so I was gonna be an academic. So I, uh, taught economics and law at Harvard in the late nineties, um, and was a fellow. And while I did it, I did some work for the Clinton White House, originally around technology policy and then around labor issues. And the Clinton White House was building a cluster of policies based on an idea that under invested communities were untapped retail markets. And Walmart and 7 11 love these policies. And I disagreed with the policies. I said it may be true that in under invested communities and untapped retail market more significantly, it's an untapped talent market. The market for talents, based on resumes resumes correlate with socio economic background, race and gender. But they're not necessarily great predictors of success in a job. And at a college roommate of work of D. E. Shaw, you know, hedge funds are playing large amounts of data to the financial markets. This was the late nineties. Get them to work better. Why couldn't we do the same thing? The labor market? So we use data to solve that problem than the folks who are best in each job to get the job organizations get could get better talent to never be happy. The response was, the guy who came up with the other idea is a very famous Harvard Business School professor. And he's more famous than you are. We're going with him. So I lost the argument. I went back to academia and my academic advisor. I was a fellow, so she was gonna help me get the assistant professor job. She said, I think you're more interested in doing this. They're writing about it. You should go do it. Um, and so I moved to Baltimore because it was a post industrial city and started my first company. Um, Thio basically apply that idea of the software engineering labor market. Um, and realized that being an entrepreneur was was a much better fit for me personally than being an academic. Andi. To this day credit. Her name is Martha Minnow. My, uh, my academic advisor with with giving the excellent career advice

eso, um, at Arena. So Arenas, my second company, my first company was Cattle Light. My second company is arena, Um, and one of things. I realized that my first company, um, which is my first community ever since it's about 800 people. So it's not a massive company, but it's a critical mass business. I'm One of things I realized is that there are things that I'm good at, Things I'm not good at, like we all are on. But I'm not very good at. Actually is process and his companies get bigger, process becomes a process becomes more important. Um and so I very early on brought up, put in place of President Arena. Find the chair and CEO. But there's a president and the president whose name is Myron or he really runs the day to day of the business. My job is, I sort of it sort of sits in a few buckets. One is ideal with capital markets, so managing relationships with investors with influencers raising money when we're doing a financing round. Um, I do a lot of recruiting, so filling out the executive team, making sure that sort of the right people are in the right seats dealing with that. I do a lot of marketing so evangelizing. So I get on a lot of stages and, you know, talk about the company and what it does a lot on di Dio sort of major sales. So you know, a really? If there's a really big deal we're trying to dio or a big channel relationship, I'll get involved in that. So those were probably the four major buckets of things that I do.depends on that. Actually, it's some subset of those four, but depending on sort of where we are in a cycle, um, some will be higher than others. So, for example, arena is getting ready to close and financing right now that financing is my first priority. Um, once that financing is closed, the capital markets peace will drop on my priority list and sort of executive team recruiting will go up higher. Um, marketing probably also go up higher, because when you do it when you do a capital raise, you know, it sort of raises the visibility of a company, So you'll three idea of the leverage thatum, so in cove, it my weeks have changed. Like probably everyone's have, um I used to travel every week, So every week I would be gone at least one night. Andi. Ah, lot of that was marketing eso to go on a stage. You need to be, actually wherever the stages, Um and so with without cove it the travel has shifted. Um, and so I would say I still end up working in some way sort of most of my waking hours. But that doesn't mean that I'm, like, intensely working all those hours. You know, it might mean that you know that I'm, you know, intensely working till 6. 30. Then I'm off for two hours, and then I work to deal with, um, you know, things in a different time zone somewhere later in the, um So, in terms of what the total hours are for a for arena alone, they're not terrible. Maybe 50 or 60 hours a week

So I've been I've been an entrepreneur for a while and the first time I was an entrepreneur, um, I was figuring out what's actually important and what isn't and figuring out whether or not a problem was a big problem or a little problem. I had a lot of trouble figuring out the difference between those on because being on for the second time, I'm sure. Um And so you know, the major challenges ended up things like, you know, we thought X was gonna work. How long do we keep trying acts or what changes did we do? The X, You know, before we realized that the basic idea of X doesn't work into something else. Um, even more than that, I would say that just sort of putting together the workforce, um, is always challenging because the you know, the folks who are really good at playing a particular role is a company printing from revenue to 10 year in revenue. It's a very different Often it's a very different job than taking a business from 10 million in revenue to 100 million rep. And taking a job from 10 to 100 is very different than taking a company from 100,000,005 and so figuring out at what point to sort of move, folks accounted organization. And do we need to bring people in? You know, how do you coach folks and for folks help folks grows as fast as they can, but then ensure folks they're successful. That's you know, that's probably that's probably the piece that, you know, given the challenge sort of implies a sort of emotional connection to that. That's probably the piece that is most challenging to figure out because you know, there, no there never clear cut answers to these things. Everyone's father is a clear cut answer, but rarely is there. So that's probably the sort of major, major challenges and people soyou know, interesting. I think when I first, you know. I mean, my entrepreneurship is all around talent. And, you know, I think when I first started doing this kind of war, my view waas, um that put folks put too much weight on things like years of experience. Um, and I continue actually believe that I think too much weight on years of experience. But there is something that he said, particularly as a manager and leader for, um, knowing yourself and for, um, you know, trust in your instincts, Andi, for having seen fat patterns before for me. Personally, um, you know, the fact that I've, you know, that I sort of went through the 0 10 million and then the 10 million to 100 million. And, you know, my first businesses in the sort of 100 or 500 million sprint now, um makes it much easier for me and lets me think much more rationally about Arena, which is currently in the 10 to 100 million sprint. And so the approach of having seen it before, um actually helps. And so I you know, I went from basically academia to being an entrepreneur on And you know, when folks asked me, you know, sort of What's the best way to get that? If what I really want to do is I want to be an entrepreneur. You know what? I want to be able to sort of scale a really big company working in an environment like that, where you see things blow up and realize that 99% of the things that blow up actually aren't that big a deal, um is a really important lesson on the lesson is not is intellectual, but more than that, it's emotional. And so for me, that actually is sort of the the approach for me that worked, you know, again, just having been through the cycle once made that made that much easier. But if you ask me sort of someone who is graduating from business school, what they really wanted to do was being entrepreneur, working entrepreneurial activities, you know, What I would say is that being in a being in a and a company like that for some period of time so you can see the stuff blow up, and you could see that it's not world. If it blows up, will help you have a much healthier emotional reaction to it and by having a healthy emotional reaction to what you'll do a better job.