The Machine Agency founder and CEO Cash Riley Jr. recently sat down with Robert Yu on his podcast, Robert’s Universe, a show built around the three things Robert loves most: food, Korea, and pets. Robert is the founder of Mervyn’s Petcare and the brand behind Ari’s Purrfect, as well as a Machine Agency client. What began as a conversation about growing up and cooking turned into a wide-ranging talk about where the pet industry is headed, how brands actually win on Amazon, and what a seven-year run in professional baseball has to do with any of it.

Here are the ideas worth carrying forward

The long game is the only game

Before The Machine Agency, before supplements, before Amazon, Cash played professional baseball in the Dodgers organization. He is quick to point out that the athletic part is not what carries over into business. What carries over is the discipline of a long season.

A baseball season runs six, seven, sometimes eight months if a team goes deep into October. You have far more failures than successes, and you have to show up ready for every single pitch anyway. Building a brand, Cash argues, is the same. It is not a football game with a fixed clock. It is a season, full of ups and downs, and the brands that win are the ones that keep showing up prepared and keep moving.

A void in pet health, and an education problem

Cash got his start developing a human nutrition line, so he has spent years in the supplement world. When he began looking for products for his own dog, Eve, he noticed a gap: an enormous amount out there for humans, comparatively little for pets, and what did exist rarely came with any real education.

That gap, he says, is the opportunity. Pets age just as people do, and because they have been domesticated, they are not getting the nutrition they would have found in the wild. And they cannot tell us what hurts. The brands that will win in this space are not just selling aproduct, they are teaching owners what is actually good for their dog or their cat, and why.

Great product plus real education is a combination the pet aisle still badly needs.

Cats are having their moment

For years, the money followed dogs. Cash and Robert have slightly different theories on why, but they agree on where it is going. Cash’s take comes from the five years he spent in private equity: investors tend to run in the same circles and chase whatever is hot and easy, and for a long time that meant dogs. Nobody wants to be last to the party. Then somebody wakes up, points at cats, and the whole herd moves.

That is exactly what is happening now. Walk any pet trade show over the last couple of years and it is all about cats, the “cat movement,” the big cat energy. Cash’s point is a simple one: cats have been here the whole time, and the market is finally catching up.

What it means to be a market mover

This is the concept Cash returns to most. On Amazon, in every category, there is an innovator who actually moves the market. The Machine Agency calls them market movers.

And when a brand becomes one, something remarkable happens: its name becomes the name of the space it occupies.

Think Kleenex. Think Q-tip. You do not ask for a facial tissue, you ask for a Kleenex. On Amazon, Cash notes, that effect is even stickier, because so much of the platform is algorithmic. Once a brand becomes the shorthand for its category, that position tends to stay put. He has had the chance to ride that wave once before, and it does not go away.

That is the goal The Machine Agency holds for the brands it works with. Not to be one more option in a crowded search result, but to become the name people reach for.

Ari’s Purrfect and the power of popping

Cash brought Ari’s Purrfect to the taping himself, a client’s product he was glad to hold up on camera, and he was direct about it: it pops. Amazon is a visual platform. Nobody can touch a product, smell it, or hold it. All they have is the image, and when Ari’s Purrfect shows up in results, it stands out. That is not an accident. It is packaging and positioning doing exactly what they are supposed to do on this platform. It is a strong example of a cat brand built to become a market mover in a category that is only now heating up.

A team sport

Robert closed the episode by asking what Cash’s pet has taught him about life. It was a curveball, and his honest answer was: love. A little more love and a little more care go a long way, for pets and for people alike.

The other thread running through the whole conversation was teamwork. You cannot do any of this alone, Cash says, not in baseball and not in business. A team all pulling in the same direction is one hell of a thing to be part of. That is true of a ball club, it is true of The Machine Agency, and it is true of the partnership the team has built with Robert and the Ari’s Purrfect crew.

The Machine Agency is just getting started with them, and as Cash puts it, it is not if, it is when.