At the end of June there was a restructuring at the company that I had been working at for the past 7 years, and over the last couple of months I’ve had some time to think about what I had been working on and where the next opportunity lies. 

One thing that I had noticed immediately after my layoff was that I had not been developing skills as fast as I had actually wanted to. The first thing I did was starting to look for courses in AI, business development, competitive intelligence, etc. After doing a bit of digging, the thing that I realized was that there is no substitute for actually doing the work and being in it, which I think is part of why companies don’t like to see long gaps in resumes, especially in a field that’s advancing as fast as AI. 

The other thing to keep in mind is that with the restructuring came severance pay. Without getting into the details, the important thing is that the severance gave me a period of time where I could stop and think about what I actually want without the burden of stressing over work. 

It’s been a real opportunity to be laid off, because now I can actually take the time to think about what skills I had developed over the last 7 years. What gaps exist in my skills and what the best ways to develop those skills are.

I’ve also had the time to seriously focus on networking. On LinkedIn, I’ve been reaching out to a number of people who are building interesting startups or working on interesting problems within larger companies and it’s given me a broader view of what is possible. 

There are a lot of startups trying to solve the same problems and as one of my connections recently said, the moat is not in the novelty of the idea, it’s in the execution.

One of the other things that I need to do as part of my time off is to figure out what I want to do with my LinkedIn presence. Over the last couple of years I had spent a lot of time posting news articles about investment rounds, mergers and acquisitions, in licensing deals and other sorts of business developments in the world of pharma. I had gotten good feedback on those posts. Many people found it helpful and later as the company I was working at developed more of their tools. I started adding additional insights from the company tools to those posts as a method of gaining traction for the solution we were selling.

Lots of the companies that I’ve talked to over the last few months are working on things that are tangentially related to what I had been working on. And although my expertise in those areas is not deep, the startup experience is still valuable and there are a number of startup founders looking to have conversations with me about how they can go about solving the same sort of problems that I went through a few years ago. 

I’m also thinking about alternative ways to make money rather than just a salary. Some companies that need advisory services will offer equity compensation. Some companies require consulting services that can charge on an hourly basis or a per project basis. Some companies are looking to build their customer base and are willing to pay referral fees for people who make introductions. Those referral fees can be anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars depending on the size of the company. One of the things I need to do is consider what other options there are to be compensated for, value that I can provide, whether that’s in advising, consulting, or making connections that lead to sales. There seems to be a really big opportunity for the people who can make the right connections and that is something that I would like to look into more, provided I have a safe base of income to meet my expenses. In the meantime, that would be a way for me to really scale my impact, which is something that I’ve always wanted to do.

The nice thing about the severance pay is that it gives me the freedom to take some risks. I don’t necessarily need to do something that will convert to a salary in the next few months, which gives me time to build connections, see what sort of introductions I can make, where I can consult on projects, and where I can provide more advisory work. It seems that a lot of the people who are doing independent consulting work use that to extend their runway while they work on startups or other projects with an outsized opportunity. And so something that I would like to do is to connect with more of these consulting opportunities to extend my runway. I think that’s the first step. The next step after that would be to devote more time to building a LinkedIn presence which I’ll need to do through content. I think what I’m going to do is change my content from being focused on business development news in pharma, to being about curating data in pharma. One of the things that I’ve been doing to stay sharp on data curation is vibe coding, a competitive intelligence tool of my own and as I’ve been building that I’ve been prompting it to include certain evals and curation flags that require manual intervention. For now, I’m just attaching additional data sources to it one after the other. Once I have more of a foundation in place, I’ll focus more on the curation of that data and possibly the addition of real-time insights. As I do more of the data curation that will give me content to post on LinkedIn about curation and typical issues with it. That will allow me to connect with more startup founders and potentially connections at big pharma. Then I will connect those startup founders with each other or with people at big pharma and develop some sort of referral scheme where I can earn some side income from making these connections, provided they convert to a sale.