233. Changing CEOs feat. Tom McGrath, CEO @ iink

If the CEO's job is to fundraise, what do you do when the best fundraiser on your team isn't the CEO? What iink did was change CEOs.

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Transcript

Tom McGrath: 0:01

Around, I want to say it was 2020 2021 we switched CEOs. I took over the position from the original CEO and, as you mentioned, Rich, one of the major responsibilities of a CEO is to make sure we don't run out of money and fundraise. My background is entrepreneurship, that was my degree. Had prior startups before. Worked in product and launching products at both VC backed and public companies, so I've seen what it's like to scale a technology company from just an idea all the way up to something with massive distribution to multiple Fortune 500 entities. Even prior to coming into college I was always involved in startup weekends and hackathons. I actually started the entrepreneurship club at my high school.Had a variety of different startups in college competed in different competitions there. I think I had the very unique experience of pitching businesses since I was about 13 years old. It was a skill that I very much honed over many years. And I think that I'm good at it and, that was one of the drivers for us making that switch. Here at iink, we have a saying, would you rather be king or would you rather be rich? We spend a lot of time beating each other's egos up here at iink, which I think is very productive and has led to good results. And at the end of the day, we just want to have the best players on the field. We've gotten to a point where we've kind of removed ego from the situation, we kind of assess what are we all really good at? What we all want is the company to excel. That's all anyone wants. We can become aligned on that motivation and say, well, this person's really good at this, and this person's really good at that, we can put, people in the right seats who can execute in the best way possible. Overall, I think it's been really great for us and everyone's been very happy and working well together. So far it's played out well. We've raised millions of dollars and we're moving in the right direction.