Gratitude for our Pericles Partners

By Bob Greenlee

I’m Bob Greenlee and I have the privilege of leading the Pericles team. Thanks for checking out our work and our new Substack where we’ll share our insights on the world of startups and regulation.

Here’s some more about be: I am a lawyer by training, have been working in and around government for the past 20 years, including serving as Deputy Governor of Illinois. Over the past decade with Tusk, I’ve worked with large clients like LVMH and CVS; growth startups like Bird and viagogo; and not-for-profits like Girls Who Code, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Bloomberg Philanthropies. 

Last year, I shifted my work to exclusively helping early-stage startups.  Because young companies have tight constraints on available cash (especially lately), Pericles works exclusively for equity.   While the work we do is hard- we are intense, and no one would hire us to solve easy problems- I have found our work to be more rewarding and higher quality than my earlier work for larger companies.  Here’s why:  

I love to learn, and working with our Pericles partners demands being a quick study.  One part of this is having to quickly get up to speed on many policy areas, from privacy to bank regulation.  That has always set us apart.  But working with younger companies, we are also learning the benefits of new models- from the clinical benefits of Kinspire’s family-centered approach to ASD therapy to the integrity benefits of Friday’s person-centered management of personal data.   Working with smaller companies on the outer fringes of new technology means that we must shape the leading fringes of regulatory policy, like the coming regulation of digital assets.  Our model allows us to learn nimbly, without having clients have to pay us to get smart.

Of course, finding ways to build businesses to monetize these new ideas creates many challenges, but we love to solve problems.  But the challenges facing fast-growing companies are different, and more invigorating, than trying to resolve hard problems that have existed for decades.  Often, these challenges include explaining to governments why a service that stated policy goals should have a growth path- like letting itselectric’s neighborhood curbside charging open up EV ownership to more neighborhoods or allowing kidcaboo’s safe child transportation network help get more moms back into the workforce. 

Sometimes these challenges involve finding the right compliance structure to meet a rapidly changing regulatory environment.  But, because we are working for equity, we have the time and flexibility to provide advice to do things right in the first place, and we remain engaged with our partners to advise them as new challenges arise over time.

But most, I love to share.  One of the great things about working with our mix of clients is that our partners have great things to offer society.  This couldn’t be any other way.  Sitting at the nexus between the private and the public spheres, if our clients’ products don’t improve society, we will never succeed in helping them gain acceptance.  But when we do have a new technology that solves a pressing social problem, like Burnbot’s self-contained, clean, and safe prescribed burn technology, we offer our government partners a way to change the policy conversation for the better.  Working with larger companies was much less about how to show government a new way, and much more about protecting the status quo.  

Last year, my biggest professional source of gratitude were all the startup partners that I have worked with at Pericles.  In 2023, I want to offer a thank you for giving me and my team the opportunity to do what we love- help you grow!