Neil Oberoi is a Senior Managing Director at Guggenheim Securities. Guggenheim Securities is the investment banking and capital markets business of Guggenheim Partners, a global investment and advisory firm. Guggenheim Securities offers services that fall into four broad categories: Advisory, Financing, Sales and Trading, and Research. Guggenheim Securities is headquartered in New York, with additional offices in Chicago, Boston, Atlanta, San Francisco, and Houston.
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Mergers & Acquisitions With Neil Oberoi
In episode eight of the show, I interviewed Neil Oberoi, Senior Managing Director of Guggenheim Securities. He and his team at Guggenheim are investment bankers and part of some of the largest transactions in healthcare. I hope you enjoyed the episode.
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Our guest is Neil Oberoi, Senior Managing Director of the Guggenheim Securities Healthcare and Banking Team. He earned a Bachelor of Science in Biology from the University of Richmond. He went on to get a Master’s in Public Health at George Washington University, followed by an MBA in Finance at Columbia Business School. He spent twelve years of his career at Bank of America and went on to Guggenheim Securities, where he works now. I’m glad to have you on the show. Thanks for being on.
It’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks for inviting me.
Introduce yourself a bit to the readers and put it on a timeline for us. What was your childhood like? Where’d you grow up?
I grew up in Maryland. I’m 1 of 2 siblings in a suburb of DC, about 20 miles north of Washington, DC. About half of my childhood was in a rural town called Germantown, Maryland. The other half was in a less rural but not necessarily in DC town called Potomac, Maryland. Like most kids, I enjoyed playing out in the yard and sports.
I played lacrosse and football starting from fifth grade and all through high school. I was always a curious kid. If you remember, back in the day, we had those large tube televisions. When they were thrown out before the trash came to pick them up, I’d like to open them up, take them apart and find out what made them work and in some cases, what didn’t work. It’s a pretty typical childhood.
What did you find out about those two televisions? What made them break?
Not a whole lot. Curiosity was something that you could characterize me then and me now. It shaped a lot of my educational and career objectives.
How so?
If you maybe forward the clock a little bit from my childhood, at the University of Richmond, I studied Science. I found Science to be interesting. It’s something that I could learn from and something that challenged me. I also liked mathematics. It’s challenging, interesting and somewhat related to Sciences and Math. I found problem solving and those two aspects of my education were related. While I tried to solve the problem of the broken television, that one particular example was unsuccessful, I found the challenge of problem-solving a math education and ultimately, my career to be rewarding.
When you were a child doing this problem solving and developing a curiosity towards science, was that something encouraged in your home and your family?
I don’t know that it was necessarily encouraged but by no means was it discouraged. My parents were supportive of whatever it was that I wanted to do, whether it was athletic-related, social-related, education-related or career-related. There was never anyone pointing me in any one direction.
It sounds like your parents were supportive of your curiosity. Were you aware of what your family’s values were? If so, what were they?
The biggest value of my family was that family. My parents were born and raised in India and came over to the US in their twenties. I was born and raised here but with similar values that my parents brought over from India that they were raised with themselves. The most important things were family or the relationships that I had with them and with my sister. Making sure that at the end of the day, we tried our best to be good people, do the right thing and build the right relationships, even outside of our family, with friends and professionally.
Moving from India to the States at twenty was quite an adventure. What was the catalyst for your parents coming to the US?
My father moved here for grad school. He came over with not a whole lot. I don’t think he knew many people and he was here for several years. He beliked a lot of folks back then was in an arranged marriage with my mother. He went back to India to meet and ultimately married my mother. She came over following their wedding.
What was he studying in the graduate program?
He studied Agricultural Economics in India and came over to study to get his graduate and doctorate in Economics. He left during his doctorate program to go into his business.
He left academia to become an entrepreneur. Did you experience that journey?
I did. I was present at a lot of his entrepreneurial activities. I would help out in a lot of his entrepreneurial activities on an informal basis. I was young and I got to experience this firsthand. A lot of the challenges that brings to someone without necessarily the stability of a corporate infrastructure or a normal day-to-day life of someone trying to build a business, start a business, change businesses, learn and pivot along the way.
What business did your father start?
He started a few different things from real estate to restaurants. Most of his time was spent in handmade carpets and Middle Eastern and Indian fine artwork.
It's very possible to have a very successful career in investment banking coming right out of undergrad or making some type of transition. Click To Tweet
Was there ever a time when your father was trying these different businesses? You were seeing the ups and downs of startup life? Did you ever think maybe that’s what you’ll do also or did you see it difficult?
I’ve never thought about that. I always followed the track going to college, getting a job after college, deciding to go to business school and from there into my current role. While it sounds exciting and I get to work with great entrepreneurs in my job, it’s not something that I have ventured into yet but the book is not fully written yet. You never know.
You’re doing a lot of sciences. Was there any particular science you gravitate towards most? It sounds like you’re fairly mechanical.
I majored in Biology. I liked biology. I didn’t love chemistry or physics as much but I liked science in general. It’s a big reason I’ve worked in healthcare or what companies in the healthcare space. I like learning how things worked, going back to the whole problem-solving aspect of it. A lot of what I learned, I didn’t love the practicality of it in terms of working in a lab or doing biological lab work as much as someone mechanics and understanding some of the ways things work, healthcare-related.
How’d you get exposed to lacrosse? You’re in Maryland. It’s the home of the sport.
I started a new school in fifth grade. It was a private school in Potomac, Maryland. When I showed up to take my admissions test or orientation, there were a couple of students tossing the ball around on campus. I had never seen and heard of it before. In the spring of my fifth grade class year, when it came time to choose a sport because at the time at my school, you chose a sport each to three trimesters, I thought about trying out lacrosse. I quickly gravitated toward it and played not only in the spring seasons but in another-seasons throughout the year.
My daughter has played organized lacrosse and I’ve still enjoyed throwing the ball around with her and even with my nephews who are starting to learn lacrosse. In Maryland on the East Coast, lacrosse was always big growing up. For a long time, the University of Maryland hosted the Final Four of the NCAA lacrosse tournament.
When you decided to start studying biology at the University of Richmond, what was the shift in your education or the point where you realized that finance would be the route versus medicine?
Math and Science are the two areas that interested me most. If there was a way where I could combine my interest in numbers and sciences, I thought that could be something interesting to pursue. Coming out of college, a lot of my classmates at the University of Richmond at the time went into basic Accounting. That wasn’t something specifically that interested me but I found a job at a small consulting firm in the DC area where I got to work in the healthcare team there and problem-solve for clients.
That particular role was competitive intelligence, market intelligence and strategic consulting. I worked in a healthcare focus team, not a large firm but in a larger organization. I got to match up a couple of my interests, problem-solving and healthcare but the numbers at the spec of it weren’t necessarily there for me. It wasn’t as quantitative as it was qualitative. I learned a lot. I’m glad I did it but as I think about all of my interests, there was one aspect that was missing. That was the numerical technical and quantitative aspect of my interests.
You’re interested in quantitative modeling. It sounds like at this consulting, your first job, you’re doing competitive market insights but it felt qualitative. You seem like you’re more of a numbers guy as how it sounds.
I found a lot of interest in that role, particularly with people I’ve worked with, which is hugely important in anything you do, the clients we worked for, the problems we were asked to help solve and the fact that it was healthcare-related. If I could have added one more piece of that puzzle, it would have been a little bit more of a quantitative type role but those weren’t the questions or the type of mandates clients were coming to us for.
I ended up going to business school after several years of working after undergrad. I knew I wanted to get more quantitative but I didn’t have that educational background. My major was Science. I almost minored in History. I didn’t take a whole lot of financial, accounting and finance. I had an interest in math but it wasn’t business-related coursework.
I felt that I needed that education and that foot in the door to help me get to that next step. I applied to Columbia. I was fortunate enough to get in. I didn’t necessarily know that I wanted to move to investment banking but I knew I wanted to get into finance, getting to something numbers-related, a way to get into something Wall Street related to getting that real training.
It wasn’t until I got to school where you’re inundated with all kinds of recruiting tools, seminars and second years who can educate you. It was that first month in business school when I fine-tuned my career sites onto investment banking. I went through the process of recruiting investment banking. In 2001 and 2002, it wasn’t easy, given the dot-com bubble had burst and it wasn’t the best recruiting environment for any type of career.
It was a challenging time. I was fortunate enough to get a summer internship offer at Bank of America. This is pre the acquisition of Merrill Lynch. It was Bank of America, which was a relatively newer investment bank at the time. I spent my summer there in 2002. I was fortunate enough to receive a full-time offer. I went back after graduation in 2003. I spent twelve years there. Midway through that is when we acquired Merrill Lynch. Half of those years at VFA were at Bank of America and the second half was at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
How important is the MBA or the graduate degree? What advice would you give to people that might be reading, that have aspirations for a career on Wall Street but are not sure how to break in?
There are successful people on Wall Street who went to business school and there are successful people on Wall Street who didn’t go to business school or any type of grad school. There are people successful people who were lawyers or had some other type of background. It depends but I agree with you that right or wrong, kids are forced or influenced at an early age to pick a career, a major and a profession.
What I try to encourage folks when I’m talking to those in undergrad, for example, is who was telling me they want to go to law school, business school or whatever it might be. For those who say they want to do it right after graduation, I say, “You should maybe work for a year. It might change your mind and find that if maybe you work in that area, you can make a pivot.”
Similarly, you might find that you don’t need that business school education or leapfrog to get into and enter a certain type of career. It depends. For me, specifically working in the job that I was working, the education that I had, it would have been difficult for me to transition to New York to a Wall Street job. Even if I had, I might not have been successful. Had I not had the financial training and education that I had at Columbia.
I wholeheartedly, for those that think it’d be helpful for their career and think it would be necessary to make that move, recommend the business school. I also wholeheartedly feel that for those, it’s possible to have a successful career in investment banking coming right out of undergrad or making some type of transition. There’s no specific path to get there and be successful there. It depends.
Don’t have a specific plan laid out that you think you got to follow going into college, business school or somewhere in between. When we’re trained to do our business school interviews, we are told to have a story of why we went to business school and investment banking was our interest the whole time. It’s not true for most people.
The buyer has to feel good about their own business and feel confident enough to go out and invest externally. Click To Tweet
It wasn’t true for me. I knew I wanted to get into a Wall Street job and something quantitative. I didn’t know it was investment banking until my first month in business school. If I had been that open about it in my Wall Street interviews, I don’t know that I would have had the same success that I had, what that story laid out that I’ve been told and others have been told to have.
Put the Bank of America experience on a timeline for us. You’re there for twelve years but if you had to give the bullet points of what you started doing and what your last role there was, tell us about that, please.
First of all, I had a great twelve years at Bank of America/Bank of America Merrill Lynch. After three years as a Generalist Associate, I was promoted to Vice President. As a Vice President, I focused solely on the medical device team there. After three years as a Vice President, I was promoted to Director in the medical device team. My responsibilities started to transition from execution and project management, which were my main roles as a Vice President, to more of a client relationship and client building. I was ultimately promoted to Managing Director in the medical device team, where I had more responsibility for client relationships, client building and driving revenue for the firm.
You’re getting a promotion every 2 to 3 years. What is the difference when you get from Vice President to Director to Managing Director? How does the role change? You mentioned client relationships but on a day-to-day basis, how different is it?
It’s different if you compare the Vice President to Managing Director roles. It’s less when you compare the Vice president and Director roles. As a Director, you’re doing a lot of what’s expected of you, building relationships, as well as a lot of your Vice President responsibilities. You are blending your role as an associate as well as your role as a Vice President. It’s a challenging work environment. There’s a lot of work to go around. You have to wear several different hats, not just the title that is in your auto signature at any particular time.
The transition is exactly that from processing, executing transactions and processing client pitch materials to managing those client pitches or deal execution to driving revenue and being the sole person responsible for a particular client relationship in the organization. While you have that relationship and you’re driving revenue, you’re also responsible for advising, executing and being the point person on a particular transaction, whether it be an M&A transaction or a capital markets transaction.
Neil, do you remember the first client that you brought into the bank and it was your medical device deal, you sourced it, built the relationship and solidly executed it?
Back to that time at Bank of America, there are 2 or 3 that I can think of that you could argue where one of which was my first. It’s a matter of which one hit the market first or price first but I feel pretty comfortable. Ironically, they’re all three different transactions. One was a capital market, high yield underwriting. One was equity follow-on underwriting. One was a convertible bond underwriting but it was one of those 3 or maybe all 3 that may have happened on the similar timelines that were the first transactions that I had a lead role. It was not individually. There’s a team effort across everything we do, particularly when it’s a capital markets transaction when you’re partnering with your colleagues across the firm. I would point to 1 of those 3 transactions.
If you’re doing a capital markets transaction, what does that mean?
Capital markets transaction typically would be a public equity type deal or a publicly-traded debt security type transaction where there’s a capital market for it. If you think about the stock market as an equity capital market, an equity underwriting transaction for an existing public company would be to help them raise additional equity capital by issuing additional equity securities. It’s a private company that is interested in taking the company or interested in an initial public offering by issuing equity securities for the first time to the public.
At the Bank of America Merrill Lynch and your time there, what percentage of the deals would you say were capital markets versus mergers and acquisitions?
There was probably more time involved in M&A or Mergers and Acquisitions than there was in the capital markets transactions because M&A is some more time-consuming product versus an individual capital markets transaction. If you look at the number of announced transactions, it might not necessarily tell the correct story because of the amount of time involved in an M&A process and M&A relationship assignment, whatever it might be. I probably tilt the scales more heavily toward M&A versus any one particular capital market transaction.
With the breadth of your role and all the different responsibilities in the capital markets, M&A, is there a typical deal that for you is most exciting and you enjoy the most?
I don’t know that there’s any one particular transaction that I would call out. They’re all uniquely different. What I enjoy is that I am working with senior leadership at my client organizations. I am working with my team, colleagues, peers and folks who I consider some of the smartest and best at what we do and deliver to our client a satisfactory outcome. Each of them is different.
In each, I’m still learning as we go along because each one is different. To have a happy client, whether they’ve bought a business, sold a business or sold their own business and issued or raised capital in some form or fashion is satisfying to develop in one form or another. It’s hard to call it any one particular transaction.
With your experience representing clients, whether they’re doing a capital markets transaction, maybe they want to buy another firm or sell their own company, if you were to strip down the psychology of the buyer to the base level, what are the feelings and motivations driving a buyer’s interest in acquiring another business?
The buyer has to feel good about their business and feel confident enough to go out and invest externally. You need to look at the stock market. For example, stock prices change. It can be volatile. As a public company, if you’re looking to go out and make an acquisition, your stock price will have an influence on how confident you are and going out and doing things externally, how you think it might be received from the investor community and how supportive your board would be to go out and do something versus a stock price that you might feel is not at the appropriate level.
Various things influence the client and their motivation for going out, first and foremost, to pursue an acquisition. That might depend on the size and how material it is to that particular company. Beyond that, there are several things that a client will look at, the strategic rationale for sure and the financial impact. What does it mean for our EPS, revenue growth or gross margins? What’s the return on invested capital? What’s the integration risk? What does it do for my ability to go out and pursue? What does it do for my balance sheet in terms of leverage if I’m using cash, debit or whatever it might be? Several factors will influence the M&A criteria of a potential acquirer. Those are some of the things that have to check the box for an acquisition to make sense.
If you take those objective facts, a company feels confident. They’re considering their board, earnings per share and how material strategic fit. Objectively, those all make sense. Was the state of being that they feel good and aggressive? How often is it fear and they’re reacting to a volatile, uncertain marketplace? The buyers and the sellers that you worked with, how often is confidence and excitement about the path ahead driving the action versus fear around uncertainty and volatility in the market?
It’s usually the former. A good discipline to acquire words is to do the right things for their business because they feel like it’s the right thing for their business, not as a reaction to any particular volatility impact in their business that’s short-term in nature. Well-disciplined acquirers try to take emotion out of the process and know when to back off and lean into a particular transaction. It’s the reactionary decisions that will not benefit any particular organization acquirer or seller.
How do you and Guggenheim view the consolidation at the strategic level in med tech? Is that something that you think will continue? How has it changed the way you operate?
My opinion is that consolidation in M&A will always be an important part of the medical device sector. There are so much innovation companies can do, pipeline they can develop and growth they can drive on their own. When you think of uses of cash, an organic investment return of capital to shareholders, whether it’s your purchases and/or dividends and M&A will always be priorities in some form or fashion for many companies. With some companies, M&A is impractical given their size, balance sheet constraints or maybe sector performance within medical devices but by and large, the M&A is here to stay.
Influence on the client and their motivation to pursue an acquisition depend on the size and how material it is to their company. Click To Tweet
When I looked at other regulated industries, for instance, finance, it has had several cycles of consolidation and deconsolidation. Do you have a view that that could happen in med tech where some of these big mega-mergers that have happened over the last years suddenly shareholders think that they can unlock value by breaking them apart as we’ve seen in banking?
We’ve seen some of that. We will continue to see what we call portfolio management. Some of the larger more diversified companies are always evaluating their portfolio and figuring out where the priorities are, what parks their business might be better under different ownership, public, private, whatever it might be.
When you see some of these large consolidations take place, you tend to see some of that happen more often with the following integration or even close the transaction. In some cases, if it’s required, you’ll see a divestiture of some size. The challenge is that a lot of times, the valuation, tax implications, other rationales and separate challenges might impact companies from moving forward with a potential divestiture. Portfolio management is constant exercise companies and boards go through.
In your last couple of years of Bank of America Merrill Lynch, what was the size of the deals you were doing? I don’t want to put you in a weird spot in this and you can’t disclose but how big did that practice get before you decided to go to Guggenheim?
On the medical device side, the healthcare group at Bank of America Merrill Lynch was one of the leading groups on the street. Across the healthcare team, we were involved in some of the largest transactions, whether it was M&A or financing side. On the device side, we were one of the leading device teams on Wall Street at the time. We were involved in some of the more notable M&A transactions and capital markets transactions, whether it been on the M&A side by side sell-side or on the capital markets side as one of the lead, if not the lead underwriters.
A lot of people don’t realize when you think of these biggest healthcare companies that when they target and acquire a business, there are these big teams and corporate development groups that also hire an advisor. Maybe you could explain why these big companies that are well-staffed need an advisor? What’s the role of an investment bank? On the M&A side, what’s the role that you play in those transactions?
Any time a CEO, a board or a management team is looking to buy a business, sometimes those discussions can be bilateral. Sometimes that can be a part of a broader sale process. CEOs, management teams or boards, while they have capable business development teams and efforts, for some transactions, they feel like they might benefit from an advisor who can help them win that process, negotiate the best price with a bilateral discussion and get to way sign announcing the transaction.
It’s not always about price. We, on the advisory side, work hand-in-hand with our clients and their legal teams to drive the best potential outcome for our clients. Some of the larger organizations won’t always use advisors for some of the smaller emanate that they do but for some of the larger things and more competitive things, they will benefit from the advice of folks who are involved in this type of work day in and day out.
How did you make the decision to join Guggenheim? How has it been?
After rewarding twelve years at Bank of America, an opportunity came up to work with some of my colleagues at B of A as well as one of our, at the time, competitors and form a team of our own at a firm called Guggenheim Securities. It is the investment banking and capital markets arm of a firm called Guggenheim Partners, which is a more diversified financial services firm.
While I had envisioned spending my entire career at Bank of America, the opportunity has presented itself to work with those folks to build a unique team and model at a firm like Guggenheim Securities, where we could offer our clients a broad range of advisory and capital markets services. It seemed like an opportunity that I couldn’t pass up. I made that transition in early 2015. I had a three-month non-compete, what we called garden leaves on Wall Street. I started Guggenheim Securities around June 1st, 2015. It’s been terrific. It’s been one of the best career moves I’ve made.
I’m glad to hear you’re liking Guggenheim. It was helpful to hear all about how the healthcare investment banking business works. A lot of our readers are healthcare entrepreneurs. If you think of the person that has started a business, gained some traction, raised capital and has a product-market fit, at what point do you and your colleagues at Guggenheim want to engage with entrepreneurs to start building that relationship? What’s too early and what’s about the right time?
It’s never too early for us. We like to meet new companies early on, develop relationships with companies and track companies. At some point, if a company is going to transact, it’s helpful to have that relationship and knowledge base before or leading up to a potential mandate.
You’re focused primarily on the medical device or with things like digital therapeutics and drug-device combos. Is there a group within Guggenheim that if an entrepreneur has something that might not fit the traditional med tech business that you can work with?
It’s one of the many factors that were influential in my decision to join the firm. We have a large established, successful healthcare effort across all the various therapeutic categories and we all partner very well to deliver the firm to our clients. A client that doesn’t necessarily fit, one of our teams specifically, we partner well.
On the startup side, what is the sweet spot in terms of revenue, traction in the marketplace and clinical for the key metrics?
We work with companies and have transacted with companies, even pre-regulatory approval up to the largest companies in our sector. What’s more important to us than the stage of commercial development or regulatory approval is the quality of the company. It can be a little bit harder to judge if it’s an earlier stage company, quality of the company, management teams, boards and investors versus some necessary financial metric to gauge whether or not it’s a company worth my time with.
For people that are reading, it’s great that Guggenheim and you and your team want to engage and get to know people early. Do you have a process? Is there an associate, somebody or a way to reach the firm? If they’re reading this episode, they think they have a great product or company that could need advisory services. What’s the best way for folks to contact Guggenheim?
We receive several inbounds through the Guggenheim Securities website, where there’s a link for potential clients. Most often, we are contacted directly. If someone has an interest in the medical device sector and wants to speak with me or another member of our team, we are contacted by email through introductions of mutual folks that we know regularly.
Let’s wrap up by going into the vault. In 2021, what book, TV show, movie or song that you experienced, had an influential perspective on life and you think about regularly?
I’m going to go with a piece of art that my girlfriend and daughter put together. It’s a painting that was taken sometime in the summer or fall of 2021, where on a whim, we were cleaning up my daughter’s room. I found a gift at some point. It’s a canvas and a paint set. It was a weekend. The three of us, unplanned and unscripted together, started painting this canvas and put together a surprisingly nice piece of art. I have hung it still on the entrance of my front door. Every time I leave or come in, I see it and am reminded of that time we spent together.
When you think about how busy our lives can be and how crazy work and juggling everything can be and sometimes having to think about planning our free time, planning vacations or whatever it might be, I’m taken back to that time when the three of us had a nice unplanned, unscripted time and a nice memory to show for it.
At some point, if a company is going to transact, it's helpful to have a relationship with other entrepreneurs and have that knowledge base before or leading up to a potential mandate. Click To Tweet
Next question. Other than your parents, who is someone that saw your potential early that took an interest in your development and had an important influence on your career and life?
I’m going to go with one of my colleagues on this one. I’m sure he doesn’t know that I’m referencing him on this but his name is Joe Coles. He is a medical device banker. He is someone I’ve worked with almost my entire career. He came over to Bank of America in 2004 from Lehman Brothers at the time, 3 or 4 months after I had started as a senior banker.
I was coincidentally staffed on something with him and we quickly developed a relationship and worked on a number of things with him along the way. He was one of the big reasons why I chose the medical device sector when I was promoted to vice president and has been someone instrumental in my development as a banker and my career.
There was one time I almost left the bank of America. I was an associate. Through some conversations with him as well as some other conversations that he had facilitated, I decided to stay. He has been instrumental in my career at Guggenheim and someone well-respected in our sector in medical device investment banking. He is considered one of the leaders in our space and what we do. He is someone that is taking a mentor, a role in my career and my professional development.
In your professional life, what is one online tool that you use almost every day and you can’t imagine doing your work at Guggenheim without it?
Email, of course. Without that, there was no communication. I tend to look at tickers fairly common. A real-time screen of tickers that I have in my office and on my phone. It’s not because I’m looking at my portfolio necessarily. Clients are often influenced by their stock prices and how well or not well they’re doing. In a particular transaction, when their stock is involved, the stock prices of both the acquirer and the target are heavily influenced by the stock prices and the market in general.
I tend to look at a screen of real-time tickers fairly consistently throughout the day. There’s an information service that I use that’s called StreetAccount, where real-time news is emailed to me in my sector, in healthcare and globally. It’s a good way to be up to speed on all types of corporate news and market news-related items.
On your phone, do you use the Gmail app or the iPhone app for email? Which email app is on your phone.
On our phones, for security purposes, we use an app called Blackberry Work.
For your ticker and real-time financial data, which do you have to use there?
CNBC, it’s real-time where there’s the news and the ticker list or my watch list. I can quickly open up a particular ticker to see news, trading activity and other basic financial statistics for a particular company.
Neil, last question. At Guggenheim Securities, what is your biggest unmet need?
I’m going to give you two on that one. One is our business is very high touch and personal. While we’re all adjusting to doing things remotely and virtually, the vaccine is going to help us get back on the road, see our clients, see them face to face and meet new clients. It is a little bit more challenging to do virtually than it is in-person and entertain, which is a big part of our client relationship development process.
Beyond the current environment that we’re in, we meet many companies that are focused on improving patient outcomes and the way we treat certain disease states. Not all of them survived, whether it be funding purposes, regulatory pathway challenges or reimbursement challenges. Not all of them should survive because not all of them will be successful but there are many that, at least from my lens, can be successful in delivering a better experience and outcome for certain patients. If there is a way for some of those companies to succeed, that benefits all of us. It benefits the healthcare system and our business because we’d like to work with those differentiated innovative companies.
Folks, you read it here. Inspired by your original Oberoi family artwork, Joe Coles had a big influence on your career. He has been a mentor and colleague. He couldn’t live without email, specifically Blackberry Work and real-time ticker data from CNBC. The biggest unmet need aside from a vaccine would be access to capital, regulatory and reimbursement services for the companies that are trying to grow and transact. Neil, thanks so much for your time. I appreciate you being on the show.
It’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me, Jeff.