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Navigating Public Scrutiny & Adversity as a GC: Mark Marin’s Candid Insights
86 Plays1 year ago
How do you navigate being in the public eye of a high-profile company? What happens when you become embroiled in a public controversy and your company doesn’t have your back?
This is just one of the themes we will be delving into with Mark Marin, Puffco’s General Counsel, on this episode of The Abstract.
In this incredibly candid conversation, Mark will take us through:
— the challenges he faced during his time at Barstool Sports, a notorious media company;
— the challenges that led him to Barstool Sports, namely a bankruptcy and two different acquisitions at his previous companies;
— and his current role at Puffco, a start-up within the cannabis industry.
Learn what it takes to truly overcome adversity as a GC. This is one episode you don’t want to miss.
Read detailed summary: https://www.spotdraft.com/podcast/episode-15
Topics:
Introduction: 0:25
Jumping into the fast-paced start-up world at Quirky: 2:31
Discovering a silver lining during bankruptcy: 6:40
Navigating being acquired twice in the span of a short time: 10:17
Learning from trying to merge cultures during company acquisitions: 14:58
Grappling with adversity as Barstool Sports’ first General Counsel: 18:50
Finding support during career challenges: 27:20
Venturing a new path in the cannabis industry: 30:40
Parting advice for younger attorneys: 33:17
Resources mentioned in the episode:
Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek: https://simonsinek.com/books/leaders-eat-last/
Connect with us:
Mark Marin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-marin/
Tyler Finn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/tylerhfinn
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
Introduction to Mark Marin's Role at Puffco
00:00:02
Speaker
I can't say that I walked into it blind, but I was not prepared for how high profile it was and for how much a general counsel would be in the line of fire. He helped Quirky navigate the challenging waters of bankruptcy, had a firsthand encounter with an acquisition that went south at Wink, and then became the GC at the high profile media company Barstool Sports.
00:00:31
Speaker
I'm your host, Tyler Finn. And today we have Mark Marin with us, who's currently the GC at Puffco. His journey there though has been nothing short of a roller coaster ride. He's got some great lessons around navigating adversity, both personally and professionally to share with
Tyler Finn Introduces Mark Marin
00:00:49
Speaker
us today. And I'm incredibly excited and grateful to have him on the abstract. Mark, thanks so much for joining us today. Hey Tyler, thanks for having me. Really excited to do this.
00:01:01
Speaker
Before we start talking about some of the challenges you faced and lessons learned, I want to go back to the beginning. What led you into a career in law? And when you were getting started, did you have any idea that this is where your career would lead? Well, not unlike many, I think, lawyers and law students sort of at the
00:01:26
Speaker
My junior year, senior year in college, found myself, what am I going to do? I had been a biology and chemistry major in college. Medical school was not something that I wanted to do and just did not have really any sense of where I was going to go and then started to think about law school and then discovered that
00:01:45
Speaker
an area of law called patent law or intellectual property law, where I could use my biology background in science and apply it in
Navigating Bankruptcy at Quirky
00:01:54
Speaker
the legal sense. And so that was kind of how it started, kind of just stumbled upon it and started my career as a patent attorney.
00:02:03
Speaker
I'm always impressed by people. My dad was a biochemist. I did not, unfortunately, inherit any of his knack for the sciences. I'm always impressed by people who can bring both of those things together, who can understand both the science side and really get the law and, frankly, often be good writers too. That's kind of the whole package. Life has a way of being a little bit unexpected. Let's talk about your first in-house role.
00:02:30
Speaker
When you joined, Corky, all seemed well. And I think you've got a pretty interesting story here. Can you paint a picture of how those initial impressions changed and how you ended up being there managing a few months later a bankruptcy?
00:02:46
Speaker
Yeah, so I joined Quirky after having worked in a law firm for eight or nine years, I believe. It was time for me to move on in this opportunity at a very well-known, well-funded, sort of exciting startup, especially at that time in New York City. Quirky was pretty well-known, I think, in the startup scene. And so I was just incredibly excited to have had that opportunity. When I started, everything that I had
00:03:14
Speaker
anticipated it to be. It was a very high energy place to work with big ambitions, worked with some really brilliant folks on the product side, the engineering side, and on the marketing side. Really, everyone that worked there was just almost without question excited and really had bought into the mission of Quirky. A couple months into it, it became more apparent that the business model was not sustainable.
00:03:44
Speaker
and that the business was going to have to shift the way its target customer, I should say. We undertook that, but it wasn't enough. A lot of things that went on during that process ultimately led to Quirky having to declare bankruptcy.
00:04:06
Speaker
And remind us, what was the space that Quirky was in? What was the sort of product? Were there attempts at a pivot too? Yes. So Quirky was an invention or product development platform. So the mission of the company was to make invention accessible. The way it worked was if you had a product idea,
00:04:24
Speaker
You would submit it to Quirky. It was a community base, so other members of the Quirky community could provide suggestions for your product idea. It was collaborative in that sense. And then the company would select over the course of a week. I mean, Quirky got thousands of invention or product ideas every week. The community was over, I think there was over a million registered users in the community. Wow.
00:04:51
Speaker
At one point, so the volume of product ideas that came in was massive. Most were really terrible ideas, but you try to find the needle in the haystack every week. So quirky every week
Partnerships and Bankruptcy at Quirky
00:05:03
Speaker
would have what was called product evaluation, product eval, where it would select sort of the best product ideas that came in to the platform over the course of a week. And ideas that were selected were explored for development. Many products actually were fully developed and made it onto the shelves.
00:05:19
Speaker
That sounds like a fun committee to sit on. If you're in that room getting to look at some of these offerings, that's pretty cool. Well, it was actually streamed. It was a production, right? So there was a panel. There would usually be a guest or two from outside the company that would help provide feedback on the products. And then there was a vote. It was like an audience vote. Like should this product go to development? Yes. No. Okay. So yeah, it was fun. And all the employees.
00:05:47
Speaker
Get involved and we had lots of people from the community watching the stream so it was a lot of fun so the pivot was quirky partner with bigger brands to help the brands develop products that would be so we did partnerships with metal.
00:06:05
Speaker
GE Lighting and Harmon, Harmon Cardin, the speakers. I think that that pivot didn't last very long because it became clear at that point that more funding was not on its way and there's just too much debt to proceed. Unfortunately, about nine or 10 months after I joined, the decision was made to declare Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
00:06:35
Speaker
And you were reporting to the GC at the time. Talk us through what that bankruptcy process is like. I'm sure it was tough and also difficult for you in the sense that you ended up being one of the last three or four employees there.
Opportunities Through Stressful Times
00:06:51
Speaker
Any advice you have for folks on managing
00:06:54
Speaker
a situation like that is you're watching a lot of sort of your peers having to leave and go and find jobs elsewhere. Yeah, I mean, I had never practiced any bankruptcy law, I really had never even dealt with a client who had gone bankrupt in private practice, or had to advise on any issues.
00:07:12
Speaker
involving a client as a creditor in a bankruptcy. The process was completely new to me. From putting my lawyer hat on, it was fascinating. I think bankruptcy law is an incredibly interesting and fascinating area of law. There's so much nuance. There's really nothing like it. There's no comparison in the practice of law to bankruptcy.
00:07:36
Speaker
I found it really interesting from that academic side and certainly gaining the experience of having to help a company through bankruptcy represent the company in that process. From a personal side, it was obviously very stressful. You've just seen upwards of 300 of your colleagues lose their jobs. In many cases, people had no idea.
00:08:02
Speaker
of what was happening. Certainly there was communication from the company that we were exploring options for capitalizing the business and getting out of the situation that we were in. But for a lot of employees, it was either wishful thinking and confidence in the leadership team that the things would work out or just not really being aware of what was happening. So it's very hard to see that happen.
00:08:29
Speaker
Certainly for yourself you're thinking about i'm not going to have a job, but i've committed myself to helping to Shepherd this company through through the process in the smoothest way possible so you are thinking about what's next but also having to do the day-to-day job And that is also a bit of a challenge now one of the ups I use upside liberally here but one of the ups one of the upsides of
00:08:59
Speaker
a bankruptcy that took place like Quirky's did, where most of the employees are let go at one time, is that everyone kind of goes in different directions. They remember you as the lawyer or one of the few lawyers working for the company.
00:09:18
Speaker
And so when they need something and especially if you've built and developed strong relationships with these colleagues and they're going to come back to you whenever they or their new company, if they're starting a company or they joined another startup, which is incredibly common in startup world to go from one startup to another. So they're going to call on you. So it was.
00:09:42
Speaker
Certainly the opportunities and the doors that bankruptcy opened for me were something that I was not really expecting, but happily they were there. So for any lawyer that's having to go through a bankruptcy, keep in mind that it is very important to build those relationships with those colleagues because you never know in what context you might see them again.
Cultural Mismatches at Wink
00:10:03
Speaker
Perhaps a little bit of a silver lining for you, at least. Indeed, indeed.
00:10:10
Speaker
And that was what led you actually to your next role, which was at a company called Wink. Before we start talking about the subsequent acquisition and what that experience of being acquired was like, tell us a little bit about Wink and actually jumping into what becomes for you your first head of legal role as well.
00:10:30
Speaker
That's right so wink was actually a subsidiary of quirky it had started as a smart home platform for internet of things devices control thermostats and locks and garage door openers and that sort of in that world and it had.
00:10:46
Speaker
Started because quirky was seeing a lot of these product ideas come through. Hey, would it be great if we had an app enabled lock or I mean things that were kind of known at the time, but Certainly the quirky community was very focused on and so quirky said okay. There's something to this smart home Internet of things that we may try to explore and so wink was born out of that at quirky and
00:11:15
Speaker
At the time, Wink was the most valuable asset that Porky had. In the bankruptcy process, Wink and the Wink side of business was kept fully intact because of its value to a bidder.
00:11:34
Speaker
Wink eventually went to auction and was purchased by kind of getting into the weeds in bankruptcy, but was purchased by the stocking horse bidder, which is if there's an asset in bankruptcy, you have a stocking horse bid, which is sort of sets the market for that asset. The stocking horse for Wink and the ultimate choir of Wink was a company called Flextronics, which is a very big publicly traded contract manufacturer.
00:11:59
Speaker
They make lots and lots of products for a lot of different companies. And the goal of Flex for Wink was to integrate Wink's platform into some of the consumer products that Flextronics made for its customers. So after the sale was complete, Wink needed legal counsel and me having worked with the company in my role at Quirky, and they naturally called me and that's how I ended up in Wink.
00:12:27
Speaker
Unfortunately, it didn't sort of have a fairy tale ending, at least in your sort of experience there. You told me a little bit about some of the sort of cultural challenges that occur as a part of an acquisition like this sometimes. Talk us through what happened after you arrived and now sort of a much larger organization tried really hard to integrate yourself and make it work and what you learned when it just couldn't quite get there.
00:12:56
Speaker
Yes, Wink had one of, if not the most talented group of engineers that I've ever worked with. I mean, just really, really smart, dedicated folks. It was an incredibly dense concentration of talent at the company. Because of that, there was just tremendous opportunity for the company.
00:13:20
Speaker
But I think Fluxtronics had a little bit of a different view of what Wink could be and how it should be used from the very beginning. And Wink never really had control of its own destiny, so to speak.
00:13:35
Speaker
There was certainly at the beginning of, or shortly after the Flextronics acquisition, there was a lot of optimism about what this could bring, working for a publicly traded company, which was not in danger of having to declare bankruptcy or hell under, or those kinds of financial struggles. But Flex just, we could not get the strategy off the ground.
00:13:58
Speaker
There was things that were happening in the industry that made it more difficult for Wink to compete. And I would say, I think it was probably about a year and a half, maybe two years after the acquisition by Flextronics, Flex made the decision to divest itself of Wink.
00:14:16
Speaker
and had found a buyer in Will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas. His company, he's a notorious tech investor. He was a very early investor in Beats and had made some money from Beats and then used some of those returns to start his own company.
00:14:40
Speaker
which I'm not sure if it's had any successes it started, but nonetheless came to find itself as the choir of wink after Flex had made that decision to divest. Looking back on it, do you think there were things if you were to put yourself in the shoes of the acquirer that might have been missed that would have indicated that this might have been a more challenging integration of two businesses than
00:15:05
Speaker
may have been expected or even signs as the company getting acquired that you didn't quite see that also would have indicated that maybe you were in for a tougher road than you might have expected. Yeah. So as I mentioned, the acquisition of Wink by Flex initially was met with a lot of excitement and optimism for what the two companies could do together. And that lasted for probably about a year. And then it became more
00:15:33
Speaker
obvious that Flex's priorities as a business were shifting and there just wasn't really a place for wink at Flextronics. And I think that that was just a matter of the business environment changing for Flex.
00:15:51
Speaker
I think it was also somewhat when Wink was purchased by Flex, the founder, you lose founders, senior executives lose influence in a situation like that. And so the strategy or the mission of the company, I should say, not necessarily the strategy, but the company's mission can often get lost.
00:16:13
Speaker
after that kind of acquisition, because the mission then becomes your acquirer's mission or integrated into that mission. And that's where companies can oftentimes go off the tracks a little bit. The second acquisition of Wink by IAM+, which was Will IAM's company, was much
00:16:34
Speaker
easier to see that it was not going to be successful from a distance. And I go back to when we first learned that this was happening, there was zero employee buy-in of this acquisition. I can't think of a single person that was at Wink that was truly excited for this partnership between IAM Plus and Wink. The cultures were so vastly different. IAM Plus did not really have a coherent strategy for what Wink was going to be.
00:17:04
Speaker
And frankly, it was doomed from the beginning. But that was also like a self-fulfilling prophecy. I mean, like I said, there was no employee buy-in. So from the moment that that acquisition was announced,
00:17:22
Speaker
you had people going out looking for new opportunities. And that was almost across the board. So I think that the lesson for a potential acquirer, and sometimes this is easier said than done, is that it's no secret that in an acquisition, you know, bringing two different cultures together is, if not the biggest challenge, one of the biggest challenges.
Challenges as GC at Barstool Sports
00:17:47
Speaker
I would argue that it is the biggest challenge. And like I said, that's no secret.
00:17:51
Speaker
But I think that a potential acquirer should really work incredibly hard to get the endorsement of employees, not just senior management, but of the employees at the company that they're acquiring. That would be the biggest lesson that I gained from that. You had a tough introduction to in-house life across the first few businesses that you were a part of.
00:18:17
Speaker
The life of an in-house lawyer is not always easy. Indeed, Tyler. And I often think about the first 10 years of my career were just incredibly boring. Practicing patent law, while it can be interesting, is often incredibly, incredibly boring. So the second half of my career has certainly made up for the way it started in terms of its excitement level.
00:18:43
Speaker
You find yourself at Wink at a crossroads again, I guess. Tell us what led you to Barstool Sports and where Barstool was sort of at that moment in time in history when you joined. Yeah. So as I had mentioned earlier, when
00:19:03
Speaker
Quirky went bankrupt, 300 employees went and found new jobs, and one of those folks went to Barstool to help launch their commerce business. And as Barstool was growing, its commerce business and its product business, at the time, digital media was struggling a bit
00:19:22
Speaker
They were leaning into using their platform as a flywheel to develop products and have a commerce business. Buzzfeed was maybe at the forefront of this, and Barstool was doing something very similar. So the person who went and started the Barstool commerce business called me up and said, hey, we're looking for general counsel and specifically somebody to help me get this commerce stuff off the ground. Are you interested? Being that things were not going well,
00:19:52
Speaker
at Wink, I decided to explore the opportunity, despite not having any digital media experience at all. And that's what led me to Barstool. I mean, I was hired primarily due to my product background and IP and product experience, not certainly not my media experience.
00:20:13
Speaker
managing the whole legal house of a really high profile company, a company with a big public footprint like Barstool. Certainly, I'm sure even in really good times has a lot of challenges. And then, right, there were a lot of public criticisms that started emerging. And I think this is all public. The New York Times and others wrote a number of articles about the sort of culture there, some folks on the leadership team.
00:20:39
Speaker
Talk us through that difficult time. And I mean, I'm curious for anything, of course, that you can share on the legal side and how you counseled, but I'm also really interested for how you managed that type of stress personally. So when I was hired, I certainly knew about Barstool's reputation and its profile.
00:21:01
Speaker
And so I can't say that I walked into it blind, but I was not prepared for how high profile it was and for how much a general counsel would be in the line of fire, whether it's the line of fire or just directly involved with some of the criticisms that others had against the company. I was not prepared for it. I was naive.
00:21:29
Speaker
entering it thinking that as the general counsel you can kind of work behind the scenes and Advise and counsel as necessary and never find yourself At the forefront of a controversy and that was just not the case. I think my advice for
00:21:48
Speaker
any general counsel is, especially after this experience, is that if you're going to be joining a company or taking on a role at a company, which is potentially high profile, you have to be prepared for all of it, I guess is the way to say it, right? Like, do not go in thinking that you can kind of hide in the shadows, because that's not going to be the case, especially for a general counsel.
00:22:14
Speaker
And being unprepared for that was what made it most difficult for me personally is because I internalized all of the difficulties that I was having due to Barstool's profile. And I've learned a lot of lessons from that, but at the time, to be honest, it was a surprise and I was not ready for it, frankly.
00:22:41
Speaker
Tell us a little bit more about what was happening, what your day-to-day ended up looking like, how it changed, and some of the bigger problems that you really had to wrestle with or grapple with. Sure.
00:22:56
Speaker
Not unlike most GCs, most of the day was pretty standard, reviewing NDAs and advising on certain IP issues or employment issues or governance stuff, but it was the
00:23:12
Speaker
publicly facing issues which were the most difficult to navigate for me personally. We're still having a very large social presence and the scrutiny that that social presence got from the media. The other media organizations and the public in general was very high.
00:23:36
Speaker
One of the challenges that I encountered after I joined Barstool was it was a company that was, I guess, 14 or 15 years old when I joined and I was the first lawyer at the company. The company used outside counsel. It's a long time to not have a GC internally defining culture. Yeah.
00:23:56
Speaker
Indeed. I mean, Barstool grew very pretty slowly in its first couple of years and then eventually took off to become what it is, what it was at the time and certainly much bigger now. But yes, to your point, it is a long time to operate without in-house legal counsel. And so a lot of habits developed.
00:24:16
Speaker
when there's no sort of lawyer there to help direct the best policies and processes for legal compliance and just the things that general counsel does every day. And so it was difficult for me to come in after such a long
00:24:34
Speaker
time without a lawyer and to implement what I believe to be the kinds of processes and policies that the company needed in order to scale the business in the best way that it could from a legal perspective.
00:24:50
Speaker
And so not having that, I was met with, not unsurprisingly, met with some resistance when you come in and you try to tell people who have done something one way for a very long time.
00:25:06
Speaker
Maybe we should try a different way because the way we've been doing is exposing us to legal risk or has gotten us in trouble in the past. That's very difficult to overcome. That would be another lesson that I would tell any general counsel is prepare for resistance if you're going to be coming in and advising that the company undertake new
00:25:29
Speaker
ways of operating certainly not every company is like that a lot of i would say that maybe the majority of companies are open to changing if it's in the best interest of the business but a lot are not because it disturbs what people are used to change is hard change is hard for everyone so
00:25:47
Speaker
That was another challenge that I faced at Barstool. Going back to me not being prepared for the scrutiny that was on Barstool, there was a situation where, I mean, I found myself directly in the line of fire. We had a situation on Barstool's Twitter account where Barstool had reposted a video that a comedian had produced
00:26:14
Speaker
And the comedian had filed a DMCA, which is a Digital Millennium Copyright Act violation. So basically alleging that the copyrights were infringed. And I had tried to resolve this with the comedian and was just not getting any response.
00:26:33
Speaker
And things escalated on Twitter where this comedian named me by name to hundreds of thousands of her followers. And it became a high profile controversy for the company and for me in particular. And it was being in the crosshairs of the
00:26:58
Speaker
random anonymous Twitter users and others was incredibly upsetting for me as somebody who had not, like I said, I was unprepared for the scrutiny, had never sought the spotlight. And it was a difficult time. You didn't seek the spotlight. Now you're in the midst of very public controversy with public figures.
00:27:21
Speaker
Did you feel like the company had your back? Or was it other people who you really turned to at this time, whether it was friends or family members or mentors? How did you navigate it and try to get beyond internalizing it as something about you as opposed to it really just being ultimately kind of like a very public business dispute?
00:27:48
Speaker
Yeah, so I did not feel like the company supported me in the way that I would have expected them to. There was a public comment from Dave Portnoy, the founder in Business Insider, which was incredibly hurtful to me. But also as the general counsel, sometimes we have to expect that the scrutiny is going to fall on us. So I was left having to turn to
00:28:16
Speaker
friends, mentors, certainly my family for support during that time. And it was, like I said, it was a difficult situation to navigate. I think for any general counsel, when another piece of advice is just be prepared for sort of doomsday scenarios, whether it be something like this situation where you're being called out publicly or financial distress companies and financial distress,
00:28:46
Speaker
always be prepared for those kinds of situations. If I can't, can I ask you're in the midst of that? Did you really feel like
00:28:57
Speaker
your friends had your back, they saw it happening or you go home, your wife has your back. Like tell me a little bit about the people who supported you while this was going down. Yeah. So when I was going through it in my head, I was convinced that my general counsel colleagues were thinking, Oh my God, how could he get himself into that kind of situation and just
00:29:23
Speaker
thinking that anybody except myself would have handled it better or differently. Not surprisingly, I guess in hindsight, but to my surprise at the time, my colleagues and friends and certainly the other lawyers that I knew were incredibly supportive. And it was amazing to me how many other general counsels had experienced circumstances which they were either
00:29:53
Speaker
scapegoated for something that happened with the company that were having to deal with an emergency crisis where they just had no idea how to how to navigate it, but eventually learning on the fly. So it was kind of inspiring to see that I wasn't alone as alone as I certainly felt at the time.
00:30:17
Speaker
So I think that it goes back to as a general counsel, there are so many situations that you're going to find yourself in and you stay in this profession long enough. You're going to have to deal with several over the course of a career. How did you move on? Because you ended up now at Puffco in the cannabis business, which people would not think of as a like super low stress GC job. But, but I think it sounds like it's been really great and you've known the folks who
00:30:47
Speaker
started the company and have been involved with them for a number of years. How'd you sort of move past the time at Barstool and find a great place to sort of land and settle?
00:30:58
Speaker
Yeah. So obviously, certainly after this incident that happened at Barstool, but going back even before I knew that I was not long for the company, that it was just the company and myself were mismatched from the beginning. It took me a couple months to realize that, but eventually I negotiated my exit from the company about eight or nine months after I had started at Barstool.
Transition to Puffco and Advice for Young Lawyers
00:31:22
Speaker
I didn't know what I was going to do.
00:31:24
Speaker
All I knew was that I couldn't be the general counsel of Barstow Sports any longer. But after Quirky, I had counseled and advised this company, Puffco, which was in Brooklyn at the time, but it was a very small startup. I think when I met the founder, Roger, there were seven employees at the company.
00:31:45
Speaker
But it just so happened that after I left Barstool, Pufco was also seeking more involved counsel. And we're looking to hire a general counsel. And so Roger and I and the team connected again after I left Barstool and said, OK, now it's time for me to rejoin the company in a full-time capacity. That was in 2019. And it's been great.
00:32:13
Speaker
It's certainly very different from Barstool. I have my own challenges here at Puffco. Cannabis is a regulated industry. I am, for the first time in my career, dealing with issues relating to regulated products in that sense. I am heavily involved in
00:32:32
Speaker
public affairs and government affairs lobbying. We're doing a lot of lobbying. Obviously this is an industry where a lot is happening at the legislative level, both federally and across the several States. We are trying to be a voice for the industry and for our community. And that has led me to having to learn a lot about what it means to try to affect legislative change for causes that we believe strongly in. Not to mention I'm still doing
00:33:02
Speaker
A lot of IP, a lot of product work, all of the things that I had done at my previous places of employment. Well, Mark, you've shared some pretty tough stories with us today. I want to end or start to wrap up with a couple of slightly more fun questions. I'm always curious to ask people about a book that you've read, and it could be recent, although I also know you're probably very busy and it may not have been recent, that you'd recommend to our listeners.
00:33:31
Speaker
so i'm currently reading so we have an executive book club at puff go so oh that's awesome yeah so every every two weeks we meet with the executive team we sometimes read books but sometimes we'll read articles hard business review articles we this past week we watched a ted talk from simon cynic
00:33:53
Speaker
And it was a very interesting talk about why, or I can't remember the exact title, I think it's Leaders Eat Last. And the talk was the basis for a book that he had written. So I just picked up the book because I was very, I thought that the TED Talk was incredibly interesting. So I just picked up that book. I read a couple of chapters and it's a really fascinating book. I'm really excited too.
00:34:21
Speaker
I love that idea of an executive book club. I hope that one of the listeners out there does that and then comes back and tells either you or me that they did it because of this episode. I think that's a very cool initiative.
00:34:34
Speaker
To close this out, think back to when you were a young lawyer, maybe before you'd even gone in-house, and what's something that you wish you'd known then, that you know now? Remembering myself as a young lawyer, I naively thought that I could anticipate or dictate the way my career was going to, the direction that it was going to head.
00:34:58
Speaker
And that's just not the case. So I think the piece of advice is just don't expect what you think your career is going to look like today is the way it will look tomorrow. Prepare for anything.
00:35:13
Speaker
Well, you've certainly experienced anything in your career or everything, Mark. Thanks so much for joining us for having such a candid conversation with me. This has really been fantastic. For all of our listeners out there, hope to see you next time. Thanks again for joining, Mark. Thank you, Tyler. It's been a pleasure.
00:35:39
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.