Monkey Business

by John Rolfe

  So there we were. Me, clueless about what investment banking was but willing to cut off my left nut to receive a coveted summer job offer, and Troob, an ex-analyst who knew exactly what he was getting himself into but who needed something to believe in. We both needed a vision to follow, something to aspire to. We needed a dream.

  The dream was to overcome untold obstacles, become wildly successful, and have fun getting there. The vision was to stand like a giant among mere mortals. We would shoot for the stars and at least land on the moon. We would walk into the Ferrari dealership and say, “I’ll buy that one.” The salesperson would say, “But that’s over one—“ and we would cut him off and say, “Whatever it is, I’ll take it.” We would be rich, powerful, intellectually challenged, and happy—all by the time we were thirty. We were going to live the high life. We just knew it.

  With these dreams burning in our souls we both decided to interview for any and all of the investment banking jobs out there. Lehman, Goldman, Salomon, DLJ, Merrill, First Boston, Morgan, Bear—we were coming to join the investment banking parade and travel down streets paved with gold.

  Interviews

  and Ecstasy

  Hello, sucker!

  —Texas Guinan, greeting to nightclub patrons

  Troob and I knew that there were some basic things that we had to get done in order to begin turning our dreams into reality. Step number one was the interview process. Troob’s experience interviewing was extremely different than mine because he knew the ropes, but interviewing was stressful for the both of us. Let’s just say that Troob was stressed about different things than I.

  Before going to business school, I had worked at Kidder Peabody as an investment banking analyst. I knew what buttons to push in order to get a rise from the I-banking recruiters. However, this was now the big time. This was the interview process for the real thing—a summer associate position that any idiot in business school knew turned into the opportunity for a full-time offer and a real job. As they said in business school, “Not just a job, but the first step on your career path.” The pressure was palpable.

  At HBS the entire interview process lasted one weekend, three days. It was amazing. We went through this months-long process of presentations, cocktail parties, and question-and-answer sessions to get to know all the different companies, but then the part that really mattered, the interviews, got squeezed into one long weekend. For a prime recruit, that meant that you were gunning for five, six, even seven different jobs in a single weekend. Here’s how the weekend usually played out.

  Friday was initial screening day. You either squirmed by and got to round two, which was on Saturday, or else you got dinged. The interviews on Saturday were usually two-on-one interviews. These sucked. Two people instead of just one made you feel insecure for half an hour. If you passed this stage you got to interview on the big day—Sunday. On Sunday, you could potentially have three interviews with the same firm. Many of these interviews were three-on-ones and four-on-ones. Questions got shot at you like darts and you either had to catch the dart head-on and answer the question or you had to scramble like a scared rabbit to avoid the question because you didn’t know what the hell the interviewer was getting at.

  Finally, Sunday night arrived and if you were lucky enough to have had an interview during the day it was possible that you would get called and asked to join the firm for the summer. Sometimes, if enough people decided to reject offers from a particular firm, the firm would call people that they had interviewed on Saturday but had dismissed and would then offer them jobs. Yes, these reusable Saturday interviewees knew that they were the second choice, but because they needed a coveted investment banking summer job they took what they could get. It wasn’t the means that was important, it was the end that counted.

  I gave the same shameless pitch to each and every bank. The pitch went something like this:

  “I was an analyst at Kidder and I know that I’ll have to work long hours, but I’m ready, willing, and able. I’ll be able to hit the ground running and your firm is the one that I really want to work for. You guys have a great reputation and I would be honored to be part of your team. I’m eager, able, and ready to work for you. I know the reputations of the firms because I worked on Wall Street before and I know that your firm is a good fit for me. I liked what I did as an analyst and I really want to go back into investment banking as an associate for a premier firm like yours.”

  I had to bite my tongue at times. However, this was the epitome of one bullshitter bullshitting another bullshitter, and usually it worked.

  The first interviews were on campus in these little interview rooms. I was able to get through the first round of interviews unscathed. I moved on to the second round with all of the investment banks. Now the fun began and the pressure mounted. The bullshit wouldn’t work as well in the second round. In this round I needed to look and act sincere, and tell them what they wanted to hear. I was nervous.

  The second and third rounds of interviews were held off campus in hotel rooms. When I entered the room for my interview with Bear, Stearns, there were two bankers sitting there facing me. To their right was a king-size bed. In front of them was a chair for the interviewee to sit in. There was a sealed window behind them that overlooked a courtyard, and a bathroom behind them off to the right. It was a pretty standard hotel room. The air-conditioning was humming and the room was kind of chilly. One of the interviewers stood up and said, “Hi, I’m Mike and I’m a managing director in the Utilities Group. This is my colleague Joanne, a vice president in the Real Estate Group. Peter, please sit down.”

  I sat down, and Mike continued. “When you worked at Kidder Peabody, did you like it?”

  A layup question to start the interview. No problem. Any well-trained baboon could answer it. I should have leaned over and given Mike a big kiss. “Yes, I liked my time at Kidder Peabody,” I began confidently, “I learned a lot and I want to continue in the investment banking business.”

  “Well,” Mike said, “why do you want to continue in the investment banking business? Is it the money or the challenge?”

  Ahh, shit. This was one of those questions where no matter what I said I’d be wrong. If I said the money, then I’d look like a greedy little bastard. If I said the challenge, then they’d know that I was full of crap. I was already treading water on the full-of-shit category due to my answer to the first question. They had to know that there was no way anybody could have ever enjoyed being an analyst. The clock was ticking. The extended pause conveyed my indecision.

  I could see my chances at Bear slipping away, and my nervousness had sunk down into my stomach. I felt a sharp pang in my gut. I said, “May I use your bathroom, please?”

  “Certainly.”

  My stomach was growling. I was so nervous. This was my first second-round interview. I walked past Mike and Joanne into the bathroom. The question still hung in the air. The pain in my side was excruciating. As quick as Flash Gordon, I had my pants around my ankles. I experienced a moment of anticipation, a flood of relief, then complete bliss. However, the breaking winds were a little loud. I knew that it would stink up the whole room within minutes and that there was no window to open. It was not easy keeping a straight face when I came out of that bathroom. I walked past Mike and Joanne again and sat down in the interviewee chair. I lamely answered their question and said, “Both the challenge and the money.” Then I proceeded to finish answering all of their remaining questions. We all pretended not to notice the rotten egg smell surrounding us. I knew that I had no chance to get asked to the next round.

  The worst part of this interview was that I knew that they knew that I did it. It wasn’t like when three strangers are in an elevator and one farts and no one except the culprit knows who farted. This was clear. I went to the bathroom and stunk up the joint. However, the next interviewee would probably think that one of the interviewers from Bear, Stearns took the crap. That made me feel good.

  My second-round inter
view with Goldman Sachs was held in the same hotel. The Goldman interviewers sat me at a long table. They must have made a special request to have this table put into the room because no hotel operator in their right mind would have put a table of this size into this particular hotel room. The two interviewers sat on either end and I sat in the middle. I couldn’t see both of them at the same time so I had to keep turning my head back and forth like I was at a tennis match. This was a real pain in the ass, and I knew that they had set the room up that way on purpose.

  In that interview I screwed it up when they asked me if I thought I had been a good analyst or an excellent analyst. I first thought, damn, another one of these catch-22 questions. If I say “excellent,” then I’m a pompous jerk. If I say “good,” then they’ll ask me what my shortcomings are. I sheepishly said, “Excellent?” Both of the interviewers paused and a hush filled the room. They were looking for the “I was good, a team player, and always looking to improve myself” answer. Actually, I knew that they were looking for the “good and team player” answer. The “excellent” answer made me look pompous, and Goldman didn’t want that. I felt like a schmuck for screwing up the question when I knew what they wanted to hear.

  Well, I knew that was the end of my chances at Goldman. It was that quick. One screw up and I was out. The interview process is a pressure game, and in order to succeed you have to be a pressure player. Goldman wanted “good and improving” and I gave them “excellent.” That was it. I was dinged. At least I didn’t shit in their bathroom. Maybe I should have.

  I interviewed Friday, Saturday, and then again Sunday with DLJ. The interviews went well. The most entertaining interview with them came on Sunday, when I met with Blake Randolph, Greg Weinstein, and Frank Alario.

  Blake Randolph’s nickname was Face Man. That was because he was tall, good looking, and a smooth talker. Blake looked like a GQ model, and he was always the guy out on the front lines pitching the business. He was damned good at it.

  Greg Weinstein was a jack-of-all-trades at DLJ. Weinstein didn’t think his shit stank. Many people in the firm wanted to whack Greg upside the head. I would soon learn that his nickname was the Widow, as in the black widow spider, because a black widow spider kills her lover immediately after fucking it.

  Frank Alario was Mr. Nice Guy. We called him Sweetcheeks. All the junior bankers loved Sweetcheeks because he was really, truly nice. That made him a prized commodity. However, Sweetcheeks had to compete with guys whose cheeks weren’t as sweet as his, and this sometimes posed an interesting dilemma for him.

  I sat down and Blake said, “How about those Knicks?”

  I knew a lot about the Knicks and we hit it off. We talked about Charles Oakley and whether the Knicks should trade him. We talked about Ewing and whether it would be his last chance at a championship. The conversation went on. An hour went by and we were still talking about the Knicks. Finally, Weinstein said, “We’ve only got five more minutes. So, do you think that you were a good analyst or an excellent analyst?”

  It was the same question that Goldman had asked me. But this time Greg Weinstein was asking the question. I could already tell that he was a pompous ass. I was ready. The answer was obvious.

  “I was excellent,” I said. For the Widow that was the right answer. I knew that I had a good chance of getting an offer.

  On late Sunday night, I got the call from DLJ.

  “Hey, Pete, it’s Blake Randolph. You’re the man. You’re a great guy and we want to talk to you. Before we discuss what we have to ask you, though, do you have any other offers from any other investment banks?”

  They wanted to know if I had any other offers to corroborate their belief that I was a suitable candidate to work at their firm. If I had no other offers, then I was a dud and they, too, should think of me as a loser and not worthy of working for them. It was a weird, insecure game the investment banks played.

  “Yes, two others,” I said. I actually only had one other offer and one pending, but I wanted them to think that I was a desirable candidate. They took the bait and the heavy ammunition came out. The mating dance was stepped up a notch. And now they didn’t just want to mate, they wanted to make passionate love.

  “Well, we want you to work for DLJ. You’ll get paid the best here and you’ll be treated well. Come on, jump aboard. You’re our favorite guy. We can see you really excelling at DLJ. You remind me of Les Newton [a very young and very successful banker]. Yes, you could move ahead quickly. We’re also thinking of paying more this summer. Maybe a stipend or a bonus at the end of the year.”

  More money. That was good, especially because I was paying for business school and I needed the cash. DLJ was an up-and-coming investment bank known for its aggressive style and above-market compensation. The top brass were young, and I figured that rapid acceleration through the ranks at DLJ was achievable. Unlike some of the larger firms such as Salomon, Lehman, and Merrill, DLJ was a lean, mean, overpaying hotshot machine. I thought that I would fit right in. “OK,” I said. I was in.

  That was it. It all happened so fast. It sounds sort of anticlimactic, but it’s the truth. I truly had no idea what I was in for even though I’d been an analyst before. With this one-minute conversation, I had sealed my fate for a summer job as well as for permanent employment after business school. I had made a career choice. I thought that I was on my way to heaven.

  Troob knew the game, that was his advantage. I didn’t, which meant that the path I took in order to catch the brass ring was a little bit more circuitous. While the usual suspects like Troob were getting slotted for interviews with every imaginable bank, the career-changers like me were fighting for the remaining scraps. We had to become banking whores—sending our résumés to absolutely every bank with the hope of landing that elusive summer associate employment opportunity. As for me, the distribution of over forty résumés and cover letters had landed me exactly three interviews: one with a money management firm and two with investment banks—First Boston and DLJ. The grand plan of heading back to business school, landing a great summer job, and then moving on to greater glories after graduation had begun to crumble before my eyes.

  By the time I rolled into my interview with DLJ, the crumbling of the dream was one step closer to being complete. I’d already punted on my first two interviews. The First Boston interview had taken a turn for the worse when it became clear to the interviewers that I had no idea what an investment banker actually did. I was promptly dismissed from their hiring roster. I’d always assumed that I could figure out that piece of the puzzle later on, but they saw it differently. Following that debacle, I concluded that my only shot at redemption would be to play it straight—admit that I was ignorant to the ways of Wall Street but was willing and able to learn quickly. I could tell them that I had the tools but not the instructions. I thought that I might be able to pitch naïveté as an advantage, a fresh perspective in a jaded investment banking world.

  It worked. At least for a while.

  I walked into my first-round interview with DLJ and, by a stroke of good fortune, happened to be face-to-face with two of the firm’s more deviant personalities. The first was Yves DesChamps, whom I’d later come to learn was known within DLJ as the Antibanker. The second was Rod Ferramo, an associate. Now at the time, there was no way I could have known who was facing me, but later it would all become clear.

  Yves was fifty-five. He was a former disc jockey, and most people within DLJ thought that he had made his way into the investment banking world through a completely random series of events. I’d later learn that nothing he ever did was random. Yves was thinning out up top but had grown out the hair on the sides and back of his head just long enough to put it into a ponytail. Yves was a flashy dresser. The day I met him, he was wearing an Armani suit and a bright red Sulka tie. He looked like Steven Seagal meets Wall Street and I couldn’t tell if he wouldn’t just as soon kick my ass as interview me.

  I’d later learn that Yves was known as a connoisseu
r of “dance clubs,” those establishments whose primary goal is the satisfaction of the fundamental male needs, and whose employees’ primary goal is the extraction from the patrons of as much money as possible in the shortest feasible amount of time. To most, they may be known as strip joints or titty bars, but to Yves they were always the “dance clubs.” It lent, I suppose, just the right panache for a banker who wanted to take part in their goings-on. I was later told that Yves’s infatuation with dance clubs went so far as to entail his having a custom-designed computer database containing the names, addresses, and qualitative attributes of dance clubs worldwide, all indexed by city. The database allowed him to begin planning his evenings before ever arriving in a city, and ensured that he would never be far from a nicely siliconed young lady.

  As I walked into the interview room, Yves and Rod were sitting back with their feet up on the interview table, plowing their way through a large plate of fruit.

  “Hi, I’m John Rolfe. Nice to meet you.”

  “Hi, John, I’m Yves DesChamps. This is Rod Ferramo. I hope you don’t mind if we eat while you’re talking.”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Why don’t you tell us a little bit about why you want to go into banking.”

  “I’m a masochist.”