Alexandre Douzet, CEO of Pumpkin Pet Insurance | CEOs You Should Know

Alexandre Douzet, CEO of Pumpkin Pet Insurance | CEOs You Should Know

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Everyone.

Speaker 2 (00:00):
This is Steve Dallison and thank you for tuning into
this week's edition of CEOs. You should know I am
joined by Alex Dussey, the CEO of Pumpkin pet Insurance.

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Alex, thanks for being here today, Thanks for having me.

Speaker 2 (00:10):
We're excited to jump in a little bit about your background,
a little bit about your journey and of course be
able to talk a little bit about Pumpkin Petitsurance.

Speaker 1 (00:17):
So why don't we kick it off.

Speaker 2 (00:18):
Why do you tell us a little bit about your
background and really what led you to becoming the CEO
of Pumpkin Petiturance.

Speaker 3 (00:23):
Yeah, so, as you can tell, you know, I was
not borning and raised in this country.

Speaker 1 (00:27):
So I was born and raised in France. But I
moved to the US.

Speaker 3 (00:30):
Almost like thirty years ago nice and did my entire
professional career here in the US, studying the media business
and then moved to technology. I became an entrepreneurs were
on twenty years ago. So my first company that I
founded was a company Cold Ladders, to job site that
compete with the likes of LinkedIn and Glassdoor. Did that
for about ten eleven years and then really in twenty

(00:51):
fifteen is when I sort of pivoted to the world
of what you made describe as like animal health in general.
So my first entry into this was my second company
that I founded called Ali Pet Food, and that company
was created out of a personal experience that I had
with my own dog that I rescued, And essentially the
story was, I got that dog, didn't know much about

(01:13):
pet nutrition. I thought I was doing the right thing,
and then my dog ga in a lot of weight
and became sick. And so I saw the advice of
a Vitinian specialized in nutrition to figure out what was
going wrong, and long story show what happened there. What
I've learned gave me the insight to create Ali, and
so I ran early, launching in twenty sixteen, grew it,

(01:34):
ran it for like four or five years, and then
the opportunity came to me in twenty nineteen to do
Pumpkin pet Insurance. And the reason why I decided to
jump ship and really go full time making my down
to Pumpkins because were made early successful were the same
trends that made Pumpkin and the pen insurance successful. And

(01:55):
that is what we call the humanization of pets. You know,
pet's becoming really part of the family. And as a result,
people want to experience a longer relationship with their pets,
and they're willing to spend money to improve the quality
of the life of the pets. And that works for food,
so improving the quality of the nutrition, as well as
for the pet care and therefore pet insurance. And in

(02:16):
twenty nineteen, when I looked at the market here in
the US, the market was drastically on the penge crede.
Only two percent of what I call medicalized pets in
the US added pet insurance. And when we looked at
other markets start of the US, one great benchmark is
the UK, we saw that the penetration was like twenty
to thirty percent, So we knew the market was going

(02:36):
to be dimmed for high growth over the next few years.
And when we studied the market, we realized there's not
a single brand that is really working very well with
the number one influencer in your pet health and that's
your vetinarient. And so we basically decided to create Pumpkin
in partnership with a large company called Zooties, which is

(02:57):
a leader in animal health, to basically become the most
sort of vet centric ped insurance public in the US,
and really one of the aim is to enable them
to practice the best medicine, but also leverage them as
this number one influencer to really educate pet don't know
about the benefit of the pensurance because penetrance is a
great product, but it's actually misunderstood.

Speaker 2 (03:19):
I completely agree with you, Like that's a huge focus
right now. Right people feel like their pets are part
of their family. There their children, they're their family member
that they love and care about. So it's surprising that
so many people didn't have pet insurance.

Speaker 3 (03:31):
Yeah, I think that what the main problem wasn't still
remain here because there's a lot of education to be
done there. Most pet owners think that, oh, my pet
is young, is healthy, and all they think about is
the is the what in care they have to do?
They have to worry about it, and they don't really
see what could happen down the road. And the reality
that what we know is it's not a matter is

(03:55):
your pet going to get sick. It's a question of
when and how much that's gonna cost. And that's really
where insurance comes in because it's here to protect you
against the unforeseen. So when they get hurt and sick.
That's where we step in as a pet insurance product
to prove by coverage and enable you to say yes
to the care. Let's do whatever it takes so that
you can enjoy that longer relationship with your pet.

Speaker 2 (04:17):
What makes you, guys different than other pen insurances out there.

Speaker 1 (04:19):
Yeah, so we are more premium.

Speaker 3 (04:22):
All mission is to enable the best care possible for
every pet. We want people to really have no biers
removes when they buy pumpkin. So whenever you have that
moment where it's unforeseen and your pet gets sick and
you go to your vet and they give you an
estimate of this is the trement you going to do.
We want your reaction to be, let's do whatever it takes.
I have pumpkin, and I'm going to get most of

(04:44):
my money back. Right, That's the experience we're trying to create.
So to do that, you need to have a product
that has higher and your limit. So we provea coverage
for intians if you have a dog ten thousand dollars
per year or above. We also have a product and
we remember for most of the expands, so ninety percent
of the expanse as well having a very very comprehensive coverage.

(05:06):
So there's a lot of things that we cover. I
won't go into the details, not to voy you, but
you can check it out on the north side. You
can see all the information of like what we cover,
but we want of the most comprehensive products. So that's
what positioned us. And then the last thing is we
really work with the community of Vetinaians or around the
country to really do that education because the best time

(05:27):
we found for people to sign up for pen insurance
is when they have a puppy or the petty is
young and you're going for one of those routine annual
visit to your veterinarians and then the vet has brought
me to the educate you to say, you know what,
you got a French Bulldog's great, but you know those
little guys they can have some problems. So you may
want to look into the benefit of pen insurance. And

(05:47):
there's a provider that we work with a lot and
we like them called Pumpkin. Should check them out and
see if it's right for you, all right, So that's
that's how we do it.

Speaker 2 (05:55):
That's a really smart way, right because so many people
probably experience it on the flip side, they wish they
had insurance when they get the news about their paths.

Speaker 1 (06:01):
Yeah, and you guys.

Speaker 2 (06:02):
Are helping them, enabling them get ahead of that.

Speaker 3 (06:04):
And what's important for people to know is, you know,
you cannot be signing up for insurance the day you
have an incident. Yeah, you know, there's actually a waiting
period when for the coverage to kick in on average
is fourteen days. So it's important to do it early
so that you protected when that enforcing event is going
to happen. In addition, across the industry, what is a

(06:26):
comment recurring issue with every pet insurance is the fact
that we have exclusions around pricing conditions. We tend to
be one of the one that's like the most favorable
approach to it, but we still have lack of coverage
for presisting. So the really only way to address this
is to sign up your pet early. If your pet

(06:48):
is six to twelve months old, we do or analysis
based on what is on the medical record, So what
your vet write down on their notes when you come
for a visit, and guess what, if you have a
young pet, that record is empty. There's no track of
like recurring chronic conditions, so when something happened, even it
becomes chronic, will always be covered.

Speaker 1 (07:08):
As a result. That's awesome.

Speaker 2 (07:09):
It seems like you guys are obviously one of the
most innovative in the space. Where do you foresee really
the pet insurance industry going in the upcoming years?

Speaker 3 (07:18):
Yeah, so, just to give you a point of reference,
when I looked at the market five years ago, only
two percent of pets in the US at pet insurance.
Today that number has moved to like five percent, So
it's a fast growing.

Speaker 1 (07:30):
Market, more than double.

Speaker 3 (07:31):
The market grows roughly twenty twenty five percent year over EU.
We think the next ten years will be in the
place where twenty percent plus of pet owners in the
US will really take care of the pets to go
see a vet will have pet insurance.

Speaker 2 (07:44):
How do you feel more people will find out about it?
Obviously the veterinarians plays apart. But how are others finding
out more about pet insurance?

Speaker 1 (07:51):
Yeah, we all know.

Speaker 3 (07:53):
So last year we did a transaction of Pumpkin where
we want on a new shahoulder. In addition to this
is what it is to involved with us that we're
working with a broader company called iph Independent spetholding and
they own other pen insurance. And what's unique about or
structure is that every brand tends to be specialized. So

(08:13):
we have brands that focus on working with shelters. We
are the brand that works with veterinarians. We have a
brand that focus on working with employer and your benefits,
so Venetrance can be an employee benefit product. So we're
trying to cover the market in every angle if we can.
It's really an education process, right, so we created a
lot of content and do a lot of marketing. It's

(08:36):
really a storytelling exercise at the end of the day.

Speaker 2 (08:38):
Yeah, I mean as a pet lover and a pet owner, right,
it would seem like a no brainer that you would
sign up for it as soon as your veterinari told
you about it. But what are something like the misconception?

Speaker 3 (08:46):
Yeah, the biggest misconception. I would categorize it into two groups.
So the first one is people think that it's nice
to have and not a mustard, and that usually falls
into the cargo of people who've never had a pet
and never gone through the end of life experience. That
makes sense when you talk to a pet owner who

(09:07):
has had a pet and has gone through an end
of life experience, the fact that insurance or not. What
they've learned through that experience, tell them my next pet,
I'm gonna get a pet insurance. And usually we see
is within sixty twelve months people will get another pet.
Of course on average, and those people that are like absolutely,
for my next one, I will have I will have insurance.

(09:28):
The young group of you know, let's go liket, young
millennials or gen z will get a pet for the
first time because you know, the trend is younger people have.

Speaker 1 (09:36):
Passed before they have kids.

Speaker 3 (09:37):
Yep, they don't know what it takes to care for
a pet, you know, just to give you some point
of reference, to care for a dog with the entire life,
you will spend over twenty thousand dollars in medical expense
over the life of your pet, right.

Speaker 1 (09:53):
And so you want to crip cover.

Speaker 3 (09:54):
And by the way, that twenty thousand dollars doesn't come like, oh,
I'm spending a thousand dollars every year. Somewhere you you
paid healthy, you spend very little, and then somewhere in
incident just happen overnight and you're like, whoa five thousand
dollars that's where we step in as pen insurance to
help you out so you can say yes to the care.
Because when people don't have an insure pet, what we

(10:14):
see is it's really really bad. They'll fight with their vet,
they ask for a discount, sometimes they want to reneke
the treatment. And it goes as far as people saying,
you know what, I'm going to surrender pet. I can't
afford to keep this pet. Worst case scenario. We see
it happen every week across the US. People utilize their
pet because they can't afford the care. So there's a
really terrible situation. We want to really like we move

(10:38):
them as part of omission to really like remove the
pain point and really help people to provide the right
care for their pets. And that's an education. It's the
first time ped owners you don't realize you're going to
get into this, so you're like, Wow, my pet is young,
is healthy, Why do I need pet insurance? I hear
this all the time when I one of my favorite
exerss to go to dog parks with my dogs and

(10:58):
I talk to other pet owners and I say, oh,
you know you have your own part what's his name?
You have insurance and like, insurance, is this something I
should should really do? I'm like, oh, yeah, you.

Speaker 1 (11:08):
Bet, that's awesome.

Speaker 2 (11:10):
Within the industry, what are some of the trends that
you're noticing, Like, what are some of the things that
you're noticing that other maybe insurance companies are doing and
that you guys are really leading the charge.

Speaker 1 (11:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (11:20):
So one of the things that we really trying to
lead a charge on it is to change the experience.
The best way I can describe this is, pets are
property right, and so we got our back home from
what I call it property casualty experience in insurance. It's
a little technical, but essentially, think about your car or
your home. If you have a car insurance or home insurance.

(11:41):
I hope you do because if you know what those
But if you do, and I so, you have an accident,
you'll take your call to the body shop, a bed repair,
file a claim with your insurance, and get your money back.

Speaker 2 (11:54):
Right.

Speaker 3 (11:55):
Bet insurance works that way. You go to your doctor,
your betting the ims, you do the treatment, you fire
a claim with us where weimburse you hopefully within two
three days.

Speaker 1 (12:05):
Right. Human health works.

Speaker 3 (12:07):
Very differently, and people constantly jump back and forth the
mad comparison between human health and animal health. In human health,
most of us have all medical health through our employers. Sure,
when we go to see your doctors, do you ever
see a bill?

Speaker 2 (12:23):
Rarely? Right?

Speaker 1 (12:24):
Really? Yeah?

Speaker 3 (12:24):
You have your copey yep, and you pay your copey
hopefully you know your network and everything is covered and
you really don't see and then behind the scene, the
hospital and insurance work together to settle the claim. That
is not how pen insurance is. That's how we want
insurance to work down the road, right, And so one
of the things where we trying to lead the way
is create an experience where you, as a pen owner,

(12:47):
suddenly I have an unforeseen event, but you do have
insurance that say, look to treat your dogs, but it's
going to cost three thousand dollars, And we want you
to say, in what, let's do whatever it takes because
I have pumpkin. But what we want you to do
is to be sure, hey, it is actually gonna be
covered by my coverage. I don't have prisy conditions. And

(13:08):
sometimes you'll be like, you know what, three thousand dollars,
but I'm gonna have to put that on my credit card.
And then I'm gonna have to follow claim and get
Queen bise and let me take two to three four
five days.

Speaker 1 (13:16):
That's a set of friction. So we want to create
a process where it's seamless. Yep.

Speaker 3 (13:20):
And for those critical care moments, we enable you to
basically just walk out for the appointment, paying your copy
and we will sell the claims with the with the clinic.
So that is a new experience that we are bringing
to market, uh little little this summer.

Speaker 2 (13:37):
That's great looking forward to that. It's going to be
a very positive experience hopefully for other Yeah. I mean
I'm going to start with a few hospitals. We're going
to pilo this so that it works smoothly, and then
over time we're.

Speaker 1 (13:47):
Going to hold this nationwide.

Speaker 2 (13:49):
That's awesome. So sweet switching industries right in your career,
go into the pet care side of things? What has
been like the most rewarding aspect of being the c
uh you know what.

Speaker 3 (13:59):
I get to go the office and spects every day,
so I get to play with pet's mine and and
other of my employees. So we have a very pet
funny office and we usually if you come to our office,
you'll see our average like three to four pets. Sometimes
there's a little bit of rumble, but it's actually quite fun.

Speaker 2 (14:17):
That's awesome. That'd be a fun, fun experience, I'm sure.
So that's great to be able to combine your passion,
your love for animals, and obviously your day to day too.
So for those people that are skeptical that say like, hey,
I have a brand new puppy, she's super healthy, I
don't need pet insurance. What would be your advice for them?

Speaker 3 (14:34):
Well, I will try to first educate them and we'll
understand like is this your first dog or have you
had dogs before or you know cats, get some experience
to really understand what mindset there from. If it's a
first time pin Ona, then I will try to re
educate them on like what is going to come down
the road, And it's not because they're healthy today that

(14:55):
tomorrow nothing's going to happen. I've had these experience maytime
with my own pets. Well, I they're fine, and then
with in the snap second, yeah hear.

Speaker 2 (15:02):
It all the time.

Speaker 3 (15:03):
My dog gets bitten by another dog because they were playing,
and then she has a cut on her face. Guess
why I have to rush to the emergency room, we
have to do surgery, she needs stitches, and I walk
out with like two thousand dollars. Right, I'm not another liar.
This happens every day for any pets, right, and you
only be protected and covered because for many people you

(15:25):
have a suddenly an unforeseen two thousand dollars bill that
is stressful.

Speaker 1 (15:30):
That is, this is not a great.

Speaker 3 (15:31):
Experience, and we don't want people to be falling to
the trap of making decisions that can I continue to
be a pet.

Speaker 1 (15:37):
Owner or no, we want you to keep the pet.
We want to be healthy.

Speaker 3 (15:41):
So we this is why people need to be protected
and have pat insurance, And it's going to take a
little time, but eventually we're going.

Speaker 1 (15:47):
To get there.

Speaker 2 (15:48):
It's awesome. Where do you foresee the role of Pumpkin
pat insurance being in the whole pet care industry?

Speaker 1 (15:54):
Right?

Speaker 2 (15:55):
Not just insurance, but where do you foresee it really
going in the next five to ten.

Speaker 1 (15:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (15:58):
So we have two products today at Pumpkin. We have
obviously we're known for insurance protections, but we actually also
have a non insurance product that we call a wellness plan.
And the wellness plan is redesigned to be a product
that enable people to get reinborsement for what we call
the more routine care. Right, that's going to be your

(16:22):
annual ved visits, some of the vaccines, key shots as
you have to do every year with your pets, protection
for the tick flee and how we're medicine. Maybe sometimes
blood tests or all the type of diagnostics that you
have to do.

Speaker 1 (16:35):
Right.

Speaker 3 (16:36):
So we we have a product, we're launching a new
product in the fall. We'll talk about it just yet
because it's not ready just yet, so it's not really
for prime time. We have you back then I'll just
have the market for it, just wait for it and
look for it. But that's another area we were investing it. Ultimately,
where we want to be all vision is to be

(16:56):
in a world where we can help you as a
pen on a being a better guardian of your pet.
And what I mean by this is educating You're providing
your tool and insights how to do risk preventions right
because if you think about it today, I'm only here
to help you when something really bad happened, which is
important and it's needed. But we want to be in

(17:18):
more upstream than that and help you to say, how
can you be a better pet on her. What are
the things you can do front or be aware of
to raise your pet in a better way? Right? That
takes very fun for us being compliance on every year
on your routine care and dream. But because we know
from a medicine standpoint, if you catch something early, you

(17:40):
have a chance to either slow down the progression or
completely eradicate the disease, right, And that's better than doing
damage control when your dog is not having a tumor
or cancer, because that's that's just going to be very
very challenging. And then going back to my background as
a kind of petfoot guy. Nutrition, quality of nutrition, but

(18:01):
also quantity, that's a whole value probably on ALI, like
we do portioning extremely well. My dog is the best example.
I rescue my dog Bell when she was two years old.
I was feeling her kind of cable food for like
a couple of years, and then I learned the downside
of that. You know, she was really the polytype child
for ALI, and you know, she was really the first

(18:22):
one who tried to you know, the experiment, and then
she's been on ALI ever since. My dog is now
fourteen years old, still really healthy and doing really well.
People think she was like an eight or nine year
old dog, and that's because we've been taking care really
really well. Right, So I'm going to be the unusual
pedal and I'm not your average ped on her because
I know so much. I've been in three for ten years,

(18:43):
and I love my pet and I take really really good.

Speaker 1 (18:45):
Care of them.

Speaker 3 (18:46):
But that we want to translate that and make it
affordable and if accessible to every ped on her.

Speaker 1 (18:51):
That's awesome.

Speaker 2 (18:52):
One thing you said earlier in the conversation that stuck
out to me is ten years ago, right, you completely
switched your gears, You trusted your guy, You saw this opportunity.
What advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs or people
that want to start their own company?

Speaker 3 (19:05):
Yeah, so great, great question, Thanks thanks for asking it.
I think the first one is really focus on what
is the problem that you're solving. I think that has
been a recurring thing for me with a gree company
that I started, is is there really a big problem
to solve and whole painful?

Speaker 1 (19:23):
Is this pain point?

Speaker 3 (19:24):
It really just kind of deep dive on that and
then craft the solution out of that. So if I
look at Ali right, all of the shure. It started
with me, my own experience, but I saw this problem
across the boat, like there's an epandemic of disease respects
all related to really bad.

Speaker 1 (19:40):
Food, like just really quality food.

Speaker 3 (19:44):
And so I create ALI to solve to problem. High
quality food made of human great quality ingredient and addressing
the nutrition because I so study that was done actually
with a pet food company that says, if you can
keep your dog as an ideal weight who most of
their li it's kind of humanized, we can announce the
life spent back a couple of years. So I'm like, well,

(20:05):
that's a real tangible benefit. So I really focused the
experience on that, and so we created everything on early
that enable people to say, we don't want you to guess,
because that's the mistake I was making on almost quanity.
You have to feed and sometimes people are like, oh,
that my dog is hungry, so I'm gonna give a
litt bit more. Yeah, guess what, You're overfeeding your dog
and that's bad. Now we just want you to feed
them exactly what they need. So we designed the whole

(20:27):
experience for this. At Pumpkin, the pain point was essentially
that we don't peninsurance was not being talked about because
veterinarians were not either aware of the benefit of pen
insurance or I had a bad experience.

Speaker 1 (20:45):
In the past.

Speaker 3 (20:46):
And when we looked at the data, we realize an
intro pet comes twice as harten to see your vet
as a non intro pet, and when they come they
say yes to the care. So the experience was as
follow someone with a non intropet goes to them, They're like,
oh much that's gonna cost. I don't know if I
can afford this. We really have to spend all this
money on this test. Someone who comes with an insurance

(21:08):
product say, you know what, let's do.

Speaker 1 (21:10):
Whatever it takes.

Speaker 3 (21:11):
I have been insurance And so that was a real
spend point and it creates a lot of stress. I
don't know if you know, but out of it in
an industry, they have the second highest suicidal rates of
any profession in the US. Wow, it's higher than dentists.
People always think the dentists are like highest. Now that's
our number two. Is driven at this pain point where
we call compassion fatigue because they are tired to see

(21:34):
every day has been utilized because the people cannot afford
the care right that's gone into this world because of
their passion for animals and they want to save life
and they want to practice the best care possible.

Speaker 1 (21:47):
And so we saw the opportunity to say we're going
to be your co pilot.

Speaker 3 (21:51):
We're gonna come right alongside of you and really remove
the friction that gets in the way of you doing
your job. Yeah, that's a lot of synergy and that's mission.

Speaker 1 (22:00):
That's awesome.

Speaker 2 (22:01):
Well, this has been a great conversation. Thank you for
coming in and really sharing your story. A little bit
more about obviously Pumpkin Pet Insurance as well for all
of our listeners that tune in, how can they find
out more?

Speaker 3 (22:11):
Yeah, I mean, if you want to learn more about
the Pumpkin, you can just google us to Pumpkin Pet
Insurance or go to Pumpkin dot Awesome.

Speaker 2 (22:20):
Well, Alex, thank you, thank you again for joining us.
Thank you for sharing all the information. We really enjoyed it.
Tune in next week for next week's edition of CEOs.
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