Interview with Jean-Philippe Doumeng of Napo Pet Insurance
Building a company from grief demands more than emotion. In this interview, Jean-Philippe Doumeng explains how personal loss became a disciplined strategy for category leadership at Napo Pet Insurance. The conversation explores empathy as an operating advantage, the systems that turn care into scale, and how high-performance cultures are built without sacrificing humanity.
Can you share the moment or experience of personal grief that inspired you to found Napo Pet Insurance, and how it reshaped your vision for the company?
Napo started with my dog, Napoleon (“Napo”). Toward the end of his life he could not walk much, so we moved him around in a wheelbarrow. He actually loved it. When he passed away, my family and I were heartbroken, and it forced me to confront how stressful and fragmented pet care becomes when emotion is already high.
That experience crystallised what pet insurance should be: fast, fair, and human – designed to provide clarity when people need it most. But clarity alone is not enough. We are building to win: protect pets, support their people, and help millions give their pets longer, healthier, happier lives.
The vision is deliberate: best-in-class insurance as the foundation, then selective expansion into services that support pets through critical moments. Insurance earns trust. Trust creates the platform for what comes next. We are not interested in being a good insurance company. We are building the category leader.
Many entrepreneurs experience setbacks or losses, but turning grief into a business mission is unique. How did you channel that personal experience into a concrete strategy for growth?
The personal story gave direction, but strategy had to be practical. We translated grief into a clear operating goal: build the kind of insurance we would want for our own pets, fast decisions, fair pricing, and human support. Then we executed relentlessly to make it repeatable.
We translated grief into a clear operating goal: build the kind of insurance we would want for our own pets, fast decisions, fair pricing, and human support.
We invested early and heavily in claims workflows, quality control, and data so decisions are consistent, not dependent on individual heroics. We use automation where it improves speed and fairness, and we keep humans at the centre where judgement and empathy matter. This is operational discipline, not sentiment.
Growth then becomes a by-product of trust. When customers feel supported at the hardest moment, retention improves, referrals follow, and economics strengthen. That creates durable growth rather than growth at any cost. But make no mistake: we are scaling aggressively. The market is ours to take. Partnerships are strategic, not opportunistic. If you want to deliver ongoing value across a pet’s life, you need to collaborate with best-in-class players across pet care rather than trying to build everything yourself. We partner to move faster and capture more value, not out of necessity.
How did that moment of personal loss change the way you approach leadership today, especially in motivating and guiding your team?
That moment of loss made the work feel deeply real, but it also widened my perspective beyond my own experience. Everyone goes through difficult periods at different points in their lives: grief, health issues, family challenges, or simply moments where things feel heavy. Work does not exist in isolation from that reality.
But understanding that reality does not mean lowering the bar. I wanted to build an environment where people do not have to pretend everything is fine all the time, and where there is room for honesty without compromising standards. At Napo, we aim for radical transparency: being open about challenges, supporting one another through difficult moments, and holding ourselves to uncompromising expectations.
That balance is non-negotiable. Empathy without structure becomes inconsistency. Structure without empathy becomes brittle. High-performing teams need both, but performance comes first. When people feel trusted and supported, they take ownership, make better decisions, and show up fully for customers. And when they do not perform, we address it directly.
Empathy is often seen as a ‘soft skill’ in business. How have you transformed empathy into a measurable competitive advantage at Napo Pet Insurance?
Empathy is not soft. It is strategic. In any business that serves people at vulnerable moments, genuinely understanding someone else’s position means you can solve their problem better, faster, and more profitably than competitors. When you take that seriously, it stops being abstract and starts shaping how you build and operate a company to win.
At Napo, empathy is designed into the operating system and measured ruthlessly: speed of resolution, clarity of communication, customer satisfaction, retention, and complaint rates. We structure claims journeys so routine cases are handled quickly and consistently, while complex cases get time, judgement, and human support. This creates competitive moats through retention and lifetime value.
It also shows up in how we build the team. We screen hard for empathy during hiring because culture compounds and mediocre culture kills velocity. We look for people who can combine judgement with care, and who understand there is no such thing as a “small” job when you are dealing with someone’s pet. Early on, my co-founder was on the phone at midnight helping an early customer through a difficult situation. That was not kindness for its own sake. It was setting the standard.
Empathy also means going the extra mile in small, deliberate ways. When a pet passes away, we send flowers. We mark puppy birthdays and adoption anniversaries. These are not marketing gestures – they are cultural reinforcement and competitive differentiation. They signal to the team and the customer that we see the pet as a family member, not a policy number. That consistency between internal culture and external experience is what creates trust at scale. And trust converts.
As a leader, how do you model and embed empathy in your organization’s culture in a way that drives both team engagement and high performance?
For me, it starts with a simple premise: we are all human. Startups are intense. People bring their own triggers, insecurities, and life events into work, whether they talk about them or not. If leaders pretend they are immune to that, the culture becomes performative and people stop being honest.
Teams that feel supported make better decisions under pressure, recover faster from setbacks, and take more ownership. That is how you build a team that wins.
So I try to lead with transparency. I have been open with the team about challenges I have faced personally, including the mental strain that can come with building a company. Not for sympathy, but to normalise the reality that high performance and vulnerability can coexist. The first step in a strong culture is psychological safety: people feeling they can speak up early, ask for help, and be truthful when something is not going well.
But psychological safety is not permission for low standards. We try to build a culture where people know they have each other’s back, especially on bad days. That shows up in how we run teams, how we respond when someone struggles, and how we handle mistakes: with accountability, but without blame. Accountability is sacred. Blame is wasteful.
Empathy, in that sense, is not softness. It is resilience. And resilience drives execution. Teams that feel supported make better decisions under pressure, recover faster from setbacks, and take more ownership. That is how you build a team that wins.
When personal experiences drive business decisions, it can be both inspiring and risky. How do you balance the emotional motivations with objective business strategy?
Emotion is the compass. Strategy is the weapon. Emotion defines what you will not compromise on: fairness, transparency, and long-term trust. Strategy is what makes it sustainable: pricing discipline, strong unit economics, and operational control. And discipline is what allows you to scale without breaking.
There are constant temptations to take shortcuts, especially in competitive markets. But shortcuts often create hidden costs later: complaints, churn, adverse selection, and reputational damage. We refuse to compete on price alone. We compete on value, and we win on execution. The balance is not emotion versus logic. It is values setting boundaries, and strategy finding the most aggressive path within them.
That is also how we think about the next phase. Expanding into services beyond insurance is not about doing everything. It is about selective moves, grounded in economics, and partnering with best-in-class operators so we can deliver more value without losing focus on the core. We move fast, but we move with intent. And when we move, we move to dominate.
What advice would you give to other leaders who are seeking to turn personal challenges into purposeful, high-impact ventures, while maintaining empathy at the core of their approach?
Start with the real problem your experience revealed, then build systems that solve it at scale. Personal stories create conviction, but conviction does not create repeatability. Operating models do. And operating models executed relentlessly create category leaders.
Treat empathy as an execution capability. Define how it shows up in decisions, communication, and metrics. Pair it with standards, because the most trusted organisations are both human and rigorous. Rigour without humanity is brittle. Humanity without rigour is amateur.
Finally, resist the instinct to build everything yourself. The biggest opportunities often sit between sectors. Leaders who build partnerships well, share value fairly, and connect complementary strengths create more durable impact than those who try to control the whole stack. But be clear: you are building partnerships to accelerate, not to compensate for weakness. Partner from strength, not need.
