00:00:03Unlocking the Power of Quantum Computing
00:13:54Navigating the Future of Public Markets
00:27:17Navigating Career Choices and Success
ABOUT THIS EPISODE
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Join host Monica Enand and guest host Ned Renzi for an enlightening conversation with Thomas Kramer, a distinguished CFO known for steering companies like Cvent, Opower, and IonQ through the complex waters of public offerings and technological advancements.
"If we do not figure out how quantum computing will works our world will eventually be covered with data centers and power plants..."
Thomas break down the evolving landscape of quantum computing and its revolutionary potential to reshape our world by leveraging qubits for remarkable power and energy efficiency. Through Thomas’s extensive experience, we gain insights into the profound implications of quantum technology in transforming data centers and energy consumption, a crucial step in addressing future sustainability challenges.
The conversation moves into the intricacies of public markets and career navigation with Thomas, sharing personal anecdotes that underscore the value of humility and mentorship during pivotal career transitions. Reflect on the current challenges within IPOs and liquidity markets, the impact of the SPAC era on public trust, and the emotional nuances behind organizational budgeting decisions. By examining the role of luck, reputation, and networking, we offer valuable perspectives on achieving career success while balancing strategic financial management with personal growth.
This episode is a wealth of insight on understanding the intersection of technology, finance, and personal development.
Georgianna Moreland - Creator, Executive Producer & Managing Editor;
Matt Stoker - Editor
English
United States
IN THIS EPISODE
SHOW NOTES 🔗
TRANSCRIPT 🔗
WEBVTT
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Things move very, very quickly.
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If we do not figure out how quantum computing will work, the Earth will eventually be covered by data centers and power plants, and we are already today seeing many examples of where quantum computers can outperform classical ones, and what we need now is scale.
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It's not that we need to prove that quantum computers work.
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This is Masterstroke with Monica Enid and Sejal Petruzak, and welcome to our special guest host, Ned Renzi.
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Conversations with founders, CEOs and visionary leaders in technology and beyond.
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This episode is sponsored by Enjoy the Work.
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For over a decade, they've helped more than 300 startup founders build successful companies.
00:00:47.993 --> 00:00:52.832
Many have reached unicorn status, while others have secured meaningful exits.
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Founder growth is key to company growth, and Enjoy the Work focuses on developing both your leadership and operational skills.
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From go-to-market strategies to raising capital and scaling teams, they partner with founders ready to take their companies to the next level.
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Learn more and schedule an intake session at enjoytheworkcom.
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Welcome to Masterstroke.
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We have a very exciting pod today.
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Thank you so much to Ned Renzi, who is co-hosting with me today.
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Ned, thank you so much for being here.
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It's my pleasure, Monica.
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All right, ned.
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We have a really exciting guest who's going to take us into a very serious dimension, so we're going to learn a lot of things today, I think.
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So I'm going to let you introduce the guest, because you have been a longtime friend of Thomas Kramer.
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Tell us who Thomas Kramer is.
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That's right.
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I think I've known Thomas maybe about 25 years or so.
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We met when he was a CFO and co-founder at Cvent, which was a leading SaaS company in the event management space.
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That company ultimately went public and exited for well over a billion dollars and then got taken private by Vista, which.
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So he has that in common with you, monica.
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Yes, after Cvent he became the CFO at Opower, took them public again greater than a billion market cap and then he stayed through the sale and integration with Oracle, which I suspect was a lot of fun, and then currently he's the CFO to quantum computing company IonQ, which I know Monique has a lot of questions on quantum computing, and he took IonQ public at $2 billion valuation.
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So Thomas is three for three in successful exits.
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Prior to all that, he served time at Accenture, bcg and the military, and I used served time with Accenture and BCG because it's probably just the same as serving time in the military.
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So Thomas jokes he's survived three recessions and he's currently looking for the fourth.
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So I'd like to get some predictions from you on that.
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In terms of background, he has a Master in Science and Economics from the Norwegian School of Economics and Stockholm School of Economics, an MBA from Harvard, and has been named CFO of the Year in Washington DC several times.
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I'd also say personally, as I've gotten to know Thomas, he has excellent taste in wine and I think it's okay to say I could give you a budget and you buy cases and just have them shipped to me, which are still some of the best wines I've ever had, and actually at reasonable prices.
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So I'm just dropping some of those nuggets in in case Monica wants to take the conversation in that direction.
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Oh well, we could talk for a very long time about all kinds of fun things, I'm sure, but what I really?
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Thomas, thank you so much, first of all, for being here on Masterstroke.
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Welcome to the show.
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We're really happy to have you here.
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Well, thanks for having me.
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Monica and Ned, thank you so much for giving us your money.
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Almost nobody else wanted to give us money at Cvent and we almost went under, but you saved us.
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So thank you very much.
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Yeah, I joked in the early days before success was obvious.
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I'm going to look really smart or really stupid in a decade and, thanks to you and the rest of the team, it turned out on the smart side.
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Oh, I think you've done a lot of smart things, ned, and definitely backing Reggie and the team at C-Bent and Thomas was incredible.
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Watching that.
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Your success, thomas, is just incredible.
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But you know it's one thing to have one successful exit, one successful, you know, go public billion dollar valuation, but your track record is amazing.
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You know I feel like next time I start a company, can you come join and help me take it public Not that I'm going to start a company, I'm not going to do that, not again.
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I'm very interested.
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You're working on IonQ, which is quantum computing.
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Can you explain, kind of the layperson, four dummies what is quantum computing?
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What is quantum computing is that it represents a new type of supercomputers that is just vastly more powerful and also more energy efficient than what classical computers represent.
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Instead of using transistors, you use qubits, so a quantum bit, and instead of the transistors that we know, which are like light bulbs they're 0 or 1, a qubit, a quantum bit, can be both 0 and 1 at the same time.
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They can also be any number between 0 and 1,.
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They can also be any number between zero and one, including negative one.
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In fact, it's a sphere of numbers.
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But the truth is that if we do not figure out how quantum computing will work, the Earth will eventually be covered by data centers and power plants, and that's really not a great feature feature.
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So that's sort of a cop-out, because quantum computing is something that goes back to 1900.
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It stems from a field of physics called quantum mechanics, and quantum mechanics is a different way of looking at things.
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Many people think that one plus one should always equal two, and we have a perfect way of doing it because it is that way.
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It isn't that way.
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If you look outside, there are no numbers of nature.
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We made them up and quantum mechanics is a different system that explains the universe, and in many ways it explains it better than our classical ways and digital ways, and in many ways it's more efficient at getting to certain solutions.
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And so it's been around for, you know, over 100 years.
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Albert Einstein first tried to prove that it didn't exist, and he then got around to saying well, it does.
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I can't tell you why, but we can observe that it does, and this is what he famously called spooky action at a distance, because he could observe that two elements knew about each other, and even when he changed one, even if they're kilometers apart, at a speed that's faster than light, the other element would know what the first one was doing, and they were not connected by any wires.
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And so that was his um.
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He admitted defeat and will go on to do many other great things.
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It wasn't until 1981 when some other famous physics geek called Feynman issued the statement that nature isn't classical Damn it, it's quantum classical.
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Well, damn it, it's quantum.
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What can you do with a quantum computer?
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The best example is probably something called the traveling seismon, which has to do with how can you get to the most stops.
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If you're going somewhere, and if you think about a FedEx driver, he or she has to make 120 stops a day.
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That is only because of our eight-hour workday, but you think, when you have this limitation, that the great minds at FedEx stack your car for you and give you a list of how you can make the most efficient route between your various stops.
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It turns out they can stack your car but they can't figure out the most efficient route.
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The reason for this is that if you want, with a classical computer, to figure out what is the best route, you have to figure out all the possible routes and how long that would take, and then you pick the fastest one.
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Well, how many possible routes are there between 120 stops?
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This is what we know from high school math.
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It's a factorial, and so, in order to figure out how many there are, it's 120 minus one, so it's 119 times 118, times 117, and so forth, all the way down to one.
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The number gets pretty large, pretty quickly.
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It is larger than the age of the Earth in nanoseconds, and so a classical computer will not be able to calculate this before all the packages have been delivered, a long time ago.
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What a quantum computer does?
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Instead of doing the sequence, it calculates how long it takes for every route at the same time, so it pushes it through simultaneously, and what comes out on the other end is a probability distribution of what is most likely to be the right route.
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You paint an amazing future and I definitely like your future where everything's perfectly optimized and I get my items exactly when I want them and quickly and efficiently, and we do not cover the world with data centers.
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What I want to know is is this like science fiction that is going to happen, like in my children or my grandchildren's timeline, or you know?
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Is this something that you think quantum computing would be broadly commercialized in my lifetime?
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Oh, 100 percent.
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Things move very, very quickly.
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They do Absolutely lifetime.
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Oh, 100, things move very, very quickly, they do absolutely.
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But we were invited to the white house recently for a quantum summit, and so were all the other quantum manufacturers, and asked just that question so when it is quantum gonna hit, like just main mass adoption?
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And depending on who you are, so Microsoft would say well, around 30 years from now, and IBM would say around 20 years from now, and Google would say the same and we're saying in a couple of years.
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So when you ask the question of when is quantum going to reach commercialization, you need to insert a quantifier on your type of hardware, because if your hardware isn't up to it, it's going to take much longer.
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And Microsoft is famously still looking for their qubit, which is the basic building block of a quantum computer.
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So obviously they can't, which is the basic building block of a quantum computer, so obviously they can't build quantum computers.
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But we are already today seeing many examples of where quantum computers can outperform classical ones, and what we need now is scale.
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It's not that we need to prove that quantum computers work.
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That is fascinating and I am so excited about that future.
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If you think about in our lifetimes what Moore's Law has done for us and the technology and where we are in the world and all the benefits that we've had from.
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If you think about the beginning of the transistor probably in 1970 or maybe around then to now, with it shrinking and shrinking and shrinking and all of the amazing technological advancements, this kind of takes it a whole different step and then you know you can see another ushering in a new era.
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Thomas, I'm going to take the conversation in a slightly different direction.
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Over the years, you've been gracious to me in sort of serving as a mentor advisor to some of the executives I've been working with, and something I admired about you is how you just I don't know if level up is the right word, but you started at startups and you've gone through the hyper growth phase.
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You've gone through the IPO, the acquisitions, multiple times and in your current role, right so like how, how did you manage your personal development to sort of level up, you know, for every next phase of growth of the companies you've worked with?
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That is an excellent question, the um.
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The truth is that, uh, companies are organisms just like people, but they grow a lot faster.
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The average company hits prime.
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Well, most companies never get out of the start and so they're dead by year three.
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But the average company probably hits prime somewhere between 10 and 20 years and by 30 they're over.
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The secret to actually surviving is just to be humble and ask.
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And when I was going public with Opar in the field that I knew very little about, and so I just picked up the phone and called other cfos who had gone public in that field and I said, hey, what do you think I should do?
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And I remember one of them, um, who?
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I called her?
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And I said I was on my way to San Francisco and she said well, why don't I just pick you up at SFO and I can drive you to your hotel and we can talk in the car.
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And then on the way she stopped over somewhere and we had lunch and there's this brother-sisterhood of CFOs of like.
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We all know who scary is and so we help, yep.
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That is really important, that's a great example of just sort of asking for help.
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It's one of the things I found when I moved to the Bay Area is there was just a culture of pay it forward, that somebody had helped that person, so they're willing to pay it forward and just continue.
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Well, I think it's important to have that beginner's mind like that you, they're willing to pay it forward and just continue.
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Well, I think it's important to have that beginner's mind, like that you're not afraid to say, hey, I know how to take an event management company public, but I don't know how to do this, and I, you know, I'm not afraid to just ask.
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So I think that's really.
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Well, I know little.
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I grew up on a wet piece of rock in Northern Europe, and so my entire country has 5 million people, and we know, all of us, that if you don't adapt to the rest of the world, well, you're not going to go far.
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So, thomas, while you've leveled up your career I know there's times in between some of these where you took time off you mountain bike, you skied, you ate and drank your way around the world but then you kind of decided to jump back in the game and sort of maybe talk to us a little bit about how you thought about those transitions at those points in life and how do you think about your next act, when to decide how to decide to get back in the game or not first I will say that I skied 30 days last season um so it's possible to have a work life balance.
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Um, but that said, after old power I took roughly five years off.
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I served on boards and, you know, traveled around and did this and that I was pretty happy.
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I was the only board.
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I will admit that.
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And then NEA, who's backed all of my three companies, called and said that IMQ was going to go public and if I wanted to maybe consider taking them public.
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And I asked them how much revenue do you have?
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And when the answer was zero, I said this has been a great call, but I've got to go.
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I was wondering about that.
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And then I felt bad.
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The next day I called my friend back and said hey, you know, I'll speak to your CEO.
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And then I spoke to the CEO and I still said no.
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But then the rumors come out that they're still going public, they're using an interim CFO, which, monica, you know what it takes to go public.
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And so that felt a little sketchy and I said I'd be happy to mentor this guy and just help along, be consultant, whatever.
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And then you know, and I left this as a voicemail and then 40 seconds later the guy called back and go, you invented this guy.
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Who do you want to be this guy?
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And so I was suckered in, partially also because the person who first funded this company was Harry Waller and he was my best man at my wedding and, uh, I was in his, and so, uh, the last, the last company he actually invested in, was I am here and he was a um.
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It was a physic physics major in college and on the weekends he read physics papers and he saw this great paper by two professors, johnson Kim and Chris Monroe, and he just drove down to Duke from their office and said you have to do this.
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This reads like a business plan.
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I'm going to fund you and that's how imq started.
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And so when age what, I realized that I'm like, okay, I should probably take them public, because it was a great connection to this company yeah, I know being with the people that you admire and respect is huge and and you know it's such a rare story to hear about academics writing a paper and somebody saying that reads like a business plan, like that's a pretty unusual story.
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And you know you talked about going public.
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We've been talking about going public and over our careers the three of us we've seen exit windows come and go, but it kind of feels different now.
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I mean there are a lot fewer public companies than there used to be.
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It's unclear that there's even like an attitude in DC towards tech M&A that is friendly.
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It seems maybe possibly hostile and the IPO bar seems really high.
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And the IPO bar seems really high.
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How do you see liquidity markets kind of evolving, especially with private equity and growth equity firms providing liquidity?
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How do you see that over the next few years?
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You know there's an old truism that good companies can always go public, and what's happening is that it's becoming harder for more peripheral companies who have a harder story to tell.
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But we should also be aware that we did this to ourselves.
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What happened in the SPAC era was a travesty of so many companies that had no business being public and they went out and they abused the trust that the public has in the system and in going public.
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I hope that this will change and I think it will change.
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We've also gone through COVID and we've gone through we're still going through two international and military conflicts.
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That interrupts a lot of things around the world, including the Odessa exchange Talk to me about ordering lasers, for instance, from the other side of the world and so these things tend to come and go.
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I both hope and I believe that it will come back.
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Look, I think it's fair to say that throughout history, these macro situations come and go, whether they be wars or recessions or whatever.
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However, you know the metrics do seem to have moved right.
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Like you know, monica's brother it was a founder who I invested in and we took his company public in 99 at 29 or $30 million in revenue, right, and you had small boutique banks that would track them and make a market and trade and provide analyst support and all that kind of stuff, right.
00:21:47.760 --> 00:21:53.096
And it just feels like you know, you know, I don't know, notwithstanding, with zero revenue.
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It just feels like if you're a revenue generating company, it feels like you know you have to be in the hundreds of millions of revenue to be considered for an IPO and a roadshow to get the banks to sign up these days.
00:22:05.474 --> 00:22:07.741
I mean, how do you view that?
00:22:17.996 --> 00:22:18.558
Well, ned, we're both old.
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What is the current value of $20 million in 1999?
00:22:21.954 --> 00:22:29.538
And we're also remembering the outliers.
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The norm used to be back when cement was going public and opar, like you need to get to $100 million the year of when you go public.
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That was just a metric, and then nowadays it feels like it's $200.
00:22:40.590 --> 00:22:47.864
So, yeah, it is becoming harder, but that doesn't mean well, actually, that might be a good thing.
00:22:47.864 --> 00:23:01.068
Harder, but that doesn't mean well, actually, that might be a good thing, because if you don't have to deal with the SEC and quarterly reporting, you have the beauty of just thinking more long term.
00:23:02.615 --> 00:23:11.277
And because somewhere along here and I don't know exactly when this happened, but an IPO used to be a fundraising event.
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You addressed a public market so you could get money.
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That's almost never the case now.
00:23:18.376 --> 00:23:43.103
When you go public, your job is actually to transition your shareholder base from people who like to invest in private companies to people who like to invest in public, and it has very little to do with fundraising, except for the SPAC era, where what they promised was a way to get funding, and some say quickly, some say cheap.
00:23:43.103 --> 00:23:55.468
To me, this backup process felt exactly like the IPO process, but it's not clear how we think about it.
00:23:55.468 --> 00:24:20.604
And if you can go private longer and you're able to fundraise, I mean, I would actually prefer that, except that from a societal perspective, I think there's a lot of good sunshine in being public, so that you're forced to follow similar rules, so you can compare one company to another.
00:24:20.604 --> 00:24:29.586
But I think that the rising bar for going public part of that is just also a reflection on the economy being there.
00:24:30.255 --> 00:24:37.788
Yeah, look, I think on one hand you make some valid points on like because we play in the private markets game, so we are beneficiaries of that.
00:24:37.788 --> 00:24:57.902
When I think about the general public, like my dad, my brother, who you know are public servants they have public pension funds who can't really, you know they're accessing these private companies through very high cost vehicles, right, and paying much higher fees and things like that than they would if it was public.
00:24:57.902 --> 00:25:08.846
You know you're a part of an ETF where the light's shining in as you speak, and so my sense is there's probably fewer people who are benefiting by some of these trends.
00:25:08.846 --> 00:25:09.988
Do you see it that way?
00:25:09.988 --> 00:25:11.451
I would know.
00:25:12.497 --> 00:25:13.682
I would have to go out and look.
00:25:13.682 --> 00:25:33.381
The truth is, if you look at the IPO as an exit, it's better to exit through a sale than through an IPO, and whether people need to invest in these smaller companies, I don't know.
00:25:33.381 --> 00:25:53.267
Actually, I know that that's probably not a good idea for most people because they don't have the ability to actually figure out what's going on, and in that respect, it's better that they're public, because there is some screening functions that happen when you force people to follow the same rulebook.
00:26:00.195 --> 00:26:03.301
We joked earlier that kind of referenced.
00:26:03.301 --> 00:26:07.430
You know you're looking for your fourth recession.
00:26:07.430 --> 00:26:19.847
I know you and I were involved during what I'll call like the first recession in my career and we kind of had to make some drastic moves to what I call default survival mode above any other goals for the company.
00:26:19.847 --> 00:26:30.109
Like if you were a CEO or CFO right now in some of these tech companies, what would you do to prepare your company in case a recession hits?
00:26:30.109 --> 00:26:31.236
Well, the best?
00:26:32.259 --> 00:26:36.748
preparation is to load up on money.
00:26:36.748 --> 00:26:50.445
So the golden rule is that, for me at least, if somebody shows up on your doorstep with two suitcases full of money, take them, because you never know when that situation comes back again.
00:26:50.445 --> 00:27:08.910
However, from an operator's point of view, I think the best preparation for a recession is to run a good company and to be I was going to say cheap, but you can't always be cheap.
00:27:08.910 --> 00:27:12.484
You know it's not necessarily cheap or frugal.
00:27:12.484 --> 00:27:15.208
It is investing in what matters.
00:27:15.990 --> 00:27:17.491
And so running a tight shop.
00:27:17.491 --> 00:27:27.586
Are you an advocate of almost like annually doing a zero-based budget approach and just start from the ground up, line item by line item, every year, every couple of years?
00:27:27.586 --> 00:27:28.714
Like, how do you think about that?
00:27:29.611 --> 00:27:40.064
So somewhere between a zero-based budget and KTLO, keeping the lights on Because there are.
00:27:40.064 --> 00:27:51.575
There's a difference between marketing and be legal and, like G&A, overall, I have to pay rent.
00:27:51.575 --> 00:27:54.576
I don't have to really think about it that much.
00:27:54.576 --> 00:28:05.064
However, it pays to pay attention to the rent and things like insurance.
00:28:05.064 --> 00:28:07.176
It's easy to forget about it.
00:28:07.176 --> 00:28:10.038
So if you don't have a list and go through that, you've done it all.
00:28:10.038 --> 00:28:15.299
Some version of Cerebes should be done.
00:28:15.299 --> 00:28:29.123
I remember when I started at Opar, the budgets were created by taking one month in Excel and then the next cell was previous cell times 1.04.
00:28:29.123 --> 00:28:33.993
And then you just dragged it across and now you had a whole budget.
00:28:33.993 --> 00:28:35.900
That meant absolutely nothing.
00:28:36.280 --> 00:28:40.019
Yeah, everything was just going to grow by 4% every year, right?
00:28:41.911 --> 00:28:57.923
So you do have to think, and we're actually right now going into our budgeting session at IONQ and it's a massive undertaking and you have to justify what you need.
00:28:57.923 --> 00:29:05.303
And we got together and then we have to decide whether we need all of that.
00:29:05.303 --> 00:29:29.961
And it's funny when you do budget cuts before the budget's even approved, because they start at a high number, it's too high, and so we cut it down and people feel this intensely oh, I lost something or somebody got fired, but these are just numbers on a page and nobody's gotten fired yet and if you do this right, you won't have to fire anybody.
00:29:29.961 --> 00:29:48.988
The most harrowing experience professionally for me was when we had to fire 78% of the workforce at C-Bell.
00:29:49.449 --> 00:30:14.844
Oh, my goodness, and we literally had the discussion of hey, should we just let everybody be around for one and a half more months we have a great party, and then we even go home around for one and a half more months, we have a great party, and then we even go home or should we do the responsible thing and cut as hard as we could so that we could have jobs for a few people and that we could honor the commitments we made to our investors and keep trudging on?
00:30:14.844 --> 00:30:17.192
But that trudging wasn't fun.
00:30:17.192 --> 00:30:26.185
That was three years misery and we were just too young and naive to know that we could just throw it all in and leave.
00:30:26.185 --> 00:30:28.057
We had to make it work.
00:30:28.057 --> 00:30:33.722
And again, thank you to Neff for sticking with us, because I know that probably wasn't fun from the outset either.
00:30:34.529 --> 00:30:36.076
Burn the boats kind of strategy.
00:30:36.710 --> 00:30:38.933
Yeah, it sounds like you've had some crazy experience.
00:30:38.933 --> 00:30:51.099
I can't imagine what it's like to have to let 78% of your team go just to keep the lights on, as you said, and survive another day, because really what it's about is just can you survive?
00:30:51.099 --> 00:31:01.711
Can you continue to survive until something can change in the market, the market that your product, your fit, can take hold, that your product, your fit, can take hold?
00:31:01.711 --> 00:31:06.818
So kind of on a personal level, what I wonder is you've had these great successful exits.
00:31:06.818 --> 00:31:25.270
I'm sure there were fun days and then some not so fun times, but you always choose to get back into it and I wonder how do you think about a next act, about a next act?
00:31:25.270 --> 00:31:28.440
Um, and how should somebody think about, like, what are the criteria and how how do they decide what to do for a next act?
00:31:28.460 --> 00:31:44.337
hashtag asking for a friend, thomas, not not at all I'm asking for myself at all well, um, I took two days off between BCG and Cvent, and then I took two days off between Cvent and OBAR.
00:31:44.337 --> 00:31:45.320
Oh my gosh.
00:31:45.320 --> 00:31:50.383
Then my friend he was a mentor to me said that's not smart.
00:31:50.383 --> 00:31:54.237
So I took five years after OBAR.
00:31:54.538 --> 00:31:56.663
Five years, five years.
00:31:56.663 --> 00:32:00.480
I mean I kept busy and I sat on boards and whatnot.
00:32:00.480 --> 00:32:04.999
Five years.
00:32:04.999 --> 00:32:09.049
And I just, I mean I kept busy and I sat on boards and whatnot, uh, but people kept calling and asking hey, do you want to be cfo of this, you want to be cfo of that?
00:32:09.049 --> 00:32:11.974
And it's, the pitch is always the same.
00:32:11.974 --> 00:32:16.564
We have this great sass company what good funding, growing fast.
00:32:16.564 --> 00:32:27.517
We don't go public and none of the recruiters ever say what these companies do is like hey, can you come look at this money for us?
00:32:27.517 --> 00:32:30.843
Right, that doesn't interest me.
00:32:30.843 --> 00:32:34.371
So I'm an economist at heart.
00:32:34.371 --> 00:32:41.714
I like to make things work and I have to be interested in what it is that we're doing Now.
00:32:41.714 --> 00:32:57.643
Grand at Sealand was perhaps not the most intricate business idea, except that when we started Sealand, only 20% of Americans had email.
00:32:57.742 --> 00:33:00.064
Oh, yeah, it was all snail mail.
00:33:00.064 --> 00:33:04.165
Running events was horrific logistically back then.
00:33:04.865 --> 00:33:22.718
And so if you get to be part of building something new and fun, that's what it's about, and I just really like what I'm doing, and it took a while for me to find something that was worth it, and it was completely random how I found it.
00:33:22.718 --> 00:33:36.880
There are many others who will correctly tell you that the best way to do this is to get up every morning and look at 10 opportunities and not pick any of them until you get convinced that this is the one.
00:33:36.880 --> 00:33:48.241
I've been pretty lucky throughout my entire career and just things present themselves and I've said, yes, I'll take that.
00:33:48.241 --> 00:33:48.803
Thank you.
00:33:49.631 --> 00:33:50.172
I don't think you're.
00:33:50.172 --> 00:33:53.821
I understand what you mean by you think you've been pretty lucky.
00:33:53.821 --> 00:33:55.712
I don't think it's just luck.
00:33:55.712 --> 00:34:00.482
I think it's, you know, establishing a reputation, a track record.
00:34:00.482 --> 00:34:10.590
I think it's establishing a reputation, a track record, people who know you, a network of people who want to work with you again, who hear about your work.
00:34:15.030 --> 00:34:17.710
So obviously, yes, there's a little bit of luck involved in all of our lives, but it sounds like you've done a lot right to get there.
00:34:17.710 --> 00:34:27.644
Well, luck does favor the prepared, but there are so many ways that you can be successful.
00:34:27.644 --> 00:34:49.371
There isn't one way, so it's hard for me to say you have to do X, y or Z, but what I do know is that you should love what you do, because if you don't, there are so many other things you can do that you should be doing one of those well, thomas, this has been a great conversation.
00:34:49.512 --> 00:34:58.277
We learned about quantum computing, we learned about public markets and what it's like to be in fast-growing startups and m&a um.
00:34:58.277 --> 00:35:00.902
So thank you so much for being with us today.
00:35:00.902 --> 00:35:04.333
We really appreciate, really appreciate you sharing your wisdom.
00:35:06.057 --> 00:35:08.282
Monica and Ned thanks very much for having me.
00:35:08.282 --> 00:35:12.659
I give my best to achieve a sense that there might be a connection there.
00:35:13.420 --> 00:35:20.119
He's my brother, and that has been our episode of Masterstroke.
00:35:20.119 --> 00:35:21.463
Another episode of Masterstroke.
00:35:21.463 --> 00:35:27.342
Thank you to Thomas Kramer, thank you so much to Ned Renzi and to Georgiana Moreland, our executive producer.
00:35:37.431 --> 00:35:38.556
Thank you for listening today.
00:35:38.556 --> 00:35:40.657
We would love for you to follow and subscribe.
00:35:40.657 --> 00:35:42.898
Monica and Sejo would love to hear from you.
00:35:42.898 --> 00:35:47.362
You can text us directly from the link in the show notes of this episode.
00:35:47.362 --> 00:35:53.655
You can also find us on the LinkedIn page at Masterstroke Podcast with Monica Enid and Sejo Petrzak.
00:35:53.655 --> 00:35:54.775
Until next time.
00:00:03.849 --> 00:00:05.232
Things move very, very quickly.
00:00:05.232 --> 00:00:22.426
If we do not figure out how quantum computing will work, the Earth will eventually be covered by data centers and power plants, and we are already today seeing many examples of where quantum computers can outperform classical ones, and what we need now is scale.
00:00:22.426 --> 00:00:26.210
It's not that we need to prove that quantum computers work.
00:00:26.320 --> 00:00:33.729
This is Masterstroke with Monica Enid and Sejal Petruzak, and welcome to our special guest host, Ned Renzi.
00:00:33.729 --> 00:00:39.932
Conversations with founders, CEOs and visionary leaders in technology and beyond.
00:00:39.932 --> 00:00:42.468
This episode is sponsored by Enjoy the Work.
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Learn more and schedule an intake session at enjoytheworkcom.
00:01:23.421 --> 00:01:25.108
Welcome to Masterstroke.
00:01:25.108 --> 00:01:27.748
We have a very exciting pod today.
00:01:27.748 --> 00:01:31.811
Thank you so much to Ned Renzi, who is co-hosting with me today.
00:01:31.811 --> 00:01:33.364
Ned, thank you so much for being here.
00:01:33.385 --> 00:01:34.969
It's my pleasure, Monica.
00:01:35.760 --> 00:01:36.240
All right, ned.
00:01:36.240 --> 00:01:44.289
We have a really exciting guest who's going to take us into a very serious dimension, so we're going to learn a lot of things today, I think.
00:01:44.289 --> 00:01:49.548
So I'm going to let you introduce the guest, because you have been a longtime friend of Thomas Kramer.
00:01:49.548 --> 00:01:50.951
Tell us who Thomas Kramer is.
00:01:51.799 --> 00:01:52.161
That's right.
00:01:52.161 --> 00:01:55.331
I think I've known Thomas maybe about 25 years or so.
00:01:55.331 --> 00:02:02.512
We met when he was a CFO and co-founder at Cvent, which was a leading SaaS company in the event management space.
00:02:02.512 --> 00:02:10.949
That company ultimately went public and exited for well over a billion dollars and then got taken private by Vista, which.
00:02:10.949 --> 00:02:13.001
So he has that in common with you, monica.
00:02:13.001 --> 00:02:42.912
Yes, after Cvent he became the CFO at Opower, took them public again greater than a billion market cap and then he stayed through the sale and integration with Oracle, which I suspect was a lot of fun, and then currently he's the CFO to quantum computing company IonQ, which I know Monique has a lot of questions on quantum computing, and he took IonQ public at $2 billion valuation.
00:02:42.912 --> 00:02:46.050
So Thomas is three for three in successful exits.
00:02:47.281 --> 00:02:58.774
Prior to all that, he served time at Accenture, bcg and the military, and I used served time with Accenture and BCG because it's probably just the same as serving time in the military.
00:02:58.774 --> 00:03:06.552
So Thomas jokes he's survived three recessions and he's currently looking for the fourth.
00:03:06.552 --> 00:03:09.146
So I'd like to get some predictions from you on that.
00:03:09.146 --> 00:03:24.264
In terms of background, he has a Master in Science and Economics from the Norwegian School of Economics and Stockholm School of Economics, an MBA from Harvard, and has been named CFO of the Year in Washington DC several times.
00:03:24.264 --> 00:03:39.991
I'd also say personally, as I've gotten to know Thomas, he has excellent taste in wine and I think it's okay to say I could give you a budget and you buy cases and just have them shipped to me, which are still some of the best wines I've ever had, and actually at reasonable prices.
00:03:39.991 --> 00:03:45.812
So I'm just dropping some of those nuggets in in case Monica wants to take the conversation in that direction.
00:03:46.419 --> 00:03:51.622
Oh well, we could talk for a very long time about all kinds of fun things, I'm sure, but what I really?
00:03:51.622 --> 00:03:54.792
Thomas, thank you so much, first of all, for being here on Masterstroke.
00:03:54.792 --> 00:03:55.622
Welcome to the show.
00:03:55.622 --> 00:03:57.008
We're really happy to have you here.
00:03:58.643 --> 00:03:59.614
Well, thanks for having me.
00:03:59.614 --> 00:04:03.042
Monica and Ned, thank you so much for giving us your money.
00:04:03.042 --> 00:04:08.766
Almost nobody else wanted to give us money at Cvent and we almost went under, but you saved us.
00:04:08.766 --> 00:04:09.788
So thank you very much.
00:04:10.288 --> 00:04:14.070
Yeah, I joked in the early days before success was obvious.
00:04:14.070 --> 00:04:21.357
I'm going to look really smart or really stupid in a decade and, thanks to you and the rest of the team, it turned out on the smart side.
00:04:23.980 --> 00:04:29.050
Oh, I think you've done a lot of smart things, ned, and definitely backing Reggie and the team at C-Bent and Thomas was incredible.
00:04:29.050 --> 00:04:30.593
Watching that.
00:04:30.593 --> 00:04:33.043
Your success, thomas, is just incredible.
00:04:33.043 --> 00:04:47.033
But you know it's one thing to have one successful exit, one successful, you know, go public billion dollar valuation, but your track record is amazing.
00:04:47.033 --> 00:04:56.408
You know I feel like next time I start a company, can you come join and help me take it public Not that I'm going to start a company, I'm not going to do that, not again.
00:04:56.408 --> 00:04:57.831
I'm very interested.
00:04:57.831 --> 00:05:00.884
You're working on IonQ, which is quantum computing.
00:05:00.884 --> 00:05:06.074
Can you explain, kind of the layperson, four dummies what is quantum computing?
00:05:06.519 --> 00:05:20.319
What is quantum computing is that it represents a new type of supercomputers that is just vastly more powerful and also more energy efficient than what classical computers represent.
00:05:20.319 --> 00:05:39.603
Instead of using transistors, you use qubits, so a quantum bit, and instead of the transistors that we know, which are like light bulbs they're 0 or 1, a qubit, a quantum bit, can be both 0 and 1 at the same time.
00:05:39.603 --> 00:05:43.908
They can also be any number between 0 and 1,.
00:05:43.908 --> 00:05:46.410
They can also be any number between zero and one, including negative one.
00:05:46.410 --> 00:05:47.951
In fact, it's a sphere of numbers.
00:05:47.951 --> 00:06:12.100
But the truth is that if we do not figure out how quantum computing will work, the Earth will eventually be covered by data centers and power plants, and that's really not a great feature feature.
00:06:12.100 --> 00:06:15.185
So that's sort of a cop-out, because quantum computing is something that goes back to 1900.
00:06:15.185 --> 00:06:22.742
It stems from a field of physics called quantum mechanics, and quantum mechanics is a different way of looking at things.
00:06:22.742 --> 00:06:33.232
Many people think that one plus one should always equal two, and we have a perfect way of doing it because it is that way.
00:06:33.232 --> 00:06:34.293
It isn't that way.
00:06:34.293 --> 00:06:37.475
If you look outside, there are no numbers of nature.
00:06:37.475 --> 00:07:03.204
We made them up and quantum mechanics is a different system that explains the universe, and in many ways it explains it better than our classical ways and digital ways, and in many ways it's more efficient at getting to certain solutions.
00:07:03.204 --> 00:07:05.812
And so it's been around for, you know, over 100 years.
00:07:05.812 --> 00:07:14.788
Albert Einstein first tried to prove that it didn't exist, and he then got around to saying well, it does.
00:07:14.788 --> 00:07:40.122
I can't tell you why, but we can observe that it does, and this is what he famously called spooky action at a distance, because he could observe that two elements knew about each other, and even when he changed one, even if they're kilometers apart, at a speed that's faster than light, the other element would know what the first one was doing, and they were not connected by any wires.
00:07:40.122 --> 00:07:44.430
And so that was his um.
00:07:44.430 --> 00:07:48.355
He admitted defeat and will go on to do many other great things.
00:07:48.355 --> 00:08:10.269
It wasn't until 1981 when some other famous physics geek called Feynman issued the statement that nature isn't classical Damn it, it's quantum classical.
00:08:10.269 --> 00:08:11.370
Well, damn it, it's quantum.
00:08:11.389 --> 00:08:12.651
What can you do with a quantum computer?
00:08:12.651 --> 00:08:23.132
The best example is probably something called the traveling seismon, which has to do with how can you get to the most stops.
00:08:23.132 --> 00:08:30.584
If you're going somewhere, and if you think about a FedEx driver, he or she has to make 120 stops a day.
00:08:30.584 --> 00:08:47.124
That is only because of our eight-hour workday, but you think, when you have this limitation, that the great minds at FedEx stack your car for you and give you a list of how you can make the most efficient route between your various stops.
00:08:47.124 --> 00:08:52.682
It turns out they can stack your car but they can't figure out the most efficient route.
00:08:53.682 --> 00:09:07.503
The reason for this is that if you want, with a classical computer, to figure out what is the best route, you have to figure out all the possible routes and how long that would take, and then you pick the fastest one.
00:09:07.503 --> 00:09:11.875
Well, how many possible routes are there between 120 stops?
00:09:11.875 --> 00:09:14.863
This is what we know from high school math.
00:09:14.863 --> 00:09:26.715
It's a factorial, and so, in order to figure out how many there are, it's 120 minus one, so it's 119 times 118, times 117, and so forth, all the way down to one.
00:09:26.820 --> 00:09:28.788
The number gets pretty large, pretty quickly.
00:09:29.880 --> 00:09:40.429
It is larger than the age of the Earth in nanoseconds, and so a classical computer will not be able to calculate this before all the packages have been delivered, a long time ago.
00:09:40.429 --> 00:09:43.445
What a quantum computer does?
00:09:43.445 --> 00:10:00.533
Instead of doing the sequence, it calculates how long it takes for every route at the same time, so it pushes it through simultaneously, and what comes out on the other end is a probability distribution of what is most likely to be the right route.
00:10:01.341 --> 00:10:15.311
You paint an amazing future and I definitely like your future where everything's perfectly optimized and I get my items exactly when I want them and quickly and efficiently, and we do not cover the world with data centers.
00:10:15.311 --> 00:10:33.261
What I want to know is is this like science fiction that is going to happen, like in my children or my grandchildren's timeline, or you know?
00:10:33.261 --> 00:10:40.434
Is this something that you think quantum computing would be broadly commercialized in my lifetime?
00:10:42.062 --> 00:10:42.864
Oh, 100 percent.
00:10:42.864 --> 00:10:44.730
Things move very, very quickly.
00:10:44.730 --> 00:10:49.782
They do Absolutely lifetime.
00:10:49.782 --> 00:10:51.488
Oh, 100, things move very, very quickly, they do absolutely.
00:10:51.488 --> 00:11:04.551
But we were invited to the white house recently for a quantum summit, and so were all the other quantum manufacturers, and asked just that question so when it is quantum gonna hit, like just main mass adoption?
00:11:04.551 --> 00:11:18.768
And depending on who you are, so Microsoft would say well, around 30 years from now, and IBM would say around 20 years from now, and Google would say the same and we're saying in a couple of years.
00:11:19.981 --> 00:11:37.688
So when you ask the question of when is quantum going to reach commercialization, you need to insert a quantifier on your type of hardware, because if your hardware isn't up to it, it's going to take much longer.
00:11:37.688 --> 00:11:42.950
And Microsoft is famously still looking for their qubit, which is the basic building block of a quantum computer.
00:11:42.950 --> 00:11:48.869
So obviously they can't, which is the basic building block of a quantum computer, so obviously they can't build quantum computers.
00:11:48.869 --> 00:11:59.067
But we are already today seeing many examples of where quantum computers can outperform classical ones, and what we need now is scale.
00:11:59.067 --> 00:12:02.909
It's not that we need to prove that quantum computers work.
00:12:04.075 --> 00:12:08.317
That is fascinating and I am so excited about that future.
00:12:08.317 --> 00:12:16.803
If you think about in our lifetimes what Moore's Law has done for us and the technology and where we are in the world and all the benefits that we've had from.
00:12:16.803 --> 00:12:35.615
If you think about the beginning of the transistor probably in 1970 or maybe around then to now, with it shrinking and shrinking and shrinking and all of the amazing technological advancements, this kind of takes it a whole different step and then you know you can see another ushering in a new era.
00:12:47.729 --> 00:12:50.491
Thomas, I'm going to take the conversation in a slightly different direction.
00:12:50.491 --> 00:13:08.610
Over the years, you've been gracious to me in sort of serving as a mentor advisor to some of the executives I've been working with, and something I admired about you is how you just I don't know if level up is the right word, but you started at startups and you've gone through the hyper growth phase.
00:13:08.610 --> 00:13:24.029
You've gone through the IPO, the acquisitions, multiple times and in your current role, right so like how, how did you manage your personal development to sort of level up, you know, for every next phase of growth of the companies you've worked with?
00:13:25.655 --> 00:13:27.359
That is an excellent question, the um.
00:13:27.359 --> 00:13:37.740
The truth is that, uh, companies are organisms just like people, but they grow a lot faster.
00:13:37.740 --> 00:13:41.990
The average company hits prime.
00:13:41.990 --> 00:13:47.078
Well, most companies never get out of the start and so they're dead by year three.
00:13:47.078 --> 00:13:53.830
But the average company probably hits prime somewhere between 10 and 20 years and by 30 they're over.
00:13:53.830 --> 00:13:59.528
The secret to actually surviving is just to be humble and ask.
00:14:00.956 --> 00:14:20.729
And when I was going public with Opar in the field that I knew very little about, and so I just picked up the phone and called other cfos who had gone public in that field and I said, hey, what do you think I should do?
00:14:20.729 --> 00:14:25.986
And I remember one of them, um, who?
00:14:25.986 --> 00:14:27.068
I called her?
00:14:27.068 --> 00:14:35.823
And I said I was on my way to San Francisco and she said well, why don't I just pick you up at SFO and I can drive you to your hotel and we can talk in the car.
00:14:35.823 --> 00:14:46.928
And then on the way she stopped over somewhere and we had lunch and there's this brother-sisterhood of CFOs of like.
00:14:46.928 --> 00:14:52.995
We all know who scary is and so we help, yep.
00:14:53.197 --> 00:14:57.787
That is really important, that's a great example of just sort of asking for help.
00:14:57.787 --> 00:15:06.125
It's one of the things I found when I moved to the Bay Area is there was just a culture of pay it forward, that somebody had helped that person, so they're willing to pay it forward and just continue.
00:15:06.125 --> 00:15:08.673
Well, I think it's important to have that beginner's mind like that you, they're willing to pay it forward and just continue.
00:15:08.692 --> 00:15:23.097
Well, I think it's important to have that beginner's mind, like that you're not afraid to say, hey, I know how to take an event management company public, but I don't know how to do this, and I, you know, I'm not afraid to just ask.
00:15:23.097 --> 00:15:24.640
So I think that's really.
00:15:24.660 --> 00:15:25.602
Well, I know little.
00:15:25.602 --> 00:15:41.288
I grew up on a wet piece of rock in Northern Europe, and so my entire country has 5 million people, and we know, all of us, that if you don't adapt to the rest of the world, well, you're not going to go far.
00:15:42.256 --> 00:16:17.076
So, thomas, while you've leveled up your career I know there's times in between some of these where you took time off you mountain bike, you skied, you ate and drank your way around the world but then you kind of decided to jump back in the game and sort of maybe talk to us a little bit about how you thought about those transitions at those points in life and how do you think about your next act, when to decide how to decide to get back in the game or not first I will say that I skied 30 days last season um so it's possible to have a work life balance.
00:16:17.856 --> 00:16:24.644
Um, but that said, after old power I took roughly five years off.
00:16:24.644 --> 00:16:33.243
I served on boards and, you know, traveled around and did this and that I was pretty happy.
00:16:33.243 --> 00:16:33.936
I was the only board.
00:16:33.936 --> 00:16:35.620
I will admit that.
00:16:35.620 --> 00:16:52.427
And then NEA, who's backed all of my three companies, called and said that IMQ was going to go public and if I wanted to maybe consider taking them public.
00:16:52.427 --> 00:16:55.201
And I asked them how much revenue do you have?
00:16:55.201 --> 00:17:01.187
And when the answer was zero, I said this has been a great call, but I've got to go.
00:17:02.977 --> 00:17:04.383
I was wondering about that.
00:17:08.616 --> 00:17:10.542
And then I felt bad.
00:17:10.542 --> 00:17:17.685
The next day I called my friend back and said hey, you know, I'll speak to your CEO.
00:17:17.685 --> 00:17:23.007
And then I spoke to the CEO and I still said no.
00:17:23.007 --> 00:17:37.048
But then the rumors come out that they're still going public, they're using an interim CFO, which, monica, you know what it takes to go public.
00:17:37.048 --> 00:17:46.428
And so that felt a little sketchy and I said I'd be happy to mentor this guy and just help along, be consultant, whatever.
00:17:47.535 --> 00:17:54.644
And then you know, and I left this as a voicemail and then 40 seconds later the guy called back and go, you invented this guy.
00:17:54.644 --> 00:17:55.547
Who do you want to be this guy?
00:17:55.547 --> 00:18:23.857
And so I was suckered in, partially also because the person who first funded this company was Harry Waller and he was my best man at my wedding and, uh, I was in his, and so, uh, the last, the last company he actually invested in, was I am here and he was a um.
00:18:23.857 --> 00:18:45.481
It was a physic physics major in college and on the weekends he read physics papers and he saw this great paper by two professors, johnson Kim and Chris Monroe, and he just drove down to Duke from their office and said you have to do this.
00:18:45.481 --> 00:18:47.280
This reads like a business plan.
00:18:47.280 --> 00:18:53.402
I'm going to fund you and that's how imq started.
00:18:53.422 --> 00:19:13.248
And so when age what, I realized that I'm like, okay, I should probably take them public, because it was a great connection to this company yeah, I know being with the people that you admire and respect is huge and and you know it's such a rare story to hear about academics writing a paper and somebody saying that reads like a business plan, like that's a pretty unusual story.
00:19:13.248 --> 00:19:17.082
And you know you talked about going public.
00:19:17.082 --> 00:19:26.238
We've been talking about going public and over our careers the three of us we've seen exit windows come and go, but it kind of feels different now.
00:19:26.238 --> 00:19:29.987
I mean there are a lot fewer public companies than there used to be.
00:19:29.987 --> 00:19:40.970
It's unclear that there's even like an attitude in DC towards tech M&A that is friendly.
00:19:40.970 --> 00:19:46.684
It seems maybe possibly hostile and the IPO bar seems really high.
00:19:46.684 --> 00:19:49.199
And the IPO bar seems really high.
00:19:49.199 --> 00:19:55.969
How do you see liquidity markets kind of evolving, especially with private equity and growth equity firms providing liquidity?
00:20:00.905 --> 00:20:02.894
How do you see that over the next few years?
00:20:02.894 --> 00:20:14.803
You know there's an old truism that good companies can always go public, and what's happening is that it's becoming harder for more peripheral companies who have a harder story to tell.
00:20:14.803 --> 00:20:19.746
But we should also be aware that we did this to ourselves.
00:20:19.746 --> 00:20:40.069
What happened in the SPAC era was a travesty of so many companies that had no business being public and they went out and they abused the trust that the public has in the system and in going public.
00:20:40.069 --> 00:20:44.096
I hope that this will change and I think it will change.
00:20:44.096 --> 00:20:53.863
We've also gone through COVID and we've gone through we're still going through two international and military conflicts.
00:20:53.863 --> 00:21:07.403
That interrupts a lot of things around the world, including the Odessa exchange Talk to me about ordering lasers, for instance, from the other side of the world and so these things tend to come and go.
00:21:07.403 --> 00:21:11.869
I both hope and I believe that it will come back.
00:21:12.694 --> 00:21:20.690
Look, I think it's fair to say that throughout history, these macro situations come and go, whether they be wars or recessions or whatever.
00:21:20.690 --> 00:21:26.183
However, you know the metrics do seem to have moved right.
00:21:26.183 --> 00:21:47.760
Like you know, monica's brother it was a founder who I invested in and we took his company public in 99 at 29 or $30 million in revenue, right, and you had small boutique banks that would track them and make a market and trade and provide analyst support and all that kind of stuff, right.
00:21:47.760 --> 00:21:53.096
And it just feels like you know, you know, I don't know, notwithstanding, with zero revenue.
00:21:53.096 --> 00:22:05.474
It just feels like if you're a revenue generating company, it feels like you know you have to be in the hundreds of millions of revenue to be considered for an IPO and a roadshow to get the banks to sign up these days.
00:22:05.474 --> 00:22:07.741
I mean, how do you view that?
00:22:17.996 --> 00:22:18.558
Well, ned, we're both old.
00:22:18.558 --> 00:22:21.954
What is the current value of $20 million in 1999?
00:22:21.954 --> 00:22:29.538
And we're also remembering the outliers.
00:22:29.538 --> 00:22:35.449
The norm used to be back when cement was going public and opar, like you need to get to $100 million the year of when you go public.
00:22:35.449 --> 00:22:40.590
That was just a metric, and then nowadays it feels like it's $200.
00:22:40.590 --> 00:22:47.864
So, yeah, it is becoming harder, but that doesn't mean well, actually, that might be a good thing.
00:22:47.864 --> 00:23:01.068
Harder, but that doesn't mean well, actually, that might be a good thing, because if you don't have to deal with the SEC and quarterly reporting, you have the beauty of just thinking more long term.
00:23:02.615 --> 00:23:11.277
And because somewhere along here and I don't know exactly when this happened, but an IPO used to be a fundraising event.
00:23:11.277 --> 00:23:15.744
You addressed a public market so you could get money.
00:23:15.744 --> 00:23:18.376
That's almost never the case now.
00:23:18.376 --> 00:23:43.103
When you go public, your job is actually to transition your shareholder base from people who like to invest in private companies to people who like to invest in public, and it has very little to do with fundraising, except for the SPAC era, where what they promised was a way to get funding, and some say quickly, some say cheap.
00:23:43.103 --> 00:23:55.468
To me, this backup process felt exactly like the IPO process, but it's not clear how we think about it.
00:23:55.468 --> 00:24:20.604
And if you can go private longer and you're able to fundraise, I mean, I would actually prefer that, except that from a societal perspective, I think there's a lot of good sunshine in being public, so that you're forced to follow similar rules, so you can compare one company to another.
00:24:20.604 --> 00:24:29.586
But I think that the rising bar for going public part of that is just also a reflection on the economy being there.
00:24:30.255 --> 00:24:37.788
Yeah, look, I think on one hand you make some valid points on like because we play in the private markets game, so we are beneficiaries of that.
00:24:37.788 --> 00:24:57.902
When I think about the general public, like my dad, my brother, who you know are public servants they have public pension funds who can't really, you know they're accessing these private companies through very high cost vehicles, right, and paying much higher fees and things like that than they would if it was public.
00:24:57.902 --> 00:25:08.846
You know you're a part of an ETF where the light's shining in as you speak, and so my sense is there's probably fewer people who are benefiting by some of these trends.
00:25:08.846 --> 00:25:09.988
Do you see it that way?
00:25:09.988 --> 00:25:11.451
I would know.
00:25:12.497 --> 00:25:13.682
I would have to go out and look.
00:25:13.682 --> 00:25:33.381
The truth is, if you look at the IPO as an exit, it's better to exit through a sale than through an IPO, and whether people need to invest in these smaller companies, I don't know.
00:25:33.381 --> 00:25:53.267
Actually, I know that that's probably not a good idea for most people because they don't have the ability to actually figure out what's going on, and in that respect, it's better that they're public, because there is some screening functions that happen when you force people to follow the same rulebook.
00:26:00.195 --> 00:26:03.301
We joked earlier that kind of referenced.
00:26:03.301 --> 00:26:07.430
You know you're looking for your fourth recession.
00:26:07.430 --> 00:26:19.847
I know you and I were involved during what I'll call like the first recession in my career and we kind of had to make some drastic moves to what I call default survival mode above any other goals for the company.
00:26:19.847 --> 00:26:30.109
Like if you were a CEO or CFO right now in some of these tech companies, what would you do to prepare your company in case a recession hits?
00:26:30.109 --> 00:26:31.236
Well, the best?
00:26:32.259 --> 00:26:36.748
preparation is to load up on money.
00:26:36.748 --> 00:26:50.445
So the golden rule is that, for me at least, if somebody shows up on your doorstep with two suitcases full of money, take them, because you never know when that situation comes back again.
00:26:50.445 --> 00:27:08.910
However, from an operator's point of view, I think the best preparation for a recession is to run a good company and to be I was going to say cheap, but you can't always be cheap.
00:27:08.910 --> 00:27:12.484
You know it's not necessarily cheap or frugal.
00:27:12.484 --> 00:27:15.208
It is investing in what matters.
00:27:15.990 --> 00:27:17.491
And so running a tight shop.
00:27:17.491 --> 00:27:27.586
Are you an advocate of almost like annually doing a zero-based budget approach and just start from the ground up, line item by line item, every year, every couple of years?
00:27:27.586 --> 00:27:28.714
Like, how do you think about that?
00:27:29.611 --> 00:27:40.064
So somewhere between a zero-based budget and KTLO, keeping the lights on Because there are.
00:27:40.064 --> 00:27:51.575
There's a difference between marketing and be legal and, like G&A, overall, I have to pay rent.
00:27:51.575 --> 00:27:54.576
I don't have to really think about it that much.
00:27:54.576 --> 00:28:05.064
However, it pays to pay attention to the rent and things like insurance.
00:28:05.064 --> 00:28:07.176
It's easy to forget about it.
00:28:07.176 --> 00:28:10.038
So if you don't have a list and go through that, you've done it all.
00:28:10.038 --> 00:28:15.299
Some version of Cerebes should be done.
00:28:15.299 --> 00:28:29.123
I remember when I started at Opar, the budgets were created by taking one month in Excel and then the next cell was previous cell times 1.04.
00:28:29.123 --> 00:28:33.993
And then you just dragged it across and now you had a whole budget.
00:28:33.993 --> 00:28:35.900
That meant absolutely nothing.
00:28:36.280 --> 00:28:40.019
Yeah, everything was just going to grow by 4% every year, right?
00:28:41.911 --> 00:28:57.923
So you do have to think, and we're actually right now going into our budgeting session at IONQ and it's a massive undertaking and you have to justify what you need.
00:28:57.923 --> 00:29:05.303
And we got together and then we have to decide whether we need all of that.
00:29:05.303 --> 00:29:29.961
And it's funny when you do budget cuts before the budget's even approved, because they start at a high number, it's too high, and so we cut it down and people feel this intensely oh, I lost something or somebody got fired, but these are just numbers on a page and nobody's gotten fired yet and if you do this right, you won't have to fire anybody.
00:29:29.961 --> 00:29:48.988
The most harrowing experience professionally for me was when we had to fire 78% of the workforce at C-Bell.
00:29:49.449 --> 00:30:14.844
Oh, my goodness, and we literally had the discussion of hey, should we just let everybody be around for one and a half more months we have a great party, and then we even go home around for one and a half more months, we have a great party, and then we even go home or should we do the responsible thing and cut as hard as we could so that we could have jobs for a few people and that we could honor the commitments we made to our investors and keep trudging on?
00:30:14.844 --> 00:30:17.192
But that trudging wasn't fun.
00:30:17.192 --> 00:30:26.185
That was three years misery and we were just too young and naive to know that we could just throw it all in and leave.
00:30:26.185 --> 00:30:28.057
We had to make it work.
00:30:28.057 --> 00:30:33.722
And again, thank you to Neff for sticking with us, because I know that probably wasn't fun from the outset either.
00:30:34.529 --> 00:30:36.076
Burn the boats kind of strategy.
00:30:36.710 --> 00:30:38.933
Yeah, it sounds like you've had some crazy experience.
00:30:38.933 --> 00:30:51.099
I can't imagine what it's like to have to let 78% of your team go just to keep the lights on, as you said, and survive another day, because really what it's about is just can you survive?
00:30:51.099 --> 00:31:01.711
Can you continue to survive until something can change in the market, the market that your product, your fit, can take hold, that your product, your fit, can take hold?
00:31:01.711 --> 00:31:06.818
So kind of on a personal level, what I wonder is you've had these great successful exits.
00:31:06.818 --> 00:31:25.270
I'm sure there were fun days and then some not so fun times, but you always choose to get back into it and I wonder how do you think about a next act, about a next act?
00:31:25.270 --> 00:31:28.440
Um, and how should somebody think about, like, what are the criteria and how how do they decide what to do for a next act?
00:31:28.460 --> 00:31:44.337
hashtag asking for a friend, thomas, not not at all I'm asking for myself at all well, um, I took two days off between BCG and Cvent, and then I took two days off between Cvent and OBAR.
00:31:44.337 --> 00:31:45.320
Oh my gosh.
00:31:45.320 --> 00:31:50.383
Then my friend he was a mentor to me said that's not smart.
00:31:50.383 --> 00:31:54.237
So I took five years after OBAR.
00:31:54.538 --> 00:31:56.663
Five years, five years.
00:31:56.663 --> 00:32:00.480
I mean I kept busy and I sat on boards and whatnot.
00:32:00.480 --> 00:32:04.999
Five years.
00:32:04.999 --> 00:32:09.049
And I just, I mean I kept busy and I sat on boards and whatnot, uh, but people kept calling and asking hey, do you want to be cfo of this, you want to be cfo of that?
00:32:09.049 --> 00:32:11.974
And it's, the pitch is always the same.
00:32:11.974 --> 00:32:16.564
We have this great sass company what good funding, growing fast.
00:32:16.564 --> 00:32:27.517
We don't go public and none of the recruiters ever say what these companies do is like hey, can you come look at this money for us?
00:32:27.517 --> 00:32:30.843
Right, that doesn't interest me.
00:32:30.843 --> 00:32:34.371
So I'm an economist at heart.
00:32:34.371 --> 00:32:41.714
I like to make things work and I have to be interested in what it is that we're doing Now.
00:32:41.714 --> 00:32:57.643
Grand at Sealand was perhaps not the most intricate business idea, except that when we started Sealand, only 20% of Americans had email.
00:32:57.742 --> 00:33:00.064
Oh, yeah, it was all snail mail.
00:33:00.064 --> 00:33:04.165
Running events was horrific logistically back then.
00:33:04.865 --> 00:33:22.718
And so if you get to be part of building something new and fun, that's what it's about, and I just really like what I'm doing, and it took a while for me to find something that was worth it, and it was completely random how I found it.
00:33:22.718 --> 00:33:36.880
There are many others who will correctly tell you that the best way to do this is to get up every morning and look at 10 opportunities and not pick any of them until you get convinced that this is the one.
00:33:36.880 --> 00:33:48.241
I've been pretty lucky throughout my entire career and just things present themselves and I've said, yes, I'll take that.
00:33:48.241 --> 00:33:48.803
Thank you.
00:33:49.631 --> 00:33:50.172
I don't think you're.
00:33:50.172 --> 00:33:53.821
I understand what you mean by you think you've been pretty lucky.
00:33:53.821 --> 00:33:55.712
I don't think it's just luck.
00:33:55.712 --> 00:34:00.482
I think it's, you know, establishing a reputation, a track record.
00:34:00.482 --> 00:34:10.590
I think it's establishing a reputation, a track record, people who know you, a network of people who want to work with you again, who hear about your work.
00:34:15.030 --> 00:34:17.710
So obviously, yes, there's a little bit of luck involved in all of our lives, but it sounds like you've done a lot right to get there.
00:34:17.710 --> 00:34:27.644
Well, luck does favor the prepared, but there are so many ways that you can be successful.
00:34:27.644 --> 00:34:49.371
There isn't one way, so it's hard for me to say you have to do X, y or Z, but what I do know is that you should love what you do, because if you don't, there are so many other things you can do that you should be doing one of those well, thomas, this has been a great conversation.
00:34:49.512 --> 00:34:58.277
We learned about quantum computing, we learned about public markets and what it's like to be in fast-growing startups and m&a um.
00:34:58.277 --> 00:35:00.902
So thank you so much for being with us today.
00:35:00.902 --> 00:35:04.333
We really appreciate, really appreciate you sharing your wisdom.
00:35:06.057 --> 00:35:08.282
Monica and Ned thanks very much for having me.
00:35:08.282 --> 00:35:12.659
I give my best to achieve a sense that there might be a connection there.
00:35:13.420 --> 00:35:20.119
He's my brother, and that has been our episode of Masterstroke.
00:35:20.119 --> 00:35:21.463
Another episode of Masterstroke.
00:35:21.463 --> 00:35:27.342
Thank you to Thomas Kramer, thank you so much to Ned Renzi and to Georgiana Moreland, our executive producer.
00:35:37.431 --> 00:35:38.556
Thank you for listening today.
00:35:38.556 --> 00:35:40.657
We would love for you to follow and subscribe.
00:35:40.657 --> 00:35:42.898
Monica and Sejo would love to hear from you.
00:35:42.898 --> 00:35:47.362
You can text us directly from the link in the show notes of this episode.
00:35:47.362 --> 00:35:53.655
You can also find us on the LinkedIn page at Masterstroke Podcast with Monica Enid and Sejo Petrzak.
00:35:53.655 --> 00:35:54.775
Until next time.
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