deal flow

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Mastering Private Equity by Zeisberger, Claudia,Prahl, Michael,White, Bowen, Michael Prahl, Bowen White

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, backtesting, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, book value, business process, buy low sell high, capital controls, carbon credits, carried interest, clean tech, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, currency risk, deal flow, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, family office, fixed income, high net worth, impact investing, information asymmetry, intangible asset, junk bonds, Lean Startup, low interest rates, market clearing, Michael Milken, passive investing, pattern recognition, performance metric, price mechanism, profit maximization, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, time value of money, transaction costs, two and twenty

These teams act both as a first point of contact for intermediaries and as drivers of the firm’s proprietary deal flow. However, deal sourcing typically involves the entire firm, as there is no telling where the next quality lead will come from, e.g. former portfolio firms and their owners or entrepreneurs may well add to the deal flow. There are two main ways to source deals: proprietary deal flow sourced through in-house resources and intermediated deal flow sourced through paid third parties. PROPRIETARY DEAL FLOW: Proprietary deals are sourced directly by a PE firm without the assistance of financial advisors.

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Some covenants are checked on a regular basis (maintenance covenants) while others are only tested upon the occurrence of a specific event (incurrence covenants). Data Room A database (physical or virtual) established by a target company and its advisors that contains all material documentation for due diligence. Deal Flow Investment opportunities available to a PE firm. If sourced by a PE firm directly it's called “proprietary” deal flow, if through an advisor (e.g., banks, accountants) then “intermediated” deal flow. Deal-by-deal Structure In a deal-by-deal fund structure, a dedicated vehicle will be created for the purposes of making an investment in a single target opportunity. Debt Capacity An assessment on the amount of debt a company can service and pay back over a certain period.

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PE professionals express a preference for proprietary deals as they are often more tailored to a fund’s size and sector requirements, provide a direct link to a target company’s management team, and have a higher chance for exclusivity than deals sourced through intermediaries. In addition, proprietary deals are often faster and cheaper to execute once they mature. LPs clearly favor firms with strong proprietary deal flow. However, proprietary deal flow has certain drawbacks. As proprietary targets are often not in urgent need of capital, it can take a significant amount of time—often years—for a PE firm to build the relationship and make a case for its involvement, with no guarantee that an investment will ultimately materialize.

Mastering the VC Game: A Venture Capital Insider Reveals How to Get From Start-Up to IPO on Your Terms by Jeffrey Bussgang

business cycle, business process, carried interest, deal flow, digital map, discounted cash flows, do well by doing good, hiring and firing, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, moveable type in China, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Thiel, pets.com, public intellectual, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, selection bias, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, technology bubble, The Wisdom of Crowds

The process by which VCs consider deals—known as processing the “deal flow”—is one of the most fascinating things about the VC business. In most VC firms, the deal flow process is most evident when partners gather to discuss which deals they will pursue and why, and which ones they’ll pass on. This conversation usually takes place in “the Monday morning meeting,” which is the meeting of the VC firm’s partners held each week at their offices. It is dreaded by entrepreneurs, because the thumbs-up or thumbs-down call usually comes in right after this meeting has adjourned. How to best manage their deal flow is a quandary for the VC. A VC wants to see every interesting start-up that is happening, particularly those led by proven entrepreneurs.

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The more deals a VC sees, the more likely he will have the opportunity to select a high-quality deal in which to invest. And there’s a secondary benefit to having high-volume, high-quality deal flow as well. By looking at as many deals as possible, VCs become smarter investors—learning a little something from every deal seen, and becoming more adept at detecting useful patterns. The volume of possible deals is so great, however, that no partner can review all the business plans, let alone fund all the companies that might be worthy. A VC with a healthy deal flow may get an opportunity to review as many as three hundred to five hundred deals per year. Most “active” VCs—those who will join the board of the company in which they invest—typically have capacity to do no more than one or two deals a year.

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“Passive” VCs—those who may come in at a later stage, take a smaller ownership stake, and don’t join the board—have greater deal capacity but still only do three or four deals annually per partner. So for VCs, managing their deal flow is a matter of examining as many deals as possible, winnowing them down to a manageable number as efficiently as possible, and following a process of evaluation that is as effective as possible. It is essentially a sales process, with a bit of mutual selling (and evaluating) by both the VC and the entrepreneur, and it usually proceeds through a number of stages before the deal is closed. As I’ve mentioned, typically a deal flows from an initial meeting (a half hour to an hour) to a follow-up meeting (one or two hours, when more specific issues are addressed) to the light diligence phase.

Buy Then Build: How Acquisition Entrepreneurs Outsmart the Startup Game by Walker Deibel

barriers to entry, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, deal flow, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, diversification, drop ship, Elon Musk, family office, financial engineering, financial independence, high net worth, intangible asset, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Network effects, new economy, Peter Thiel, risk tolerance, risk/return, rolodex, software as a service, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supply-chain management, Y Combinator

Which brings us to the lesson: you need to get upstream. In investment banking and private equity, professionals look for “deal flow.” Since they are evergreen professional buyers, what typically differentiates the pros in the business is “who has the deal.” Getting the best deal flow means that a firm is always at the top of the list for potential sellers and somehow gets early looks at the best opportunities. The opacity and fragmentation of the market allows for this and makes navigating deal flow a 89 major part of what makes a good firm—they get access to the good deals! This is exactly what you are trying to achieve, and I assure you professional buyers aren’t hanging out exclusively on bizbuysell.

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This is exactly what you are trying to achieve, and I assure you professional buyers aren’t hanging out exclusively on bizbuysell. Instead, you need to get out and meet the people who have deal flow in your area. In your case, this is the business brokers, intermediaries, I-bankers, and M&A 44 Advisors who get the listings in the first place. If you need proof of this, I would ask you to draw a on your own experience looking for a job online. Using online job post sites like Monster and CareerBuilder can work, but more than likely, focusing on them just kills your job search. This is because they are mostly geared toward entry-level candidates who aren’t networked well, they are postings that generate thousands of applicants, and frankly, if the company couldn’t find anyone they knew to hire for the job, then it ends up on a website as an afterthought.

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Finding a business is no different. This trend exists at every level of the market, from Main Street to solidly middle-market investment bankers, from bizbuysell to Axial.net; the deal doesn’t hit the website if they can engage a buyer before they have to. These sites exist for people who do not have deal flow themselves. Yet at least 80 percent of the private equity professionals I know that pay the high fees to services like Axial have expressed in one way or another that they aren’t there to get the specific deals on the platform. Instead, they are there to learn who has the deals, then build relationships with them.

The Website Investor: The Guide to Buying an Online Website Business for Passive Income by Jeff Hunt

buy low sell high, content marketing, deal flow, Donald Trump, drop ship, frictionless, frictionless market, intangible asset, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, passive income, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Skype, software as a service

Other marketplaces may have some of these same options or others that Flippa doesn’t have, but the principles will apply just about anywhere that you might list your site for sale. Clicking on SELL in Flippa will initiate a series of forms prompting you for details about your website. The first decision point is whether to list your website under Flippa’s exclusive brokerage service called Deal Flow. Deal Flow is for sites valued at greater than $10,000. Deal Flow auctions are advertised to a group of pre-qualified buyers. Flippa will look at your site and do some pre-validation prior to presenting the listing to its buyer list. The listing fee is free. There is a 10% success fee paid by the seller and a $1,000 finder’s fee paid by the buyer at the time of this writing.

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In addition, buyers and sellers are pre-qualified, so you don’t have to spend as much time checking each other out and the listings are not made public, so any proprietary info has a more limited viewing audience. The high-end buyers that participate in Deal Flow also look at normal Flippa listings, so you won’t necessarily miss out on their perusal, but you will probably have a better chance at attracting their attention with Deal Flow. The next important question in the listing process is whether to have Google Analytics information verified by Flippa. I suggest you do this if at all possible. This lends credibility to your listing. When presented with “The Pitch” form, you will enter your listing’s title, called Tagline by Flippa.

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Some go for as low as $10,000, but most have minimums of $25,000, $50,000, or even $100,000. This is by no means a comprehensive list of website brokers, but some of the popular ones include: • AcquisitionsDirect.com • DaltonsBusiness.com • DigitalExits.com • EmpireFlippers.com • FEInternational.com • FlipFilter.com • Flippa.com (Deal Flow) • Latonas.com • QuietLightBrokerage.com • TheWebsiteBrokers.com • W3BusinessAdvisors.com • WebsiteProperties.com • WeSellYourSite.com Unlike traditional brick and mortar business brokers, website brokers sell Internet properties whose assets are primarily digital. They understand the importance of certain metrics that are specific to websites, like traffic statistics, conversion rates, email open rates, and earnings per page view.

One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com by Richard L. Brandt

Amazon Web Services, automated trading system, big-box store, call centre, cloud computing, deal flow, drop ship, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Free Software Foundation, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, new economy, Pershing Square Capital Management, science of happiness, search inside the book, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, software patent, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Tony Hsieh, two-pizza team, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

So he decided to spice up his love life and become what he was later to describe as a “professional dater.” He took a particularly geeky approach to the problem. Having always been the methodical type, he set about trying to find a great girlfriend by using the same methodology that Wall Street bankers use to find a great investment: He set up a “deal flow” chart. Wall Streeters’ deal flow charts are listings of all the attributes a deal must have before they will take a chance on it, in order to remain objective and not be influenced by an emotional response. Likewise, Jeff’s “women flow” chart listed the criteria his potential partners had to have before he would consummate a deal.

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His big challenge was to figure out what product to sell. To answer that question, he created a deal flow chart to analyze several opportunities. He made a list of twenty possible products. Which one offered the best set of features for quickly building an Internet presence? “I was looking for something that you could only do online, something that couldn’t be replicated in the physical world,” he said. The answer turned out to be books. Imagine the criteria an ambitious young executive with a penchant for computers would put on a deal flow list. Familiar product: Everyone knows what a book is. When ordering a particular title online, nobody has to worry about whether it is a cheap knockoff or an imitation, as they might with, say, consumer electronics.

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The conversation between Bezos, Kaphan, and his friend lasted for several months as Bezos made his plans. Bezos had not yet decided where to base his company. While most entrepreneurs were moving to Silicon Valley as the obvious place to become an entrepreneur, Jeff took a different approach: Yes, he would create another deal flow list to help decide. He came up with three criteria: It had to be a place with an established population of entrepreneurs and software programmers. He wanted to locate the business in a state with a relatively low population because only residents of that state would have to pay sales tax on the products he sold.

How to Be the Startup Hero: A Guide and Textbook for Entrepreneurs and Aspiring Entrepreneurs by Tim Draper

3D printing, Airbnb, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, business climate, carried interest, connected car, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, family office, fiat currency, frictionless, frictionless market, growth hacking, high net worth, hiring and firing, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, school choice, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Tesla Model S, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

The network limped along for several years until we hired Gabe Turner, who steadily and systematically brought the network back to life, rebranding it as the Draper Venture Network (DVN) because of branding confusion issues we ran into, and building on its strong global reputation. Today, the DVN spans 14 relationship firms, with 8 alumni firms, covering over 50 cities around the world and managing several billion dollars in nearly 1000 companies. And the power of the network is unprecedented for deal flow, due diligence, best practices, and the connections the teams make for their portfolio companies around the world. Companies in the network include Right-Click Capital in Australia, Dalus Capital in Mexico, Wavemaker in Singapore and South East Asia, Blume Ventures in India, as well as the various Draper branded funds: Draper Dragon in China, Draper Athena in Korea, Draper Nexus in Japan, Draper Esprit in the UK, Draper Triangle in the Midwestern US, Draper Aurora in Russia, and Draper Associates in Silicon Valley as well as three smaller firms in our DVN beta program, and we are adding more partners every year.

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More nodes on a network increase the power of the network as the square of the number of nodes on the network increases. This concept is known as Metcalfe’s Law, after entrepreneur, venture capitalist, educator and pundit Bob Metcalfe. The DVN allows me to evaluate and potentially fund any company from anywhere in the world. My deal flow has also expanded and improved. My judgment can only have been improved by seeing more companies from more regions, and Draper Associates’ returns should continue to improve because we see so many more companies for each one I invest in. Additionally, my entrepreneurs can easily grow their businesses internationally because our network has such great reach.

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The company built the platform out, and then we easily raised $300 million through a brokerage firm from small investors who wanted to participate in the returns venture capital could provide them. Our pitch was simple. DFJ had an extraordinary track record, and we had a great global network of funds that could all generate deal flow for the fund. We pitched that we would manage the fund, and that was an even bigger attraction. Our thinking was that we would be able to invest alongside our existing funds with the same terms we got for our private investors, and the public would finally be able to invest in venture capital. All of this was cleared and recleared with attorneys and government officials.

The Middleman Economy: How Brokers, Agents, Dealers, and Everyday Matchmakers Create Value and Profit by Marina Krakovsky

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Al Roth, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Black Swan, buy low sell high, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, deal flow, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, experimental economics, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, Joan Didion, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kenneth Arrow, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market microstructure, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Network effects, patent troll, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, power law, real-name policy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, search costs, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, social graph, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Y Combinator

“It’s not like an agency—‘I’ll introduce you to these Hollywood producers, and if you raise money, I’ll get five percent of the profit you make at the end of the day’—it never was like that.”6 At one point, as I began posing a question about “deal flow,” a piece of VC jargon that had slipped from his lips, he interrupted to make sure I didn’t get the wrong idea. “A lot of people look at deal flow,” he said, “but these are all human beings, and we try not to call companies ‘deals’ or ‘deal flow.’” Similarly, when I wondered whether he’s thought about what his network looks like, he cut me off, as if objecting to the instrumental implication of the question. “I don’t look at it as tools, I look at it as my friends,” he said.

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How Contrarianism Attracts Opportunity * * * In pitch fests and media interviews, the Floodgate partners have expressed these ideas many times; the more they do, and the more times they put their money where their mouths are through their funding decisions, the better known these VCs will become as entrepreneur-friendly, especially among entrepreneurs who don’t fit the traditional mold. That gives the Floodgate partners an edge in the competition among VCs for good deal flow. A quarter of Floodgate’s portfolio companies are women-led, as are a quarter of the companies pitching Floodgate.44 If the next Leah Busque is seeking seed-stage financing, it’s a good bet Floodgate will be high on her list of VC firms to pitch. “We fundamentally believe that some woman will start a company worth more than $50 billion in the next five to ten years,” Maples says, “and we have a better chance of winning her preference if we’re not a firm full of 6-foot-tall white dudes.”

Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley by Antonio Garcia Martinez

Airbnb, airport security, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Big Tech, Burning Man, business logic, Celtic Tiger, centralized clearinghouse, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, content marketing, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, drop ship, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, financial engineering, financial independence, Gary Kildall, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Hacker News, hive mind, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, information asymmetry, information security, interest rate swap, intermodal, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, means of production, Menlo Park, messenger bag, minimum viable product, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, second-price auction, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Socratic dialogue, source of truth, Steve Jobs, tech worker, telemarketer, the long tail, undersea cable, urban renewal, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Heavyweight funds like Mayfield and August knew this, and started doing seed investing, not to own some little piece of a company (they could write small checks all day and still not invest their entire funds) but merely as an option on the real rounds down the road. Which brings us (finally) to our point: in the day-to-day, the lifeblood of a VC wasn’t money, it was deal flow. Getting a first look at a potential Uber or Airbnb is what distinguished a first-class VC from an also-ran. Given Y Combinator’s immense success in drawing the best entrepreneurs, it had a quasi-stranglehold on the best early-stage deal flow in the Valley. And since early-stage deal flow today translated into later-stage deal flow tomorrow, via the follow-on investing phenomena described, Y Combinator was the gatekeeper to the best present and future deals in the Valley.

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That money was just as green either way. That meant that those funds would start losing YC deals wholesale to their competitors, and, as we reviewed earlier, getting locked out in the early rounds likely meant the same in the even juicier later ones. PG was about to flush a whole chunk of their deal flow down the toilet, just like that. I smiled, imagining the sputtering fits pitched by the partners over at Mayfield and August when PG read them the riot act. YC was actually willing to sever ties with some of the most illustrious names in Valley investing over the piss squirt that was AdGrok. It may seem like nothing to you, reader, who maybe inhabits a normal realm of twenty-first-century economic life where things like tit-for-tat reciprocity enforce social codes.

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On another side, Murthy’s moneymen were likely yelling at him to stop being an asshole and respect unwritten Valley rules about not frivolously picking expensive fights with nascent startups. Thanks to PG’s expulsion of these money changers from the Temple of Demo Day, and what that meant for their future deal flow, the VCs’ very livelihoods were now at risk due to Murthy’s bullshit. And by the way, why aren’t you focusing on our investment, the ailing Adchemy, anyhow? Finally, the next big partner Murthy critically needed, the last card he had to play as entrepreneur with a troubled startup, was telling him the deal hinged on settling the AdGrok mess, or else.

Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley by Emily Chang

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Burning Man, California gold rush, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, company town, data science, David Brooks, deal flow, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, game design, gender pay gap, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Hacker News, high net worth, Hyperloop, imposter syndrome, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microservices, Parker Conrad, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, post-work, pull request, reality distortion field, Richard Hendricks, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, women in the workforce, Zenefits

Specifically, she claimed a male partner, Chi-Hua Chien, suggested that women not be invited to an upcoming dinner hosted by partner Al Gore, because they “kill the buzz.” On the stand, Chien denied saying this but confirmed that an all-male dinner did occur at Gore’s home and that the number of guests was limited because of the size of his living room. Chien also testified that he often invited Pao to get-togethers that might lead to deal flow but she was too busy to attend. Kleiner’s attorneys presented multiple emails that showed Chien inviting Pao to meetings he thought she might find interesting. The implication was that Pao chose to pass on critical social opportunities that might have advanced her position within the firm. • • • WHETHER PAO WASN’T INVITED, or chose not to attend, or was invited but didn’t feel welcome, her experience is a stark reminder that venture capital partnerships are deeply competitive and political.

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“I think VC has been a boys’ club, and even if many of those boys have great intentions, many of them don’t realize the privilege that they have being male and mostly white and how things they do or say may unintentionally make others feel excluded or uncomfortable or discouraged. At the time, I didn’t think of a lot of those things as bias. I just thought, ‘Oh, there’s a cool kids’ club, and I’m not in it.’” Lee added that when women aren’t invited to male-only social events, or don’t attend, they often don’t know what they’re missing. “You don’t realize they trade deal flow and talk about what they’ve learned and what’s a hot deal,” Lee said. “When that hot deal is raising their next round and someone says, ‘Who should we call?’ Someone says, ‘Oh, how about Jeff?’ And Jeff gets the deal.” When I asked Lee if she felt that these circumstances qualify as gender discrimination, she paused, then said, “I think most women at VC firms, most women in business, if they wanted to could probably put together a case.”

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In 2016, Sequoia launched a mentorship program called Ascent that pairs women in technical roles with senior women across the industry (though one female founder who was asked to join the program as a mentor said she felt as if Sequoia was asking her to do free work, while the firm took all the credit). Botha has also been working to add more women to Sequoia’s super-secretive “scout” program, a large group of mostly entrepreneurs who unofficially refer deals back to the firm, then get a cut. It’s an ingenious way to get deal flow, but once again male dominated. When the Wall Street Journal compiled a long list of known Sequoia scouts in 2015, only 5 out of 78, or about 6 percent, were women. By September 2017, the number of female scouts had jumped to 25 percent. Still, women have a long way to go before they can have even close to an equal voice at the venture capital table.

Women Leaders at Work: Untold Tales of Women Achieving Their Ambitions by Elizabeth Ghaffari

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Bear Stearns, business cycle, business process, cloud computing, Columbine, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, dark matter, deal flow, do what you love, family office, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, follow your passion, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, high net worth, John Elkington, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, Oklahoma City bombing, performance metric, pink-collar, profit maximization, profit motive, recommendation engine, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, trickle-down economics, urban planning, women in the workforce, young professional

My second job was to improve the deal flow, meaning the number of quality deals presented to the group. Those two metrics go hand in hand. If you don’t have good deals, members won’t come, and if you don’t have members, deals won’t come. So those were my primary goals, and we made very significant improvements in both areas. We ramped up the number of deals. When I came in, they were having trouble ensuring that members would see at least one interesting new deal per week. When I left, we had four new deals every week, as well as a waiting list. So the deal flow was ramped up. There were a lot of things we implemented that improved deal flow, but the visible result was that there were more than enough really quality deals to keep everyone quite busy and engaged.

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Roden was managing director of The Angels’ Forum, a leading association of individual and corporate early-stage investors, and was president and CEO of the Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs (SVASE), the largest nonprofit in Northern California dedicated to helping technology entrepreneurs. At both entities, she was responsible for dramatic increases in membership, deal flow, events, volunteers, sponsorship, and service offerings. During this period, she was also a lecturer in the Department of Accounting and Finance at the College of Business at San Jose State University (2001–2004). Earlier in her career, Ms. Roden spent a decade in key executive-management roles at several emerging technology companies, including PowerTV (1997–2001) as chief financial officer and vice president of finance and administration; Whalen & Company (1996) as director of operations for the Western Americas; Vicarious, Inc. (1994–1996) as chief financial officer; and US Media Group (1992–1994) as co-founder and principal.

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There were a lot of things we implemented that improved deal flow, but the visible result was that there were more than enough really quality deals to keep everyone quite busy and engaged. On the membership side, we had a declining number of members when I started—down to the high teens. The goal of the group was twenty-five members, but I rebuilt it to over thirty members with a waiting list. Ghaffari: What did you do that was of significance to enhance the number of deals and the membership? Roden: I would say there were two different things. One was pure process improvement, which kind of goes back to my business school and Touche Ross consulting experience.

Alpha Girls: The Women Upstarts Who Took on Silicon Valley's Male Culture and Made the Deals of a Lifetime by Julian Guthrie

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, blockchain, Bob Noyce, call centre, cloud computing, credit crunch, deal flow, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, game design, Gary Kildall, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, information security, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, new economy, PageRank, peer-to-peer, pets.com, phenotype, place-making, private spaceflight, retail therapy, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, Teledyne, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, UUNET, web application, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce

The look was terrible for women, but she had a secret source of solace—designer shoes. She loved combing through sales racks at Neiman Marcus for discounted designer heels. She would wear the uniform, but she wouldn’t give up her shoes. Theresia’s job as an associate at Accel was to manage and create “deal flow.” Every day partners forwarded dozens of e-mails to her, most without a single word of explanation. She had to read down the e-mail chain and figure out what was being proposed and whether it was worth a partner’s time. It was a heady blend of triage—where she could not afford to miss something critical—and methodical analysis and research.

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The door closed, and Theresia took a seat at the back of the room. She had been at Accel for less than six months and was sprinting to land a seat at that white marble table. It wasn’t so different from her teenage days flipping burgers at the back of Burger King and setting her sights on working the cash register. She was doing deal flow triage for the partners, meeting with entrepreneurs offline to learn more, and calling on her contacts at Stanford and from her days at Release Software to see who was doing something interesting. She had zeroed in on cybersecurity as an area of specialty, given what she’d already learned about encryption from her time at Release.

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They were locked into the lease at the same time that they were laying off staff. And Salesforce, which had come out swinging with some early successes, was now struggling like every other start-up. Magdalena was constantly worried that Salesforce might run out of money. Comfort was nowhere to be found. Federman appreciated Magdalena’s deal flow and her judgment. She was not an ideologue who always had to prevail. She was fact-based, data-driven, and practical. Federman felt confident that she would see the pragmatic, who-is-buttering-your-bread side of the Siebel deal. Magdalena soon realized she would have to compartmentalize her brain.

Den of Thieves by James B. Stewart

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, Carl Icahn, corporate raider, creative destruction, deal flow, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, fixed income, fudge factor, George Gilder, index arbitrage, Internet Archive, Irwin Jacobs, junk bonds, margin call, Michael Milken, money market fund, Oscar Wyatt, Ponzi scheme, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, South Sea Bubble, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Predators' Ball, walking around money, zero-coupon bond

But in frequent phone calls to Wilkis, Levine did little but complain, especially about his wife. "She's getting in the way of my career," Levine griped. Laurie, wrenched from her comfortable Queens existence, felt isolated in Paris. She was miserable, and ended up in a hospital. Levine wasn't much happier himself. He was frustrated at being out of the "deal flow" in Smith Barney's New York office. Even though, as a junior corporate finance employee, he'd done little there besides spreadsheet analysis, he'd boasted to Wilkis that he knew practically every deal underway in the office. He said he had mastered the ability to read documents on colleagues' desks upside-down.

…

Cecola told Wilkis that he was already at work on a top-secret deal that would be a perfect trading opportunity: Lazard was working for Chicago Pacific Corporation on a bid for Textron, the big conglomerate. Wilkis called Levine that night. He felt he'd proved himself, landing a new recruit with access to a deal flow, just when the loss of Reich threatened the scheme's profitability. Levine was elated, and wasted no time taking advantage of the hot new information about Textron. He bought 51,500 shares; Wilkis bought nearly 30,000. Levine also tried to capitalize on the information to enhance his reputation at Lehman.

…

His bankers often had to scramble to muster enough $100 bills, the currency Levine insisted upon. During 1984 alone, Levine withdrew $200,000 in March, $200,000 in July, and $90,000 in December. He appears to have spent all of it. By the time Levine got the bad news that he was being promoted only to senior vice president, he was already prepared to abandon Shearson Lehman. As the deal flow had steadily increased during the year, other firms were becoming almost desperate for investment bankers with even a modicum of experience in M&A, and Levine's head-hunter at Hadley Lockwood found his once-lackluster resume to be in high demand. Nearly all the top investment banks were at least willing to consider hiring Levine; even Gleacher, now at Morgan Stanley, tried to recruit him.

Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City by Brad Feld

barriers to entry, clean tech, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, deal flow, fail fast, G4S, Grace Hopper, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Marc Benioff, minimum viable product, Network effects, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, place-making, pre–internet, Richard Florida, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, SoftBank, software as a service, Steve Jobs, text mining, vertical integration, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Great angel investing organizations exist all over the United States, and around the world, and they have invested in many great companies, as well as helping many angels become better investors. But like so much in a startup community, they are neither necessary nor sufficient. For prospective angel investors who don’t think they have enough deal flow or want someone to help them think through the screening or legal process, an angel investing group can be a good thing. But saying that some angel investors can benefit from being part of organizations doesn’t mean that all will. Communities must feel that their startup community isn’t working if groups of angel investors aren’t meeting every Tuesday night in their city to screen startups.

…

Boulder is home to a small informal angel group, the Boulder Angels. The group was founded in January 2007 by eight investors who were increasingly unsatisfied with the existing, much larger and more organized angel groups in the Boulder-Denver area. The group found the large, formal angel organizations to be expensive and a poor source of deal flow. Boulder Angels was created with two major assumptions in mind. First, we assumed an angel group could be very informal, lightweight, and nimble. We wanted to get moving and start helping the local startup community as fast as possible. We did not consider forming a corporate entity, hiring administrative help, or renting office space.

European Founders at Work by Pedro Gairifo Santos

business intelligence, clean tech, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, deal flow, do what you love, fail fast, fear of failure, full text search, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, information retrieval, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Lean Startup, Mark Zuckerberg, Multics, natural language processing, pattern recognition, pre–internet, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, technology bubble, TED Talk, web application, Y Combinator

I mean, I agree with you that the venture capital market is extremely different in Europe and in the US. I think that it's about critical mass. Nowadays there are actually quite a lot of venture capitalists even in Europe. But the problem is they are so fragmented on different markets and many European enterpeneurs and investors still don't share the forums. So this makes the deal flow much less open and much less comparable. So, I think that the only place that I found that the words “capital market” truly applied is here in the US. Because here I think it works much more like a market. What I mean by that is that there are buyers and sellers who go to a place and they promote their goods.

…

Farcet: Well, he said, “No, but…” Santos: And how did he pass from the “No, but…”? What did you do then? Farcet: Well, I met the right co-founders. That was Rainmaking. That is a partnership of serial entrepreneurs who built 14 startups in 4 years. They were thinking about how to handle their own deal flow and wanted to extend their brand. We just really hit it off. They had a lot of know-how on legal and financial, and also resources. I had the sweat equity, the drive, and the passion to run an accelarator program (and you have to be a bit crazy to embark on such a journey). So we put it together and we said let's try and do one to see how it goes.

…

Farcet: Well, obviously, for a relatively small amount of money, you get a not insignificant percentage in ten companies that are diversified, highly selected and accelerated. So you spread and lower the risk. We attract really cool projects that you don't have to spend time doing due dilligence for. For that type of early stage investment it's still risky but definitely a safer bet than your own deal flow if you're an angel. Santos: Once the program finishes, how do you provide help to the start-ups? How do the investors keep in touch with the start-ups? Farcet: I keep the investors updated on what's going on with the teams when our they raise money. In terms of helping the teams, we tend to get involved when there are term sheets flying around, if they want our help.

Confessions of a Wall Street Analyst: A True Story of Inside Information and Corruption in the Stock Market by Daniel Reingold, Jennifer Reingold

Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, corporate governance, deal flow, estate planning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, George Gilder, high net worth, informal economy, junk bonds, margin call, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, Michael Milken, new economy, pets.com, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Telecommunications Act of 1996, thinkpad, traveling salesman, undersea cable, UUNET

From Clay’s perspective, research must have seemed like something of a waste of time. It didn’t make any money—and was, in part, paid for by the fees generated by bankers like him. So wasn’t it logical that an analyst, whose salary and bonus inevitably came from the money earned on deals, shouldn’t do anything that could jeopardize that deal flow? Ticked off by Sandy’s conclusions, Clay wrote a memo in September 1990 that shocked all of us on the 20th floor, which was where Morgan Stanley’s research analysts worked. “As we are all too aware,” it said, “there have been too many instances where our Research Analysts have been the source of negative comments about clients of the Firm….

…

Essentially, Wallace was arguing that I was going to torpedo Merrill’s entire investment banking business. The logic went like this: tech was the biggest banking opportunity in the world, and Silicon Valley VCs (venture capitalists) controlled most of the technology IPO candidates. In order to break into this deal flow, Merrill’s relations with the VCs had to get a lot better fast. So if I turned down Pathnet and the venture capitalists took it as a sign that Merrill was too conservative to work with the startup world, Merrill Lynch’s bankers would be screwed. “Sean, I agree that you have a problem,” I said. “But I can’t solve it for you.

…

I didn’t change my mind, so the bankers ultimately had no choice but to tell Pathnet we couldn’t do the deal. The company never did go public. But of course no one could know that at the time. All they knew was that Dan Reingold and Megan Kulick were pain-in-the-ass, stick-in-the-mud analysts who were messing up Merrill’s deal flow in a big way. BY THIS POINT, I had managed to antagonize just about everyone, especially my own bankers and some of the companies I covered. I had hoped that this wouldn’t translate to my buy-side clients, but perhaps somehow it did, as I remained in the number two spot on the I.I. poll for the second year in a row, unable to dislodge Jack from his land of boundless sunshine and everlasting opportunity.

The Dealmaker: Lessons From a Life in Private Equity by Guy Hands

Airbus A320, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, corporate governance, COVID-19, credit crunch, data science, deal flow, Etonian, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, flag carrier, high net worth, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, Nelson Mandela, North Sea oil, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, proprietary trading, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, traveling salesman

Andrew had since run wholesale banking and markets at Lloyds Banking Group and I was convinced he could bring some discipline to Terra Firma’s organisation as well as help the talent we had inside the firm flourish. Andrew made it clear that he had strong views about how he wanted to transform the firm, operationally and structurally. He would manage Terra Firma and take control of the deal flow. Justin, meanwhile, would take control of the portfolio businesses and work out how to get them working better. The two of them would run Terra Firma day-to-day. I would be its most active investor and travelling salesman. Within weeks of the second EMI trial ending in June 2016, we announced Andrew’s appointment.

…

Justin brought in a new management team, led by Roger McLaughlan, a veteran retailer who had most recently been in charge of Toys ‘R’ Us in the UK. Their diagnosis was optimistic. Most of the cost of implementation had already been met, they pointed out. The recent decline could be reversed. To sell the company at this stage would be a mistake. Meanwhile, Andrew was working on deal flow. He had managed to get us into a number of transactions including what was known as Project Ford (a chain of Italian motorway service stations), was bringing in new people and had arranged meetings with investors in Asia and Australia to help raise a new fund. Technically, this should have been Terra Firma Fund IV but since four is a very unlucky number in Chinese and Japanese – in both languages it’s similar to the word for death – we decided to count two other funds we had raised and skip to Terra Firma Fund VI.

The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co. by William D. Cohan

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, bank run, Bear Stearns, book value, Carl Icahn, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, deal flow, diversification, Donald Trump, East Village, fear of failure, financial engineering, fixed income, G4S, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, interest rate swap, intermodal, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, land bank, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, Michael Milken, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short squeeze, SoftBank, stock buybacks, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, Yogi Berra

He charmed his partners--to say nothing of his clients--and rewarded them with a meaningful percentage of the profits when he needed them to execute his prodigious deal flow. At the slightest whiff of resentment, disloyalty, or burnout, Felix would dispatch them to irrelevance and excommunication, in some out-of-the-way hovel, before shining his beacon and affections on the next rising Lazard star. He was immensely feared around the halls of Lazard--just as his mentor, Andre Meyer, had been--but could not even for a moment be ignored, so long as he continued to produce 80 percent of the deal flow and profits. No one at Lazard had anything like Felix's client list, CEO access, or annual revenue production.

…

Morale at the firm, always low, dropped even further. "There are rumors of layoffs but no one has been laid off yet," another banker said. "That creates a level of panic that will not subside until they are made or it is made clear that they will not be made. This is coupled with markedly slower deal flow in M&A from a year ago across the Street. Furthermore, there are rumors that Lazard is being sold.... Right now, there is a level of group panic about something that could be very real and very ugly." Another disgruntled employee confided, "First of all for those support staff who have lost jobs and are supporting families, I am truly sorry.

…

At his memorial service in London, Verey, the former head of Lazard in London, remembered Evans--often described by his colleagues as "Verey's brain"--as a man who had the ability to make everyone feel as if he was your best friend. Michel did not attend the memorial service. Soon thereafter, Bruce held a meeting at Paris's Bristol Hotel for about seventy managing directors to discuss ways to improve cross-border marketing and deal flow. "Historically, people had talked about the business in New York or the business in Paris," Chuck Ward said. "They never really talked about the telecom business or the media business." Now, he said, "we have industry groups really talking to each other on a global basis." After the meeting at the Bristol, Michel invited his partners to his fabulous maison particulier on Rue Saint-Guillaume for dinner, wine, and sumptuous surroundings.

Palace Coup: The Billionaire Brawl Over the Bankrupt Caesars Gaming Empire by Sujeet Indap, Max Frumes

Airbnb, Bear Stearns, Blythe Masters, book value, business cycle, Carl Icahn, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, data science, deal flow, Donald Trump, family office, fear of failure, financial engineering, fixed income, Jeffrey Epstein, junk bonds, lockdown, low interest rates, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, NetJets, power law, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Robert Solow, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, super pumped, Travis Kalanick

Marc Rowan and Leon Black made calls to the Oaktree brass. Liang believed that these moments when Apollo went over his head only confirmed the strength of Oaktree’s arguments. Apollo had its cudgels, as well as a gift for preying on the pain points of its adversaries. Apollo ominously reminded them that Oaktree and Canyon depended on deal flow from Apollo that they could be excluded from in the future. On March 3, 2014, Caesars announced the sale of the Four Properties. Additionally, Caesars disclosed that the Total Rewards IP was also leaving OpCo. The junior bonds traded down to twelve cents on the dollar on the news. Vazales and Sheffield crunched the numbers and calculated that the terms of the four casino sales were laughable.

…

Deal lawyers even described what had become the de facto path to partnership at Paul, Weiss: Achieve excellence in two of three areas—public company M&A, private equity transactions, or Apollo work. Apollo was a demanding client. The work had to be done quickly and perfectly. But it was often interesting, highly lucrative work, particularly for a firm that was relatively less prominent in blockbuster deal flow. The downside to this arrangement was now evident. Apollo was an aggressive firm that liked to push the envelope. And with Paul, Weiss’s fortune now so tied to the firm there was the risk that the tail was wagging the dog. Even fans of Karp and Paul, Weiss in the legal community had been shocked at how it appeared Paul, Weiss had sold its soul.

Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story by Kurt Eichenwald

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, book value, Burning Man, California energy crisis, computerized trading, corporate raider, currency risk, deal flow, electricity market, estate planning, financial engineering, forensic accounting, intangible asset, Irwin Jacobs, John Markoff, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, Michael Milken, Negawatt, new economy, oil shock, price stability, pushing on a string, Ronald Reagan, transaction costs, value at risk, young professional

Neither told him that the board had just approved one, although it was far smaller than what Timmins had in mind. “Okay, so here’s the idea,” Timmins said. “We raise money for the fund under the Enron name. But we let it become more independent over time. The perception will still be that it has access to Enron deal flow.” In essence, the manager would ultimately run a fund that was separate from Enron but that had the credibility of the company name. Fastow was intrigued. He was already planning another fund something bigger and more lucrative in the future. Maybe Timmins had laid out the perfect structure for it.

…

It would be his way out, his step toward becoming a fund manager full-time. No more begging for bonuses. He would be wealthy. He would be a player in Houston society. Fastow had no doubt: LJM2 would transform his life. “LJM2 will have a lot of unique features,” Fastow said. “It will have access to massive deal flow from Enron. It will, in truth, be a virtual Enron.” It was 9:15 on the morning of September 16. Fastow had traveled to New York to present his big proposal to Enron’s bankers. His first visit was with Chase Capital Partners, an investment arm of Chase Manhattan bank. He had described his vision weeks before to Rick Walker, Chase’s banker in charge of Enron, and had won him over.

…

He would have to move fast. Later that day, Mintz was leaning on his desk, his eyes gliding across the words in the LJM3 offering documents. On page 2, he stopped. That can’t be right. He read the sentence again. Fastow was telling investors that they would profit from his access to proprietary deal-flow data from Enron. In effect, he was putting Enron’s inside information up for sale. Mintz grabbed a copy of the LJM2 memorandum and discovered the same bold claim. Any Enron investors who saw this would go nuts; it was their confidential corporate information that Fastow was selling. Mintz rubbed his face.

King of Capital: The Remarkable Rise, Fall, and Rise Again of Steve Schwarzman and Blackstone by David Carey

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, asset allocation, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, deal flow, diversification, diversified portfolio, financial engineering, fixed income, Future Shock, Gordon Gekko, independent contractor, junk bonds, low interest rates, margin call, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, new economy, Northern Rock, risk tolerance, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, sealed-bid auction, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Teledyne, The Predators' Ball, éminence grise

Their M.O. on the M&A front was the same one they had employed at Lehman. The fifty-nine-year-old Peterson, with his entrée to executive suites around the country, would get Blackstone in the door and Schwarzman, then thirty-eight, would make the deals happen. Peterson and Schwarzman would cozy up to management to get “deal flow.” With the financial world polarized by the wave of hostile takeover bids, Peterson and Schwarzman knew that they would have to choose sides. In 1985 the backlash against the raiders and Drexel had not reached its peak, but it was clear to them how they would ally themselves in the battles over corporate control.

…

“It was highly successful quickly, and it showed we weren’t looking to antagonize corporations but to be friends. Corporate partnerships became our calling card.” Whereas competing buyout shops typically exercised dictatorial control over their acquisitions, Blackstone was adaptable. Its openness to splitting power or even taking a back seat to a corporate collaborator bolstered its deal flow, as Schwarzman and Peterson had hoped: Of the dozen investments that Blackstone went on to make with its 1987 buyout fund, seven would be partnerships akin to Transtar. In addition to differentiating Blackstone from the competition, Schwarzman also believed the partnerships heightened Blackstone’s odds of success.

Working the Street: What You Need to Know About Life on Wall Street by Erik Banks

accounting loophole / creative accounting, borderless world, business cycle, corporate governance, deal flow, estate planning, fixed income, greed is good, junk bonds, old-boy network, PalmPilot, risk/return, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, telemarketer

CUTTING INTO MUSCLE For all of Wall Street’s market savvy and technical prowess, for all the time and effort it puts into recruiting, training, rotating, and promoting, it 1 1 8 | W o r k i n g th e S tr e e t usually falls short in one key area: figuring out how many employees it needs during bad times. It’s no surprise that when things start looking ugly—markets fall apart, deal flow dries up, clients go on very, very long vacations—a firm’s management pulls out the hatchet and starts swinging, sometimes randomly but always energetically. Heads roll, and it’s not a pretty sight. Just how many swings and how many severed heads depend on the perceived depth of the downturn, but it’s not an exact science.

So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love by Cal Newport

adjacent possible, Apple II, bounce rate, business cycle, Byte Shop, Cal Newport, capital controls, clean tech, Community Supported Agriculture, deal flow, deliberate practice, do what you love, financial independence, follow your passion, Frank Gehry, information asymmetry, job satisfaction, job-hopping, knowledge worker, Mason jar, medical residency, new economy, passive income, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, renewable energy credits, Results Only Work Environment, Richard Bolles, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, web application, winner-take-all economy

Here’s the amount of time he dedicates to each: Mike Jackson’s Work-Hour Allocation Hard-to-Change Commitments Activity Hours Allocated for the Week E-mail 7.5 Lunch/Breaks/Other 4 Planning/Organization 1.5 Partner Meeting/Administrative 4 Weekly Fund-raising Meeting 1 Highly Changeable Commitments Activity Hours Allocated for the Week Improving Fund-raising Materials 3 Fund-raising Process 12 Due Diligence Research 3 Deal Flow Sourcing 3 Meetings/Calls with Potential Investors 1 Work with Portfolio Companies 2 Networking/Professional Development 3 Mike’s goal with his spreadsheet is to become more “intentional” about how his workday unfolds. “The easiest thing to do is to show up to work in the morning and just respond to e-mail the whole day,” he explained.

Statistical Arbitrage: Algorithmic Trading Insights and Techniques by Andrew Pole

algorithmic trading, Benoit Mandelbrot, constrained optimization, Dava Sobel, deal flow, financial engineering, George Santayana, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market clearing, market fundamentalism, merger arbitrage, pattern recognition, price discrimination, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, risk tolerance, Sharpe ratio, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic volatility, systematic trading, transaction costs

What is the difference between merger and statistical arbitrage such that massive structural change in the economy—caused by reactions to terrorist attacks, wars, and a series of corporate misdeeds—was accepted as temporarily interrupting the business of one but terminating it (a judgment now known to be wrong) for the other? Immensely important is an understanding of the source of the return generated by the business and the conditions under which that source pertains. The magic words ‘‘deal flow’’ echo in investor heads the moment merger arbitrage is mentioned. A visceral understanding provides a comfortable intellectual hook: When the economy improves (undefined—another internalized ‘‘understanding’’) there will be a resurgence in management interest in risk taking. Mergers and acquisitions will happen.

Getting a Job in Hedge Funds: An Inside Look at How Funds Hire by Adam Zoia, Aaron Finkel

backtesting, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, collateralized debt obligation, commodity trading advisor, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deal flow, discounted cash flows, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, global macro, high net worth, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, merger arbitrage, offshore financial centre, proprietary trading, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk-adjusted returns, rolodex, short selling, side project, statistical arbitrage, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, systematic trading, two and twenty, unpaid internship, value at risk, yield curve, yield management

I had met a lot of nice people there and felt I fit in with the culture of the firm. I chose to join the industrials group, where I thought I would be exposed to not only many different types of companies but also each of the banking products (debt, equity, and M&A). Still, this was 2001 and it was a tough time for deal flow. I was busy during my first year really only pitching deals. It wasn’t until my second year that activity picked up and I managed to close five or six deals. By working closely with my bank’s financial sponsors group, I became involved with several private equity firms advising them on M&A and putting together debt financing packages in support of their buyouts.

Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup by Brad Feld, David Cohen

An Inconvenient Truth, augmented reality, computer vision, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, deal flow, disintermediation, fail fast, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, Inbox Zero, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, lolcat, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, Steve Jobs, subscription business

When I first started angel investing, I quite naturally joined the local angel group in my city. I'd estimate that 95 percent of the members of the group had done at most one angel investment in their entire lives and many had never done any. I quickly figured out that I could generate much more interesting deal flow by getting to know other real angel investors and by creating my own independent brand and visibility. It turns out that strong entrepreneurs are pretty good at finding people who actually make angel investments. And it seems to me that people who don't actually make angel investments, but tell the world they do, aren't really serious about it.

Financial Market Meltdown: Everything You Need to Know to Understand and Survive the Global Credit Crisis by Kevin Mellyn

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cuban missile crisis, deal flow, disintermediation, diversification, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, global reserve currency, Greenspan put, Home mortgage interest deduction, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, long peace, low interest rates, margin call, market clearing, mass immigration, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, pension reform, pets.com, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, reserve currency, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Suez canal 1869, systems thinking, tail risk, The Great Moderation, the long tail, the new new thing, the payments system, too big to fail, value at risk, very high income, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Y2K, yield curve

No deals, no fees, no bonus, so the advisor is conflicted between looking out for the client and the need to make deals happen to produce revenue. His or her credibility and usefulness, however, depends on honest, objective advice. Because they are in the markets every day as brokers and dealers, the firms these advisors work in have visibility to something called ‘‘deal flow.’’ They have a pulse on the market, on what things are worth today and likely to be worth tomorrow. INSTITUTIONAL INVESTORS As anyone who has been cold called over the phone by a stock broker knows, the whole world of investment banking we have just described is all about selling. Investment banks are always hustling: The brokers and dealers push trades, the advisory folks pitch ideas in the hope they will turn into deals.

Makers by Chris Anderson

3D printing, Airbnb, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, business process, carbon tax, commoditize, company town, Computer Numeric Control, crowdsourcing, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deal flow, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, DIY culture, drop ship, Elon Musk, factory automation, Firefox, Ford Model T, future of work, global supply chain, global village, hockey-stick growth, hype cycle, IKEA effect, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, planned obsolescence, private spaceflight, profit maximization, QR code, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, spinning jenny, Startup school, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Y Combinator

He can watch the flows of fabrication, the tides of tooling. The Americans sourcing in China and those who are returning to the States. The Germans sourcing in Poland and the French sourcing in, well, anywhere but Germany. It’s a fascinating glimpse into culture, economics, and globalization. Forget the rhetoric—this is the raw deal flow of what companies are actually doing every day. What’s even more interesting than what’s being ordered is who’s doing it. It’s not just big companies ordering custom parts and molds from global machine shops, but little ones, too: bike makers and furniture shops; electrical contractors and toymakers.

Fed Up!: Success, Excess and Crisis Through the Eyes of a Hedge Fund Macro Trader by Colin Lancaster

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, asset-backed security, beat the dealer, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bond market vigilante , Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, Carmen Reinhart, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collateralized debt obligation, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deal flow, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, family office, fear index, fiat currency, fixed income, Flash crash, George Floyd, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, index arbitrage, inverted yield curve, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, margin call, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, National Debt Clock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, oil shock, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, social distancing, SoftBank, statistical arbitrage, stock buybacks, The Great Moderation, TikTok, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, value at risk, Vision Fund, WeWork, yield curve, zero-sum game

Not just the long hours he needs to work, but the sacrifices he needs to make to his values, his personal code. He needs to change. And who knows if he could handle the additional opportunities that come with that extra dough—not just business opportunities. I’m talking about a different kind of deal flow: blondes, brunettes, redheads, and all the other extras that find their way to you when you succeed. Jerry likes to wear the skinniest of suits, but he’s starting to gain weight due to the long hours. And his name really isn’t Jerry. It’s a nickname from a movie. Then there’s the Rabbi, heavy set with high blood pressure and an ornery edge.

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian Mallaby

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 90 percent rule, Adam Neumann (WeWork), adjacent possible, Airbnb, Apple II, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Bob Noyce, book value, business process, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Didi Chuxing, digital map, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dutch auction, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, family office, financial engineering, future of work, game design, George Gilder, Greyball, guns versus butter model, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Masayoshi Son, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, microdosing, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, mortgage debt, move fast and break things, Network effects, oil shock, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, plutocrats, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, super pumped, superconnector, survivorship bias, tech worker, Teledyne, the long tail, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban decay, UUNET, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Vision Fund, wealth creators, WeWork, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Zenefits

He had begun his investing career at Accel, where he had absorbed the idea of the “prepared mind,” and he saw that this top-down, anticipatory approach could be especially useful at Sequoia. Because of Sequoia’s status as the Valley’s leading venture firm, most startup founders were eager to pitch to it; by the partnership’s own reckoning, it was invited to consider around two-thirds of the deals that ended up getting funded by the top two dozen venture shops. But this privileged deal flow was both a blessing and a curse. The partners’ days were crammed with meetings organized at the visitors’ request. It was easy to become reactive.[16] To manage this danger, Goetz brought Accel’s prepared-mind approach to Sequoia, leading the partners in mapping out tech trends and anticipating which sorts of startups would prosper from them.

…

One year earlier, Doug Leone had given a talk for entrepreneurs at Nozad’s carpet store and had encouraged Nozad to look out for deals that might be interesting.[37] After that encounter, Nozad had become Sequoia’s ambassador to the Iranian diaspora in the Valley, a group that included Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, and Dara Khosrowshahi, later the boss of Uber.[38] Sequoia valued Nozad’s connections because of its belief in immigrant grit: Moritz, Leone, and Botha were born in Wales, Italy, and South Africa, respectively, and three in five Sequoia-backed successes had at least one immigrant founder.[39] What seemed like serendipity, in other words, was actually the opposite. Nozad was part of Sequoia’s strategy to ensure the best possible deal flow. Three years after Nozad flagged Dropbox, Sequoia’s formal scouts program got off the ground, and stories of this sort became more common. Angel investing, at times a counterweight to the power of VCs, was now transformed into a mechanism that enriched Sequoia’s links to the next generation of founders.

Poorly Made in China: An Insider's Account of the Tactics Behind China's Production Game by Paul Midler

barriers to entry, corporate social responsibility, currency peg, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, full employment, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, language acquisition, new economy, out of africa, price discrimination, unpaid internship, urban planning

The impression that I got at some of the factories that engaged in quality manipulation schemes is that they did so after growing bored with their more conventional successes. There was a great deal of excitement that came with getting a new business off the ground. These manufacturers were thrilled when they signed up their first major customer, and they got another kick from orders that were especially large. When deal flow leveled out, factory owners looked for others ways in which they could capture that hint of thrill. The poverty myth was dispelled at least to some extent by one rather public example. Mattel’s supplier in the lead-paint case was run by an industrialist said to be worth US$1.1 billion. The manufacturer, coincidentally, had a 15-year relationship with the toy giant, which countered another argument made—that these supplier relationships necessarily improved over time and with greater familiarity.

When the Wolves Bite: Two Billionaires, One Company, and an Epic Wall Street Battle by Scott Wapner

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Carl Icahn, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, deal flow, independent contractor, junk bonds, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, multilevel marketing, Pershing Square Capital Management, Ponzi scheme, price discrimination, Ronald Reagan, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Tim Cook: Apple, unbiased observer

Shares quickly popped 15 percent on the news—a sign that, at least at face value, many on Wall Street liked the deal.20 After the transaction was announced, Pearson addressed the company’s critics in an interview with CNBC’s mergers and acquisitions expert David Faber, who asked Pearson point-blank whether the market was forcing him to keep the deal flow going, irrespective of whether it made good business sense. “That’s my job,” Pearson scoffed. “It’s our board’s job to do whatever we can to create value for shareholders.”21 Ackman was so smitten with Pearson’s game plan that he even compared Valeant to Warren Buffett’s hallowed Berkshire Hathaway and its own platform strategy of scooping up businesses and seamlessly adding them into the fold.

The Greed Merchants: How the Investment Banks Exploited the System by Philip Augar

Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, deal flow, equity risk premium, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, information retrieval, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, Michael Milken, new economy, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, proprietary trading, regulatory arbitrage, risk free rate, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, systematic bias, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, tulip mania, value at risk, yield curve

For example, in global currency dealing the biggest player, UBS, recently had a market share more than double that of Goldman Sachs, the highest placed investment bank in sixth place;18 and in credit derivatives, a vast and rapidly growing area that involves repackaging and swapping corporate debt, the big financial conglomerates are the market leaders. However, as we have already seen, corporate advisory work and underwriting are the key investment banking products in terms of deal flow and prestige. These remain dominated by the top investment banks. With at least a dozen global investment banks theoretically able to carry out most transactions, the customer clearly has plenty of choice. Yet when it comes to exercising that choice there has been an increasing tendency for customers to go with the leading players.

The End of Growth by Jeff Rubin

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bakken shale, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deal flow, decarbonisation, deglobalization, Easter island, energy security, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, Eyjafjallajökull, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, flex fuel, Ford Model T, full employment, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Hans Island, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, low interest rates, McMansion, megaproject, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, new economy, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

That meant bigger deals and larger profits. The razor-thin margins earned by traditional deposit-taking and commercial banking operations paled in comparison with the spectacular returns notched by the investment banking arm, encouraging CIBC to give more of its balance sheet to the rainmakers from Wood Gundy. By the late 1990s, the deal flow at CIBC shifted into overdrive. Backed by the capital of a major Canadian bank, the scale of deals soon dwarfed anything ever dreamed of at Wood Gundy. CIBC World Markets became the newly minted investment banking arm of CIBC. And for a while all seemed right with the bank’s world. CIBC World Markets was in the top tier of Enron’s banking group, a lucrative spot to be in at the time.

Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street's Post-Crash Recruits by Kevin Roose

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Carl Icahn, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deal flow, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, East Village, eat what you kill, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, fixed income, forward guidance, glass ceiling, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, hedonic treadmill, information security, Jane Street, jitney, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Michael Milken, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, plutocrats, proprietary trading, Robert Shiller, selection bias, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, tail risk, The Predators' Ball, too big to fail, two and twenty, urban planning, We are the 99%, work culture , young professional

He’d gotten over the disappointment of his meager first-year bonus, and he had consoled himself with the fact that this year’s would probably be much better. The year 2011 was shaping up to be a good one in the markets—not nearly as good as the pre-crisis days, but the best J. P. had experienced since he was hired. Already, there was talk of increased deal flow, and of promoting a few of the third-year analysts to associate during the next bonus cycle. But when he turned on his BlackBerry after a week of inactivity, J. P. got a startle. Among the hundreds of e-mails waiting for him upon his return was a farewell e-mail from an analyst in his class, a kid named Terrance Hawk.

Lurking: How a Person Became a User by Joanne McNeil

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andy Rubin, benefit corporation, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Chris Wanstrath, citation needed, cloud computing, context collapse, crowdsourcing, data science, deal flow, decentralized internet, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, eternal september, fake news, feminist movement, Firefox, gentrification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, green new deal, helicopter parent, holacracy, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Julie Ann Horvath, Kim Stanley Robinson, l'esprit de l'escalier, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Mondo 2000, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, packet switching, PageRank, pre–internet, profit motive, Project Xanadu, QAnon, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing complete, Wayback Machine, We are the 99%, web application, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, you are the product

Annie Karni’s Politico story “In Jared Kushner, Trump Finds a Kindred Spirit” (November 18, 2016) details, “At The New York Observer, which he bought when he was 25, Kushner pushed for the newspaper to launch a standalone website called ‘Socialite Slapdown.’ It was fully his idea: to rate Manhattan’s 64 reigning socialites by ‘birth, brains, beauty and brio’ to see ‘who comes out on top.’” See also reports about Jeff Bezos’s “women flow,” which wasn’t an actual app but an approach to dating inspired by “deal flow” on Wall Street. The updates on Myspace Tom drew from Business Insider (Nicholas Carlson, “Myspace Tom: I Am ‘The Guy Who Sold Myspace for $580 Million While You Slave Away Hoping for a Half-Day Off,’” December 20, 2012). Kyunchi’s “Myspace is the new Woodstock” comment comes from a Paper magazine interview (Katherine Gillespie, “Kyunchi Is Making MySpace Music for 2019,” January 28, 2019).

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Timothy Ferriss

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Beryl Markham, billion-dollar mistake, Black Swan, Blue Bottle Coffee, Blue Ocean Strategy, blue-collar work, book value, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Cal Newport, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, David Brooks, David Graeber, deal flow, digital rights, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fault tolerance, fear of failure, Firefox, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of work, Future Shock, Girl Boss, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Howard Zinn, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, Menlo Park, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, passive income, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, phenotype, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, post scarcity, post-work, power law, premature optimization, private spaceflight, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, selection bias, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, vertical integration, Wall-E, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Party rounds often lead to poor due diligence and few people with enough skin in the game to really care. Checking these boxes allowed me to add a lot of value quickly, even as relatively cheap labor (i.e., I took a tiny stake in the company). My ability to help spread via word of mouth, and I got what I wanted: great “deal flow.” Deals started flowing in en masse from other founders and investors. Fast forward to 2015, and great deal flow was paralyzing the rest of my life. I was drowning in inbound. Instead of making great things possible in my life, it was preventing great things from happening. I’m excited to go back to basics, and this requires cauterizing blessings that have become burdens.

Peers Inc: How People and Platforms Are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism by Robin Chase

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, Anthropocene, Apollo 13, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, business climate, call centre, car-free, carbon tax, circular economy, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion charging, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deal flow, decarbonisation, different worldview, do-ocracy, don't be evil, Donald Shoup, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eyjafjallajökull, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, frictionless, Gini coefficient, GPS: selective availability, high-speed rail, hive mind, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Kinder Surprise, language acquisition, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, means of production, megacity, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, Post-Keynesian economics, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing test, turn-by-turn navigation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, vertical integration, Zipcar

At Prosper, more than 80 percent of the loans made in March 2014 were financed by hedge funds, pension funds, asset managers, sovereign wealth funds, and foreign banks.11 And at Lending Club, that number—the percentage of loans fulfilled by institutional lenders—was about 70 percent.12 In October 2014, institutional investors issued $177 million in loans, three-and-a-half times more than they had in October 2013.13 Larry Summers, secretary of the treasury during the Clinton administration and now a Lending Club board member, said, “Lending Club’s platform has the potential to profoundly transform traditional banking over the next decade.”14 The question is, transform it into what? A different cover on the same deal flow? Or a totally different group of lenders? In some city markets, Airbnb has seen the same takeover: professionals using the platform to market their apartments, condos, and houses. In early 2014, after a battle of several months, the New York State attorney general received data on New York rentals from Airbnb for the period from January 1, 2010, through June 2, 2014.

The Revolution That Wasn't: GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors by Spencer Jakab

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, book value, buy and hold, classic study, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deal flow, democratizing finance, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, fake news, family office, financial innovation, gamification, global macro, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, John Bogle, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, meme stock, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, PalmPilot, passive investing, payment for order flow, Pershing Square Capital Management, pets.com, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Saturday Night Live, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, TikTok, Tony Hsieh, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Vision Fund, WeWork, zero-sum game

An April 2021 study by Futu, a Chinese brokerage firm with a US subsidiary, found that members of Generation Z opened their trading app 8.2 times a day and traded 147 times a year on average.[3] Where do the forgone gains of frequent traders go? Not money heaven. Some accrue to people in the market who are preternaturally patient—the Warren Buffetts of the world. He has earned 120 times the market’s return since 1965. And a good deal flows to people who are the opposite of patient but happen to be pretty good at capturing short-term profits in the market from amateurs. High-frequency traders don’t care about how a company is doing or what is happening with the economy. They profit by programming their computers to find a small inefficiency and then get in and out faster than a human possibly can, earning as little as fractions of a penny.

Too big to fail: the inside story of how Wall Street and Washington fought to save the financial system from crisis--and themselves by Andrew Ross Sorkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, book value, break the buck, BRICs, business cycle, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deal flow, Dr. Strangelove, Emanuel Derman, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial engineering, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, junk bonds, Ken Thompson, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, moral hazard, naked short selling, NetJets, Northern Rock, oil shock, paper trading, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, supply-chain management, too big to fail, uptick rule, value at risk, éminence grise

By his estimation AIG had only about a week to find a solution, or it, too, could falter. Of the handful of principals involved in the dialogue about the enveloping crisis—the government included—Dimon was in an especially unusual position. He had the closest thing to perfect, real-time information. That “deal flow” enabled him to identify the fraying threads in the fabric of the financial system, even in the safety nets that others assumed would save the day. Dimon began contemplating a worst-case scenario, and at 7:30 a.m. he went into his home library and dialed into a conference call with two dozen members of his management team.

…

It was in the resulting battle that Paulson came to dislike Grasso’s cronies, who seemed all too ready to throw Paulson under a bus if it suited their purposes. But as secretary of the Treasury, he was obliged to be a diplomat, and as such, needed to maintain good relationships with all the Wall Street CEOs. They would be huge assets, his eyes and ears on the markets. If he needed “deal flow,” he preferred to get it directly from them, and not from some unconnected Treasury lifer whose job it was to figure these things out. About a month after he settled into the job, in the summer of 2006, Paulson called Fuld, whom he reached playing golf with a friend in Sun Valley, where he had a home.

Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Gobal Crisis by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dr. Strangelove, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, full employment, game design, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, global rebalancing, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, high net worth, income inequality, interest rate derivative, it's over 9,000, John Meriwether, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Myron Scholes, Network effects, New Journalism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, oil shock, one-China policy, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, power law, price mechanism, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, short squeeze, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time value of money, too big to fail, value at risk, vertical integration, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Low rates also set off a search for yield by institutional investors who needed higher returns than were being offered in risk-free government securities or highly rated bonds. The subprime residential loan market and the commercial real estate market both exploded in terms of loan originations, deal flow, securitizations and underlying asset prices due to Greenspan’s low rate policies. The great real estate bubble of 2002 to 2007 was under way. In September 2002, just as the low rate policy was taking off, Greenspan gained an ally, Ben Bernanke, appointed as a new member of the Fed Board of Governors.

Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

3D printing, additive manufacturing, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Boston Dynamics, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, company town, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deal flow, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Firefox, Galaxy Zoo, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, gravity well, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Jono Bacon, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, microbiome, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Narrative Science, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, rolodex, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart grid, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, superconnector, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Turing test, urban renewal, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine, web application, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Operational assets, meanwhile, are those things required for business to run effectively. For example, if you are running a software business, these assets include the algorithms powering your software, your database architecture and server implementation, technical designs, models, and frameworks that organize deal flow and customer acquisition strategies, and so on. A number of companies allow you to crowdsource the creation of operational assets. In fact, doing so is one of the keys to becoming a data-driven, exponential organization. A great example of this is TopCoder (www.topcoder.com). You’ve probably heard about hackathons—those mysterious tournaments where coders compete to see who can hack together the best piece of software in a weekend.

The Accidental Investment Banker: Inside the Decade That Transformed Wall Street by Jonathan A. Knee

AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, book value, Boycotts of Israel, business logic, call centre, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, corporate governance, Corrections Corporation of America, deal flow, discounted cash flows, fear of failure, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, if you build it, they will come, iterative process, junk bonds, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, new economy, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, proprietary trading, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, technology bubble, young professional, éminence grise

These firms are deal machines: all they do is buy, sell, and finance, all of which are the core fee generators of the investment banking business. Understandably, keeping financial sponsors happy is a very high priority. Financial sponsors view many of the services investment bankers provide as commodities. What they constantly demand and need to survive is deal flow—access to transactions that can allow them to put their capital to use. As a result, bankers whose job is to manage relationships with financial sponsors comb their firms looking for deals that can be shown to their clients—then actively encourage merger bankers to coax their selling clients to offer the potential deal to the broadest possible universe.

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US by Rana Foroohar

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

I remember coming into work day after day and feeling that people were just pretending to be busy, researching fruitless ideas in the open-plan spaces that I will forever believe are actually counterproductive to getting real work done (who can think with people constantly talking around them?). Although the founders kept a deal flow going and the press kept writing naïvely positive stories about London’s homegrown tech incubator,9 internally, the firm was already starting to revert to what it really was—a collection of ex–City bankers looking to make a quick buck. When you pull back the lens, that’s really what much of the late ’90s/early 2000s dot-com boom was all about.

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone

airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, buy and hold, call centre, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, deal flow, Douglas Hofstadter, drop ship, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, fulfillment center, game design, housing crisis, invention of movable type, inventory management, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Larry Ellison, late fees, loose coupling, low skilled workers, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Rodney Brooks, search inside the book, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, Skype, SoftBank, statistical arbitrage, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Hsieh, two-pizza team, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, zero-sum game

Bezos thought analytically about everything, including social situations. Single at the time, he started taking ballroom-dance classes, calculating that it would increase his exposure to what he called n+ women. He later famously admitted to thinking about how to increase his “women flow,”2 a Wall Street corollary to deal flow, the number of new opportunities a banker can access. Jeff Holden, who worked for Bezos first at D. E. Shaw & Co. and later at Amazon, says he was “the most introspective guy I ever met. He was very methodical about everything in his life.” D. E. Shaw had none of the gratuitous formalities of other Wall Street firms; in outward temperament, at least, it was closer to a Silicon Valley startup.

Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream by Nicholas Lemann

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Black-Scholes formula, Blitzscaling, buy and hold, capital controls, Carl Icahn, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deal flow, dematerialisation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norman Mailer, obamacare, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Peter Thiel, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, public intellectual, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Snow Crash, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, universal basic income, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor

Just before LinkedIn went public, Hoffman joined Greylock, one of the top-tier venture capital firms on Sand Hill Road, as a partner. He began spending part of every week at Greylock and part at LinkedIn, where he worked in an office next to Jeff Weiner’s. This put him more formally in the position he’d been in informally for years, with as much access to deal flow, the lifeblood of Silicon Valley, as anybody. As he casually remarked to a visitor once, “If there’s anything in the Valley, I’m going to know about it.” Greylock played host to an endless procession of people who wanted funding for start-ups, almost all of them young men in jeans and T-shirts.

eBoys by Randall E. Stross

Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, deal flow, digital rights, disintermediation, drop ship, edge city, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , high net worth, hiring and firing, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job-hopping, knowledge worker, late capitalism, market bubble, Mary Meeker, megaproject, Menlo Park, new economy, old-boy network, PalmPilot, passive investing, performance metric, pez dispenser, railway mania, rolodex, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, vertical integration, warehouse automation, Y2K

Greenberg called him up to see whether he liked his new life at Benchmark. Beirne said yes, and you’ve got to meet my partners. Before he knew it, Greenberg was invited to become an entrepreneur in residence at Benchmark. EIRs, as they were known, were funded by many of the leading venture firms in the Valley as a source of “deal flow”; by having EIRs tinker with a new business plan while under the same roof, the firm gets the first peek; if it likes what it sees, it also is in the best position to be the earliest investor. At any given time, Benchmark hosted one or two EIRs, who usually stayed four to six months. One of Greenberg’s dearly learned tenets drawn from his earlier experience was that it was best to have many venture firms bidding against one another.

Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment by David F. Swensen

asset allocation, asset-backed security, Benchmark Capital, book value, buy and hold, capital controls, classic study, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, deal flow, diversification, diversified portfolio, equity risk premium, financial engineering, fixed income, index fund, junk bonds, law of one price, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, money market fund, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pez dispenser, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Ballmer, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, technology bubble, the market place, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-sum game

Franchise Firms Atop the hierarchy of venture capital partnerships stand a relatively small number of venture firms that occupy an extraordinary position. This group of eight or ten firms enjoys a substantial edge over less exalted practitioners. Top-tier venture capitalists benefit from extraordinary deal flow, a stronger negotiating position, and superior access to capital markets. In short, participants in the venture capital process, from the entrepreneur to the investment banker, prefer dealing with this small set of “franchise firms.” In no other area of the capital markets does the identity of the source of funds matter in the way that it does in the venture capital world.

How to Build a Billion Dollar App: Discover the Secrets of the Most Successful Entrepreneurs of Our Time by George Berkowski

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, Black Swan, business intelligence, call centre, crowdsourcing, deal flow, Dennis Tito, disruptive innovation, Dunbar number, en.wikipedia.org, game design, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, minimum viable product, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, Paul Graham, QR code, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, TechCrunch disrupt, Travis Kalanick, two-pizza team, ubercab, Y Combinator

Venture capitalists can be harsh and unforgiving: some will dismiss you outright; others will feign interest with the goal of investing later. One of the first things you should do at this point is figure out which VCs do invest early in Series A funding rounds. A lot of VCs will take meetings and talk with you at any stage to ensure they are building their deal-flow pipeline (and make sure they are building up valuable information about what startups like yours are doing). But be careful, and identify investors with a strong history of investing early so that you don’t spend too much time pitching to investors who won’t actually be useful at this point. In the best possible scenario, the process of securing a Series A investment, from the initial meeting to cold hard cash in the bank, is about two months.

What Should I Do With My Life? by Po Bronson

back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, California energy crisis, clean water, cotton gin, deal flow, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, financial independence, high net worth, imposter syndrome, job satisfaction, Menlo Park, microcredit, new economy, proprietary trading, rolling blackouts, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, telemarketer, traffic fines, work culture , young professional

She didn’t want to be a bean counter. So she did business development, acquiring new firms for Cantor, and she became the person who got newly acquired companies plugged in to the rest of the company. The reason Heidi Olson is not dead is because she was laid off last April. With the market’s downturn, the deal flow dried up and the company consolidated. There was no rapid growth for her to manage. Heidi understood the reasons for being laid off, but it wasn’t handled well. “I had issues with it, but the people I had issues with are now all dead.” Heidi went through some soul-searching last summer. What was she looking for?

Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall--And Those Fighting to Reverse It by Steven Brill

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset allocation, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, carried interest, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deal flow, Donald Trump, electricity market, ending welfare as we know it, failed state, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, future of work, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, immigration reform, income inequality, invention of radio, job automation, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paper trading, Paris climate accords, performance metric, post-work, Potemkin village, Powell Memorandum, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, Ralph Nader, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stock buybacks, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, telemarketer, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor

Second, even if everything worked out, the win scenario still required job cuts, asset sales, and other dis-investments. Sometimes this was, indeed, a matter of enforcing long-overdue efficiencies to make the enterprise stronger. Other times, it would mean strip-mining what had been a viable business. The deal flow that Milken and others organized became a tidal wave, as banks and investment funds poured money into debt instruments to finance these raids. Suddenly, leveraged buyouts made even the biggest companies vulnerable, giving the lawyers and bankers non-stop work on billion-dollar deals that dwarfed anything Wall Street had ever seen.

Bleeding Edge: A Novel by Thomas Pynchon

addicted to oil, AltaVista, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Burning Man, carried interest, deal flow, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, East Village, eternal september, false flag, fixed-gear, gentrification, Hacker Ethic, index card, invisible hand, jitney, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, margin call, messenger bag, Network effects, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, rent control, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, telemarketer, Y2K

Along with PBRs, of course, in a washtub full of crushed ice, for those who cannot easily deal with the prospect of an irony-free evening. If there’s business being talked tonight, it’s someplace else in town, where time is too valuable to waste on partying. Third-quarter earnings are in the toilet, deal flow is down to a slow drip, corporate IT budgets are as frozen as machine margaritas in a Palo Alto bar, Microsoft XP has just emerged from beta, but already there is nerdal muttering and geekish discontent over security and backward-compatibility issues. Recruiters are out discreetly prowling the crowd, but with none of the usual color-coded bracelets visible tonight, hackers looking to work for short money have to default to intuition about who’s hiring.

More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite by Sebastian Mallaby

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, automated trading system, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, deal flow, do well by doing good, Elliott wave, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, German hyperinflation, High speed trading, index fund, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, machine translation, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Mary Meeker, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, operational security, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, pre–internet, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, survivorship bias, tail risk, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, the new new thing, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, uptick rule

Before the big institutions came along, equity trading was dominated by “specialists” on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. When an individual wanted to sell 50 shares in Ford, his broker called the New York Stock Exchange market maker who specialized in that stock; having a feel for the deal flow, the specialist would buy the shares at a price slightly below what he could sell them for a bit later. But this simple system broke down with the rise of the pension funds and mutual funds; suddenly, these institutions wanted to trade Ford in 100,000-share blocks, and the specialists lacked the capital to swallow that much.

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk by Satyajit Das

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, carbon credits, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deal flow, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discrete time, diversification, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Goodhart's law, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, load shedding, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Nixon shock, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Satyajit Das, savings glut, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, tail risk, Teledyne, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the market place, the medium is the message, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Turing test, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Skilling’s decision to join the company had been conditional on Enron being able to adopt mark-to-market accounting, “a lay-my-body-across-the-tracks-issue.”12 Mark-to-market accounting accelerated growth, with future profits being brought to account at the start of the contract, creating an urgency to increase deal flow to maintain earnings growth. Complex accounting provisions—special purpose entity rules (SPE)—allowed companies to shift assets off balance sheet, avoiding the need to record investments and associated borrowings as the firm’s assets and liabilities. This reduced the amount of reported assets used to generate earnings, boosting return on capital—the key to shareholder value.

House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street by William D. Cohan

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, book value, call centre, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, Irwin Jacobs, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, Northern Rock, proprietary trading, Renaissance Technologies, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, shareholder value, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, too big to fail, traveling salesman, uptick rule, vertical integration, Y2K, yield curve

I sat in meeting after meeting trying to explain to huge delegations of Citic people what we did for a living in fixed income. If you had five years, it probably was a pretty good trade. Somewhere down the road, the Chinese were going to become more and more sophisticated in financial transactions. The theory was if nothing happened other than that we get some of the deal flow from Citic, that would pay for itself. In the long run, a pretty good thing; in the short run, insanity. To me it seemed like sort of a shell game, even beyond the fact that they were going to give us a billion dollars and we were going to give it back to them. It was a really good concept: Here is the preeminent broker-dealer in China.

Expected Returns: An Investor's Guide to Harvesting Market Rewards by Antti Ilmanen

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, backtesting, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Bob Litterman, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, commodity trading advisor, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, deal flow, debt deflation, deglobalization, delta neutral, demand response, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, framing effect, frictionless, frictionless market, G4S, George Akerlof, global macro, global reserve currency, Google Earth, high net worth, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, incomplete markets, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, John Bogle, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, law of one price, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market friction, market fundamentalism, market microstructure, mental accounting, merger arbitrage, mittelstand, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, negative equity, New Journalism, oil shock, p-value, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pension time bomb, performance metric, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, principal–agent problem, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, savings glut, search costs, selection bias, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic volatility, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, systematic trading, tail risk, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, value at risk, volatility arbitrage, volatility smile, working-age population, Y2K, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Investors should prefer experienced GPs and avoid funds in hot years when too many funds are chasing the good deals. One reason for the tenure advantage is that established funds can behave tactically and accelerate their investments when investment conditions improve, competitive pressures for deal flow ease, and credit market conditions loosen. Younger funds cannot afford to be as sensitive to market conditions and they tend to invest in riskier buyouts in order to establish a track record. Perhaps surprisingly, smaller funds earn higher returns. Anecdotally, funds with more focused holdings tend to outperform funds with broader holdings.

Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World by William D. Cohan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, deal flow, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford paid five dollars a day, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, hiring and firing, hive mind, Hyman Minsky, interest rate swap, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, margin call, market bubble, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, short squeeze, South Sea Bubble, tail risk, time value of money, too big to fail, traveling salesman, two and twenty, value at risk, work culture , yield curve, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Although Rubin and Friedman assured Zell that Goldman had “Chinese walls” to prevent any confusion, the truth was that Goldman was constantly blurring the lines and more and more clients were getting angry. Despite their anger, many clients seemed reluctant to do anything that would end up alienating the firm, since it was generally acknowledged that Goldman had the best deal flow and had access to the best investment opportunities. Pissing off Goldman Sachs—it turned out—would be bad for business. Despite Blankfein’s concern that Goldman did not want its clients upset with the firm, sometimes the firm left its clients little choice. For instance, in February 1999, somewhat out of the blue, Société Générale, the big French bank, announced a preliminary agreement to acquire Banque Paribas, another important French bank with a big investment banking business.