I was very successful all the way through college. I mean I went to college early. I was top of my class and went to grad school. I was extremely successful with what I did in grad school and got snapped up. All these different things. Every moment up until I got in the technology or tech industry, I´ve always felt confident and knew what I was doing. I knew that I was one of the people in the room who could make a difference. I enjoyed making a difference.
I think a lot of it was actually pulling back from my past and going okay, just because you don't have a degree next to your name that says you are an expert at this doesn't mean you are not bringing something really valid to the table. In this case, when we started PetHub, in the early days of PetHub, I truly was our ideal customer. I was a customer. I knew the customer because I was the customer. Now I am kind of too old to be our customer. Our customers are about 18, 19 years younger than me, but at the time I was the ideal customer. I knew that, but also I was talking to the clients and I was talking to our customers. I was seeing the light bulb moments. I knew what was going to work and what wasn't going to work.
I think the moment for me just remembering that I had it in me. What do I have to lose? Really, truly, what do I have to lose? I guess there would be the embarrassment factor if I didn't make it at all, but they didn't list everyone who had applied. They only list the top 25.
Brett: Here are the losers.
Lorien: Here are the losers. If I apply, a couple hundred women, and I get chosen as the top 25. When I actually got chosen for the finals, I was oh my gosh. I was blown away. Really, holy crap, that's amazing. But I think it was just that moment of going okay, you have been successful up until now. I don't know why I have lost that confidence that I would be successful. Other than that, I was in a brand new industry that I had no training. I didn't have that resume behind me that the gentlemen had behind them.
Brett: How did that process of coming through and applying shift your perspective regardless of whether or not you won?
Lorien: It is hard to remember now. Like I said before, it is really just more about that validation, and actually having to write out. They were asking some pretty in-depth questions about you as a leader and where you were making an impact. You kind of don´t realize when you are in the work. The whole idea of working on the company rather than in the company, and everything, and so when you are in the work, you lose sight of all the accomplishments. You get this done. All right, great, we are hitting that milestone. Good, we hit that milestone. You really kind of like lose that big picture of what you have really accomplished. Being able to step back and take a bird's eye view, and really say this is what you have done. This is where you have helped. This is where you actually led the effort, and this is where you made a bunch of mistakes and then you learned from those mistakes. Then you turned it around into this success.
Being able to see that progress I had made in those first 4 years I had been at PetHub was huge for me. It was a huge learning for me. That stepping back and looking up where I have been and what I have become. That process, even before I turned in the application, was a self validation that I really needed.
Brett: That seems like a seed for a really good writing assignment for anyone in our position, your position and in the position of somebody who is feeling some kind of fraud complex or uncertainty or insecurity and their head is down, doing what they are doing. They just take a step back and imagine you are writing your own award application.
Lorien: Yeah, exactly.
Brett: See what that does to your psyche. The thing was I found that at the end of the whole thing, it wasn´t just about what I had accomplished. It was about what I had learned, where I went. It also opened for me like wow, okay, that nugget right there, that's where my fear is. That nugget over there, that's where my strength is. How can I use this strength to help bolster this fear and get rid of this fear. It really opened up very clearly where I had my strengths, where I had my challenges and what I could work on for me. It was just a great experience. Anytime, I think, that you step back.
Tom and I, and now we have a bigger leadership team, yah, as we grow. We take one time a year where we step back and we do a retreat. We just do that bird´s eye view. Where have we been? Okay. What did we learn along the way? Where do we want to go? Where do we see those strengths and weaknesses? Reassessing that all the time, not just keeping your head down and moving forward. Being willing to step back and look and reassess, and say okay, this is where we are, and this is what we have learned. Every time you do that, that stepping back, you help reset everything and get so much more clarity than when you were just focusing on the grand plan and just moving forward.
Brett: That's powerful stuff. Thank you, Lorien. We are coming up on our time now. Thank you for your sharing and thank you for your vulnerability and for your time.
Lorien: Absolutely. Happy to be here. I just want to encourage everybody. It is loss pet prevention month. Please go to losspetpreventionmonth.com and please make sure you have everything in place that you need to to keep your pets happy and safe and at home.
Brett: All right, thank you. Take care everybody.