Steve Grace: Anna, welcome to the show. Good to see you again.

Anna Podolsky: Thanks Steve, good to be here.

Steve Grace: Before we go into how you ended up running this business, can you give everyone a rundown on Lyka and what stage you’re at?

Anna Podolsky: Sure. So Lyka is a direct-to-consumer pet wellness company. We focus on health, not shelf life, through the food we provide. We provide minimally processed food from whole-food ingredients shipped to our customers through a direct-to-consumer subscription model. We’re about three years old, we started in 2018, and we’ve just raised our Series A, a $6.5 million round. So we’re in that scale-up phase.

Steve Grace: Tell us the story of how you got here, because I think it’s one people will really relate to.

Anna Podolsky: Going way back, I studied finance and maths at uni. I then worked at Bain and Company as a management consultant for about five years. I loved the work, the people, the travel. But ultimately I was never super passionate about the clients, these large corporations. I always knew I wanted to start a startup. I love the idea of creating something from nothing in an area I really cared about. It was a personal journey with my dog that led me to start this business. I have a dog called Laika. She traveled around with me, I lived in five different countries for work. And she was having this parallel health journey. She was itchy all the time, to the point of having scars from scratching. She was shedding a lot. Her teeth were so bad the vet said we’d need to pull them out, and she was only four or five years old. That really shocked me because I thought I was doing everything right. I was feeding her premium commercial food, walking her constantly. I started researching the ingredients and was quite shocked. The distinct moment was in Chile, translating Spanish ingredient labels into English on Google Translate and still not understanding them. At that point I decided to start cooking for her. Within weeks the shift in her health was mind-boggling. She stopped itching, her shedding dropped almost to nothing, friends were commenting on her energy levels. She hasn’t gone back to commercial food since. After Chile we moved to San Francisco and I started building the business on the side at night and on weekends. Then in 2018 I moved back to Australia to launch it.

Steve Grace: You have a finance background, no history in e-commerce or food production. Did you ever see yourself running a pet food company?

Anna Podolsky: Not at all. I’ve always loved animals, I wanted to be a vet as a kid. But running a pet food company, definitely not. I think that outside-in perspective is actually really valuable. It brings a different way of looking at a problem that insiders often can’t see.

Steve Grace: What was the hardest thing in the early days?

Anna Podolsky: The very early stage, before raising any money. I bootstrapped for about a year and a half, just to get more confidence in the business before bringing in investors. As a bootstrap founder you are doing absolutely everything. Ordering ingredients, going to Woolies to buy food, supervising the kitchen team, talking to customers, dropping off boxes, plus trying to build the company at the same time. Exhausting. But the hardest part for me personally was that it felt like I wasn’t using my skill set to its full potential. Coming from consulting, working with executives, traveling the world, and then going to buy ingredients at Woolies felt like a step down. That said, the biggest learning from that time was that I got really familiar with the whole business. I wrote code, made ads, did everything. And even though I wasn’t great at everything, what it allowed me to do was hire the right people by understanding what good looks like in every role.

Steve Grace: Tell me about the production. You make everything in-house?

Anna Podolsky: Yes, everything in-house. We have our own production kitchen in Sydney. It’s a big differentiator. About 80% or more of the industry uses processed food with long supply chains, ingredient sourcing all over the world, production all over the world. We source 85-95% of our ingredients locally, only going outside Australia for things like turmeric from India or coconut from Indonesia. We’ve made over two million meals since we started.

Steve Grace: How has COVID impacted the business?

Anna Podolsky: We’ve been really lucky with two big tailwinds. One is home delivery and e-commerce, which has seen a massive boom. The second is the puppy boom. People were getting puppies everywhere, breeders were sold out a year in advance, rescue shelters were running low. That’s been really positive on the demand side. The challenge has been the team side. High growth plus remote work plus constant change is hard to manage when everyone’s in different rooms. And for the production kitchen in western Sydney, which is in a high-risk area, we’ve had to put in every possible procedure to keep the team safe.

Steve Grace: Any beliefs that have changed or new habits since the pandemic?

Anna Podolsky: What resonates more now than before is connectivity and context. In the office you absorb information by osmosis without even realising it. Remote work removes that. We’re still figuring it all out but we’re building in deliberate mechanisms, like brown bag lunches every few weeks where the team orders takeout and discusses a topic, just to maintain that breadth of connection and information sharing. On habits, being more consistent about sleep and wake times has been positive. Morning is my best thinking time and I’ve shifted my day to protect that, starting around 7 am and blocking out those early hours for deep thinking.

Steve Grace: What’s your advice on fundraising after going through the Series A?

Anna Podolsky: Invest the time upfront to nail your pitch and storytelling. Founders often have a rough idea of the vision but articulating it clearly with data takes a lot of upfront iteration. Get it in front of lower-risk investors first to get feedback before you go broad. And stay positive. There are going to be a lot of nos. Each no is one closer to a yes. It takes longer than you think.

Steve Grace: Why should someone come and work at Lyka?

Anna Podolsky: Two things. First, our ambition and vision. If you’re passionate about helping dogs and other pets live their best life and want to make a real difference, that’s something our whole team shares. Second, our culture: high performance, achievement, and fun. We get the best people in every function and we bring them together in a dog-friendly office. Anyone can bring their dog in. We have photo shoots, events with dog influencers. It’s a perfect touch of fun alongside really serious work.

Steve Grace: Anna, thank you so much for coming on the show. It’s been a great conversation.

Anna Podolsky: Thanks so much Steve, appreciate it.