Ira: 0:19

Thank you even planning to become entrepreneurs. In other words, we did this all despite originally having no idea what we were doing or getting ourselves into. In each episode of this podcast, we will share stories and tips from our journey and we'll answer a randomly chosen question about our experience. Let's jump right into the show.

Stacee : 0:40

Welcome everybody. We have quite a treat for you today. We are meeting with our special guest, Luke Burnett. He is the founder of a company called KeraVet, and we're so excited to have you on the show today, Luke.

Luke: 0:55

Thank you, Stacee, glad to be with you.

Stacee : 1:05

Well, first I want to talk about KervaVet and what your product is, because let's start at the end and then we'll go back to the beginning. Tell us what KeraVet is, the product that you have founded

Stacee : 1:48

sector.

Luke: 1:49

I did not plan this, and I think this will probably be a theme of our discussion is the things that you don't plan right. But it's essentially. The product is for wound care, but we've formulated it with a bittern so that the animal doesn't lick. And not only have we found in(clip

Stacee : 2:07

our clinical studies and the clinical usage by doctors that are using the product

Luke: 2:13

now it's on the market now is that you can use the product in lieu of a cone. So if used as directed, that's the key is you got to break the licking cycle on day one. But if you use it as directed, that's the key is you got to break the licking cycle on day one, but if you use it as directed, you don't need to put an animal in a cone, and we found this for just about every injury set that you could imagine you would use a cone for. The product is very effective in doing that, and so our goal is to essentially remove the cone from clinical practice.

Stacee : 2:44

and who wouldn't love that? I remember when I rescued this big dog, Nacho, out on my property. I just saw him out in the other pasture. He was emaciated like a Newfoundland mix you. up naming him Nacho Libre because we wanted to scream that out the back door. I am Nacho the luchador, who Maybe you have seen me on TV.

Luke: 3:27

Nacho.

Stacee : 3:33

So he came to me. He was not neutered, he had a rope tied around his neck. You could tell he chewed himself free from being roped out. I'm like I guess I'll keep you Right. And one of the first things I did is I took him to the clinic and removed a bad tooth and neutered him. And he had the cone on and me, as seasoned vet, I'm like, oh, I feel so bad for him, I feel so bad. So I took the cone off and he promptly, within like a few minutes, licked out all of his sutures when I happened to not be looking, and so I had to take him back in with my head hanging and explain to my staff what happened. It was a horrible event, because then I had a big mess to clean up and he was miserable. So I think what you're bringing to the market here it sounds like such a game changer.

Luke: 4:27

Yeah, we think so, and your story is not unique.

Stacee : 4:33

Unfortunately.

Luke: 4:34

Yeah, exactly, unfortunately, right, everyone hates the cone and a lot of research, recent research has shown that it really impacts the human animal bond as well. b t

Stacee : 4:45

Oh yeah. L

Luke: 4:46

The animal hates the coach so much, not to mention you're breaking furniture and you know all of the kinds of things. So, compliance, compliance on cone usage. You talk to clinicians and and and they almost laugh right Cause like cause. They know, they know compliance is probably good for the first two hours and everyone has the same reaction you have of oh this is terrible. You know, and they just take it off and cross their fingers that the animal's not going to rip the sutures out. Or you know, got the implant or all of the you know anything that you've done surgically to help. So you know this. We, we, we found a lot of potential benefits for, for the use of our product.

Stacee : 5:29

For sure i. So you probably didn't, you know graduate high school thinking I'm going to remove the Elizabethan collar situation for all animals on in the world. So take us back to how you got started, luke.

Luke: 5:44

Oh yeah, so I told students I'm faculty at a medical school here and so when we do, you know r, talk to students and career guidance or what do you want to be when you grow up? You know? I'll tell them that you know. You're not going to know, and and if you think you do, you're wrong. Yeah, Isn't that the truth, Like I find. Here we are asking young kids 17, 18, what do you want to do for the rest of your life? And I'm like, oh my God, just figure out what you don't want to do. Right Until you're like 25, like just figure out what you hate. That's a better plan, yeah. C G And I think you just need to have you. You need to be open to doors that you don't anticipate Right and and, and then find something that you can be passionate about and that you enjoy. But you're not going to know that at 17, 18 or even twenties, right, um and and, even after you, you get a degree. Um, uh, you know, you went through the, the horrors of vet school. Um, did you think you were going to be doing what you're doing now when you started your? No, right, and I, when I went to grad school for my doctorate, I didn't think I was going to be, uh, um, you know, running a veterinary health health products company at all. I thought I was going to be academic faculty. You know that was the track that I was moving. You know writing grants and sitting on committees and arguing about parking spaces and all of the you know things that academic faculty do. That's what I thought my career path was. But the thing that kind of changed for me is I also did 27 years in the military and most of that was National Guard. So it was quote unquote part-time. But if you remember, right in the aughts and in the early 2000s, we had some conflicts that kept getting everyone deployed. So I got deployed twice to Iraq, did two tours, both of them and the second tour. I got back and really wanted to focus on trauma. Trauma and regenerative medicine started to be a big thing in that space, because what we were finding is, you know, the, the injuries. So there's a, there's a score called the ISS, the injury severity score, and an emergency room doc or you know, just a trauma clinician, might see an ISS in the twenties or so part of their career. Well, we were seeing ISS scores high twenties and even thirties daily. I mean, the amount of trauma that occurs from an improvised explosive device, so one by five millimeter shell that blows up underneath your truck, um is is pretty dramatic. So that, uh, we had, you know, guys that were just busted up. Oh man, the technologies that were available at the time just weren't able to treat these kind of massive injuries, and so the Department of Defense was just throwing money at the problem, for good reasons, right To basically asking product developers to come up better technologies, better things that could be used for battlefield trauma. And if you go to an ambulance rig today, you will find that the configuration as well as the products that are carried on that rig have completely changed over the last 20 years, and that is because of the direct work that Department of Defense, through grants and contracts to product developers and then basically testing all of this stuff out on the battlefield to find out you know what works and what doesn't. So just how all of that stuff, or how all um worked its way through, allowed, you know, better trauma care to just people in Denver, colorado and Atlanta, georgia and the various cities that you know. K K K Trauma occurs usually with car accidents, but you know from other things as well. Um, so I wanted to do that and, uh, so I jumped careers when and? Um, you don't do that after grad school, right, cause you have to start over rewarding for me, cause I really wanted to work on things that, uh, you know my initial thing. We were working on non-compressible hemorrhage, so basically internal hemorrhage that could not be stopped. Um, and we were working on, you know, a bunch of different fields of use and we started filing a bunch of patents. And then my university said wait a minute. You know, you guys, we put a lot of money into all this patent portfolio. You all need to make a company. So so we did that and we didn't really know where it was going to go. We had an idea but, you know, got a bunch of government grants to help fund the R&D work on it and then started moving the products through the regulatory process. And at this point the human products company is a company called Carenetics. Carenetics has two products that are through the FDA. One is the wound management product that ultimately became CareVet gel and another is and you'll laugh about the accidental kind of process of all this happening the other is a cream product that's used for a condition called radiation dermatitis and that is the skin condition that you get if you go through radiotherapy. And most people of a certain age know people who have had breast cancer, even their immediate family or people they know and the number one complaint of typically women who are going through breast cancer is the pain and the dermatitis, the skin toxicity that occurs from radiotherapy. It's not the scare of the cancer, it's not all the other things that you assume, it's that, and you hear these stories from women all the time. I can't wear a bra. My quality of life is lower because I don't wanna go out in public. I've got ulcers on my chest wall and my breasts right. So we started working, funded by a government entity called BARDA, the Biomedical Advanced Research Development Authority. That does biodefense and they work on products, what they call medical h countermeasures. p They c wanted a medical countermeasure to radiation injury and so we started working on a cream version of our product for that and found out it worked really, really well. There's a lot of science behind why it works well, but found out it works really well for that and the government is interested in it for what I'll call unplanned radiation exposure.

Luke: 12:45

The market is for planned radiation exposure right when you go through radiotherapy, but you can imagine there's a fairly large need for government planners to deal with the kind of crazy thing that would happen if a backpack nuke went off in downtown Manhattan.

Luke: 13:04

You know the casualty rates and the injuries that we would work through. So that's what the Human Products Company does. That's what the human products company does. But as we were going through, I had colleagues tell me you know you really need to look at getting into animal health and you know my kind of human health product bias of oh bless your heart, right, that cute little market. You know working on dogs and cats, and I mean we were sharing before we started recording here that you know we both have a lot of animals and you know they're our families and we love them. But I didn't really, you know, get my head around how big and lucrative the animal health market is, as well as kind of limiting some of what I'll call the barriers to entry to get your product in, in into the market, the and the biggest one of those is is reimbursement.

Luke: 14:02

On the human health side, if you're going to start in the human health sector, I would recommend you start backwards. Figure out how, how your product's going to be reimbursed, and then work through. Okay, then, what clinical studies do I need to do? What's my regulatory path? But if you can't figure out a way the insurance companies are going to pay for your product, I would recommend you do something different. Oh, wow, okay, but the animal health sector doesn't have that. No, we don't have HIPAA.

Stacee : 14:32

We don't have a lot of stuff. That's very nice.

Luke: 14:35

But you know, those kinds of things that create lots of costs in the human health sector. They're just not not there um in in the animal health space. But uh, which is actually, you know, kind of nice. It allows a lot more innovation, oh, yeah.

Luke: 14:49

Doesn't create, you know it doesn't create those barriers of you know know, tens or hundreds of millions of dollars um to to figure out if you know your product's going to work and if the market is going to um going to adopt it and can you price it appropriately, and all those things that you have to figure out right. You can do it pretty quickly, um in the animal health sector, where it's just very much difficult in human health have you.

Stacee : 15:15

Are you a Seinfeld fan?

Luke: 15:17

Yeah, absolutely.

Stacee : 15:18

Did you see the episode where Kramer has a cough and he decides to take himself to the vet instead of the MD?

Luke: 15:25

(clip from Seinfeld) Yes, yeah, taking any medication for that. Yeah, I got some pills. They taste terrible, just swallow them, oh my throat's too tender? All right, sit down, sit down. I don't want to come on, just sit down. Sit down. What? Sit down? Hey, open, lean your head back, open your mouth, open your mouth, open it, open it. What kind of pills are these anyway? For smuckers May cause panting and loss of fur. These are dog pills. We have the same symptoms, but he's a dog. You need to see a real doctor. No, no doctors. All right, where are you going? I'm taking the car. I've got to run some errands. You want to go? I don't know, come on. You want to go for a ride? Huh, come on, come on you want to go for a ride.

Stacee : 16:46

I think we just have less restrictions than we can be more explorative with our therapies and we're not going to get you know. Also, the malpractice situation is totally different. We're not so scared to try things because we don't have such huge penalties. And there's so many things that make animal health appealing, I think to companies that are doing great things like yourself, in the human side, like yourself in the human side.

Luke: 17:12

When we were designing our animal health product KeraVet, the team and I decided that we were going to test it to human standards for permanent implant, even though the product's not indicated for that and we wouldn't recommend using it for that. But in conversations with veterinarians I had a couple say you know, would it work on hernia repair, you know? And she's like, well, it's not designed to be permanently implanted. And you're like, well, I'll try that out. And I'm like, oh, I won't give it a whirl. I need to have a safety profile where I don't care what you do with this product. You are, you know, I am not worried at all about what it's going to potentially do. For just that exact reason not worried at all about what it's going to potentially do for just that exact reason.

Stacee : 17:58

It's like, you know, clinicians who are very good and have fantastic ideas can just kind of try things out in a way that you know you obviously can't do that in human health legally, technically, you're supposed to just only use the things that have been labeled for veterinary use, which drastically limits the amount of resources and things we can do for our patients, even though we know it will work. And it's funny when covid hit right and then all the people are taking the cow ivermectin and we're we're like go talk to the vet now and because when stuff gets hard and you're not sure what to do and you have limited resources, I think if you're a good veterinary clinician you're gonna try stuff logically, with methodically. You're not just like grabbing random stuff off the shelf. But I don't know. I I feel like that's definitely one of the things I've done a lot in my career too is just let's give this a whirl and see what happens. Got no other choice here. You're going to die if we don't try something.

Luke: 19:08

I one of my recommendations to people looking at getting into human health is you know you got to fail fast. So design your clinicals to be the hardest possible situation you know, because if it's not going to work in rats with the hardest possible situation, it's definitely not going to work in humans right. So try to break your product. You know, whatever that product is, whether it's a you know medical device or a drug or biologic or et cetera, try to break it early. You can do a lot of that in the animal health sector fairly quickly with good, almost anecdotal studies, and that will help inform what your plan is.

Stacee : 19:54

So Kera CareVet was presented to the market.

Luke: 19:57

Yes.

Stacee : 19:58

December, J january. How's it going? This right now, here we're in May. How's it going? And where can our listeners find veterinary people find Kera CareVet, because you know what they're going to do they're going to go look on the ambulance for it if you don't give it to them, that's right.

Luke: 20:17

We are basically signing with all of the distributors and we'll be available. I think we're available with MWI, C ovetrus, I think Patterson comes on in a couple of weeks Penn, V victor, M midwest, all of the all of the usual suspects, and so in the next couple of weeks, basically any distributor that your clinic uses will have it available and it's it's priced pretty competitively. And so what we found is you get better outcomes, you improve the human animal bond because you're reducing the cone, and our goal, our goal, our goal is to basically remove the cone from clinical practice. It's kind of a lofty goal, but our data says that, that, that it can do that. And we've priced it to the point where you know you're going to save time, which is going to save you your clinic money. And if you put all of the things that you would, you know, the cone, the dressings, whatever you know topicals that you may send home with the pet parent or the customer, you know you add all that together and that's more than what the product will cost you To the clinician. The price is, I think, $27 from our distributors.

Stacee : 21:41

Oh yeah, and that's going to save you from getting your legs railed in by the cone when your dog walks into you, or, it's also bad they hit the door, jamb the door away and jar their neck like, oh my God, so uncomfortable.

Luke: 21:52

It's just, you know, we talk to clinicians all the time and everyone almost laughs at us about the. You know, yeah, yeah, yeah, I prescribe a cone but or tell them to go buy a cone, but I know they're not going to use it. You know, and it's just, it's almost like this like running joke of yeah, I need to put it on there to basically say hey, I told, I told you to go put your animal in a cone and it's not my fault. They ripped the sutures out and you have to bring the animal back and re-suture, right.

Stacee : 22:17

Oh, it's a total CYA move.

Luke: 22:21

And the compliance is terrible. Everyone knows that. Oh, it is.

Stacee : 22:26

And we we've tried things too, like they make outfits for dogs, like surgical little outfits which have their. They're great until the dog eats it, you know, like stuff like this.

Luke: 22:38

Exactly, yeah. So so we've, we've found that, uh, um, we can improve on a lot of those situations.

Stacee : 22:46

Fantastic. Well, that is such a great story. Thank you for sharing that with us today. Luke, Of course you want to stick around with me and spin the wheel real quick.

Luke: 22:55

I've heard about the legendary wheel. I'm looking forward to it.

Stacee : 22:58

All right, well, here we go, okay, okay. So the question is what key advice would you give to new first-time founders?

Luke: 23:25

I would say that embrace open doors, because you're never going to know you don't really know how you might walk through that door and what kind of opportunities that that may provide. Build a network of experts. I am now in the animal health sector. I've been in this sector for two years. I am not an expert, right, I am an expert in human trauma and regenerative medicine, and so I surrounded myself with just fantastic group of advisors and experts in the space to essentially say, hey, you know, this is what you need to think about, because you don't know what you don't know, and a lot of times you just you need to listen to as many people as you can. And then I think the the one big piece of advice I would have to you know, um, aspiring founders is know your audience.

Luke: 24:23

Before any you walk into any meeting, and I can give you a horror story from when I was um was a brand new company chief science officer and I got asked to go pitch some of our burn and wound data to a group at a large burn conference and I thought, yeah, yeah, no problem. It was one of my board members set it up and so I walked in the room and it was four past presidents of the American Burn Association. It was the who's who of and I'm pitching pig data, right, and we weren't even done with the study yet and I got nuked, oh my gosh, and I walked away from that meeting and I'm like that will never happen again. I'm not walking into a room unless I know who the audience is. So I know how to tailor the pitch, because you need to be able to take the same deck and make that deck relevant for you know, scientific or clinical peers, your potential investors, bankers you know you name it.

Luke: 25:27

You know you need to be able to take that data and present what they want out of it. You know. So you know. If it's a VC firm, it's how fast am I going to make you money? Right, and and here's all the things that I've de-risked along the way to ultimately get you a three-year flip within the time window of your fund right, versus, if it's a clinical colleague, I need to take them through the clinical data and why the efficacy that we're seeing is relevant, right, and not so much of how we're going to quote, unquote, make money. But that's the same deck.

Stacee : 26:01

Ooh, I love that so much because I've seen companies have multiple decks depending who the audience is. But I love what you're suggesting is be so in tune with your product or service that you know how to use one deck. Yeah, and you can leverage certain slides or certain stories for each of the points and not in. I've seen also people want to share all the stories.

Luke: 26:31

Yeah, no, just don't do that.

Stacee : 26:34

don't do that c Cause y ou know, like you're seeing, the audience generally cares about one, maybe two key points. They don't care about all the points. It's just different audiences care about different points. So you got to be versed in the whole thing.

Luke: 26:48

Exactly, and feel free to skip.

Stacee : 26:50

Slides right, oh yeah, skip slides, please, and the way you know if you're hitting is if the audience member is doing more of the talking than you.

Luke: 27:01

Yeah.

Stacee : 27:07

And you might feel frustrated because you're like thinking to yourself oh my God, I have all these slides to cover with you and you just won't stop talking. But that saying people like to hear themselves talk is kind of true and what's happening is they're talking themselves into your product in their own way. So just shut up and let them talk.

Luke: 27:25

That's really good advice.

Stacee : 27:28

Well, thanks for doing this. Now we're at the part of the show where we're going to share with our audience. A favorite tip, trick tool could be a quote that really resonates with you, or a book like what do you have for us luke?

Luke: 27:42

So my tip is find great people and keep them, because this if you think that entrepreneurship is a you're a one-man band and you can do everything, you're wrong, and in fact, as you get your organization gets more mature, it's going to be harder to raise money. If you're pitching that you're a one-man or one woman band, right, you have to have a team. This is a team sport. It requires a village if you will. And so find great people and take care of them as best you can, and don't forget about them. As you know, I see too often that the person at the top of the org chart sometimes gets all the accolades, but it took a whole lot of people to do all of the stuff. But make sure, when the time comes, that you take care of them, both financially, because a lot of times the junior people get left out of the cap table, but your success depended on a lot of their work, and so make sure that you compensate them along the way.

Stacee : 28:50

Oh, I love that so much. I'm working with s Startup n Now and they're a two-person show and they are just like we're going to try to run this thing without hiring a bunch of people. I'm like, oh yeah, no, you can't really succeed if you don't grow the team, like it will definitely limit your success.

Luke: 29:13

Yeah, yeah, and if you think you can, then you're not professionally mature enough yet to do the job, because you don't know that it can't.

Stacee : 29:23

Exactly, yeah, exactly.

Luke: 29:26

That's so good and funders know that and they're not going to give you money.

Stacee : 29:29

Yeah, they know that. Yeah, exactly, that's so good and funders know that and they're not going to give you money. Yeah, they know that. Yeah, totally w Well, my tip of the week is based on my visit yesterday to the eye doctor and you know, one thing I did on my product roadmap is a lesson I learned from the eye doctor. You know, when you're wearing the, they put the thing in front of you and you have to look at the chart with all the letters and they're telling one or two, three or four.

Stacee : 29:57

So when I was building my company and there's like an overwhelming backlog of features and bugs, you need to fix all this work. Some of the hardest parts are knowing what to work on, and my advice would be to narrow it down to maybe your top 10. And then you need to do the doctor eye test on it. Is it going to be one? I want this feature. Well, do you want it more than this one?

Stacee : 30:29

And you prioritize and rank them and if you aren't sure, you have to do that one or two tests so that you have a clear prioritization of what you're working on for that quarter or year. And then you constantly have to go back, and by constantly, I would probably do this every eight to 12 weeks. I'm looking at that list to see if I still have the rankings right. And I would even do this to my team members, because they would come to me and be like oh, we need this feature in the app right now. This is the key feature. I'm like, oh well, you told me this other feature was the key, so which one? Is it One or two? And they'd obviously oh no, it's still that one. I'm like perfect, then we're still working on the right thing today, because you can't do it all. You just can't.

Luke: 31:17

Can't. You're right, yeah.

Stacee : 31:19

All right, well, thanks so much. It's been a great treat.

Luke: 31:30

And we look forward to seeing where Kera CareVet goes. All right, available now.

Stacee : 31:34

Fantastic. Thanks for listening to the show today.