People keep asking me why I left my last role to run a company built around a physical device. It's a fair question. For those who know me well, you know I love to write things down. From children’s books to the technical-heavy textbook, words are my favorite medium. What better way to share my thoughts? I've spent most of my career in digital care, virtual medicine, telehealth infrastructure, building systems designed to make veterinary care more accessible from wherever a pet owner happened to be standing. So, stepping into the CEO role at Purgo and Vetlen, a company whose flagship product is a pouch you place directly into a patient, might look like a strange turn.
It isn't. It's the same thread I've been pulling on my whole career, just from a different angle.
Where I started
I trained at Texas A&M, came out with a DVM and, along the way, picked up a Master's degree in Biochemistry and another in Business Administration because I've never been able to sit still with just one lens on any problem. Clinical medicine taught me what patients and their families need. Biochemistry taught me why some of our tools work, and why others don't. Business taught me that even the best idea in veterinary medicine goes nowhere if nobody can build a company around it that survives long enough to reach practices.
That combination took me through some roles I'm proud of. I was Chief Veterinary Officer of Digital Pet Health at Mars Veterinary Health. I served as Lead Medical Advisor for KeraVet Bio and Chief Medical Officer at Fuzzy and others. I co-developed Virtual Care University and MyPetDoc, and I've got my name on a handful of patents because when I see a gap, I have a hard time not trying to build something to close it. These roles each gave me unique lines of sight on issues with care and what I could do about them with amazing teams around me. I’ll still be active in other parts of the industry, but it was also clear that the level of impact that was possible here was impossible to walk away from.
Every one of those roles was about access: Getting the right care to the right patient, with timing in mind, with fewer barriers in between.
What pulled me here
Three things pulled me toward Purgo and Vetlen, and honestly, I didn't need to pick just one.
The technology itself stopped me in my tracks. A refillable, catheter-connected pouch that delivers therapy directly where the pathology lives, instead of asking the whole patient's system to absorb, distribute, and hope enough drug reaches a small, poorly perfused site. That's not an incremental improvement. That's a different way of thinking about how we treat disease locally.
Then there was the mission, and the chance to lead it. I've spent more than a decade building systems and advising companies, but there's a different kind of pull when you're offered the chance to steer the whole ship, especially when the ship is carrying something you genuinely believe practices and patients need.
Underneath both of those was the gap I kept running into throughout my clinical years without fully naming it. I didn't have one dramatic case that changed everything and pointed me to Purgo Scientific and Vetlen. What I had was more powerful, in a way. It was recognizing, once I finally saw this technology, just how many cases over the years would have gone differently with it on the shelf. Surgical sites that got infected despite doing everything right. Wounds that dragged on because systemic therapy just couldn't concentrate where it needed to. Patients and families who went through longer recoveries, more visits, more cost, more worry, because the tools we had were built for the whole body when the problem was sitting in one place.
That's a hard thing to sit with as a clinician. You don't get to go back and treat those cases differently. I can decide what I do with that recognition going forward, and for me, that meant going all in on a company built to close exactly that gap. But this isn’t really about me…
Why I think this matters for you
I didn't come into this industry, and I'm not staying in it now, because I like being simply close to good medicine. I like building the thing that makes good medicine possible for more people doing the actual work in exam rooms and surgical suites.
If you've ever closed a site and quietly hoped it would heal clean, if you've ever re-dosed a patient systemically and wondered how much of that drug was actually reaching where it needed to, you already understand the problem we’re solving. That's the whole reason I'm here!
I didn't leave digital care behind. I just found another way to keep doing the same work: closing the gap between what patients need and the care we've historically been able to deliver.
Try the Vetlen Pouch. It will change the way you practice, and that’s a great thing.