David Haber

You were going to start effectively a bridge fund.

Bridge fund, right.

And Bennett, I think, had said, okay, well, so these are like $250 million, $500 million financing.

Like, how big is your balance sheet?

And you're like, I don't know, $300 million.

And he's like, okay, how does that work?

And you're like, well...

We were controlled by Equitable, which was one of the biggest life insurance companies.

And it was just, this is something I've heard from a lot of people, but the confidence that you had and the confidence that you instilled in others to go compete against people who are far better capitalized, had much bigger businesses, he would argue, drove a lot of the firm's success.

I'm just curious if you could talk through kind of that dynamic in the 80s.

Totally.

And that has definitely shined through in a lot of my conversations.

I mean, maybe just kind of talk through the inception of the merchant banking kind of false platform and how that grew.

Ultimately, I think it became one of the largest or the largest in the world at the time.

Right.

And what was the kind of core motivation to sell DLJ to Credit Suisse?

Was there some like a macro reason or just good timing?

I'm just curious.

One of my favorite fun facts about your time at DLJ, and, you know, we're sitting in a venture capital office, was that you led the Series A into Costco in the 1980s.

I have to hear more about that story, you know.