777: A CFO's Unfinished Business | Isaac Ro, CFO, Sema4

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.

“Good management teams are good, and bad ones are bad,” 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’t leave.

“I loved working at Goldman, and I believed that if ever I were going to leave, I wanted to be running to something and not from something,” explains Ro, who admits that he had a self-imposed “high hurdle” to jump if he were to consider future opportunities.

To Ro, the classic equity analyst segue to corporate investor relations chief would be “just a different version of the same gig.”

“I needed to spread my wings wider and do something sufficiently different,” he remembers, “but I needed someone to sponsor me.”

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.

“I 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,” reports Ro, who goes on to say that in early 2019, he received calls from a number of this firm’s management team members, who outlined how they were ready to launch yet another new medical technology company that they characterized as “similar but bigger.”  

“The founders knew what I had to offer and wanted exactly that, and you really need this combination to have a chance,” 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—less than 2 years later—to Exact Sciences for $2.15 billion.

Still, despite having helped the Thrive management to achieve an impressive exit, Ro’s job satisfaction wavered.  

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

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

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

“Sema4 is a very natural progression for me when it comes to keeping the learning curve steep,” notes Ro, who happily observes that he seldom gets bored these days. –Jack Sweeney