Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette

Salomon Brothers, if you remember them, big important Wall Street firm at the time.

DLJ was another one where, where I interviewed.

But once Goldman made me the offer, it was very clear that that's where I wanted to go, and so, and so ended up there and really had a great experience all the way around.

It's, it's an amazing place.

So they should do well longer term, as long as they don't spend too much money on number one, data centers, number two, acquisitions.

And Safra Katz, who was the CFO, she was hired from DLJ in 1999 or 2000.

She's a brilliant financial engineer.

What she did was she pioneered the acquisition model for Oracle.

And I had the opportunity, anyone who got a job at the investment banks this summer, I think there were 20 or 25 of us, had a lunch club where we got to meet the head CEOs of Goldman, like Weinberg and Whitehead.

We got to meet Dick Jenred from DLJ.

And so we would have lunch with them.

And one thing I found out from these meetings and these lunches is that, and Bobby, you know me well, I really like numbers, but I also like to laugh.

And so you read a bunch of good books and you're like, it seems interesting, but I don't really understand Value creation.

I mean, how can you when you're just out of undergrad? So what I love that I was at places like Hanbrecht and Quist, which was bought, and DLJ, Dalsloch and Generat, which was bought.

And then I started my own investment bank with another buddy in small, a group of 30 of us in New York and London, Washington, different places.

But I think what I learned was, or it was actually... why was one company so much more successful than the other if they're penciling out the same in the model, right? Everyone told me all of life's answers were found in Excel.

It was the first New York Stock Exchange firm that had just gone public.

It was called Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette.

Bill Donaldson actually founded the School of Management after and that was because this is a financial markets course.

That was quite interesting for me because I didn't even know what common stock was when I graduated.

I was asked about the demise of stockbrokers and financial advisors because all of the discount houses were coming into play, the

Ameritrade, the E-Trades, DLJ Directs,

all that stuff.

And I'm like, what? What do you mean? Like, oh, you know, people are going to go do this stuff on their own.

Wow.

At DLJ, where he traded mortgage and asset-backed products.

So that's a complete profile of capital markets there, Dean.

Don't forget, I had a military career before that.

So if you're a very large asset manager and you get a big allocation of bonds and the bonds tighten 30, 40 basis points, You're probably going to take some things off the table.

So yes, they look to diversify their funding books away from the top 50 to 75.

And that's what we did at DLJ.

That's what Rob Carr, head of capital markets at Prudential with their middle markets group.

Tiny, a research boutique.

Wall Street, half-mockingly, calls them the Jewish DLJ.

Now watch what happens over the next 20 years, because this is the pattern.

The whole rest of the story is this pattern, over and over, getting bigger each time.

[inhales] All right.

"Oracle," big software company, it used to have its headquarters down the road here in Redwood City, now it's in Texas, "is firing again, and they're facing some inner issues, and are they really a big part of the pyramid of AI?" Yeah, so one, one of the issues with, with Oracle, there's a, a brilla- a brilliant investment banker, uh, from DLJ named Safra Catz that joined, uh, decades ago.

Uh, and what she did, she finds-- she re- reengineered the company to be an acquisition machine.

They made massive acquisitions every year.