When it comes to building a powerful network and expanding your influence as a legal leader, few people embody that journey better than Stephen Chu. From his early days in big law to becoming Chief Legal and Administrative Officer at InStride, Stephen has navigated the legal world with an impressive mix of strategic thinking and adaptability. In this episode, Stephen shares the pivotal moments that shaped his path, the mindset shifts that helped him thrive, and the key leadership principles that every aspiring GC—or seasoned one looking to level up—should know. Stick around to the end for the top takeaways and how you can apply them to your own career.
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Building A Powerful Network And Expanding Your Influence: Stephen Chu Of InStride
Let me introduce this episode by saying I thoroughly enjoyed having Stephen Chu on the show for our very first episode. The words that come to my mind when I think of Stephen are, “That guy is going somewhere,” and I cannot wait to see how his career progresses. He’s already accomplished a lot, but I see him as perhaps a CEO someday.
Stay with me to the end where I’ll share my key takeaways from the episode focused on how this might help someone tuning in who aspires to be a GC someday, or who already is a GC but wants to take their career to the next level. The show is sponsored by Inside Counsel Academy, where in-house council goes to elevate their careers while enhancing their lives. Also by GeneralCounselWest, a law firm that supports GCs of healthcare companies and their teams with an inside council mindset. Without further ado, I bring you Stephen Chu.
Our guest is Stephen Chu. He’s the Chief Legal and Administrative Officer at InStride where he oversees legal, human resources, IT information security, and facilities. InStride is a human capital management company that delivers workforce education solutions in partnership with top academic institutions. It’s headquartered in El Segundo, California. I’m thrilled to welcome Stephen to the show.
Thanks for having me, Joe.
It’s great to have you here. That’s a lot of responsibilities. That was a long list. How did that happen?
Career Evolution And Added Responsibilities
It didn’t start that way. It is an interesting transformation from when I first started at InStride. When I first started at InStride, I was doing legal and HR, which are two very large jobs by themselves. As time went on, the CEO and the board wanted to add more to my plate and to try to give me more responsibility and more along my own journey. They added IT information security and they added facilities. The facilities are a small part. We’re a pretty remote distributed company, but we still have two offices that we still pay for. Those need management as well.
I like it. I often thought there would be benefits to companies that have more of a chief administrative officer. There aren’t the CEO and the CFO who aren’t listening to a cacophony of voices on things, but a unified voice that’s synthesized those areas that you’ve talked about.
I haven’t seen it a lot, but I think there’s some wisdom to it and that’s a great job to have. Congratulations.
It works for us. We’re a smaller company too. We’re only about 200 employees. I can imagine a much larger company. There’s more going on in legal and HR. It’s much more difficult maybe for one person to consolidate across all of those various functions but it works well for us. When I first took the job though, I went into the interview processing. I’m legal and HR. At some point, I’m going to give up one of these things The answer was yes. At some point in our growth journey, they were going to split the role, but it’s been two and a half years now and we still have not split it. I don’t think the split is coming anytime soon. The CEO likes it this way.
On the contrary, instead of splitting it, they’ve added more things. You must have great support. The GC job is a full-time job. The head of human resources and all of these are full-time jobs, so you cannot possibly be doing them all.
That’s exactly right. There’s no way I can do them all. Every single function has what I would call an amazing lieutenant who can effectively be the entire department. In some ways, they don’t even need me. I often make that joke to other executives like, “You don’t need me. You can work with so-and-so who’s in charge of legal or so-and-so in charge of HR.” The only way I succeed in my job, and this has been true since the day I walked in the door, is by having a number two in each function that can do the entire job and it’s the central point of failure. They know everything that’s going on from a legal perspective. I’m not keeping anything from them and they can do the job on their own. Every one of my functions has that capability.
That’s great. Take me back in time. You went to a law school at Columbia, far away from home.
Like someone else I know.
We both did years apart, but far away from home because you were born in Canada but you grew up in Downey. You went to the East Coast and you went to law school. Did you know what a general counsel did at that time?
Absolutely, not. Did you know what a general counsel did?
I don’t think so. I’ve often thought of when it first came into my conscious awareness of what a general counsel is and that I wanted to be one. I know it was during law school because I had a great uncle or a distant relative who was a judge. I told him that and I think he was disappointed.
That might come out in a little bit of my story too. As you will soon learn and we will maybe soon discover in the next several minutes here, I like to fly by the seat of my pants. I feel like I don’t exactly know what I’m going to be doing at any moment in time. When I got to Columbia Law School, I didn’t think I knew what job I was going to have when I left Columbia Law School. When you go to a place like Columbia, especially when you finish your first year, everyone talks about something called OCI. Everyone is doing OCI. You get on the bandwagon. Maybe I don’t have any of my own independent thought, but since everyone else was talking about OCI, I was like, “I guess I got to do OCI.”
On-campus interviewing.
Thank you for telling the audience what that is. Everyone goes through on-campus interviewing and you go through this audition process or interview process with a bunch of firms and you end up picking one of the firms and that’s your 2L summer job. That’s how it works. From then on, that was the path that I was on. In some ways, I chose it but it was the only path that I saw because that’s the path that everyone else did. It’s good that I didn’t see a bunch of monkeys jump off a bridge because I might have done that too.
To be fair, the job that you went to was at Cravath, which for people probably at many law schools, especially Columbia, is the plum job to get.
The reason why I went there too, was because I interviewed with a lot of other firms, not that we need to name any of them, but I did my Cravath interview. It was the only one that I had butterflies in my stomach. I went into it and I was like, “I got to nail this interview.” People talk about this firm like it’s a big deal. I want to see if I can get a job here. Lo and behold, I got a job there.
I think it was like, “If that’s how much anxiety or nervousness went into it, then this might be a job that I care about.” That’s how I ended up at Cravath. Once you end up at Cravath, you have two paths, litigation or corporate transactional. I was like, “I don’t know if I’m a litigator.” I went down the corporate path and that’s how I became a corporate lawyer. At that point, I still don’t think I knew what a general counsel was even then.
Tell me how that outside counsel work evolved into moving inside. What was the inflection point that caused you to want to go inside?
It’s an opportunity that arises. I don’t know if you’re going to ask me later about how an in-house lawyer can move through and get different opportunities. When I was at the law firm, maybe this was because I was lazy and I could look only 2 feet in front of me. I thought that the law firm partner gig was the gig. You get to a law firm and everything is set out for you.
Everyone makes the same amount of money and follows the same path to becoming a partner. Share on XEveryone makes the same amount of money. Everyone is on the same path and the amount of time it takes to make a partner. At that time, I thought being a partner was the pinnacle of the legal profession. Maybe your judge family member thought that being a judge was the pinnacle of the legal profession. At that time, I thought it was a law firm partner.
At the time, I was at Gibson Dunn and I was in the finance practice. I ended up working on a deal where I had a partner and then I was doing the debt side of the transaction. The equity portion of the transaction was led by another mid-level associate and another partner. We’re like a team of two partners and two associates, and we’re working on this transaction together. It was somewhat complicated. At that time, the Gibson Dunn partner was nearing the end of his career. He was on the golf course a lot. I ended up doing a lot of that deal on my own.
Was this still in New York?
No, this is in LA.
You’d come out back to LA.
I was working on this deal, my law firm partner was still involved, but he was doing other things. I was working with another associate who was a year ahead of me. We did the transaction together. It was a complicated two months. I didn’t even know who he was before we started working on the deal together. We closed the deal and everything was fine. He then immediately went in-house at CBRE, the Commercial Real Estate Services Firm. He then moved in-house. A year later, he is at CBRE. The Deputy General Counsel of Corporate was his friend. They seem to know each other.
He said, “When you were at Gibson, did you meet anyone good? Do you think I could talk to them? Do you think I could hire them to be on my corporate team?” This guy who I only worked on this one transaction with was like, “You have to talk to Stephen. He might be worth talking to.” That was a year after he had already left and a year after this transaction. That’s when Stephen Ballas, who is now a law firm partner at Sidley Austin and was the deputy General Counsel of Corporate, reached out to me and said, “Let’s start to get to know each other.” That’s when the interview process for me going in-house began.
How quickly from there did you go in-house?
We started a courtship process that took six months. We probably had lunch together 3 or 4 times in downtown LA. I think he knew he was going to fire his existing senior counsel but he wasn’t sure. He was beginning that process. When he ultimately did move on from his lawyer, he ended up opening a full interview search process. I interviewed for the job, despite having known Stephen for 4 or 5 months at that point, and then interviewed against 2 or 3 people, according to him, and then ultimately I did get the job.
The moment Stephen reached out to me, it was about 5 or 6 months later that I ended up taking the job. I don’t even know if I knew I was going in-house at the time because, at the time, I still thought I wanted to be a law firm partner. I went through maybe 13 or 14 interviews at CBRE over a month period, meeting different people. I was so exhausted by the end of it. I was like, “If I didn’t take this job, I would have wasted a month of my time.” I said, “I’m going to do it.” I went to CBRE.
When you got there, was it what you expected or were there surprises?
Transition From Law Firm To In-House Role
There were surprises. When you’re at the law firm, you have a little bit more time to think. There are fewer meetings. When you go in-house, the thing that was shell-shocked to me was there are a lot of meetings. The way that things get done is through meetings. At a law firm, it’s not as meeting-heavy because at least I wasn’t meeting with clients from 9:00 to 5:00 every day. Maybe I’d have 1 or 2 calls with a client, but that was it. The rest of the time I can do work. When you’re at an in-house job, you have to do your work in between all of those meetings that are taking place during the day. Some of your work is happening during those meetings but as lawyers, we still have to read.
One of the things that I always emphasize with people on my team and in my private coaching clients is how important it is to carve out time to get work done so you’re not saturated with meetings and not have 30-minute pockets to think work because you could add those up together and they’re not going to amount to much.
I agree. That was the biggest shell shock moment that I often think back on. The cool thing about going in-house, especially to a large public company like CBRE is the opportunities. It’s less true with the company that I have now, but when you’re one lawyer in 100, 150, or 200 people in the legal department, there’s a lot of room for you to do different things. I appreciated that when I got to CBRE. I got to do some cool stuff that was not just M&A, public company securities, and corporate governance. I got to do other things. I went to Asia for a year. That was an opportunity that I would never have had I gone to a company that didn’t have the global reach or the global operations that CBRE does.
It sounds like you have a variety of experiences that set you up well for a GC role.
Mentorship And Preparation For The GC Role
It was the beginning. I only did two in-house gigs before becoming GC. I did the CBRE role. When Stephen became general counsel of another public company in LA, he made me his deputy GC. After about two years at CBRE, he moved on and became GC. He brought me over with him. That’s when I was probably even more broad-based, as you said. I wasn’t just doing M&A, corporate governance, and securities. I was doing IP and employment. Now I was doing it all, managing a team of about eighteen.
I was doing commercial work. That was the first time I had ever done commercial work at a company. When I was at CBRE, there was an entire commercial team that handled that part of the business. I was mainly doing the corporate work. When I got to the next company with Stephen, I was able to do everything. I was his number two managing everything. That’s what helped me do everything. Learning from him as GC was what prepared me to become GC myself.
When you talked earlier about the importance of having a number two, I was going to ask you, but I figured we’d get to it if you had been the number two exactly like that for someone else, and it sounds like you had. That gives you broad exposure to everything. How long from being number two in that role until you got an opportunity to be the GC? How did that come about?
The GC Opportunity And Networking With Law Firms
It was about three years. That question is a great question because it’s a great part of the story. We had an intellectual property firm that we were working with based in Westlake Village. We have been working with them since the beginning. We had maybe ten different IP firms that we were working with. Ultimately, we consolidated them.
We decided we were working with too many. We had a lot of IP work going on. We consolidated down to this one firm. I got to know the law firm partner there well. That was probably 2 or 3 years we were working together. He found out through whatever that I was interested in becoming a GC one day.
I was at the airport flying to the Bay Area for a GC interview. It was Friday at 6:00 in the morning. I did end up doing a call with him at 6:00 in the morning. He’s like, “Where are you?” I said, “ I’m at the airport on the way to a GC interview.” He goes, “I didn’t know you wanted to be GC. Maybe I have something for you.” As you know, a lot of law firm partners have a way to create value for in-house lawyers.
They’ll say, “Joe, if you ever need a GC gig, I’ll find one that’s good for you.” Sometimes they mean it and sometimes they don’t. They don’t have anything. I’ve met enough law firm partners that have that maybe in their back pocket and maybe they don’t. This particular IP law firm partner said, “I got something but I didn’t hear from him for maybe six months.” He did have something. He did.
You have me curious because you said Westlake Village which is where I’m headquartered. Who are we talking about?
We’re talking about Jonathan Pearce at SoCal IP who works with Steve.
I know Steve well. Great firm.
Steve’s great. For that particular public company that Steve and I were at, Steve and Jonathan both did a couple of big litigation cases for us and some patent infringement cases. I got to see Steve and Jonathan in action. They’re both great. It goes back to the story, and I don’t know if this is going to be a recurring theme among some of your other guests. I hope this isn’t cliche because the last thing I want to be is cliche, but it pays to be a nice person.
It pays to be kind to everyone around you. Don't treat your outside law firm providers or their service providers poorly—they might be the ones to help you land your next opportunity. Share on XIt pays to be nice to everyone around you. Don’t treat your outside law firm providers or their law firm service providers like crap because they might get you your next thing. Jonathan and I became very good friends during that period of time and spent time together. When he knew I was looking for a GC job and he knew my personality, he knew what I could do, he was doing a patent infringement case for a company called Zwift. Zwift was probably at that time, three years old, pretty young, and never had a GC before.
The Interview And Decision To Join Zwift
They had an outside GC, a pretty well-known one in the LA area. The fractional GC did many different things. Jonathan thought I was a good fit for the CEO who he had been working with a lot for that patent infringement case and said, “You have to meet him.” How I got the GC job was Jonathan introduced me to Eric, who is the CEO of Zwift. Eric and I met on a Friday. I met him at the Zwift offices in Long Beach for about an hour. On that weekend, Eric texted me and said, “I’m in Manhattan Beach,” where I was living at the time. He said, “There’s going to be a bike race.” Zwift is a cycling company. “There’s going to be a bike race in Manhattan Beach. Come out.”
We watched the bike race together for about an hour. We went to a coffee shop and sat for about two hours, chatting about things. He said, “I’m going to introduce you to my head of people on Wednesday.” I met the head of people on Wednesday. I met two other executives on Thursday and I had an offer that following Friday. That’s within a week, and that’s the startup world probably.
Zwift was pretty small at the time. It was pre-series B. It had not yet closed at series B. Less than 50 million revenue. It was not the first GC offer that I got, but it was the first GC offer that I thought was extremely interesting. I took it. I probably do not know exactly what a startup world is. I know now what a pre-series B company was or is. I don’t think I knew that when I took the GC job at Zwift at the time. I’ll be completely honest.
What did you do? You were the first in-house lawyer and you’re the GC. What did you start with there?
Starting As The First GC At Zwift And Initial Responsibilities
There were three things that I was hired to do, which is why I think Zwift wanted a GC at the time. I only ended up doing maybe two and a half or one and a half. One of the three things that Eric wanted me to do was he thought we were going to buy a company. We were going to do some large M&A transactions. That never happened. The second thing that he wanted me to do was to get ready to close our Series B, which did happen, but it took a few months. It wasn’t like I showed up and we were in the middle of Series B and I was getting ready to close the transaction.
He had maybe started the roadshow. It was several months later that we ended up closing Series B, but we ended up doing that too. That number two box, I will check. The third box, which didn’t ultimately happen either was he wanted to form a professional cycling league on the Zwift platform. I probably spent 80% of my time in the first several months working on that. I almost felt like a sports lawyer. I was interviewing Proskauer and Covington to see if they could work and help me build a sports league on the Zwift platform.
It was extremely exciting. Eric and I were working pretty much side by side on this thing together. We’re trying to work with the existing professional in-person cycling league, not the e-sports league that we wanted to set up. We were trying to get the e-sports like trying to get the real-life NFL with Madden, Xbox, and sports league, and somehow combine them together. We’re somehow going to get the actual NFL athletes playing in Madden. That’s the concept of it. It never took off. We couldn’t get this professional cycling league on board with what we wanted to do. It fell apart and we never got it done. For the first six months, that was what I was tasked to do as GC.
There are a lot of things that you hadn’t done before, either in the outside counsel role or even in the prior in-house roles, or the number two role. What skills did you have to acquire and how did you go about that to be successful?
Acquiring Skills As A GC
It’s a good point. There are many things I do not know. I feel like I don’t know a lot of things. A lot of what a GC does is trying to figure it out and trying to access the right experts, the right people, and the right tools to make sure that you can sound half-educated and make the right business decision, the right business recommendation for either the CEO or the board. It requires a couple of things.
One is you have to be willing to talk to everyone at the company who does know the answer. If you’re going to work at some company and it has some ARR or Annual Recurring Revenue, there’s going to be some subject matter expert or supposed subject matter expert at the company. You have to be willing to do the diligence, sit down with them, and learn from them. You cannot show up as a GC and think you know everything because that’s impossible, especially if it’s a company or an industry that you’ve never been a part of.
A GC's job is to know the business as well as the CEO. You can't identify risks or anticipate challenges if you don't know how the business works. Share on XFor me anyway, every single company I’ve joined has been a company that I had no idea what was going on including my current one, which is an education technology company. I did not know anything about EdTech before I started here. You have to be willing to go in and tell people that you’re going to invest and take the time to learn from others, especially those who are already at the company. I do think a GC’s job is to know the business as well as the CEO does because you cannot identify risk.
You cannot look around corners if you don’t know how the business works. If you’re just a contract attorney, then that’s all you’re going to be. You don’t know how to strategically provide advice because you don’t know how to think about the business at a higher level. I spend time with the business. That’s number one. Number two is you have to be able to problem solve, look at a problem, and say, “Who can help me figure this out?” That might be other GCs in the space. The easy one is to go to an outside counsel and find a law firm partner who can figure it out. Those are the two main areas.
There might be consultants or contractors that have done it before, like a PWC or the Big Four. There might be those types of specialist service providers that are maybe experts in that particular issue. Those are what I would call the third-party help-type places that you need to go. The last thing I would say is Google. Do the research. At least start doing the research yourself and figure out where you can go and get a little educated. You can then access the two buckets that I first mentioned, which means you know which experts to go to.
You know what questions to ask once you’ve educated yourself a bit. You can ask a lot smarter questions and it helps you figure out who’s the right expert to help you. How is it similar or different on the HR side, leading the HR function?
HR And Legal Roles Intersection
That’s a good point. I forgot that we were also going to talk about HR for a second. I thought this was the legal podcast. The HR department or the side of things is very different from legal. What has prepared me to do the HR job well is the intersection that legal and HR have at every company. Legal sometimes or often does get involved in very hairy situations when it comes to HR.
You learn the most when things are difficult. The more complex the situation, the greater the learning. Share on XThose are the most difficult HR situations that help you learn. When you think about your career and where you learn the most, you learn the most when things are hard, we didn’t know what was happening. You had to apply everything that you had to that particular situation and things are difficult. The more complex the situation, the more you learn. It’s always great to learn from simple things and build upon them.
When you get to that thing that is so complex, so difficult, so hard to wrap your head around, that’s when lawyers and people in general elevate their game. They take a step up and figure out, “I’m going to challenge myself. This is challenging, and I want to get it done.” That’s when law or lawyers get involved in HR situations. That’s why typically when I was just a GC, I would handle executive employment agreements. That’s why we get involved with equity because equity can sometimes be complicated, especially in complicated corporate structures for companies.
Lawyers get involved with that because they’re complicated, and there are legal implications. That’s where I learned a lot about it. Ultimately, on the HR side, what makes a successful Chief People Officer or Chief Human Resources Officer is understanding people and trying to remember that the people who work at a company are not numbers on a spreadsheet. That can happen for large organizations when every company might have to do a reduction in force. You look at the names on a page and you look at the dollar signs that the company is going to save.
It’s very easy when you’re sitting in the executive room or executive office to say, “We’ll cut 10%. The 10% is 10%. These are the dollars we save.” You always have to remember in every HR decision you make, there’s a person’s potential livelihood that is going to be affected by that decision. I don’t think it’s good for HR people to hide behind emails or corporate speak.
You have to reach out, pick up the phone, and say, “Stephen, this is a difficult decision that we’re making. Things are happening.” Keep them informed. The biggest lesson on the HR side I’ve learned is that if you treat people like people, you have a better culture. If you treat people like they’re cogs in a system, that’s not a good culture to have at any company, which is very different from legal. That was a different explanation of how to do a job than the GC job.
It gives you the opportunity to influence the culture. Is that what brought you to InStride?
It’s a good point. What brought me to InStride was I got headhunted. That’s probably the short answer. Thank you, Spencer Stewart, for bringing me to InStride. In terms of the opportunity itself, at the time, I was excited about the executive team. I was excited about TPG. TPG is a great private equity fund and they are the primary investor in InStride. I had not done private equity before. I had done Zwift which was a VC-backed company. I do think that the legal and HR aspects were interesting in the beginning to get me through the door.
I do think that my current job is maybe 80% HR and 20% legal. The HR job is all-consuming for the people and the needs of the InStride employees never end. It never stops. There are times as a GC when something happens and it keeps you up at night. We hear that phrase all the time. That would happen every once in a while. With HR, it could be every day. There’s something that might keep you up with something related to HR or employment at the company that it’s an everyday thing. It demands more of my time anyway.
I was going to ask you how you manage the competing demands of being a legal advisor, business partner, and corporate leader.
The GC’s Role As Strategic Advisor And Boardroom Presence
On the legal side, my main two functions. I suspect that a lot of your GC guests say the same thing. One of the two main things that I can provide to the company on the legal side is I’m a strategic advisor to the CEO. Anything that the CEO is about to do or make a business decision, I like to think that I’m typically in the room and helping them decide whether it’s a good idea or a bad idea. That is one thing that I provide as a benefit to the CEO.
The second thing is I provide a second set of eyes and ears in the boardroom. That is something that not every other executive gets to do all the time because I’m in the boardroom from beginning to end. I see almost every board interaction that the CEO has with the rest of the board because our CEO is on the board. That position, which is a very special position that no GC should take for granted, means that you have the ability to provide counsel or advice, or as I said, a second set of eyes and ears. Any person that the CEO is interacting with the board is going to be thinking, “Should I say it this way? Should I say it a different way? How are they going to react if I position it this way.”
You’re going to have a better relationship with your CEO if he’s able to come to you and ask you those questions. You want your CEO to ask you those questions because you want your CEO to trust that you know how to read a room. You know how the business interacts with the types of decisions that a board is going to make. At least on the legal side, those are the two main areas where I put in a lot of time and effort. A lot of the other legal stuff is run by the deputy GC.
Got it. You talked about your number two in each of those areas. How do you cultivate a strong high-performing team? Do you treat each of those as independent teams from your perspective, or do you manage them as one? How does that work?
Do you mean legal and HR combined?
In all the areas that you manage.
Cultivating A Strong, High-Performing Team
I don’t know if my opinion or thought process on this is exactly right, but this is how I do it. I do silo them off. I do operate with you are a legal team, you are an HR team, you are an IT security team. It’s easier that way because, as I mentioned earlier, they fall under one person. That one person isn’t the entire thing. I do bring them together for cultural things. When we’re at an all-company gathering or we’re at a dinner, we all come together because these are all my people and they’re all shared service departments at the end of the day.
It’s not like I’m mixing a commercial team or a sales team with legal. These are all shared services for the entire company. We are all our clients at the end of the day or the entire rest of the company. There are a lot of synergies under what we call the administrative function at InStride. How do I cultivate things? One little interesting metric is when I look at a manager, especially when we hire executives, one of the questions that I typically ask or like to find out is, “How many other people from your past life are you going to bring here?”
That is a big sign as to whether or not you’re a good manager, whether people like you, or whether you’re a jerk. If you are a jerk, then no one is going to come work for you. I’ve moved around a lot in my career if you look at my resume. I cannot hold down a job to save my life for longer than four years. I move around. When I move on and join a new company and I ask you, “Will you come with me?” That’s not the question. The question is, “If I ask you, will you say yes?” There’s a big difference. Me asking someone to come join me is irrelevant. It only matters if I ask and then they want to come.
Currently, of the twenty people who report to me at InStride, five of them came from a prior life. Five of them came from Zwift at some point in the past. Two of my three legal team members, not including myself, came from Zwift. There are two on the HR team and one who transitioned to a different part of the company, which is great mobility, also came from Zwift.
When it comes to cultivating a team, I like to be the type of manager that at the end of the day, if I move on in a year or two, come and ask them, “Will you come with me,” there’ll be one that will say yes. It’s a certain style. It causes me to be a nice guy. There’s a nice balance of a nice guy. I don’t want to burn a bridge. I don’t want to be too hard on them. I want to create a very collegial environment.
That’s the type of leader I am. There are great GCs and good leaders out there that I’ve met who are very hard on their people. They believe by challenging them, making them grow, pushing them to the absolute limit, in the end, that’s why they’ll thank them. That’s why they’ll want to join them and go with them. It’s a philosophy I didn’t think about, but I probably am more on the nice guy side than the push them to the limit side.
Know thyself and be who you are. Don’t try to be somebody else. That’s great. What are you looking forward to?
Future Goals And Advice For Younger Self
I’ll try to say this without sharing too much confidentiality of my current company. I’m looking forward to an exit. I want to take a company to some kind of exit. It doesn’t have to be an IPO. I’m more than happy to sell a company. I haven’t done any of those things as a GC yet. I want to experience what that process looks like.
An exit—any exit—is a valuable feather in a GC’s cap, signaling experience and credibility to the market, future employers, and recruiters. Share on XThat would be a huge number one goal for me and I do think that as for GCs and what you have like your feather in your cap so to speak, having that type of exit, is good for us. It shows the market, it shows future employers, it shows recruiters that this person has gone through this phase or this type of transaction. I have certain other things like I’ve done multi-million dollar M&A. That checks that box. I’ve been in the boardroom for a long time, but the thing I haven’t done is exit a company. I look forward to trying to do that because that’s an experience I’ve never had.
Another thing I look forward to, which is not in my current role, is that I look forward to doing something more internationally again. We alluded to that a little bit back when we were talking about CBRE and that experience. When you’re in the startup world, especially when they’re relatively small and US-based, they don’t always have global operations. I haven’t had the opportunity to get out internationally, and that’s something I want to do. I don’t know if your audience cares about that at all, but that’s more for Stephen Chu.
I like to wrap things up by asking if you could give one piece of advice to your younger self, what would it be? Now, you’re quite young.
Trust me, there’s probably a lot of advice I could give to my younger self, that’s for sure. I’m trying to think. That is a good question. It’s a philosophy in life that you try to live with no regrets. I look back on all of the various decisions that I’ve made in my career. I try to think that each one was for the right reason and that it put me on the path that I am on now.
That path is something I’m very happy about. I would probably say don’t change anything, but at the same time, I’d probably tell my younger self to be patient. You and I both became general counsels at a young age, but I probably would have told my 25 to 33-year-old self that it would happen eventually. That’s why I jumped around a lot because I was probably being impatient.
I was trying to look for the next big thing. It’s no surprise that other people call me impatient, especially when I’m trying to get that itch and I want to do something else. I would probably tell myself as much as possible to be patient. I don’t think it’s a grass is always greener thing, but I don’t think it’s going to be the end of the world if this opportunity doesn’t come exactly at the time that I need it to come or want it to come. I’d probably tell them to be more patient.
It’s a brilliant answer. Not just because my answer to that question is very similar.
Really?
Yeah.
That’s the best advice I’ve given. Hopefully, younger Stephen might make different decisions based on that advice.
Stephen, it’s been a real pleasure having you on the show. We cannot wait to see what you’re going to do next.
I appreciate it. Thank you, Joe. It was great.
We’ll keep in touch.
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Thank you for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed our time with Stephen. I know I did. Three key things I’ll take from this episode include 1) Taking on more than one role means you need to have key lieutenants in all the areas under your responsibility. You cannot try to be the hands-on person in each of the areas. You have to hire great people and manage them with trust. 2) working in a large company law department is helpful in your development into a GC particularly if you take advantage of the opportunity to get a broad range of experience in multiple roles like Stephen did at CBRE.
3) It helps to build relationships that transcend companies. Consider following your key mentors as they step into bigger roles. Later, as you step into new roles, build relationships so that you have the opportunity to bring people along with you who you trust to support you. Until next time, for more tips on accelerating your path to becoming a world-class general counsel, visit InsideCounselAcademy.com and connect with me on LinkedIn.
Important Links:
- Stephen Chu on LinkedIn
- Stephen.Chu@InStride.com
- Inside Counsel Academy
- GeneralCounselWest
- InStride
- Jonathan Pearce on LinkedIn
- Zwift
- Joe Schohl on LinkedIn
About Stephen Chu
Stephen Daryl Chu was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, moved to the United States when he was eight days old, and grew up in Downey, California. He attended Columbia University and earned his JD from Columbia Law School in 2009. During law school, he served as managing editor on the Columbia Business Law Review and as a Student Senator. After law school, Stephen clerked for the Central District of California, and then worked as a corporate associate at Cravath and Gibson Dunn. He moved in-house in 2014, and became General Counsel for the first time at Zwift in 2018.
Stephen is now the Chief Legal and Administrative Officer at InStride, where he oversees legal, human resources, IT/Information Security and facilities. He is dedicated to fostering inclusive workplace cultures, enhancing employee engagement and culture, and aligning people strategies with organizational goals. He was recently honored by the LA Business Journal’s in its annual Corporate Counsel awards as Corporate Counsel of the Year for Mid-Sized Private Companies.