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Ep 56: Poker helped me negotiate contracts, says Andrew Woods, GC @PubMatic
92 Plays3 months ago
Can playing cards teach you to be a better lawyer? How do you make it in Silicon Valley without the traditional big law firm experience? And how do you make the jump to public company general counsel?
Join Andrew Woods, General Counsel at PubMatic, as he discusses the unique path he forged from professional poker player to legal star. From founding a think tank at Harvard focused on poker and law to breaking into tech and privacy as Director of Legal and Associate Counsel at Twitter, Andrew relies on his belief in the value of autonomy, mastery, and significance to guide him towards work that makes him happiest.
Listen as Andrew discusses his love for game theory, landing a fulfilling job leading legal at a tech company, hiring lawyers based on their ambitions instead of their experience, and more.
Read detailed summary: https://www.spotdraft.com/podcast/episode-56
Topics:
Introduction: 0:00
Starting your career as a professional poker player: 1:33
Comparing poker skills with skills required to succeed as general counsel: 6:10
Taking an unorthodox path after law school: 13:02
Transitioning to in-house roles in tech: 17:12
Moving away from skill questions in the hiring process: 22:52
Developing mastery over fields like privacy and ad tech: 29:05
Breaking into privacy: 33:18
Considering the future of AI governance from a privacy perspective: 36:37
Making the jump to Twitter and PubMatic: 39:21
Book recommendations: 54:23
What you wish you’d known as a young lawyer: 57:23
Connect with us:
Andrew Woods - https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewmichaelwoods/
Tyler Finn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/tylerhfinn
SpotDraft - https://www.linkedin.com/company/spotdraft
SpotDraft is a leading contract lifecycle management platform that solves your end-to-end contract management issues.
Visit https://www.spotdraft.com to learn more.
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Transcript
Hiring Values: Goals Over Experience
00:00:00
Speaker
If you come interview for a job with me, I will not ask you a single question about what your experience is. You could come to me with 30 years of experience in my sector or not a single second of experience. I'm going to ask you the same questions because the answer is that my own experience has told me that it just isn't that relevant. I don't care what you've done.
00:00:21
Speaker
I don't care what school you've gone to. I don't care like where you've worked. What I care about is like does the job I have or the opportunity I have, does it vibe with what you're looking for? Does it fit into where your next step is? Because
Introduction to Andrew Woods
00:00:35
Speaker
ultimately the thing I care about the most
00:00:44
Speaker
Can playing poker teach you to be a better lawyer? How do you make it in Silicon Valley without the traditional big law firm experience? And how do you make the jump to public company General Counsel? Today, I am joined on the abstract by Andrew Woods, General Counsel of Pubmatic, the publicly traded ad tech platform.
00:01:03
Speaker
For those who are in the know, in the ad tech industry, Pomatic is an SSP, a supply side platform. Andrew has global legal experience, including previously spending about eight years at Twitter, leading their revenue partnerships legal team where he got a deep education in privacy law. And before that, he spent some time at another ad tech company called Turn. Andrew, welcome to this episode of The Abstract. Thank you, Tyler. I'm very glad to be here. We've got a couple of different themes that we want to cover off on today, including building an expertise around ad tech and privacy. That's a subject close to my heart as well. I had a little bit of experience there too, as well as growing into a GC role. Before
Poker's Influence on Legal Career
00:01:50
Speaker
we start though, you've got a pretty fantastic story about how you got your law degree. It's sort of like that movie twenty one If folks remember it, about the MIT kids who go and gamble on the weekends and help pay for MIT, how did poker help you at least pay your way through law school? Yeah, you know, yeah and again, thank you for having me today. Poker was something I sort of found my way to, starting in my late teens.
00:02:18
Speaker
So when I was 15, 16, 17, I discovered the game of Texas Hold'em and sort of this poker right before kind of this poker craze hit America and sort of the early aughts. And I was early to the scene and I had discovered a book called Super System, which is now quite well known, but at the time was a very sort of rare legacy of 80s poker theory and a bunch of silliness. I got super interested into the game behind the game.
00:02:47
Speaker
I've always been somebody who was really into puzzles, really into games. I grew up playing strategy games, board games, computer games, the whole sort of thing. And I've always been really interested in the game theory and the mechanics behind sort of how different systems operate and how you can play these games and how you can generally tell a story in a way that helps to move things one way or the other. And to me, ultimately, that's what poker is. It's about you're telling a story with your actions and you're trying to induce somebody to do something, whether that is you want them to but fold, you want them to bet, whatever the case may be.
00:03:27
Speaker
and I started playing poker. I started playing cards in my teens. Then when I got to college at UCLA, I got really into it. and It was a vehicle to meet people and then eventually became a pretty large part of sort of my life and a source of revenue and sort of all these things. and It became a framework through which I started really studying the game starting to learn the game theory underneath it starting to learn some of the math starting to learn some of the soft skills that became sort of a cornerstone of poker and then ultimately i started playing poker like a lot and doing this as a primary source of revenue
00:04:04
Speaker
in conjunction with sort of like, you know, the school thing. and And going to the undergrad took a year off after I finished college, took my cards and to sort of explore that space. And ultimately, what happened was in 2004, there was an explosion of poker play in the world. Online poker rooms became a big thing, which created a lot of liquidity opportunities, but also brought a lot of really good players on.
00:04:30
Speaker
And you started having a wave of hyper-competitive poker players joining. And at the time, I was very closely tracking sort of my winnings andhaine and I was seeing my expected value drop. So I decided
Transition from Poker to Law
00:04:44
Speaker
I need to go for a little easier. And ah so I went to law school. And you know, I started looking at this idea of what did I want to do with my It really came down to I really enjoyed playing cards, not because of the actual playing itself. That was fun. But at the time I was playing like a lot and it becomes a grind, right? You're trying to make a profitable existence. And what I started thinking about was two things. One, if you're trying to play cards for your money, the dental plan sucks.
00:05:13
Speaker
know There's no 401k, no dental, there's no health insurance. And I frankly wasn't good enough to think like, oh my God, am I going to get twice as good, three times as good, four times as good? Am I going to be doing this when I'm 60, when I'm 70? And I started thinking about building a sustainable career. And then that that brought me back to becoming a lawyer, which is always somebody I had thought about, something that I had considered, but really a profession where I saw a lot of parallels between the things that really jazzed me about playing cards and the things I would go out and do. And so I went to law school and then I had the ability to kind of take those focus skills and help me both in law school. It ended up animating a lot of my educational career and it also provided a way to help offset some of the costs of law school, which was nice.
00:06:03
Speaker
It's super cool. Not a story that we've ever had before on this podcast. um that's i Just to put like a fine point on it, I am curious. do Do you use those same skills that you learned in poker around telling a story or trying to understand what someone else is doing today? i mean is Is that negotiation skills, basically, or is it something slightly different? How how do you how do you think of Being good at poker is aligning with being a good lawyer, let's say, not even specifically a general counsel. I can't overemphasize how much I pull from sort of my background playing poker and the everyday elements of every aspect of my job.
00:06:47
Speaker
If you think about what poker is, it's a game of incomplete information. So to contrast it with chess, for instance. You see a lot of parents, I do it with my own kids, where there's chess clubs at school. They're like, hey, we want you to play chess. Chess really helps your mind develop, et cetera, et cetera. But when you're playing chess, it's a game of complete information. You can look at the chess board and see every possible outcome, right? It's just a question of whether you can process it or not. That's why supercomputers can beat humans because they can just process more steps down the line. That's not life.
00:07:17
Speaker
right That's not a deal when you're trying to negotiate a deal when you're facing a litigation. You never have complete information. You never know what another person is doing. Poker, in contrast, is a game of incomplete information. There's an information asymmetry between you and the other person engaged in what is essentially a negotiation around a table. There's an element of chance driven by the cards that are going to come. and When you look at sort of the variance introduced by the cards and the game of incomplete information,
00:07:46
Speaker
You start to have something that, you know in a game format, really starts to approximate the types of rules we're trying to solve. Let's align it to like sort of a contract negotiation.
00:07:57
Speaker
or when you get into a contract negotiation, you're looking at an information asymmetry. I know what we're going to do. I know what we could do. The other side of a contract negotiation doesn't. I don't know what they're going to do. I don't know what they want. right so We're engaged in a series of signaling exercises, which in the poker world is bets and checks and your table image and a bunch of the things you do as you're starting to demonstrate kind of what your hand is.
00:08:25
Speaker
and you see the same thing in a contract negotiation. We're trying to signal like strength or weakness or we're trying to signal you know you can trust us and like here's what we're doing and there's a whole bunch of different levers you can pull to get there. But the core problem you're trying to solve is information asymmetry because my general belief in deals is that people have an enormous capacity to accept bad news, to take a deal that may not be perfect as long as they're they're being tricked. so like When I'm in a contract negotiation, my main goal is to try and reach a level of trust with the lawyer who's my counterpart on the other side, who I'm partnering with to be like, hey, man, I'm trying to put it all out here on the table so you understand exactly what's going on. Because if I can take the risk that you're facing and put a box around it, then you can wrap your head around it and figure out is this a deal you want or that you don't want.
00:09:17
Speaker
And similarly, convince their business people like, I'm a reasonable person. We're doing reasonable things here. Like here's how this system works. All this stuff kind of lines up A plus B plus C in order to equal out to something we want to do together. And that's what you're doing in poker, right? I'm trying to tell you a story.
Poker Strategies in Legal Negotiations
00:09:34
Speaker
and I'm trying to make my actions line up to make that story make sense to you. And if you trust me at a poker table, and I know this sounds weird because you're talking about poker trust, but if you trust me, whether you trust me to tell you the truth or you trust the story I'm telling you, you will get to a place where you almost certainly will do the thing I expect you to do. And that's generally my benefit.
00:09:55
Speaker
And the only difference there in the contract negotiation and poker is in poker, well, I suppose i suppose you could take the house's money. So not everybody loses. Well, generally a zero sum game, right? but like Or a slight negative sum game if you're talking about yeah the house's take rate and things like that and sort of the rake. But when you're thinking about a contract negotiation, you're right. It's not. It should be. at your party yeah but Oftentimes, the sort of sheer mechanics of it are still the same. I'm telling you a story. right You're either buying it or you're not. and If i' my story seems inconsistent to you, you're going to get suspicious. You're going to start thinking about like, wait, what's wrong here? and I'm doing the same thing when you're saying, your so you know your contract says one thing, your words say another. This is inconsistent. Like, okay, wait, you said you're going to do something, but then I'm looking at like,
00:10:47
Speaker
a loophole in your limitation, a liability that seems to exempt you from this. and like Suddenly, I'm like, wait, what's going on here, guys? You're telling me I don't have to worry about this, but your paper's telling me I got to worry about this. These are the sorts of things that slow down deals. and so sort of My experience playing poker has weighed heavily into that.
00:11:06
Speaker
Did you know anybody else? like Did you go and play with other students? Did you know anybody else who had a similar sort of trajectory? Or was this was this something that you were doing on your own? another Was it actually like 21, the movie? for So two different things there. One is I stopped playing. It was hard for me to play like higher stakes, big money poker, and go to law school at the same time. Understandable. The amount of money I was paying for drops somewhat dramatically. We did play a lot of poker in school. And ah while I was in school, I actually met a professor who became maybe my closest mentor there over a poker table.
00:11:44
Speaker
at the school. Charlie Nessen, who is and was a professor at Harvard for many years, ah was somebody I met at a poker tournament, playing poker with him. And then ultimately, we were both really interested in sort of the mechanics and legality of poker. And that led to us building and co-founding a think tank.
00:12:03
Speaker
that we ran out of Harvard for a couple of years called the Global Poker Strategic Thinking Society, which is the GPSTS, an acronym and a name I didn't come up with, so I won't take that apart, but it rolls off the tongue. But something that we were able to launch and start looking at both the legal academic elements of poker, but also trying to organize and encourage like thinking about playing poker as a mechanism for developing some of the skills that are really useful in lawyers and really in everyone.
00:12:31
Speaker
In another life, you probably could have been like a law and economics guy or something. I've always been interested in it. but yeah so um There were lots of poker players around Harvard. There were some very successful ones. When I was at Harvard in the Harvard College of Economics, Brandon Adams was a PhD student. He is a as a noted professional poker player.
00:12:53
Speaker
Huh, significantly better than I was, far more successful. But ah there was a community of folks around who were all very successful and very effective. So after you graduated from law school, and this with most people is sort of the part of their career that we don't talk that much about because they go to a big firm and they end up spending three years there, four years there, seven years there. Maybe they make partner.
00:13:15
Speaker
um You did not do that. You decided to go and and do something different. Tell us, you know, what you did between the time of graduating law school and then ultimately where we'll get to, which is like, you know, making it in Silicon Valley and and sort of finding a career in in the Bay Area. Yeah. I mean, as you might be picking up, like I've never been the most orthodox of of guys in my approach. But one of the things that when I was in law school, I was on the path towards doing exactly that. I had done my summers at big firms. I had a job sort of as I was approaching the end of my year to go be ah a ah first year associate at a large T20 law firm as doing employment litigation was lined up and then sort of two things were happening in parallel. One was I couldn't shake the feeling that I wasn't really sure this is what I wanted to do
00:14:08
Speaker
it kind of felt like this is just kind of what you do next. And I was like, ah, whatever. It's like, you get paid a bunch of money, you get to go be, you know, it's a good solid career, all that sort of stuff. And the other one is I met a girl. And so I started dating this woman pretty seriously in kind of the mid point of our 2L year and our 3L year, it was like really serious. And I thought it was gonna be something. So I went to her and I said, hey, I want you to move to l LA with me while I go be this associate. And she was in law school with me and she said,
00:14:38
Speaker
I'm going to go be an associate in New York. I think you should go to LA and we'll talk." And I said, well, I like New York. And so I decided to move to New York. We got married, so it worked out for us. But as I sort of worked through that process, the firm said, okay, they would agree to move me to the New York office. But I was moving to that firm to work for a partner in a practice group, and I really wasn't jazzed by this idea. And it really put me in a position
Unconventional Legal Career Path
00:15:04
Speaker
where I started thinking about like, what is energizing to me? What are the things that I want to do? and In that world, I think maybe law and medicine are parallel in this way, but like you're sort of programmed. like You go to the best college you can get into. You go to the best of law school you can go to. You go to the best firm you can go to. and like Who cares about like what the firms are? It's all pretty fungible. Just like you know pull out your US News and World Report and your annual ranking and just get to the highest the highest ranking thing you can do and just do that thing. It's signaling.
00:15:36
Speaker
And like, you know, like, whether that makes you happy or not, like has never related to the equation and the way to measure that. And so like, how will other people be impressed when you come in the room? If you're just like, this isn't a thing you wanted to do. And when I was making that decision, I had an offer from a guy, uh, who we hadn't met through this poker think tank that I had built with professor Nessa to come work with him. And it was a very different thing. He was one guy working out of his kitchen in his apartment. He's like, come here, work with me on poker-related stuff, and I looked at this big, firm opportunity, and I looked at working at this guy's kitchen, and I couldn't shake the feeling that I feel like this is going to be more fun to go do kitchen things. So I spent the first three years or so of my career sitting around this dude's kitchen table,
00:16:26
Speaker
working first on poker stuff and then on a series of very unorthodox issues, most prominently a big lawsuit down in Ecuador against an oil company where we were trying to bring a lawsuit, ah trying to continue a lawsuit. The lawsuit had been in progress for a number of years by the time I got there to try and hold this oil company responsible for what we saw as their responsibility for polluting the Amazon rainforest.
00:16:52
Speaker
And so a hard left turn in my career, not something I'd planned, led to a pretty unbelievable series of experiences. I got to visit Ecuador a number of times. I've, you know, I met numerous people, media things, lots of stuff, lots of really interesting stuff, but a very, very unorthodox sort of beginning to my career.
00:17:12
Speaker
As you would maybe put it, or you know you said to me, one point that gives you a lot of great cocktail stories, but in terms of transitioning to moving and working in tech in the Bay Area where didn't have necessarily a huge network, even if you do have a degree from a grade law school, it didn't like immediately click.
00:17:31
Speaker
Talk to us about how you found your footing there and and ultimately were able to make the jump to your first in-house role, which was a turn in the tech industry. Yeah, you know, you're exactly right. And and I have said that, but I came out of this process.
00:17:48
Speaker
having had some really cool experiences. I had yeah into, you know, premieres of a documentary made about our case. I had negative experiences of being the target of like discovery actions from a very large international oil company who's sick to a lot of lawyers on us. I had like the experience of meeting and working with members of Congress and, you know, going through the process of interacting with the media. I had done lots of really cool things.
00:18:17
Speaker
What I hadn't done was develop any sort of transferable skills that were immediately useful. It was great training for thinking about issues and advocacy in sort of a macro way. I had never done any discovery to speak of. I had never proofread a ah pleading.
00:18:33
Speaker
I had never drafted a, I don't know, a motion to dismiss. I had never done due diligence on the deal. Whatever the things that are that you might work on or engage in in the first three or four years of your career, as you're really learning the practical skills of lawyering, I hadn't done. So when it came time for me to move on and my wife and I moved out here to California and we started building our career, I was kind of in a very weird space.
00:18:59
Speaker
And I had the benefits and the luxury of having gone to a good law school. I had the benefits and the luxury of having a safety net, of having sort of my family's support behind me if I needed it, and having a wife who was also a lawyer. So like tons of advantages. So this isn't always a good story. But it let put me in a position where kind of every place I tried to talk to as I thought about building a career were kind of like, you're on a useless third year, dude. high to go to dinner with, but like I ain't hiring you. and That led me to really think about what I wanted to do, what were the skill sets and the things I had in front of me, and ultimately led me to join two other guys at an early stage at a startup, helped to build a startup pretty unsuccessfully in terms of my own contributions, and then ultimately led me to a place where I really had to make a hard assessment of kind of where I was and how I was going to sort of grow up my career and get to a place where I really understood the hustle that it would take in order to build a successful legal career. So for me, that meant trying to find a spot where I could get in
Self-Taught Legal Skills
00:20:10
Speaker
and start to learn and really a humbling process of me thinking that I was pretty amazing and finding out that not only was I like not as impressive as maybe I thought I was,
00:20:23
Speaker
but also like not as effective as I'd hoped to be. And I really need to spend a bunch of time figuring out how to like refine my like hone my craft and how to be like a really like good lawyer and a good contracts lawyer. That's a journey that's still continuing for me. I'm not suggesting that like I've done it, but I literally had to like go through like I was back going through a like a secondi placement firm talking to I went through Fenwick's flex by Fenwick program. sure Get a spot in and I remember at one point I was trying to get hired into one of these spots and turns GC max Ochoa who's still a friend of mine was going camping and he had a lawyer who was there and he's like
00:21:09
Speaker
I'm going to be out of cell phones service for like a week. I need like somebody who has a pulse and hard mittens to like sit here for a week. And I legitimately bought a book called, I think it's called the Tech Lawyer's Handbook. And it was a book on like how to negotiate contracts for tech lawyers. And I took it with me to work and I was like, all right, here we go. Let's do it. And I had to like through hook and crook figure out how to be a lawyer, how to be a commercial lawyer in-house, how to be able to like think through these things. And that's where I really started pulling on maybe not the hard, firm experience that I never had, but the concepts that I had learned around a poker table, the concepts that I had learned in school a bit, but really trying to draw on sort of that storytelling and understanding the stories that other people are telling you and figuring out like, what is the game going on when you're negotiating a contract? When you're dealing with an internal client, what are they telling you?
00:22:08
Speaker
What is the information that doesn't matter? What does? Like starting to pull that out. And when Max got back after his week, he said, oh, well, you did like a pretty good job. Do you want to do another week? And that launched a ah ah princess bride like story of like the dreadlocks where for three months it was like every week it was like, good evening, Wesley. I'll probably kill you in the morning.
00:22:31
Speaker
It was great. and Max was incredibly generous with his time and trained me in a way that I had never been trained before. And I had the benefit of other great mentors there like Jason Marko and some of these other lawyers who were on that team or around that team that I was able to learn from and build built sort of a core skill set. And that was just like a hustle game.
00:22:52
Speaker
I suppose this is skipping ahead a little bit and what we'll come back to sort of like building skills around ad tech and privacy and and such, but having had that experience and knowing sort of what
Passion Over Experience: Hiring Insights
00:23:03
Speaker
you walked into that job, possessing the ability to sit next to a congressperson or go toe to toe with the large international corporation, even if you weren't as well resourced or, but also maybe what you lacked.
00:23:18
Speaker
do Do you hire differently because of that experience, you think, from some of your peers? Or how do you how do you look for some of those raw skills while recognizing that maybe junior people who you hire also have slightly inflated ego sometimes or lack certain hard skill sets that they're going to need to learn? Talk to me a little bit about that. Yeah. And the answer to that is yes, conclusively I do. If you come interview for a job with me, I will not ask you a single question about what your experience is.
00:23:47
Speaker
You can come to me with 30 years of experience in my sector or not a single second of experience. I'm going to ask you the same questions because the answer is that my own experience has told me that it just isn't that relevant. I don't care what you've done. I don't care what school you've gone to. I don't care like where you've worked.
00:24:08
Speaker
What I care about is does the job I have or the opportunity I have, does it vibe with what you're looking for? Does it fit into where your next step is? Because ultimately the thing I care about the most is are you going to lean in here?
00:24:22
Speaker
And I don't mean lean in like in a Sheryl Sandberg, like let's write a book about it type way. yeah Are you going to be like excited to try and figure this thing out? Because the experience I had when I like more or less bluffed my way into that first job at turn was like, I was like, man, I need a paycheck. I have a three week old baby and no job. And once I got in there, I was like, okay, i can I see it like I can start to see the parameters of the thing and see the outlines of the puzzle. And then I started getting really into figuring it out. And I was successful in that role, mostly because like,
00:24:59
Speaker
I was into it. I wanted to learn the product. I wanted to learn the business. I wanted to figure out the mechanics. I was going to dig into the deal negotiations with the business people. I was going to spend the time with them. I made great friends there that are still my great friends 12 years later. That was because I was totally into it. The lesson I came away with that is that the subject matter is the easiest thing to teach.
00:25:23
Speaker
What I yeah teach is like you're wanting to do this because you could be the smartest guy on the planet or down on the planet. You could be the most credentialed, most experienced human being there ever was. If you don't want to do it, if it is not something that is energizing to you, that that like fits into where you are in your life, you're not going to be successful.
00:25:45
Speaker
I have no interest in having to put my boot in somebody's backside to get them to work. right I don't know how good you are. I want this to be the best possible place for you to work. and so like I tell my team all the time, like there's no hostages on my team. I don't need to get a better job someplace else. I want you to go. I was not a recruiter for a hiring and he's like, don't worry, I won't poach your people. I was like, poach them. poach hi them like If there's a better job out there, I want them to go do it because I want you here because this is the right place for you. And I want you here because you're like the value transfer works. I'm learning the right things. I'm getting the role that I want. I'm getting the affirmation from being great at my job. All these sorts of things that ladder into, to me, the environment that I'm most successful in.
00:26:28
Speaker
Yeah. Do you have a favorite interviewed question to tease that out? Uh, so I ask a series of scripted interview questions. I don't want to get too deep into them because I do ask them to people. and I don't want to like get like, the but generally what I'm trying to test for when I am interviewed people, the things I want to see is I want to see an aptitude for mastery, meaning like I want to see you want to be great at things.
00:26:53
Speaker
I don't care what it is really. I don't care if it's collecting fountain pens. I don't care if it's like playing soccer. I don't care if it's legal stuff. like I want to see you think of yourself as somebody who masters stuff. I want to see somebody who wants to be autonomous, somebody who wants to own the work, somebody who's going to think of the projects I give them as like, I'm the quarterback, this thing is mine.
00:27:16
Speaker
And I'm going to rise and fall with this. And like I will be mad at you if you come and try and work on this project because this thing is mine. and yeah i Because I want to see that level of desire for sort of autonomy. And I want to see people who are jazzed by significance. I want to see somebody who is like, hey, the thing that matters to me is mattering. It's not about right the paycheck.
00:27:42
Speaker
Look, paychecks are important. You've got to make enough money to like take money worries off the table. But like sure I want you to be in a position where if I told you, hey, you can come to job A, and I will pay you twice as much money, and you will be a cog in this machine, and it'll be like interesting work, but you'll go around. Or I can give you job B, and you'll make 40% less money. But it's going to be on you. like This thing's going to rise and fall on you. If you are like unequivocally, yeah, give me job B. like yeah The money will come. like I'll make that comp later. But like I want to be in it.
00:28:12
Speaker
then like huh Then we got something there.
00:28:17
Speaker
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Speaker
From
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00:28:38
Speaker
creating and managing templates and workflows, to tracking approvals, e-signing, and reporting via an AI-powered repository, Spotdraft helps you in every stage of your contracting. And because it should work where you work, it integrates with all the tools your business already uses. Spotdraft is the key that unlocks the potential of your legal team. Make your contracting easier today at spotdraft.com. um Talk to me about, I like that word mastery. I was going to use you know subject matter expertise or something like that as as we talk about ad tech and we talk about privacy, but mastery is sort of a better way to put it. How do you, once you're in the seat or in the role, maybe you don't have any background in ad tech or you don't have any background in privacy law and regulation, both of which, by the way, are quite complicated. How do you that mastery or earn that mastery? There's a couple of different ways. and like Let's separate that conversation into the micro and the macro. At the macro level, the mastery comes from a desire to understand it. I don't mean to like pull back to the same idea, but if people are really into it, you can start to understand the principles behind it. Like, I actually don't think privacy is very complicated at the macro level. At the macro level, privacy and privacy compliance comes down to a very simple concept. At some point, somebody's going to come knock on your door, and they're going to say, hey man, what are you doing with all this data? And you're like, oh yeah, we're doing like this thing. And they're like, why did you think that you could do that?
00:30:10
Speaker
and yeah what That's what privacy is about, right? It might be an investor, it might be a regulator, it might be ah a litigant, but somebody is trying to say, what are you doing with like what are you doing with the data that you have? And it could be an ad tech company like ours that deals in large volumes of personal data, or you might be like a regular company. That data is not really in your DNA.
00:30:33
Speaker
but Bora, for example. Let's say you're a makeup company. like yeah These things are going to come up, and when they come up, like privacy is all about at its core, you have to be able to answer that question. There's lots of different answers to that question, right? But if you're trying to master this space,
00:30:51
Speaker
but If you really want to, you will start thinking about reading about trying to understand that story from the other person's point of view. What were the legislators trying to do? I mean, we could dive into like ad tech and where like, I think like, you know, sort of what like concerns are there. But by starting there at the first principles, you can start to understand What it is that they're trying to get to, right? And that plays itself out over anything, right? If you're looking at any sort of regulation, any sort of legal issue, you can start at sort of the macro level of understanding like what's going on here. And then there's the micro sort of tactical stuff. And the mastery there to me starts internally first. So I tell like lawyers the best place to start if you're trying to like figure out something and learn something, start at your own company and read your own contracts.
00:31:40
Speaker
go through and like start with your own MSAs and stuff and take them apart until you understand every single word in the contract. Because the default is like, yeah, we got a good contract. It's like a lot of stuff.
00:31:56
Speaker
I'm always like, hey man, some thinking person sat there and wrote all that stuff in there. They thought there was a reason to have it there. If you don't know what it is, you should figure it out. It might be a bad reason, but it's there, and it was their reason. Contracts are a great way to figure out what companies are worried about.
00:32:17
Speaker
And like if you're trying to master, like trying to understand your own company, starting at your contracts, with any contract that is actually written for your company, I'm going to exempt people who just like copied and pasted things from the internet. But reading that, I guess, is instructive on some level.
00:32:32
Speaker
but like ah for you, it is a way to understand or a gateway to start understanding all of your concerns or at the very least the questions you need to ask to understand your concerns. And then after that, the next question is the product.
00:32:48
Speaker
like I generally expect my lawyers to like understand the products at least as well as my product people do. like You can't negotiate something that you don't know. and That's like a continual journey. so like If you start at those two points, like really understanding what is your product that you're moving and what is your contract say, you have a really great basis for starting to build subject matter or mastery, at least within your company. And then you can fit that into sort of the macro level thoughts about like, what are the principles that these laws, these regulations, these rules are trying to accomplish?
00:33:18
Speaker
Let's say that you want to get into this. I mean, we'll we'll take privacy as the example. And you know it's a passion of mine. I think it's a passion of yours. It's an area that we both find interesting. And it's still growing, by the way, too. There's a lot of opportunity. Maybe you don't have a ton of experience in it yet, or you don't have fancy credentials around privacy. Like I built a GDPR compliance program before, or I led my company through CCPA. How do you break in? or, because I'm sure you've gotten that question before from from folks. like How do you break into privacy? I think part of it depends on who you are. like Are you a lawyer? Are you a non-lawyer? If you're a lawyer and you like want to break into privacy and you currently like exist within a law firm,
00:34:01
Speaker
There are very legal, very lawyerly ways you can do this. If you're working with a privacy practice group, you start going to CLEs and starting to build the basis, you can start trying to do thought leadership stuff where you write enough blogs that suddenly somebody like, this is a privacy person.
00:34:16
Speaker
You can try and put the in-house into a role that is privacy stuff. I think that's one way. I think the other way, there are like online resources in the official world of like the IAPP and some of these organizations that create privacy regimes in our industry. The IAB and the NAI are like trade groups that deal with that, that have lots of privacy resources. These are places where you can grab factual information.
00:34:42
Speaker
and you can get, generally speaking, like some formalized training. But the other aspect of it is that going back to that macro question. It's like, what are they trying to do? And for that, you can look to like what have the legislators actually done? What is the law? You can read the GDPR. It's a little confusing. There's terms in there and stuff that require industry knowledge, but it's relatively clear. And like I always tell everyone who's trying to understand privacy, just go read the thing.
00:35:08
Speaker
It's like, you know, it's like, it's right there it's like a bunch of stuff, like read it, make some notes, like try and figure out what are they trying to do? Because if you can understand that macro question, and like, you can start to see the threads of they're like, okay, we want to establish a controller, because, like, we're trying to figure out people going the internet is like data going everywhere. How could a person possibly corral this? Okay, well, we're gonna say that there are like throats to choke, so to speak.
00:35:32
Speaker
We're going to say that when you go to a website, that's your controller. That person, that website, that entity is responsible for telling you what they're going to do with your data. Now, we've got a principle as a controller. and like Well, some people don't really decide, they're a processor. and like You can start to draw the threads out to understand how the legislators are trying to make things simple. They're trying to simplify it and like take it down to like sort of the point-to-point lowest common denominator.
00:36:00
Speaker
and That, to me, comes back to that question of if that knock comes on your door and they're trying to say, what do you do with that data? Who do you ask? Well, the GDPR helps you figure that out. right and like I try and tell people that the best way to get into privacy is to start by reading and trying to understand that first principle.
00:36:20
Speaker
And once you've like really grokked that, once you understand that very deeply, then the rest of things are just details. They're mechanics. They are passages. It gets very complicated. There's a hundred, maybe thousands, different variants, consent strings, all these sorts of things. But they all come back to sort of these core questions.
00:36:37
Speaker
Something I've been thinking a lot about, and you know we can take this from both a you know like learning perspective or just from an operational perspective, but what's going to happen around AI, of course, and and in particular AI governance, where that's going to live in organizations? Who's going to either sort of seize it and say, hey, like I want to own this, I want to master this, right to use your words? Who's going to be responsible?
00:37:03
Speaker
Do you have a perspective on that, both for yourself and your legal org, but but also more broadly what you think is going to happen around AI governance? I don't know yet is the first answer to that question. um Yeah. I think we're like in the very early days. I think that you're going to be at a place inevitably where things become much less manual, where things where you get to a point of confidence where you can rely on the tools in a different way. The way that I think about what I see as the most immediate impact of AI, and just to be clear, I'm assuming that we're talking first about like AI's impact on privacy rather than governance around AI tools specifically. But when I think about AI's use, I think about discovery. And I think about discovering class action lawsuits in the 80s and the 90s of associates who spent the first 10 years of their career in literal warehouses in New Jersey going through documents annually, hand-to-hand, before eDiscovery really became a thing. And now it becomes a pretty massive exception to the rule.
00:38:07
Speaker
that you would do physical, like, review of, like, discovery, right? And, like,
AI's Impact on Privacy Compliance
00:38:12
Speaker
that you would even do a physical manual review of documents produced in discovery without first searching them with an eDiscovery tool, trying to catalog them and then trying to go through them in that way.
00:38:25
Speaker
And to me, it feels very much like AI is going to function in the same way that right now we're looking from a privacy compliance standpoint at consent strings and opt-outs and having to click on you know banner cons consents and CMPs and DSAR requests and all these sorts of things that ultimately are still very manual processes, even with the types of sort of what I would consider nascent tools that are on the market today.
00:38:49
Speaker
I think that's going to change dramatically in the next like two to six years. Like I think that in 2030, the idea that I would be sitting here being like, hey, we're going to have such and such person manually review a DSAR request and respond to it is going to seem insane. The fact that a a human would manually submit it is probably going to seem insane.
00:39:08
Speaker
Like I think these things are going to be, are going to change somewhat dramatically. And so right now, I don't know where that puck is going exactly, but I do know that assuming that it's not going there is pretty full hardy.
00:39:21
Speaker
Yeah, i I tend to agree with that. um We haven't talked that much about your specific experience at at Twitter and and what led you to Pubmatic, but in a general sense, I mean, both ad tech, I mean, Twitter, most people I don't think know this necessarily, but Twitter has a huge but huge part of the business was ad tech, maybe less so today. or direct the company's going. um So you had deep ad tech experience, deep privacy experience. But you know one big difference as you stepped into the GCU role at Pubmatic is that it's a publicly traded company and and now you're responsible for securities law and and all the rest. How did you end up making that jump? I think that's something that in particular a lot of folks who are GCs who are listening might be interested in because
00:40:06
Speaker
I don't know, but I guess that you probably had to overcome at least some objections sort of as a part of the interview process, which is, are you going to be ready to take on a public company GC role? Tell us about that. Yeah. So when I think about my career, and this is a change that I sort of made. So I originally went into turn and I sort of had to learn how to be an in-house counselor. I had to learn how to operate. When I joined Tern, it was about 200 employees, grew to about 600 during my tenure there. And that was in the days, like they were trying to get to unicorn status. That was the days when unicorns were a very rare thing. And Tern was pushing aggressively to expand. And it was really an opportunity
00:40:44
Speaker
for me to do what I consider like a tour of duty, learning how to be an in-house counsel, how to be a tech lawyer, how to be a lawyer inside a fast-growing, smallish-sized company. and
Journey to General Counsel Role
00:40:58
Speaker
I read this book called The Alliance, and oh yeah it's a great book, but it does this part.
00:41:04
Speaker
It's a concept of ah of tours of duty and built into it about you know thinking about your career as a series of sort of tours of duty that should each be transformed and transformation, like who you are, what your resume is, borrowing the military concept of like you send somebody off to do a tour of duty and they come back with a new skill set and they're like ready for the next thing.
00:41:24
Speaker
and That was sort of how I think about my journey. I was at turn learning how to be an in-house lawyer. I moved to Twitter to learn how to like be at a big company, how to work as a part of larger teams, how to work with you know sophisticated people and resources behind you to operate on like a much more public stage and to operate where you really got like consensus as the driving mechanism.
00:41:50
Speaker
for building And then I stayed at Twitter and did my second tour of duty at Twitter to learn how to be an executive, to learn how to like be a manager, to learn how to operate you know as part of like the executive staff of like the chief revenue product officer, how to like sort of interact with people at sort of the VPC level, yeah how to support those teams in the way that they need to be supported and the way that to operate sort of in that manner.
00:42:17
Speaker
And what I've typically found is these tours of duty generally take like three to four-ish years, and it fits nicely into like my eight years, seven and a half years of Twitter. And I got sort of towards the end of that, and it was time for me to move if I was going to grow. And for my purposes, I wanted to go be a GC. I had to make the decision about like if I wanted to go down the GC route or if I wanted to go to a you know, sort of running a function within a larger company. And I think there's a lot of pressure in the legal profession to choose one of those routes versus the other. And I don't think that's fair. Like, I think that those are like equally valid things. And I don't think that a GC like a CLO is like the end of the rainbow. And no and but I made the decision that I wanted to do that. And that one was important to me. And I made that decision by thinking deeply about like what mattered to me.
00:43:09
Speaker
because I had one of the world's great jobs at Twitter. I left before Elon took over, so I can't speak to that Twitter 2.0 Elon world, but Twitter 2.0 was a fabulous company to work at. Unbelievably sophisticated people, very employee-friendly workplace, great work-life balance, you know good compensation, like all this stuff.
00:43:30
Speaker
And I had, you know, I was a director there and had a team and like we were doing our thing. And, you know, to come back to that concept of sort of mastery, autonomy and significance, I felt like I had mastery, I felt like I had autonomy. But I couldn't shake the feeling as I sort of got to the end of my 6th or 7th this year there, that I was starting to lose the significance. I started to feel like,
00:43:53
Speaker
I'm not sure, even though like I have a fairly broad scope and I'm like, everyone trusts me to do my thing. and like you know I made a lot of like wonderful friends. I couldn't shake the feeling that like if I get hit by a truck tomorrow, this gonna be keep other thing's be fine. like I couldn't shake this feeling that like the consensus-driven nature of the role meant that like I really wasn't contributing that much.
00:44:19
Speaker
And I have kids, you can see one of them back there on the wall. And I started feeling like in a really weirdly first world problem unorthodox way that like, I have like an amazing job and I don't want it. And I had to start thinking about like, what was it that drove me?
00:44:40
Speaker
What was it about the things that would make me happiest, make me most effective? And the mechanism I used for that personally was thinking about when I think about my career, can I isolate a three month chunk where I was really cranky, when I was doing my best work, when I was happiest, when I was like my most effective and most productive. And when I started thinking about that, and I started thinking about, again, those concepts of autonomy, mastery, and significance, it really was clear to me that what I wanted to go do was to try and lead a team.
00:45:10
Speaker
I wanted to be a part of a leadership and I wanted to lead a function. And that meant for me, like going down the GC route. And so I started a process and a search to think about where I wanted to go next. And I looked at opportunities that weren't GC roles and it just wasn't right. And then I looked at GC roles ranging from sort of pre IPO late-stage companies to early-stage companies, I went out on a ton of interviews. and In that process, I learned kind of what I needed to do and what I needed to establish, what story I needed to tell in order to win a job. and For me, that comes down to four basic things. like One is, if you want to win a job in this game, you have to be excellent at your thing. so If you're going to be coming from the commercial world, you got to be a crackerjack contract lawyer.
00:45:59
Speaker
You got to be able to negotiate like at the highest levels. You have to know how to build contractual processes. You've got to know like, okay, we're going to do a click wrap here. We're going to negotiate these. Here's one we're going to note you're not all the sort of leverage you pull in order to drive that. If you're going to be a corporate person, same thing. right If you're going to be a securities lawyer, you got to know how to take somebody out. You got to do all the stuff that you would do as part of like, if you're going to like sell yourself as somebody who can come help you IP yeah the case maybe.
00:46:25
Speaker
The second thing though is you also got to have a framework to be able to do the things that aren't in your specialty. like No one expects you, as of particularly as a first-time GC, they don't really expect you to, like for me for instance, I'm coming in with a commercial and privacy background. They don't expect me to like tell you like offhand, here's how we're going to do an M and&A action. But they do expect me to know how to think about it.
00:46:50
Speaker
They do expect me to like have them say, hey, we're going to buy a company and have me not be like, what do I do? and so There is a whole process of being able to answer those questions and to be able, when you're asked a question about something that's outside of your area, being able to say, hey, I don't have a lot of experience. I've never done this. But here's, let me talk you through how I would think about that problem. and Let me talk you about who I would call to help me with that.
00:47:18
Speaker
Because the fine answer to a question like that is, yeah, I don't know anything about tax. I haven't done tax work. Gianna Devornik, my friend from law school, is the world's leading tax expert over at Walktel. And like I will text her right now and we'll have a like we will hire her and have a great tax answer. like you know There is an answer to these questions as you sort of work through these things.
00:47:39
Speaker
The third thing I think you have to have is executive presence. And by executive presence, I don't mean being a white guy standing in front of a PowerPoint talking and being there. The two white guys on this call notwithstanding. What I mean is the ability to go from the tactical to the strategic and the strategic to the tactical.
00:48:00
Speaker
You have to be able to like hear a conversation and say, hey, I'm isolating our strategic goals up here at the 30,000-foot level of trying to do A, B, and C. Now, here's some paths and how we're going to get there. like here and Here are the trade-offs for each of those paths. These are the avenues we can take to try and ladder into that goal.
00:48:18
Speaker
And conversely, you have to be at the tactical side and be able to hear people be like, okay, like we're doing XYZ thing and be like, cool. If we pull those levers, here's how it's going to get us closer or farther away from our strategic goals. And you have to be able to see that and like center your team there yeah so that you can effectively guide strategy. And the fourth thing you have to be able to do to win these jobs, in my opinion, is you have to be able to show that you can produce.
00:48:43
Speaker
You have to be able to show that you can be pragmatic and you can deliver, that you can deliver projects on time, that you can do them under budget, that you can show up and figure out a way to like land the plane. and You have to be able to do it when you don't have the ability to like call up Latham and say, deploy 1,000 associates. anyone forgotten it For me, the process of going through my GC search involved a ton of false starts. I think I went out on 28 interviews.
00:49:12
Speaker
And I think I won three jobs. like And then fourth the fourth job was pneumatic. And some of those interviews were like first blushes. Some of them were I got to final rounds. so more But it was a long journey. It was a lot of interviewing. it was like That stuff is exhausting. And it's continued failure. Because all these folks are looking for one person. These jobs don't grow on trees, right? And I never done it at the time. I needed someone to take a chance on me. And part of that process was learning about how to tell my story. and to bring this whole circle back to the poker stuff. It's about trying to feel out and figure out what is the story I'm telling as I approach these things. Sometimes you're trying to project what you think they want to hear. and you know You're saying words like you're a chat GPT bot trying to predict the next word, rather than telling your story in a way that creates a logically coherent picture. and Coming back to sort of my core principle about people being willing to accept it as long as they know what it is.
00:50:09
Speaker
You can build a company and be like, this is what I am. This is what I'm really good at. Here's not what I'm good at. Here's the ways that I would try and mitigate those things that I'm not great at. And then they can wrap their head around it and make a decision. And the answer is, in my opinion, if you tell your story really clearly and they don't hire you, that is a good thing, not a bad thing.
00:50:30
Speaker
because if you tell your story really clearly and they don't hire you, what they're telling you is, yeah, we know what you are. And it's not for us, which is yeah something you want to find out first. You don't want to take a job and get fired three months in. And then you're like, you know, it's like a whole thing, right? And so like the best thing that you can do, and I tell people this when I interview them, is like, The best thing you can do is be totally honest about like what you are, who you are, and tell your story in a way that makes that story make sense and like lets them really understand you. The worst thing you can do is lie to me so that I give you a job that you don't really want and also that you're going to suck at. It's like <unk>s a bad thing for everyone.
00:51:09
Speaker
So that's kind of how I think about trying, if you're like trying to win a job like this, if you're trying to yeah go out there and convince somebody to hire you, particularly as a first time GC, I think you have to be able to do those four things. And I think you can probably be light on one of them, but you can't be light on two of them.
00:51:28
Speaker
So you should think very carefully about how can you tell that story? How can you tell it honestly and with authenticity? And how can you like make sure that you're expressing who you are in those sort of ways? That's great. And that's also sort of a full circle for us around storytelling from poker to present, ah which we did not plan.
00:51:51
Speaker
I try and make it cohesive. I try and bring the whole thing back together. But like the honest truth is is that I believe all of that. And that is like the animating principles behind how I'm trying to build my team here at Pubmatic.
Fostering Growth and Autonomy at Pubmatic
00:52:05
Speaker
We have a bunch of people who are hired in all sorts of different phases of their careers who do all sorts of different things. And the animating principle that I try and convey to all of those folks who are part of the legal function here at Pubmatic is that I want you here because you're on your tour of duty.
00:52:21
Speaker
where you're getting an opportunity to build yourself. like What we have at Pomatic as a small mid-cap level ad tech company with big ambitions is an incredible opportunity. But it's only there like so only a good opportunity for the right person. like For some people, you would look at this and be like, why would I want to do this? Why wouldn't I go get a job at, like I don't know, Google or something, get paid twice as much for half the work?
00:52:46
Speaker
yeah I would say, go do that if that's what jazzes you. But if what he jazzes you is that autonomy, mastery, and significance thing, like here at Palmatic, this company is going to rise and fall on you. like You're going to have whole areas, product things, all that stuff. And so trying to build a culture where people feel empowered to say, hey, this is what I'm here pursuing. I'm trying to do this over the next three to four years. I want an opportunity to go tackle that thing.
00:53:16
Speaker
I see the sort of wood chopping that we're doing in this role and it doesn't bother me. I don't feel like I'm doing chores because it's laddering into the next thing. I'm thinking about as I'm doing this sort of rote contractual amendments or something about how would I build this system differently so that we can reduce sort of this lower value work or like more sort of mechanical work.
00:53:37
Speaker
How would I think differently about if I was running the team? you know I try and talk to the team a lot about like what I'm thinking, what's in front of me, so that they can just see it and just decide, maybe I'm right, maybe I'm wrong. like I want them to all be better. like My dream is that nobody on my team is still here four years from now.
00:53:54
Speaker
Like I want them all gone because I want them to have all grown past a point where Pubmatic can keep them. Because even if we grow 10X, I want them growing 100X. Like I want every one of the team to be in a position that the next thing for them is like ready for them and there and they're ready for it. And the only reason that they're staying here is because this is the best place for them, not because they can't.
00:54:16
Speaker
Reed Hoffman talks about that too, I think. And if not in that book and another one, you've really internalized that, which is fantastic. I've got a couple of questions that I like to ask every guest as we wrap up. And one of them, you can't say the Alliance because you've said that. if there's a If there's a book that you've read recently or two or three that you've read recently or read at some point that has really made an impression on you that you would recommend to to the audience. This is a little bit of a of ah of a deep cut there is a book historical fiction book called 1812, written by ah an author named David Niven. It's 40 years old, maybe. It must be. it's like it's i don't I don't even think there's a Kindle version of it. I have a paperback back there. And it's a historical fiction, but it talks ah in depth about the War of 1812, a lesser known sort of American conflict. ah But a big part of the book, and again, this is an historical fiction, so it's imaginary, but the thing that I like about it
00:55:18
Speaker
is it digs into some of the lesser known members of American history trying to figure out what the hell to do about this conflict. And like they're in a world where they're dealing with like this popular nationalist uprising in a country that really isn't ready to like have another fight with the global superpower.
00:55:36
Speaker
started that war. A lot of people don't realize this. like America invaded Canada, kind of that the 1800s version of Canadian bacon, I think, if you're... But we invaded the British, you know, Canada after there were like con questions about British, pressing our sailors into service with the British Navy.
00:55:55
Speaker
I'll leave the history lesson aside, but like the process there was like talking about managing a problem, talking about managing a population and talking about leading, like building troops and figuring out a question about how you train. That's when West Point was founded, for instance, because American troops are like disciplined. And while it's very much like a pop history book and enjoyable, I read it for the first time when I was like 12 years old.
00:56:20
Speaker
And then I read it again a number of years ago. More recently, a lot of these things really resonated with me as rough parallels to some of the things that I've been trying to think about how you build. Because you end up in a place where, well, this book is certainly not a self-help book or anything like that. And it really is very much like kind of an exciting, interesting, like,
00:56:40
Speaker
historical fictional novel, a lot of the concepts there as you think about leadership and different styles of leadership and a lot of these characters are very different in their approach and like where details matter and how you empower people resonated very deeply with me. They resonated me when I was a kid and they resonated even more as an adult.
00:56:59
Speaker
And so that is a book that I really enjoyed, and it's a little bit of an esoteric deep pull, so I feel that. We will find it for the show notes. There you go. We'll find a link whether it's to a used book's website or if it's actually on the Amazon. I think it's the deep i it' a deep cut. i friend and I think the author passed away about 30 years ago, but you know, what can you do? My last question for you that I like to ask pretty much all of our our guests and don't feel like you need to come up with something new for this because you've given us so many lessons today. But really it's, you know, if you could look back on your days, and just starting out as as a lawyer after law school, something that you know now that you wish that you'd known back then. You know, um this is a question I think a lot about because I had a very naive and like, I don't know how to say it, a very like self centered view of what adult life was going to be like when I was a young lawyer. I kind of had gone through a place in my life where most of my life had been essentially voluntary. I had never really had to do anything. right like I had the benefit of having parents who like paid for my college, for instance, if I wanted them to. I paid for part of my own college because I chose to. And because UCLA at the time was like 1800 bucks, it wasn't very expensive. like like My parents were supportive. I didn't have to do anything. And so most of my life, like high school college had kind of been like, I was like a smart kid. And and like I showed up and like I did my thing and everything worked out.
00:58:32
Speaker
like you know you got awards in high school and college and like you got good grades and like it was just kind of like just as long as I just did the stuff it worked out and I never really had to think about like what makes me happy and what am I willing to do to find like real fulfillment and when I think a lot about is like I kind of showed up into my career and Forrest gumped my way through the first half of my career, just kind of thinking if I just showed up and I was like smart, like things would kind of happen. Somebody would like take me under their wing and like, you know, I'd end up like doing great.
00:59:09
Speaker
And I found out sort of in that early phase of my career that that is not true. And like that's not enough in and of itself. I'm sure some people leave charmed lives. And again, I had tons and tons of advantages. But trying to think about what I was willing to do and the work I was willing to put in and how I wanted to craft my career was sort of the turning point for me professionally and thinking about what I wanted to go do.
00:59:33
Speaker
And so the thing that I try and encourage young lawyers to think about now when I talk to them, the thing I wished I would have done is I wouldve had wish I would have had more clarity on what actually jazzes me. I wish I had a better, a deeper understanding, again, pulling on these same threads, like the satanity and mastery of significance, that like for me, the what I'm working on matters much less than those environmental questions. If I don't have those three things, I'm going to be deeply unhappy.
01:00:00
Speaker
Working on the coolest thing on the planet won't matter to me if I don't have those things. For other people, if they don't feel like the concept the concept that they're working on is is worthwhile, then they won't do it. like They want to feel like they're part of something that is something, whatever that is, whether it's like very cool and popular, whether it's like a good thing for the world, whatever the case may be. There's some sort of extrinsic motivator there.
01:00:24
Speaker
that motivates them. and for Particularly for lawyers, I was mentioning earlier, we spend no time at all thinking about, as the young lawyers, like what actually makes you happy? How do you discover that? and like We talk about it only in the most esoteric ways. like well Do something, you know do a job you love, you'll never work a day in your life. like like like all the all litigator like you know It's like, we don't ever get into like, what really drives you? What is the career that you want to have? What is going to make you get up and not feel like work sucks? And
Career Advice for Young Lawyers
01:00:55
Speaker
because we don't do that, we have a bunch of lawyers who have substance abuse problems. so We solve that by signing them CLEs on ethics and substance abuse. And I'm like, I'm not sure that gets it, guys. Like, I'm not sure that you can solve the fact that a lot of people feel trapped in careers because they feel like they need to make a certain amount of money and they don't have another mechanism to do it. They don't really know what it is they want to do. And law firms are a really terrible discovery mechanism for that. And so what I try and encourage the young lawyers when I talk to is like, think, like really think.
01:01:25
Speaker
But when are your best days? What are the things that like you like went home and you're like, today was cool. This was a good day. This was like yeah this was like one I enjoyed. And then like try and build your career towards that. It doesn't have to be the next thing you're doing, but the thing you're doing right now. But make that environmental thing, make that thing the thing you're going to go get. Run to the things that energize you. And generally speaking, I wish I had understood that earlier.
01:01:49
Speaker
If I'd understood that earlier, I think it would have helped my, and I think I would have been more successful. I think it would have been more successful earlier. I think I would have had fewer bumps along the way. So that's the one thing I would tell people.
01:02:01
Speaker
What a great message. I had one of those days because I got to do this. There we go. And as you can tell, the other thing that I really enjoy is hearing my own voice. So why not why not spend some time talking? Well, Andrew, thank you so much for joining this episode of The Abstract. This was really a fantastic conversation. Appreciate you taking the time. Hey, thank you for having me, Tyler. A very ah very nice honor to be included.
01:02:27
Speaker
And to all of our listeners, thanks so much for tuning in today and we hope to see you next time.