LinkedIn Thought Leadership for a Startup Founder

Due to the nature of my work, most of what I actually do stays confidential. Which is great for my clients and mildly inconvenient for my portfolio.  So here's a mockup built around Oslo, the fictional 33-year-old founder and CEO of Petta, an Australian pet health platform. Same process as with any real client brief: I built the voice, editorial angle, and content from scratch.

I was sitting in a product design class at Stanford when I first started paying attention to the pattern.

Every case study, deck, and startup being held up as an example of digital health done right was built for humans. Which makes sense, obviously. Human healthcare is a massive, urgent, genuinely complicated problem and the people solving it deserve every bit of attention they get. But I kept thinking about my parents' house back in Adelaide, where we always had at least one cat and one dog at any given time, and the time, money, and emotional energy that went into keeping those animals healthy. The frantic Sunday night Google searches, the waiting rooms, the vet bills that arrived with no warning, the complete absence of any system that remembered your pet's history from one appointment to the next.

The infrastructure that humans had built for their own healthcare, even in its most basic digital form, simply did not exist for animals. And yet anyone who has actually lived with a pet knows that the emotional investment is not that different. People cancel plans for sick pets. They make financial decisions around their fur friend's chronic condition. For many people, the relationship between a pet owner and their animal is one of the most significant relationships in their lives. The market was not a niche, it was simply hiding in plain sight.

When I started talking to investors about Petta, I heard the same thing over and over in different packaging. "It's a nice idea." "The TAM is unclear." "Pet owners are passionate, but are they really paying customers?" One investor told me he just couldn't see his partners getting excited about a pitch that was fundamentally about animals.

I understood the hesitation, even when it frustrated me. Digital health investment moves toward the highest-stakes human problems, which is rational, and pets don't fit neatly into the frameworks that most healthcare investors use to evaluate opportunity. But the data was telling a different story. Australian pet owners were already spending billions annually on pet healthcare. Vet costs had been rising steadily for years. Wait times to see a vet in most major Australian cities were getting longer. Pet ownership had surged during and after the pandemic. All of this was documented, measurable, and largely ignored by anyone building technology.

The core problem I kept coming back to was fragmentation. A pet owner in Australia navigates a genuinely frustrating system. They book a vet appointment through one channel, receive a diagnosis with no digital record attached, try to fill a prescription through a completely separate process, and start from scratch at every new clinic they visit. If their animal develops a chronic condition, the record of that condition lives in a filing cabinet somewhere, if it lives anywhere at all. None of this is the fault of vets, who are working within an infrastructure that was never designed for continuity. It's a systems problem, and systems problems are solvable.

That's what Petta is built to solve.

The investors who passed were not wrong that this was a harder pitch than a straightforward human health play. They were wrong about the opportunity. The pet health market is not a soft market for people who really love animals. It's a large, underserved, data-rich market where consumer behavior is already there, and the infrastructure has simply not caught up. That gap is exactly where Petta lives, and I'm glad we kept going when people told us it wasn't worth the effort.

If you wait for everyone to agree with you before you build, you'll always end up building something someone else has already built.

Excited to finally announce this: Petta Festival is coming to Melbourne this June.

It's the first summit of its kind, bringing together pet health companies, vets, investors, researchers, and pet industry founders for a proper conversation about where this space is going. The pet health industry has been moving fast, and the people building in it deserve a room where they can actually think together.

More details on speakers, agenda, and tickets dropping soon. If you're building in pet health, working in veterinary care, or investing in this space, this one's for you. Check out www.petta.com to register your interest.

One of the things I've learned building Petta is that "all in one place" is a sentence that takes about three seconds to say and a very long time to actually build.

The four things Petta does: online vet consultations, health records, clinic bookings, and pharmacy and medicine delivery — each have their own technical complexity. But the harder problem is making them work together in a way that's genuinely useful rather than just technically connected. A health record that doesn't talk to the consultation layer isn't a health record; it's a PDF in a database. A pharmacy integration that doesn't pull from the vet's notes creates gaps that fall to the pet owner to bridge manually. The integration is the product, not a feature of the product.

The goal is for any vet who sees your pet through Petta to have the full context of that animal's health history before the consultation begins, which sounds like a basic expectation and is not something that currently exists in any reliable way in the Australian pet health system. The longer-term technical direction is predictive: using the health data we're accumulating to flag patterns before they become emergencies.

It's slow and foundational work. It's also the only version of this worth building.

The reason so many pet owners have frustrating experiences, expensive surprises, and fragmented care is not that vets aren't good at their jobs.

The reason is that the system connecting it all was never designed for continuity or accessibility. No shared records, no digital triage, no way to get a quick answer at 10 pm when your dog is behaving strangely and the clinic doesn't open until 9 am. The infrastructure gap is the problem.

The reason I think pet health belongs in the broader digital health conversation is that the frameworks being developed for human health (longitudinal records, remote consultations, predictive diagnostics, integrated pharmacy) translate directly to animal health, with real consequences for animal welfare. Earlier detection means earlier intervention. Better records mean fewer missed diagnoses. Accessible consultations mean fewer owners making decisions in the dark because they couldn't get an appointment.

That's ultimately what Petta is here to do: make a real difference in how animals are cared for by making it structurally easier for their owners to do the right thing.

The technology is never the point. Better outcomes for animals are. The technology is just the most reliable way we know to get there at scale.

I'll be honest... I think growing up in a house that always had animals shaped how I lead more than business school did.

Animals have a very clean way of reflecting exactly the energy you bring into a room, which turns out to be a useful thing to have learned before you start managing people.

There's also something about caring for an animal that quietly reorients your priorities. They need consistency, attention, and for you to notice when something is off. Those are, not coincidentally, also the things good teams need.

I started Petta because I saw a real gap in pet healthcare and believed I could help close it. But I'd be leaving something out if I didn't say that the animal-lover part and the founder part have never felt separate to me.