Why I Left Goldman Sachs: A Wall Street Story (26 page)

But there was none of that. Instead, she smiled and (very unexpectedly) said, “How would you feel about moving to London?”

She looked especially pleased with herself, as if she were presenting me with a terrific gift. But my heart sank immediately. I had no desire to move. I loved New York, I loved America, and I thought I was doing well in my career here. The environment was tough, but I felt I could succeed.

My face must’ve betrayed my unhappiness. “I’d never really thought about it,” I said.

“We’re going to start a U.S. equity derivatives business in Europe,” she said excitedly, “and we think you might be the right guy to go start it. We think you’re at the right point in your career. You’re responsible, you have a lot of experience in derivatives, and we think you’re enough of a grown-up that you’ll be able to travel the Continent and the Middle East and do a good job for us figuring out this business.”

I wasn’t as excited as she was. Beth now found herself in the unwelcome position of trying to foist a prize on an ingrate. Her smile hardened. “We could have chosen anyone for this,” she said.

Just then, Mr. Cleanse walked in. As coheads of the group, he and Beth shared a big office. Remembering that he had been previously stationed in the London office, I said, “Conti, you spent six years in London. What do you think about this?”

Beth was looking unhappier by the second. It suddenly occurred to me that she had met with me solo, rather than together with Cleanse, because she was trying to show me that she was the one who’d thought of me for this role, the one who’d put me forward and put herself on the line. She wanted gratitude, she wanted ownership, and she wasn’t getting it.

Mr. Cleanse sat down. “Dude, this is a great opportunity,” he said. He was a salesperson, and he was selling me. “I understand you’re happy here, but this could be a good thing for your career.”

But as he talked, I felt more and more shell-shocked. Beth was talking about a three-year commitment. The first thing that came to my mind was my hope and plan to move my mother to the States from Johannesburg, which was crime-ridden and dangerous. The plan had been in motion for a couple of years. I’d helped move my sister over to America; my dad had by now passed his pharmacy exam and moved over. But my mother was hesitating. My transferring to London could throw a wrench into the works.

“Look, most of my family live here,” I said.

“But you’re a single guy,” Cleanse said. “How hard could it be? London is only seven hours away.”

I shook my head. “I don’t know,” I said. “I really need time to think about this—I’m not sure it’s up my alley.”

Beth frowned. “You really need to tell me if you’re serious about this,” she said. “I’m not going to send you over there to meet with Daffey [who was now in charge of Securities division sales in the London office and Global Head of Equity Sales] if you’re not. There are a lot of other people who want to do this job—in fact, would kill to do this job.”

As fate would have it, a fairly close acquaintance of mine from the London office, a managing director named Georgette, was in New York that week. I invited her out to lunch to ask her what she thought.

I’d known Georgette since we were both junior analysts, and we’d come up together as futures traders, talking on the phone almost every day. She usually came to the States twice a year, so we’d met a number of times. She was dark-haired and striking, always elegantly dressed. Cleanse had mentored her in London; rumor had it that she was more Cleanse than Cleanse himself. Word had also crossed the Atlantic that she’d become a vicious boss and ruthlessly power-hungry, with a penchant for trying to get colleagues fired or transferred—one MD had dubbed her the Black Widow. I found all this strange: Georgette and I had always respected each other and gotten along well.

When I mentioned Beth’s offer at lunch, Georgette seemed taken aback. I assumed she’d been in the loop on the offer, possibly even involved in deciding who should get the job, but it was now clear that she wasn’t senior enough to know about it. She clearly didn’t like hearing about it for the first time from me, and she tried to save face: “Well, I’d heard some rumblings about this,” she said. I would also find out, soon enough, that she was threatened by the idea of someone moving in on her territory.

At the moment, however, I trusted her enough to be honest with her. I told her about my family situation and my reservations about the transfer. I said I was afraid I’d reacted badly to Beth’s offer.

Georgette appeared completely calm and reasonable—it was hard to imagine how she could have gotten her evil-sounding nickname. “Well, I also would have reacted badly,” she said. “If you’re shocked with something like that, what are you supposed to do?”

When I came to work the next morning, Corey Stevens came by my desk and said, “I’ve got to see you immediately.” He pulled me into a room and shut the door. “You really, really fucked up with Beth,” he said.

“I thought she was unhappy,” I said, “but I didn’t know she was that unhappy.”

“This is very serious,” Corey said. “You gave her the impression you weren’t grateful; that was insulting to her. This could be big trouble. You don’t want to be on her bad side, because she’s not someone who forgives easily. You need to figure this out quickly. You need to either unwind this thing very quickly and say, ‘I’m sorry, family issues, I’m not able to do this,’ or very quickly and diplomatically and sincerely apologize to her and say you want to really consider it seriously, and you’re grateful that she thought of you, and that she’s gone out on a limb to recommend you when she could have recommended anyone.”

I later found out that Corey had been considered for, and wanted, the job. But he was an MD by now and was deemed slightly too senior to leave his post in New York. Now he was looking out for me.

Then came the groveling.

Putting my family worries on hold for the moment, I decided to give this opportunity serious consideration—or at least make a very good show of doing so—and eat humble pie.

The problem was, Beth wouldn’t let me. She was a major league grudge holder, and I’d clearly pissed her off big time. Every time I asked her for ten minutes, she looked at me as if I were a fly on her food. “Speak to Brigitta, my assistant,” she’d say. “Try to see if you can get some time.”

Finally, after she’d decided I’d squirmed and sweated sufficiently—and since her desk on the trading floor was only four seats from mine, she had a very good view—she budged. When she was off the desk and in her office, I got an e-mail from her saying, “I have a few minutes now.” I was on the phone with a client. I got off. When I walked into her office, I found her staring distractedly at her terminal. “Take a seat,” she said. I sat. Then she looked at me, stone-faced. “So what’s up?” she asked.

My move. There was no way forward but to tell the truth—humbly. “Look,” I said. “I realize I didn’t act in a way that showed how grateful I was to you. But once Corey explained how far out on a limb you went for me, I began to understand what a big deal this was.” Mentioning Corey was purposeful. She knew he was my mentor, and I knew that she and he were close. And I was telling her the truth. Corey had made it clear that she really had extended herself on my behalf. According to him, she had actually told Daffey, “Greg is the guy we want to send.”

I admitted that the idea of leaving New York had seemed shocking at first. I told her how much I loved the city. I told her I did have some family issues, repeated that most of my family lived here in America, but didn’t spell out the situation in great detail. “But,” I said, “now that I’ve thought about this, I am excited, and I just want to ask you to give me another chance. I’d love to go over there and meet the people in the London office. I’ll give it the most serious possible consideration and look at it as a potentially great opportunity.”

It was a pretty stirring speech, but Beth still had her poker face on. She didn’t want to let me off the hook just yet. “You know, I have to tell you, I was really taken aback by how you reacted,” she told me.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was just really shocked by the thought of moving to another country. It was a human reaction. I understand I didn’t convey the right sense of appreciation.”

But she wasn’t giving an inch. Still, she nodded to show she’d heard me. “Let me speak to Conti,” she said, referring to Mr. Cleanse. “Let me think about it a little bit more, and then we’ll let you know.” Just a few days earlier, I’d been her fair-haired boy. Now, for all I knew, she had ruled me out.

That night I had dinner with a client who was in town from overseas and, oddly enough, Mr. Cleanse ended up coming along. It was just four of us—the president of the New York office of the client, the client’s head of trading, Cleanse, and me—at a three-star Italian restaurant called Alto, in Midtown. Poking mild fun at me, Cleanse brought up my table tennis history. It turned out that the client trader was a good player, so, strangely, we talked about that for quite a while. Mr. Cleanse couldn’t get enough of it. The evening flowed freely, and was mostly social, with little shop talk. In an effort to impress everyone at the table, Cleanse ordered a $400 bottle of wine—significantly over the Goldman Sachs allowance. (He would end up paying for it out of pocket.) At the end of the night, he sent me an e-mail saying, “Great dinner—well done, well organized.” The London opportunity never came up.

Two days later, though, Beth said, “All right, get your visa. We’re going to send you over to meet some people.” It was no longer “We think you’re the right guy for this”; the strong implication was that I would have to win London over. It was all right with me. Beth wanted to put some pressure on me and exact some further revenge, not to mention save face. I was very deferential. I even asked her for advice about the different personalities in the London office. I could sense her warming ever so slightly.

Before I left, I had another conversation with Corey. “All right, you almost blew it,” he said. “Now you’ve made it all the way back to neutral. Beth’s not sold on you; Daffey isn’t, either. You’re going to have to go over there and really crush it with London. You’re going to have to sell them on why you’re the right person, and what you see as the opportunity.”

My suspicion meter flickered a little at that. How could Corey have known that Daffey wasn’t sold on me? Had Beth put him up to saying this? But it was clear that he was trying to light a fire under my ass.

“And by the way,” Corey said, looking me in the eye, “you should want this.” He mentioned the example of the guy who had expensed the ChapStick, who was doing in New York the same job I was being considered for in London. “Look what happened to ChapStick,” Corey said. “He was nowhere, and he took this role, and now he’s on the partner track. The same could happen to you. This wouldn’t just put you on the managing director track. If you get this right, this puts you on the partner track. The fact that Daffey and all these partners are focused on this—this is no joke.”

So I got on a plane and headed to London. One thing I hadn’t told anybody: I’d never been there before. I didn’t want to look like a rookie or anything.

American Airlines, business class, red-eye. I arrived early in the morning to a typically rainy, gray London day. The sky looked bleak: low-hanging clouds, no visibility. I went outside to stand in the drizzle and wait for a cab. I had arrived a day early so I could see my brother, who’d been in London for a few months, working as a lawyer—a nice coincidence. I also wanted to rest a bit: I needed to bring my A-game to the office the following day.

“Where to, guv’nor?” the cabbie inquired, in his Cockney accent.

“I’m going to the One Aldwych Hotel, please,” I answered, in my South African accent.

“One
the
Aldwych, is it?” he said, adding a
the
right in the middle of the name. “No problem, guv.”

I felt like I was in a movie. The cab ride cost £120, the equivalent of almost $190, and took more than an hour. I was glad Goldman Sachs was paying. (I would later learn that taking a cab was a rookie mistake: the Heathrow Express train gets you in to London in fifteen minutes.)

The position I was being considered for was head of U.S. Equity Derivatives Sales in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa—which meant I would be selling options, swaps, derivatives, and other products to foreign hedge funds, mutual funds, sovereign wealth funds, and asset management firms. In the beginning, I would have to build the business, but Beth and Mr. Cleanse had told me that, within a year, I could probably hire another person if I found the business that I believed was there. My title would be executive director, the equivalent of vice president in New York.

I was scheduled to meet with nineteen people over two days in London, mostly managing directors and partners: my assignment was to persuade them, one by one, that I was the right guy for the job. If and only if I managed to do so, I would get a twentieth and final meeting, this time with Michael Daffey.

The audition would be strange.

The weather outside was cold and rainy, but the action on the trading floor at the Goldman Sachs offices on Fleet Street was hot and heavy: intense, dramatic, in your face. The offices were housed in two adjacent buildings, Peterborough Court and River Court, connected by a sky bridge. Both buildings had belonged to newspapers and dated to the early 1900s. The trading floor was noticeably smaller than its New York counterpart, with a significantly lower ceiling, and the traders and salespeople were squashed more tightly together. As a result, the place possessed a kind of compressed energy, a tension you could feel immediately—more a submarine than an aircraft carrier. The trading floor at 200 West Street was massive; people were spread out as far as the eye could see. When they interacted, they usually observed the social niceties. Goldman Sachs’s London office had different sorts of niceties.

The dress code, for example. Daffey and other partners in the London office loved tossing around the time-honored phrase “Dress British, think Yiddish”—the latter a nod to the firm’s Jewish roots, the former an accurate description of sartorial styles at 120 Fleet Street. Suits were big at Goldman London. Everyone wore them, and everyone seemed to have a lot of them. The big hitters got theirs custom-made on Savile Row (at close to £5,000 a pop); the lesser hitters (like me) got them either from Asia or from an Italian tailor, Gianni, who came through town once a month. Typical dress for a Goldman London guy was a bespoke suit and a tieless dress shirt (Turnbull & Asser, Thomas Pink, or Charles Tyrwhitt) with the top two buttons open, so at least a little bit of chest hair was showing.

Patterns were big. People wore checked, striped, and windowpane suits. Colors were big. Neckties, when worn, made a strong statement: green and purple were popular. Basically, anything went, as long as it was stylish. In the much less fashion-forward New York office, you couldn’t get away with most of this stuff, especially wearing a suit with no tie. “Casual Friday” in New York meant khakis and a polo shirt. In London, it meant coming in to the office in whatever you’d worn to the club the night before. A couple times I saw people come straight to the office, sleepless, from having been out all night: women in low-cut dresses, guys in jeans and ripped T-shirts. London made its own rules.

The various desks there were organized by nationality. There was an Italian group, a French group, a German group, and a Scandinavian group—not to mention several UK-focused groups. As a result, the trading floor was like a microcosm of Europe itself: each area had its own distinctive sensibility. Between them, language difficulties, cross-border arguments, and frequent misunderstandings, often expressed at high volume, played out constantly.

A managing director who had encouraged my first attempts at writing market commentary was my “friendly” in London. He took me out for breakfast at a private club in the basement of the Lutyens restaurant, across the street from the Goldman offices, to give me the lay of the land. Over omelets, he looked through my schedule and prepped me for each meeting, giving me some insight into who the tough characters were, who would be most supportive. This was extremely helpful. I knew all the names; I had done my homework; but he had worked alongside all of them, sometimes butted heads with them.

He gave me some more background about the position I was being considered for. He confirmed that it was a senior role, and that at least two MDs, including Corey, had been considered for it. But my South African background was in my favor, he said; management saw it as potentially helping me bond with overseas clients. And because they weren’t exactly sure what the total business opportunity was, they thought it might be too risky to bring an MD over. They saw my level (VP) and experience as ideal, he told me.

He also warned me a bit about moving to a new office. He had done it three times: from New York to Tokyo to Hong Kong to London. “You’ve got to think this through,” he said. “There are pros and cons. Every time you go to a new office, you’re starting from the beginning in terms of new people. You have to impress them; you can’t rely on your reputation.” He wasn’t trying to discourage me; he had no agenda. He was very close with Corey—to some extent, I think he was taking it upon himself to look after me a bit while I was there.

I asked him if I should try to squeeze the firm a bit, to make them realize how much of a sacrifice this was for me. Maybe I could get some kind of financial guarantee from them?

“They’re not going to do that,” he said. “At best, they’ll give you an expat package.” I had heard something about this before, but wasn’t exactly sure what it was. He explained that the expat package was a salary supplement to compensate for the United Kingdom’s higher income taxes and the brutal exchange rate. But it was strictly discretionary on management’s part, and given only in rare instances. I knew how management was thinking: they didn’t need to give me anything; they’d already be giving me a great opportunity by moving me to London. The benefit for me was potentially to get on the partner track. They were saying, “Here’s a whole world of business. Go get it.”

And I believed the business was there. I felt more and more excited about the opportunity. From the moment I arrived, I saw that the priorities there were so misaligned that there were major efficiencies to be created and much new business to find. At the time, Goldman Sachs in Europe was focused almost exclusively on structured products. Goldman would never have admitted this to clients, but internally they felt that salespeople should be going after only big, high-margin business—elephant trades. The sales force was ignoring day-to-day, flow business—what Goldman Europe called “low-margin business.” At times, they were turning clients away. I saw a wide-open field. All I had to do was go there and start selling plain-vanilla options, swaps, and derivatives to clients whom Goldman Europe seldom called on, and this new business would very quickly add up to what I estimated to be north of $20 million above and beyond the business we were already doing there.

The people I met with over my two-day speed-dating round, mostly the head honchos in sales and trading, were also a cross-section: English, Dutch, Swiss, Belgian. Each twenty- to thirty-minute meeting had a yin-yang to it: I had to convince each manager why I was right for the position, but he or she had to convince me why it was a good opportunity. What remained unsaid was that, as a newcomer, I represented a certain threat to the status quo. It was interesting to see how various people reacted to this. One Dutch MD told me, in his heavily accented English, “This is not a very good opportunity at all. I really don’t think there’s much business to do here.” And then there were people who said, “This is a great opportunity. We don’t spend much time on this business.” After I got back to New York, one of the people I’d met with sent me an e-mail that read, “Dude, when are you coming over? We have a whole world to conquer together.”