#57 Margot Carter | Sold to Blackstone the Morning of the IPO

About the episode

Carter was chief legal officer of FYI, later Sourcecorp, at 27, after helping it merge its first eight companies and go public. It went on to buy two or three businesses a month, and Jerry Jones, an original investor, still tells people it was one of his best investments. Days after September 11, her old law firm asked her to help rebuild the legal department at Cantor Fitzgerald, where about a third of the employees were left. She went on to SoundView, which she helped sell to Charles Schwab, and The Princeton Review, then spent 2010 to 2015 as global chief legal officer of RealPage.

She treats the legal seat as a growth job. At RealPage she pushed the company to become a licensed money transmitter so it could earn a share of the rent payments it already collected. On the board of Interior Logic Group she helped buy a virtual home design platform so the company would be valued on revenue instead of EBITDA. It sold to Blackstone on the morning it was set to price its IPO.

Today she sits on three NYSE boards and runs Cien, the AI company she co-founded 10 years ago. She explains how Cien turns CRM data into a growth plan, the client where it found $180 million in opportunities and recovered $20 million within a month, the three questions she asks before joining a board, how boards recruit directors, why deals fall apart before closing, and why she thinks AI is still in the first inning.

Margot Carter is founder and president of Living Mountain Capital, which she started in 1998, and co-founder of Cien.ai, an AI sales-intelligence platform. She is lead independent director of Installed Building Products and an independent director of Eagle Materials and Tyler Technologies, all NYSE listed. She was EVP, global chief legal officer and corporate secretary of RealPage from 2010 to 2015, and earlier held general counsel roles at FYI/Sourcecorp, SoundView Technology Group and The Princeton Review after starting her career at Morgan Lewis. She holds a J.D. from Fordham and is chair emeritus of NACD North Texas.