A Chat With Paal Gisholt, President/CEO, SmartPak Equine

CS: How many employees do you have?
PG: About 100.

CS: Tell me a little bit about how the company got started.
PG: I got a call from my wife and co-founder [Becky], while I was sitting at my desk working as a venture capitalist. She said she had an idea for a business. This was common; she comes up with a thousand ideas a year. She had a problem. She had purchased a horse that had to be fed pretty high doses of vitamin E to ward off early blindness. So it was a high stakes game. Horses are expensive to begin with, and the last thing you want to do is spend even more money caring for a blind horse. So she went to her barn management, told them that the horse had to receive these supplements, and that it was really important so the horse wouldn’t go blind. And they said, “Of course.”