PET TECH + how caring for something at the scale of gluttony is some sort of antidote for 2019
Hi team,
A few weeks ago, I asked my friend Melissa W what I should write about for the next 4CJ.
Melissa W said “pets.”
Here we go:
In the past decade, we’ve all purchased apps and devices to make our own lives easier — we’ve invested in tools to boost our confidence (Instagram) and track our periods (Flo) and increase our productivity (Evernote). It doesn’t always work, but this technology is all aimed at helping us care for ourselves better.
Pet tech, in contrast, is really about our need to care for other things. To be generous! To do for our Persian Greyhound what we cannot do for ourselves: track her steps, make sure she eats healthy. It is relieving to be over-the-top and lavish towards a non-self entity for a change, right? It is a morsel of something else. With a little budgetary wiggle room, we can ensure that our Alaskan Malamute does a happy dance each month when a new chewtoy comes out of his subscription toy box. If this isn’t nice, what is?
Subscription dogtoy boxes, pet finance tools, comprehensive veterinary solutions, and dog genetic services:
Work here because: what if your whole job was about creating hilarious pet gifts?
Nearly 2 million dogs have received a custom-curated gift basket from Barkbox. What is this experience like? “Every BarkBox has 2 innovative toys, 2 all-natural bags of treats, and a chew, curated from each month's unique themed collection.” Past themes include “Throwbark Thursday” and “The Good, the Bad, and the Pugly” and “Chewrassic Park.” All treats are sourced and made in the USA; full refunds are offered if your Staffordshire Terrier is not 100% happy with his box. It seriously seems as though the best practices in product curation, customer service, and materials sourcing have found their final telos in the pet services industry. Think about how fun it would be to design this cute pet stuff: see, for example, the video their media team was tasked with compiling for the prehistoric theme. It is a stop-motion production entitled “the Age of the Dogosaur” which features that month’s toys exploring a volcanic environment.
Barkbox is hiring a data scientist, a cybersecurity manager, a product designer, and more.
Work here if you want to deploy 21st-century debt finance techniques to the challenge of pet affordability.
I ask my friends once a week if they will co-parent a dog with me. They always express the same concern: what happens when our future Chow Chow needs to go to the vet? A routine check-in, with vaccines, is the price of a Michelin dinner; more complex procedures run in the thousands of dollars. While I do see that having a Finnish Spitz is a discretionary expense, can’t we do something with all our new blockchain internet et cetera that makes it easier to welcome the unconditional love of a pet into our lives? This is Scratchpay’s prerogative; they offer payment plans in the event of veterinary emergency. If your Tibetan Mastiff needs heart surgery, Scratchpay will front the $4000 cost; you’ll pay it off at $40/month. This idea (a point-of-sale installment payment service) has succeeded in other industries: take Afterpay, which allows you to finance, among other things, your Urban Outfitters purchases.
Scratchpay is hiring engineers, a product manager, and more.
Work here because: comprehensive healthcare networks are the future.
So many of the business and personal problems we encounter are really about the costs of distributed information access — this is excruciatingly true in healthcare. Here’s how. Imagine that someone named Taylor — otherwise healthy, 25 years old — dies from a heart attack. Taylor’s doctor knew that she had an arrhythmia. Taylor’s best friend knew that she was almost always drinking a hot beverage. Taylor’s mom knew that her puberty was delayed. The information required to diagnose person X with hypothyroidism before it resulted in sudden cardiac death was all known, but it wasn’t connected. We want to more reliably bring these clues together — this is exactly what Babelbark is doing in the petcare universe: their software is designed to make sure that no data point on the health of your British Shorthair is lost to the wind. Vets can see their own test results right next to adoption notes from the shelter, live fitbit data, and doggy daycare journals. The potential for proactive care skyrockets — comprehensive networks like this are the future of healthcare for dogs and cats and humans and even cities. Babelbark off to a head start.
Babelbark is hiring an account manager.
Work here if you want to help eliminate preventable disease in pets.
Embark veterinary lets you learn so much about your dog from a single morsel of spit: breed, traits, health, relatives, ancestry. This company is delivering on “a promise for all dog kind.” They produce “science worth wagging about.” They have, in the past, used their insights to reunite separated-at-birth dog sisters. Because — know thyself and know thy dog, right? It has got to be so fun to help your pet, a Bergamasco Shepherd, understand who he is and where he came from - his base coat color, his shedding tendency, his ancestors. For only $199.
Embark is hiring for a slew of very serious-sounding research positions (a statistical genomicist, a computational biologist), an accountant, a logistics manager, and a few software engineers.
Thanks for tuning in.
xoxo
Lea B
leaib@umich.edu