by Bill Browder
Bain chose students with top grades from good schools who were ready to work sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, for two years. In return, they promised you would get into one of the top business schools in the country. There was a rub that year, though. Bain’s business was growing so quickly that they needed to hire 120 smart “student slaves” instead of just twenty, like all the other firms running two-year pre-MBA programs. Unfortunately, this ruined the implicit deal Bain had with the business schools. These schools did indeed like to admit young consultants from Bain, but they also liked McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and dozens of other sweatshops for ambitious young capitalists. So in the best case, these schools could accept only twenty people from Bain, not the full 120. In essence, Bain was offering the opportunity to work your fingers to the bone for $28,000 a year, and your reward was a 16 percent chance, at best, of getting into Harvard or Stanford.
The resulting business school application process created a crisis for all of us at Bain. We eyed each other suspiciously for weeks, trying to figure out how we were going to differentiate ourselves from one another. I certainly wasn’t better than my classmates. Many had gone to Harvard, Princeton, or Yale, and many had better performance reviews than me at Bain.
But then it dawned on me. My colleagues may all have had better résumés, but who else was the grandson of the leader of the Communist Party of the United States? No one else, that’s who.
I applied to two schools, Harvard and Stanford, and told them my grandfather’s story. Harvard was quick to reject me, but amazingly, Stanford said yes. I was one of only three Bain employees accepted to Stanford that year.
In late August 1987, I packed up my Toyota Tercel and drove across the country to California. When I got to Palo Alto, I turned right off El Camino Real onto Palm Drive, which led up to Stanford’s main campus. The road was lined with twin rows of palm trees ending at Spanish-style buildings with terra-cotta roofs. The sun was shining, and the sky was blue. This was California, and I felt as if I were arriving in heaven.
I soon learned that it was heaven. The air was clean, the sky was blue, and every day felt as if I were living in some kind of paradise. Everyone at Stanford had killed himself to get there, working eighty-hour weeks at places like Bain, poring over spreadsheets, falling asleep at their desks, sacrificing fun at the altar of success. We were all strivers who had competed against one another for the right to be there, but once we got there, the whole paradigm shifted. Stanford didn’t allow you to show your grades to potential employers. All hiring decisions were made on the basis of interviews and past experience. The upshot of this was that the normal academic competition was replaced with something that none of us expected: an air of cooperation, camaraderie, and friendship. I quickly realized that success at Stanford wasn’t in doing well there, but rather just being there. Everything else was gravy. It was for me, and for every one of my classmates, the best two years of our lives.
Aside from just enjoying the experience, the other purpose of Stanford was to figure out what to do after business school. From the moment we arrived, my classmates and I spent nearly every day going to corporate information sessions, brown-bag lunches, evening receptions, dinners, and interviews trying to choose which job, among thousands available, was the right job.
I went to a standing-room-only Procter & Gamble brown-bag lunch and watched three female junior marketing executives in pleated blue skirts, white shirts, and floppy ties talk in excited corporate jargon about all the fantastic ways they sold soap.
I went to a Trammell Crow cocktail reception. I felt so out of place that I curled my toes in my shoes as smooth-talking, good-looking Texans slapped each other on the back and shot the shit about baseball, big money, and real estate development (which was Trammell Crow’s business).
Then there was the Drexel Burnham Lambert reception where I tried to stay awake as a team of balding bond salesmen with fancy suits droned on about the thrilling world of high-yield bond trading in their Beverly Hills office.
I thought, No, no, and no thank you.
The more I went to these things, the more out of place I felt, and one interview in particular drove it home for me. It was for a summer-associate job at JP Morgan. I didn’t particularly want to work there, but how could I not interview for a job at JP Morgan, one of the top firms on Wall Street?
I went into a small room at the career-management center and was greeted by two tall, square-jawed, broad-shouldered men in their early thirties. One was blond, the other brown-haired, and both wore monogrammed, button-down shirts, dark Brooks Brothers suits, and red suspenders. As the blond one thrust his hand forward, I noticed an expensive-looking Rolex. They each handed me their business card from a small stack on the desk. Their names were something like Jake Chip Brant III and Winthrop Higgins IV.
The interview began with the most standard question: “Why do you want to work at JP Morgan?” I considered answering, Because you invited me and I need a summer job, but I knew that’s not what I was supposed to say. Instead I said, “Because JP Morgan has the best attributes of an investment and commercial bank, and I think that combination is the most compelling formula for success on Wall Street.”
I thought, Did I really just say that? What the hell does that even mean?
Chip and Winthrop didn’t like my answer either. They carried on with some more standard questions and I batted them back with some more similarly insipid answers. Winthrop finished with a softball question, offering me a way to find some common ground. “Bill, can you tell me what sports you played in college?”
This was an easy one—I hadn’t played any sports in college. I was such a nerd that I barely had time to eat and go to the bathroom, let alone play a sport. I said flatly, “Well, none, really . . . but I like skiing and hiking,” hoping that those sports were cool enough for these two guys.
They weren’t. Neither Chip nor Winthrop said another word or bothered to look up from the stack of résumés. The interview was over.
As I walked out of the building, I realized that these guys didn’t care what I said. All they wanted to determine was whether I “fit” the JP Morgan culture. I clearly didn’t.
I made my way to the cafeteria, feeling awkward and dejected. I stood in line, got some food, wandered to a table, and ate distractedly. As I finished my sandwich, my best friend, Ken Hersh, walked in wearing his suit, which was a sign that he too had just gone to some job interview.
“Hey, Ken. Where’ve you been?” I asked.
He pulled out a chair. “Just interviewed with JP Morgan.”
“Really? You must have met Chip and Winthrop too. How’d it go?”
Ken laughed at my nicknames and shrugged. “Not sure. It wasn’t going very well until I told ‘Chip’ that he could use my polo ponies at the club in the Hamptons this summer. Things turned around very nicely from there.” Ken smiled.
He was a short, middle-class Jewish guy from Dallas, Texas. The closest he’d ever been to polo ponies was seeing them on the Ralph Lauren logo at the Galleria mall in Dallas. “How ’bout you?”1
“You and I will be working together, then! I know I’ll get the job for sure since I told ‘Winthrop’ I’d take him sailing on my skiff at the Kennebunkport yacht club.”
Neither Ken nor I got an offer, but from that day forward, Ken called me Chip and I called him Winthrop.
After the JP Morgan experience I couldn’t stop wondering why I subjected myself to being rejected by the Chips and Winthrops of the world. I wasn’t like them and I didn’t want to work for them. I had chosen this direction in life in reaction to my parents and my upbringing, but I couldn’t escape the fact that I was still a Browder.
I then started looking for jobs with some type of personal relevance. I went to a lecture by the head of the United Steelworkers union and loved it. As I listened to him talk, I heard the voice of my grandfather, a man with white hair and a mustache whom I fondly remembered sitting i
n his study, surrounded by books, the sweet smell of pipe tobacco infusing everything. I was so inspired that after the speech I approached the man and asked if he would hire me to help the union negotiate with its exploitative corporate employers. He thanked me for my interest, but said that they only employed steelworkers in the union’s head office.
Undeterred, I looked at other aspects of my grandfather’s life that I might emulate and came up with the idea of Eastern Europe. He had spent an important part of his life in the Soviet Bloc, and his experience there had catapulted him into global significance. If that’s where my grandfather had carved out his niche, then maybe I could too.
In the midst of this soul-searching, I had also started lining up real job offers in the event that my search for utopia didn’t bear fruit. One was with the Boston Consulting Group in its Midwest headquarters in Chicago. I was from Chicago and had worked in consulting at Bain, which meant that I checked all the right boxes for its new recruits.
Only I didn’t want to go back to Chicago, I wanted to get out and see the world—more than that, I wanted to work in the world (what I really wanted was to be Mel Gibson in The Year of Living Dangerously, my favorite movie). In an effort to get me to accept its offer, BCG flew me to Chicago for a “selling day,” where I was joined by other recruits. We were subjected to meeting after meeting with bright-eyed first- and second-year consultants who regaled us with tales of their exciting lives at BCG. It was nice, but I wasn’t buying it.
My last meeting was with the head of the office, Carl Stern. This was meant to be the end of the process, where I would shake the big man’s hand, thank him profusely, and say, “Yes.”
When I entered his office, he said warmly, “So, Bill, what do you think? Will you join us? Everyone here likes you a lot.”
I was flattered, but there was no way I could accept. “I’m really sorry. Your people have made me feel very welcome, but the fact is I can’t see myself living and working in Chicago.”
He was a bit confused, since I hadn’t voiced any objections to Chicago during the interview process. “It’s not BCG, then?”
“No, not exactly.”
He leaned forward. “In that case, please tell me—where would you like to work?”
This was it. If I really could go anywhere, I might as well tell him. “Eastern Europe.”
“Oh,” he said, clearly caught off guard. Nobody had told him that before. He leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling. “Let me think. . . . Yes . . . As I’m sure you know, we don’t have any offices in Eastern Europe, but there’s someone in our London office who specializes in that area named John Lindquist. We can arrange for you to meet him if you think that might change your mind.”
“It might.”
“Great. I’ll figure out when he’s available and we’ll arrange it for you.”
Two weeks later, I was on my way to London.
* * *
1 This is the same Ken Hersh who went on to run Natural Gas Partners, one of the most successful energy private-equity firms in the world.
4
“We Can Get You a Woman to Keep You Warm at Night”
The London offices of BCG were right above the Green Park Tube stop on the Piccadilly Line in the heart of Mayfair. I presented myself at reception and was shown into John Lindquist’s corner office, which resembled that of an absentminded professor, with books and papers stacked everywhere.
When I laid eyes on him, I could immediately see that John was something of an anomaly. An American, he looked like a more refined version of Chip or Winthrop in his Savile Row suit, Hermès tie, and horn-rimmed glasses. But he also had a bookish awkwardness about him. Unlike his blue-blooded juniors at JP Morgan, John had a soft, almost whisperlike voice and never made direct eye contact.
After getting settled in his office he said, “The people in Chicago tell me you want to work in Eastern Europe, right? You’re the first person I’ve ever met at BCG who wants to work there.”
“Yes—believe it or not, that’s what I want to do.”
“Why?”
I told him the story of my grandfather, how he’d lived in Moscow and then returned to the United States and ran for president and became the face of American communism. “I want to do something interesting like him. Something that’s relevant to me and who I am.”
“Well, we’ve never had a communist working at BCG before,” he said with a wink. He straightened. “At the moment, we don’t have anything happening in Eastern Europe, but I’ll tell you what. If you come work here, I promise that the first piece of Eastern European business that comes our way will be yours, right?” I quickly guessed that he said right? at the end of almost every sentence, as if it were a tic.
I couldn’t pinpoint why, but I liked John. I accepted his offer on the spot and became the first employee in BCG’s East European practice group.
I moved to London in August 1989 and rented a small house in Chelsea with two of my Stanford classmates who were also starting new jobs in London. On the first Monday in September, I hopped on the Piccadilly Line with butterflies in my stomach, ready to take on Eastern Europe at BCG.
Only, as John had explained, there wasn’t any work in Eastern Europe—not yet, anyway.
But then, in November of that year, as I sat in my tiny living room watching television with my Stanford buddies, the world shifted beneath my feet. The Berlin Wall had just come down. East and West Germans emerged with sledgehammers and chisels and began breaking it down chunk by chunk. We watched as history unfolded before our eyes. Within weeks, the Velvet Revolution took hold of Czechoslovakia, and the communist government there fell as well.
The dominoes were falling; soon all of Eastern Europe would be free. My grandfather had been the biggest communist in America, and as I watched these events unfold, I decided that I wanted to become the biggest capitalist in Eastern Europe.
My first break came in June 1990 when John popped his head in my office and said, “Hey, Bill, you’re the one who wanted to go to Eastern Europe, right?” I nodded. “Excellent. The World Bank is looking for restructuring advisers to go to Poland—I need you to put together a proposal for turning around a failing Polish bus company, right?”
“Okay, but I’ve never done a proposal before. What should I do?”
“Go to Wolfgang. He’ll tell you.”
Wolfgang. Wolfgang Schmidt. Just hearing his name made my skin crawl.
Wolfgang was a BCG manager who led some of the case teams day to day. He was widely considered one of the most difficult managers to work for in the London office. A thirtysomething Austrian, he enjoyed shouting, forced all-nighters, and chewing up and spitting out young consultants. Nobody wanted to work for him.
But if I really wanted to go to Poland, then I would have to work for Wolfgang. I had never been to his office, but I knew where it was. Everyone did, if for no other reason than to avoid it.
I walked there and found a complete mess—his room was strewn with empty pizza boxes, crunched-up papers, and piles of reports. Wolfgang was hunched over a three-ring binder, running his finger along the page. His sweaty brow glowed in the fluorescent light, and his unkempt hair shot out at different angles. His expensive English shirt was untucked, his bare and round stomach peeking out on one side.
I cleared my throat.
He cocked his head in my direction. “Who’re you?”
“Bill Browder.”
“What do you want? Can’t you see I’m busy?”
I thought that he should have been busy cleaning the sty that passed for his office, but didn’t say as much. “I need to prepare a proposal for a Polish bus company restructuring. John Lindquist told me to talk to you.”
“Christ,” he grumbled. “Listen, Browner, start by finding résumés of BCG consultants who have experience in trucks, buses, cars—whatever you think could be related. Get as many as you can.”
“Okay, should I bring them back to you—”
“Just do
it!” He returned to his binder and resumed reading.
I left his office and went to the library. Flipping through the résumé book, I saw why BCG had such an amazing international reputation. There were people with experience in every field and in every corner of the globe. A team of consultants in the Cleveland office were experts in automobile manufacturing; a group from Tokyo had worked on just-in-time inventory implementation for Japanese car companies; and some consultants in Los Angeles were specialists on operations research. I photocopied these and quickly returned to Wolfgang’s office.
“Back so soon, Brower?”
“It’s Browder, actua—”
“Yeah, yeah. Listen, there’s a couple other Polish assignments coming up as well—the guys doing those proposals will tell you what to do from here. I don’t have time for this. Now if you don’t mind . . .” Wolfgang flicked an open hand at the doorway, indicating I should leave.
I found the other consultants, and thankfully, they were more than happy to lend a hand. Over the next few weeks we made timetables, work plans, and compiled more information about what a great firm BCG was. When we were done, the presentations were so polished and slick that I didn’t see how we could possibly lose. We handed them over to John, who submitted them to the World Bank, and we all waited.
Two months later, Wolfgang came by my office looking uncharacteristically cheerful and put together. “Bill, pack your bags. You’re going to Poland.”
“We won?”
“We did indeed. Now the real work begins.”
I was elated. “Should I start calling the experts we put in the proposal to make sure they can come to Poland as well?”
Wolfgang furrowed his eyebrows. “What are you talking about? Of course not. You’re the only one who’s going to be working on this case.” He clapped his hand on the doorframe, turned, and stomped off.
