Intro Music 

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Tyler Finn 

Can your pets inspire you and shape the direction of your career? How can practicing abroad open doors? And what personal and professional lessons can you draw from training for, I think it's important to note, and also completing in Ironman? Today for this episode of The Abstract, I am joined by Tim Hirsch, who is the General Counsel of Mars Science and Diagnostics, a division of Mars Pet Care. He was previously the GC and Head of Business Daevelopment for Kinship, another division of Mars Pet Care, which included a technology company, a $100 million venture fund, and a startup accelerator, pretty cool stuff I think that we'll also talk about. Before Mars, he was the GC of CASL.

He has a little bit of an entrepreneurial bent or background. He was a co-founder of Doggy Chef, which was a DTC dog food company here in New York City. And then earlier in his career, he had a couple other in-house roles, head of legal at Calibra, and I believe the first lawyer there as well, VP and senior counsel for public and private partnerships at MasterCard. And as we'll talk about too, you started your career working at a few notable law firms in Brussels, Paris, and then finally New York City. So Tim, thanks so much for joining me today for this episode of The Abstract.

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Tim Hirsch 

Thanks for having me. That was a mouthful. 

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Tyler Finn 

Well, it's an interesting background and fits with the sort of, we were talking about the theme before we got going in the podcast, it's with the, like we want people on who've had winding careers, done things different, not just a linear line. Okay, fun question for you to start. Most guests get a hard question, but you get a fun one. You seem to have a love of pets. Do you have a dog? Do you have a cat? Do you have other pets?

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Tim Hirsch

We have a dog. We have a 12-year-old Cavapoo. His name is Peanut. 

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Tyler Finn 

Cute. Oh, that's a good name. 

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Tim Hirsch

It is a good name. We always joke with my wife, it was our first kid. We got him early in the relationship. The stories diverge as to whether it was a gift or not and a surprise or not. I always say that I surprised her with the pup for her birthday and that she wanted a pet. She always says that it was just me going out on a whim and getting a dog. So we'll never know for sure, but we do have a dog. And yeah, it's been a great part of my life. 

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Tyler Finn 

One of those stories is more favorable to you, though.

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Tim Hirsch 

That's exactly right, yes. I tell the story of how I went out and got this for her birthday. She just said, you just showed up with a dog. But either way, it turned out being a good thing for us. 

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Tyler Finn 

And your kids love the dog as well? 

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Tim Hirsch

Kids love the dog, yeah.

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Tyler Finn 

They didn't have to beg you for one. 

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Tim Hirsch 

They did not have to beg us for one, which was definitely a bonus for them. Yeah, they grew up with it. So, they were always around him, especially my son is a COVID baby. Just turned five. So, he essentially spent the first two years of his life inside trap with his parents, his sister, and a dog. So he's really comfortable around dogs. But no, they love him. They love him. He's always been a part of the family. And yeah, it brings a ton of energy into the house. 

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Tyler Finn 

We are going to come back to pets because it features somewhat prominently in a couple of aspects of your career. But you started your legal career in Europe. Tell me a little bit about how that came about.

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Tim Hirsch

Well, I grew up in Europe. So I was born and raised in Brussels, Belgium, and went through high school there. Then I left to go to university abroad in a couple of countries, and then came to the States for the first time a long time ago now, but to get my LLM. And I did that on a Fulbright scholarship. And the way that that works is you sort of got to go back to your home country for two years to sort of preach to the rest of the world how great America is, which sounded much better then than it does today. But it sort of, you know, it's a cultural exchange program, essentially, right? So, I went out there and so part of the contract is you got to go back in and work for two years in your home country. 

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Tyler Finn 

Interesting. 

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Tim Hirsch

And so, I ended up going back to Brussels and sort of the way that, you know, my education was set up is I ended up passing the bar in New York. And I never went to law school in Belgium, right? And so that created a sort of weird situation for me because I couldn't really practice in a traditional Belgian law practice.

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Tyler Finn 

Interesting.

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Tim Hirsch 

Because I knew nothing about Belgian law.

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Tyler Finn 

Yeah.

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Tim Hirsch

But I needed to be in Belgium. And so sort of what was the natural option for me was to go sort of for going to work for an international law firm and do antitrust, which is sort of, you know, the main hub for that is in Belgium. So I sort of fell into it a little bit by accident and, you know, sort of ended up being the start of a long journey. 

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Tyler Finn 

I think it's interesting that you grew up there and then came to the US for law school and then went back. I mean, I think a lot of times American lawyers even have trouble maybe navigating some of the, like, the cultural aspects of European law or the focus on regulation or there's just a very different lens on it, a very different view of antitrust to the role that government should play. Was that ever challenging for you? Like did you feel like you were sort of caught between these two perspectives? How did you navigate that I guess is my question. 

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Tim Hirsch

It's a good question. I think it was more of a shock when I came back here to work, which is when I when I ended up in Brussels to work, because I do think that law school prepares you maybe not that well for the realities of working as an attorney in a firm. And so, it all sort of felt pretty theoretical right up until the time that I ended up starting work. I think that part of the interesting challenge of working in antitrust in Brussels is that, you know, you mostly deal with the European Commission, which is sort of, you know, huge behemoth when it comes to regulation. And so, yeah, that was a little bit of a shock just in and of itself, not in comparison to anything else necessarily. You know, it's just, it's a big machine. But it was super fun. It was super fun, but I didn't necessarily feel that I was better equipped than others or not as well equipped as those that, for example, went to law school in Europe before I ended up there. So, what I think it did provide me a little bit more is maybe the sense of perspective I was born in Belgium, especially never having studied in Belgium myself. But it also sort of led to me feeling a little lost at times as well, right? Because you end up working in this country. It's weird, right? I was born there, raised there, I end up working there, and I feel like I know nothing about the legal system. Which I didn't, I knew nothing about it. So, in a way, you feel a bit lost in—I felt a little bit lost in that. But you know, the antitrust sort of European law community in Brussels is mostly international as well, right? It's kind of European. It's a lot—lots of folks from all around Europe and the U.S. that end up, you know, converging there. And so, in a way, it's pretty cosmopolitan and very international. So, I felt great in that little group, but yeah, it was sort of a strange dynamic at first.

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Tyler Finn 

Do you feel like even today, I mean, you've worked for a variety of now very global companies, you bring a slightly different perspective to things than maybe folks who've went to law school in California and then have practiced in New York for their entire career, having the benefit of having practiced a few different places?

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Tim Hirsch

I hope so. Yeah. I hope so. I don't really think about it that much anymore, right? I mean, I've been now working in the States for 15 years. 

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Tyler Finn 

Yeah. 

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Tim Hirsch

I mean, I spend more of my career working here than I have working anywhere else. With that being said, I do think that it hopefully shaved a little bit, you know, the way that I think and the way that I approach problems. I do think there are fundamental differences between just generally how lawyers are perceived even just in the States versus in Europe. The way that the lawyers are trained here versus in Europe, the way that you practice is very different. I went to university in the UK and even then there's multiple different ways to be a lawyer, right? Sure. Whether you're a barrister or a solicitor. And so, you know, I do think that having had the chance, and it's maybe not so much that I've studied, you know, in these different places, but having lived in different places and, you know, being exposed to different cultures certainly helps me navigate Mars, a highly multicultural, super-matricized, very large organization, with presence in most countries in the world. So, I do think that I have sort of a natural ability to connect with people that are maybe not just naturally comfortable in sort of the corporate American culture. But maybe it's easier for others to tell whether that's true or not, right?

That's my perception. But I certainly think that it adds to my perspective. 

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Tyler Finn 

Super matricized. I like that. I'm going to use that.

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Tim Hirsch 

Yeah. Yeah. It's sort of the way that I describe it. 

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Tyler Finn 

Yeah. 

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Tim Hirsch

It's, you know, I mean, it's a very, it's a huge organization. I'm sure we'll get back to it. But just have a ton of layers that intersect. And that's really the only way to run an organization that big. But you just have a ton of touch points with people all over the world.

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Tyler Finn 

When we were preparing for this, one of the inflection points that we talked about in your career was that head of legal role, that first lawyer role at Calibra. Can you tell us a little bit about how they found you, you found them, that got started? 

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Tim Hirsch 

Yeah. Again, the world is a very big place, but it's not. And yeah, you know, Calibra is now, you know, 5 billion unicorn in the data software space, you know, massive company. You know, when I got in touch with them, they were very small, right? So, they're a Belgian company. So they were founded by a couple of researchers in university in in Flanders in Belgium and They were really doing stuff around Pure sort of data right and really research driven And like a lot of great inventions sort of stumbled into turning that into the business, right? and you know at a time it was working in MasterCard and Maybe not necessarily yet able to navigate a pretty corporate in-house environment. And yeah, it turns out that the recruiter there somehow knew people that I knew and reached out to me and said, hey, you're here, but you're Belgian and you speak a couple of languages and we're a very small company and we're from Belgium and we're in a WeWork at 25 Broadway. But we really think that there's a there there and we'd love to talk to you. And next thing you know, I was working there in a very small WeWork at 25 Broadway and sharing office space with the sales team. And yeah,

it was a transformative experience for me for sure in terms of my career and even just overall my development. I think that it was the first time where I felt that I could have an impact. It was the first time that I felt I could really screw up in a major, major way, which I think is often the case in very small companies or at least at startups that are really early stage where a mistake can have a huge cost. 

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Tyler Finn 

Sure.

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Tim Hirsch

And yeah, I think it was a lot of luck that I ended up in that job. You know, a little bit sort of talking my way into the role, you know, maybe overselling a little bit my abilities with SAAS agreements and NDAs at the time. 

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Tyler Finn 

NDAs are easy. 

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Tim Hirsch

You know, NDA, NDA here, NDA there. But, you know, talk about the cultural difference between the US and Europe right I mean not a thing in Europe Yeah, or much less of a thing back then at least right and yeah, it just ended up being a crazy crazy journey, you know going through multiple rounds of funding and exponential growth and you know now they're they're huge. 

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Tyler Finn 

I think with those sort of early legal hires Let's say like the first lawyer or the first head of legal or VP of legal at a company at that stage. One piece is financing that you're talking about, the net growth. The other piece is sort of commercialization, getting the product really ready to go to market. The folks who make it sort of the next level with the business generally have a very good business sense. Do you feel like you learned that on the job? How did you try to do that actively? Because then when I look at the rest of your career, it seems like there's a very strong through line of, hey, I'm not just a lawyer here, I'm also someone who's bringing a sort of like business perspective to the table.

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Tim Hirsch

Yeah, that's a good question. So going back, I think for me personally, I ended up going to law school because I didn't want to do math, right, essentially. Like a lot of lawyers. 

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Tyler Finn 

I was not good at calculus either so. 

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Tim Hirsch

There you go. And so, and the reason I'm saying that is because I don't think that I was naturally driven to a legal career because that was my passion. Right. 

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Tyler Finn 

Right. 

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Tim Hirsch

I know a lot of folks that ever since they were 10 years old, they wanted to be attorneys and they wanted to practice and they could tell you already, I want to be a litigator or I want to do IP. That was never really the case for me. And it's a huge luxury to have been able to go through that process even without that fire and that passion originally. But the reason I'm saying that is because I always sort of felt that maybe my greatest skill was not necessarily to be a just straightforward attorney because I don't think that I was naturally gifted at it, to be honest, right? That you go to law school and you see in your class, right? There's a group of folks that are just amazing. They read, they understand, they dissect, they just have a natural ability to just explain these concepts in a way that I didn't feel I ever had in law school, right? And I was a terrible student, but I was on top of the class. And I think that that mostly stemmed because of, you know, the lack of just pure passion for the topic, right? And it's not that I hated it, but I didn't feel a passion for it, at least initially, certainly not when I was in law school. And the reason that I said that is because when I started my legal career, I didn't feel a passion for the pure legal work, right? I always felt a lot more passionate, a lot more interest in sort of things that were tangential to the legal work, right? And so when I worked in a law firm, I love doing deals because I love to learn about new industries and read through Sims and read through business plans and understand how putting two companies together is more than just one plus one equals two, right? And that I always found fascinating. And so when I ended up working at Collibra, I loved that opportunity to just be able to learn everything, right? Learning about software, which was the first time that I was exposed to software. And at a time it was still, SaaS was still sort of a new thing, right? A lot of the customers were still on-premise. And so the model was sort of shifting slowly from on-premise to purely cloud-based, you know, SaaS offering. And when I started, I still remember, you know, my welcome packet from the CFO was, you know, this binder of documents that still had, you know, on-prem license agreement that was a hundred pages, you know, with financial institutions, like, oh, it's cool. But I love that ability to sort of sit with the sales team and just listen to calls, right? And say, hey, this is why you need this tool. This is what it's gonna do to your business. I love to be, you know, to be sitting with the CFO and the CEO to understand how you plan on growing this company, right? What is the path to product market fit? Cause it was still really early on. Yeah. And we weren't sure, right? I mean, we knew there was something, it was working, but we, you know, it was only a handful of customers. It wasn't scale yet. And so, I think I really learned just by not talking too much, which is difficult for attorneys to do, by listening a lot, and then by just trying to be in every non-legal call that I possibly could. And that was, for me, sitting on all the product team calls as much as I could, most of the sales team calls and we just try to soak up, you know, how how do you scale a company? right, what what what is What is the key to growing a company particularly early on and and I think that was the first time where I felt that That I belonged, you know in a way and sort of. 

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Tyler Finn 

Yeah. 

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Tim Hirsch

I was working because I felt that I could have an impact and I felt like good, you know Sort of take my background, which, you know, it's never going to change. I'm always going to be a lawyer, but apply it in a very different way. And to me, that was sort of really eye-opening that that was a possibility, right? Because even before at MasterCard, which was a great experience and, you know, an awesome way to go from firm to in-house, it was still a lot of much more segmented, right? It was more, you're a lawyer and this is sort of what you need to do, which tends to be the case in larger corporations, certainly financial institutions. But that was sort of the first time where it was sort of a little bit free for all, right? In early stage companies, everybody needs to do everything and everybody needs to sort of chip in and if you're willing to take more, they give you more. Right? And so for me, that was sort of an incredible learning opportunity.

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Tyler Finn 

Do you feel like your time at Calibra gave you a lot more confidence when you started to think about starting your own business. Was that really formative in giving you the confidence to say, I know you didn't fully quit your job to start Dougie Chef, but saying like, okay, I actually think I could lean into this and I could be an entrepreneur. 

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Tim Hirsch

Yeah, I think so. You know, I think at least it gave me a maybe false sense of confidence, right? Because we could talk about it more, but running your own company, starting your own company is so difficult. 

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Tyler Finn 

Yeah. 

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Tim Hirsch

But I certainly think that it gave me a false sense of confidence in terms of, all right, I know how to do estate filing, I know what sales tax are, I've seen payroll, I understand these concepts from up close because we were a really small group and I was exposed to all these topics. And I think that it gave me a sense of, okay, I've seen it, now I can do it. Now, that was not right, because those are two very different things. But I think it certainly sort of was a moment where when my co-founder called me and she said, hey, you know, I think there's an opportunity here, do you want to do this? I felt that I had cars that I didn't have before to be able to do that. And that was, you know, that was certainly a moment for me where I said, okay, I can try to do this.

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Tyler Finn 

I mean, maybe tell us a little bit about the business, but then you've almost preempted my next question for you, which was, was this as hard, like starting a company, was it as hard or was it a lot harder than you expected?

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Tim Hirsch

Yeah, I think you know the answer to that now, but yeah, a lot harder, right, a lot harder.

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Tyler Finn 

Yeah.

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Tim Hirsch

And the company was a D to C human grade fresh dog food company. And this is 10 years ago when the market was essentially – there was nothing on the market like that, right? And you essentially had high-end kibble or you had sort of your supermarket type of food. And then you had some fresh – the supermarket fresh food that was starting to roll in. But it's sort of that trend of, you know, what we now call the, sort of the humanization of pets, right? And treating your pet sort of like your child was really in its early stages. And, you know, my co-founder who also had a dog who was having issues with the food that she was eating, she started noticing this gap in the market. And she was like, there's not really stuff out there that I would want to feed my dog. And so like a lot of companies, we started it from sort of a need that we had. I was like, it's true, I wish I could feed my dog something better. And so that's where it started. And we literally just started, you know, the two of us in her apartment, just sketching something on a piece of paper to very quickly her saying, hey, we should do it. Like, we should actually start a company. And you know, there's like this huge gap between having an idea and running a company. 

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Tyler Finn 

Yes.

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Tim Hirsch

Huge, right? And I think that a lot of people will at some point in their life probably maybe think, oh, I want to run this company or I want to start a business. And the space that you need to fill to get there, even just to get started, is so big. And I will say it is much smaller in the US than I think it is in Europe, just because we as a country do make it pretty easy to start a business. But it is a pretty sort of staggering mountain to climb when you decide to actually go into it. And so it turned out to be incredibly difficult, incredibly rewarding, but incredibly difficult. 

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Tyler Finn 

I think that fits with what a lot of, you hear from a lot of other founders of businesses who've come on. It's also why when I see companies that are in stealth mode, sometimes I kind of laugh because I think, I've had lots of ideas for businesses and I tell everybody about them and I haven't started any of them. 

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Tim Hirsch

That's right, well, you're running a stealth startup. 

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Tyler Finn 

Tell us a little bit about the journey. Did you have to go out and raise capital? Where did the business start? Where did it end?

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Tim Hirsch

Yeah, no, so we bootstrapped it at the beginning and got some friends and family money. And we essentially ran it almost exclusively on that. And yeah, our ambition was to get a lot bigger. So for a long time, it was just my co-founder and I, her name is Deborah, if she's watching. And she was really sort of the creative, sort of operational muscle behind the company. And I was doing a lot of the, sort of the more corporate-y stuff, which, you know, not shocking. 

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Tyler Finn 

Yeah. 

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Tim Hirsch

And, you know, we just started making food in my kitchen, in her kitchen. 

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Tyler Finn 

Wow. 

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Tim Hirsch 

Meals ourselves, you know, doing guerrilla marketing, going to dog parks and going to trade shows and, you know, for weekends on end, we would set up and, you know, go around and distribute samples in parks and wherever we could go. And we did that for a long time. Then, you know, we ended up at a revenue level where we could hire help. So, we hired folks for production and for delivery. And yeah, it was a pretty intense experience going from ideation to distribution, right? I mean, everything from how do you make food, right? How do you package food? Where do you get your supplies? How do you set up a distribution route? How do you set yourself up on e-com to be able to manage that business? How do you run a P&L? How do you run payroll? I mean, all that thing, all these things that you never really think about are involved in running a business and less than until you actually run your own business.

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Tyler Finn 

Right.

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Tim Hirsch

And, you know, to me, it was probably the biggest learning experience of my career in terms of getting hands-on, you know, operational experience in running a business. And it was a crazy ride, right? I mean, we went on seed invest where we pitched.

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Tyler Finn 

Oh, cool.

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Tim Hirsch

In San Francisco. We grew the company and so we ended up as sort of this inflection point where a lot of companies I think end up, which is either you take substantial outside capital to grow the business, particularly D2C, particularly 10 years ago, which was very much an acquisition game, or you don't and you're sort of stall. And I think we were maybe a little slow to get there because just the thought of getting outside capital and what that entailed, I think, is daunting. And it's weird because I had done it on the Calibra side and I knew that pretty well, but when it comes to yourself. 

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Tyler Finn 

it's different, I'm sure. 

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Tim Hirsch

It's very different and you feel a lot more exposed. It's easy to sort of go and sell somebody else's P&L when it's loss-making. It's very different when it's your P&L that's loss-making. You got to sell that, right? But we did feel pretty good about sort of the fact that that business was going to get disrupted massively, right, in the way that people were going to shop for that sort of level of pet food was going to change. But we got really, I think we got delayed in getting to that realization. And then we did accelerate that and we were negotiating with a couple of investors and then literally, you know, a couple of weeks before, two of the largest competitors that we had closed pretty substantial funding rounds. And sort of that cooled the mood a little bit. And that was sort of the beginning of the end for our business. But, you know, some good lessons there. Not the ending that I think we had hoped for. I think, you know, looking back, I think the other big thing for me was I was doing two jobs at once. 

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Tyler Finn 

Right. I was going to ask you about that. 

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Tim Hirsch 

Yeah. And I think that you can do that for a while. I do think that a lot of founders, you know, often do that, right? You have your company that you're trying to run on the side. I think that for me, I was also probably a little cold feet when he came to saying, okay, I'm going to jump and do this full time. Which, you know, looking back was probably the ideal time for me to do it, but we didn't have kids, we're living in a small apartment. It was sort of the pressure that you probably have when you have a family or when you're later in your career was not there. But I don't think that I was bold enough, I don't think that I was brave enough. I think that lawyers have a bias against these type of decisions, probably in the way that we wired And you know I thought I can manage both for probably longer than I could And and that's something that I certainly have have regrets over for sure And you know looking back. I feel that I probably could have done more should have done more decided earlier, but you know these are part of Lessons that you learn over time and… 

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Tyler Finn 

Share with others. 

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Tim Hirsch 

That's exactly right.

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Tyler Finn 

The interesting thing to me is then, at least it seems from the outside looking in, that there's kind of an obvious through line. Not from your earlier work for MasterCard or the law firms or Calibra, but from the startup to what you're doing today. Yeah, I mean, tell us a little bit about that journey. I don't want to totally steal over your time at Castle.

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Tim Hirsch

No, no, no. Which was great. But yeah, I mean, it is a thread, right? Yeah. And my time at Castle was great, but I ended up sort of coming into this company and into this role in a way that felt quite organic. And yeah, a recruiter at Mars reached out to me, I think probably because they saw that I'd run a pet company. And at the time, they were looking for, you know, first legal hire for this small-for-Mars division that was focusing on sort of innovation and technology and sort of bringing the next thing to pet care. And you know, I think it's easy to sort of look at my background and put, you know, tech and pet together and see that that was not a really

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Tyler Finn 

It can't be a huge Venn diagram, right?

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Tim Hirsch 

Exactly. I don't think it was like a million of us out there. So I feel like her LinkedIn search was probably pretty quick. But, you know, we ended up getting on the phone. And so two things. One, I had that conversation and I felt that this is so obvious, right? I also ended up initially saying no, because I felt that, you know, it was not the right time, through COVID. And I just wasn't in the mental space where I felt that I was ready for it. And the amazing thing that happened is that the CEO at the time for Kinship said, sorry, I'll take your time. We'll wait. And I don't think you get too many of those in your career. And, and that was a little bit of a catalyst for me to say, Okay, I think that if that's representative of the culture, and of management, and how they run, you know, the company, maybe I need to think about it a little harder. And, and I did that. And, and, you know, ended up in probably was for me at a time, you know, the dream job, right, which was combining these passions that I had for, you know, building companies for technology for the world of pets, which, by the way, is a crazy world. And, you know, you go to the pet convention, you see some crazy things. But but people, people love their pets. Yeah, people love… 

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Tyler Finn 

Absolutely.  

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Tim Hirsch

Love their dogs, in a very different way than they love human beings. And I do think that it's an area that has so much passion. People that tend to work in the pet care space tend to be passionate. And whether it's vets or it's people that work in the pet food business, it's just, I think it's a very emotionally charged, in a good way industry where people just are in it because they love it. And so I ended up joining. I ended up joining as the first fully dedicated legal resource for Kinship. You know, I think that for a lawyer that likes innovation, it was also sort of the best of both worlds because it was, you know, a mandate to go and innovate and really try to bring something new to the pet space while being part of this, you know, really, really, really big company, which, you know, talking about protecting your downside, you know, it's a really, really awesome way to be able to do that, right? To have sort of the backing of such an amazing company that Mars is. And yeah, I ended up taking the job and immediately loved it. Immediately loved the people, the work, the freedom. And yeah, went through multiple iterations of my job while at Kinship, took on some business development, some corporate development, talking about non-legal stuff. And yeah, ended up being an incredible, incredible venture incredible adventure and learning a ton more about just bed care generally still am. But I realized that I knew this and then you realize that it's that, right? And so, yeah, it ended up being, I think, not a lot of times in my life do I look back and think, okay, this was meant to be. This was sort of one of these moments where you look back and you're like, okay, there's some common sense here.

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Tyler Finn 

You said something earlier that I thought was interesting when you were talking about the transition from MasterCard. You said, I think, now you know how to navigate a big organization maybe better than you once did. And I raise that only because, I think people have trouble sometimes going both directions, right? Like big organization, Google, to five-person startup, right? I think some of these people have trouble going the other way, too, though, right? You go from an org in which your responsibilities are wide-ranging and you are a lot more essential and there aren't sort of like edicts from six levels up on high, right? Talk to us a little bit about that. What have you learned about navigating a big organization? Why do you think you're better at that today?

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Tim Hirsch 

Yeah, and listen, it's hard. I think it's even hard for people that have been in larger organizations their whole life.

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Tyler Finn 

Sure. Small P politics.

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Tim Hirsch

That's exactly right. For me, I think the biggest challenge is to sort of framing your area of influence. Right? And like you mentioned, when you work in a, you know, 10-people startup, your area of influence is everything and everyone.

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Tyler Finn 

Yeah.

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Tim Hirsch 

And it's reciprocal, right? Because everyone is in everyone's business. Totally. I think that the reason that people challenge to go from that to a large corporation is because they think that it's going to work the same way. Right? You're going to go to a big corporation and you're going to be able to influence a million different things. And I think that the sort of one of the critical Things to do is to reframe your own perception of what your area of influence should be And it doesn't mean that you can't have influence in a very large organization It just means that you need to influence in a different way Mm-hmm and and on different things right and I think for me that was certainly even though I had been in a large organization a startup, it was still a learning curve when I joined Mars because no two organizations are the same, no two cultures are the same.

And I did have to figure it out and to sort of relearn and retrain myself. I think particularly for lawyers, it's an ego thing as well. I think that we like to shape as much as we can and we like to impact as much as we can. Yeah. And yeah, when you work in a startup or certainly when you're in one lawyer or legal department, you shape every legal decision because that's your job. Right. Now, you go into an organization that has 200 lawyers, you're not going to shape every legal decision and you're not going to touch every legal issue. That doesn't mean that what you touch is less important, right? Or less impactful. But I do think that from an ego perspective, I think we're sort of, you know, especially if you come from a smaller company, you're sort of naturally trained to be that person, right? And you want to sort of have a very large area of influence. And so I think part of the secret or at least part of the recipe for me was, yeah, one, you got to check your ego and realize that you're not gonna be in every conversation, you're not gonna be in every department, you're not gonna be able to influence at all, but it doesn't mean that you can't impact, right? And in a way, you can have maybe a much larger impact in a bigger company if you're in a much bigger scale business, you just gotta figure out how you can do that in a way that focuses on sort of why you're being asked to do. But it is hard, it's hard to retrain your brain. It's hard to put your ego in check a little bit and say, this is the new normal for you. But the flip side is that it comes with a lot of amazing other things that you don't get, rather than a smaller company. And so, you know, I, and maybe personally, I also had maybe the easiest of transitions, which was, I sort of went into the startup of the big corporation because before I went into the big corporation. 

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Tyler Finn 

Trampoline of sorts, almost. Yeah. 

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Tim Hirsch

Exactly. You know, but, you know, I think you're always sort of evolving as a person as well, right? And so it's really a matter of, I think, founding your comfort level in the new normal and accepting that it's different. And then, you know, some people love it and then some people hate it. But for me, it ended up being an awesome fit.

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Tyler Finn 

That's really interesting. I have a couple more questions for you about something that I'm really interested in. I hope my guests are too. Yeah. You recently, a few months ago, six months ago, completed an Iron Man.

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Tim Hirsch

Yeah, June. 

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Tyler Finn 

June, okay. I think you're my second guest who's done this. You're in good company because Dan Haley is the other one and he's an amazing general counsel. What motivated you to take on a challenge like that?

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Tim Hirsch 

I still don't know. I still don't know. I, so I think I am a pretty challenge-oriented person, right? And I find that if I don't have something specific to work towards, I tend to stagnate a little bit. I think I'm naturally lazy, you know? That's sort of my default state. And I can get out of that laziness if I have something specific to work towards and you know I had a couple of conversations with my wife about you know wanting to do a physical challenge You know I've done some other stuff in the past, and I got injured and I felt like you know I was stagnating a little bit fitness wise and I Somehow started thinking about triathlon and I have zero triathlon experience Prior to that I had never owned a road bike. The most that I had swam in a pool was, you know, two laps on vacation. And I don't think that I'd ever run in a 10K before. So I had no right to play in that space. We often talk about the right to play and the right to win. Zero right to play in triathlon. I don't think that I'm naturally built for triathlon either. But it sort of started to perk a little bit in my head. And I started talking and talking about it. I think it was at the end of the year, at the end of 23, my wife was like, just do it if you're gonna talk about it. I think she called me out during a dinner. I said, well, because I kept saying I'm training. She's like, you're not really training. And I was like, okay, you know what? I'm going to sign up. And so I signed up and paid the fee. 

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Tyler Finn 

They're not cheap. 

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Tim Hirsch

They're not that expensive. It was like 300 bucks or something. But it's enough that you're like, I don't want to…

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Tyler Finn 

It's motivating. You don't want to miss it. 

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Tim Hirsch

It gives skin in the game. And then, you know, realized that I sort of had to train for it. But it really all started from just wanting to challenge myself. And I do like to set sort of, you know, objective-based performance and something that works for me and something that I really like to anchor around, even my team. And that's how it started. And so I went from having zero triathlon experience to doing the race, and yeah, it was an incredible journey. Honestly, just super fun. Learned a lot about myself. 

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Tyler Finn 

You can give me some tips offline. I mean, so I see it's a little bit for a half, which I think is more reasonable given my work travel schedule. I Can I can maybe relax a little on the training? But I can imagine doing a full Ironman like you have to be incredibly disciplined on the training and it's also a lot of time How did you find how did you find that balance? Like how did you create the time? I think to tackle something like that

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Tim Hirsch

Yeah, it's it's Jenga a little bit. So you got to sort of reshape your days and your weeks. One, my wife was super supportive. And you have to have support from within. And so I was incredibly lucky that she said, you can do this. And that she gave me the time, the freedom, and the money to do it. And then it was a lot of waking up very, very early in the morning, you know, 4.30 a.m. to go and hit the pool before the workday. It was a lot of, you know, time early on on the bike before the kids woke up. It was a lot of time my wife just, you know, dealing with the kids so that I could go and do, you know, a four-hour bike ride, in the garage in the middle of winter. And so, I do think that a lot of it is the support system, a lot of it is the people that you have around you that can really provide that space for you. And then just discipline, right? I mean, you just, the most difficult thing is to just stay very committed to the process. I do quite a bit of travel for work. You know, I was on the road a lot, you know, we had vacations with the kids and, you know, you just got to figure out a way to keep training, right? And I went on, you know, 18-mile treadmill runs at the Frankfurt Airport Sheraton, you know, when I landed. You know, I did laps in the pool when we went on vacation with the kids, which was great. I went on really early morning runs in the middle of nowhere when I was traveling just because I had to get it done. You just have to find a way, right? And I think that that's probably the toughest thing is when you have a career and when you have a family to just not find excuses not to do it. Because I think it's easy, or it's easier to find a reason not to do it versus a reason to do it. But then I just fell in love with the training. I just love, you know, I'm a sucker for repetition, and I'm a sucker for schedule, and I'm a sucker for knowing what I'm going to do a week. And, you know, I had a coach that was programming for me and worked really well. And yeah, you know, you just, you learn a lot through the process. And I think, you know, with triathlon, a lot of it is, it's a lot about the training versus the race, right? Because the race is like this, but when you train for months, really, when you look at the ratio, it's a lot more training than it is racing.

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Tyler Finn 

For sure.

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Tim Hirsch 

Yeah, it was pretty awesome. 

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Tyler Finn 

Maybe you've already said it, but is there like a core lesson that you feel like you took away from the whole experience? 

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Tim Hirsch 

Yeah. Maybe two things. One is you've got to break things in small chunks. Totally. And I think that that really applies to think about doing 65 miles on the bike, that sounds awful.

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Tyler Finn 

Yep.

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Tim Hirsch

Right. And that sounds like you're never going to get through it. If you think about doing 10 miles six times in a row, all of a sudden that becomes a lot more approachable and a lot more reasonable. And that's really sort of how I approached the training on on the long distances. Right. It's don't think about how long you're going to be on that thing. Just went through all the seasons of Full Swing and of F1 on Netflix. I watched a lot of shows, but you just do it one episode at a time is the way that I approach it on the bike. When I had to do four hours on the bike, it was like, I'm going to watch five episodes today.

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Tyler Finn 

Yeah. 

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Tim Hirsch

And that's how you break it up. And that's something that you can really apply to work as well. You know, when you have to write a super long memo or when you have to read a presentation that's 200 pages, you know, break it up in 10 pages, increment. 

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Tyler Finn 

Yeah. 

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Tim Hirsch 

And I think that that brings a lot more immediate satisfaction, you know, to our brain, which I think we crave just naturally. It also makes the task feel a lot less daunting. So I think that's number one. And then number two is, you know, you gotta work your weakness. Because I think that we all naturally tend to like to do what we're best at. And I think, you know, for me, you know, it was running, right? I love running. You don't need to be great to run, right? It's just pretty simple thing. Put your shoes on, you go out. But, you know, that was my comfort zone, right? I went out and, you know, could run and that was not a big deal. But I very quickly realized, because I sort of was not really investing as much time and effort into the other two, that's pretty quickly becoming a problem. And so I sort of flipped the training, and my coach was like, you need to flip the training. And so for a month, I ended up just swimming, essentially. 

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Tyler Finn 

Wow. 

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Tim Hirsch

Which was miserable, because I'm not a good swimmer. I mean, you're a good swimmer, but I'm not a good swimmer. I don't have a swimmer's body. I was not naturally, you know, drawn to the pool. And you know, the first time that I had to swim for more than 20 minutes, I thought, what is this? Why am I doing this to myself? And how does anyone subject themselves to something like that? And I really learned a lot through that. And I think that's something that you can apply anywhere.

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Tyler Finn 

Absolutely.

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Tim Hirsch

Just focus on the stuff that you're not good at. And I think that, especially as you go through your career, I think we tend to just gravitate towards the stuff that we're the best at, the stuff that we like the most. Right, because they tend to be the same thing. You Tim, you tend to like what you're really good at. And so, that was really sort of philosophy that helped me break through a lot of those plateaus when I was training, and that's something that I really took away from that experience. 

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Tyler Finn 

A great reminder to our guests to listen all the way through the podcast because some of the best advice-

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Tim Hirsch

Is at the end.

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Tyler Finn 

Is at the end. Okay, I've got a few closing questions for you that I like to ask all my guests. The first one is if you have a favorite part of your day to day. 

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Tim Hirsch

Yeah, it's bedtime with my kids. We always read a story together at night. They're five and seven, and they still want my wife and I to read them stories. For parents of young kids, bedtime can cut both ways. It can be challenging, but it is something that the kids look forward to every day. And I think that we both, my wife and I, look forward to every day. And it's part of these things that you know are not going to be there forever. And it's something that I definitely, definitely love to do. 

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Tyler Finn 

Do you have a professional pet peeve?

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Tim Hirsch

Yeah. Yeah, for me, lack of effort. I don't mind people failing. I don't mind if you don't know something. I don't care if you need time. Nothing is a no in my book. I think not trying is something that really irks me because anyone can try. That doesn't mean that you will succeed. And I'm not, you know, I don't care about success in and of itself or about the outcome, but I think lack of effort and not trying is something that really rubs me off the wrong way. 

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Tyler Finn 

Do you have a good book that you would recommend to me and to our audience? 

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Tim Hirsch

Yes, I recently read this book called 100 Saturdays.

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Tyler Finn 

Oh, I haven't heard of that. Yeah, which is- Yeah, cool, something new.

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Tim Hirsch

There you go. So it's a really fascinating story, story of this 90 year old woman who grew up in Rhodes, which is an island off of Greece, in the Jewish community there, in the late 1800s, early 1900s, as part of the Jewish community, which was very small, and, you know, used to be owned by the, the, the island was part of Turkey, then Italy invaded it in the early 1900s. And she ended up, like all the other Jews on roads being deported to Auschwitz, and she ended up surviving and made her way to New York and, you know, lived a really long life. And she met this this journalist book writer. One day, they sat down at her house on a Saturday. And it led to 100 Saturdays of them coming together to have him him interview her about her life in in Rhodes. And, you know, turned into this book, which is fascinating. You know, it's an incredible sort of snapshot. She sort of goes through her life as a Jew on Rhodes, which was a really unique time that we're probably never gonna see again, but you know, this island where they went from having no electricity, no running water under the Turks to being invaded by the Italians, and all of a sudden, and this renaissance and being very prosperous in the 1920s to in 15 years being all essentially massacred and exterminated on what was the longest journey of any Jewish population to get to Auschwitz, because they went from the south of Greece to almost northeast Africa, northwest Africa, to all the way to Poland. And it's a beautifully written book, you know the story. She's a beautiful storyteller And it's just a wonderful wonderful story and it's called a hundred Saturdays 

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Tyler Finn 

Great recommendation. Okay final question for you my Traditional closing question for my guests. It's if you could look back on your days of being a young lawyer just getting started Maybe getting your LLM or in Brussels, something that you know now that you wish that you'd known back then?

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Tim Hirsch

Yeah, and when you sent me that question, I really had to think hard because I feel like there's so much today. But I think probably the biggest thing is you know nothing, you know? A little humility. You know, and I think that's so, you know, for lawyers, I think particularly, right? You come out of law school and you really think you know a lot. And you do, right? You don't, maybe you just don't know a lot about what you need to know to be a practicing attorney. And I really wish that I realized that a lot quicker because, yeah, I think this massive confidence that we get when you get out of law school, you pass the bar, you know, it's really hard to get to that place and you feel that you've got there. But you know, looking back now to where I was, you know, I really wish that I realized how little I knew about what it actually means to be a good attorney at least, right? And to add value, to help a business, and sort of guide decision making in a way that's valuable to the business. And so, you know, having realized that a little earlier, you know, maybe it would have been beneficial, but you know, you are your mistakes, and so I wouldn't be here without those as well.

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Tyler Finn 

Tim, this has been really fantastic. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of The Abstract. And to all of our listeners, thank you so much for tuning in and we hope to see you next time.

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Tim Hirsch

Bye

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