Something that happened

All about Lenny

Today, I’m a little down. It’s nothing serious. I mean, I wouldn’t call it a Great Depression or anything. But it did get me thinking about mice and men. The mice who say they’ll do something and never do; or know that they should do something and don’t. And, the men (people) who just do.  This isn’t Steinbeck’s story; it’s mine.

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A long time ago, I worked for a n^th-tier investment bank. We didn’t do big deals. Or name brand deals. But we tried hard to do good deals. One of many people who helped me get that job was the firm’s sell-side biotech analyst, Franklin. An average-sized man of well-above average intelligence.

A few years earlier, Franklin led the charge to take a biotech company public. One he believed in. It was public for nearly thirty years until AstraZeneca bought it a couple of years ago for $39 billion. The CEO of that company, Lenny (yes, really), never forgot that Franklin helped get the ball rolling.

And man did that ball roll. When the company started to take off, Goldman Sachs and banks of that ilk courted Lenny to do much bigger deals. You don’t say no to Goldman. Lenny didn’t. But Lenny did say no when Goldman said they wouldn’t include Franklin’s firm in the deal.

Here’s how most public offerings work. A company wants to raise $100M. One investment bank leads the deal. They coordinate investors, lawyers, accountants, regulations, company, marketing, and, importantly, other banks. For their work, they get the right to sell a majority of the stock to investors. They get a commission on the stock they sell. The more stock they sell, the more they make. When Goldman leads a deal they want to sell as much of the stock as possible.

For a lot of reasons, they let other banks sell stock. Maybe the other banks will give Goldman a cut of their next deal or the other bank will have an analyst cover the stock which is good for everyone. You know, stuff.

Goldman doesn’t need favors from an n^th -tier bank. So, as an n^th -tier bank, we got chopped off future deals. Lenny made sure that didn’t happen. We didn’t get big allocations. But our little name was there. In the corner. Lost in a land of giants like Goldman and Morgan Stanley.

It was more than a feel-good story. We sold some stock and made a couple of bucks. We could use that story in our marketing, “Hey check it out, we were part of this credible deal.” Being part of a credible deal with a credible group made us more credible doing good small deals. It’s worth noting that Lenny called Goldman and Morgan in the early days and couldn’t even get a call back.

None of this seems heroic. But, trust me, it is. It’s easy to forget who got you there. Very, very easy to feel important. Way too easy to not reply, to not pick up the phone when it rings, to just say, “Hey, I’d love to help, but I’m really busy.”

It’s not intentional. It’s just something that happened. Which just happens to be Steinbeck’s original name for Of Mice and Men.

If you’re worried, no. I’m not a little down. Just needed a hook. And, if you’re wondering. No. Apropos nothing.