Steven Chao, Lucking into Building a Great Healthcare Consulting Firm

 

92-130. Steven Chao

SPEAKERS

Steven Chao, Will Bachman

 

Will Bachman  00:31

Hello and welcome to the 92 report conversations with members of the Harvard and Radcliffe class of 1992 I’m your host, Will Bachman, and I’m delighted to be here today with Stephen Chao, Steven, welcome to the show. Great to be here. Will, so Steven, tell me about your journey. Since graduating from Harvard,

 

Steven Chao  00:51

I’ve been thinking about how to break this up. I’m going to do it in segments. Will and ask you to just interrupt with questions, segment by segment, because otherwise I’ll just be monologuing for an hour. I love it. Segments. Okay, perfect. So I’ll just start with sort of first segment. Very briefly. I grew up in South Carolina, so I’m like, a US born, like second generation kid, and, you know, had, like, really a rough time in high school. We my sister and I went to private high school in Charleston, and by the time we got to college, we were, I think, very much out of our element. And I’ll just speak to myself for a moment, growing up in a very small place, small school, insular environment. Arriving at Harvard in 1988 just felt very overwhelming to me. I looked at people around me, a lot of the folks in particular who came out of boarding schools like Exeter and Andover, just think thinking like amazingly, how well prepared they appeared, how put together they appeared, and definitely felt a lot of imposter syndrome arriving on campus. So I was in Canada, AG, freshman year, and took a long time to find my footing freshman year. I think really the first thing that happened to me that helped me turn the corner was joining the Collegium Musicum, the CO Ed classical musical singing group at Harvard. That was a fantastic experience. It really kicked off my meeting friends social network at a time when I was really struggling a lot to figure out what was my place in this sort of high power institution and environment where everyone really seemed to have it more together than I did. So that was I turn the corner freshman year there’s a class of 9019 92 member I’m still in touch with Carl. Carlson goes by Michael now, one of my very good friends, one of my groomsmen at my later wedding. The other, I think, close relationship I developed at that time was with a guy named Eric Taylor. I remember just hanging out with him on the steps up there. I would generally just drop by. It was his habit to hang out there. And anytime I was passing through the yard, he was there. I would just plot myself down, and we would chat. And later he and I would room together at North house now for timer with a third individual. And that, I think, really helped me start to turn the corner. Starting in sophomore year, I majored in biochem, which is no no more as a major, I started to expand a little bit my social school circle, just like bit by bit, and to find connections that were meaningful. And I think, start to find happiness at that point. So a couple again, class of 1992 members really core to that, Dave Lombard, who was also a fellow biochem major, Carrie suzawa, maiden name now Carrie Michael, both class of 1992 became amongst my closest friends at that time. So I think those really two things, the clay game, music come and then, like people within my major just helped me feel a little bit more at home. Was a small bubble, but one that I felt much better about. And, you know, from there, you know, just, you know, muddled my way through the rest of college. So that’s maybe a quick nutshell of the Harvard experience for me, that was my major extracurricular. And, you know, the academic stuff also covered any questions will before I model log on too much.

 

Will Bachman  04:50

No, keep going. All

 

Steven Chao  04:53

right, so I think from undergrad, I grew up in a household that really probably. Advanced Education. So my parents were both PhDs, and they both grew up in research, academic academia, and were working at the University of South Carolina, Medical University of South Carolina, as research scientists. And they had a bit of a complex regarding not having an MD. They saw a lot of people in their careers succeeding with the MD, so they really pushed me hard into going into the MD PhD program. So like a dutiful son, you know, I applied, coming out of senior year at Harvard, and, you know, decided to head down that path. And I stayed in the city. I went to Harvard Med in their combined MD PhD program, and started again, I think, with more confidence. So to begin with, really coming out of undergrad feeling a little more sure of myself and my place, and thinking I was going to go in and cure Alzheimer’s and win the Nobel Prize or some such nonsense, and honestly, hit a bit of a brick wall, so going through classes in medical school, and then, more importantly, doing research on the side, leading into the PhD program, and in the PhD program, just feeling like, what did I do? The pace of research was so slow. I knew some of this, of course, but just the stakes were higher. I felt like I perhaps made a huge mistake, and really was questioning everything about like, Why did I even do this in the first place? And it got so bad that I was basically not able to keep going and just plow through it, and I took a leave of absence to do something totally different. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, but I’d always loved the tech environment, computer games. In particular, I remember my parents sort of looking at some of my computer gaming when as a hobby, like as a fun thing when I was younger, and saying, no one ever made a made a career out of computer gaming. And boy, were they even more so, more wrong today than they were then.

 

Will Bachman  07:19

It’s bigger than the film industry, exactly, yes.

 

Steven Chao  07:23

And so, you know, I, I applied, I got a couple of offers. And you know, there’s a place that took a chance on me called Activision out in the west coast. And so I just packed up my bags, went to LA and just did learn. Learned a lot. Did what they taught me to, told me to do, mainly not like coding. I’m not a good program or anything like that. But I worked in the area of sound and asset, video, asset, photo asset acquisition, which all that means is a video game may need a lot of things beyond game design to make it look and sound good, and so I was on the front lines of just going out and acquiring those things, making sure they fit well within the context of the project, and interfacing between those vendors and the design team. So I did that for a year and a half. I had a great time, but I sort of ultimately decided it was not going to be the long term solution for me. Career wise, we had, I made some good friends there. We had a great time. We would sometimes play this is going to date me, like 16 player quake, a game called Command and Conquer. But the really, the plum jobs that everyone everyone wanted was in game design. And so that was like the dream, initially, to access that. But there were just people so much more creative than I was will. And so I saw that, and I sort of said, okay, like I’m not going to make it to the top of this world. So I came back, tail between my legs to my PhD program, because the way MD PhD programs are typically structured, not always, but you do half the MD, you do the PhD, and then you finish the second half of the MD. So I was in the middle of the PhD, so the middle segment of that process. So my thesis advisor was kind enough to welcoming me back, even though I was the prodigal son returning. And I finished the PhD, and it was not without trouble and trauma. It was, it was hard, but I did it, and then I pinned my hopes. Then on the last half of the MD program, I always said, Okay, I’m not going to be a researcher. That’s on my path. I finished the credential I’m done, but maybe I’ll be a doctor. And so I really threw myself into that, you know, I thought initially, maybe a radiologist or an internist, an ophthalmologist, a neurologist, and ultimately figured out that none of those were going to be for me either. And. And mainly it was just recognizing the difference between the fun of learning a new field versus what the day to day life would be like living it for 30 or 40 years. And once I saw that will it just, it just felt like there wasn’t a career path in that space that would make me happy long term. And so I was feeling very stuck near the end of medical school and wondering again, like, what would I do? What was going to be my escape hatch? So let me pause there again, any anything to ask before I keep on plowing forward.

 

Will Bachman  10:37

No, keep going. I want to I want to hear how this plays out.

 

Steven Chao  10:41

So, you know, for me, that was like a decade, right? So I graduated, advanced standing in 1991 and I was graduating from the MD PhD program in 2001 and really with no plan. I didn’t want to do research, I didn’t want to go into medicine. And those were the two most common paths, or combine the two coming out of that program. I ran into a guy near the end of my MD who was taking a year off from consulting at a company called McKinsey to basically finish his internship. And the way that set up is as a what they call a sub intern. So if you’re in third or fourth year med school, you’ll do a sub internship, and you often are paired with an intern to learn from, to be mentored as you figure out like what the heck you’re doing in that medical rotation. And he described to me what this other world was like, and so for me, this was eye opening. I’d never thought about careers beyond medicine or research, and I think you’ll appreciate this well, like in those days, I don’t think the resources were there. The Internet was in surly days, you know, the Office of Career Services, you know, wasn’t, at least for me, helpful in thinking outside of the box. And so it was sort of a very surprising lifeline in terms of something that you could do that would be different from academic medicine. And so I applied. It was the only place I applied to. And you know, it was in the very first years of companies like McKinsey accepting non MBAs into their program. And I was very fortunate. So I got an offer, and I thought, Okay, let me try this out, not because I knew anything about what consulting was or that I would like it, but more as like I said, an escape hatch from the academic field, and thinking, Maybe this will open the door to something else later on that I will truly like. So that was, I guess, like for me, the, you know, the the departure from the academia path. That was the branch point in my career, in my year, the MD PhD program at Harvard, at that point graduated about a dozen people a year. It was just so happened that three of us from that graduating class left for McKinsey, and I think it was treated as like a disaster. So the MD PhD program thought like, what are we doing wrong? This is terrible. I mean, like, you know, Can we reverse this and figure out how to persuade some of them to reverse course. I think that it’s different now, like people understand they’re different for career paths, and there’s a little more support and understanding for diversity.

 

Will Bachman  13:31

Wait, so what office did you join in? When did you start at McKinsey? So

 

Steven Chao  13:34

I started in two. You know, I actually started a little bit before I graduated, because I had a little bit of flexibility. I didn’t max out my medical school rotation. So I started in round 2000 I did some work. And then I, you know, joined full time in 2001 and it was the Boston office. And at that time, you know, as someone with an MD background, even though you join as a generalist, as you know, well, you’re tilted in a certain direction based on what background you have. I thought I was going to do biopharma work, and I did some, but actually at the bulk of what I did at McKinsey, or the bulk, probably 50% of what I did. So the biggest segment was in the payer, provider space. So health insurance, hospital systems, mainly health insurance. And that was a ton of fun, like just learning about that space. So anyway, long story short, like I spent about four, four and a half years at McKinsey, just basically starting from scratch, because, you know, as an undergrad at Harvard, I didn’t even take econ, so I had zero business background, just learning from scratch, doing the best I could, just fumbling along

 

Will Bachman  14:49

you care on the 92 report, all roads pass through consulting, so I’m glad

 

Steven Chao  14:57

it certainly seems that way. But at. The time. It didn’t feel that way, you know, because I wasn’t in touch with a lot of people who had gone down that path.

 

Will Bachman  15:05

All right, yeah, it is. It is a rare guest who avoids both law school and consulting. It’s so I’m glad to see that you you passed from Mackenzie.

 

Steven Chao  15:18

Gravitational pull is strong. It’s very strong,

 

Will Bachman  15:21

right? So okay, when we overlapped at the firm, we obviously didn’t ever work together there. But okay, we overlapped at the firm. And so then to keep, keep going on your McKinsey,

 

Steven Chao  15:33

sure, so I mean, just to give an illustration of, like, how green I was, and like, one of my first mentors, McKinsey, trying to say, okay, like, you have no idea what you’re doing. You don’t know what you should do day to day. I’ve got a phrase that might help you, like, a slide a day keeps the partner away. So just like, break content. Like, it doesn’t even matter if it’s good, at least, just create something. Like, every day

 

Will Bachman  16:01

you got a PhD, so you at least must have had some Excel skills, right? Some analytical skills,

 

Steven Chao  16:07

not really. I mean, I could create a slide, but it was like that academia faded, new background, type of slide. Well, the

 

Will Bachman  16:14

not the PowerPoint, you probably but like Excel, didn’t you learn how to use Excel in your PhD program? Wasn’t there analytics involved somehow,

 

Steven Chao  16:22

the barest bit, really, my PhD was really not analytical. It was in your biology. You know, I did a lot of sort of gene genetic rearrangement and plasmids, trying to put in different cassettes into plasmids to test the effects on different you know, cellular model systems, different changes, but that’s not really excel heavy. It’s really creating different variations on a genetic theme and looking at the result, okay, yeah, so I was like, I was lost again at the beginning of McKinsey. It was sort of like deja vu, like all the MBAs seemed like they had it all together, and had, like, just really understood things. Even some of the PhDs seem more advanced than I did. So again, like, just like, felt like I was starting from scratch all

 

Will Bachman  17:11

over. Did they even send you to the mini MBA program? I did a mini MBA,

 

Steven Chao  17:15

okay, that was a ton of fun. Like, what, at least half boondoggle, right? So I got sent to Austria and did the Austria thing. Yeah, it was not in the wintertime. It was the summer, but it was beautiful. And, you know, I’ll play a little catch up, because I’ve been talking mainly about school and and, you know, career. But I had met my then girlfriend, now wife, Cindy Wang in medical school. We dated through med school. Were married in 1998 and she, after we were married, I was at McKinsey, she came out to visit me at the end of the mini MBA, and we had this great time out in Europe. So I’ll say more in the personal life later on, sort of too many tracks to cover, but the mini MBA. MBA was a ton of fun. But I gotta say, like even though I met these great friends at McKinsey, terrific people, the work itself was a little hit or miss. I remember there was one company I can’t name, that we were trying to save from bankruptcy, and we failed. They went bankrupt. And, you know, there was another company that we had to do, like a Salesforce reorganization. And eventually I learned how to do that. But it wasn’t like, it didn’t really, you know, grab me, that type of work. There was one pharma project I did with a partner who I’m still in touch with today, named Jeff Elton. And that was a ton of fun, and it sort of piqued a little bit of interest in the back of my head at Hey, you know, maybe I should try to find my my way back to biopharma. But then I quickly forgot, because then I was sort of back in the other rest of the project mix world at McKinsey, the only other person that I should mention, because there’s a Harvard undergrad connection. She started our year in 1988 I think, but, or maybe she was one year off. I’m blanking, I’m so sorry will, but her name was Kim Packard, and I think she started in 88 and was a class Marshal in 91 so she also graduated advanced standing. And we didn’t stay in touch, and we didn’t even know each other’s undergrads then, but she was really my, my first and best mentor at McKinsey. So she was ahead of me at in consulting, and I just remember working with her on a healthcare health insurance project, and she just helped me along, so much like I owe so much to her and what she contributed to my career. And it wasn’t till later that we figured out that we overlapped as undergrads, as original I guess, class. Of 90 tours, and for me, that that’s where I started to turn the corner. Like I was still a late bloomer. I was the last person in my class to be promoted to em, like, I, I guess I feel fortunate. There were a lot of counsel outs, because, you know, there was a bit of a tough time in the generals consulting world at the time. But I was slow, you know, I was I was late to promotion, late to advancement, and so forth. And then in 2004 and I’ll pause for a second, my wife and I started our family, and when Cindy became pregnant, I knew that I couldn’t travel four days a week anymore, and so I gave my notice and started to think about, like, what the heck am I going to do next? Because I still hadn’t found the thing. So anyway, just pause for a moment, if any questions will before I plow forward.

 

Will Bachman  20:55

Yeah, I mean, I’ll just share, you know, just from personal knowledge, there the that 2001 2002 time frame was was a tough period for consulting in general, and particularly at McKinsey. So in fact, I was a business analyst in 2001 and 2002 and they let us go early and even said, oh, we’ll keep paying your salary through the end of your like, two year term, because they they needed to give the work to associates, right? Because the associates were just not getting any projects. There was not enough projects to go around. So that was a tough period. So the fact that you know you got promoted to engagement manager says a lot a lot of people were just counseled to leave. So alright, so 2004 continue with your story. Oh,

 

Steven Chao  21:42

absolutely so. And just last follow up on that, honestly, there were friends of mine who were counsel out we’re just better than I was. But I had this like slight fortune of having the MD, and I think that meaning, like a little bit valuable to those health insurance healthcare projects. Because honestly, I saw people who are more advanced and were just more capable than I was who suffered those consequences will so I felt very fortunate. But then, you know, I gave my notice. And so the next part of my story, I was trying to figure out what was next. I had not gotten very far in my job hunt. And then a McKinsey alum who was at a company called leering Swan, which was an investment bank primarily reached out to me and said, Hey, I heard you were looking and I have, I’m part of this consulting organization that is a small consulting group that sits within this investment bank clearing Swan, and we should talk. And I learned a ton about sort of that niche. While I was McKinsey. I had no idea about any consulting companies that were not named BCG or Bain or any of the big ones, right? But upon talking to this McKinsey alum, I sort of learned about this, then cottage industry of boutique, smaller, specialized consulting firms that operate in different world, mostly than McKinsey’s the world. And it sounded very interesting. You know, it felt like, in this case, a very like, a better fit, in the sense that they were very life sciences focused, so they worked a lot with biotech, with pharma companies. And I felt like that would be a nice change, given that it was always my ambition to be able to leverage my love for science, because that’s why I got into MT PhD in the first place. And so I didn’t really interview very broadly. I thought, let me try this. And I joined, and this, for me, was the aha moment. Well, in week one, I was assigned to a project, I think it was in Parkinson’s disease, and I was talking to world experts in that space, interviewing them, asking them questions on day three, and by day five, I was hooked. I just I couldn’t it was mind blowing. I just could not believe that I stumbled upon this space that I have come to grow to love so much, and that I would know it within a week. It was really a fortunate, remarkable, not the result of a master plan, just luck based thing that I ended up there, and I sometimes like to talk about my wife, it took me, like, a year and a half to wear her down till before she would start to date me. But for this career thing, it was love at first sight. It was just, I just couldn’t imagine anything that would fit better, because it combined my love of science, my love of medicine, without needing to do research or really have a career, just in clinical practice. I. Some of the business stuff I picked up at McKinsey was just really everything I was looking for. And, you know, I just still can’t believe how lucky I was. That’s, that’s

 

Will Bachman  25:10

very cool. I’m laughing because I love the part that, like, I love medicine, except for the part of dealing with patients or doing research. But other than that, it’s like, awesome.

 

Steven Chao  25:22

The funny thing is, I did love clinical practice in the sense of seeing patients like, I was not this person who said, Oh, patient, I’m too good to see patients. Yeah, it was just like, the prospect of 35 years of that. That was the days, right? You just doing the same thing again and again, Dave, that was the difference. Like, you know, going in for a month and learning about, you know, whatever the kidney and seeing dialysis patients was awesome, but it was, it was the prospect of a lifetime of it that challenged me. Yeah,

 

Will Bachman  25:50

so, like, you really loved, like, learning about different aspects of medicine and, like, the sort of, the curiosity factor was really high, but to kind of the idea of just doing the same thing wrote over and over again. So kind of doing consulting where you got to learn about different aspects of medicine more as a consultant, it sounds like that was a great fit for you.

 

Steven Chao  26:11

It was. And finally, when I found the place where that variety and diversity of day to day work overlapped with the content that I really loved, which I did not even know that job existed before that moment in 2008 sorry, 2004 2004 was just a stroke of tremendous good fortune. So that that really was the turning point, I would say. And if I hadn’t had that turning point, I don’t know where I’d be right now. I’d probably be somewhere I don’t know, like moderate happiness, just like trying to muddle through, like, but, but to me, that that really changed the trajectory, trajectory of of what I what I am today.

 

Will Bachman  26:53

Yeah, so play the film forward from there. What happened after you, and what was the name of this firm, is that where you are today or

 

Steven Chao  27:00

1. So that was the my one stop before where I am today. So it was called leering swan. The consulting group within it at that time was called metacore. And you know what I felt in the first week, just continue to build. It wasn’t like a one week wonder. And then I did just like I just loved it more and more as I did it. And the other two people who were sort of a part of that, that I became closest with, I worked with more and more. And like the group was small will so we were about 2530 people. But I just, I just loved every bit of it, and it felt like we were doing new things, but we were capable of doing it right. We were learning but also delivering tremendous value. And if I, if I take a step back, you know, there’s a lot of money thrown in a lot of industries at different things, and so in this particular industry, just imagine X amount of funding being thrown at drug development and marketing and so forth, but a lot of it may be misdirected or wasted or sub optimally deployed. So for me, that there’s a part of loving the work, but there’s also mission based piece of this that anyway, some some people might turn a skeptical eye towards but I really believe in my heart, which is that if we do our jobs right, then the capital that’s invested in the industry is deployed a little more efficiently, and maybe on the margins, you know, a couple of of life saving drugs that you know would not have otherwise existed, or like, you know, life altering drugs come to the market and help patients over time. And so that’s how I feel about what the problem solving and sort of consulting aspects of what we do link to the mission based parts of what we do, and it’s just incredibly satisfying. The only time I can think of, like, to me, that’s that’s been the long term trajectory, the only time there was one time I missed, sort of the MD, PhD, sort of academic medical route. And this is like going backwards in time a little bit in 2000 during 911 when Boston was gearing up to accept casualty overflow from the terrorist attack, I had a lot of friends that were just basically preparing themselves and getting ready. This is before we knew the fatality rate was going to be so high, I was thinking, Boy, that would have been a special thing to have had the skills to be able to offer that help in that time. So that was sort of like a moment in time when I thought like that, that would have been pretty incredible to be able to. Be in a position to offer that support, but separate from that, you know, I do feel like the combination of consulting plus this mission based thing has always, you know, since I started this in 2004 really resonated for me. I loved the four years I was there will. And then, long story short, it was just the two people I was closest with in that firm, and I sitting down and thinking about, just by chance, what would it be like if we were to strike out on our own and do this ourselves? And there was nothing really that we didn’t love about our existing position and role at leering Swan, except primarily that we were a very small part of a much bigger organization whose primary mission was focused on the investment banking as it should have been, right? So there’s no hard feelings about this, but I think the ability to strike on our at our own allowed us to imagine, what would we do if we could make all the decisions from the ground up, trying to build a world class company in our space, without worrying about whether we fit well or not with a larger organization that we were sitting within. So you know, that’s the last, like, obvious step in my resume, so I left leering Swan with these two other people to co found ClearView in 2008 and just as a sidebar, like family didn’t play a big role in that decision making process. But by that time, it has been, you know, one of the greatest joys, if not the greatest joy, of my life, my wife and I sort of welcome like four kids in quick succession into our lives, from 2004 to 2008 and we’ve got three girls and a boy, and I’ll tell you more about those at the end of the story a bit. But just to round that out, that was happening around the same time will

 

Will Bachman  32:06

so you founded your own firm, tell us that segment of the story.

 

Steven Chao  32:12

So this is really the last career segment. So even though that’s spanned 17 years, so the biggest, longest segment of my time, I’ve loved every second of it. So at the beginning, I was going to Costco, buying the printer, lugging it into the office. There was another guy building Ikea furniture. You know, we’re classic startup mode, like hiring people in imagine if you were like three McKinsey partners splitting off your own no furniture, trying to convince, like a young analyst out of college that you’re a real company and that you’re going to survive and be able to make payroll and to join you. So that’s, that’s the position we were in in year one. And you know it all, it was amazing, like there’s amazing people that were some of, many of whom I’m still in touch with today in year one, that joined us for this venture. And since then, you know, I’ve grown to just appreciate, like, what it the challenges, the the hardships, but also the tremendous joys of being able to try to shape and guide, not alone, of course, like, you know, with with many others along the way, a firm like this. So in another show, it was really sort of born of the same concept of what we were doing earlier in Swan. It was a McKinsey, except we were working solely, primarily in the life sciences, biotech, pharma, some private equity clients, et cetera, diagnostics companies, and doing strategic consulting in that client world. And as a result, a lot of people we hired had science backgrounds, or business slash science backgrounds. I ended up doing a lot of my damage, sort of in the recruiting space. That was my hat, primary hat, when I was not selling and delivering client work and everything that I fell in love with in that very first week of my prior job continued to be the case. I sort of continued to love every second of doing the work. And the new layer on top of that was, of course, how do you then continue to do that while building and growing a startup, and later on, a small sized, and then medium sized, boutique consulting company. So during that 17 years, I feel like I’ve had, you know, four or five different jobs. You know, as it’s evolved from scrappy startup to sort of building our client base with clients that have to take a bet on a company that they may never have heard of, to really growing the leadership team, to then thinking about, you know, how do we enter into bigger initiatives as we grow? You know. Starting another office, starting a European presence, a lot of things that start to come into play as a company gets bigger, but every segment of that, you know, if it’s been like four or five jobs, it’s been fun, and I guess for me, incredibly rewarding. So I just, you know, just thank whatever luck has brought me to this place every day. It’s just, it’s been, it’s, I can’t imagine other path that would have been better for me, you know, as an individual. So that’s the short sort of synopsis on well, you’re being,

 

Will Bachman  35:38

you’re being a, you know, little bit, little bit humble here the, I mean, ClearView healthcare partners is quite a substantial firm. Give us some indication. You know, it’s private, so not revenue. But like, you know, how many, how many employ members of the firm do you have now? It, you know, it’s quite a well known, established consulting firm at this point.

 

Steven Chao  36:00

It’s it’s so fun we were about, we’re several 100. And then on top of that, there’s a lot of corporate teams, sort of non consulting staff, that are also truly excellent, that help us to do everything that we need to do across four offices right now, and we’re sort of have a growing presence also in India. So I guess it’s sort of a nascent fifth office. And so London, India, and then San Francisco, New York, Boston. And, you know, I guess the luck piece of it was how I stumbled into the space. I think beyond that, yes, it’s been, it’s, it’s been a lot of hard work and really a team, collaborative effort to get to this point. I never in our wildest dreams would I have imagined being here when we started the company in 2008 our business plan did not go past five years, and like 50 or 60 people. So we’re way off that initial business plan. And you know, the the ambition is to be, come the 600 pound gorilla in our space. And I think we’re on our way to trying to achieve that. It’s been, it’s been a great fun and a great joy.

 

Will Bachman  37:13

Well, I mean, congratulations. That’s an extraordinary achievement, to build a firm of a professional service firm of several 100, you know, employees. So that’s, that’s amazing. We in just the time we have left. Let’s, let’s talk about some of the other segments of your life, right? One that I wanted, I mean, I’d love to hear a bit more about kind of the the non work, the family side, but also music, singing. Did you know, did any of that continue on past the Collegium, and you know, love to hear about that, as well as anything else outside of work you want to share,

 

Steven Chao  37:47

definitely. So just on the personal life side, I’m we’re coming up on almost 27 years of marriage. My wife and I, we met post undergrad, as I mentioned in med school she ended up going down the practicing physician route. So being an ophthalmologist, an eye doctor, for a long, long time, very happily at a private practice in the south shore, and transitioned more recently to working with a ophthalmology startup company. So that has been really great to have, sort of both sides of those careers. You know, represented in the household, as I mentioned, four kids, three girls and a boy. I won’t say too much about them, other than like they are, of course, as like with many families, the light of our lives, our oldest, I will mention a little bit we’re as the good fortune of being a sophomore at Harvard and so like, you know, just the full circle moment, she’s at Mather house, so about as far on the other side and the Riverside as I was at North house. But you know, the nice thing is, as she does those long walks to get to class, because it’s so far away, she often uses those walks to call my wife and I, so we were able to stay in touch while she’s basically trekking our way, you know, to some rehearsal or something like that. So we have two in college, two still in high school, and on the sort of personal interest side Music has always been a huge part of our family. It’s interesting. I haven’t continued to pursue the classical singing stuff too much after the Collegium. I did sing with the Trinity choir in that church based near Copley Square in Boston, and that was really great, but I didn’t really continue it after that, there was a conductor at McLeod who inspired the creation of an alum choir, the Jamison singer. So his name was Jameson Marvin, and I just think that would be a great thing to try to do someday. But you. You know, it’s challenging, you know, to make a consistent rehearsal schedule, but the thing that we have done, in a nutshell, is to really tilt into our love for Broadway musical theater. My wife and I were huge fans, so that’s the place that we’ve spent a lot of our time, as you know, just going to performances and just not always on Broadway, sometimes small regional theater, the nonprofit board recommendation at the head of this show that I left on voicemails for the Merrimack Repertory Theater, which I love. It’s local ish to Boston at Lowell, and I’m on on the board there, and it’s it’s just a way to to give back to that space. And I like to think that as parents like you might have that chance to brainwash your kids around like one maybe two things, but you have to pick your bets. You can’t brainwash them into loving like soccer and musical theater and whatever, like, you know, cooking or whatever it is, you have to pick one ideally. And so what we picked, not totally consciously, was musical theater. So all four of our kids love the space. Three of them enjoy performing it, obviously at school, the school level. And one is more of a techie, but also performs a little bit. And we’ve got a kid, our youngest, who’s doing a local production of Hadestown in Wellesley coming up later this month. And then our oldest is performing at the Agassi theater in a production of nine to five the musical, the old Dolly Parton musical, which has great themes of female empowerment coming up in May. So it’s just a super small world when it comes to that, and it’s been a lot of fun as parents to go just watch them do their thing. So that’s probably the best sum up I can give on the personal front,

 

Will Bachman  42:02

amazing, Steven, what a journey you’ve had, building an incredible firm and four kids, where can listeners find you online if they wanted to track what you are doing.

 

Steven Chao  42:19

I think that the best way like, I think I published my email and the alumni reports and things like that, is just by shoot me an email, and then, you know, we can get in touch. But my email is Steven, s, t, e, v, e, n, dot Chow, C, H, A O, at ClearView, H, C P, at C L, E, A, R, V, I, E, W, H, C p is in Harry, Charlie, peterdotcom, and I just love that you’re doing this well. I just, I’ve been a fan. I’ve lurked your stories over time. It’s just been so fun to see where people have gone, professionally and personally. And, you know, I think we’re at an age where most people like are just very, you know, comfortable with what they’ve done, and they still have more to go, but you know, you can see that, you know in these interviews, that there’s a, in a way, of relaxedness about people, about like, where, how far they’ve gone in their lives. And that’s what I think makes it particularly enjoyable to just catch up, almost vicariously with all these individuals you’re interviewing. It’s been a ton of fun.

 

Will Bachman  43:28

Thank you, Steven. Yes, it is time to start our third act right now. So Stephen, it was great speaking with you. Thanks so much for coming on the show.

 

Steven Chao  43:38

Indeed, thank you will thank you for doing this. You.