Retirement at the age of 38

Meet co-hosts Ivan Zakharenkov & Shawn Wilkie

Shawn Wilkie: Hey, you’re listening to the veterinary Innovation podcast. You’re listening to the veterinary Innovation podcast. My name is Shawn Wilkie and along with my awesome. Co-host, Ivan Zak we are going to have some brilliant conversations every month with some of the most innovative people in the veterinary medicine space. Ivan why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself.

Ivan Zak: Yep. I think that it would be important to uh outline why we think it may be important to be talking about these things. I myself I come from the veterinary background, i’ve been a veterinarian since 2006, uh i’ve done about 10 or 11 years

Shawn Wilkie: You’ve been a veterinarian twice, is that correct to say?

Ivan Zak: Correct, I did have a hobby of doing vet schools in different countries and different languages so I started in Ukraine and then when I finished that I moved to Canada and did it one more time here, so im looking for another country at the moment, but um, but uh yea, so the second time I became a veterinarian in 2006 which was in Canada, and then I followed my passion and became a veterinarian uh emergency veterinarian which i’ve done for about 10 years and by the end of it I was pretty tired of inefficiencies in the hospitals and the idea came to optimize one little piece of the uh process in the hospital and it was the treatment sheet so we wanted to replace it with technology which we’ve done, we put it on the Ipad, we called it smartflow, and slowly it evolved from just the treatment sheet into a series of whiteboards and then eventually we were optimizing workflow in the veterinary hospitals. By 2018 we exited out of that, so Idex bought Smartflow, and now they own it and sell it, and I moved into the role of the general manager of the software department at Idex, which was a great experience but I feel like i, um enjoy more building things than managing and uh, leading the teams rather than managing. So I resigned on May uh 1st, 2019, and now in the search of a new thing, joined Shawn Wilkie, a friend of mine in this podcast, and uh there’s duel purpose of this, one is to interview people in this industry, and uh to talk about innovation, and the second one is to find the next best thing for myself, so Shawn Wilkie why don’t you uh, let the folks know how we met and uh why were doing this together.

Why we’ve started a veterinary podcast

Shawn Wilkie: Yeah sounds great, like Ivan I’m gainfully unemployed or partially retired, um, I’ve been a technology entrepreneur my entire life. My last startup was a company called DragonVetrinary, and we did a speech to text software and helped tons of people around the world get away from the computer faster, so we took their speech and turned it into text, and we did that for 100’s of veterinarians all around the world. It was a great time, we had a lot of fun, and in January of uh this year I sold that company and so you know, me and Ivan met because we attended a lot of the same trade shows and had a similar peer group inside veterinarian medicine, it was a lot of fun and we actually started to give some talks together which was great, we gave some talks in the US and in London and talked about transformative technology and how to pick practice management softwares and along with this great conversation really just enjoyed our comradery and humor we had back and forth together, but you know Ivan remember, I think we were grabbing coffee, um somewhere in middle America at one of these conferences and I remember you telling me about a friend of yours that you had met, and you said it’s like watching somebody play in a band, you know watching this guy do his medical records, you describe this guy and I don’t know his name, uh you probably remember and this is somebody, this is the type of guest that we want to have on our podcast, so why don’t you tell the listeners about this, maybe share his name or don’t I mean, depends on what you wanna do, up to you

Ivan Zak: yeah, so uh yea so first of all, try not to grab a coffee in middle of America because the coffee is terrible, it’s likely to be the reason to me, but um the, I remember the veterinarian I told you about, his name is Frank Marshal, he owns a clinic uh not far from Portland, it was actually, yea it was like watching, so he was using voice recognition software and it was interesting to watch him because he was dictating and clicking the buttons and changing the fields and you know putting some quotation marks, and it looked like he was playing the piano and singing and it was so fluid that I was fascinated with how he runs his medical records, that’s the guy who was pulling 1 and a half times the revenue of other clinics by himself, and that it was all done through the proper medical record keeping and through updating the clients, he does it all by himself and i’m really fascinated with this guy and as soon as I saw him I thought this person needs to be digitized into a program, so yea definitely a fascinating uh figure in the industry and I met a lot of vets through my career and he’s definitely one of those that we’ll probably invite to this podcast.

Shawn Wilkie: Yeah absolutely, so Frank if you’re listening or this finds you, like uh look for the invite it’s coming soon. I think the other thing that’s worth just saying to listeners is these are the kinds of conversations that we’ve had with each other that really have inspired me to say “Hey Ivan Zak, why don’t we, why don’t we give this podcast thing a try, there’s all of these innovative people out there doing all of these innovative things and if the people that are in the veterinary industry had an opportunity to have some exposure, they may be able to increase their efficiency, decrease the amount of time they spend in our office, and I really do appreciate the plug from my previous company, Frank I think is using DragonVetrinarian software which is pretty cool um we were able to change the lives of lots of people

How to contact us

Ivan Zak: Uh so yea those kinds of folks that we would like to interview doesn’t have to be cool technology built and ready you know to be sold to a large technology company its just something that you think you’re doing cool or you know some of your colleagues are doing cool and it doesn’t have to be a vet, it could be a technician, it could be a receptionist it could be someone in um, I don’t know in the OR or whatever relates to veterinary medicine, please invite those folks to participate in our podcast, it’s uh you know were real people and just uh you can connect with us through our facebook page and group, uh you can email us or just contact us through the uh web page which is

Shawn Wilkie: VeterinaryInnovationPodcast.com

Ivan Zak: Awesome

Shawn Wilkie: yea, so find us on Linkedin, find us on all of the social channels, we, we have all of them, and absolutely, if you know somebody who’s doing something unique and truly different or something that’s increasing the efficiency of a veterinary medicine practice or a hospital, please reach out to us and it doesn’t have to be in North America you know were happy to talk to people from anywhere in the world, it’s truly a global community that we’re apart of, you know, I’ve been uh to Australia, New Zealand, uh the UK and I know Ivan I know you’ve been all over the world, implementing smart flow in your past life before you got your retirement at the ripe old age of 38, um

Ivan Zak: is that a bald joke?

Shawn Wilkie: I don’t think it’s a bald joke and it’s hard for me to like, actually give you shit about your age because we happen to be the same age. I think i’m older than you

Ivan Zak: Well I qualify a bit more than you cause im bald, yea

Shawn Wilkie: So you look older

Ivan Zak: yeah, thank you, so yeah

Shawn Wilkie: Yeah So I apologize, i’m sure I will get that back at some point which is gonna be great. Thanks so much for listening to our first episode, were super excited to continue down this road of uh delivering innovation and driving value from the connections we have in the vet space, and uh yea stay tuned, reach out to us on facebook, instagram, linkedin, anywhere where cool people hangout we will be there.

Ivan Zak: It’s very canadian of you making fun of people and then apologizing right away after, so thank you

Shawn Wilkie: You’re very welcome, well you are a foreigner, you are from Ukraine so, have to uh, we encourage all forms of immigration in this country

Shawn Wilkie and Ivan Zak: hahahaha

Ivan Zak: Inclusion and diversity,

Shawn Wilkie: That’s right exactly, all of those things, this is us signing off before we get into trouble uh, thanks for listening

Ivan Zak: Can you at the end say one more time, “its about”