Richard Resnick, MOT ’04

Richard Resnick, MOT ’04, joins classmate Christopher Reichert, MOT ’04, to reflect on his career that began in computer science and evolved into senior management roles, including his current position as CEO at Cureatr. He also details the evolution of his management style and his desire to be a leader that transforms the culture of the organization.

Sloanies Talking with Sloanies is a conversational podcast with alumni and faculty about the MIT Sloan experience and how it influences what they're doing today. Subscribe and listen on Apple Podcasts, Google, and Spotify. 

Episode Transcript

Christopher Reichert: Welcome to Sloanies Talking with Sloanies, a candid conversation with alumni and faculty about the MIT Sloan experience and how it influences what they're doing today. So, what does it mean to be a Sloanie? Over the course of this podcast, you'll hear from guests who are making a difference in their community, including our own very important one here at MIT Sloan.

Hi, I'm your host, Christopher Reichert, and welcome to Sloanies Talking with Sloanies. My guest today is Richard Resnick, a fellow 2004 graduate of Sloan. Welcome, Richard.

Richard Resnick: Thank you. Great to be here.

Christopher Reichert: Richard is the CEO of Cureatr, a New York-based company that helps health plans, healthcare organizations, and patients make sure medications are taken appropriately, effectively, and safely. But before I start that conversation, let me give you a bit of a background on Richard. He has a BS in computer science from UMass Amherst, and MS in computer science from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where he's the chair of the Advisory Board for Arts and Sciences. Am I right?

Richard Resnick: Yes, wow. Great.

Christopher Reichert: You have an MS and an MBA from MIT Sloan. Richard's a serial entrepreneur with a focus on life sciences. I want to delve into that entrepreneurial side because I think that life sciences seems to be a vehicle for some other interests and areas that Richard has.

He started a company at 24, which developed a web-based application to connect buyers at scientific laboratories to vendors of oligonucleotides. Wow. And this was back in the 1990s, before .com was a thing. He was a software engineer at Whitehead Institute. Worked at Wyeth. Was a CEO of a data warehousing company, so I think there's a thread there, which was purchased by another life sciences company where he joined them as well.

After Sloan, he became the CEO of an interesting company called Harmony Line, which came out of Tod Machover's lab at the MIT Media Lab. It was a music technology company aimed at unlocking people's songwriting and music composition skills, inherent to us for those without musical backgrounds, which my daughters have used here and there. They play violin, but I think it's a really good bridge technology there as well. After that at GQ Life Sciences, which I think we used to be called GenomeQuest. Am I right?

Richard Resnick: That's right.

Christopher Reichert: He returned to the life sciences again in data management and helping the top 20 pharmas at all the agrochemical companies and hundreds of biotech and life sciences companies, giving them big data solutions to master the competitive landscape of science and intellectual property. So that's another thread in there. And finally, full disclosure, Richard and I were classmates at the last Management of Technology program at Sloan, where Richard and a few other bright lights added the Health Science Technology program to your study. So I think it was a merged program for you guys, right?

Richard Resnick: That's right. Yeah. Which I didn't finish, if I must be honest. I stepped out after a year because I was just ready to go run businesses again. I got bored.

Christopher Reichert: I remember actually I have two, actually probably three memories of our time together. One was the time that you invited, Bob Langer to come to our class and talk about his studies. Now, I mean, if people don't know Bob Langer... Actually, tell us a little bit about Bob Langer just to give a scale and scope of the guy.

Richard Resnick: Well, I don't really know quite how many patents this guy's got, but he has invented more things than most other universities combined, right? He's got so many patents and he's got a lab that just churns out invention. And you remember, the thing that we all discovered when we went to Sloan in those first days and weeks, was you can call anybody and ask them to show up, and man, you're a student at MIT Sloan, of course, they're going to say yeah, because you're asking them to be smart and give you advice about their life. And so we did that all sorts of ways. Didn’t we that with a few other really big names? I'm trying to remember, there was a CEO of a major car manufacturer or something. Do you remember?

Christopher Reichert: Yeah, I think we had one of the Ford people come.

Richard Resnick: Yeah. Yeah.

Christopher Reichert: Yeah. No, it's true. It seemed so easy back then, right?

Richard Resnick: Yeah. Now, they're like, "Who are you and what are you trying to sell me?"

Christopher Reichert: Exactly. Exactly. The other thing I remember was one of our first classes. I think it might have been even Shlomo Maital’s class, economics. We were given a test on, I think the marginal, the change in marginal costs over time and how it went down. And you were the only one in the class of... I don't know. What were we,100 or so, who aced it? Everyone else screwed it up somehow.

Richard Resnick: Really? I wish could remember that. We never remember our successes quite well. But let me start just by saying, if you ever want anybody to introduce you accurately and so fluidly, go find Christopher Reichert because I've never, ever in my life had anybody get all those facts lined up in the right order and said so eloquently. It was as if there was nothing being read. You know me better than my wife. How do you do…

Christopher Reichert: Well, I do have the benefit of knowing you, but I followed you since I've known you from class.

Richard Resnick: Very well.

Christopher Reichert: So, there you go. It's paid off. The other part, the last part I remember about you was the music, that you were very much into music. Do you still play? What was it? Guitar, is it or...

Richard Resnick: I played piano. Yeah, our class, we had a few other musical folks and we put this band together. What did we name it again? It had a funny name.

Christopher Reichert:    I'm sure it was nerdy, right?

Richard Resnick: It was super nerdy. Yeah. Oh, no, it wasn't nerdy at all. It was “Old Guys Pretending.”

Christopher Reichert: That's right!

Richard Resnick: Yeah.

Christopher Reichert: “Old Guys Pretending,” but you had Veronica Guo who was not old and not a guy.

Richard Resnick: Man, I mean, we were all in our mid-30s then. Who's old now? Gosh, I'm-

Christopher Reichert: Yeah. Right. Right. Right. It's like the, I think, irony of the Rolling Stones singing those songs back in the '60s when they were all young and as beautiful as they ever were going to be.

Richard Resnick: Exactly. Yeah, they peaked early.

Christopher Reichert: They peaked very early. Exactly. So, what did I miss? For me, there's a thread in there of the entrepreneurial side, in the life sciences. But it's not so much the science, if I had to guess, is kind of like the material you're working with, but I think it's the overall management that I pick up in what drives you. So, tell us a bit more about what drives you in all of those endeavors, and even now a Cureatr, if you want to start there.

Richard Resnick: Well, it's changed a lot. There is that thread of science throughout my career, but that's all accidental. The thing that drives me, it used to be a popularity contest around how good can you be, and fame, and fortune, and...

Christopher Reichert: External metrics of success, really.

Richard Resnick: Yeah, comparisons to other folks that are doing it a little bit better, a little bit farther than me, a little bit younger or whatever.

Christopher Reichert: That is hard to give up.

Richard Resnick: That is hard to give up, but recently... And perhaps because there has been some success in my professional and personal life, but not as much as I think that 20-year-old version of me would have wanted. But again, I do feel like what drives me now is purpose a lot more. The 20-year-old still yells at me a little bit like, "Is this as good as you can do and think?" But the primary joy that I get out of working now is the people that I work with and trying to get a group of people that all see the world really differently, but in general, compared to other organisms that aren't human, are so freaking similar to actually work together on the same team in a way that's safe and transparent and compassionate. And that's like the whole thing for me.

So, it doesn't matter if it were science or anything else. The reason science is the thread is because I heard this. This is not my saying, but I'll accept it as mine, "A career is just a job gone awry." Right? The notion that I like, I was just starting computer science because I liked math and my dad thought it was good. And frankly, I was trying to make up with my dad after such a [censored] relationship. Can I use words like that on a podcast?

Christopher Reichert: I think in a podcast we can beep. Too late, but...

Richard Resnick: I had such a bad relationship with him in high school, which is really all my doing. And so, I was willing to be persuaded by him and I was good at computer science at UMass, which was an exceptional... I didn't know it. I joined to study English and flipped over to computer science. I didn't know it was top 10 research for computer science back then, but it taught me well. And I was looking for jobs, and one of them coming out of there was working for this startup, I think, called Target Software or something like that. They were building systems to help public radio to raise money more effectively. This is like '92 or '93 maybe. And that seemed kind of cool because I like public radio. I was still a hippie and thought patent sort of stuff was important. It was a $45,000 a year, that was the salary, which I was pretty psyched about.

Christopher Reichert: Yeah, it's pretty good by early '90s, right?

Richard Resnick: It was a second job though, Christopher. And it was with this guy named Eric Lander, working on this thing called the Human Genome Project. And it was only $32 grand a year. There was something about the fact that it was MIT. Back then, I had this belief that I was going to be an MIT computer scientist researcher and I thought, "Well, this could get me a little closer to there. I could move into Cambridge." So I took that job. If you get focused on a thing like genomics and you're in that and you're writing software and that software is being used all over the world, even though you didn't even really understand the nature of the software that you were writing, somebody else was giving you the spec, but your name is on it, and then all of a sudden you're like, "Well, I guess I'm going to get hired for more and more of this stuff." That's the reason why science, frankly.

Christopher Reichert: Yeah. I mean, this is one of those things that recruiters or career counselors talk about is that they look backwards, hiring organizations look backwards, as they try to move forward with something. So they want to tick the boxes of what you've done, which makes career changes difficult, right?

Richard Resnick: That's right. That is right, for sure. And I think the context switching like that in careers becomes easier as you have success, less about the domain and more about being a leader of a company who has experience in that domain, right?

Christopher Reichert: As you move up, and do you mean in the totem pole?

Richard Resnick: Yeah, as you develop skills that are more generally applied. And so, that takes some time. But still, I guess there's something about science. I mean, science is the reason why this podcast is happening, is the reason why I'm drinking this tea right now, and the reason why my high blood pressure medicine over there is going to be swallowed with lunch. Everything around us is because of that stuff. So if I had to err on the side of something to be focused on, pursuit of knowledge seems like a good one to me.

Christopher Reichert: So, I'm curious, if you look back on some of the positions you've had, I mean, particularly say coming out of Sloan, you went to Harmony Line, and to me, when I look at the roles that you've had since Sloan, they've been invariably in senior management, right? They've been the CEO or somewhere. Well, I really felt like I'm just going through here. Yes, CEO pretty much all the way through. What was it that gave, say Tod, the faith in you to become the top of the pyramid there to run it? And then how did you leverage that as you move forward in... I guess what I'm asking is how did you sell yourself to be that leader if you felt at some times that you didn't have the specific science skills or a PhD or whatever, particularly in the life sciences, the biotech industry?

Richard Resnick: I mean, I wouldn't want to speak for Tod Machover in terms of what he saw. I think he saw... I don't know what he saw. I think every CEO that has ever existed has had their first CEO job at some point, right? And how the heck do you get that one? My simplest answer to that question is you fake it till you make it. It's pretty much it. You just know that you're going to be able to figure stuff out, and there are always people that are holding the keys to that chair and you show them your internal character, what is innate about you. And if they're looking for somebody, if it's your first time out and they're looking for somebody who's scrappy, but will not give up, then you're going to get that thing if you show them that's what it is.

Once you've had a success or two, then the phone just rings because you have investors that liked what you did for them and they've got this other investment. And so, it just goes from there. And you can be a little bit more choosy. But hey, let's face it, Harmony Line, that company that I ran out of the Media Lab, the reason why that happened in the first place is because I was devoting my Sloan career to renewable energy. And my thesis with Lester Thurow was on using phytobacteria to split water so that we could produce hydrogen and oxygen, and all of the biology behind that and the chemistry and the physics and the engineering to build these sorts of things. I've never been more proud of the work that I did in that thesis. The conclusion of the thesis is this is never going to work unless we stop subsidizing gas. And it was so frustrating to me because alongside the thesis was this company that I started called Biological Energy System.

Christopher Reichert: I remember that.

Richard Resnick: Or Biological Energy Corporation, that's what we called it. And I would imagine this future of being the entrepreneur who saved the planet ... My illusions of grandeur about that were so embarrassingly big. In fact, this is the first time I've ever said that out loud.

Christopher Reichert: Well, you have to have those, right?

Richard Resnick: Totally. You got to be totally freaking nuts. And so I went to Bob Langer's lab and I got this brilliant PhD guide. I've worked on some of the science, and we filed a patent. And I then funded the company. I was raising money and all this stuff. And I was pitching it. Everybody was giving this feedback like, "You're incredible. This pitch is so good, but this can't work until we remove the gas subsidies." And so at the end of my year, I was like... Well, I've been working with the venture mentoring service at MIT with Roman and everybody. They had been so helpful. I was like, "I'm giving up on these guys." And Roman said, "Well, what are you going to do now?" And I said, "I don't know what I'm going to do." And he's like, "You're a musician, right?" I said, "Yeah." And he said, "Well, you should meet this guy, Tod Machover. He's got this cool software called Hyperscore and he's looking for somebody that you might just be like that." I remember walking in there. First of all, I did research everything about Tod Machover.

Christopher Reichert: That's a key step, always.

Richard Resnick: Key step every time, right? Who is this guy? What is the soapbox on which he stands? And I found it to be something that I could actually be emotional about, which is that there is something connective about music that when a person suffering from Alzheimer's is almost lost, then you can play even a single tone or music from their past and they come back. Or when you're sitting with your friend or your loved one, and something comes on and you each have the same emotional experience that shouldn't be taken from people who don't have the time to invest 12, 25 years to become virtuoso. And he had built this piece of software to enable anybody to be musical, to compose music without knowing about the rules. And that just gave me the chills. I loved it.

And so, it was easy for me to walk into his office and use his own words because they were mine too. I had Roman, who was saying like, "You can believe this guy. He's worked really hard." And we had a couple of seed investors and they said, "Alright, well, I guess we'll go with this Resnick guy." Now, fast forward, we raise a couple million bucks. The story of that company is it would take longer than we have right now. And ultimately, I drove it into the ground. I drove it into the ground.

Christopher Reichert: I mean, was it something that you could not avoid driving into the ground, or was it something that someone else would not have driven into the ground?

Richard Resnick: I'm sure somebody could have been more successful than I was. We ended up trying to... I mean, the short story, slightly longer, is you can't really sell boxed software even back then in 2005, '06. The internet was coming. I still have that 20-year-old anger against people like Mark Zuckerberg. I want to take that that guy down. We were fighting Myspace at the time. That was 2000s, right?

Christopher Reichert: Yeah, that's right. GeoCities.

Richard Resnick: Yeah!

Christopher Reichert: Friendster.

Richard Resnick: And we were like, Okay. Look, we can't sell the software as a box. Let's give the software away and create a social network where you can make music, put it up there and sell it as a ringtone, because even everybody's mom is going to buy their kids ringtone. And so we started doing deals with all the major carriers. You remember back then, the ringtone market was this $8 billion anomaly. I was over in Taiwan and China all the time, where all the action was, and their social network grew. We called it H-Lounge, and it was so all these avatars. It was the best. And the team was so dynamic. We had a great time, but couldn't make money. And we just ran out. And then I started into a really bad divorce and all that stuff came together at once.

Christopher Reichert So, I want to pick up on the spiritual side, and you've put it in your bio in LinkedIn and a few other the places, about the vision and the mission and the culture. And that's an area where you spend a lot of time, I think, with organizations, really getting the culture right, in addition to the basic management of the mission. So tell me about that, because I've noticed you did, I guess, a video session about a year or so ago with someone else, and that was really more what was being expressed than careers, expertise or technology expertise or whatnot. So tell me about that evolution in you. And I think it probably goes back to what I hear with your father and finding your own place in the world and finding meaning that way.

Richard Resnick: Oh, this is fun. I'm sure it has got to be boring for everybody else, but everybody loves to talk about themselves. So it was that moment there with Harmony Line and the things that happened after with a breakup, that horrible relationship, where I found myself at my lowest. And I was lucky enough to meet this guy named Bob Gregoire, who's kind of my guru now. What he's taught me and what I try to... Well, it's just changed my life entirely. And it's this notion that we all walk around believing something about ourselves. And where do those beliefs really come from?

 If you think about it, they come from other people telling us that this is what you're like, this is what you're not like. And then based on our assessment of their credibility, we will accept or we will reject what they say about us. And that can be the five-year-old girl whose grandmother looks at her and says, "You're so ugly. What are you doing? You should get inside and wash your face."

Christopher Reichert: Right. You never know when it's going to bite to the quick, right?

Richard Resnick: That's right. Or it could be your boss firing you because you didn't measure up, or it could be a breakup, or it could just be the approval of a whole series of, "I almost got that job and I didn't." Whatever that is, you decide and nobody else, you decide whether that's like you or isn't like you. And the way that you do that, is by just repeating it in your mind, visualizing it clearly, and then you behave in accordance with reality as you believe it to be. And that's the key, is that we act in accordance with the truth, not as it actually is, but as we believe it. And that's the unlocking belief. Because if you can see that and you can appreciate that, then all you have to do to change reality, is change your belief.

And it turns out that what most people are missing is a technique for changing their beliefs. And if you had one, and you could believe that you are completely deserving to be the CEO of this company, completely deserving to be whatever it is that you've always dreamed of, then what happens is you start to notice the things that are around you that are valuable in achieving that goal or that threatened you in achieving that goal. And the simplest way to explain that is imagine just walking down a street that has got a slight decline, slight gentle decline, and you're on the sidewalk. Now, your goal is to get to the end of the street because there's a store there. And so, if you set a goal, then you immediately start noticing things that can either help you or that can hurt you from achieving that goal. "I will get to that store," so you start looking at the store. You start checking your pocket to make sure you got the money too, right? You're doing all these things.

Now, if I still have that goal but I put roller skates on your feet, now you start to notice other things, because I've just given you a new goal, which is don't fall down. I didn't even have to say it. I just gave it to you. I put in roller skates on your feet. And you're probably not looking at the store anymore. Now, you're looking down to see where the pebbles are in the cracks in the sidewalk. So it's the same you. You're still just doing this one thing, but the goal, setting the goal, causes you to notice the things that will help you or hurt you to get there. And that's the key to changing your belief, is setting a goal, because when you set the goal... I think it's about 3% of the population who sets goals, writes them down and reads them every day. And if you're not doing that, then guess what you're doing, you're working on somebody else's goals.

If you write the goal down and then you talk to yourself as if it's already happened in the first person, "I'm at the store." Right? "I am the CEO of a publicly traded company. I am the greatest father." And it makes me feel, and I can picture it and visualize it, right? Then you come back to this state where that's actually not true and you say, "Well, look at what I'm noticing. How do I get there now?" And it actually just opens up your creative mind to do it. So that system, which I could teach you over the course of weeks, simply rendered in three minutes there, has led me to understand that everybody is a tenant. Everybody's got this innate potential. And all of us are limited by that, our self-talk by the things that we tell us we can't be because we haven't yet been.

And so, what I try to do in companies now, is I try to share that system. And with increasing success, company to company what happens is I'm more and more confident now of this way of thinking and I'm less willing to accept people that will reject it. And Cureatr, the company that I run right now, I went in here saying, "Look, I've been successful now. And I'm just going to be the full, the weirdest, strangest, most far out version of me. And I'm going to give this to everybody. And if you don't like it, well, either you're going to be able to get the board to fire me or you're going to leave. And either of those is okay."

And what happened? The miracle was everybody in the company said, "This is amazing. Let's line up and let's do it." And we now have this positive culture that's helpful. People are actually using the system to set big goals for themselves. Some of our team has grown so far that they've left the company because they've realized that there's something bigger and better for them. And you know what happens? The whole thing just floats up. And so my job is just giving people a way to see their biggest future. That's so fun. I'll do that. It doesn't matter if it's science or anything. That's what I do now.

Christopher Reichert: I mean, I guess I'm trying to think how... I mean, this is like an evolution, right? And to me, this comes down to authenticity. This seems like the purest version of authenticity. "I'm going to be who I am and either you'll fire me, board; and staff, you'll join or leave." But at the end of the day, what's left behind is an authentic team or core who's on board with this vision and they need to go find their own vision. That's something, I guess, that's taken you decades to get there.

Richard Resnick: Yeah, 48 years. Yeah, that's right. And I'm not there. I mean, it's so easy to... You don't even catch the negative things that you say to yourself about yourself most of the time. So a huge part of the practice, if you will, and this isn't a religion, it's really just cognitive behavioral therapies, that's all But a whole part of the practice is listening to yourself talk. And when you catch yourself in the act of saying something about yourself that's not helpful, that's grooving a belief that you don't need, you say, "Stop it, Richard. You're better than that." And then you say, "The next time," and you replace that negative thought with the way that you will talk to yourself the next time. That's really important, is that replacement picture. And that happens to me all the time, man.

The last negative thing I said about myself was this morning because the coronavirus, I used to be fit and strong and tiny little man full of muscle. And then I was like, "Well, eh, I'm just on the Zoom from 6:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. I can't do that anymore." So I started running again today this morning, and it sucked. I have lost so much in this however many months. And I was beating myself up about it instead of talking to myself about, "Look what you're doing right now. This is the thing. You're doing it." Yeah, it hurts and it's going to hurt less tomorrow and the next day, and picture yourself doing the 5K in 25 minutes and not really breathing very hard.

Christopher Reichert: So back to Sloan for a second. You started with the HST program, Health Sciences and Technology program, which I don't think exists anymore. Am I right? Is that…

Richard Resnick: Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah.

Christopher Reichert: That is one of the hallmarks of MIT and Sloan is just a lot of experimentation programs. And as the markets or opportunities evolve, they are, I guess you could say under-emotional about cutting it away and starting anew, which is the innovation process.

Richard Resnick: I agree completely. I have nothing to add.

Christopher Reichert: Yeah. If you had to do have a do-over at Sloan, what would it be? A professor you would have taken or a class? I mean, if you look back on your career and say, "God, I really wish I'd taken that accounting or something."

Richard Resnick: It wouldn't be accounting. I mean, I know debits on the left and credits on the right, and I'll never forget that. I think the stuff that was really powerfully transformative... What I wish Sloan had that they didn't was a class on really exceptional selling techniques, sort of interpersonal persuasion. That would have been something really tactical and useful for me. But the thing that was actually the beginning of this evolution that I've had towards trying to understand humans as autonomous beings that do things that aren't always aligned with what they want, was John Sterman's stuff.

Christopher Reichert: The system dynamics, right?

Richard Resnick: Yeah, the system dynamics as a piece of it that. If you turn on the water in the shower and it takes three seconds for it to tell you where it's actually going to be, it just takes a long time to figure that out. You jump in this cold water. You turn it up and it's cold nelson. You're burning. And then that sort of stuff exists everywhere and it's really important. But the thing that Sterman really affected me with were all of the psychological studies that show how our biases will have us...Do you remember there was this set of videos where you'd have an experimenter would walk up to a person with a map saying, "Hey, can you help me to figure this thing out?" And showing them the map and talking to them, "What is this? How do I get from here to there?" And then two other experimenters with this huge board would walk between the two. And while they did that, the person who was having the map, asking the question of the person in the experiment would switch with some other persons, same map, but maybe even different gender. He would swap out entirely and just keep going. As soon as the guys pass and they're back together, and that person would just continue to help this experimenter figure out where they were going. That sort of stuff around our awareness and our focus and what we're able to focus away from.

Remember the gorillas with the basketball? That struck me as incredibly important because it's said that we are terrible, absolutely terrible, at seeing everything. Our information, it's required that we perceive only a tiny fraction of what we sense. Otherwise, we just fall apart and that's stuck with me, man, that system for what we perceive, right? When you put the roller skates on and suddenly your awareness goes somewhere else, is really, really important in terms of optimizing your own performance. Because what you perceive is yourself in a negative place failing all the time, then guess what's going to continue to happen? That was the beginning of unlocking that understanding for me.

Christopher Reichert: Interesting. As a kid, I remember it was a famous race car driver who said that he doesn't look where he doesn't want to go. He looks at where he wants to go.

Richard Resnick: Yeah.

Christopher Reichert:... with a car.

Richard Resnick: Look to the recovery point. That's right.

Christopher Reichert: So, interesting. So here you are. You're in New York City, right? And you've been with Cureatr for a few years now. And you've gone through this personal evolution as well. What's your definition of success?

Richard Resnick: I think I'm living it. I mean, I think success is having a purpose and measuring the degree to which you help people and the depth of your relationships with the people around you. I think that's what it is for me. The 20-year-old version of myself would kick my ass for saying that, but he's wrong. It's my body now.

Christopher Reichert: So, on that. Any parting advice for perspective Sloanies? I mean, if they're thinking about business school or a higher education studies, what do you have to say?

Richard Resnick: So for perspective Sloanies, don't just go to business school, for sure, because the things that you learn at business school, you'll forget. I've forgotten almost everything that I learned there. You go to a school that gets you a network and the credentials and the pedigree that will last forever, and a place like MIT is definitely one of those. Now, connecting that to what my definition of success is, I don't think I would have been able to get this far in my career had I not go to Sloan. I think that Sloan launched me into a number of companies. And the farther away you go from Boston, the more powerful that seems over time. I think Sloan helped me to make some final mistakes in a way that I had an opportunity to make them on a big enough scale to change something more fundamental about how I am.

Christopher Reichert: That's excellent. So on that note, I want to thank Richard Resnick, a fellow 2004 graduate of Sloan and CEO of Cureatr in New York for joining me on Sloanies Talking with Sloanies.

Richard Resnick: It's been my pleasure.

Christopher Reichert: Sloanies Talking with Sloanies is produced by the Office of External Relations at MIT Sloan School of Management. You can subscribe to this podcast by visiting our website, mitsloan.mit.edu/alumni, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts. Support for this podcast comes in part from the Sloan Annual Fund, which provides essential, flexible funding to ensure that our community can pursue excellence. Make your gift today by visiting giving.mit.edu/sloan. To support this show or if you have an idea for a topic or a guest you think we should feature, drop us a note at sloanalumni@mit.edu.