David Haber

Tony, thank you so much for being here.

You're very welcome, David.

You joined DLJ as an investment banking associate in 1975, I think just after business school.

Maybe give us a reminder of what the shape of that business looked like at the time.

I decided that I'd give it a shot.

I mean, you ultimately stayed for 25 years, I believe, which is a pretty long tenure generally, but certainly for Wall Street at the time.

I guess, what were some of the kind of key inflection points in that journey, maybe that led to your success or kind of the evolution of the business, which grew obviously massively during your tenure?

And I want to dig into the merchant banking business in a bit.

One of the folks that I spoke to in preparing for this conversation was Bennett Goodman, who you've had a long history with.

And he told me a funny story of you recruiting him when he was, I think, at Drexel at the time.

And Mike Milken was sort of

top of the power chain in terms of like the junk bond ecosystem and kind of the growth of the private equity world.

And he said, he asked you, what makes you think you can compete with Drexel?

And you gave an amazing answer, or at least his recollection.

I'm curious if you remember that conversation that you said.

I don't.

What did he say?

You basically said you had the whole theory for why Drexel's business model was flawed.

It was basically that all they had to do was sort of say that they had high confidence that they could raise the capital.

And you had a very different point of view that you were going to actually have dedicated pools of capital.