166 THE BiG DROP
existence thanks to my parents.
Suddenly things weren’t so comfortable. I made a vow to
myself that I was going to take charge and not let this thing
happen to me again. I wasn’t going to be a victim, in other
words.
Again, I wasn’t blaming anyone. I understood that things
change, but I wanted to be more alert to financial circumstanc-
es and try to understand them. If I understood things I couldn’t
control, I reasoned, I wouldn’t be caught off guard.
That was a very seminal experience for me. I decided that
my ticket out or my way forward was education. I got my
undergraduate degree, a graduate degree in economics and I
mentioned two law degrees. That got me on my way and into
financial services.■ Long Term Capital Management
In the late 1990’s I joined Long Term Capital Management as
a lawyer. That was another very critical experience for me.
The firm made billions of dollars and I was one of the part-
ners there so I shared in that. Here I was working with sixteen
finance PhDs. We had two Nobel Prize winners there too.
We actually had complaints from business schools that we
were hiring so many finance PhDs that there wasn’t anyone
left to teach in academia. Our firm had the founders of modern
financial theory.
We had the former Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve
David Mullins, Jr.. We had two Nobel Prize winners Myron
Scholes, and Bob Merton, who had invented the Black-Scholes
options formula. There were many others, some of who were less
well known, but one of them occupied the office next to Janet
Yellen at Berkeley. It was the crème d’ la crème of finance PhDs.
I invested my money in the fund. My thought was, “These
guys know more about investing than I do. I could try to buy