Episode #17 – Dr. Caleb Frankel

Better Technology, Better Medicine, Better Care
Merging his entrepreneurial spirit, knowledge of technology, and passion for animals, Dr. Frankel’s pursuits range from founding a sophisticated software platform to practicing emergency Veterinary medicine to speaking and publishing.

Speaker 1:
Welcome to The People of Animal Health Podcast. The host of our podcast is Stacy Pursell. Stacy is the leading executive recruiter for the animal health and veterinary industries. She’s the founder of Therio partners and The VET Recruiter. Stacy has placed more professionals in key positions within the animal health and veterinary industries than any executive search professional. And along the way, Stacy has built relationships with some outstanding people who are doing incredible things to make a difference. The People of Animal Health Podcast features industry leaders and trailblazers who have made a significant impact or are making an impact in the animal health and veterinary industries. Stacy chats with them to learn more about their lives, their careers, and the unique and interesting things that they have done to contribute to the animal health or veterinary industries. She is here to share their stories with you. Now here’s the host of our podcast, Stacy Pursell.

Stacy Pursell:
Hello everyone, and welcome to The People of Animal Health Podcast. On today’s show, we are talking with Dr. Caleb Frankel, an entrepreneur who is an internship-trained ER veterinarian, an alumni of the University of Pennsylvania. He started a software company essentially because he couldn’t take it anymore. He launched Instinct in 2017 as a new practice software platform focused on improving state-of-the-art hospital through humanized software that incorporates true workflow improvement, decision support, patient safety tools and charge capture automation.

Stacy Pursell:
He also practices emergency medicine at the Veterinary Specialty and Emergency Center, an 80 doctor referral hospital in the greater Philadelphia Pennsylvania area. Caleb previously served as director of new product development at Brief Media, where he led the development of the Plumb’s veterinary drugs app. Caleb, welcome onto The People of Animal Health Podcast. We’re excited to have you. And how are you today, Caleb?

Dr. Caleb Frankel:
I’m great. Thanks for having me on the podcast.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, Caleb, I know that you have already experienced success at this point in your career, but I would love to start off at the bottom in the very beginning of your career. What was your life like growing up, and where did you grow up?

Dr. Caleb Frankel:
Yeah, thanks for that awesome intro. I grew up in the middle of nowhere, Pennsylvania. It’s a town called Williamsport. Many people know it because it’s the home of Little League Baseball in the Little League World Series. You see it on ESPN for two weeks out of every year when Little League Baseball takes over there. And my family has roots there. I grew up there. I went to a very small high school, graduated with 80 people, and my family were business people. I come from a long line of business people. My grandfather, and then my father owned a local store and then continued work in various parts of business. And a lot of my upbringing was shaped in that small town environment; far away from the city and in the beautiful mountain part of Pennsylvania.

Stacy Pursell:
Wow. So when did you first figure out what you wanted to do professionally?

Dr. Caleb Frankel:
Yeah. So I’m one of those cliches probably. When I was 16, I was offered a high school program where they would place students who were good students in local businesses for career exploration in the afternoons instead of being at the high school. And I, at that time, for the first time, started thinking about what I wanted to do with my life. And I had a bunch of options and I sat down and said, I really love science. I happen to be unique in my family and that science was my passion and I loved animals. And I didn’t know anything about veterinary medicine. I probably had maybe been with my parents to bring our animals like a few times in my life. The real story is, it’s not like I had been a lot. And I said, I wonder if that’s a cool job.

Dr. Caleb Frankel:
I had a bunch of these lined up with high school, and my first one that they placed me with was a very small veterinary clinic with a veterinarian who did large animal medicine in the mornings. Actually, Amish farms, and then small animal medicine in the afternoons and the evenings. And I remember my first day there. We were, like many veterinarians, he was there till eight o’clock at night. After the program ended at four, I was supposed to go home. I didn’t want to go home. So I asked if I could stay and I had fallen in love. I got to see the reward of helping people and helping animals, and helping these Amish farmers. And quite honestly, I became obsessed from that first day. I canceled all my other high school after work activities and asked if I could just stay there and haven’t looked back since.

Stacy Pursell:
Wow. I love that story. Well, tell us the story of the very beginnings of your career. How did you get started in veterinary medicine?

Dr. Caleb Frankel:
Yeah. So from there I spent most of high school with now a new plan to hopefully one day get into veterinary medicine. I really liked it. I spent a lot of time with various veterinarians from that point on, shadowing them mostly. And when it was time to go to college, I had a singular focus of going to a school where I could position myself to get into veterinary school. And so I went to the University of Maryland as an undergraduate student. I chose that school because I looked at a lot of programs that had agriculture backgrounds because I really had fallen in love with the large animal work, to be honest, even though I was from a strictly small animal background, and knew nothing about farms or farm animals, except for my work with this… some of the veterinarians in my hometown.

Dr. Caleb Frankel:
And I really loved it enough where I said, I should probably do animal sciences at a land grant institution if I was serious about that, so that I could get up to speed with farm animals. And so I started looking at various schools and visited the University of Maryland, fell in love. That was an institution that really did shape my career, to be on honest. And I’m the typical cliche. I, from day one, I had the same major, worked really hard, positioned myself to get into veterinary school, got into Penn, and went there right after Maryland.

Dr. Caleb Frankel:
And Penn is where I graduated from veterinary school. And when I was at veterinary school, I started to spend some time in other industries and spend some time looking at more of the industry as a whole. I got the opportunity to work at a consulting firm called Booz Allen Hamilton, which many have probably heard of, where I was a subject matter expert, helping teams working with the USDA on projects, for example.

Dr. Caleb Frankel:
And I got to start to see how technology was being used. Remember, this was around the early 2000s; 2004-2008 was when I was in vet school. And so summers, I would spend either working at Booz Allen Hamilton, or I would spend with veterinarians, and I got to start to see the stark contrast for the first time of how technology was being used in other parts of the business world, and how the veterinary industry really had nothing. And looking back, I didn’t see it at that time, but it greatly shaped where I was headed with my career, even though I didn’t know it. And so to finish the story, I ended up really seeing that I wanted to be a hospital owner, and I really thought it would be interesting to open up chains of specialty hospitals. That was my goal by the time I was done with veterinary school, and I wanted to be an internal medicine specialist.

Dr. Caleb Frankel:
I saw specialty medicine as an emerging and really exciting part of the field in 2008. This was back when specialty hospitals weren’t a very common thing, besides the teaching hospitals, but they were starting to form. Blue Pearl was starting to form, for example, as one of the early chains. I didn’t know about them, but I really saw that as an interesting thing. And I thought I wanted to start chains of specialty hospitals, and I applied for an internship to get extra training. I ended matching at a place called Coral Springs Animal Hospital, just another place that really shaped my career. I worked under a fabulous human and mentor, Lloyd Meisels, who was somebody who had started specialty medicine in a very early part of the industry, and learned a lot about the intersection of client service and business and referral service and specialty medicine.

Dr. Caleb Frankel:
And I felt like my career really started there because when I got out into this private practice, I recognized, and this was a hospital that had won multiple hospital of the year awards, was trying to do everything they could to make their lives better. They were very progressive, but I realized that the technology, that they were used, mostly around software, in various parts of the hospital was extremely limiting. And this was back in the days where technology was really starting to be adopted. People were moving their medical records to software. And I really started, I got blindsided by it, to be honest. And I said, huh, this would…

Dr. Caleb Frankel:
If I wanted to open up chains od specialty hospitals, this would really be an interesting barrier, and I would be constantly frustrated by it. And so my career took a sidetrack to starting to work on, can I help make that better, be part of the solution for the future of the industry? And so I got on software advisory boards and started tinkering and became a lecturer on how to use technology and an author in the industry. And that’s really where I got my start. And at the same time, I fell in love with emergency medicine, surprisingly. And so my career in emergency medicine and technology started to form there.

Stacy Pursell:
So then how did you go from there? You became an entrepreneur. Next, tell us about your journey from the getting started with forming your company. How did you go about that?

Dr. Caleb Frankel:
Yeah, there was a lot that came in between there. So I was working as an intern in 2008 at Coral Springs Animal Hospital, and really my budding interest in starting to learn to be a high quality clinician for the patients I was caring for and becoming obsessed with this software technology problem. And I started to think about how to marry those things. And I ended up staying on there as an emergency room clinician. Mostly that was default because my wife, girlfriend then wife at the time was starting a PhD program in the area. And I had already said, if I was going to do a residency, I wanted to go back to Penn. And so we had a nice agreement that we would never be in school at the same time. So I owed it to her not to go back into training.

Dr. Caleb Frankel:
And so I worked while she did her PhD, and in those three or four years where I stayed on at Coral Springs Animal Hospital, I really started thinking seriously about how to help with this technology problem. And then I eventually moved. My wife and I had children, and we wanted to be back in the Northeast. And I took a new job where I work now at the Veterinary Specialty and Emergency Center with lots of my former Penn professors and clinicians and colleagues, and I recognized the same problem there. And started tinkering with all kinds of technology there, and eventually that led to some speaking, some writing and consulting. And the real story is I wrote an article on a blog that I had started in, I think it was 2013, and it was talking about how, wow, if anything should be digital, it should be Plumb’s.

Dr. Caleb Frankel:
We use this every day. Why are we using a book for this? And I wrote this blog about digitizing pharmaceutical resources, and the story about how this all started is the founder of a company called Brief Media, Elizabeth Green. She reached out to me and I read Clinician’s Brief and she said, I saw your blog post about pharmacy. I’d love to talk to you. And so we met up at the next conference we were at together and she shared with me that they were starting to think about digitizing Plumb’s with the author, Don Plumb. And they have been looking for a veterinarian to help lead the team to make sure that as they start their point of care software division, they had the right input. And she wanted to know if I would do some consulting.

Dr. Caleb Frankel:
And then that eventually led to a job. I started working there as director of new product development, working hand in hand with the team, leading the team that built the Plumb’s application back in 2013. And that was a transformative experience for me because I was really given a job I wasn’t qualified for, but I’m a learning animal. And I decided to do it and learned everything I could about working with software engineers and designing high quality software at the point of care and supporting it and commercializing it, and dealing with all the stakeholders in it.

Dr. Caleb Frankel:
And that’s really where I felt like my entrepreneurship journey started. And at that time I was working 50% in the clinic and 50% as director of new product development for Brief Media and Plumb’s became very successful, and I still had this burning interest to fix some of the bigger software problems. And really I look back and almost eight years had gone by, and nothing really had changed. And I felt like a veterinarian should be part of the solution, and so I started to make early plans on what would become Instinct, which is the software company I started.

Stacy Pursell:
One of the things that I heard you say, Caleb. You said you were put at a job that you weren’t qualified for. And I think that’s an interesting point there. How did you overcome that? How did you overcome being put in a job that you were not qualified for? I know you said a few things about that, but elaborate on that, if you would.

Dr. Caleb Frankel:
Yeah. I remember when I was offered that job… [inaudible 00:15:05] tell this story too. The real story is I declined it. I said, no, I’m not qualified for that, which I think would be a lot of people’s reaction to an offer like that, right? And I can resonate with that. A lot of people call something similar to that imposter syndrome these days. Right? And I turned it down because I didn’t feel like I was qualified, but also I felt like that was the job you’d take when you were burned out of your clinical job maybe 10, 15, 20 years down the road. And I felt like, hey, I’m loving being a clinician. I am not burnout. I am early in my career journey and that just seems silly. My wife and I went out to dinner and I remember talking to her about this, and her reaction was, are you crazy?

Dr. Caleb Frankel:
And she really helped me through this, because she was right. This was a stepping stone in what I was really interested in, which is solving some of these problems, having a bigger impact on my colleagues in the industry. And so I remember calling Beth back and saying, hey, what if I did this half and half with clinical medicine and working for you, and I stay in the clinic, and that could be better for this. And we came to an agreement that that would be a interesting idea, and that helped me. And then the real problem started, which is I don’t know what I’m doing.

Dr. Caleb Frankel:
I don’t know how to direct new software, new product development. I’m not a business person. But I surrounded myself with a lot of good people. I had trust from the leaders. And just one of those people who learns how to do things, and I have a lot of confidence in my ability to figure things out. That’s something I’ve honed over the years, but I really do believe that I could be given almost anything and I could figure it out. And that’s just my personality, and that’s always helped me through those periods,

Stacy Pursell:
Having confidence. Wow. What a great story. So many people don’t apply for positions that they don’t feel qualified for. And sometimes they’re given opportunities and they turn down those opportunities because of the fear of not feeling qualified or having confidence that they can do that. So I love the story about how you overcame that, and you just stepped into that role. When did you first feel like you were truly beginning to gain traction with your career? You’ve done all these different things up to this point. Was there a point in time where you felt like I’m really gaining some traction with my career?

Dr. Caleb Frankel:
I’ve probably had many milestones where that felt like I was gaining that traction, and then of course, a few days later, you feel like you have no idea what you’re doing, and I still have those days by the way. But, and I think that’s normal. But I do remember some inflective shifts as a new veterinarian probably at the end of my internship, where I was the only doctor in the hospital, or I was seen as the expert from the nurses, or even some of the specialists on how to help with a certain case. And those periods, I’ll never forget, because they feel really rewarding. Those people who aren’t veterinarians listening to this, or have not been to veterinary school, I think there’s a very common misconception that you graduate from veterinary school and you are magically a veterinarian, right?

Dr. Caleb Frankel:
You can handle it, you know what you’re doing. And those of us who have been through it know that it couldn’t be more the opposite. An internship was so transformative for me because it helped surround me with people to solidify my confidence and holes. I had an internship director who used to say that everybody graduates from veterinary school with a bunch of holes in their knowledge, and everybody has different holes. And nobody really knows how to put it all together. And in an internship, those holes get filled rapidly and they come together rapidly because you have experts surrounding you in the right internship. And that’s very true. And I can still picture the nights or the day shifts where that started to happen, and that was a big point for me.

Stacy Pursell:
I know that successful people have some low points and then they have some high points throughout their career. And I know that you’re still on this career journey. Walk us through the highest high up to this point in your career and also the lowest low, if you will.

Dr. Caleb Frankel:
Yeah, that’s a tough one. So I’ll tell you what comes to mind. I still go into hospitals where people don’t know that I’m part of Instinct. Our software, for those that don’t know, even though it’s not extremely well known, happens to be running some of the biggest and most important veterinary centers in the world. Some of those are universities. We have almost 50% of the teaching hospitals and students graduating using our software now, one of the biggest hospitals in the world, the Animal Medical Center in New York City has used it for years.

Dr. Caleb Frankel:
The biggest hospital in Asia uses it. So we have pretty significant centers using it, and it is never going to get old for me to walk into one of those hospitals, for whatever reason, if I’m visiting, sometimes it’s bring my own pet there and to see our software on all the TVs and all the computers. It still blows me away, and it’s the impact we’re having. And I think our team gets to feel this on really at the end on families and pets around the world in cities everywhere.

Dr. Caleb Frankel:
And so I have those moments all the time. On the low part, this is not easy. And I have a lot of respect for anybody who’s led a software company, serving the critical parts of veterinary hospitals. I’m talking about the point of care where if something goes wrong with your software, it can literally be to some degree, life or death for the patients that are involved in it. And so we take that responsibility very seriously, but I remember the early days, I’m talking about the first few months of our program back five years ago, where we’d have one or two hospitals using it, and we’d have an issue that we didn’t expect, or maybe we weren’t even causing and the impact and the responsibility that you have on the teams using it really can create some serious lows for somebody like me who’s driven towards helping. And I remember a nurse who now works at Instinct by the way, saying to me at one of these early hospitals, because I am sure I had called and apologized and bought pizza for the whole team or something.

Dr. Caleb Frankel:
This is a giant specialty hospital where the system was down or something for an hour, right, while the team was fixing something, and I remember her saying, hey, I know we complained about this, but I just wanted to say, everybody has issues like this. Every software company, every company, every product, but I hope you know that how responsive you and your team is, is everything we could ask for and nothing we’ve ever seen before. And it dramatically changed how I think about any kind of issue that we have. We’ve prided ourselves on building the best support organization on top of the amazing software we think we’re building and that’s more important sometimes to our users, and that moment really helped me. But it was a low moment for sure. And I will never forget those early days where you have those stressful periods. Luckily we’re way more mature now and have way fewer of those.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, thank you for sharing that story. That must have been extremely validating just to hear that feedback from that customer. And I love you talking about how you build the largest support organization. Caleb, I’m curious, what has been the most surprising thing to you so far throughout your career in the veterinary profession and animal health industry?

Dr. Caleb Frankel:
Probably that I am a software entrepreneur. I used to not even like saying that, because it didn’t feel like I was. I’ve always prided myself on being a veterinarian first, but I’ve really had to change that. I think a lot of people get into the industry side of veterinary medicine because they want to, because that was a goal, because they were burned out and they were looking for other career opportunities and there is nothing wrong with that being the way. Right? But that’s just not my story. I’m here because I’m genuinely frustrated and felt like I had no other choice than to do this.

Dr. Caleb Frankel:
I’m one of those people, I’m a practice manager’s worst nightmare, because if I think something can be done better, I’m going to be all over that. I’m not only going to be vocal about it, I’m going to be actively trying things and changing things without asking. And it’s all, I think, for the better, but that’s not for everybody. And my personality is one that if I think something can be done better, I’m going to be the one who’s part of doing it. I can’t help myself. I describe myself as a Border Collie, I need a project all the time. And that alone is what got me here as a software entrepreneur. But the surprising part is I’m a planner. I knew that I was going to be a veterinarian since the time I was 16. So now to be doing a small amount of emergency veterinary medicine and a very large amount of running a software company is very surprising still.

Stacy Pursell:
You’ve got the best of both worlds. You get to have both feet, one foot in the veterinary profession, and one foot in the animal health industry. I’m sure you’ve seen a lot over the years. How have you seen the veterinary profession and animal health industry change over the years throughout the time that you’ve been involved?

Dr. Caleb Frankel:
Yeah. There’s a lot of changes happening as you probably know, and a lot of people who you have on this podcast probably can talk about. I’ll focus on one that’s one of the more recent changes that I think is fascinating and in some ways, in a long term lens, really a good thing. And that is that finally, the veterinary professional, meaning the nurse and the veterinarian and the front desk employee on the front line is the most important stakeholder in every veterinary hospital in the world. And that was not the case when I graduated from vet school. And what I mean by that is, you probably remember this, but the AVMA was talking about an oversupply of veterinarians.

Dr. Caleb Frankel:
They were talking about veterinarians becoming commodities and nurses becoming commodities. And I remember when I started as a veterinarian, if you wanted to start a veterinarian hospital, your list of problems or things to solve for were clients, cash, referrals, supplies, maybe even acquirers. I remember talking to older veterinarians who couldn’t find a way to sell their hospital back in the early days, right? Just think about where we are now. So everything is flipped. Capital is extremely easy to obtain if you want to start a veterinary hospital, clients, everybody’s closing their doors because we have too many pets and too many clients in the market, so there’s a supply and demand shift.

Dr. Caleb Frankel:
The buyers of clinics, you’re turning down acquirers every day, even if you just start your hospital, by the way. You don’t care about referrals, because you don’t need them. You just want less clients, right? But you can’t staff your hospital with veterinarians and nurses. And this is one of the most fascinating changes because it’s overdue and it puts the veterinarian and the veterinarian nurse in the driver’s seat in terms of what needs to get accomplished. And it brings the focus, no matter what you’re doing for running your hospital, right down to the point of care which is where it should be. And that’s going to be a hard thing to change over the next decade. So I would say that’s the one that I think is most fascinating.

Stacy Pursell:
You mentioned a supply and demand, and it’s interesting. I spoke at the AVMA Economic Summit in the fall of 2019, and I said this there, and I’ll say it here too. But back in the great recession, right around 2008, there were a lot of people saying that there were too many veterinarians in the market or there were going to be too many veterinarians. I didn’t see that as a recruiting firm owner and doing executive search and recruiting in the veterinary profession for over 25 years. I saw a shortage of veterinarians back around 2008. In fact, we did more placements of veterinarians throughout the great recession than we had in the whole history of our company prior to that. And we had clients that were complaining, we cannot find a veterinarian anywhere.

Stacy Pursell:
So I was scratching my head, trying to figure out during this time, why are people saying that there are too many veterinarians? Because I always say, if you want to know what’s going on, or you want to know what trends are happening in a profession, ask recruiters because recruiters are talking to hundreds, if not thousands of people a year, but I didn’t see too many veterinarians at that time. And, as you just mentioned, now we’ve got a staffing problem. We’ve got a severe shortage of veterinarians and veterinary nurses as well. It’s become the biggest problem for most employers in the veterinary space is hiring talent. Caleb, what does your crystal ball say about the future of veterinary medicine and the animal health industry?

Dr. Caleb Frankel:
I think there is a lot going on and I’ve said this for a couple years now, we are going to look back and this is going to feel like a transformative decade or 20 year period for veterinary medicine. It really feels that way. There’s a lot of new clinic models starting up. There’s a lot of outside money finally recognizing how interesting veterinary medicine is, and there’s a lot that’s going to change because of that. But I’ll tell you one thing, the crystal ball tells me that one, pets are going to continue to become a much bigger part of society. We are on a hundred year trend. Most people think of pets becoming family members more and more and more, if that sounds even possible to those of us in the industry, but it is.

Dr. Caleb Frankel:
We are on probably a hundred year trend of insurance for at least pets, small animal healthcare becoming a bigger thing and probably large animal. In other countries, it’s north of 55-0%, in the US, I don’t know what the recent statistic is, but let’s say it’s under four or 5%. And so all of that points to animals are going to need veterinarians. That is going to be really hard to change. It is the foundation. There are legal knowledge, professional barriers to anything changing around that simple fact. And so if you were looking for problems to solve, you should start right there.

Stacy Pursell:
Yeah, that’s really good. Well, tell me about, I would like for you to share with the listeners about the kinds of projects that you’re up to today and also, what does a typical day look like for you these days?

Dr. Caleb Frankel:
Yeah, so Instinct for those who don’t know is a company that we started in 2017. We started it as a way to start to make a dent in workflows in especially the very large emergency specialty teaching hospitals. We built a whiteboard and workflow platform that plugged into the existing practice management software to help get people off paper and connect their workflows and automate charge capture, and step in and help make sure patients are safe and teams go home on time. Those are really our focuses. Now we’ve transitioned. We offer three products today.

Dr. Caleb Frankel:
One is our [treatment 00:32:06] plan, which lots of people know us for. Two is a full practice management software for those who want something fully unified and different. And that is brand new as of last year, many don’t know about it, but will soon. And three, we started at the end of last year and launched the first e-prescribing platform for veterinary teams, meaning a way to finally get off fax machines and paper to handle outside prescriptions like the human health field has had for decades and do it in an agnostic way. Meaning you can send them to multiple pharmacies, not an individual pharmacy. And this is where the future’s headed and when it comes to projects, I always say, we’ll keep taking on problems until we feel like some of this is solved and we’re in a great position.

Dr. Caleb Frankel:
We have a team of about almost 60 people now. Most people don’t realize that on the Instinct team, we’re a much bigger company and we have built this really unique squad of 50% animal health experts, nurses, CVPM’s, veterinarians, we have 10 veterinarians on our team, and technology experts, senior experts, software development, we don’t outsource anything. And we built this really unique team who has a mission around what we’re doing for our hospitals. And so I think you’ll hear more and more about what we’re doing and we’re really proud of where we are, but we’re not even close to done. We talk a lot about how this is really just year one of 20 plus of what we’re trying to solve for this industry. And we think we’re really making a dent so far. So that’s the first part.

Dr. Caleb Frankel:
I think the second part, what does my day look like? Well, I have three young children and a gaggle of animals as you’d expect. So it’s not all work, but from a work perspective, I am an early riser. So probably shouldn’t put this out here, because people start emailing me early, but I get up around 5:30 Eastern. I secretly get most of my things done for the day before the world wakes up. It’s my superpower, and then I’m mostly there for my team or for other meetings during the rest of the day. And I use a lot of technology as you can imagine.

Dr. Caleb Frankel:
One interesting thing is the Instinct team is a fully remote organization and we’ve been that way since pre pandemic. We, in 2018, made a conscious decision to build an organization with no office. And that’s weird, but becoming way more common, obviously. When the pandemic hit, we were already used to swatting our dogs and kids out of the video screen and knew how to be productive from home while others were learning. But this is something we’re very committed to and it allows us to find talent in any place, including outside of the US.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, I look forward to hearing more about that too. We’ll have to have you back on the podcast again in the future so you can share more about the work that you’re doing. Caleb, what mentor has had the biggest impact on your career?

Dr. Caleb Frankel:
I’ve had a lot of mentors. You don’t do some of the things that I’ve done without them. That’s really the secret. Everybody who’s done this has mentors and from a veterinary standpoint, I’ve had too many to mention, to be honest. Some I work with still now. As a software entrepreneur, somebody named Rick Genzer, who is a software entrepreneurship guru in the Philadelphia area, stumbled into my world back in 2015 or 16 when I was really thinking about doing this and has become somebody who really helped accelerate me as a CEO and an entrepreneur, and shaped some of the strategy behind Instinct in the early days. And he’s been instrumental in terms of helping me and Instinct be successful.

Stacy Pursell:
What advice would you give the younger version of yourself if you were just starting out?

Dr. Caleb Frankel:
Well, I certainly don’t have any regrets. I think I’m very lucky in hindsight, in many ways of the timing of what I’ve done, both as a emergency veterinarian, interested in specialty medicine and somebody who’s working on technology. We started Instinct late enough in the 2000s that we are able to take advantage of some of the amazing technology tech stacks, code, tools that some of my predecessors who started software companies unfortunately were unable to and now are locked into the technology they use. And that’s a really amazing thing for us. We also started it early enough that hospitals haven’t in mass had to gravitate to clunky software. And in the early days, a lot of hospital owners would describe X, Y or Z software as the Oasis in the desert, but really it’s a desert, and I’ve heard people say that to me.

Dr. Caleb Frankel:
And we’re trying to change that by giving something that really makes your team smile at Instinct. And so in terms of my early self, I would say one thing that I’ve learned is nobody actually knows how to do this, what we’re doing. We’re the first ones to do this very specific thing, the way we’re doing it. And don’t get too caught up in what number style of pen your favorite author used, that doesn’t matter. It’s just a distraction. And what I’ve learned is nobody knows what to do. And so think for yourself, evaluate advice critically as a data point, like you’re used to doing as a clinician and keep moving forward one day at a time.

Stacy Pursell:
That’s good advice. Caleb, some of our guests say that they have had a key book that they read that helped them throughout their career through their life. Do you have a key book in your life that has impacted you the most? If so, I’d love to hear about that.

Dr. Caleb Frankel:
Yeah. I read a lot. Lots of entrepreneurship and business books have impacted me, but I’ll give you The Digital Doctor by Robert Wachter. This is really specific to anybody really interested in the intersection of technology and medicine. But this book was given to me by a friend when we were first starting Instinct or right before. And it blew me away and really helped validate and crystallize what I think was my unique insight years ago about the intersection of med and technology and where we’d be heading with technology over the years and the challenges that would come with it if they weren’t thought about from a clinical standpoint. So that book’s wide ranging and really, really fun to read and holds up well. My team did it as a book club recently and it holds up well, even for engineers trying to understand what we’re doing for the point of care of the veterinary industry.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, Caleb, you’ve got the mic. What is one thing that you want to share with our listeners of The People of Animal Health Podcast before you drop the mic today?

Dr. Caleb Frankel:
I would just say, reach out and check out what we’re doing at Instinct. We think we’re onto something special and very excited about what we’re building for the future of modern practices. And I’d love to talk to you.

Stacy Pursell:
All right, Caleb. Thank you so much for being a guest on The People of Animal Health Podcast today, we enjoyed having you here.

Dr. Caleb Frankel:
Thanks for having me.