Pet Project
AS I SIT HERE WRITING, I have a dog staring up at me mournfully,
hoping I’m going to drop my lunch into his mouth in a moment of
distraction. After all, it could happen, couldn’t it? No, I’m not working
from home in my bunny slippers. I’m at the office of Embrace Pet
Insurance, where dogs and cats belonging to Embracers (as we fondly
refer to anyone who works for Embrace) visit frequently. Such is life
at a pet insurance company.
How on earth did I get from the very
respectable position I had at a large life
and health company in Toronto to a pet
insurance startup in Cleveland? Accidentally on purpose is the short answer.
The long answer is a story of career
goals, career changes, and the entrepreneurial path that I found.
to get my master’s in business administration, move my technical insurance
background to a résumé footnote, network with business types, and restart my
career in a totally di erent field.
As it happens, I didn’t end up leaving insurance. I just changed the path I
was on.
While I was doing quite well in Toronto on the traditional actuarial path,
I came to realize that working for a
large life and health company wasn’t for
me. Back then, in 2000, I’d worked for
11 years, been qualified for six of those
years, and had a number of rotations
that had been both challenging and quite
satisfying. The more senior I became,
however, the less I liked my work life,
and I knew I had to take control of my
career and make a radical change to get
where I needed to be.
Career Change
When I sat down to think about where
that was, I asked myself what I wanted
to do when I grew up. The answer was
that I wanted to run a company. I assumed, because of my rather sheltered
view of the world from the vantage of a
large insurance company, that if I were
to stay in insurance, it would be at a large
life and health insurance company. I figured I needed to fix my résumé so that
someone would let me run a noninsurance company. After all, while being an
actuary might be important in insurance,
it seemed to me to be rather a hindrance
in a nonfinancial role in the outside
world. O I went to the Wharton School
While at Wharton, I had some
friends who spent $5,000 on their sick
cat. When they wondered about pet
insurance (they were British, and pet
insurance is much more common in the
U. K. than in the United States), they saw
a business opportunity and drew me in
to help them write a business plan for
the Wharton Business Plan Competition. While I was working on the plan,
I realized what an amazing opportunity pet insurance was and how it fit me
perfectly. I had the actuarial skills to
change pet insurance, the entrepreneurial leaning needed to build the company
to do that, and a pet-loving upbringing
(my mom was a vet tech and an entrepreneur at di erent points in her life—it
must be in my blood).
To cut a long story short, my friends
and I ended up winning the Wharton
Business Plan Competition in 2003—
and after graduating from Wharton that
same year, one of the team members and
I founded Embrace Pet Insurance. That
was the start of my wonderful but extremely di cult path of entrepreneurship.
As you might imagine, at the time,
pet insurance didn’t have a well-defined actuarial basis and certainly no
nicely crafted actuarial tables that were
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publicly available. The products were rudimentary and didn’t o er a satisfactory
customer experience. The opportunity
was wide open. And with less than 0.5
percent of 172 million U.S. cats and dogs
insured (compared with more than
10 percent in the U.K. at the time), it
seemed to be only a matter of time that,
with the right product, pet insurance in
the United States could become respectable and big—very big.
Building a Business
I spent a lot of time developing our pet insurance product from sample clinic data
we’d obtained while at Wharton. I created a customizable policy in which the pet
owner could make his or her own trade-
o between premium and benefits to suit
a particular budget and risk tolerance.
I also discovered a surprising beauty of
pet insurance: Moral hazard is something to be embraced, not abhorred. Pet
insurance is meant to be used, and by allowing the pet owners to make their own
policy design choices, they reveal a lot of
information about themselves and their
DREAMSTIME
