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From NASA to HR Tech: Evan Ferl, Chief Strategy Officer & GC, Bambee
95 Plays1 year ago
Where does legal end and strategy begin? Taking on new tasks and new roles can help you expand beyond the traditional GC role. But are enthusiasm and attitude enough to skyrocket you to bold new places in your career?
Join Bambee Chief Strategy Officer & GC Evan Ferl for an exciting discussion about following your passions and using legal to inject positivity into your organization.
We’ll hear tips for advancing your career to match your ambitions, activating your creativity, and find out how Ferl expanded beyond legal in his roles at Hired, Poshmark, Bambee, and his many personal ventures, like Neatworking. We’ll also discuss how making mistakes can be an essential key to success and how to capitalize on your enthusiasm.
Read detailed summary: https://www.spotdraft.com/podcast/episode-11
Topics:
Introduction: 00:00
Finding your passion working in legal: 02:14
Starting his career at NASA with a cold email: 06:23
Exploring work at big and small companies: 11:10
Expanding beyond legal: 14:06
Approaching strategy and corporate development from a legal perspective at Poshmark: 19:05
Finding ways to activate creativity: 23:48
Transitioning into a strategy role at Bambee: 26:12
Identifying the inflection point to begin a new venture: 28:39
Launching the Neatworking newsletter: 32:23
Improving your writing practice: 37:23
Advice for younger lawyers: 40:34
Connect with us:
Tyler Finn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tylerhfinn
Evan Ferl: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evanferl/
Evan’s newsletter: https://evanferl.substack.com/
Evan’s children’s story book: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/maxs-big-day-evan-james-ferl/1142525323
SpotDraft Summit 2023: http://surl.li/lufqw
SpotDraft: https://www.linkedin.com/company/spotdraft
SpotDraft is a leading CLM platform that solves your end-to-end contract management issues. Visit https://www.spotdraft.com to learn more.
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Transcript
Unexpected Team Expansion
00:00:03
Speaker
The CFO pulled me aside and he was like, hey, you want to take an additional team? And I was just like, yeah, of course I do. And he was like, do you want to know what the team is before you agree to taking on? Like, no. When the CFO asks you if you want to do additional stuff, you say absolutely.
Introduction to The Abstract Podcast
00:00:23
Speaker
Welcome, listeners, to The Abstract, where the biggest voices in the legal industry take us through key challenges and moments of growth throughout their careers and what led them to where they are today. My name is Tyler Finn. I'm the Head of Community and Growth at Spotdraft, a leading CLM company that enables lawyers and businesses by operationalizing their contract management processes.
Evan Pearl's Career and Side Projects
00:00:46
Speaker
And today I am super excited to have Evan Pearl with us. Evan was previously the GC and VP of Strategy and Corp Dev at Poshmark. And now he is the Chief Strategy Officer at Bambi, which is providing small to medium-sized businesses with dedicated HR managers and easy to use software to manage employee performance, store company documents, receive HR guidance on demand.
00:01:14
Speaker
something that I think honestly Spot Draft, we've got a great HR team, but we could probably use. Let's go. Let's go. I mean, we're making deals happen. Evan's also got his own newsletter, which we're going to talk about today, and is one of the reasons I invited him on this episode. He's done some pretty cool projects on his own, on the side, all throughout his career. So Evan, super excited to have you here today.
What Led Evan into Law?
00:01:40
Speaker
Yeah, I'm excited too. I heard that you described that this is like big legal voices, so I'm not particularly sure that I'm in the right place. Maybe by the end of the episode though. Okay, my voice will get bigger as the episode goes on. So yeah, super pumped. This is like, I love doing these kind of things on Friday because I feel like I just leave like so energized. You know, I'm like just ready to go out there and like, I don't know, conquer the weekend, still work. I'm not sure what I'm going to do, but I think it's super pumped.
00:02:08
Speaker
Awesome. Well, we've got a couple of themes for the episode. And the first one is really kind of around finding your passion in law. I'll start this one the way that I start a lot of these conversations, which is, you know, what led you into the law? And then we can talk about passion from there. But what led you into a career in the law?
Evan's Academic Journey
00:02:28
Speaker
When you're like fighting your passion in the law, I'm like, yeah, good luck. I don't know that many people do it. Okay, what led me in the law? So I think I switched majors six times in college, probably. I think I started out as an industrial engineering and in summer B of the University of Florida. And I didn't even take one engineering course before I switched my major. I don't know how I figured out I didn't like it by not taking the course, but I was like, no way. That's scary.
00:02:54
Speaker
Yeah, so probably for the better, but I like so I think I did industrial engineering and then there was a few other majors. This is all like the first couple semesters and then economics and business for a while and like wasn't into that despite shameless plug going back and getting my MBA like wasn't into business at the time. And then I figured I figured that I should really focus on something that had little to no economic value at all, which was class
00:03:22
Speaker
political science, which is what I finally ended up.
Choosing Law Over Science
00:03:26
Speaker
And, you know, so like, bright eyed, bushy tailed, you know, college student, I was like, I just want to learn stuff that I really enjoy doing and that I'm pumped about. And so I studied, there was a classical lit and a classical language track, classical language required you to take Greek and Latin and the classical lit only required you to take Latin. And I'm terrible at foreign language. So it's like, okay, I'm gonna do
00:03:46
Speaker
classical lit. When I was towards the tail end of my junior year I was like, okay, classical studies sets you up to give funny critiques of the movie Gladiator and that's about it.
00:03:58
Speaker
You know, Evan, I took eight years of Latin and I've seen that movie on pretty much every rainy day in high school and in college as well, honestly. Okay. I mean, it's one of the best movies of all time. There's some utility there, but like I've learned terrible languages. I love languages. Like it's weird. Like I love foreign languages. I take in Spanish, I take in French, I take in Latin. I'm horrible at all of them. I got the worst grades I ever got in school in Latin.
00:04:22
Speaker
despite loving it. And then I was like, Okay, like, okay, so what should I do? And my dad's this, like, big, high powered science dude, you know, I was like, I don't really want to be a scientist. My dad's also much taller than I am. So I'm like, I've been physically living in his shadow my whole life, I can't be professionally living in the shadow my whole life too. So I was like,
00:04:43
Speaker
Alright,
LSAT Success and Law School Entry
00:04:44
Speaker
what do I really like doing? I like reading, I like writing, I like talking to people. Everyone is always like, I like arguing, so I should be an attorney. I was like, no, you shouldn't. That's not really a good reason. But in any event, I was like, okay, maybe I'll go to law school because I took a legal writing class where at the end of the class,
00:05:00
Speaker
you did this kind of a mock trial for law students when you were an undergrad and i really really like that like the prep for the thoughtfulness behind it like how you formulated arguments and opinions and got your collateral together and everything like that i was like okay i'm gonna go to law school and um
00:05:17
Speaker
I remember I was like studying for the LSAT. My practice exams, I just didn't miserably on so bad. I don't even want to tell you the scores because like they were just magnificently bad. And I was like, all right, I'm gonna take the LSAT anyways. I'm gonna do way better on it than I and luckily did way better on it.
00:05:35
Speaker
I don't know if you can get a zero on the LSAT, but definitely the practice exams. I was as close to that as you possibly could, but I always made the joke that I'm pretty sure the only reason I got into UF law school is because my application got stuck underneath someone else's application when they slid it over.
00:05:51
Speaker
profile. But yeah, like my path to law school was was kind of just that it wasn't that was the last choice, but it was that that I went through all these other different ideations and thought processes and things like that. And like finally just had to say, what do I really like doing? And what is the closest profession, at least to start with, that I can do that. And there I was in law school.
00:06:12
Speaker
You also went through quite a few very different organizations.
Law and Science at NASA
00:06:16
Speaker
You started at NASA, so you actually did end up close to the science piece, right? Yeah, I did. Talk us through a little bit of NASA and then deciding, hey, what I want to do is go in-house, and then you've been at big companies, you've been at small companies. We don't need the whole resume. But talk us through moving through these very, very different environments. And what you learned about yourself is you made that journey.
00:06:41
Speaker
Yeah, good question. Okay, so in law school, boy, I think I'm going to start off this whole blog podcasting sounding like I shouldn't be on it, right? But anyways, because I talked about like how terrible I did an undergrad. In law school, you know, I was not at the top of my class. Once I found out that I wanted to be a lawyer, I didn't know what kind of lawyer I wanted to be and like what I wanted to do. And all my other friends, this was in Florida and in Florida, like you
00:07:06
Speaker
especially back when I went to law school, which is now longer than it was a number of years ago. In Florida, there wasn't tech. There wasn't really in-house work. You can be a construction litigation person. You can do slip and falls in public supermarkets.
00:07:22
Speaker
nursing home malpractice or whatever, I don't know. Not that we don't need those kind of attorneys. It's just not the kind of attorney I wanted to be. So I was like, man, what the hell do I even want to do with this degree? One of the things growing up, I always remember doing is like watching rocket launches, my dad making me sit through the movie of Paul 13, like 20 times, you know, things like that, really being enamored with the space program. And this shows you how naive I was back then. So I was like,
00:07:50
Speaker
Hey, NASA must have attorneys, right? Like, I was like, I don't know. I remember I was sitting in, I think I was sitting in property class, I think, and one of my really good friends, her and I were talking about the jobs that we wanted to get. And I remember I was applying to this municipal water district attorney role or something like that, just because it was open. Because at the time that I graduated, it's like, man, is there just anybody hiring? Any job record. Any. And then like something clicked. And I was like,
00:08:16
Speaker
This is something I've always wanted to do they probably have attorneys like why don't I just reach out to one of them? You know, so like literally went on to I don't know NASA gov or something like that and the finding the chief counsel's email of NASA and I was like, I'm just gonna send this guy an email. I'm just gonna like to attach my resume, which was probably a horrible resume at the time, you know, probably still said that.
00:08:41
Speaker
My first job was probably life guarding up there, you know, just like really, really terrible resume. And I was like, you know what, I'm just going to send him this and wrote this email that was like, Hey, I always want to work at NASA, love the space program, I can drive down there. Like you don't need to pay me, I'll sleep under my desk, whatever I need to do, and like just sent it out into the ether. And I was like, there's just no way that the chief counsel of NASA is ever going to email me back.
00:09:07
Speaker
and three days later got an email back from him. He's like, hey, yeah, we still have an open position. Why don't you drive down and interview for it? And drove down there, like interview for it. Nervous is all hell. Same pitch. Don't pay me, just let me work. And he was like, well, legally, we have to pay you. And I was like, okay, or pay me.
00:09:30
Speaker
was the first time working at NASA that I like really felt like I found what I loved to do. And what I love to do is working inside of organizations and using legal almost as a means to an end to influence possibly a business or an organization or in NASA in an administration. And so the bummer was is that that was right when NASA was going through budget cuts. So when it came
00:09:56
Speaker
time to actually provide a long-term offer. They were like, hey, we'd love to, but we can't. And also, NASA is one of the few government administrations that's on a two-year budget cycle. So it's like, not this year, and also not next year. So go figure out something else. And I'm like, what?
00:10:15
Speaker
You find what you love to do and then you can't do it anymore. You know, what do I do now? I was like, okay, where do rockstar in-house councils go to make the world a better place, you know, make a difference.
Transition to Silicon Valley
00:10:26
Speaker
And it was like, all right, Silicon Valley. So same thing, you know, sending out emails into the ether.
00:10:32
Speaker
One company, some total systems ended up taking a chance on me for some reason, no idea why again. And so I went straight in-house into a tech company. And I remember the time all my buddies from law school laughing at me and they're like, ah, you're ruining your career. You're going straight in-house. You got to go work at a law firm, et cetera. And I hate to ruin the end of the podcast here, but it didn't ruin my career.
00:10:58
Speaker
everything's working out just fine. Talk us through, you know, big companies, smaller companies you've worked for. What's that exploration process like? Once you were in house, how did you continue to sort of like try to navigate towards issues that you really wanted to work and didn't matter even if it was at a big place or a small place or with a big team or a small team?
00:11:20
Speaker
Early on in my career with the economic environment I didn't really have the opportunity to be like this is exactly what I want and I'm gonna wait until I get that just didn't exist. The very fact of having a job offer when you left school was incredible.
00:11:35
Speaker
Particularly incredible for me given transcripts and everything like that. Your initial point is right. Basically everyone was like, hey, you're a contracts
Growth Over Titles: Career Choices
00:11:44
Speaker
attorney. That's not even a title. And everyone's like, you should have been an assistant general counsel or you should have been a deputy general counsel. And like, I went in to my first job with that attitude. It was not the right attitude to go in with at all feeling like you were more important than you really were.
00:12:05
Speaker
person early on in their career. Shoot, not even early on in their career. At any point in your career, take the job that you're excited about and that's going to increase the neurons firing in your brain and doing cool things, then the title. Because the title really doesn't matter. Eventually, it probably does. But especially early on, it doesn't matter. What matters is what you're doing.
00:12:28
Speaker
At some total, we went through five acquisitions. They were shifting from on-prem to cloud. That's how long ago this was now. Safe Harbor fell. This was before GDPR. We were an international company. All of a sudden, I was doing big deal contracts. I was doing M&A. I was doing IP. I would go talk to some of my buddies that
00:12:51
Speaker
laughed at me for taking what seems like a little piddly in-house gig and like they were just writing the same motion they have been writing since they got out of law school. Nothing wrong with that again. I always feel like I bash law firm attorneys in these things and I like don't need to do it.
00:13:09
Speaker
I always try to look at the holistic opportunity and like what I get a chance to touch and grow and titles come, money comes, but also like I've since then passed up cool titles and way more money to just do stuff that I like really, really like doing.
00:13:27
Speaker
Yeah, I've had friends that have done the same thing. I've had friends that have left law school and like become product managers, you know, and I think my path is non traditional. Their path is very non traditional. But like, you talk to them and they just like love what they do. You brought up folks who've transitioned into into product roles. I think that's a great segue into the next theme that we wanted to touch on, which is expanding beyond legal and
00:13:51
Speaker
For you, I mean, that's happened in terms of titles, and we can talk about that in a second, like what some of those different titles mean and what some of those experiences are. Was that intentional, though? Did it happen organically? Was it someone just bringing you a project that sat a little bit outside of your remit and saying, hey, Evan, why don't you try this? Talk us through, you know, moving kind of beyond a pure legal role.
Engaging with Business Operations
00:14:17
Speaker
One of the main reasons why I even got into in-house and like tech, et cetera, is I saw legal as a way to get as close to the business as quickly as possible, right? Working even as just like a contracts attorney or whatever in my first job, I was like interacting with the CEO, the CFO, like our heads up product, like and like everybody. All of a sudden it was like, I was just like, thread it out throughout the business.
00:14:45
Speaker
isolated myself, not done anything, and not pushed. There's nothing wrong with that. I remember somebody that I talked to early on in my career and they were like, do you actually want to be a GC? And I was like, well, yeah, of course I do.
00:14:58
Speaker
bring it on. And it's not for everybody. My experiences are purely my own. My impressions are purely my own. If you just want to be a product attorney for your career, awesome. You should be. If you just want to be a commercial attorney, I worked with like a really killer commercial attorney in my prior role and like she loved to do it. It's like, awesome.
00:15:18
Speaker
do it. And I'm pumped for people when they find those things. That's the negotiator in the company. Right. Yes. So like find the thing you're awesome at and you love to do and go do it. What I think I can be awesome at is positively influencing the business test through legal grade. And then it's eventually that allows me to increase my scope awesome. But the quickest and the most dramatic way up and in I saw
00:15:45
Speaker
into the business as I could. Throughout my early career, I tried to figure out where my gaps were and plug those gaps. Anytime something came up at some total that I could be like, okay, how do I set myself up for success and potential general counsel rolls down the road? Take it.
00:16:01
Speaker
RTC doesn't want to handle our IP portfolio anymore. Sweet. I'll handle it. There's M&A integration stuff that is thankless work and no one really wants to do. Awesome. I'll handle it. Because then I sit in the next interview and I'm not just BSing. I'm like, yeah, I've done M&A. Yeah, I've done IP. Yeah, I've done this. I just love that Swiss Army knifing mentality too.
00:16:25
Speaker
From some total I moved to VMware. VMware is like 150% legal department. It's just like one of many, but still trying to figure out ways to Swiss Army knife my way around there. Worked on this program where I could spend time with
00:16:40
Speaker
the corporate securities team with the M&A team, spend some time with the employment and the litigation team, all while still doing my key regular commercial job as well.
MBA for Business Insight
00:16:52
Speaker
And it's like, like, how do I just take on as much as I can while still doing good work, of course, just like, keep building myself and especially building a resume, because I think plenty of people lie on their resume and they go pretty far anyway, so I probably could have just done that. But it's like, how do I actually
00:17:05
Speaker
Do and then when i get into the role where they let me do even more like i built that foundation that was also the reason why i like my back and got my nba is i was like okay how many is out there have an nba. Not many i mean at least back then maybe more do now. I would find myself sitting in meetings with finance meetings with accounting and so on and i was like i can't talk to any of this.
00:17:28
Speaker
So it's like, how do I enable myself to talk to it in a really thoughtful way? And going back and taking those finance classes and those accounting classes, we took HR classes, we took IT classes, et cetera. Then all of a sudden, I can speak to this stuff. I'm not an expert in any of it. But then you start to show the business that you can make those connections, that you can actually speak the language of other people and other organizations.
00:17:53
Speaker
Slowly building building blocks until eventually i got to a point where i was just like alright like i'm ready to go try and be a gc if somebody will let me go be a gc.
Operational Role Expansion
00:18:04
Speaker
After that happened my first opportunity to kind of grow and expand out of that was that hired when i remember like the cfo pulled me aside and he was like hey you want to take an additional team and i was just like yeah course i do and he was like do you want to know what the team is before you agree to taking on it like no.
00:18:22
Speaker
when the cfo asks you if you want to do additional stuff you say absolutely like it doesn't matter what i'll do it and that was the operations team that hired and that was my first step outside of just traditional gc work and that's where i feel like kind of the momentum started that yeah i still want to be a gc at that point but i want to be a gc plus other things since then i've got the opportunity to you know expand beyond the role which has been super special more yep
00:18:51
Speaker
You go back and are able to grow into a GC role and begin to take on
Strategic Leadership at Poshmark
00:18:56
Speaker
more. One of those additional titles, which happens at Poshmark, is Running Corp Dev. I want to drill in on that because I think that's a place where a lot of GCs, even those without M&A experience,
00:19:09
Speaker
want to grow, talk us through what that really meant. And what that looks like in the context of also having a CFO, who I'm sure wanted to have a strong say, or even a chief product officer, etc, wants to have a strong say in what corp dev means, M&A activity the company might be engaged in. I'm really curious for like, what is the title head of corp dev really mean? And how do you work and sort of play nice with the other stakeholders there?
00:19:39
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I was very fortunate at Poshmark to be surrounded by a ton of really supportive other executives, right? The CEO in particular, right? And we were going through a CFO resign and we brought in a new CFO. So the prior CFO, Corp Dev, lived underneath of that CFO. Well, leading up to the CFO resignation and bringing in a new CFO, I had done just a ton of
00:20:05
Speaker
very casual, candidly, conversations with the CEO, with our VP of enterprise, et cetera, just ideating on the industry, not just the state of our business, the state of the entirety of the ecosystem, what kind of feature sets were out there, who was getting funding, why, what our beliefs were on the future.
00:20:27
Speaker
I feel like those conversations, there was one in particular company events where like me and the CEO and a few other leaders just kind of like aside from the event, we're just jamming on a bunch of different industry ideas and like really leaning into those opportunities to like not just provide legal guidance or business guidance, but just
00:20:47
Speaker
gut understanding of the industry. And I credit not just the support of the leadership team, but also that moment to show the leadership team that, all right, Evan is engaged and actively thinking about this stuff, actively understands the industry, what other players are doing and why the positive impacts of it, the negative impacts of it and so on. Then continuing to contextualize that into the work that I did into the instance that I had for the rest of the
00:21:15
Speaker
we were moving through the CFO resignation. One of the things that, and I forget whether the CEO brought it up or I brought it up, it doesn't really matter who brought it up was. By that time, I built the legal team, awesome legal team, running great. I was also able to say, hey, I think that I can step out a little bit and take on additional responsibilities. I would love for those additional responsibilities to be
00:21:39
Speaker
strategy, partnerships, corporate development, things like that, right? Like building our ecosystem. We had done an M&A deal that I was involved in as well, that we executed the business, executed on incredibly, still working incredibly within the business as well. So good M&A success story. And just like, was, I think, pretty transparent about that's where I wanted my career to go. Yeah, I still like the GC, still want to be the attorney to the company, etc. But like,
00:22:06
Speaker
Unleash me let me kind of go out there and conquer and ceo is super supportive of the incoming cfo everybody very supportive of that and i really try to lean into it you know like i had to develop my own reports on the market and who is getting investor money why they were getting it what like features and products etc
00:22:26
Speaker
were prevailing in the industry and why and what Poshmark should do about it and really try to actively push into the role and then keep actively pushing and so
Creativity in Legal Roles
00:22:35
Speaker
on. I feel like the GC role, if executed correctly, actually can inject a ton of positivity and creativity into some of these complementary roles. But I think there's this idea that
00:22:48
Speaker
all we do is sit around and think about risk i think that some gcs maybe that's all they do and that's all they're supposed to do and i appreciate it disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer but i think that life if you can show in a meaningful way your executive team your ceo the board whoever it is that
00:23:04
Speaker
you have the ability and the want to execute on greater things on things outside of your scope i think we just have an excellent opportunities to do that and i'm like clearly but will re emphasize how just super appreciative i was of. The posh martin being supportive of it and seeing that too because i would be where i am in my career today if it wasn't for them see that that.
00:23:27
Speaker
It certainly requires initiative. I love one of the words you used, which is creativity too. Cause I think that it really is when you begin to take on roles like that, it's not even just execution or like handling operationalizing something. You're actually sort of creating a new view of the market or a new view of competitors that didn't exist before. Or there may not be an easy answer to what is a pretty open ended question, but is it just permission lists? Like how do you begin to activate that sort of creativity?
00:23:56
Speaker
Oh, how do you activate creativity? I don't know. I've always been creative, man. I just kind of like, I've always done it. I just love this stuff. Haven't been super afraid to embarrass myself. I'm always pretty good about embarrassing myself. You can ask like any of my college buddies and they'll tell you I did plenty of it and still do. And so like, I think a lot of it is that not being guarded, like not being like, Oh, I don't know. Should I say something? Because like, I remember even if higher, you know, you get into the room with everybody. And then once you're in the room,
00:24:27
Speaker
It's scary. And you're like, ah, should I say anything or should I just shut up and should I just nod my head and you're like, yeah, I agree with you. Yeah, that sounds good. And then I started like really trying to pay attention to the people that, you know, excuse my language, got shit done in companies.
00:24:42
Speaker
I made things happen and they were there is a one to one ratio that people that could get things done in companies and people that were in the right way outspoken in these meetings and i was like okay i need to push myself out of my comfort zone and speak up and realize that like
00:24:59
Speaker
I may not always be saying the right thing and I may get things wrong and I may have the wrong intuition and I should always be able to have my mind changed and have the CEO or whoever it is be like, no, we've tried it and you're wrong, you know, but like remove that need for embarrassment and just like lead into it and talk about it. I wasn't that good at higher. I got a little bit better at it at Poshmark.
00:25:20
Speaker
I think I'm much, much better at it at Bandy. It's actually like leaning in, providing thought, and I think that it's like a snowball. It collects upon itself, right? The more you do it, the more comfortable you get doing it, the more right you are more often at the time, or just the more you get used to being wrong and it's okay, and it just keeps rolling and rolling and rolling, and all of a sudden, you go from being like the person in the room that's just kind of like, ah, I don't know, to like the, we got to see what Evan has to
Transition to Strategy Focus
00:25:47
Speaker
say.
00:25:47
Speaker
As you've grown now into the Chief Strategy Officer role at Bambi, has the day-to-day changed a lot from the days when you were... Tell us a little bit about that. What does the day look like today as opposed to what it looked like back when you were focused, we won't say solely on legal, but where your remit was much more legal intensive and legal heavy?
00:26:08
Speaker
I don't know whether I said this out loud to the CEO or not, maybe, but previously I was known as the GC that did others, you know, that did strategy and corporate development, right? And in this role, I think, and seen as like the
00:26:22
Speaker
strategy corp dev guy that also happens to be the attorney, right? And I think that that's a really important switch, right? And we talked about it earlier is that a lot of times that attorney moniker just like cast this shadow over everything else that happens. And you know, people are like, Ah, well, you know, we'll go to Evan for rules and regulations. And that's it. Because that's what he does. And so that was a really important and a really intentional move.
00:26:48
Speaker
Once again, disclaimer that like, and just being a GC is awesome. Just being a corporate counsel is awesome. It's all awesome. Sometimes I say these things and I'm like, I don't want anyone to think that I'm like, ah, you know, I was just bored of being a GC and it's like, what a snooze fest and I got to go do corporate development. It's like, not that. It's just like, once again, asking myself, what do I want to do?
00:27:07
Speaker
when i grow up you know and so i remember talking to the CEO of baby during the interview and i'm paraphrasing here but basically and saying like what do you want to do and i was like what i want to be the ceo i don't know if it's right now or if it's in the next job that's what i'm gonna be.
00:27:24
Speaker
I'm going to run a company one day and I want my next role to be as close to that as I can get. I want to learn and I'm once again going to get stuff wrong, but I want to fill gaps and I want to grow and I want to influence the business in ways I haven't before. And I really feel like I'm doing that.
00:27:42
Speaker
The briefness of moments was helping manage the revenue team, have worked with the CEO of the product team on our product stuff, have been restructuring partnerships, talking about corporate development stuff, et cetera. I love it because it's the most disparate amount of work that I've done in my career where it's just bouncing around all these different things. It's almost weird when legal stuff pops up because I'm like, oh, wait a minute.
00:28:09
Speaker
I'm also still an attorney and it's time to do some attorney stuff too.
Diverse Ventures and Opportunities
00:28:14
Speaker
You've started your own startup. You've had a consulting firm. You've got a real estate investment vehicle. You've done some startup investing. You now have Neatworking, which is a very cool newsletter and people should subscribe to that and we'll talk about that in a second. The first question I've got here is really like, what drives you to start something new? And more than that,
00:28:36
Speaker
Not just to maybe like make one real estate investment or make one startup investment, but sort of like to try to create something bigger around it. Like when do you know? When's the inflection point where you're like, no, this is something and I want to turn it into something. It's not just a check that I cut once upon a time. My wife would be laughing at this conversation because she says basically as soon as I get any idea, I start executing on it like immediately.
00:29:00
Speaker
My diligence usually comes long after I've started doing something, which is probably not the right legal way to do things. I just get super excited about stuff and then the best way to do it is just to do it.
00:29:13
Speaker
sit on my Google Drive as scratch notes that I haven't executed on and my iPhone notes section is just full of business ideas. And I just need to do these things. So what I've tried to do is I've always tried to have a bias for action.
00:29:30
Speaker
anytime something feels like it's the moment feels like something I'm excited about feels like also thinking about like what's really the worst thing that could happen so when I started like real estate investing I was like what's really the worst thing that can happen it's like all right maybe I lose the closing costs on some of these but like what's the best thing that could happen all right I learn a new industry I make some new connections there and
00:29:52
Speaker
maybe there's some financial upside maybe not but like i had a good time and i've done it and i can say that i've done it. A lot of my which will talk about a lot of my working articles kind of revolves around all the existential problems i have with life.
00:30:07
Speaker
and realizing that my life is finite and I'm still kind of coming to grips with the fact that it's finite. But I guess what I'm trying to do is not defer anything until tomorrow, until the next year, until the year after that. It's like, I just got to do it. I don't know that I'm going to have the chance to do it when I finally get around to doing it, regardless of what that is. I signed up to play in this Woodbat baseball league this year because I was like,
00:30:33
Speaker
I'm just gonna do it. Play baseball in the past and like who knows if I'm gonna be able to play it later so like I'm just gonna do it now. I do the same thing like I buy and sell cars pretty regularly and the exact same thing. It'll be like a Friday afternoon and I'm like whatever I'm selling this car and we go buy this other car because
00:30:50
Speaker
Who knows if I'm going to have the chance to do this again? It's constantly driven by this mentality of, I don't know when other than right now I'm going to have the brain power and the bandwidth and the excitement and just the opportunity to do these things. Go do them. Real estate was the same way. The consulting firm, me and a few of my buddies, one finance guy, one product and ops guy, and me, we kept on getting asked by our network and our friends to weigh in on different things and so on.
00:31:20
Speaker
There's something here and instead of sitting around and pontificating on it, I'm just going to write an engagement agreement today and then we're going to sign people up and then we're going to help them with their business and let's go. Luckily, I've had people in my life that reel me back in from being too energetic about these things if you're excited about something and you have the opportunity to do it.
00:31:43
Speaker
Don't do it. Don't wait because either one may not be able to do it tomorrow. Somebody else may start doing it and you don't have the opportunity to do it anymore. So why not me and why not right now?
00:31:55
Speaker
With that sentiment in mind, tell us about Neatworking. I've been subscribing. I love the newsletters. You interview cool people. I mean, one of the conversations was about NASA and someone's dream of becoming an astronaut, which I thought was super, thought it was a super fun article. If folks haven't read any of them yet, that's a good one to start with, I think. Tell us about the idea for Neatworking first, maybe before, you know, sort of when did it come to fruition?
00:32:19
Speaker
I was at a holiday party with some of my buddies this last year and I was talking to them and we were trying to figure out the last time we had hung out. And I felt like it was a month or two ago and it turned out it was years ago. I hadn't seen them in ages.
00:32:35
Speaker
It was kind of like this aha moment where I realized, so I spent the last two years heads down with the Poshmark, take private acquisition.
Networking and Professional Insights
00:32:44
Speaker
I had a kid, so at that point had like a year old kid and realized that so much of my time was spent zeroed into this laptop.
00:32:53
Speaker
I hadn't made an effort in my personal life to connections with people, hadn't made a good effort in my professional life. And then when I started really thinking about it, I was like, man, a lot of people that I know are doing really cool stuff. I'm not learning from them. We can learn from everybody.
00:33:10
Speaker
We have the opportunity to learn something from everybody, and I'm not availing myself of any of these opportunities. My New Year's resolution was that I was going to reconnect with somebody in my network once a week, and it was going to be like no stress, no scripts, just getting coffee with them. I just want to spend an hour with somebody and learn who they are again. Then I started thinking a little bit deeper into it, and I was like, I might get a lot out of this, but
00:33:35
Speaker
Is there something I can do to like help the universe get something out of this too? And I was like, I know that video podcasts and stuff like that are, you know, more popular than sub stats and everything. But going back to like college, I was like, what do I really love doing? I love writing.
00:33:51
Speaker
shameless plug i wrote a children's book a couple years ago which was an awesome experience and so i was like how do i keep writing you can't let you off the hook there what's the kid's book about so it's called max's big day it's a long-form poem that i also
00:34:07
Speaker
wrote and illustrated about what our cat does when we go to work for the day and so like all the adventures he gets into and I end up publishing it and using all the proceeds from the from publishing it to raise money for an arts and medicine program at the children's hospital back in my hometown.
00:34:22
Speaker
We will get the link in case anybody wants to pick up a copy and we'll include that in the notes for this episode. That's super cool. Thank you. You talk about being creative. Growing up, I want to be a cartoonist, so I drew for all. I drew for our college paper. I was a professional stand-up comedian for about seven years, so I did a bunch of stand-up comedy. I wrote this children's book because I realized that I hadn't been creative in a while and I wanted to be creative again. And then meatworking is the same thing, right? Meatworking is like, okay,
00:34:52
Speaker
maybe this is my opportunity to be created whether the only person that reads it is my mother or not i just love the process of sitting down and created and so i was like okay i'm gonna write a blog about this and like posted to my network and if you want to read it awesome and then i started thinking about the blog and i was like i don't just want this to be like you're the CEO of a tech company how do you raise money here's how you raise money there's more to people into their experiences than just the transactional parts of what they did and so
00:35:21
Speaker
These conversations are really cool because like i find that we don't even talk about we barely talk about like the professional part of it. We usually talk about the emotion behind it like the philosophy behind it you bring up the nasa article it was a aerospace engineer that i was talking to me and we just talked about like how.
00:35:39
Speaker
similar like his passions of all day after he had both of his kids were you know i was born in the hospital and then when there was a job opportunity to work for the hospital you realize how is product work touch people in that way and like how he got excited about that and about just like pursuing that dream i had another talk with the ceo where all we did was talk about american diplomacy and how diplomacy is effectively
00:36:06
Speaker
We're losing diplomacy daily. All that is to say is like each of these talks are they're very special because they're they're all different. They're all unique and they all have they're all beautifully unstructured that allow me to have these very deep and exciting takeaways about
00:36:23
Speaker
life about things that they've gone through and it reflects a lot on then like what I've gone through too. I end up learning a lot about myself through this process. So like it doesn't contribute to my career at all. It doesn't make me learn about securities law or about how to write a good limitation liability provision or anything like that. It is just this purely raw positivity that I get out of reconnecting with people, learning about people and like understanding their journeys as it's been a great year doing it.
00:36:52
Speaker
One of the things about this sort of thing too, and I'm curious if you've had the same experience that I have, when folks come to me and they ask, like, they say, like, I want to start writing more, or one of the things that I found with some of the writing that I've done recently, or these episodes, or one, you do it more when you do it more, right? So like, if you start writing, you write a lot more, and you have ideas about what to write more frequently.
00:37:15
Speaker
And two, you put a lot less pressure on yourself for it to be perfect, right? I think that if this was the only episode that I was recording this year, I would feel a lot more pressure than the fact that this is going to be part of, you know, sort of like our second season and fall series.
00:37:33
Speaker
I don't know if it's the same way with you, but when people come and they say like, I just don't know if what I write is going to be good enough, or I want to try this thing, I usually kind of say like, we'll just get through like the first one or two things, and then it starts to get easier. And you start to feel like what you're putting out is getting a great reception. And you don't feel quite as much pressure if one of them isn't quite as good. I don't know if you've experienced the same thing with me. No doubt. And in fact,
00:37:57
Speaker
My very first new working post is like describing what new working is all about and in there i say like i'm just gonna start writing and like there may be errors in there and the grammar may not be great but i wanted to just feel like me talking. Some of the best feedback i've gotten with my buddies was like when i read these i hear you and i hear you talking in similar to the way i talk there's like a statement in there but then there's.
00:38:21
Speaker
I use parentheticals for like a side of different stories. That's just kind of the way I talk to. And to your point about just doing it, making errors, etc. Growing up I played music, I was like played percussion and orchestra, drumline, jazz bands, things like that. And one of the things that a conductor told me like very early on in my music career is like, if you make a mistake, just keep going. Don't let anyone know you make a mistake. Like a lot of times people make a mistake and they'll be like,
00:38:48
Speaker
99.9% of the audience has no idea that wasn't exactly like how it was supposed to be anyways.
00:38:54
Speaker
When I was doing standard comedy, same thing. When I was drawing as a cartoonist, same thing. Neat working, same thing. It's like the pursuit of perfection is great, but you have to understand that maybe some people get there, but getting to perfection is not the
Embracing Creative Imperfections
00:39:07
Speaker
point. And not making errors is not the point. Doing it is the point. Being creative, having that work product. I think the same thing about professional careers too, and outside counsel attorneys probably do not agree with me here, but I just don't think things need to be perfect. I think things need to be creative
00:39:23
Speaker
We need to understand that we don't deliver perfection all the time or any of the time and be comfortable with it. I think that's especially true in creative pursuits. Don't just sit there and grind and make sure that every comma is right and everything or that this line connects and stuff like that because that's not the point. It's especially not the point of creativity.
00:39:44
Speaker
creativity and doing things like is doing doing it is the important part like even if you stink at it for a while and even you stink out of the whole time you know doing it's like taking latin i still stink at latin i still try to read things on old churches when i travel you know like i'm still not but it's fun just to do it and doing it is the important
00:40:03
Speaker
Normally, as we wrap up, I start to wrap up by ask guests for advice for young lawyers or people in the early stages of their careers. I think that's great advice. So I'm happy to leave it there. But if there's anything else that you would offer those who are sort of coming up or trying to be creative, I want to give you the opportunity as well. I think we've pretty much touched on everything, you know, I mean, like find what you truly love to do. Don't let other people tell you what you should love to do. Don't get wrapped around the axle about titles.
00:40:33
Speaker
all that other kind of stuff, you know, and like, I just really wish I had owned my mistakes earlier in my career and been upfront about it because there's just so much power in that. And I found that some of the best leaders, some of the best executives just own mistakes, which is really cool. I found that that's really, really cool. Just don't take it so seriously. Boy, everybody just takes all this stuff so seriously. Like at the end of the day, you got to love this stuff.
00:41:01
Speaker
I think there has to be a little bit of levity in order to have that enjoyment. Find what you love to do. Don't take what you're doing seriously so you can still enjoy it. You can still drive pleasure out of it, not driving perfection out of it. If you can't do those things, then keep looking for where it is you can do those things. Who cares if somebody at Big Law is flying around in a helicopter and driving an Aston Martin?
00:41:29
Speaker
If they're doing that and they found what they love to do, awesome. But also if you are legal counsel for a food processing manufacturer and you love that, awesome. Dude, awesome. The coolest thing that I found in meatworking has showed me this is that I talk to people at all different stages of their career, all different industries, all different goals in their career. And the common thread through all of them is the excitement and the enjoyment for finding what you're truly put on this earth to do. So find that and go do it.
00:41:59
Speaker
This has been an amazing episode, Evan. Thanks so much. I love your positivity. I love your creativity. I learned something with this one too, which is that I should record more of these on Friday morning because now I'm super enthused to go into the rest of my Friday and into my weekend. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us and to all the listeners out there. Look forward to hopefully seeing you again next time on The Abstract. Thanks so much.
00:42:32
Speaker
Thanks for tuning in today. Don't forget to subscribe so you can get notified as soon as we post a new episode. And if you liked this one, I'd really love to hear your thoughts, so please leave a rating or a comment. If you'd like to reach out to me or our guest, our LinkedIn profiles are in the description. See you all next week.