By Eleanor Foa Dienstag

These are boom times on Wall Street. The “financialization” of the American economy during the last 25 years has helped turbojet careers and rewards. It has also transformed a fairly insular world into a broader-based meritocracy. “As Wall Street has become more quantitative,” observes Brian Yelvington, MS ’01, director of credit arbitrage, Collineo Asset Management, “it’s opened up.”

“Major firms care about talent,” agrees Ted Beck, MBA ’76, who spent more than 20 years in senior management positions at Citibank/Citigroup and now heads the National Endowment for Financial Education. “What you bring to the table is what people care about. You’re supposed to maximize the performance of the organization. If you are good, you form a whole new network of successful people.”

A vital Wisconsin-to-Wall-Street network already exists. It includes a significant number of high-profile Wisconsin business alumni who set their sights on Wall Street during the late ’70s, ’80s and ’90s and today are major players.

Claire Schiedermayer, BBA ’84, MBA ’89, managing director, Fixed Income Sales at Merrill Lynch, concurs. “The power of the network increases with each year. It is better organized and growing.” That contrasts with 20 years ago when many of today’s heavy hitters, like Schiedermayer, secured Wall Street jobs and moved up the ladder largely on their own through a combination of determination, confidence, skill, passion and willingness to work grueling hours.

“Also,” says Julie Richardson, BBA ’85, managing director, Providence Equity Partners, “we were at the right place at the right time. Twenty-five years ago the hedge-fund business didn’t really exist as it does today, and private equity was just getting started. It was a great time to get in at the ground level of what was going on. The one thing I’ve learned, after going through a couple of Wall Street cycles, is that if you catch the market at the right point in time, a lot of people get carried up, and if the market crashes you can end up being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I was just lucky.”

Well, yes and no.

A vital Wisconsin-to-Wall-Street network already exists.

It’s true that economic trends worked in Richardson’s favor, and that her area of expertise — telecommunications, media and technology — has been at the red-hot center of merger-and-acquisition action. On the other hand, Richardson, a finance major, who started out in the Investment Banking Group at Merrill Lynch (first in San Francisco, then in New York), is now at the pinnacle of her profession. By her own admission, “There are only one or two other women at partner level” in the notoriously male-dominated world of LBOs and private equity. In fact, her career rise is almost unprecedented. Luck had little to do with it. Did UW-Madison make a difference?

“I think the finance classes at school gave me great skills to pursue a career. If anything, I felt I had a better background than a lot of my peers in terms of some of the nuts and bolts subjects, like finance and accounting.” After 11 years at Merrill, and five with JP Morgan Chase, serving as vice

chairman of their investment banking division and chairman of the Telecom, Media and Technology group, she was offered, in 2003, “a once in a lifetime opportunity,” to open the New York office of Providence Equity Partners, one of her clients. As Time magazine noted in its “People to Watch” section, she went from being “a star investment banker…a career-capping accomplishment for many, to becoming a private equity superstar.” In fact, during the last six months her firm participated in two of the three largest leveraged buyout deals (other than RJR Nabisco) on record: Sunguard at $11 billion and TeleDenmark at $14 billion.

Richardson admits she’s a focused, high-energy person who loves what she does and doesn’t mind working long, crazy hours. Seated in a conference room in a landmark building overlooking Park

Avenue, she is modest about her high-profile position which, in addition to her LBO work, includes membership on New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Telecommunications Policy Advisory Group, and chair of the business school’s Dean’s Advisory Board.

Her advice to UW graduates no doubt mirrors her own experience. “People who grow up in the Northeast know a lot about Wall Street. As a Wisconsin grad, it takes a more pro-active approach to really understand what’s out there. It requires people to be really tenacious, to use whatever contacts they have to make sure their resume gets to the right places.”

Michael Jamison, MS ’03, an associate in the Financial Institutions Group at Lehman Brothers, used the UW network to do just that. Jamison, who “caught the finance bug” late in his MBA program, then spent a year in the Applied Corporate Finance (ACFIN) program at the School of Business. Because he lacked a summer internship in investment banking on his resume, he pitched to potential employers ACFIN’s hands-on, real-world problem-solving projects. “From my standpoint, I actually felt like I had more experience — nine months vs. three months — relative to a summer intern who had never done investment banking before.” That strategy, plus reaching out to Robert Hedlund, head of High-Yield Debt at Lehman, who sits on the ACFIN advisory board, and other MBA classmates already at Lehman, helped him make the transition to New York, “the mecca of investment banking.”

School of Business Dean Michael Knetter is working to strengthen Wisconsin’s network by bringing Wall Street luminaries onto advisory boards and into mentor relationships. Knetter often travels to New York City for School of Business alumni gatherings. Last February, for example, more than 40 School of Business alumni attended an event at the Penn Club. “People are really jazzed about the network,” says Yelvington, who is now on Wisconsin Business Alumni Board and an active member of an informal alumni group in New York.

UW grads are a bit less coddled. They tend to be not only bright but also very driven and resourceful.

Graduates of the Applied Security Analysis Program (ASAP) — widely acclaimed by Fortune magazine, the Wall Street Journal, CNBC and others for producing an extraordinary number of high-profile, successful fund managers and financial analysts in its 35-year history — have long appreciated its pipeline to Wall Street. And to keep the NYC pipeline flowing, ASAP is starting a brand new Associates Program. (See page 11.)

“ASAP was key to finding my way to the Street and preparing me to work in the securities industry,” says Yelvington. “The interaction with successful alumni was — and continues to be — invaluable. They take your calls, they answer your questions, even after graduation. They have alerted me to opportunities in the job market, provided feedback for ideas and even employed me.” Yelvington landed his first job at Lehman Brothers, by way of an alumnus who had graduated the year before. “My best friends in the city are the people I went to business school with. In fact, the most recent addition to my team is a guy I graduated with.”

Considering the relatively small size of the School of Business, Yelvington is particularly impressed by the number of successful people from Wisconsin on Wall Street. “The hit ratio is very high.” Why? “UW grads are a bit less coddled. They tend to be not only bright but also very driven and resourceful. Eighty percent of the ASAP alumni are on Wall Street.”

 

Schiedermayer, who recently stepped down from the Dean’s Advisory Board, is one of them. She received an undergraduate degree in Actuarial Science from Wisconsin, and worked for three years at Coopers & Lybrand in San Francisco before returning to graduate school to fulfill her dream of a career on Wall Street. “I thank my lucky stars that I was able to get into ASAP because it gave me the specialized training I needed.” She was less lucky in the timing of her job search, which coincided with a downturn in the market. “The network was helpful but most firms were downsizing. Moreover, at that time ASAP was more skewed toward people working on the buy side as investment managers, and I wanted to work on the sell side.”

In fact, she landed her first job as a fixed income research analyst at Merrill Lynch through an ad in The New York Times. And except for two years at Bear Stearns, she’s remained at Merrill ever since, specializing in High-Yield Bonds in the retailing and consumer products areas. An outstanding analyst — she was voted to Institutional Investor’s All America Fixed Income Research Team for 11 consecutive years — she switched to sales three years ago, serving a roster of institutional clients, primarily insurance companies, mutual funds and hedge funds.

Schiedermayer envisions an even brighter future for the School of Business. “It’s going to be a higher-profile place to look for graduates because the dean has added new areas of Wall Street specialization, including Applied Corporate Finance and a fixed income fund.” Now that more students with her specialty are coming out of ASAP, she is in a better position to advise and refer those in her field. While on the Dean’s Advisory Board, for example, she met Manoj Kulkarni, MS ’05, who was interested in joining Merrill. Kulkarni, with a master’s in electrical engineering and an ASAP
focus on fixed income, was a natural fit. “Last summer,” says Kulkarni, “when I was trying to get a feel for the job market, I was able to meet a lot of alumni in New York and everyone was very kind to me.” He is now an associate at Merrill Lynch in Schiedermayer’s former Research Group.

Another key player in the Wisconsin-to-Wall Street connection is Jeffrey Weiss, who earned a BS in Economics from UW-Madison in 1983. Weiss, managing director, Global Finance at Lehman, is leading the charge to build critical mass from Wisconsin at his firm.

Although School of Business alumni working in the investment field have an affinity for the Big Apple, there are many Business Badgers working in investments in other cities, notably Chicago, Milwaukee and Boston. ASAP, for example, has placed a series of its graduates at Boston-based Fidelity Management, the nation’s largest mutual fund company. And two of the most successful ASAP alumni in the money management business worked together at the Harvard Management Company (HMC) in Boston. Phillip Gross, BBA ’82, MS ’83, co-founder and managing partner of Adage Capital Management, a spin-off of HMC, remains in Boston. Paul Leff, BBA ’83, MS ’84, co-founder and Chief Investment Office of Perry Partners, Ltd., a widely respected money management firm, is in New York. Both firms largely serve college endowment funds and private foundations. Gross and Leff are great admirers of each other’s skills and are devoted to ASAP, which they say changed their lives.

“In my year there were 14 of us,” recalls Leff, “and I feel we may be among the most successful group of investment professionals that the school, collectively, has had. These are people in leadership positions all across the investment management business. We are very loyal to each other.” ASAP contacts helped Leff land his first job in L.A., as well as his subsequent move, through fellow alum Gross, to Harvard Management as a portfolio manager. In 1988, itching to do something “a bit more entrepreneurial,” Leff joined Richard Perry, who was about to leave Goldman Sachs to set up his own successful firm, Perry Partners.

Leff is actively involved with the School of Business. In addition to being on its Dean’s Advisory board and ASAP boards, he runs the Wisconsin Eastern Alumni Scholarship Fund (WEASF) in New York. Established 35 years ago, it seeks appropriate candidates from public high schools in the outer boroughs from underprivileged backgrounds. “We try to send as many minority students from the New York City area to UW as we can find.” Leff also mentors and recruits UW graduates to Perry Partners and Wall Street in general.

The distance from
Wisconsin to
Wall Street keeps
getting shorter.

Gross is a quintessential self-made man who is happy to share his remarkable story with UW business students. As an undergraduate, he’d heard about ASAP, but 1982, as he put it, “was tough times.” He needed to earn a living. So, in his senior year he accepted a $16,500 a year job at Lasalle National Bank. One day, by happenstance, he coached a friend who was interviewing for admission into ASAP. “All of a sudden, a light bulb went off. ‘I can answer these questions. I should interview for this program.’” He persuaded his grandmother to lend him the money for an extra year in school and—showing the perseverance that success in any field takes—finagled a last-minute ASAP interview, got into the class and the following summer accepted a job at Harvard Management for more than double what he would have earned at Lasalle. “I always tell that story because it really shows the enormous difference ASAP made in my career. I was ready to go into banking instead of into something I really loved.”

HMC hired Gross because of the skills he’d acquired through ASAP. “I knew what a P/E ratio was. I knew what stocks were. They got a kid who could hit the ground running, because I’d been running money for a year.” That was invaluable experience for a lot of reasons. “In this business,” he points out, “you have to get used to getting things wrong and dealing with that mentally. Through ASAP you can make a lot of mistakes and learn from those mistakes. None of the other kids interviewing for the job had that experience. Within three years, there were three of us from Wisconsin working for Harvard Management: myself, Paul Leff and Jeff Peskind, MBA ’85, who now runs his own hedge fund in New York.”

Gross has specialized in healthcare for 23 years. “Why am I not bored? Because the challenges change all the time. There are a lot more hedge funds out there doing what we do. The business is getting tougher. Running money is more of a career than it was in the ’80s. People graduate from Harvard and want to get into investments rather than into consulting. So there are a lot of smart people competing with you. When you buy a stock, you are buying from someone who is equally convinced that you are going to lose money. There is no more intellectually competitive arena.”

Gross, on the UW Foundation board, the ASAP board and the Applied Corporate Finance board, is an enthusiastic advocate of learning by doing. “All of us who came out of ASAP believe it’s the right way to teach people how to embark on a career, whether it’s brand management, human resources or corporate finance. He is particularly enthusiastic about the Applied Corporate Finance Program (ACFIN), which began in 1999 and became the Nicholas Center for Applied Corporate Finance in 2003. The ACFIN program serves undergraduates as well as MBAs. “There are three sides to Wall Street: the buy side, the sell side and the corporate finance side. We’re already placing kids out of that program into the top brokerage and investment banking firms. They will have an impact similar to the business school’s ASAP grads from the ’70s and ’80s.”

Jamison also foresees a growing cadre of corporate finance grads from UW. “The ACFIN program is starting to pump out a lot of people at a lot of places, including Lehman, Goldman and Merrill. It’s a young program but it’s really beginning to gain traction.”

Thanks to the efforts of these and many other alumni, the distance from Wisconsin to Wall Street keeps getting shorter.

Eleanor Foa Dienstag is a New York-based journalist. Her work has appeared in The New York Times and The New York Observer, among others.

Photos by Carol Kitman