Careers in Finance | Eric S. Byunn

Meeyeon (00:00)
Hi everyone. And welcome back to another episode of Careers in Finance, the podcast where we talk about the many paths that you can take in the world of finance, from traditional roles to emerging opportunities and everything that might be in between. Today’s guest is someone I am so honored to have on the show, Eric Byunn.

He is a partner and co-founder at Centana Growth Partners with more than 25 years of experience spanning growth equity, product management, and tech innovation. Eric’s career has taken him from Stanford to Harvard, FTV Capital, and now leading one of the most respected names in growth equity investing. And along the way, he’s backed category-defining companies, served on numerous boards,

Eric Byunn (00:47)
Okay.

Meeyeon (00:48)
and helped shape how enterprise tech scales. But today we’re not just talking about deals, we’re digging into the person behind the resume, what shaped Eric’s early career decisions, what hard-won lessons did he carry from product to partner, and how he’s thinking about the future of finance and leadership today. So let’s dive right in.

So Eric, you’ve had an amazing career and you started off at one of the best schools that is highly competitive. The first part of our discussion, I’d like to call the formative years. And I was just wondering if you could give us some insight into how you started off, what drew you to economics, for example, and computer science at Harvard.

Eric Byunn (01:35)
Yeah, so I was probably a pretty classic nerdy kid of immigrant parents, kind of striving in school and in high school, and earlier than high school, I’d had good success and enjoyed a lot of math and sciences things that we would today call STEM fields.

And so when I was lucky enough to get to attend Harvard, I entered thinking that I was going to continue to be very focused on hard math and science. But frankly, guess the beginning, or close enough to the beginning, beyond kind of those raw skills of this journey is that as a freshman at Harvard, I took

the introductory economics class. It was a huge survey lecture class taught by the luminaries in the Harvard Economics Department. It did fulfill a distribution requirement, so had I not ended up being an economics concentrator, it was still helpful to my schedule. So I took that as a freshman with some level of interest, but also just knowing that it was 

a good thing to start off with freshman year and it was a big common freshman class. And I loved it. I loved the sort of combination of some elements of hard math science type of concepts with the behavioral aspects and sort of how humans who are somewhat unpredictable and where there’s always some randomness involved.

how that element comes in and how it affects the different pieces of our daily lives. So it’s important to note that economics in its purest form as that particular university taught it is not business and it’s not finance. There was no accounting class anywhere in my program. There was very little classic corporate finance in that program. It was a very academic

Meeyeon (03:48)
My gosh.

Eric Byunn (03:54)
approach to economics, but kind of leaning to where we’re going overall on my career and this story, I did find greater interest in the microeconomics elements and in fact the applied microeconomics elements overlapping with industrial organization and kind of going through my four years. I took deeper and deeper work in both the behavioral and the theoretical elements of that

and I ended up writing a thesis that was very much about how companies, or in my case, one particular large iconic company, IBM, had competed around the dynamics of their competition in a historical period. So you could say that the seeds of my career were sown there, but at the time, in a way that I would encourage folks to do, but happens much less

I really was just following things that I was interested in and topics that seemed fun and enjoyable to explore and intellectually stimulating, as opposed to really thinking far out in the career planning and the career planning aspects. The computer science elements and the additional focus in computer science was really the trailing element of closer to the pieces that I thought that I was going to

continue in and of course, as we’ll talk about, I have continued to combine those elements throughout my career, but that’s really how my undergraduate college academic experience came together.

Meeyeon (05:30)
Did you have any early influences when you were applying to Harvard? It truly you had a passion for something? You’re like, you know what? This is what I want to try and pursue. Or did you have any, did you have a parental influence? Did one of your parents study economics or anything?

Eric Byunn (05:45)
So, of course, my parental influence was very significant, very significant in both my level of academic achievement as well as the desire and interest in going to a top university and actually specifically Harvard. And my parents were both academics, both in university environment. So my father was a math professor

and my mother was a university librarian. So if you think about this as all very foundational, know, right there you’ve got reading and writing, right? I mean, in addition to math, reading, writing, and arithmetic. So it was all very foundational. I think the path towards economics, the path towards finance.

Meeyeon (06:28)
Yeah.

Eric Byunn (06:43)
much, much less influenced in my pre-college years. And I think the kid who graduated from high school, who was entering college, knew nothing about finance, knew nothing about business, only knew the elements of economics around sort of everybody’s day-to-day life. But of course, the parental influence in

achieving intellectual curiosity, understanding that there can be valuable things out of academics, all of that comes from a very, very strong parental influence and encouragement.

Meeyeon (07:28)
And pursuing intellectual curiosity. Generally, a curious person, a great place for those people, I think, ends up in consulting. McKinsey, a company that so many people aspire to work at, but how did you transition straight from undergraduate to McKinsey? Were they recruiting on campus, or what sparked your interest? Because I know that’s also a very competitive and highly sought-after path.

Eric Byunn (07:31)
Thank you. Okay.

Yes. So, unfortunately, I was aware that the world has changed, but I did not have any interest in consulting until I was a college senior, and they did recruit on campus.

And I had never spoken to them or anyone associated with consulting until I was a college senior. Now backing up one step, the summer, the college summer between junior and senior year, I interned for J.P. Morgan. And as an intern at J.P. Morgan, I had gotten that through,

through campus recruiting as well and perhaps being not as clued in as I think many of today’s students and folks going through this are. I heard the name, I knew great things about J.P. Morgan, I knew a bunch of my friends were going into different things in…

Now I guess we’d say the word finance at the time, I just thought banking. And so I interviewed with JP Morgan for that internship and it turned out that the group that I was interviewing for was effectively an internal consulting group to JP Morgan. Within the very large bank of JP Morgan, they had been, and I actually think they still have a sort of internal consulting operation, and I was being hired into that.

Meeyeon (09:15)
Yeah.

Eric Byunn (09:39)
Once I was lucky enough to have several options on what to do that summer and that was my introduction to, there’s this role that is consulting. And so of the different things that I do, which had a number of different characteristics, like I could have done more computer stuff. I could have done more pure banking sorts of things. But I found this internal consulting role to be pretty interesting

Meeyeon (09:52)
Get it?

Eric Byunn (10:07)
when I was looking at my options. And so I went to JP Morgan. That being an internal consulting role, I guess in hindsight, that obviously helped me both get seen and interview well for a traditional management consulting role like McKinsey & Company.

Meeyeon (10:28)
And what was your time at McKinsey like? Cause I know that’s a huge, think for generally anyone going into management consulting, investment banking, those are, that’s a really big step going from being in academics, kind of being able to manage your own time, study, prepare for tests, do well on those to going not into just any corporate environment, but one that just generally has extremely high expectations, very high demands in terms of time.

It’s a really, really big transition in life personally, I found. So after undergrad, I went into investment banking in Toronto. And I just remember being so shocked at how different my life was arranged day to day. But there were so many incredibly pivotal lessons that I think I learned in my first three years in investment banking that I think really set me up for success for my whole career. Like even today, there’s like habits, there’s a polish in professionalism and there’s a degree of,

Eric Byunn (10:56)
It…

Meeyeon (11:25)
stress management that I can handle that I don’t think people could necessarily become accustomed to unless you went down that path. What was the first, what was your time at McKinsey like?

Eric Byunn (11:38)
So I would echo a similar takeaways from that experience in terms of it was an amazing experience. I learned so much, so many lessons and formative elements about the way I think about business, career, competitive dynamics, strategy, all that sort of thing and importantly finance

all started at McKinsey. On the other hand, and I think this is still somewhat true, although maybe not as true, going to McKinsey as someone who had before that entirely been essentially a student was I think less of a transition than many other roles, including investment banking. And I say that because there

was and I think to some degree still is an academic element to strategic management consulting or management consulting. The problems you work on are defined as projects, whether you call them an engagement team or a case team or whatever the different firms language are, you work in project teams, again, not unlike in school, on a defined project with a defined timeline.

And ultimately, the end products are deliverable that now I think map almost exactly the things that people do in school. When I was there, there’s a little bit of a transition. Probably the biggest transition was showing my age a little bit. In school, we wrote prose papers, not slide decks and presentations. And so I had to transition hard to…

Meeyeon (13:24)
Hahaha.

Eric Byunn (13:28)
Encapsulating my thoughts not in 10 or 20 or 30 pages of prose, but instead 10 or 30 or 50 pages of presentations. And of course, some McKinsey consultants to this day still joke about the fact that you move from operating in paper in portrait format to paper in landscape format. And that literally felt like a very big transition. But honestly, the day-to-day 

Meeyeon (13:49)
And landscape.

Eric Byunn (13:58)
Frankly, just problem solving, thinking about a defined problem, trying to get to an answer, working in a team, and being able to draw on a library and other resources and this sort of thing. There were a lot of similarities. So a place, a management consulting job as first job out of college, both ease the transition, and then of course the direct application of that was to exactly as they pitch.

Big topics that senior managers are thinking about and being able to do that as a 22-year-old, 23-year-old from sort of the bottom of the totem pole provided great insights in terms of some of the same things you said. Work ethic, how to arrange, kind of work how to arrange thinking, how to stay prioritized, how to think about the interchange between

the math and the analysis of what you’re doing and the human elements of change management and having people and all the personalities and emotions and everything that go into all of us as people and how that all filters into both folks understanding information and the decisions that get made that lead to both strategy and execution. So invaluable time, amazing starting place for a career.

All those things were true. The last thing, perhaps again, paving the way towards finance for a young career person who had studied economics but was still very much kind of torn about where to go long term in career. I actually still had a thought about law school. I had a thought about many, many different aspects of business.

The very first project on which I was staffed was actually supporting an M&A transaction. And it was interesting because the transaction had both bankers and consultants involved, bankers, consultants, and lawyers involved. And shockingly, one of the things that the consultants were asked to do was to provide a point of view on the valuation that the transaction was being done.

Meeyeon (16:23)
That’s so bizarre.

Eric Byunn (16:24)
Very, very bizarre for, in hindsight, for a management consultant to do. But, you know, at the time, I didn’t know that that was an unusual ask. And it’s a few years later, and to all of my then clients and current McKinsey clients, there were many, many, many senior people examining my work. But at the very far bottom of the totem pole, I got handed, it’s actually my

regular office, not my home office, which I’m doing this from. I got handed a book titled Valuation. The author was Thomas Copeland, who was a professor at UCLA, I believe. And that was the Seminole McKinsey book on how companies were valued. And I read it cover to cover in order to figure out how to do this project.

Meeyeon (17:14)
My gosh. god, that sounds so stressful. I can’t imagine consultants being asked to provide an opinion on that these days. Maybe, mean, practices change so much over time. Maybe it was part of their due diligence at that point.

Eric Byunn (17:31)
Well, in a kind of side note to this, my partner and co-founder in my current role, he actually also started his career at McKinsey & Company, but he was in a specific corporate finance group within McKinsey and a specific group where they did a number of evaluations. So in that particular part of McKinsey, this would have been a natural project, but I was a generalist consultant,

Meeyeon (17:53)
Wow.

Eric Byunn (18:01)
coming in not having done any kind of business or accounting or finance background and so being tossed into a valuation exercise which was not a legal opinion in the capital O opinion but just a perspective on valuation was in hindsight kind of unusual but a great learning experience again lots of great managers, partners, mentors who helped me get through that exercise

Meeyeon (18:14)
Mm-hmm.

Eric Byunn (18:28)
and perhaps did kind of lead me on the path that I’ve been on for the past decades.

Meeyeon (18:36)
And then after your time at McKinsey, how did you find Netscape? I remember Netscape, but unfortunately, Netscape is not necessarily around today. But I find that part of your resume to be so interesting. What was it like there? What did you do? What drew you to Netscape? And what was your time there like?

Eric Byunn (18:46)
Thank you.

Yeah, so you didn’t ask, but I’m going to answer this question continuing in chronological order. So I did the standard, in my case, two year analyst program at McKinsey. And at the time, McKinsey was very, very encouraging of its analysts to return to business school. And so I

came out of McKinsey with their full endorsement and support. And honestly, at the time, with every expectation that I was going to return to McKinsey after business school, I came out here to the West Coast to go to business school at Stanford and enrolled in the MBA program. And so just kind of quickly, because there is some degree of a logical thread, if we go all the way back to college, as I said, I did a lot of in computer science and

taking internships or jobs the technology field and the computer software field was something that I had explored each and every time, although as we’ve been through, I didn’t take those roles. And so when you come to business school and you’re coming from a place like McKinsey and you’re thinking about returning to a place like McKinsey, you have kind of the standard conventional wisdom as encouraged by McKinsey as

to do a summer internship in something that’s not management consulting and that’s quite different. And so I returned to my sort of technology history and said, great, I’m gonna go do something in technology. So I did go through on-campus recruiting at the Sanford GSB and ended up in an internship at Microsoft working in…

This was the summer of Windows 95. It was the summer of the launch of MSN and so it was a very exciting time to be in Redmond at Microsoft. Got to work with a great set of folks there and so I did that summer internship at Microsoft and then I rolled back to your question. I came back to my second year as a second year MBA at the GSB and then I had the decision.

So this was a very deliberate decision-making process, much more so honestly than I’d had coming out of college. And there was a whole set of…

former McKinsey analysts who were thinking about what to do coming out of business school. And many of us had the option to return to McKinsey. Importantly, to your point about Netscape, this was 1996. The Netscape IPO was in 1995. This was the beginning of, those of us who were old enough would call it the first internet bubble. And so companies were being formed, and it was very, very clear.

not perhaps unlike the AI wave today, it was very clear that the internet was gonna be a big thing. That sounds so silly now, but it was clear and yet we were at the beginning of it. after a lot of deliberation, I went through on-campus recruiting for technology jobs and Netscape was one of the offers that I did get.

Meeyeon (22:06)
Yeah.

Eric Byunn (22:24)
Again, a great group of a team that I was able to join, led by a former GSB grad, an MBA from a number of years ago. And so that opportunity to work in what was very clearly the formative stages of a big and important change in business and industry was an opportunity that I jumped at. And we’re still a long way away from finance because I went into very traditional product management there at Netscape.

Meeyeon (22:58)
And then, so speaking of, it’s, as you say, a long way from finance, but today you are a partner and co-founder at an equity growth firm. So, from Netscape to where you are today, there are a couple of chapters in between. And I’d love for you to take us through what led you to each one of those opportunities and share any particular, particularly significant milestones or learning opportunities that you think you have.

Eric Byunn (23:28)
Yeah, so, so as you noted earlier, Netscape is no longer a company or it’s barely a brand these days.

And the reason for that is that we were acquired by AOL, also not really a company or brand these days. But at the time, it was a big blockbuster acquisition. viewed our Netscape, we viewed ourselves as a Silicon Valley hot startup. We were being acquired by, with apologies to those, this was at the time an East Coast older company. And so l,ike many, we started to look at people we…

Meeyeon (23:48)
Hahaha.

Eric Byunn (24:11)
We were like, we should do something else. And like many, I thought, well, I joined Netscape as a young but public company and wanted to go to a true startup. And so this is kind of step one in this finance career. One of the founders of Netscape, Jim Clark. So not in Mark Andreessen, but the original story about Netscape involves Jim Clark and Mark Andreessen. read that in a bunch of different places. But Jim Clark

was what had founded another company. This would actually be his, he had already founded three billion-dollar companies, and he was founding a fourth company. And that company was to focus on wealth management in today’s terms, not what we called it then. And I was recruited to come do this. And I joined as an early employee

of a wealth management company, again in a product management role. But the business of the startup was to bring a new Silicon Valley internet mindset to wealth management. That is, by the way, fundamentally a great thesis that a bunch of people have been successful with. But in hindsight, we were too early, but we tried it and we made a very, very good effort. And importantly for me in my career,

Meeyeon (25:25)
Hahaha!

Eric Byunn (25:36)
while I came in as more of a technologist, much of the team at MyCFO were folks who came out of brand name, Wall Street, bulge bracket types of names and all sorts or Big Four accounting. And so while there was a technology team and a team of product managers,

actually the majority of the company was senior professionals out of finance and accounting in various aspects, investment, know, date tax, you know, all these different elements. And so I had to learn elements of the domain knowledge, the domain kind of coming out of that for what we were trying to implement in software. And so that was also very form and kind

the layers, kind of reverse of peeling the onion, kind of adding the layers to my finance learning and training. And then MyCFO, also not a household name these days because it also did not succeed. As I said, we were, I’ll stick with great concept, but too early for a bunch of different reasons. And so when I left there, I took a pause,

kind of think about what to do with my career. I knew that I wanted to take that pause. I had sort of thought about the types of companies I wanted to be a part of and what I wanted that role to be. And unfortunately, again, dating myself, this period, I had just left my CFO and the September 11 attacks and tragedy happened at that time. And so for those of us who lived through that, like everything kind of came to a halt.

Like everyone’s re-examining their lives and this sort of thing. And a bunch of people went out and did great things to affirm the world. I took this period, did a very methodical, straight out of the books, advisory sort of things. I did dozens and probably 50s of informational interviews

across a wide range of different things that I might do. This is the point at which I focused in on finance. This is the point at which I focused in on becoming an investor, which is something I toyed with earlier and thought about, but I was really kind of focusing in on becoming an investor. And then over the course of my informational interviews, trying to match both my skill set

and my experiences with what I thought was interesting, I landed on growth equity with a focus on financial services, really leveraging my last experience or two. And so after a period of time off and at least career soul searching, I joined a firm that had not pretty recently before that been called Financial Technology Ventures.

They were able to take the name because no one used the word financial technology or fintech And then within that time frame they changed their name to FTV capital or we changed our name to FTV Capital, which now is the first of these names that is is is still known because that is a large multi-billion dollar growth and private equity firm today and Honestly, this is my first real finance job.

Luckily, it had very significant elements that overlapped with understanding business strategy, understanding technology, understanding the business of building technology companies, and understanding financial services, and understanding how the dynamics within financial services work. And so I had assembled, not so deliberately, but like

in a way that made this a good match. I had assembled all those pieces, but the pure corporate finance was something that was newer to me. And kudos to my colleagues and partners at FTV who helped me go all the way back to my McKinsey evaluation book and, frankly, relearn and re-familiarize myself with a number of those tools. I would say to any of our listeners, it’s not rocket science.

It is all very learnable. I did go through the full three-level CFA sequence, and I am now a CFA charter holder. I continue to hold that. And so both sort of academically and in practice, I kind of built up my corporate finance elements. And again, there were a lot of foundational elements that I built along the way. But somewhere in there, I woke up one day and said, wow, I really, I’ve become

a finance person. And so I was lucky enough to stay there, be promoted to a partner, lead a number of deals and had a nice long tenure there. And then at some point decided along with my current partner and co-founder who was also at that point a partner at FTV that we had a somewhat different view on

the strategy and how we wanted to pursue our ongoing career. And so with fondness and appreciation for FTV and everything we experienced and learned there, as well as our colleagues and the great things they’ve gone on to achieve, we stepped out and founded Centonic Growth Partners 10 and a half years ago now to keep investing in growth stage and early growth stage financial services and related enterprise technology businesses.

Meeyeon (31:50)
I want to touch on the part where you said you were going through, I think what people would now characterize as the soul searching, trying to find your lane, which I find is a really, I guess like admittedly, I’m kind of in that portion of my life where I’m trying to also figure out, what is my lane? And I think a lot of people that are listening that are about to approach that phase are currently going through it, would love your perspective on…

Eric Byunn (32:09)
It…

Meeyeon (32:15)
How did you find that part of your life? Because in retrospect, now you can look back as future Eric and say, like all those conversations that I had, like everything, all that research that I did led me to where I am today, and things are great. But in that moment, did you find it stressful? Were you struggling to figure out what exactly…

Eric Byunn (32:38)
Uh-mm.

Meeyeon (32:38)
Do I want to do? Did you deal with the fear of, Is this the right next move?

And how did you find that all those conversations really allowed you to pursue the next step with conviction and courage?

Eric Byunn (32:55)
So, first of all, was it stressful? Incredibly so. So, and a little bit on the personal side, look, if you listen to that story carefully. Every step up until that step, I had been on a path that in a way was well trodden, right? Was well trodden for a, a…

Meeyeon (33:20)
Like a nice linear path.

Eric Byunn (33:25)
relatively high achieving, kind of successful, you know, climbing the ladder sort of a person, they were nice steps, right? Do well in high school, you go to Harvard, you have some great internships, you go to a great consulting firm, McKinsey, you go to Stanford Business School, even out of Stanford in 1996, going into a tech software project management job was still on a path, and then I’d kind of…

So everything up to then for many decades was just following, maybe, you know, there’s clearly choices in there, but, you know, there were well-trodden roads and there were forks, but only a few paths from those forks. To the point that you referenced, I really was stepping back and on a, wow, to some degree I could do, I could try to do anything, whether I’d be successful or not, would not.

And a couple of things. One, it was very helpful to get a little bit of distance and think about the skills and experiences that I had assembled over this path that was somewhat guided by what’s been there before. What set of things had I put together as skills and experiences? Because let’s face it, there was a lot of

positive flywheel when you can be good at what you’re doing or feel like you have the right set of things. The second thing was obviously, what do I like? What’s enjoyable? But in many ways, I find there are some folks who will feel similar about this, but there are some folks who aren’t. But for me, there are a lot of things that I liked.

So this process was a little bit more about I was able to identify a good handful of things that I didn’t like, but it was harder to identify. Taking the set of things that I liked still left a relatively broad path. And here’s where that very classic informational interviewing, I guess maybe to some degree what people call coffee chats today, came in incredibly helpful.

Meeyeon (35:48)
You…

Eric Byunn (35:51)
I reached out to people that I knew from every chapter of my life. I, course, we didn’t have LinkedIn, but I did my best to figure out what they were up to today. So whether they were from any of the jobs I had held, any of the internships I’d held, any of my academic kind of stops, you know, if they were, as I started narrowing down, if they weren’t finance, if they were investing, if they were in, you know, some different aspect of consulting, like I’d call them up and ask them to have

coffee or lunch or kind of whatever. And just, I ran it like a school project or like a consulting project. I tracked it, I had goals, I had objectives, I had dates, all this kind of thing. And running around and having all these conversations really helped me refine that. And I think the path that I’ve basically since then been on reflected all those things. Where am I interested?

What sort of makes me happy as well as what makes me not happy, where my skills and experiences were relevant and would be used and helpful, and the input that all those folks made around everything, around what they liked, around what they didn’t like, around where their skills and experience, what a typical day was like, where they saw the industry going and not going in terms of what would be a good place to be from a category perspective.

All those things came to bear.

Meeyeon (37:20)
And at Centana, it’s very different because you were actually co-founding this firm, which is so different from anything you’ve done before. Typically, and I think it’s the case for most people, we go to an employer. We work for businesses, we help grow them, build them, maybe sell them, and that’s all fun and exciting. But it’s also very exciting and stressful in a very different way when you found your own thing, especially when it’s something so big.

Eric Byunn (37:43)
Yes, yes.

Meeyeon (37:46)
How has that been for you? It’s been a 10-plus-year journey now. How did you go about the process of, for example, finding a co-founder? How were the first two, three years of starting? And how is the firm today? I know that there’s a, can all, everyone has the web. I’ve looked at Santana’s website, kind of know what the theme is, but would love to hear your thoughts from Eric himself.

Eric Byunn (38:04)
Yeah.

Yeah, so I do always remember that when we decided to do this and I started sharing this with my network, including one of the CEOs and founders of a company that I invested in, it been a very successful investment. His words back to me are like,

look, Eric, I’ve enjoyed working with you and you’ve been a great partner investor, but this is going to make you a even better partner investor. And I asked why and he said, because the founder journey is unique. And even though you’re founding a finance firm, you are a founder and you will experience that and it will be great for you. I have remembered that for the decade plus and it’s entirely true. So, you know, and I had even

Look, I was in the top, I think, 25 employees when I joined, the first 25 employees when I joined MyZinfo. It was very small, it felt very startup-y, but there’s a sense of responsibility that this is on your shoulders and it’s all you or no one that comes with being a founder that I think is both stressful and on the good days, exhilarating, to be fair.

So I think that’s fantastic. I think the other thing is, of course, the support system around you is incredibly important to that. Of course, a little bit of the shout-outs. First of all, I was lucky enough to have a business partner who I’d worked with for over a decade. So we were able to talk and share with that. And as we found our third co-founder, who is someone through our network,

he kind of joined into that as well, but that was a key part of it. Of course, I can’t believe I’ve gone this far without mentioning my wife, my life partner, who is also in finance and understands a lot about, from her perspective, a lot about how investment firms are formed and so could provide a lot of support. And then just everywhere around us, there is a…

natural community. My understanding is that in the operating company startup world, it’s the exact same way. those of us who have founded investment firms, is a, because I’m now on the other side of that, to some degree, we’re still only a teenager or something, but I guess we’re 10 and a half, not even a teenager. there is very much a network of those who have done it before you are very willing to help.

Meeyeon (40:58)
Yeah.

Eric Byunn (41:04)
and give you their advice and tell you what worked and didn’t work and share their networks and all that kind of thing. And we try to do the same thing for those who are starting after us. And that was an invaluable part of the process. But it was very, very stressful. I think most founders of investment firms now specifically will tell you, you go through some period,

short, long, ours was non-trivial, of not having any income, of not having a paycheck coming in. Then you wonder about where the next one’s coming in, and then you wonder about where the one after that’s coming from, at the point where you start to hire staff, and so other people are depending on you. All of those elements kind of come into place. And while the funding model’s a little bit different in

an investment firm, we of course have to raise the funds that even our operating expenses come from. So, you know, that stress of fundraising applies to all elements of this ecosystem, whether you’re ultimately a fund, a growth equity firm or a startup, you have to do that fundraising. So it is, and like everyone in this situation, you get told to know a lot.

But you get told, yes, enough that you can create the firm and get it going and then hopefully it turns into a flywheel. But yeah, was very stressful and I tell everyone who’s considering this kind of move, it will be stressful.

Meeyeon (42:37)
Enough to keep going.

And based on where you started, which is a highly competitive school, going into McKinsey, an amazing consulting firm, I think a lot of those places seek a lot of great leaders. And certainly a lot of great leaders come out of those programs and institutions. Given all of your work experience so far, how has your view of leadership changed? And I’m particularly curious about how much it’s changed since you have co-founded.

Eric Byunn (43:24)
Huh, so.

The good news about my thoughts on that question is that my thoughts on leadership have never taken a big turn or pivot. If you think about the path that we’ve now been through in painstaking detail, I’ve been able to layer learnings on leadership through every stage of my career. McKinsey is an incredible

kind of learning ground for that both inside McKinsey as well as the clients that you get to work with and see those different elements and take a very within McKinsey. I mean, they have a practice around this. I mean, there’s academic learning around this. And then you go to business school, which is, I mean, you look at their mission. It’s very much around training leaders and managers. And so you learn academically, you learn from others, you learn from your classmates and incredibly well.

And then just kind of continuing, I had this desire to kind of, in my mind at least, mention generically every great leader that I’ve worked with, which has happened at every phase of my career and there are people that I know. So it’s really just pulling together the learnings from that and all those layers. I was on a call this morning where I was referencing someone who I worked with

25 years ago and key learning that I’d gotten from him or I often refer back to learnings from one of my bosses. She was incredibly formative, you know, 25, 27 years ago. So the last part of your question about having a co-founder, not sure if this is what you’re getting at, but this is actually really interesting when you, for me, it has been at least, when you…

Join with a co-founder where the both formal and handshake agreement, the full understanding is that you’re sort of, that you’re gonna be equal partners in leading this firm and all that that entails. What we say to each other a bunch of times that’s really, that’s been really nice is we’re not the same person. We have different styles, we have different approaches, we don’t.

We agree on a lot, obviously, but we disagree on some things also. But what’s been pretty true about it is having worked together for well over a decade as partners prior to forming the firm and having been friends through that period as well, we are rarely, if ever, surprised by each other. And so that’s been a very comforting fact

Meeyeon (45:58)
Thank you.

Eric Byunn (46:25)
in terms of being co-leaders, if you will. And I think it’s been really helpful from a personal, emotional, mental health state to have someone that you know is in so many literal and sort of figurative ways appear to sort of bounce ideas off of. So, you know, there’s a lot of literature about how sometimes you need to have a single person in charge.

Meeyeon (46:34)
You…

Eric Byunn (46:54)
But I think certainly for us at Santana and certainly I think you can see examples across the investment landscape overall, there are a number of places where having, know, fundamentally partnership is the form that is most prevalent. And in many cases, there are partners who are truly equal peers. And, you know, that’s something we strive for. And that’s something that has been incredibly valuable

to, I think, all of us. Something that we continue to seek is to make the partner title, which we all use, truth across the full partnership that we have, whether that’s one partner, two partners, four partners, 10 partners, kind of whatever. We really want that to be the case because it helps in the shouldering of the burdens of leadership and also enjoying the triumphs.

Meeyeon (47:52)
And I have one last forward-looking question before I move into a rapid-fire question just to get to know you a little bit better. ⁓ Is there anything in particular that excites you about the next generation of investment professionals that are coming into the growth equity space?

Eric Byunn (48:08)
You know, I think what is great is that there is more of a defined path into positions like this. If you go back to my era and if you go back to before that era, like the paths into investing, out of a small

private partnership type of firm are incredibly varied. And what’s true today is that there’s more of a defined path, but it’s not exclusive, right? So there are still people coming in from less typical paths, but there’s more of a mainstream. I hope that the industry as a whole can take the benefit of that, which is not to lose the diversity that comes, or the diversity of perspective that comes from that, but

take advantage of the fact that, look, we just talked about, I consider myself to be a quite experienced growth equity investor and particularly one of the sort of OG in terms of growth equity investing in financial services and FinTech. But that’s only been 25 years. And with this next generation, we will have folks who have been

investing on this strategy in this kind of environment for their full full careers. They’ve been thinking about it the entire path. Hopefully blending that with the non-typical backgrounds will lead to some great things. And I think we’re lucky enough in this industry that perhaps unlike some industries as they’ve grown, you’ve seen some, 

some level of the quality of talent coming into the industry not being as strong, but I think in broadly speaking growth equity, private equity, VC investing, we’re still seeing this incredible richness of talent coming into the category. So it’s hard not to be excited.

Meeyeon (50:23)
And before we wrap up, quick, rapid-fire question, a few about investing, a few just for fun to get to know you a little bit better. What is a book that’s had a lasting impact on you, except for the valuation one?

Eric Byunn (50:36)
It would have been way, way, way too easy to reference that because I do remember and know what it is. There’s going to be a funny and kind of old-school example, but there’s a book from the mainframe era of computing called The Mythical Man-Month. And what it talked about was

very specifically, if I recall, and it’s been many years since I’ve read it, so perhaps I’m not having this exactly right. But as I recall, I talked about how you could think that writing a computer program should take 24 months, and therefore, under the principles of industrial organization, you should divide that up and maybe take six people and have it last four months, but that’s not actually how it works in computer programming and computer software.

Many folks who have been development and engineering leaders have read this or at least understood those concepts. I actually think it has broad leadership applicability overall. We’re all, especially in a universe of finance people and finance listeners, we’re all very quantitative. We can do a lot of math and analysis and believe we can break up a problem into its constituent parts. And this is an important part of problem solving, but you always have to think about the human element

and the interactions and how things kind of play with each other in order to understand how something’s really going to go.

Meeyeon (52:11)
And then switching gears, if a movie comes on the screen, what is one that you will always watch if you catch it on TV or streaming?

Eric Byunn (52:22)
So, the, not a dark answer to your question, but having grown up in the Southeast, ACC basketball will always get my attention if I’m flipping channels or what have you. But to the point of your question, I do, I do still carry my, nerdy STEM-y computer science roots. And so, there are a lot of classic science fiction, 

Meeyeon (52:39)
Ha-ha!

Eric Byunn (52:52)
universes that I still love to dive into, whether that’s Star Wars, Star Trek, or some of the other ones that are around, I still love that stuff.

Meeyeon (53:03)
And one company you wish you had invested in.

Eric Byunn (53:07)
As a fintech investor, today’s obvious answer would be Stripe.

Meeyeon (53:14)
A friend of mine works at Stripe. That’s a great place to be. And then on the personal side, a daily habit or mindset shift that has made a difference on you from your perspective as a leader.

Eric Byunn (53:34)
I think going back to some of those lessons from 25, 30 years ago, and this one is attributable to a particular person who’s gone on to have an amazing, prominent career in Silicon Valley. She very much told me that like, you get to a certain point in your career and it’s all about your individual contribution and you succeed by

working both harder and smarter. Right? mean, all that and all that. Like, at a certain point in your career, in the early stage, you’ve got to do both. And then there comes a point where that isn’t the answer. And you have to think about working with people and getting more people involved and helping them. And perhaps we could argue semantics of is that also working harder and smarter? But that basic paradigm was one of the biggest leadership shifts,

paradigms that I have had in my career, it was told to me I could count, but somewhere between 25 and 30 years ago, and I still think about it at least weekly.

Meeyeon (54:43)
And to close out one of my favorite careers and finance podcasts yet. What is the best piece of advice you’d give someone considering a career in growth equity today?

Eric Byunn (54:54)
Wow. There’s so many elements to that. I think we use all these analytical tools. um We’re talking about it here today because it is within the finance track. um But what I’d say is fundamentally we exist to support in both capital, advice, network expertise, all the same,

to support the entrepreneurs who are building growth companies. So, for all the other wonderful things that come with being a growth equity investor, if you don’t, you should only do it if you actually love the idea of building a growth company, because that’s what this all boils down to at the end of the day. And we are enablers, advisors, all those different things.

But you’ve got to love that actual process of building and being a part of growth companies. And if that isn’t what’s getting you into the business, you should probably do something else.

Meeyeon (56:18)
And that is a wrap on today’s show. A huge thank you to Eric Byunn for joining me and sharing such thoughtful insights.

If you enjoyed this conversation, be sure to follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcast. And if you’re feeling generous, leave us a review because it really helps others find the show. We’ll be back soon with more stories from across the world of finance. And until then, thanks for listening to Careers in Finance. I’ll see you next time.