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Authors: John Rolfe, Peter Troob
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Stevens had a habit of regularly smashing his handset to pieces against his desktop after receiving phone
calls from DLJ managing directors whose requests he didn’t appreciate.
Stevens’s capacity for work far surpassed that of the rest of us. He was concentrating most of his efforts during the summer
on work for DLJ’s insurance banking effort, an industry with which he had considerable expertise. While the rest of us typically
had our hands full with one or two concurrent projects at any given time, Stevens was doing yeoman’s work by managing up to
three live deals and multiple pitches at the same time. For the seventy-two hours prior to our dinner with Jenrette, in fact,
Stevens had been assembling five pitches at the same time, an incredible feat for anybody, let alone a summer associate. Stevens’s
physical and mental capabilities were being pushed to the limit, as he had done back-to-back all-nighters, but the reigning
powers at DLJ had indicated that the Jenrette dinner was absolutely a mandatory event.
So there was Stevens, with no sleep for the preceding seventy-two hours and with a full meal under his belt, fighting to stay
awake during our after-dinner question-and-answer session. Rolfe and I were seated directly across from him, and had watched
him come close to nodding off several times during dinner. Each time he’d been able to fight off the urge and stay conscious,
but the effort this required was clearly increasing with each occurrence. At times his eyes came within a hair’s breadth of
being closed, so that he looked like a Korean fighter pilot after two quarts of rice wine. When a short lull in the question-and-answer
session arose Stevens elected to fire off a question of his own, more to keep himself awake than for any real desire to hear
the answer.
“Mr. Jenrette, can you please talk a little bit about which product or industry areas DLJ intends to focus on over the next
few years as potential growth areas?”
“Certainly, Mike,” Jenrette replied, having already committed each of our names to memory.
As Jenrette launched into a discourse on potential areas ripe for expansion in the investment banking world, a struggle of
epic proportions began to unfold directly across the table from us. With each word that came out of Jenrette’s mouth, Stevens’s
eyelids grew heavier. Several times, his head began to sink backward as his body’s desire for slumber began taking over, and
it was only at the last minute that his head would snap back to vertical. Finally, there was nothing left that Stevens could
do. His head fell backward, his mouth fell wide open, and there he lay in deep slumber while the chairman of the board answered
the question Stevens had asked just moments before.
Fortunately for Stevens, Jenrette was too good of a man to draw attention to his condition. While a more devious soul might
have chosen the moment to either humiliate Stevens verbally or, at the very least, pour a shot of tequila past his open lips
and directly into his gullet, Jenrette chose instead to wrap up the question quickly and move on to the next one. In the investment
banking land of wall-to-wall hard-asses, the man was a true gentleman.
Kinetic II
With the exception, perhaps, of Stevens and Slick, not many of us had particularly enviable live deal experience over the
course of the summer. For the most part, the summer consisted of a whole lot of pitches and just a few scattered deals. Ten
weeks was barely enough time to seea deal from beginning to end, but it was more than enough time to do multiple pitches for potential clients. When it came
to these pitches, one managing director took the blue ribbon. His name was William DeBenedetti; his fellow managing directors
called him Billy, but we knew him as “Bubbles.”
Bubbles was as much fun as a bottle of lukewarm castor oil. He’d only been at DLJ for two short months and he’d already garnered
calls from DLJ managing directors whose requests he didn’t appreciate.
Stevens’s capacity for work far surpassed that of the rest of us. He was concentrating most of his efforts during the summer
on work for DLJ’s insurance banking effort, an industry with which he had considerable expertise. While the rest of us typically
had our hands full with one or two concurrent projects at any given time, Stevens was doing yeoman’s work by managing up to
three live deals and multiple pitches at the same time. For the seventy-two hours prior to our dinner with Jenrette, in fact,
Stevens had been assembling five pitches at the same time, an incredible feat for anybody, let alone a summer associate. Stevens’s
physical and mental capabilities were being pushed to the limit, as he had done back-to-back all-nighters, but the reigning
powers at DLJ had indicated that the Jenrette dinner was absolutely a mandatory event.
So there was Stevens, with no sleep for the preceding seventy-two hours and with a full meal under his belt, fighting to stay
awake during our after-dinner question-and-answer session. Rolfe and I were seated directly across from him, and had watched
him come close to nodding off several times during dinner. Each time he’d been able to fight off the urge and stay conscious,
but the effort this required was clearly increasing with each occurrence. At times his eyes came within a hair’s breadth of
being closed, so that he looked like a Korean fighter pilot after two quarts of rice wine. When a short lull in the question-and-answer
session arose Stevens elected to fire off a question of his own, more to keep himself awake than for any real desire to hear
the answer.
“Mr. Jenrette, can you please talk a little bit about which product or industry areas DLJ intends to focus on over the next
few years as potential growth areas?”
“Certainly, Mike,” Jenrette replied, having already committed each of our names to memory.
As Jenrette launched into a discourse on potential areas ripe for expansion in the investment banking world, a struggle of
epic proportions began to unfold directly across the table from us. With each word that came out of Jenrette’s mouth, Stevens’s
eyelids grew heavier. Several times, his head began to sink backward as his body’s desire for slumber began taking over, and
it was only at the last minute that his head would snap back to vertical. Finally, there was nothing left that Stevens could
do. His head fell backward, his mouth fell wide open, and there he lay in deep slumber while the chairman of the board answered
the question Stevens had asked just moments before.
Fortunately for Stevens, Jenrette was too good of a man to draw attention to his condition. While a more devious soul might
have chosen the moment to either humiliate Stevens verbally or, at the very least, pour a shot of tequila past his open lips
and directly into his gullet, Jenrette chose instead to wrap up the question quickly and move on to the next one. In the investment
banking land of wall-to-wall hard-asses, the man was a true gentleman.
Kinetic II
With the exception, perhaps, of Stevens and Slick, not many of us had particularly enviable live deal experience over the
course of the summer. For the most part, the summer consisted of a whole lot of pitches and just a few scattered deals. Ten
weeks was barely enough time to seea deal from beginning to end, but it was more than enough time to do multiple pitches for potential clients. When it came
to these pitches, one managing director took the blue ribbon. His name was William DeBenedetti; his fellow managing directors
called him Billy, but we knew him as “Bubbles.”
Bubbles was as much fun as a bottle of lukewarm castor oil. He’d only been at DLJ for two short months and he’d already garnered
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