Finance and City with a lot of Tenacity!

It was the fall of 2002 and I had just moved to NYC. I had majored in Finance and International Business at Wash U. and had dreams of being an investment banker (back then that was the cool job to get). The dot-com bubble had burst and jobs not being in high supply were an understatement. I had my heart (and societal pressure) set on getting a high profile job and landed in NYC with 1 contact who I met within the first week I was in town. He didn’t have a job for me, but introduced me to 2 others that might be hiring. Two became four, four became eight and pretty soon I had been rejected almost 50 times in just over two months

At this point I could tell going into a meeting how it was going to go based on the coffee order — if it was an espresso, I was lucky to get 5 minutes to plead my case and if it was a large latte I had a bit more time to develop a relationship. In either event I usually knew within 2 minutes a rejection was coming and so my only hope was to ensure I could get another introduction out of it. I remained confident in myself, knowing that it was a case of them, not me, otherwise, why would they be making introductions for me (or so I thought)?

The two month mark came and went and I received a call from my parents telling me that if didn’t have a job by the end of the third month I would need to come back to San Diego and move back in with them. My apartment at $900 a month was officially eating into all my bar mitzvah savings and the $5 matzo ball soup from 2nd ave deli — big enough for both lunch and dinner — was also depleting my funds…

The next day, a Monday morning I showed up at the office of a temp agency to put myself at their mercy. True to form, they introduced me to Fischer Francis Trees & Watts, a fixed income firm, where I began the interview process. One interview led to the next and on my fourth and final interview I was told I had the job. This was Thursday at 12:00PM and they gave me 30 hours to get back to them. I left their office — above Grand Central Station with a skip in my step! I had done it! I had a high paying job, making $36,000/year — more then enough for me to live on in NYC.

As soon as I hit Park Avenue a thought occurred to me about a cold e-mail I had sent to a boutique investment bank the week prior. They were brought to my attention from one of my coffee interactions, Stefan Dulak, and the response I had received from them was like many rejections I had received to date — “Thank you for your interest in Finacity. We are in the process of management restructuring and are not hiring at this time”. Their offices were located on 54th and Madison — 12 blocks and an Avenue from where I was standing, and with all the confidence of “one in the hand” I thought I would try a go at it one last time.

This firm, on paper, sounded amazing. They were small, focused on international markets, revolving around trade and with some of the largest investment partners — Bank of America, ABN Amro, Euler Hermes.

I walked into the lobby of 535 Madison and went up to the security desk and told them I had a meeting at Finacity. Post 9/11 you no longer could just walk into a NYC skyscraper and get into an elevator. Security looked in their system and politely informed me that they had no record of me having a meeting at the firm. I pleaded my case and they agreed to call upstairs only to receive the VM. They told me there was no way they could let me in, to which I responded that I had an important package I needed to deliver — I decided to omit that the “package” was me.

Someone was looking down on me that day, and the security officer told me I could walk around to the back of the building, go down the stairs into the shipping department and drop off my package there. Having gone this far, I stepped out of the lobby and found the shipping department and continued my adventure. Upon arriving to the shipping department, dressed in a full suit, and with no package in my hands other than a resume, I told the shipping clerk that I needed to personally deliver a package to Finacity. Clearly not looking the part of a normal courier, the clerk (another gift from the heavens) took it upon himself to take me up in the freight elevator to the 4th floor and then kindly walked me to the main elevator lobby and continued to take me up the 7th floor so that I could appear as though I was arriving for a meeting. A few months later, for New Years, I purchased that clerk a bottle of fine champagne.

When I walked into the office, there was no one to greet me and so I walked around the office and into the kitchen where I found someone with a cup of coffee in their hands. I figured if this guy knew how/where to get coffee he could direct me to someone that might be of import.

Little did I know at the time that I was speaking with the Vice Chairman of Euler Hermes, who happened to be at Finacity that day for a board meeting (which is why there was no one at the front desk and no one picked up the call from security). I took my chances, handed him my resume and told him I wanted to work at Finacity. He walked me around the floor and into an office and said to the man sitting behind the desk “Adrian this young man is looking for a job”. Having done meaningful research on the company, I knew that the CEO of this investment bank’s name was Adrian Katz and thought to myself “holy shit, I can’t believe I am being introduced to the CEO”!

Adrian, as I subsequently saw thousands of times in my career, politely stopped what he was doing, took off his glasses and invited me to sit down. Within a minute of conversation, I noticed that Adrian had a South African accent and immediately told him I was also an expat and asked him where he was from. He said Cape Town, and I told him my mother was born there and gave him her maiden name. He didn’t know of anyone with her first name, but did know a Samson named Renee — my grandmother!

Turns out, two months earlier I was sitting across the table from his parents at my grandparents Rosh Hashanah table in Stamford, CT and they had been close friends for over 50 years. Could I have been any luckier!

I told Adrian all the reasons I wanted to work for Finacity and while he appreciated my commentary, he informed me, like I had heard so many times already, that they just were not hiring.

At this point I took a gamble and told Adrian that I would be willing to lick stamps for him and work for free if he gave me a job. Adrian, always one to sniff out a good deal, perked up at that offer and asked me to meet his lieutenant, Kit Codik who was the firms EVP. Kit and I hit it off and I told him that I needed to know whether this was something they would consider by this time tomorrow, or else I would have to take my temp job.

That night Kit called me to tell me that he had good news and bad news. Good news was that they couldn’t let me work for them for free, as I no longer was a student and therefore wasn’t eligible for an internship. Bad news was that they were offering me a salary of $1,000 / month on a 90 day trial basis.

I was ecstatic!

I immediately accepted the offer (and turned down FFTW) knowing that I could now pay rent and have enough left over for my 2nd Ave deli matzah ball soup :-)

And so began my adventure with Finacity that came to an end this past Monday (We just sold Finacity to Greensill. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/finacity-corporation-joins-greensill-120000414.html). Five weeks into the job Adrian tripled my salary and five months later tripled it again. Five years after that, I had left Finacity to join the Israeli Air Force and later was nominated to the companies board of directors.

I warmed to and welcomed my first professional mentors in Adrian, Kit and Mike Rodgers who I owe so many of professional talents today. The lessons learned through my time at Finacity will remain with me for a lifetime and the knowledge of what one can achieve when their back is to the wall has held me up countless times in my career as an entrepreneur.

I remember the days when I would make hundreds of calls to CFO’s and Treasurers of multi-billion dollar companies as a 22 year old red headed shmuck and convince them of the benefits of a trade receivable securitization. I cut my teeth on those origination efforts and always knew I had the best in the business to back me up. The fifty coffees and the thousands of calls taught me how to develop trust within seconds.

I learnt from Adrian the importance of asking questions and doing so only after analyzing every angle and having thought through potential solutions. I learnt from Brian O’Neil why when you stand with your hands across your chest you do not invite comfort and calm from those you are speaking with. From Kit I understood what it meant to dive into a foreign environment and to constantly push yourself to learn how to be the best. From Jeremy, analytic thinking. From Peter, a love for the Rolling Stones and what it means to enjoy the most simple things in life. And from Mike, I learned how every system/machine/company can be broken down into simple processes that when looked at from multiple angles can be pressure tested to see whether they will stand the test of time, and why having a sound body is so important to ensuring a sound mind.

Every once in a while you are given a gift from the heavens, in my case Finacity and the adventure described above was just that.

Congrats and thank you to everyone who made this journey possible.

JE