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My title is vice president of corporate development for a subsidiary of Intel.

My primary responsibilities are doing deals with other companies. We trade business considerations for business considerations. We're sending crude anything - from intellectual property licensing to co-marketing deals to co-development deals to joint ventures - at the outside.

The skills are really a mixing bowl of different kinds of skills. Most people that are involved in deal work have at least two, if not three, experience bases that they pull off of. Personally, I have engineering, manufacturing, marketing, and investment experiences as well as post-acquisition integration. It's the sum total of that experience base that then allows me to craft more intricate and more complex kinds of deals. I would say that newcomers into the field typically have some sort of an engineering background, possibly a marketing background. Those are the two primary areas from a corporate development sense. If you're doing other types of deals, you may have more of a financial background or a business background. I work heavily with the legal and financial teams to put a deal together. Part of that is being able to speak their language and understand the issues and implications across multiple disciplines.

It sort of tapped me on the shoulder. I didn't quite decide. It's been a progression of careers over time. I think my first taste of doing deals was early on when I moved from engineering to technical marketing, and I realized I had to get other companies to get things done and I had no real budget, so I had to put together what I call "wink and hand shake deals" where the imperative was to get the other company to see why it was investing their time and their money to help me was of value to them because it would help them as well. Those were my earliest deals very early in my career, three, four years out of college, but it was just because we were running on a shoestring budget, and getting it done was still the mandate.

Over time, as I moved into product marketing, the deals were more customer-based. People often confuse business development with corporate development. Fundamentally, what I do is a form of business development, but I took the title to corporate development because I feel that the deals I do will change the course of the corporation. There is business development, sales development, market development, and customer development and these are all sort of wishy-washy titles that all get interchanged and inter-used. In the marketing sense, there's a whole lot of sales development work, market development work, and customer development work and in that sense, I built a marketing team that worked a lot to get customers engaged and create a reason for them to buy our products over those of the competition.

At a certain point, I wanted to go after new markets where we had zero penetration, and that was a form of business and sales development. I enjoyed that because it was a big challenge to go from nothing to a third of the market in a year and get it done. I spent a year doing that. I spent two years doing investment deals, and those were some of the most enjoyable years here, because my work was engaged with small company start-ups, very sharp people, very sharp boards, working at a board level, working at the executive management with very small companies. I never got my MBA. I sort of learned what I needed to learn to get the job done, and in the investment side, what I was really more capable of was the operational side of deals, or how we get something done between two companies.

So then, I spent a number of my years doing post-merger integration, and that was totally an operational thing. I got less enjoyment out of that, so when I was tapped on the shoulder four years ago and was told, "You're uniquely qualified to help this business, figure out a course for the future." I said, "I don't want to go back to that business. I spent seventeen years of my career working in business." But because they told me I was uniquely qualified, I agreed under two conditions: the executive staff of the company, the CEO, had to recognize the need to change the course of the business; and the business unit had a general manager, the director of engineering, the director of manufacturing, and the director of marketing who all had to recognize the need to make a change. So, I said, "With those two conditions, I'd put my heart and soul into figuring out a way to change the course of the business," and here I am four years later, having done two massive deals. One was a joint venture with another processing company that will probably be four or five billion dollars in investment with the factories. The latest deal is spinning out two billion dollar businesses from our company. Over time, the experience I had has given me the skills and the aptitude because the experience gave me the confidence to engage the CEO, the executive vice president of the level in the industry, and to sit across the table and try to conceptualize a move to accomplish business goals with revenue profit.

Well, I hated engineering. Frankly, I knew when I was in college that I wouldn't spend my life and my career doing engineering, and I knew that I needed the fundamental understanding of technology and the engineering approach to problem-solving to deal with technology. I needed to be able to solve problems and have some experience in that process, and so there was opportunity back in that training that took years of my career, where new technology came along. I was apt to characterize the technology, play with it, see how it worked, and see if we thought it would do what it might do as an engineer. Once I had done that, I was then asked to play with that new technology, and figure out how we could design it into new systems and create a demonstration of how it could be used. Because I was one of the new engineers that played with the new technology, it was an opportunity for me to go out to customers and explain how it worked and how to use it and that was sort of my transition into technical marketing. I found that I liked the customer interface, I liked the psychology of engaging customers, I liked writing about the technology and demonstrating it, and going to conferences and training people, all different things like that.

No, that’s the most amazing thing about Intel. I would say there are probably forty people who do what I do, and everyone's different. Everyone comes from a different place. Some people have combinations of degrees, whether it's engineering and MBAs, or some business background and a law degree. It may be that they worked as a systems designer and knew what it takes to put together all the pieces of the puzzle and knew what it takes to have a marketing background. Because of the melting pot skill mix, there's no one way into it. I've found the people who are involved with it tend to be people who can take a very amorphous definition of a problem, and go to a whiteboard and say, "Here are the different options. Here are the different approaches. Here are the different ways," and get to an answer. That's the fundamental skill. It doesn't matter where you come from.

A lot of my time is based on strategic imperatives, and there are a bunch of deals that may get done with the marketing team that I won't bother dealing with. On the other hand, if there are things that could change the course of the company or change the course of the industry, then I will get involved with them. So, on a daily basis, I spend a lot of time doing e-mails, because I have to understand what is going on in the corporation or the business unit. I have to know everything from technology development to manufacturing, from design engineering to marketing and sales, and understanding where these strategic gaps may be, or where strategic opportunities may be, and I need to have that background in order to then go forth and meet with other companies and try to craft. It's a very creative job because there's often no defined answer, but there's potential for deals. Often, it's called the art of the deal rather than the science of the deal, because it's finding the value for each company that makes it a benefit for companies to get involved with each other. On a daily basis, I do a lot of e-mail reading and a lot of industry research. If something pops up in the industry, I want to know what happened with whom, why it happened, what I think the strategy is behind it, and how it impacts my company, my competitors, and the industry. I'll typically have a couple of hours of meeting per day, often internally, and then once we get rolling on it, it could be anywhere from a couple of meetings a day with a company to figure out a deal, or for a joint venture, it could take two years to get it done.

For me, it has to start off in person, because it's about the relationship that a deal person develops with another deal person. In the course of any negotiation, challenges are going to be difficult to surmount and in those cases, a lot can come down to personal relationships with an element of trust. When I begin and when I truly engage another company, my first meeting or two or three will always be face-to-face and from there, we can do teleconferencing. Once we get into it, it can come to e-mail where we trade documents back and forth and formally lay down the specifics of the deal.

Early on, yes. Often, there's a lot of travel, because while you may have a sense of how a company wants to engage, you often have to smell a lot of flowers before you find the right one. It's sort of like a dating kind of thing to really see if there's a chemistry that will enable a deal to happen. I won't take that analogy any further.

I would say that an entry-level analyst job out of school could be $75,000. At the top end, you'll find vice presidents and business developments and corporate developments for one, the executive staff of the company at $300,000 to $400,000 range including compensation.

Yeah, that would be salary, bonus, and stock options.

It goes in cycles. When you're deep into a deal, you can have 15-20 hour days. You're also in the law firms for three to four months in a row running long, long days. Then, there are other kinds where it's the 30-hour workweek. Generically, I think of it as a typical corporate job that's somewhere from the 45-50 hour a week kind of thing.

Some people do a week a quarter. I tend to do two weeks at the end of the year and a week somewhere in the spring and a week in the summertime.

What I like most about traveling is learning. Every time I travel to a new country to visit a new company, I learn more about the industry, and I learn things that I might have assumed and might have conceptualized, but didn't know. But when I travel and go face-to-face with other companies and visit their factories and their executives, I learn different ways of thinking, and that's the most critical element in doing deals - being able to put yourself in the other person's shoes - because that way you can understand their interests and their imperative. From that, you can then try to offer something that meets what they need out of something. What do I like least about it? The time away from my family. It's wasted time, wasted life, being somewhere else stuck in hotels in some corner of the earth, wasted in airports and not being there for the important things of a family's life.

I think generically the key thing about business development or corporate development is being able to look at the industry as a whole, and with that, it gives you a global view of things as opposed to a narrow of things. So I think, in general, I look at the big picture.

Very simply, it's being able to have an impact on a business, on a company, on an industry. That's very satisfying, knowing that you conceptualized an idea and that changes the course of what hundreds or thousands of people do.

The biggest challenge on a daily basis is probably wading through and prioritizing what information I'm going to look at, where I engage. There are often a lot of companies that want to engage with our company, and being able to objectively set up times to hear their thoughts as well as be able to say, "Look, we're not interested. Maybe in a quarter. Maybe in six months. Maybe in a year." You have to be able to handle and manage what's often called the "deal tunnel," where you might have five to twenty ideas, and those ideas may either be strategic goals, gaps, or they may be specific companies that we're researching, we're investigating. From there, you begin engaging. There might be three to five companies you've met with, you've engaged with, done some level dialogue to see if there's even an opportunity to craft a deal contract and then from there, you may have two or three deals in active stages of negotiation. That can take from a few weeks to two years for a very complex deal. You constantly have different deals in the pipeline, and it's not just the deals; it's the people on the other side. That's one of those challenges of how to keep things with percolating, but at the rate that you need, not at the rate the other company needs.

I think the most critical thing is actually simplifying the complexity and being able to reduce it to the fundamental elements of the deal concept. Whenever you get deep into the weeds and into some issue, you can go back to the principles of the deal, say "Am I no longer bound to what I was trying to do? Has the deal changed? Has the deal morphed?" without anyone realizing it and do we need to take it back to the basic premise, or can we accept that it's changed for reasons we didn't realize up front? You know, no one lays all of their cards down on the table up front, and often it's well deep into a series of negotiations where you find the real heart of the issue. So, you know, I think the time up front spent on simplifying things, understanding the fundamentals, understanding the financial and legal implications of those so that when you're downstream, you can always revert to the basic premise. That's the most critical element in terms of getting through the hard times. I like to pose the question as, "Do you know why you're doing it?" and the other company confirms why you're trying to do it still makes sense. It's much easier to set that as the raison d'etre, the reason that you're going to slog through the hard crap because the reason is clear to everyone.

The superior is the CEO. In my case, because I'm fairly experienced and seasoned, I tend to come up with concepts, flesh out those concepts and bring them into the objection of business and say, "Hey, I think this is what you need." In other cases, I think more junior people might be told, "Hey, here's the gap and we need you to find a solution to this gap."

Well, your question was, "Do you do all this work yourself?" and the answer to that is that I rely on a matrix team of people to do a lot of the research. I'll do my own digging. I'll crawl through a pile of investments to get information on companies. Companies really have to be more forthright in the information about the risks of the business and it's one of the corporate risks or issues that cannot define opportunities for doing something creative. History and problems of the business relate to corporate risks and corporate issues.

The gaps come out of statistic analysis within the business unit and specifically business will have quarterly, semiannual, annual statistic presentations where you'll be looking at whatever procedure models you want to use, and look at the challenges, the strengths, the weaknesses and the opportunities. That's really the first place that I look for what in a good deal: what does our company need, and what do we need to grow and stay topical?

Right. Typically, that's strategic marketing, where a technology office puts that together.

The biggest thing that I've learned came from one of my mentors at the company who told me, "When you want to grow, take a really big step into something you know nothing about, and you'll grow the fastest." I said, "Well, I've done that. I went from engineering to technology to product marketing to strategic marketing," and he said, "All of those are half-steps. They're going from something you know about to an adjacent area. So, what do you know nothing about?" I said, "Finance." He said, "Great. Take a job in finance." My choice was the investment side, the finance specifically, and he was right. I grew tremendously in doing that, and I think that advice is a core piece of advice in my career. The other one is that the careers of our parents that may have been spent spending years developing a high competency to do it is just one kind of career approach. The other approach that over the course of your life, life is a path; it's not a destination. When you have opportunities, you have a choice: do I continue doing what I'm doing? Do I continue to develop skills and expertise in this field, or do I want to move on to something new and take the other path, the other fork in the road? People laugh when I say my corporate mentor is really Road Runner, because Road Runner had an uncanny ability to take a dire situation and create opportunity. He would take a bucket of paint and paint the side of a mountain and create a hole! It was the concept of being able to make your own opportunities and have the confidence to step into that dark tunnel and say, "I'm going to figure out a way to get to the other side." To me, the essence of the career is that willingness to try new things. Someone who worked for me once said, "Saul, you don't ever spend long in any one place" and I said, "I've actually spent 17 years working for the same company" and he said, "No, but you do something for a couple of years and move on," and I said, "Well, I get bored." I think if someone gets bored but they stick to what they're doing, they'll be bored for decades. I have a knack for learning a lot about an area in the first year, and in the second year, really developing a competency to get the job done, in the third year really mastering whatever that job is, and in the fourth year, trying to figure out how to teach someone else, a beginner, how to do it, such that I could move on. So that's been my view of life and career. Spend three to five years doing something, learn what you need to learn, learn what you're trying to learn, and during that time frame, you'll deal with a lot of stuff and a lot of things that are not all that pleasant. If you know your own personal reason for doing it, you can put up with a lot of challenges because you know at the end of two, three, or four years, you'll have developed some skill that you can take with you.

Extremely difficult. What I tell people is to look for jobs in marketing where they have opportunities to participate in deals, in customer development, in marketing development, in sales development where they have to deal with ambiguities and create opportunities that they can demonstrate. It's difficult to jump right in it, but there is a need to accumulate experience so you can then tell people, "I got involved in this and here's how I changed what we did, and here's the concept I came up with and here's what we got done."

The only big change is that change is part of the field. So, in a sense, the goal and what we do is create change and that creates opportunity, so you have to be able to deal with that sense of flux and change.

I think generically by looking at deals that get announced, whether it's mergers, whether it's companies working together and trying to research what each company got out of it, what each company was trying to accomplish. Evaluate what each company's strategic issues were, whether it's in their FCC filings or whether it's write-ups in The Wall Street Journal or Business Week or Newsweek Always be lookingto analyze deals that are happening.

My view is that people need to start with the beginning. Start with something fundamental, whether it's business, engineering, marketing, and be willing to gain experience over time and take a longer view at it than "I want to be the general manager at 26." There are very few Googles in the world. For every Google in the world, there are nine companies that fail. You need to take a little bit of a longer view of "How do I build experiences and keep experiences?" and that builds competency. That's the most critical thing, I think.