Question:

I’m CBO of a start-up & my company is being acquired. What should I do next?

Transcript:

Hi sweetheart. So, oh, sorry. I'm just gonna adjust myself because, um, I'm trying to sit in the sun, so this is not Goa, that's where I want it to be. I guess though, in a couple of weeks I will be in India, so it's gonna make, it's gonna be easier. So, um, I wanted to briefly discuss this before our coaching session tomorrow.

Discuss this. I'm talking, you're listening. It's a video. Um, but anyway, I wanted to show you this slide because I think it is really important, um, to answer the question that we were talking about, which is what's Plan A, plan B, plan C. Okay. So right now you are sort of in this, let's see if I can go full screen and still record it.

Yeah, I can. Okay. So you are here. Well, you're not anymore. You ha you used to be a professor, um, in academia and you're not anymore. So what you have done is that you've hopped over one towards, um, the startup, what I call thes on the scientific sector scale. So here's a, oh, I have to move my little. Um, face over here.

Okay. So here on this side is just like, how do you make money? This is like, you have a job in order to make money, right? Mm-hmm. Um, unless you're me, in which case, you know, it's a separate situation where you don't need money, but you do. You have a child, um, you have a family to raise. So I think it's really important to recognize how every sector makes money.

You already know that in order to make money as a professor, right? Like what did you do? You got a starting grant, and then you went out and you said, look, if you give me this money, these millions, I'm gonna return to you something about knowledge. So I'm gonna create some new knowledge that we didn't have before.

And in academia, I kind of. Describe that as money and time are about the, about the same on my e equals MT squared. Right. Time and money are like, you have about the same amount of time as you have about money. Okay. And that's kind of in the middle, like the, it's somewhere between serving the self. And serving society and you know, I'm American and Indian.

So we've talked about that before, that the self is a very much like an American way to think about things. Like I care about myself and then maybe I'll like donate money to charity in order to benefit society later. But like my way that I like make money is sort of centered around the self. That's what I value.

Versus over here where it's just like, okay, I value society so much that I'm like willing to. Dedicate my whole life to the service of society, right? So that is like my sister, she runs an NGO, right? Um, and she is always talking about, um, I. She's the only person who has no time and money. Like time and money are rapidly approaching zero, right?

And here in finance, arbitrage, vc, that kind of stuff, your time and money can approach, approach infinity. Okay? So for me it was not literally infinity, but like, you know, millions, right? Multimillions and that like there's no way that you could ever approach. Like that amount of salary in the middle here in academia.

But as you go towards the self, and there's no moral judgment about this, right? I'm not telling you it is like this is better or that's, um, worse, right? Nothing about that. I am here and my sister is here, and we're both very happy. We are both in our dream jobs, living our dream lives, and nobody is better than anybody else.

It's my job to get you whatever it is that you want. Right. That's like, I love you and you're my one-on-one client, and that's my job. So I just wanna identify like what it is that you want, and that is what this is about. And so. Just quickly brief overview of the sectors in between academia and like, um, self.

Okay. Self, I call it finance arbitrage. You know, that's how you make money. Buy low, sell high, right? You're like running these algorithms and programming, um, ways to, I don't know, crypto exchanges and stuff like that. Like ways in the, in the high frequency trading in the stock market. A lot of physics. Um, PhD students go off to do this, right?

Not necessarily physics professors, but um, they, they go off to do this and that's fine. Like that's a function by which you make money and that's how time and money can approach infinity. You can like have a bunch of money and you can have a bunch of time as well. If you do this in between these two sectors is where you are right now, right?

Well, where you will transition to, let's say, because this company is being bought by Mark, right? So this like. Way that you make money is you sell a product, right? We talked about this in our last coaching session, right? Pharma sells medicine. That is what Merck does. They sell a product and people pay for that product or people, or governments or institutions, whatever somebody pays for that product.

And then they use that money to pay everybody else and return profits to their shareholders. That's how it works. So you are creating a product here. You have more money than you have time. Right. Um, and we're kind of on this side of scale, so we're not gonna like go too much towards this because I like know that we're sort of in between these two like sectors.

Right? Planning, plum B and Plan C will fit in between these two sectors. Okay. So, but just as a brief overview, in between industry and finance, you have the whole like sector, economic sector of consulting, right? Where they take the tools of finance. And they bring MBAs, you know, masters in PowerPoint, I call it.

Um, uh, and they bring or venture capitalists, right? A bunch of my clients are venture capitalists. They take the tools of like, we can limited partners, we can raise money from our li from our LPs, and we're gonna, you know, fund, we are gonna make your product better, right? So, consulting, McKinsey, the kind of traditional way that you think about consultants, they're just making this product better using the tools of finance.

And in between industry and academia is the startup. That is where you are right now because you take the knowledge of academia and you make it into a product, but you may not have the money to do that. Right. This is exactly what we were talking about. Uh, it starts out as a lab. It starts out as an organization.

Then you get funding, and then you create a product that actually sells. Like literally, this is your job. This is the job of CBO, chief Business Officer. This is the job. Okay? So you take this knowledge and you make it into a product. You are like instrumental, essential in that process. And VC is kind of like a way, it's kind of between finance and consulting, honestly.

And that's where you get your funding. Does that make sense? Um, and if it doesn't make sense, obviously you cannot talk back to the video. So tell me tomorrow if it doesn't make sense. Okay. So that is where we are here, and I want to be like crystal clear about where those plans are right for us. So that your ladder, your corporate ladder, is leading against the right wall because it is quite difficult, as we've already established.

It is quite difficult to switch from sector to sector. Okay? Within industry, it's easier to switch, and within startups it's easier to switch and it's easier to go from startup to industry. Right. So I wanna be like sure that our plan A, b, c, that we have nailed for you are lying within this phase, if that is right.

I'm just gonna double check. That's right. By describing the right side of the sector scale. Um, and NGO you take, um, you can think about legacy. That's how you make money. My, my sister goes to Goldman Sachs and is just like, you should fund my NGO. She's just like, don't you care about the future of the children?

Right about the future of society as a whole. Do you want children to have every single rights the same? Right? Do you want my children to have the same rights my children raised on the streets of India to have the same rights as your children? Okay, that's, then you give me money, right? That's what that is.

That's how you make money or fundraise, fundraising, we call it. We don't call it making money, of course, and in between, um, that when you're thinking about legacy, that's what you're quote unquote selling. In between that and knowledge academia, which is what you're quote unquote selling. There's government.

Right. These are jobs like ano where does, like, that's not even on the radar for you. Um, but there you take the knowledge of academia and you use it to benefit the community as a whole. Okay. Government research jobs are kind of like this. The Dutch government's like, we care about X, Y, Z things and then.

You know that we're gonna fund that and then institutes get together, like research institutes get together and partner with companies over here to make those things happen. That's that kind of job. Um, there you have a little bit more time than money because there's like work-life balance and there's all those things that we talked about, um, or matter at this phase in your career.

So it's like. Like knowing you, I don't think that this is an option, but I just wanna like, explain and put it out there that we can go in that direction. If once you listen to this video, you think like, oh Kathy, I really, really wanna do that. So let's talk about that, if that comes up for you. Okay. And in between government and academia, there is, um, medicine, you know, all of our colleagues that are MD-PhDs and like run labs at, you know, whatever Erasmus Medical Center, um, those people.

Are taking the knowledge of academia and they are using it to serve the community, right? That's their function and. In between government and NGO is school. So you take the, the knowledge and the community benefits that the government provides and you use it to serve the legacy, the future generations.

So I definitely do not think you're gonna become a high school teacher, but, um, people do that. PhD students sometimes go off and they leave and they do that because they really, like, that's where their heart lies and they care about the next generation, and they wanna educate the gen next generation in like a deeply profound way.

And being a professor is one way to do that, being a research professor, which you were until recently, but this is another way to do that. And I just, I, I don't think that, that those are the directions in which we're going. But just so you know, here's the whole framework and think about it and let's discuss it when I see you tomorrow.

Cannot wait. Love you, love you, love you. Bye.