Michal Cieplinski (CBO Pipe, ex General Counsel at Fundbox)

Hey everyone, this is Erik Torenberg and you're listening to Execs by On Deck. Execs is a show for founders, operators, and leaders who want to understand the playbooks, frameworks, and tactics that leading tech companies today have used to scale. Our guests are tech execs in key roles at top tech companies who share their hard-won, earned secrets on how to scale faster. Michal Czapliński is the Chief Business Officer at Pipe.

He also spent time at General Counsel and CCO at Funbox, as well as Senior VP at Leadnikal. among others. He describes himself as a lawyer who's never really been a lawyer, meaning that no is a rare answer for him to give his fast-moving colleagues. In this episode, we discuss the important role that a CBO plays at a high-growth tech company. Mikal shares tips on building legal teams, hiring speed for the rest of the org, and why you should hire for a plan, not a problem. For anyone thinking deeply about their team's legal function, this should be a good one. Hope you enjoy. Michal, welcome to the podcast.

Good morning, or yeah, good afternoon actually. It just turned afternoon.

You've had a number of different roles in your career at pretty exciting companies. What would you say is the thread that ties your career together? If you're looking back and trying to find things in common, how would you define what threads it all together?

I would say A lawyer that has never been really a lawyer, if if that's if that's an answer to any question. So I'm I'm by training a lawyer, and at most of the places I had a legal role as well. But very early in my career, I kind of transitioned. I think people above me around me realized that I am a very unusual lawyer, and I am. Quite innovative. And no is a very rare answer from me. And as a result, I started supporting business more and more, then I became business and used legal as a tool. And I think that's what I do right now. I'm mostly acting in regulated places where the legal knowledge is one of the arrows in your quiver that you can use to be more effective.

Describe your role a little bit today and talk about what are the other arrows in the quiver and sort of what makes a good chief business officer.

So I'm a chief business officer at Pipe, and Hari Harsh, my co-founder at Pipe, calls it shit done officer. I think that's a better title to me. I don't know if we need to peep it or not, but the reality of it is that it's a glue That binds everything together. It's a person that doesn't have the most defined role, but acts to the benefit of the company, acts in front of the investors, in front of the customers, and is the person that migrates a lot from various roles in the organization. Pipe is a fairly complex business. We are a trading platform for recurring revenues. But that means, as with every marketplace, you actually have 2 sides to it with different sets of customers. We have the sell side, which are companies with recurring revenues, and they vary with size. We started companies with as low as $100K ARR, very, very tiny. To companies with several hundred million ARR and public. On the other hand, we have a buy side, which are institutional investors. That's also a customer of PIPE, but also very, very different to the sell side.

On Deck is also a complex business. We have a startup accelerator, we have a professional education development business, a few other sort of business units that sell to different customers. We're building our executive team. We haven't really even thought about, should we have a chief business officer? What is your advice as to what types of startups should think about whether or not to hire a CBO and how it works with the other executives?

Chief business officer is an extension of the CEO. And Hari and I and Josh formed a partnership. We each understand what are our core strengths. And it's basically bringing somebody as an extension of these functions into the area where the CEO may need help at an executive level. So Josh is one of my co-founders at Pipe, is one of the geniuses of product. We'll never get to his level. Harry is one of the most fantastic visionary and salesperson alive. I am an operator in financial services. I understand how investors think about this product and how they would like to interact with Pipe as a trading platform. We all can come together and supplement each other to form that uniformity, that, that the leadership group.

And Chief Business Officer is a better term than Chief of Staff because you could get a more senior Leader?

So I think typically Chief of Staff is an execution role to the entire C-suite, and that's at least how that role I've seen at many, many places— at Fundbox, Lending Club, uh, at Pipe. Chief Business Officer is an extension of the CEO in areas that he or she may not have the inherent base of a background. And that's how, you know, I've seen it at Fundbox with Sebastian being, um, Reimers being a chief business officer to Eyal. Sebastian was a former Goldman Sachs banker. And that's how it is at Pipe, where we divided the roles in the leadership to align with our core skills and core dependencies.

Does Pipe have a chief strategy officer? And I'm curious if the orgs you worked at previously also had chief strategy officer and what you think about that role.

Yes, I would say we each play that when it comes to our respective areas. Josh sets up an agenda for the product together with Zane on product and engineering. Harry and I set up a vision as to the broader company, how to achieve the metrics that every company needs to achieve. And then we execute across our organizations. It's interesting. I think if we didn't have a CBO, we might have had a Chief Strategy Officer. I just play more of an operator role day to day versus Chief Strategy, which I guess I never actually been at the company that had a Chief Strategy Officer. But I would say, The CBO and Chief Strategy Officer may be a lot similar. One may be more operational versus the other, but I think it just depends on people, to be honest, Erik.

Do you have a bunch of people reporting to you that maybe at another company, if they didn't have a CBO, might report to the CEO?

Yes. Well, legal department, the buy side of the organization, part of the finance to a certain degree reports to me. So I think My advice is build your org on the basis of responsibilities and also people's capabilities versus titles. If I was less inclined to do day-to-day operational stuff on the buy side, which that's what I'm doing most of the time, I'm responsible for the buy side of our platform, I guess there would be no need for certain folks reporting to me. Also, my background is I was a general counsel at Lending Club, which is one of the largest fintech lenders, if not the largest in America. And as a result, legal reports to me. But at another company—

It reports to the COO usually.

Exactly. We have a very lean structure across ourselves, across Josh, Zane, who is our CTO, Harry, and me. That we figure it out as it goes, which units, which departments report to each person. We have a Chief Customer Officer, for example, but PR and marketing doesn't report to him but reports to Harry because Harry is so into weeds into our marketing and brand building. So it really depends on the person versus— and that person capabilities. Versus titles and how it should be done. Never do it how it should be done. Figure it out, your C-suite. Figure out their core competencies and align the reporting line to them. There is no sense of finance reporting to a CEO or COO that's not interested in it. Then you should hire a person that can understand that area of law. It's the same with legal, PR, marketing, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That's why in a lot of organizations you get a chief operating officer, which plays a lot of these roles that I currently play. But for us, it's a much bigger organization and there's a place here for a COO as well.

Yeah, a lot of people listening to this are founders who are, you know, they're starting to get some traction, maybe they raised their Series A, And now they need to start building an exec team. And so it's helpful to learn about the CBO role. I wanna segue a bit and talk about general counsel. And for startups who are just, you know, building their legal team, their legal organization for the first time, what's really important to get right there? And what advice do you have for founders who are not used to it or not familiar with it on how to build out that team?

First of all, for anybody listening and thinks right now, I may hire a general counsel, or should I hire a general counsel? The moment that thought enters your mind, you're probably 6 months too late. And I've heard it several times. Honestly speaking, every CEO that hired a general counsel realized it came 6 months too late. But, but to be, to be clear and give like an actual pointers, if in any shape or form you are in a regulated place, fintech, regtech, any crypto, please hire as one of your core initial hires. That person will save you later on so much pain that you can't even imagine. If you are a pure SaaS play, let's say consumer social app, then I've seen it delayed. But at some point your investors are asking, okay, how are you going to be making money out of this app that you have created, that feature that you have, that product that you have created. The moment that happens, general counsel will help you organize your legal documentation so that you could actually derive revenue out of your, your, the app, the thing that you have created. In principle, it's either the core hire, that's regulated spots, and anybody in a regulated spot without a general counsel I worry, and I typically don't, as an angel investor, invest in those because it's not that the CEOs or C-suite is wrong. It's just you may not understand what you don't know about the space. And those typically— the spaces are very complicated, especially in America. When it comes to non-regulated spaces and non-crypto, one can delay it, but I would say round A, When you are in charge of moving from the idea to operationalizing a product and making your first revenue out of that product, you should probably hire that person.

Okay. I'm a company, I'm a founder. I know I need to hire that person. I'm set out to hire that person. What advice do you have for how to hire well? Where do I look? What to look for?

So I'm originally from Europe, as you can probably sense from the accent. So the original name for an attorney, it was consigliere, which is translated into an advisor into English. It should be your advisor. Look for a person that doesn't think of himself or herself as an island. A lot of lawyers tend to do that because that's how law firms train, that you are there to provide advice but not to implement it, not to take risks. and not to measure risk. As one of the interviewing tools for the CEO, and I advise actually a lot of CEOs as to hiring their ops and legal folks, I tell them, give them a very simple task, rank risk. The one that you hire is the one that will be able to rank risk. The joke is lawyers tend to view every single thing as the same existential risk. And that's not true. And it's actually one of the harder skills to get is the risk ranking, because you as a business person want to be able to know, okay, so this is existential risk. This is shit. I need to fix it very soon, but it's not going to kill me. And 3, 4, 5 are the things when I have time, I'll get to. Inherently, it's much harder for lawyers to do that level of Risk ranking, even lawyers with many, many years. So don't look at the years of career. Sometimes lawyers with 10 years of legal career can't do that because they just never had clients that required it. And sometimes very junior lawyers can do it. So just don't look for the years of experience. Look for a person that can be your advisor, your trusted advisor.

You're open to taking inexperienced hires, people who haven't, haven't yet done what you need them to do. You're open to betting on potential.

Yes. My current head of legal at Pipe had no fintech experience. He's a lawyer with 8 years of experience from Fenwick, a magician when it comes to private company fundraising and the things that you learn at Fenwick, which is one of the 3 or 4 major law firms dealing with private venture-backed companies. But I knew that he will be able to learn all the other stuff. Like, once you move from a law firm to in-house, you become a generalist. So it's a test of becoming a generalist and test of becoming an employment lawyer, venture capital lawyer, immigration lawyer, regulated— like lending lawyer, securitizations lawyer. You become all of it at once.

What is the key to ranking risks well? If you're a lawyer saying, hey, I want to get better at ranking risk, what is the right way to do that?

Again, I come from regulated places and as a result of regulated industries rather. So we rank the things as the things that can kill us, things that cannot, and then you differentiate in between of this. You know, some people in the older days were calling it what is the shot below the waist and above the waist. One, it's more hurtful than the other one. So it's the same thing here. The thing is that building businesses, whether it's regulated or not, it's inherently risky. You take some positions, you're building it in a stratospheric, typically, pace that very few folks can do it. You need to be, as an operator, And it's not legal risk, I'm saying any risks. It's risk of hiring people, etc. You need to figure it out of what are the crucial things about your business that you need to get right. And if the answer is, oh, everything is, then it's wrong. Then you go back and back and back until you actually are able to divide it into groups. You know, interesting, funny enough, Erik, that you're asking this question. I just went through the Prioritization list from my side of the organization at Pipe for the whole buy side just right now. I just finished it today. We categorize it as priority 1, which is as soon as possible, priority 2, Q1, priority 3, Q2, and priority 4, Q3 and 4. And within those, we assign people. And we also, if the person was responsible for 2 or 3 projects, within the same priority, we assigned stars to provide that person a very, very clear guidance as to if he has to do 2, which one takes priority within the same group. But this is like hardcore organizational skills. The more you do that, the better the results will be. What I realized from my career as an operator, and I see it with a lot of CEOs, whatever, CBOs, COOs, whatever that C-suite role is that organizes the business, is that in our head we got it all right. We got the prioritization, the list, et cetera. But it's inherently super important to put it on a piece of paper, seek people's feedback, and then align as an organization. Because what I'm realizing time and time and time again is that— Whatever's in your head is not in other people's head. The level of prioritization you had may not be what other people thought, and especially people at more junior levels than, than you. You're seeing them, people running like chickens with their heads cut off. They're really trying to please you as a boss, trying to be there for you, but they don't really understand, oh, this is more important than the other. So what's important And that's what I would give to every operator and in startups. And there's actually, I would say, especially in startups, and I took it from public companies and I don't keep it as strict as it is like at public companies, but a lot of folks in private companies don't do it. And it's, and it's, I think it's a failure of us in startups. Really organize your priorities both by importance and timing. It will help align the resources. Startups tend to do the same thing, shift 100% of the organization into one direction, then the other. I find it always interestingly and interesting to, to see how many early-stage startups can't do more than one thing at a time. And that comes not because people are not capable, it's because the whole organization does one thing. The organization can do multiple things at the same time if you organize it correctly.

When you're advising founders on, on how to do this well, what behavior are you changing for them? Why are they making the mistake that they're making and how do they alter that?

It starts with the conversation about the difference between retrospective and prospective. If you are running from a problem to a problem, you're just fixing the problems that occurred, you're not moving your organization forward. If you start planning, then it's the first step. Of course, crap will happen. Always does, especially in startups. Plan is going to get derailed. But without having a very clear plan— so we're talking at the tail end of the year— that's the time when C-suite of every organization should be sitting in front of the computer, And laying down the plan for the next year. What I do see a lot of time is founders saying, "Well, I don't want to put too much organization. We hate it. My XYZ hates it. We moved from a big company where we hated it." You can make it in a way that it doesn't smell, sound like a big organization. Hopefully, I don't make it at. That pipe, though you have to ask other people for that. But, you know, it's, it's— you can make it as we're all trying to figure it out, how to allocate our resources. Let's all get aligned. And I think the path there of not making it like a singular my decision is actually broadly disseminating it, seeking people's feedback. It doesn't mean you have to take— by, you know, seeking people feedback does not equate to have to take everybody's feedback. But I typically do, uh, to a certain degree, I take a lot of people's feedback because it's typically good feedback and things that I may have not seen. But at the end, you are the respo— you're where the buck ends as to allocation of capital, human capital especially. And each startup has the same problem area: not enough engineers, not enough finance, not enough legal, not enough Sales, ops, whatever, you always will be at not enough because the company is typically growing too fast for the people to hire. And especially in Bay Area and in other centers, Miami, where Pipe is headquarters, it's tough to hire experienced folks. There's a lot of competition for it. So it's always going to be not enough of the resources to tackle the issues.

Especially as you're growing, as you're scaling, as you raise your Series A, raise your Series B, you have a lot of capital. If you're a first-time founder, you haven't really done capital allocation decisions. You know that you need to think about 2022 planning. You have all your different heads telling you they need this, they need that. What mistakes do you see even teams that you've worked with or founders that you coach get when they make allocation or human capital decisions? Just because they haven't done it before? What are things that they learn after doing it a few times?

I would say throwing bodies at the problem. So hiring for a problem. You should hire for a plan, not a problem. Because once you fix that problem, then you have people that you hired for that problem that may not be right for your organization, but that's not typically the case. The typical case is that then you have 3 people for a job that could have been done by 2 or 1. You just hired 3 people in order to fix the problem faster. Yes, 3 people can do it, one problem faster, but then these 3 people are going to be doing the job of one person in the future. And I've seen it time and time again. That goes back to the plan. If you have a plan for the allocation of, you know, what your product will do, what your engineering will do, what yourself will do, what your marketing will do, what your finance and legal will do. If you ask each of the leaders of these organizations to prepare a plan of what they're trying to achieve, and in startups, don't make year-long plans. It never works. Q1, Q2, and then the Q3, Q4 mush together and see where it goes. You can't plan for longer than that. Have some stuff for there. And especially, you know, with Pipe, we have a lot of stuff that we're looking at. And as a result, we need to start the scoping right now. But it doesn't mean we're gonna really start implementing it or having this as a product in Q1, Q2. So I would say, don't throw bodies at the problem. Don't hire for a problem. Hire if you Need that person in your org past the problem. Employee— cost of employees is, is, will be, and it always is your highest cost. Be careful about this because firing in startup has very, very damaging repercussions on the morale of your organization. And sometimes you don't have to do that. It's just that you just overhired in this department while the company is doing great, but there's nothing for these people to do anymore. Again, if you hired for a problem, you already hired too late. And that's the second lesson that I give to a lot of first-time founders. Hire before the problem arises, not when you have a problem. Then you have to be intellectually honest with yourself that you hired too late. And so that next time it doesn't occur. And if it occurs each and every time, then you're planning skills are, are in need of significant improvement. But typically, you know, a lot of founders are curious individuals. They're smart. They are extremely inward-looking as well. And that's why just once explaining it to them— because I, as an angel investor, I, you know, invest in a lot of folks, and, and I think majority of founders, but, you know, You have to ask them as well. But from my perspective, the reason why they accept my check versus a check of another guy, um, is that I provide operational day-to-day advice and as well advice how to deal with fundraising, how to deal with investors, how to construct your cap table. It's a very real— not that the other advice is not real, but my advice is very operational. It's not philosophical. It's very real as to what to do. It applies to any company.

That's some great advice. And I recognize it myself. I hired too late in a bunch of different scenarios.

Me too.

We all do. Just be intellectually aware of it. Then next time, next time you're not gonna have that problem because you're gonna be aware of once you construct your next, either next company or next year, you're gonna be, okay, in Q2 I'm thinking about that product. I need to start hiring right now to get to there.

Yeah, totally. And so my question is, once you've identified you've hired too late, you're going to change it for next time, but right now you have a problem. The problem is pretty important. Do you either redirect resources somewhere else in the org if you can? Do you hire knowing that you're going to have a new problem with these people? You hire too much. Or do you just say, hey, we're just going to deal with it slowly or slower? By hiring one person instead of 3? How do you typically advise there?

It depends on the severity of the problem.

Yeah.

So as a former army person, I'll tell you, stop the bleeding first, immediately, long-term fixes later on. A lot of people overemphasize, oh, I need to figure it out what the fix to it is while a thing is bleeding. hopefully not a human, but if, you know, you know, a product is not working, etc., fix the bleeding first, move to a long-term solution later on. When it comes to— I would always skew on, uh, I do believe in people, and typically founders, where folks that are devoted to our vision. If you are intellectually honest with yourself Fixing a problem within 2 weeks versus a month and a half. Typically the month and a half is a better solution if you didn't have to hire for it, because hiring then leaves you with a person, A, may or may not be the right fit. 2, what is that person gonna do if you haven't prepared a plan for that person to do in the future? We tend to, us folks in charge of startups, however you call it, you know, overemphasize on the speed. And the speed is always part of an equation. But when it comes to hiring, hire slow, fire fast, and be deliberate. If you're hiring as reactive stuff, it's hardly ever gonna be right. And also very quickly, you know if it's working or not. Don't pretend, oh, XYZ is going to change and, and that person is going to work, then you're doing a disservice not only to your company, not only to your investors, but also most importantly to that person. If you know that it's not going to work out, be honest. And we tend not to be because we like to be liked as humans. Very, very few people like to be assholes like Honestly speaking, never met a person that said, I like— I genuinely like to be an asshole. No, people don't. People like to be liked by other people. People don't like to have hard conversations. But as a leader in an organization, your job is to provide feedback to people that work with you. And if it's not working, affect it faster than you think. Don't do, oh, another 3 months may fix it. Oh well, He or she is still doing some work, it's fine. It creates malaise within your organization. Other people see it. Your high standard that you had with the first employees gets lowered, lowered, lowered, and that's not good.

You began the podcast by talking about how you're a lawyer who knows how to talk to other lawyers. They say no, and you know when to pick your battles. And the challenge with a lot of CEOs or founding teams is that they don't have legal backgrounds. And so it might even be difficult to identify once they hire a head of legal how their head of legal is doing. What advice do you have when to get external counsel?

It's kind of like the same thing as to how do you know if your CFO is doing the right job? And that's why that concept of an advisor conciliary starts. You need to build that advisor relationship with your general counsel, with your VP of Finance or CFO, because these are the 2 roles that is harder to know whether you need to trust them before they are able, A, to prove themselves, to show them the fruits of their labor. Because in each and every of those 2 organizations, there are clear positions to be taken. And you need to trust that person's moral spine, experience, and to lead you to the right direction. It's tough for the founders to be interacting directly with an outside counsel because they have many of other things. If it's just a singular simple things, yes, but if your business is getting complex, hire the person that you interact with the most. I mean, like Uber's general counsel, the first one— well, they're right now on the second one, but the first one under Travis was a litigation partner. And you would wonder, what is a litigation partner doing as a general counsel of Uber? Well, that was the person that represented them in the first litigations with, uh, San Francisco Transportation Commission. and in California regulated. And Travis got very comfortable with her and, and she learned much more about the business. And actually, interestingly enough, a lot of general counsels at later on successful companies are their first outside counsel, and a lot of them are litigation counsel. So don't look at— it may be your IP lawyer that really took time, understood your business, You like the way you interact with him or her, and you feel that you can trust that person. That's, that's your general counsel. And the same with the, this CFO or finance person. A lot of times they grow within your organization, like we had at Pipe with Lucas, but it's the inherent trust. It's the person that will also challenge you. When it comes to the finance role, maintain the independence And an ability to tell you, no, that's not working. No, we need to do something else. Or no, it's not right. I actually value this from finance more because it maintains a certain level of checks and balances within the organization. You may not have the right idea every single time. If anybody thinks that as a founder, they're wrong. Be open to soliciting feedback. Understand that at the end, the buck ends with you. The responsibility for the running company is nobody. That's you. That's the core founding team. That's the CEO. That's the group that founded it, however you define it in each and every organization. But that's that being or that group. But don't assume you know all the answers. Solicit people's feedback. Opinions. It will make them feel more involved in a company. The fantastic answer can come from the most junior employee in your organization. It doesn't really matter. That's why you come to startups to be in charge at the much earlier stage in your career than typically you would be at, you know, going to a different company. But understand that the end, you know, when investors come to pipe, they will choke me and Harry. And I fully understand that. You know, also buck ends with us because we deal with the investor relations at Pipe.

You've worked at startup, obviously, you know, Pipe super early, and you've worked at companies that gone on to go public. And so you've seen the full range. How do the legal and finance organizations evolve? We just hired our VP of finance and we just hired our first head of legal. 5 years from now or 8 years from now, whenever we're going public, hopefully, What can we expect in terms of how those organizations are going to evolve or what they should look like or what should we be preparing?

There are different stages at the organization when it comes to your current VP of Finance, in your case, and your GC or head of legal. They should take you up to the point of near public. I am always honest with my teams of the following. Pipe is a multibillion-dollar company. we're shooting for the sky, just like it happened with many companies that reach our level of velocity, are shooting for $100+ billion valuations in 5 to 10 years. At that point, I probably will need a CFO with 25 to 35 years of experience of being a CFO. I'll probably need, need a chief legal officer that has been a partner And head of a practice, or a former SEC commissioner, or a government official, depending on which path we take in our life. As long as you're honest with your teams and they accept it, and our team is is is you know more than okay with it. We did discuss it many times. There are fantastic lawyers and finance folks up until pipe reaches that level of needing. somebody with 30+ years of experience in those roles. And especially, that's especially finance. As you know, once you go public, many companies just before going public, a year before, hire a CFO just for this role. Going public, interestingly enough, is very little legal. Me as person that used to be in that call, you just click on Edgard button, submit. That is your whole thing. And when it comes to finance, it's much more on the finance side. And, and as a result, there is— and there are several fantastic CFOs that go from a company to a company, advise these companies a year before they go public, up until they're public, and then they leave the company year, year, 2 years One of your advice for head of legal and general counsel was telling them to rank risks and you're open to taking bets on people, especially earlier on in the company lifecycle.

In finance, what is your litmus test or what do you advise in terms of how to interview? Are you as open to taking bets earlier on potential or is experience more important even earlier?

Well, experience. You may have the most experienced CFO or a chief legal officer from large companies that are no longer capable because they haven't done it in years of going back to the basics and back to the NDAs, back to your— as a CFO, to the basic P&L plan. A lot of folks later in their careers struggle with And I know that I'm going to get a lot of crap from people after that, that telling me, no, no, no, no, no, people can do it. Yes, they can. The question is whether they're willing and whether they're still as agile when it comes to that. So early on, whether you hire an experienced or non-experienced person, make sure that that person can go back to the basics. Like when you hire a lawyer, You typically will go for a person at the lower end, 3 to 5 years of law firm experience. That person is 2 or 4 years away from doing NDAs, now had a much other person, and I am sure that they don't want to be doing NDAs or a basic P&L plan for finance, but because it's not fun, but that's crucial. And, and that's what you should as a founder optimize on. Can that person in that role, Erik, go back to basics?

When you're recruiting a more senior CFO and you're selling, what are things that tend to, you know, convince them? Are they often just optimizing for, hey, what is the potential to be the most, you know, the biggest company and the most successful? What is sort of the mind of a CFO who's Evaluating between companies?

The thing is that the person that's only interested in making money, I rarely hire that person. It's not that money is not a question in the equation. No, it always is. But it's a journey and it's many years of ups and downs. Optimize on somebody that is more intellectually curious about the journey Versus somebody that is only interested in making their own career through that. And that's one of the, you know, interviews— during the interviews, figure it out if that person is more interested in enabling their own career versus building something together with you. Startups are hard. I keep repeating it to everybody. This glorified view of founders, startups, uh, people making a lot of money. It's, it's BS. You know, 99% of startups fail, very few succeed, very few get to any valuation that actually made it work for you versus staying at Google and making half a million dollars in the regular salary plus bonus plus an equity, which makes you a millionaire much faster than 10 years in a startup. So As long as you understand that for some reason we glorify building startups. Startups are tough, not for everybody. In a lot of ways, you may make more money staying at Google and be more successful. It is tough on your family. I wake up at 5:00 AM in the morning, my day starts at 6:00, and many times it goes until 8:00 PM of each and every day. Like even at the quote unquote vacations, I'm on the call three to four hours a day. So I don't know. I I think people need to be aware that this is not a rosy journey, Eric. It's it's tough. And the moment like I find myself like a lot of people that succeeded really with legal careers, finance. iBanking, hedge funds. I find it interesting common thread. They had no other options. And you know why? Because if they had, they would have probably freaking taken those other options. So startups are for people that have no other options. This is your life.

It's true in my case and in many people's cases. That's a good place to end, Michal. You've dropped a lot of good advice in this podcast from how to build a legal team and how to build a finance team. And also how to do planning. I'm going to go talk to my team and say, hey, we're hiring because we have a problem. And it's going to be, if we do that, it's going to be a problem a few months from now. So thank you very much, Michal, for joining the podcast today and dropping some advice.

Erik, always, it was a pleasure. And again, there are no good books on building startups. Read a lot, listen to other people, get advisors, get friends to advise you, but understand that they And it's a it's a lonely journey. Cheers, bye bye.

Thanks for listening to today's episode. Execs is produced by On Deck, where top talent goes to start companies, find their next roles, or invest in their careers. If you're looking to start a company. Up-level your career or navigate a career transition, I encourage you to visit beyonddeck.com. See you next time. Bye.