From MLB Umpire to ER Veterinarian: The Story Behind VetGeni

The Baseball Years: Jim Evans Umpire Academy to the Big Leagues

Christopher Tiller was born on October 25, 1978. He grew up around animals, watching his father, Dr. Robert Tiller, practice veterinary medicine at a mixed animal clinic in Waskom, Texas. Dr. Robert Tiller graduated from Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine in 1976 and spent decades caring for everything from cattle to companion animals in East Texas.

But young Chris did not go straight to vet school. He played baseball through junior college and Texas State University, and when his playing days ended, he discovered a different way to stay in the game. In 2000, he graduated from the Jim Evans Umpire Academy in Cocoa Beach, Florida, one of the most prestigious umpire training programs in the country. The academy was an intensive eight-week program that taught the mechanics, rules, and mental toughness required to officiate professional baseball.

From there, Tiller entered the professional minor leagues. He worked his way through the Appalachian League, the Midwest League, the Florida State League, the Texas League, and the Pacific Coast League. Over the course of his minor league career, he umpired approximately 1,500 games, each one a test of concentration, composure under pressure, and split-second decision-making.

In 2007, Tiller reached the Major Leagues. His first MLB game was at Miller Park in Milwaukee, with the Brewers hosting the Atlanta Braves. Between 2008 and 2010, he worked 64 Major League Baseball games, standing behind the plate and on the bases at the highest level of professional baseball.

His career was notable enough to be mentioned in Bruce Weber's book As They See 'Em: A Fan's Travels in the Land of Umpires, published by Simon & Schuster. Weber's book is considered one of the definitive accounts of what it means to be a professional umpire in America, and Tiller's presence in it speaks to the caliber of his career.

Why He Walked Away from MLB

Professional umpiring demands a lifestyle that is difficult to reconcile with family. The travel schedule is relentless. Minor league umpires drive thousands of miles between small towns. Major league umpires fly across the country on schedules that change weekly. Tiller missed his second son's birth because he was traveling for a game.

That moment crystallized something. Tiller has said publicly that life is too short to not do what makes you happy. Umpiring had been his dream, and he had achieved it at the highest level. But the cost to his family was too great. He stepped away from professional baseball with no regrets about what he had accomplished, but with clarity about what came next.

“The moment you realize you're not happy doing something, move on.”

The Trucking Company: Building a Business from Nothing

In 2008, while still umpiring in the majors, Tiller and his brother started a trucking company. What began as a small operation grew rapidly as they found their niche serving the oil industry. Within a few years, the company had grown to 60 trucks hauling equipment and materials for oil and gas operations.

Building a trucking company to that scale requires operational discipline, financial management, and the ability to manage people and logistics under pressure. Tiller took full ownership in 2013 and ran the business for several more years. The experience taught him how to build systems, manage growth, handle regulatory compliance, and make decisions with real money on the line.

These are not skills that show up on a veterinary school transcript, but they are exactly the skills needed to build a technology startup. Understanding cash flow, operations, customer needs, and scalability prepared Tiller for founding VetGeni in ways that a traditional academic path never could have.

The Call to Veterinary Medicine

In 2016, while visiting his father's clinic in Waskom, something shifted. Watching his father practice the same profession he had practiced for four decades reignited a childhood ambition that Tiller had set aside for baseball and business. Dr. Robert Tiller, Texas A&M CVM class of 1976, had modeled what it meant to serve a community through veterinary medicine. That model had been waiting in the background of Chris Tiller's life for decades.

Tiller enrolled at Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine. He was older than his classmates, with a wife, children, and two full careers behind him. He brought a work ethic forged by thousands of baseball games and the operational intensity of running a trucking fleet. The academic demands of veterinary school were significant, but Tiller had spent his life thriving under pressure.

He graduated, chose emergency medicine, and entered ER practice. And that is where the documentation problem became impossible to ignore.

The ER Documentation Crisis: Why VetGeni Had to Exist

Emergency veterinary medicine is a documentation machine. Every patient who comes through the door generates a triage assessment, stabilization notes, treatment records, monitoring updates, client communications, and a discharge summary. An ER veterinarian seeing 15 to 25 patients per shift produces tens of thousands of words of documentation per night.

The documentation does not stop when the shift ends. ER veterinarians routinely spend one to three hours after their shift completing charts. After a 12-hour overnight, the last thing any clinician wants to do is sit at a computer typing SOAP notes. But the charts have to be done, and they have to be done well because they serve as the medical record, the legal record, and the communication bridge to the day team.

Tiller experienced this firsthand. Night after night, he finished treating patients and then sat down to chart for hours. He knew there had to be a better way. His business background told him that any repetitive, time-consuming process that follows predictable patterns can be automated. His clinical background told him that the automation had to be accurate, evidence-based, and trustworthy.

VetGeni was the result.

Why the Unconventional Background Matters

Every phase of Tiller's career contributed something essential to VetGeni:

From umpiring: discipline and split-second decision-making. Calling balls and strikes at the Major League level requires processing visual information in milliseconds and committing to a decision under extreme scrutiny. Emergency medicine demands the same skill. The AI scribe Tiller built reflects this reality: it processes rapid, unstructured voice input and commits it to a structured clinical format in seconds.
From trucking: business acumen and operational scaling. Growing a trucking company to 60 vehicles taught Tiller how to build systems that scale, manage costs, and deliver reliable service under pressure. VetGeni's architecture reflects that operational thinking: the platform is designed to handle thousands of concurrent users, process voice recordings of any length, and deliver consistent output regardless of load.
From veterinary medicine: clinical authenticity. VetGeni was not designed by engineers guessing at veterinary workflows. It was designed by a practicing ER veterinarian who knew exactly which documentation tasks consumed the most time, which errors were most common, and which features would actually change the daily experience of a working clinician.

Wiley-Licensed References: The Standard That Matters

One of Dr. Tiller's non-negotiable requirements for VetGeni was that the platform had to be powered by authoritative veterinary references. He had seen what happened when AI tools generated plausible-sounding but inaccurate medical information. In emergency medicine, where drug doses have narrow therapeutic windows and treatment timing can determine survival, accuracy is not optional.

VetGeni secured a licensing agreement with Wiley, one of the world's most respected academic publishers in veterinary medicine. The platform's knowledge base includes 739 parent drugs with over 60,000 question-and-answer vectors, all grounded in Wiley-licensed content. No other veterinary AI scribe has this.

For Dr. Tiller, this was personal. His father taught him veterinary medicine by the book, literally. The references on Dr. Robert Tiller's shelf in that Waskom clinic were the foundation of his practice. VetGeni carries that same commitment to reference quality into the AI era.

Where VetGeni Stands Today

VetGeni saves approximately 10 minutes per SOAP note and 10 minutes per discharge instruction. At $50 per month, it is the most accessible AI scribe in veterinary medicine. It is a TVMA partner. It is the only platform powered by Wiley-licensed references. And it was built by a veterinarian who lived the problem it solves.

Dr. Tiller still practices emergency medicine. He still finishes overnight shifts. And he still uses VetGeni to document his cases. The tool was built for his workflow, and it continues to evolve based on the reality of clinical practice, not the assumptions of software engineers.

To learn more about VetGeni's story and capabilities, read the Texas A&M profile of Dr. Tiller, explore the AI scribe overview, or start a 14-day free trial to experience the platform that three careers built.