Mindaugas Petrutis -A Quick Transition from Program Director to Startup CEO

I interviewed Mindaugas Petrutis early in this series about creating a new program at a high profile scaling startup. Recently Mindaugas suddenly became the CEO of Coho, a new startup. I asked him to come back to the podcast for a behind-the-scenes look at his experience. We talked about what it was like to suddenly become the CEO of a startup where no playbook existed, his most urgent priorities after he took over, what surprised him about being CEO and the first thing he says new CEOs should do. 

Can you introduce yourself?

The last time we chatted, I was a program director at On Deck. Around that time, this time last year, I was quite actively trying to build myself out of what I was doing. Community building can be exhausting, especially as an introvert, as much as I love it. I thought maybe I'll just build a little consultancy and chill out for a bit. I’d already picked up a client by accident. So I was like, great, I'm on the way. A few weeks later all of that changed and I became a CEO of a company. Directly opposite of what I was trying to do.

Was it a hard decision to make when the opportunity came about?

While I felt drained and trying to find a way out, this opportunity was a stronger pull. It was a chance to keep building something I wanted to see be around for many  years so it was really a no brainer. 

It was such a unique opportunity. It wasn't like somebody just offered me a job, it was the idea of what we might do and the unknowns we’d face. 

I knew that becoming CEO of this startup would be complex and intense. I didn’t know how it was going to pan out. Nothing could have prepared me for what was to come. 

I knew that becoming CEO of this startup would be complex and intense. I didn’t know how it was going to pan out. Nothing could have prepared me for what was to come. 

I just knew that there's an opportunity to continue building on my own terms and continue building this community. So those two things were just an immediate yes.

We’ve known each other for a while as I’ve been a fellowship partner at On Deck and for Coho. One of the things that always strikes me about you is you seem to follow your instincts with your career rather than having a five year plan.

Yeah, I’ve never had a plan. I have a very messy brain. I have zero organization skill, personal organizational skills. Everything lives in my head. There's these nodes that just are floating around in there that just start connecting. 

I often make decisions that are so obvious and clear to me but others look at me like I’m out of my mind.  I don't know. It just makes sense to me. The combination of doing this for most of my life and things working out builds confidence. So when an opportunity like this came along, I didn’t overthink it. 

I’m very similar. Follow my instincts. It leads to interesting places. Did you expect to become a CEO of a startup at this point of your career?

I've always struggled with the idea of working for somebody else. I get bored. I don't fit into a lot of places. I always want to do things my own way. I've always known that I just don't fit in a traditional construct of a company. So I've always wanted to do my own thing. That can take different shapes, right? For years when I worked in hospitality before entering tech, I wanted to open a restaurant. I opened, you know, I had a bar for a little bit. Then when I entered tech, I discovered design and then the community. I started a design recruitment agency around  2016. That failed, it didn't work. But I learned a bunch of things. 

So when I looked at like Coho, did I necessarily strive to become a CEO or founder? No, at that point I was trying to do the opposite. But, but again, it gave me the opportunity to say, well, wait a minute. I can actually build the environment that I've never had and maybe do it for others.

That was also part of the decision-making process. We’ve all dealt with shitty experiences,  it's taken all of these shitty experiences. We're not going to do any of that. We'll build a different kind of company. 

Can you share a bit more about how it came about? 

At On Deck, there was the founder's side, which was how On Deck was born. Then there was the career side which I was building a part of. I owned multiple fellowships. It’s really hard to build a business where the two sides are so different.

An opportunity came up to spin out a bunch of the careers fellowships into a separate company, bring a team and continue building these communities. I’ve been viewing my work as a multi-year project and I was just getting started. I wanted to build something that is around for many years. So the chance of that not happening anymore made me step in and say I'm going to carry on building this. To have a chance to build that kind of institution that is around beyond me – I had to do it.

Can you share more about what Coho does? 

We have six fellowships – design, engineering, data science, chief of staff, marketing, sales, and business development. We take folks at a more senior stage in their career, between senior manager level and director level. We focus on people navigating specific career challenges. We help people untangle those challenges by surrounding them with peers who are dealing with the same things and taking them through a  journey to get them unblocked. 

As a side effect or a continuing effect of COVID and other things that are happening, a lot more people are re-evaluating their relationship with work. I still do a part of the interviews and I've noticed that every conversation is the same.  

Every single person at that senior enough level are saying you know what all my life I've just been told I have to climb this ladder and now I don't know if I believe in that anymore but what is my other option?

So we curate these groups of folks and we help them untangle it together. We surround them with resources and access to folks like you. People look for nuance because you can’t get from books, from generic YouTube videos. If you're in a group of peers that we've curated of six people, you can get six different perspectives on the specific situation that you're dealing with today, and probably walk away with a completely different scenario or solution that you weren't thinking of.

What was your most urgent priority? 

First it was to figure out how to communicate what was happening to the people in, in our communities and those trying to join. We had 1200 people in the six fellowships in those six fellowships or those who have paid and are just about to join. They're all at varying stages of their experience. Some people have been here for like a year. Some people had just joined. So there's over a thousand of those. Then there's hundreds, if not thousands of people who have applied, people who just completed interviews and were waiting for feedback. People who had been made offers to join and we had been planning to do a cohort or onboarding the next month.

The priority was making sure people are informed. How do we address this existing base and those folks that were expecting to join? So I opened up my calendar. It was like eight hours a day, 15 minutes slots. I said to the team, “We're gonna get some nice messages. People congratulate, people who will understand what's going on and they'll be excited, right? Tell them thank you, please do not send them my way. Send me anybody who's confused, upset, wants a refund, give me those people.  I put them on my calendar. 

It was a whirlwind of many different things happening. So we kept informing folks. Then putting together a plan, how do we maintain everybody's experience through to the end of the year? Because again, we're now a different team. The six fellowships that we took had each their own team, their leader, their processes, they were all separate and siloed. We knew that we wanted to run it differently. We're now a small team of 13 people. There’s no longer a specific owner for any fellowship. 

So we had to figure out how to maintain it without causing more panic or concern and then figuring out how to start rebuilding the under layer of our operations and systems without breaking things on top of that. Even, how do we incorporate the business? What is the name? We didn't have a name for a few months. Oh, wait, we're going to need a new brand. It was endless. 

When you spin out a startup from a larger company we think they have lots of assets but you had to rebuild everything. 

Yeah. The other thing is that there’s usually a playbook, right? Nothing we do is new, somebody has done it. I looked into other spin-outs. The company essentially says, “This feature or this team should be their own separate thing. We're going to fund them, but we still own them.” This was like breaking off a piece of a company and now it's a separate thing. Everything from your name, your branding to your ops – everything is completely separate. Of course we had a lot of support from the folks at OnDeck but the goal is that there’d be a moment when we’re completely on our own. There was no playbook for that.

Was that process harder than you expected or about what you expected?

It was definitely harder because there wasn’t a playbook. I knew some things we could predict but there were so many things you can’t predict. There was a moment I remember when I pulled together a bullet point list of the things that we were doing. Each one of them would take months of work and we’re doing it in a couple of weeks. I was like, this is madness. It was way more than I or any of us could predict.

I've been in lots of weird, crazy situations and I've dug myself out of them. That builds resilience. So when you’re in this kind of a position, you don’t overreact. You’re able to step back and say, let them think first and not get stressed. I realized I’ve been preparing for this moment for basically the last 40 years. 

What was it like leading with the folks who came with you? 

These people are heroes. I wanted to make sure this happens in the smoothest way possible. I had to tell the folks that I wanted to bring along ahead of time. I told them very early, as soon as I knew there was a possibility. I told them it might happen. I can’t guarantee that I will be able to pay your salary. That’s it. They all said yes. That’s also when I knew it was the right team of people. I consistently updated folks on the progress as things happened. I took the approach of being open and honest as early as possible which is always a risk, but that’s what I did.

It seems like you lead them through it by being really transparent.

As chaotic as it all was I used it as an opportunity to use skills I’ve always wanted to use. My kind of challenge with being honest and transparent and saying what I think in other workplaces was always that the risk was too great because I had too much riding on that salary I was taking. So I would stay quiet or not act in my true self. So in that moment I was like, I'm gonna do it the way I haven't had the opportunity to do for a really long time or never.

How do you see your role as a CEO? 

I think the worst thing that I could do as a CEO is remove myself from being part of the community. People are surprised that I still do interviews with those folks that are applying to join us. How else am I supposed to know how to lead or what are we building? What is resonating, what is not if I don't talk to these people. As a CEO I can’t be some person in the corner if you have no context in what's going on with the community, if you're not part of the community. My ultimate goal is that I spend 50% of my time being part of and building the community. I try to translate all of those insights into what we should be thinking about or building. Not telling people how to do it but offering another opinion. Other than that, I view myself as part of the team and that's what I want. I'm trying to just be who I've always wanted to be in this scenario and hopefully make the right decisions too.

Had you thought about what your CEO leadership style might be like before this? 

I have been thinking about that for years. It was more driven by the fact of always, feeling uncomfortable in lots of different places. I would always dream about how I would approach it if I ever had a chance. I thought about what kind of a leader or CEO I would want to be. I’d watch other CEOs I’ve worked with. I’d think about how I might approach a situation. 

I will say, there are situations now that are happening for the first time. It's this weird realization like, “Oh I have to deal with this because there’s nobody else. I’m the one.” I remember thinking, this is new. I've heard of these kinds of situations before, but I never had to deal with it or be the face on the receiving end of it. It’s fun.

I was just thinking that you might find the challenge of not knowing the next step fun. 

Yeah, it’s growth. I’ve been doing this for so many years in different situations, I’m comfortable with being uncomfortable. 

I've been in lots of weird, crazy situations and I've dug myself out of them. That builds resilience. So when you’re in this kind of a position, you don’t overreact. You’re able to step back and say, let them think first and not get stressed. I realized I’ve been preparing for this moment for basically the last 40 years. 

Resilience is such a good word and that I think we don't talk about enough in leadership. It does take resilience.

What's been most rewarding about leading a startup?

There are so many businesses that have been around for many years that make a profit, doing great work and doing the right things for their teams. I think that's super rewarding to do. I've been thinking about these things for 20 some years. Having the moment to implement some of those ideas is very rewarding. It’s rewarding to do it the way I've always wanted to do it.

What advice might you give others who find themselves suddenly the CEO of a startup?

Get yourself a peer group immediately. Talk to others about whatever the challenges you may be facing before it's too late. 

I learned that the hard way. I don't think I did this enough earlier. I did it better this time around, but I learned it the hard way. When I was trying to build a company in 2016, I kept all of these challenges to myself because I was embarrassed so I didn't say anything. I nearly ended up homeless. 

So get yourself a peer group. 

I happened to be talking to a bunch of founders and we all just became a group. When you get into those conversations, you very quickly realize that the thing that is keeping you up at night is actually not that bad because the other people in the room have been there and they figured it out. Find that group and don't be afraid to be honest. 

Get yourself a peer group immediately. Talk to others about whatever the challenges you may be facing before it's too late.