#314: Cindy Eckert (formerly Whitehead) — How to Sell Your Company For One Billion Dollars
The Tim Ferriss Show
Let the Silence Do the Work
"I love that story. It's so powerful," he says of Wegmans' loyalty to its employees. "How do you get folks that are cashiers at the checkout line with jobs that may seem relatively unexciting to show up every day with unbridled enthusiasm for what they do? I got to tell you that first day anybody in the entire DC metro area who'd ever been to Wegmans showed up and stood in line."
Cindy Eckert (formerly Whitehead) (@cindypinkceo) is an entrepreneur with 1.5 billion dollars in exits who currently serves as the founder and CEO of The Pink Ceiling, an investment firm and consulting enterprise nicknamed the Pinkubator with a mission to invest in, launch, and build other women-led or focused businesses. She believes that access to good advice alone is not enough to change the ratio of men to women in business, and that is why she personally invested more than 15 million dollars in 2017 alone to support the development of nine portfolio companies.
I should mention right off the bat that if you're a guy, don't let this bio turn you off in any way — in the sense that I wanted to have Cindy on the show because she is a good CEO and entrepreneur, very much irrespective of gender. The negotiating techniques, the approaches to deal-making, everything that we talk about applies to entrepreneurs, period, full stop.
Earlier in her career, Cindy was the founder of Sprout Pharmaceuticals, home of Addyi, the first and only FDA-approved treatment for low sexual desire disorder in women, which was sold for one billion dollars and then reacquired in a crazy story with incredible terms that we will discuss in this conversation.
Please enjoy this wide-ranging conversation with Cindy Eckert!
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