BROADCASTS.com

After spending 16 years as an equity analyst (the last nine of which at Goldman Sachs), Isaac Ro could not escape the fact that he was busy and bored.

The same work that had once challenged his every faculty had become more or less an exercise in pattern recognition.

\u201cGood management teams are good, and bad ones are bad,\u201d observes Ro, recalling the cynical mind-set that had been stalking his professional life inside the medical technology sector for nearly 2 years.

Still, Ro didn\u2019t leave.

\u201cI loved working at Goldman, and I believed that if ever I were going to leave, I wanted to be running\xa0to\xa0something and not\xa0from\xa0something,\u201d explains Ro, who admits that he had a self-imposed \u201chigh hurdle\u201d to jump if he were to consider future opportunities.

To Ro, the classic equity analyst segue to corporate investor relations chief would be \u201cjust a different version of the same gig.\u201d

\u201cI needed to spread my wings wider and do something sufficiently different,\u201d he remembers, \u201cbut I needed someone to sponsor me.\u201d

Ro leaves little doubt that he had a CFO role in mind and that he had concluded that the best route for distinguishing himself from his IR-destined peers was through his existing relationships with successful management teams.

One such relationship that Ro had kept in place over time was with the management of a medical technology company that he had helped to take public in 2013.

\u201cI had sort of mentioned to them over the previous several years that if an opportunity for me with them were to arise, I would appreciate a call,\u201d reports Ro, who goes on to say that in early 2019, he received calls from a number of this firm\u2019s management team members, who outlined how they were ready to launch yet another new medical technology company that they characterized as \u201csimilar but bigger.\u201d \xa0

\u201cThe founders knew what I had to offer and wanted exactly that, and you really need this combination to have a chance,\u201d comments Ro, who would step into the CFO office at newly formed Thrive, Inc., in June of 2019 and help to drive the sale of the company\u2014less than 2 years later\u2014to Exact Sciences for $2.15 billion.

Still, despite having helped the Thrive management to achieve an impressive exit, Ro\u2019s job satisfaction wavered. \xa0

\u201cIt just felt like I had a lot of unfinished business as a CFO,\u201d recollects Ro, who adds that he determined that the best way to broaden his CFO resume was to move beyond start-ups. \xa0

Taking the advice of a Thrive board member, Ro says, he then purposely focused on opportunities within firms that were already generating \u201csignificant revenue\u201d and that had aspirations to go public.

It was this prescription that led Ro in early 2021 to enter the CFO office of Sema4\u2014a company with 900-plus employees that was generating roughly $200 million in annual revenue. \xa0

\u201cSema4 is a very natural progression for me when it comes to keeping the learning curve steep,\u201d notes Ro, who happily observes that he seldom gets bored these days. \u2013Jack Sweeney