Human contact, kinda

Get to know us a little better

This week finds most of us taking drastic measures to collectively slow the spread of COVID-19. A majority of U.S. universities have sent students home and are moving classes online. If you are among those now tackling this challenge you have our admiration and our thanks on your students' behalf!

In today's newsletter we're sharing more of our own stories of what we have done since leaving academia. At a time when we all have less of the human contact we are accustomed to, we hope you enjoy getting to know us a little better.

Brendon’s Story

Kitchens have been a kind of cosmic wormhole of career serendipity and energy that have propelled me forward.   On a dreary mid-winter Saturday morning in 2006, I think, a gaggle of yawning parents were standing around a kitchen nursing lukewarm coffee and watching a bunch of toddlers running around singing to the Wiggles.  I was talking to a woman who was involved in admissions for the MBA program at Babson College, and someone tapped me on the shoulder. “Hi, my name is John, and I overheard what you were saying. You can get an MBA, of course, but I know the perfect place for you.” He was right.  A year later, I left academia and started my next career, in finance and investing. 

That conversation in the kitchen was luck, pure and simple.  I wasn’t working from a blueprint more detailed than “I’m going to be that mid-career career-change guy.”  I had big ideas (“I want to be the next Warren Buffett!”), a lot of energy, some deep unhappiness as a professor, and a few books that provoked and inspired me.  That fateful shoulder-tap in the kitchen was one of many conversations that I’d had over the previous few years. Echoes of those early conversations remain with me today: “the biggest risk is taking no risk.”  “You’re always looking for your next job.” “It’s about storytelling; you have to have a tight narrative.” “Business is all about people.” I didn’t know how to turn my CV into a resume. Fortunately, my inspirational shoulder-tapper’s wife, Julie, did.  She sat with me at a café for a few hours and basically did it for me. I didn’t know how to use Excel or Powerpoint, so I took some courses. 

I rolled into my first day at Cambridge Associates in the summer of 2007, all fired up and pretty ignorant. That was the first time I heard the phrase “drinking from a firehose.”  And I did. I learned a lot about investing, and that this thing called “business” or maybe more precisely, “consulting” was a lot about being really, really organized: calendars and meetings and phone calls and managing a lot of projects simultaneously without really knowing what you were doing most of the time.  I learned that it’s usually better to ask for forgiveness than permission, and that teamwork sounded great in theory but that there really is an “I” in team, and that I was responsible for just getting s*** done, whether it was interesting to me or not, and despite lazy or disorganized senior people on my team. I learned that there are a lot of people in the world doing a lot of interesting things in investing, and a lot of them are making a lot of money.  I decided that I wanted some of that, and I started looking. 

One day I got a phone call from Steve, who had founded a hedge fund on the brink of really taking off.  We had had lunch a few times when I was in New York City for work, and he is a distant relation (the brother of my brother-in-law’s wife – what is the technical term for that?).  He’d never had someone run his marketing and sales effort. Would I be interested? I didn’t know anything about how to market and sell a hedge fund, but it seemed like a path to a smaller, exciting environment with opportunities to learn and to grow and to put some swagger in my step.  I thought it might be a path for me to get to an analyst or portfolio manager position, actually picking stocks (à la Warren Buffett!) And, finally, if things went well both for me and the firm, I could make a lot of money. Neither of us knew if I’d be any good at it, but we both liked the odds, and with a handshake, we agreed to try it for a year. In April of 2011, I joined Locust Wood Capital.

As it turned out, I was pretty good at it.  I learned a ton about stocks and sales and marketing and private banks and all kinds of other twists and turns about the financial services business.  I read business books and magazines to try to catch up with everyone for whom marketing and sales seemed obvious and intuitive. I traveled all over the country, met all sorts of people, and I helped the firm grow quite a bit.  And I had a few pretty lucrative years. It was great. And I discovered some other, less great things. For example, by switching from consulting to marketing and sales, I’d “jumped tracks” and unwittingly closed off some options for myself, or at least made them even more difficult than before.  I found out that once I’d mastered a lot of marketing and sales for that firm, it was, well, pretty limited. I could almost literally feel my brain slowing down, getting stupider by the day, losing the imagination and nimbleness that I so enjoyed, and which was always such an important part of my self-perception.  I was bored and burned out, and I was itching for more and different. In the summer of 2017, it was time for a change, for both me and Locust Wood, and we amicably parted ways. 

In the meantime, my wife had taken a new position as the Stephen King Professor of Literature at the University of Maine, about a 5-hour drive from our house in Boston.  We’d decided not to move that year (2017-18), so that our daughter could finish high school where she’d started. So, by desire and necessity, I had a sabbatical to ponder what I’d do next when we moved to Maine the following summer, while managing our household when Caroline was away every week. 

Fast forward to today, and several new professional directions.  I’m active with several non-profit organizations here in Maine, and I’ve recently started a consulting business with another recent Downeast transplant – check out www.harborhousepartners.com.  I muster all my skills and experience every day as we strive to get our fledgling business aloft. Reading, writing, thinking, and talking are my tools. They’re the same ones from academia, mutated and adapted in different ways by my professional experience.  My other job is this: sharing with you what I’ve learned about how to launch from the academy into a new career, with all of the messiness and complexity and uncertainty that such a move entails. There is a great big world of opportunities out there. My aim is to help you explore it for yourself.

Patrick’s Story

People at parties always congregate in the kitchen. It’s probably for practical reasons like needing ice or a trash can, but I prefer to think of a kitchen more broadly as a natural place for things to change: after all, it’s where ingredients become meals. So if you’re in the kitchen, chances are that the spirit of transformation will rub off on you, and it stands to reason that a kitchen is where both Brendon and I pinpoint our career changes.

The kitchen in which I met Brendon was at a party full of English professors. I was teaching in the same program as Brendon’s wife (as you already know, a distinguished English professor); my wife (and far, far better half) took my hand and said, “You have to come meet this guy,” and I did.

At the time I was on course for a good academic career: I had secured a tenure-track job at a very good school when I finished my PhD, I had peer-reviewed publications in leading journals in my field, I had a book contract with an academic press, and I had successfully campaigned for a raise in my pay (the Vice Provost said I’d had a “monster year” of publications, and conference papers in the US, UK, Germany, and Italy). So far so good, right? Yes, I was succeeding, but…

I was throwing myself at my academic career because I didn’t think I had an alternative. Earlier, in grad school, I had attended those recruiting sessions from consulting firms (and one hedge fund) and had sent in applications with zero response. I figured I was just not the right kind of candidate for them, and that it was not an avenue I could reasonably pursue.

When I talked to Brendon, he said a lot of helpful stuff (more below), but one thing really still sticks in my mind from that kitchen conversation. He told me that at the time he made his career switch, he said, “I’m going to be that thirty-x-year-old guy who switched careers.” It was so refreshingly unapologetic, and it got me thinking seriously about making the switch myself.

I met Brendon over coffee(s) and we talked about the importance of “networking,” how to do it, what is different about the business world, what business people care about, what to read, and more. Over the course of the Fall, I read business books, networked conscientiously, and created a resume out of my CV — or rather, committed to the process of revising my resume countless times. (We’ll talk about resumes in another group of posts.)

I applied to various places, including a couple of firms in the finance industry who sometimes hire people with quirky backgrounds, but since I was in higher education it made sense for me to apply to higher education research and consulting firms. I was excited about a company called EAB (Education Advisory Board), but when they scheduled a call with me, it was actually their parent company in health care research (The Advisory Board Company) that contacted me. They told me they thought I would be a great fit, and asked how I felt about health care. Knowing almost nothing about the industry, I naturally responded that I thought it was fascinating.

Working for the Advisory Board Company brought me into direct contact with the business of health care: my first meeting on the company's behalf was with the CEO of a 14-hospital system, and over the course of two and a half years, I met with CEOs, nurses, surgeons, and health care administrators, here in the US as well as in Colombia, Brazil, and Saudi Arabia. It turned out — admittedly a little to my surprise — that I understood how businesses work better than I thought I would.

My next move was both deliberate and coincidental: deliberate in the sense that I wanted to take more of a hands-on role in building or guiding a business, but coincidental in what happened and how. In preparing for a move, I knew I needed expert input on my resume, so I asked a tech recruiter I had been in touch with in the past (she's now a friend). I started the conversation by saying I knew I didn't have the engineering background to be placed by her, but I valued her input because she sees hundreds of resumes and could tell me if mine was communicating the information it should. We talked over the phone for her to share her thoughts, and as we talked she said, "actually there's a small company that's almost all engineers at the moment, but at some point as they grow they will need non-engineers... do you mind if I share your resume?" So she did, and after an unorthodox and challenging interview process, I got a job at Kensho, a machine learning startup in finance. At the time it had funding from Goldman Sachs, the CIA's investing arm, and Google Ventures. Kensho went on to be acquired by S&P Global (the S&P 500 Index is perhaps their best known product). In 2018, it was the largest AI acquisition to date.

As I look back, my responsibilities at Kensho have been almost comically diverse, and include devising tortured finance-themed puns for our Twitter feed at one end of the spectrum to meetings at the Pentagon and CIA Headquarters at the other. (Some of my work involves customers in the intelligence community.)

Which brings me to the point of sharing all this. Let me rewind a few years. If someone had told me then (as I sat converting my copious footnotes from MLA format to Chicago) that I would do any of these things, let alone all of them, I think I would probably have stared blankly at them and returned to my formatting. Looking from academia outwards, the view even from the most broad-minded institutions is limited to a small number of 'natural' or logical career paths, like management consulting or high school teaching, both of which can be immensely rewarding, but are by no means the only choices available. It's also worth noting that they are both very structured paradigms similar to academia. There are, however, a very limited number of these so-called natural paths and paradigms, and a more eclectic path like mine even when it's made up of well thought-out, deliberate choices is not something that a careers office could help you plan or prepare for.

We can, and it's why we are here.