Morgan Valentino | Vice President of Design & Construction, VEG ER for Pets
VEG ER for Pets runs real estate, design, and construction as one team, so every site is vetted for cost and infrastructure before the lease is signed. Morgan Valentino explains why VEG's ERs have no reception desk, how a kit-of-parts keeps fast growth from getting expensive, and why hospital layout is a staffing decision as much as a clinical one.
As Vice President of Design & Construction at VEG ER for Pets, Morgan Valentino has helped scale the organization from a small number of hospitals to a national footprint. In that process, she has developed a distinct approach to veterinary hospital design — one that integrates real estate, design, and construction into a unified operating model, enabling faster execution, stronger site selection discipline, and more consistent experiences across markets.
In our conversation, she explains why openness serves as the guiding principle behind both physical layouts and communication practices, how repeatable design systems reduce friction as organizations scale, and why hospital environments directly shape team performance, customer trust, and patient outcomes.
Other Interviews
More conversations with founders, operators, and investors building the future of pet care.
Elizabeth Iorns | Co-Founder & CEO, Familiar Therapeutics
Elizabeth Iorns lost her French Bulldog to a brain tumor that a published canine study suggested could be treated, but no company had taken the drug forward for dogs. Now she and Science Exchange co-founder Dan Knox license the companion animal rights to human drugs at Familiar Therapeutics: 13 programs and $5 million raised in five months, plus a pitch to pharma that pet trials validate targets faster than phase two.
Brian Cheng | Co-Founder, HOLY CAP
HOLY CAP launched in Hong Kong in 2022 selling functional mushroom powders and learned fast that pet owners will not measure another supplement into the bowl. Co-founder Brian Cheng explains the pivot to lickable Squeezees, why in-person sampling beats Amazon at this stage, the operating cost of 14 SKUs split across dogs and cats, and the plan to become a complete-diet brand.
Dennis Gucker & David Franklin | Co-Founders, PawPay
Fewer than 5% of U.S. pets are insured, and PawPay's co-founders think the failure is operational, not emotional. Dennis Gucker explains what carriers told them about the gap between point of sale and point of care, why the company stayed carrier-agnostic, and how real-time coverage scoring plus point-of-care payment changes what clinics can say yes to.