A Discussion with Greg Curhan, Partner of FLG Partners

Pamela Rucker: Hi, I'm Pamela Rucker, an instructor for Harvard Professional Development. I focus on coaching executives in the areas of leadership, strategy and innovation.

Welcome to Leading With Passion, a series honoring innovative small business leaders using their unique capabilities to improve people's lives. Today, I'm joined by Greg Curhan, one of the partners at FLG, a leader in CFO solutions that delivers CEO and board advisory services across the United States. Greg's role entails serving as CFO at three different life sciences companies. Greg, welcome to the program.

Greg Curhan: Thank you.

Pamela: So, look, you work with three different organizations. Can you tell me a bit about your history and how that happened?

Greg: Sure, so I'm a partner at a consulting firm called FLG Partners. We're a group of chief financial officers. We all have 35, 40 years business experience. And so my three clients that I'm currently working for are all through my FLG engagements.

Pamela: I see, and so you said your background is in three different things. What are each of those companies and what do they do?

Greg: Yeah, so they're all life science companies. One is developing a shingles vaccine. One was working on organ injury and repair, but there's been a pivot there and I can tell you about that later. And one is working on advanced cell therapies for cancer.

Pamela: I see. Now, how is it that you came to work for FLG and these three different companies? Is this something that you always wanted to do?

Greg: No, I had no idea this is where I would end up.

Pamela: Really?

Greg: No, I had been in the investment banking world for about 35 years, mostly here in Northern California. So I'd been mostly working with information technologies and biotech and medical devices and typical Silicon Valley, you know, type businesses. Around 2012-ish, I got out of that line of work and I've been doing CFO work pretty much for the last decade on and off.

Pamela: Okay. So investment banking, that's a great career. What made you get out of that line of work?

Greg: It was exciting, it was rewarding financially, it was fun. It put me on the forefront of a lot of new businesses, but it's an extremely demanding lifestyle. It's all client service and it's very transaction oriented. You live on an airplane. And, I mean, that can be fun too, but it gets old after a while. I have three kids, my youngest is now 25. And so at a certain point, I just didn't want the lifestyle of being gone four to five days a week, three weeks plus a month. And I just wanted to be there to spend time with my kids.

Pamela: So as you're sitting back thinking about, "Okay, I have this great career, I have this great family, I have these things that I want and things that I don't want," how do you decide that this is the direction you're going to shift into? Because I think a lot of people go through that, right? That they've done something for the bulk of their life that they find out, "Maybe I'm not wanting to be that anymore."

Greg: Yeah, well, so investment banking and CFO, they're both financial-oriented, you know, jobs. And so the basic qualifications and skillsets kind of work for both of them. And my clients had always been CEOs and CFOs for, you know, all my time as an investment banker. I had done a very brief stint as a CFO at the end of the last century. I'd been a CFO for an internet company for a brief period of time and they'd brought me on to help take them public.

And I liked it, but then I went back into investment banking. I actually started my own investment bank after that. Did that for about a decade. And so, as I was deciding I'm gonna get out of being an investment banker, it was sort of a very natural transition. And one of my clients, one of my investment banking clients, called me up one day and said, "Hey, I need to hire a CFO. I just took on some venture capital investors. They're telling me I need to hire a CFO. They're suggesting people for me. I've never done this before. I'm not sure if I should trust them or they're just gonna have like a plant inside. You know, what do you think?" And it was at that moment I was sort of thinking about a career transition myself. And I said, "Well, what about me? You know, what are you looking to do?" And so it went from there.

Pamela: You did something that I hear people do often, they drove right by this important point. So you said that you were in investment banking and you started your own bank yourself?

Greg: Yes.

Pamela: What made you do that?

Greg: Well, so the companies I worked with in investment banking, the industries I worked with were very entrepreneurial. They were all, like I said, Silicon Valley based, startup companies and so forth. I had actually worked for a number of small companies that grew quickly, including one or two that I had started myself. And so I really liked the whole concept of trying to do something first and by yourself.

And, you know, the whole thing with entrepreneurs are they always have to believe that they can do something even though the rest of the world has either already tried and failed or hasn't thought about it. There's something inside of them that says, "Well, I can do it." And I did have that sort of element. And then as I was coming out of being a CFO back into investment banking, again, a circumstance came about where one of my old partners said, "Hey, I'm doing this. Do you think you'd be interested?" And immediately I was, "Yeah, I'm ready. Let's do it." And that was starting something from scratch.

Pamela: That's so interesting that you've thought about that, though, that in order to be a successful entrepreneur, you have to believe that there's something that you can do that someone else can't do, right? That is part of your value proposition, that there's something that is a need out there that I can fulfill that nobody else can do. And you recognized not only that they need money, but that you probably needed to do the same thing and started your own business.

Greg: Yeah, and I've worked once or twice for big organizations and it hasn't gone well. It just, something that's very exciting about small, fast-growing entrepreneurial companies is the pace of change and decision-making is rapid. And I find that stimulating and invigorating. And the flip side is I think one of the biggest skills to getting by in a big company is not rocking the boat and sort of being politically astute. And I'm not degrading people who have had long careers in big companies, 'cause they're good at that and other things, obviously. But I'm not good at that and I figured that out a couple times.

Pamela: Yeah, one of the biggest things people need to do is not only recognize where they want to go and what they're good at, but what they're not good at too. And it sounds like you figured that out. You talked about startups being these small, nimble, very agile organizations, but they're also pretty risky. I mean, how do you deal with that level of risk and trying to both steer them and find money for them? Is it ever something that you feel like you've done extremely well and wanted to do again? Or something that you failed at?

Greg: Yeah, well, anybody who's done startups has failed. I mean, unless you're Mark Zuckerberg, you don't hit it on your first time. One of my mentors and bosses from years past used to say, related to that, is like, "You only have to get it right the last time." And so there is this sort of inherent assumption that failure is gonna be part of the game. And most entrepreneurs I know are serial entrepreneurs, they do it over and over again. And not necessarily 'cause they have a huge success and wanna replicate it, it's 'cause they don't quite get there.

But I also like to say, like, being an entrepreneur, it's like a disease. It's like there's nothing you can do about it. You're just attracted to it. It's like you're attracted to risk, you're attracted to the fast pace of what's going on. You're attracted to this concept that you probably have a big ego and you think you can do things that other people haven't been able to do before. So I'm comfortable with risk. I'm naturally, I guess, a risk-taker when it comes to stuff like that. And at this point, 40 years into my career, I'm comfortable with it 'cause I know, when you fail, it's not the end. You can just keep going. So, you know, that's at this point.

Pamela: Say more about that, 'cause I think too many people are afraid of risk because they're afraid of the failure. But every risk has an upside and a downside to it, right? And so where have there been some places where, "Look, I put myself out there and I took a risk and I did incredibly well," and other places where you feel like, "You know what? I didn't do well," but to your point, "I've bounced back"?

Greg: Yeah, well, there's the same circumstance in both in the company that I started. So I started an investment bank in 2002 with a couple other people which ultimately bore my name. It was called Merriman Curhan Ford and it was here in San Francisco. And there had been a number of very successful investment banks in San Francisco, like Montgomery Securities and Hambrecht & Quist and Robertson Stephens and another one I worked for called Volpi. I actually worked for two of those. That all got bought around the year 2000, plus or minus. And so there was this opportunity that the Silicon Valley still needed to be serviced by an entrepreneurial investment bank because the big guys like Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, they don't really care as much about the small companies. They care about the winners.

But the ecosystem needed, you know, an investment bank. So we just stepped in and said, "Okay, we'll start it." We literally started it with three of us. We grew it to over 250 employees In offices all around the country by 2007, 2008. And I literally thought that would be the last company I ever worked for. I was having a great time, we were doing incredibly well. We were actually a public company ourselves. The stock was going up, and then the financial crisis of 2008 hit. And, I mean, it stuck around for a while, but it basically completely unraveled. It doesn't exist anymore, and by early 2009, it was clear to me anyway that the game was over.

Pamela: Tell me how you deal with that from the point of taking that incredible amount of risk to being incredibly successful to then seeing that all sort of erode away.

Greg: Well, that example was probably the most extreme of those examples. It was devastating for me. I mean, it was literally devastating. I personally lost, you know, over $10 million in that, you know, fall off in terms of stock I owned in a publicly traded company. I went from being, you know, name on the door, president, no real boss, doing whatever the heck I wanted, to, "What do I do now?" And you know, I also had three kids. College was coming for all of them. I mean, it was a traumatic experience. And I was roughly 50 years old. So it was also another one of these things.

So the way I dealt with it after spending a couple of months, I wouldn't say depressed but, you know, not knowing what was next, was I decided, okay, that's when I sort of got out of investment banking. I did one more mini-stint after that for another company and then realized, "Okay, I'm done with it." But one of the weird things I decided to do was write a book. And it had nothing to do with that experience. I needed, I've always had, you know, a creative side to me. I like music, I play music, I like to perform, I've acted, stuff like that. And I just had a need to sort of exercise a different part of my personality so that, while I was grieving and dealing on a professional level, I had something productive to do every day and so I got this idea to write a book.

And I'd never written a book before. And I researched on the internet how to write a book and I found this methodology and I just dove into it. And I got up every morning at 6:00 AM and I wrote until I couldn't write anymore. Some days a half hour, some days three hours. And I told a lot of people I was doing it because I didn't wanna be one of these people that would be like, "Oh, I tried to write a book, and five years later, I didn't write a book." I've always been motivated very much internally, but also externally where I was like, I wanted to have to say to people two to three years later, "I told you I was writing a book. Here's the book." And so that's part of the way I dealt with it.

Pamela: Yeah, and it sounds like you wanted to hold yourself accountable for that, right? That there was this thing you said you were going to do and you wanted to hold yourself accountable. I have a colleague that talks about reinvention and she said one of the biggest phases people go through is not knowing. They just don't know what's going to come next. And another colleague that I talk to in the Valley that talks about the, you know, ups and downs of having these roles in these companies, and one of the biggest things you see is people saying, "Well, who are you if you aren't that anymore?" And so having to redefine yourself can be really difficult if you don't know what you're going to do. So even though you were writing the book, at least you had something to do.

Greg: That's actually really interesting. I never thought of that, who are you if you're not doing that anymore? I never really defined myself by my job. But I think it's very apropos because, yeah, I'm not an investment banker, I'm an author. Really? You know, whatever, but I guess I'm doing something on a day-to-day basis.

Pamela: So what’s the title of the book?

Greg: It's called "Indomitable Spirit."

Pamela: Okay. And what’s it about?

Greg: It takes place primarily during the Rodney King riots and it's about a hedge fund manager, you know, a big departure from what I was doing, who he's working in Beverly Hills. The Rodney King riots happen, Los Angeles devolves into chaos within 24 hours. He's also a martial artist, again, part of my background. And his girlfriend gets kidnapped the night of the riots because she works in like a daycare center in Watts, basically. And then he has to rescue her in the middle of the chaos 'cause the police are, you know, overwhelmed.

Pamela: Wow, as you think about what you were planning when you wrote that book, I mean, what are some leadership takeaways that we might apply to what we see happening even today?

Greg: Yeah, so writing the book to me was really, I lived through those riots. I was in Los Angeles, and it just was a really, you know, very few things in my life made an impression that strongly on me. I mean, LA is sunshine and, you know, the lifestyle of Los Angeles. Everybody knows about it. And I was living in Beverly Hills. I mean, you can't get more, you know, perfect situation than that. And yet, literally within 24 hours, the police were saying, you know, "Don't sleep in your bedroom, sleep on the floor, barricade your door. You don't want stray bullets coming through your windows." And it was just like, "Wait a minute, You know, I'm in the United States in Los Angeles.

Now I feel like I'm in the Middle East in a war zone." And the the biggest thing, I think what it what made the big impression on me was like this illusion of control and stability and prosperity just evaporated. You know, within 48 hours, the National Guard was rolling down the street in tanks with machine guns over their shoulders, right? And so that is life and the world. I mean, we have an example from a couple weeks ago. You know, Silicon Valley Bank, the premier banking institution for all the startups on the West Coast in California, you know, made a mention on a Wednesday night that they were having some issues. And by Friday morning, they were gone. And no one saw that coming.

Pamela: No one saw it coming.

Greg: And so you just have to be able to somehow navigate in an environment that's gonna be forced on you from time to time where your illusion of control and everything else evaporates and there's no playbook and there's not necessarily a precedent that you can even rely on. And you've gotta just, you know, you're on the wave, you gotta stay on the board. You gotta be on the wave.

Pamela: You gotta stay there.

Greg: And that has happened in my professional life, that happened in that Rodney King, it's happened personally, it can happen with your health, it can happen with your kids, it can happen with your parents, it can happen with anything. And so, to me, that's probably the big takeaway there.

Pamela: I was wondering what, you know, with everything that you had said you had done and you were 50 years old at the time, what would make you write about that? Because you could have done something about business, you could have done something about your memoirs. But it sounded like there was a lot of chaos going on in your life at the time too and you were really able to tap into that to find some way to add value.

Greg: Yeah, it was not conscious. And it's funny because, when I decided to write that book, like, it was fully formed in my head. It goes back to like, and that was in 2009, 2010 so this was almost 20 years prior. It had made such an impression on me that it just kind of was there. It took a lot of work and organization to get it out, but it wasn't like I said, "Oh, I'm gonna sit down and write a book." It was just like, "There's a book. It's coming out, so here we go."

Pamela: You've gone through this series of events where you've been an investment banker, you started your own bank, you've lived through these riots, you've written a book about it. To your point, sometimes you don't necessarily know where you're going to land, but you have to know how you're going to add value. How has this theme of knowing how to add value helped you even as you work with the three companies that you're dealing with today?

Greg: Yeah, so for a lot of my career, I've had clients that I had to service, whatever it was in the investment banking world. And at this point, this role as a CFO, as a consulting CFO, is really interesting. Number one, I can have more than one client at a time, and number two, I mean, I'm over 60 now. And so what I've realized is that running these entrepreneurial companies, especially in the role of CEO, it's a lonely, hard job because you do have a board of directors that you report to and they're kind of your boss. And then you got everybody else in the company that ultimately reports to you. And all eyes are on you during whatever the difficult decision process is.

It's not always a crisis. Sometimes it's just, "Do I go left or do I go right? Is it time to grow or time to, you know, consolidate?" And it's hard to be in that position alone. And what I feel like now with my experience and with my position as a consultant is that I can just be very honest and open with these CEOs of, "This is what I think you should do." And I don't worry at all about whether they're gonna agree or disagree with what I have to say. And if I offend them somehow, which, you know, I try not to be abrasive in giving contrary advice or whatever, but if I offend them, fine, they'll stop being my client. I'll get another one. But what I've found in all my client relationships going back to being an investment banker but carrying all the way through to my job now being consultancy of FLG, is they all really just value that so much. They may take the advice or not, but they just value knowing that when I say what I say to them, I believe it, I have no agenda. It's just, "This is what I think you should do." And I think it's really hard for them to find those type of relationships where they can trust somebody's gonna say what they mean and it's not gonna have an agenda behind it.

Pamela: Yeah, I think it's so great that you have been able to figure out what the job is that people want you to do. So functionally, yes, they want you to help them raise capital, but this emotional side of being able to be authentic with them and talk to them, where does that come from? Does it come from the years you've worked in the industry? Does it come from something in your childhood? Where does that come from, that sense that, "I can be myself and tell you what you need to hear?"

Greg: I've always had that. It's been innate. I think I've learned to modulate my delivery over the years. I've had plenty of situations where I spoke my mind and it didn't go so well, and also, you know, different circumstances. The other thing is like, you know, you think of work and then not work, right?

Pamela: Yeah.

Greg: But work is, you spend more hours with the people you work with...

Pamela: You do.

Greg: …than the people you don't.

Pamela: You do.

Greg: And, for me, that means I have to have personal relationships with these people. I'm a gregarious person. I love getting to know people, I like talking to people. I'm at the point in my career I work out of my house. I don't necessarily need to be around them physically all the time, but I need that interaction. So for me it's kind of easy to get into that emotional connection with someone. I don't have just business relationships, I have personal relationships.

Pamela: Yeah, but it sounds like you don't just focus on the connection with the person, you try to be a catalyst too. You try to take action. I heard you say one time that no one's gonna fix it for you, right? You gotta fix it for yourself. Nobody's gonna come help you, period. Can you talk about where that comes from?

Greg: Again, that's, you know, going back to being a little kid and, you know, whatever the situation is, realizing, "Okay, I want to do this and no one's gonna do it for me." My mom was always like that. You know, she was always very, she raised my sister and I as a single mom. And, you know, she had a job and I'd have to come home from school and if I wanted to eat something, I had to open the fridge and make it myself. And if my sister was hungry and my mother wasn't there, I had to make dinner for both of us. And, you know, kind of a silly example, but it just sort of carried all the way through. And then you get in this feedback loop where you realize, "I can do what I want for myself. And if somebody's gonna tell me no, unless they're gonna do something for me instead, I'm gonna go ahead and do that." And you get sometimes good, sometimes bad, but you get that feedback that, "Okay, I gotta be self-sufficient."

Pamela: It's so interesting to me how people's path in life helps them become who they are. Because I can imagine, to your point, if your mom is working and you need to eat and you realize "I'm not going to eat unless I fix my own food," that does build into you this attitude that, "If I want to do something, if I want to achieve something, I'm going to have to do it myself. I can't wait for somebody else to come do it for me." So let me turn to the companies you're working with. How do you help these companies realize that with the missions that they have going on right now? I mean, three great missions that you've talked about, one with shingles, one with a company that wanted to go public, and then this third company that's doing advanced stem cell therapy. How do you help them figure out how they can help change the world too?

Greg: Well, yeah, so I don't advise them on the science, right? Because that's not where I come from. And what I find in these biotech life science companies is the people that run these companies generally have a really, and they're PhDs, they're maybe PhD MBAs, they've been MDs, they've been scientists. You know, they're very accomplished people, but those paths all take a lot of dedication to, you know, becoming a PhD is a 10 or 15 year journey. So how are they supposed to learn how to run a business while they're also learning, you know, how to isolate and figure out the best proteins or, you know, whatever?

And so what I try to do is say, "Okay, you've got the science part." I need to understand it because I need to be able to help them articulate it to employees, investors, board members, corporate partners, whomever. But what I really need to do is say, "Okay, let me help you with how do you establish a business? How do you incorporate? How do you raise money? How do you grow? How do you handle your HR function? How do you pick an accounting firm to be your auditors? How do you figure out what law firm to use? When you're growing, how do you budget for growing in an environment where," all of these life science companies operate at a deficit for a long time, meaning they don't generate their own cash. They're always dependent on somebody else for cash, and markets fluctuate.

So, "How do you make a plan and know that the day you put the plan in effect, it's obsolete and wrong and how do you correct course?" So those are the things that I try to bring to these companies. And it's fulfilling for me, number one, again, on the people aspect 'cause all of these companies go from zero to something. And like I said, I grew a company from zero to 250. I know the challenges that are involved there. They're all trying to make people's lives better. And again, while I don't really have a contribution to make there on the science side, it's nice to go to work with a company, for a company whose product is gonna maybe save people.

Pamela: Yeah, it's gonna change the world in some way.

Greg: Yeah, improve their quality of life, extend their life, you know, make it possible for them to have kids. Whatever it is, it's like that's very fulfilling too.

Pamela: I can imagine that the startups really value having somebody with your wealth of experience too, because it's gotta be difficult to find that deep level of expertise when you are a startup.

Greg: Yeah, it's kind of interesting, when I was, right before I joined FLG, I worked as a full-time CFO for a medical device company. Same kind of thing. They could be a client of FLG, but they weren't. And I went to work there full time, and when I left there, or I was getting ready to leave there, because the reason I went there was to help them go public and it was gonna take another three or four years, they had do more clinical studies and it was sort of like, "Okay, my fit's not perfect." As I was looking around saying, "Okay, well, I've got this great experience, I can go work for a CFO for any of these other companies," and at this point I'm in my mid-50s and I probably reached out to over 100 companies, very organized through not cold calls. You know, people on their boards, venture capitalists, whomever, got introduced to a bunch and no one wanted to hire me.

And it was never like, "I don't wanna hire you." It was just, "Yeah, you made it through the process and we're gonna go in another direction," or, you know, whatever. And I realized that there was this whole, and I started talking to some other people, that the double-edged sword in Silicon Valley is they're all entrepreneurial and they want to be entrepreneurial and they want people with experience. But in Silicon Valley, there's such a youth culture focus that they didn't want an employee CFO who was gonna be 55. But in the consulting world, they love that because they get all your experience but you're not an employee. So the risk of you not fitting in culturally, and by that it can mean, you know, you're not willing to spend, you know, 14 hours, this was all pre-pandemic, 14 hours a day in the office and, you know, go out for pizza and beer every night and this, that and the other thing. As a consultant, you're sort of safe.

Now, what's funny about it is, after the fact, both 'cause of the pandemic and everybody works remote now or some element of it, and once they get to know you, these CEOs, they often realize that whatever they thought they wanted really wasn't exactly what they wanted in terms of, you know, hiring somebody younger and, you know, whatever and because you don't get the flip side. You know, it's hard to throw something at me I haven't done before. And not only in the execution phase of, "Okay, you need to set up a subsidiary in Australia. I know how to do that. You know, you need to raise money in this fashion. I know how to do that. You need to bring in a PEO to help you scale your business. I know how to do that." But really, on the other side of it that we were talking about, which is, you know, they've hired a VP of clinical operations and after two months, they're going, "Oh, my God, I don't think this is gonna work out." And where my response is, "The minute you know that, it isn't, so do not spend the next 11 months trying to convince yourself that what your gut is saying is that it's not working." Because 11 months from now, it's only gonna be that much harder. The person's gonna be that much ingrained in the organization. They may have infected, you know, other things by being there or whatever. And someone who's 35, 40 years old, can't give you that advice.

Pamela: Wouldn’t be able to do that.

Greg: They haven’t seen it enought.

Pamela: Such an excellent point that the very thing that might work against you in one scenario will work for you in another one. And it looks like the people that you have worked with have started to discover that, But what about you personally? Do you have traits that might have worked really well for you before that you feel like also maybe work against you a little bit?

Greg: Oh, sure. I mean, we all do. I mean, what we've been talking about is this entrepreneurial, dynamic, exciting, fast-paced environment, which I love, something that, and again, we talked in the beginning about saying, "Okay, well, if you work for a big company," what I don't have an abundance is patience.

Pamela: Really?

Greg: Yeah, no. I'm not a patient person. So if you're impatient, that's fine. Because if you're in an entrepreneurial environment that's moving at at lightning speed, you know, you've gotta, it's all about this. But not having patience has definitely hurt me over time and it leads to, you know, decisions that, in hindsight, I'm like, "Okay, if you'd just taken literally a week longer to make this decision and you talked to two other people, you might have made a very different decision. And in hindsight, you might be in a very different position today as a result of that." All right, well, you know, you can't go backwards. You can only go forward, so you gotta deal with it. But that's what I would say to that.

Pamela: How do you take that idea of patience and knowing how to, at the right moment, do the right thing and apply to the companies you're working with? Because if I look at the three companies, you've got one that's doing the shingles vaccine, a clear-cut customer value proposition, right? You got a second one that you said wanted to go public, but you said there's a story about that one.

Greg: They did go public.

Pamela: They did.

Greg: But what they were going to do once they were public, they were doing a bunch of clinical trials for organ repair. biotech solutions to repair, like, if you had a kidney injury, actually giving you drugs that help your body repair the organ, liver, lung, different things like that. The clinical trials didn't show enough evidence of efficacy to continue with those clinical trials, or continue with those drug programs, especially in light of the fact that the money was, you know, they'd gone public in a bull market and now it wasn't a bull market anymore. So there was a pivot to, "Okay, we're a public company, we've got a bunch of cash," 'cause we didn't spend nearly all the cash that we had from going public, but it would be better used to support some other, you know, biotech endeavor.

And so there was that whole process, which actually, you know, I say, like, my job in these companies is kind of being an in-house investment banker because the CFO for a startup life science company, number one job is to make sure you don't run out of cash. Whereas if you work for a bigger company, you might be focused on improving your gross margin, or, you know, compensation across your organization, or you know, whatever it is. That doesn't really exist at these companies. But it's not just, it's also operational, right? It's also some of the things we talked about. But in this case, in this pivot, now we were gonna go out and look for companies that were private that wanted to merge with us so that they could become public. That is investment banking. Like, I've done that literally hundreds of times, never from inside a company in the position of CFO, but that was just kind of, it was really cool because it was like, "Oh, all right, now I really am an investment banker even though I'm still a CFO inside this company."

Pamela: And you've helped them pivot from one thing to another. Because, in the first case, a clear cut value proposition, right? The second one, they're trying to figure it out a little bit, right?

Greg: Yeah, and at this point, it's all public, there are public filings. They have figured it out. They've entered into a definitive merger agreement with a private company that's also trying to solve cancer. But, you know, we looked at literally hundreds of private companies and almost acted as a venture capitalist. They pitched us what their idea was and we had to figure out, you know, given the amount of capital we had and given their science, which, again, that wasn't my job, there were other people evaluating the science, did it make sense for the companies to come together?

Pamela: And then the third one, advanced stem cell therapy, pretty complicated. How do you help find value? What do you see as the common theme across all three of those?

Greg: Yeah, well, and it is by far the most complicated science that I've been involved with. And, you know, it's hard to keep up with. You're on a call with seven PhDs and they're just, you know, whipping around terminology that's just, you know. Actually, being remote is nice. I have two computers, I'm on Google on the other one and I'm like, "What is this they're even talking about?"

But yeah, I mean, again, it's all about the same thing. It's translating the value of the science to a story that can be told complete with a budget that says, "This how much money we're gonna need to get to these various milestones. And these are what the milestones are gonna mean. 'Cause once we get to those milestones, we're gonna need more money to get to the next milestones," and figuring out a way to package it so that when we take it to the investors who I've been dealing with for 40 years now and understand investor-speak, that they can make the case and be successful and get the money to go forward.

Pamela: I love the way that you phrased that, right? So it's translating that value into a story that can be told that will fit a budget, right? So if I just take the life sciences part out, there's an incredible value proposition for you in doing that for the organizations, right? Because that's what every startup is going to need, someone that can tell their story.

Greg: Yeah, that I've been doing consistently for 40 years, that has never changed. That's probably the one constant through the whole thing.

Pamela: Yeah, so given all that you've learned and all that you've seen, what do you wish you knew then that you know now?

Greg: Yeah, I guess it kind of comes back to this patience theme, but somebody said to me not too long ago 'cause we were talking about, you know, they'd actually been pretty successful and I was joking and I was like, "Yeah, you're, you're an overnight success." And they said, "Yeah, I'm an overnight success after 7 1/2 years of, you know, trying to get this company off the ground." And, you know, it really does come down to that. It's the number one, in my perspective, the number one successful trait in any entrepreneur is perseverance.

It just, you are gonna have doors slammed in your face. You are gonna think you've succeeded. You raised your first set around, you know, you raised $50 million, you did what you said you were gonna do and it's time to raise your next $50 million. And it doesn't matter 'cause the stock market's in crisis and nobody's getting funding. You just have to find a way to persevere. And again, back to this nobody's gonna do it for you, even your board members and investors will be like, "Yeah, we got your back. Our checkbooks closed, but we got your back. And it's sort of like, "Well, what does that mean?" It means you better figure out how to get, you know, from here or there. And that's that whole just you gotta do it for yourself, you gotta persevere. You have to lift up a whole organization who's staring at you saying, "What do we do now?" You know? So, yeah.

Pamela: You said earlier, I think, something to the effect of the only job you have to be successful at is the last one?

Greg: Yeah, the only time you gotta get it right is the last time.

Pamela: The last time. Is that what drives you every day? I mean, as you get up and work with these organizations every day, does that help you take more risk or help you not be afraid of failure as you're working with them?

Greg: Yeah, I mean, I don't know if that exact statement does, but it's just sort of like, you know, this too shall pass and times will get great. And when times are great, know in the back of your head this too is gonna turn as well. But yeah, no, it's like that's just sort of who I am. I'm an optimist by nature. I've had to learn to only look forward because I've had failures. It's very easy to get caught in a cycle where you're just sort of like, "Oh, my God, how did I not see this? Why did I make this mistake two years ago and then 10 years ago and 20 years ago?" It's like, okay, you know you're gonna do that. It's natural, but it doesn't get you anywhere.

Pamela: It doesn’t get you anywhere.

Greg: So you just gotta push forward.

Pamela: And it seems like the things that you have learned from your ability to bounce back are what you're able to use now in your arsenal will help other companies move forward, right? Everything that you have gone through was what you used to help other people today.

Greg: Yeah, we're all just the sum of all our past experiences.

Pamela: Yeah, yeah, and the ability to reinvent yourself is core to that. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Greg: Yeah, I had fun. Enjoyed it.