I never met Bruce Wasserstein but he had a strong influence on my early career as an investment banker and I had a huge admiration for him from afar. Sadly, he died yesterday at 61. He helped turn First Boston into the investment bank of the 1980's (famously one year, a third of Yale Business School applied for a job at First Boston) and a huge M&A powerhouse.
Alas, they wouldn't hire me out of Columbia so I ended up joining PaineWebber instead. But less than a year after I joined, Wasserstein took a whole bunch of folks out of First Boston and started a new bank, Wasserstein Perella (he wanted more control than anyone would give him at First Boston). First Boston responded by hiring whole groups out of other investment banks to help rebuild its practice. My four person group at PaineWebber was one of those groups and in February 1988, I found myself working for the storied firm (and in M&A, no less).
The legend of Bruce permeated every thing I did for the three years I was there. I learned a lot about deal making from him without ever once meeting him.
To Mr. Wasserstein, deal-making was a chess game, one ripe for unusual strategies — that often came at high cost. Never one to easily lose a deal, he often urged clients to reach deep into their pocketbooks to win, often stroking their egos with what became known as his “Dare to be Great” speech. Critics bestowed upon him a sobriquet he detested: Bid-’em-Up Bruce.
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