Customer Reviews

The Accidental Investment Banker

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I could really relate to this book. Up until four months ago, for the previous seven years, I was the General Counsel of a medium sized publishing company. Our company was backed by Private Equity, and a large part of my role was mergers and acquisitions. During that time I interacted with more investment bankers, bankers, and money fund managers than I could possibly remember. Prior to that I worked for a couple of years in the M&A group of a Fortune 500 publishing company, and prior to that I spent 20 years in government and large law firms.

I have never personally met Jonathan Knee, at least not that I remember, but my company danced and flirted several times with his current company. I knew people at pretty much every boutique publishing investment bank in New York. So, while I didn't work as an insider at an investment banking firm, I've been as close as you can get. And this books is absolutely dead on accurate both in its historical perspective as well as its view of what life is like inside the investment banking industry.

Knee comes across as somewhat conflicted. He obviously likes the money and maybe the prestige of investment banking, but he knows that investment banking has a side that is ugly and corrupt. He wants to continue in the industry, but he also wants to expose its faults. As a consequence sometimes the book waffles. For example, he criticizes Mary Meeker and defends her at the same time. He clearly does not want to burn any bridges.

He accurately captures the sense of power and feeling of doing something important that comes from investment banking. In particular the satisfaction of advising CEOs and seeing ones advice taken. Based on my own experience, in the world as it is today, the feeling of doing something important can be much more tangible when working with big business than working in the government as he notes.

Still, he longs for a different time when relationship investment banking was the heart of the business. I have the sense that if one were really to talk with him heart to heart that his awareness of the corruption runs deeper than he is willing to fully disclose in this book. In part I think this is the reason some of the reviewers here were disappointed with the book. However, I also think the palpably conflicted nature of his feelings ultimately makes this book more interesting, if less of a simple entertainment.

If you are looking for a rollicking but superficial account of the investment banking world, along the lines of Liar's Poker, this is not the book. If you are looking for a deep historical analysis of the growth of investment banking, along the lines of something written by Ron Chernow, this is not the book. But as a thoughtful insiders account with good historical perspective, this is an excellent book

As an I-Banker at a regional firm I always enjoy reading books such as this. This is a mixed bag. Knee starts the book discussing his internship in London, what a "rookie" does, what he did well, what he did not do well, and why he didn't want to do this forever. But, after an MBA and a short career with an airline, he's back at it again, and with success. He "accidentally" fell into a role and used his wit to carve out a successful niche. This is where this book is at its best and an excellent, fast read.

Unfortunately, it's not quite a full book and Knee feels the need to regurgitate a past history of Goldman Sachs, the excellent firm for which he works. This is where the book slows down and is totally out of character with the title. Given I had just read "Goldman Sachs: Culture of Success" written by Lisa Endlish to whom he refers liberally, this was really of no interest to me.

Finally, we're back to his career change to Morgan Stanley in New York and now have a new problem, the total collapse of deals where bankers earn their money. This is quite interesting also. As I-bankers will attest, the business becomes ruthless with inter-fighting as everyone grabs for the few crumbs of income, people must be let go and mansions and egos must be protected.

Overall, I love the book and I'd rather he had shortened the book and stayed on subject instead of spending 30% of time on a history lesson before jumping back to his career. So, be forewarned, it's good with a twist.

The Accidental Investment Banker (the "AIB") has been compared with Liar's Poker, and surely readers who enjoyed the latter will also enjoy the AIB. But in some respects the comparison is unfair to the AIB, because as it is not only a quick and amusing story of Wall St in the '90s, but a serious analysis of a transformative decade in investment banking. As an attorney who participated in the process on the periphery, I can testify that Knee understands the key economic, business and regulatory trends and knows the"trophy" bankers who shaped decade, and the culture of their firms. The AIB is a great read for anyone on the Street (or in the "City," for that matter), anyone in the "codependent" professions (lawyers and consultants), MBA candidates and those contemplating it, and anyone who enjoys Wall St. as a spectator sport.

This book describes the personal journey the author had gone through during his decade in investment banking. He talks about what's involved in investment banking, office politics, the incentives that drive the hehavior of the bankers, dynamics of the competitive landscape the clients. He also quotes or put in a nontrivial amount of material that he did not experience first hand, in order to provide the background or history of stories or issues he's talking about. The author is quite candid, albeit with a trace of hidden bragging of his smarts and achivements.

I have read "Monkey Business", "Liar's Poker" and "Goldman Sachs : The Culture of Success". Each book has its own strength. The strength of this book is description of politics, dynamics of the relationship between investment bankers and their clients.

As writing style, this book is easy to follow, a pleasure to read. In a way, it reads like a story, keeps you wanting to find out what happended next. However, it is relative slow to go through this book, as least for me, because the book is actually quite dense.

Jonathan Knee's book provides an insider's look at the wild ride that was investment banking in the internet boom and then bust. For anyone who lived through this era, the book provides an enjoyable and realistic trip down memory lane with enough fun anecdotes and keen observations to keep you laughing. More importantly, though, the book gives a sense for history and makes a compelling argument about what has changed in investment banking and why. Regardless of whether one agrees or disagrees with Knee's thesis, this is one topic worth debating and Knee does an artful job of blending history and conversational story-telling, sprinkled with entertaining personalities. Easy enough to understand for someone outside the industry while sophisticated enough for someone inside, the book is an enjoyable and worthwhile read.

The Accidental Investment Banker is an excellent mix of Wall Street "war stories" and an analysis of the evolution of investment banking. The "war stories" are both engaging and colorful, and are weaved into a thoughtful discussion of how investment banking has changed - specifically, from institutions focused on building long-term relationships with their clients to myopic firms focused solely on short-term profits.

A must-read for anyone working on (or interested in) Wall Street, and one of those rare books where the intellectual value is equal to the entertainment value.

When I was eight or so, we moved from Houston TX to Greenwich CT. My Dad was a scientist, but many of my classmates had names like Greenhill or Biggs -- apparently they did something odd for living called "Investment Banking". I had never heard of Investment Banking (sounded kind of stodgy and boring) but I remember that nonetheless I came home from school in third grade and announced that I wanted to be an Investment Banker (which sounded pretty cool, although not quite as cool as "Headhunters", which I had learned a little about from Gilligan's Island -- spears, grass skirts, and the like.) At any rate, I had no idea at the time what Investment Bankers actually did, but I assumed I would eventually figure it out.

I didn't.

Here's what I knew: They worked long hours. They made lots of money. They did M&A and IPO's, and occasionally financed companies. A lot of them hated it. But I had no idea how they actually spent their day -- and I was curious -- was investment banking something that I would have been good at? (If I had majored in Economics instead of English?)

The Accidental Investment Banker is a great introduction to the profession -- I didn't realize that i-banking is, at the top, a sales job (not unlike law and consulting). But of course like all of those other jobs, you have to slog some really hard and pointless hours to get there: creating "blue books" for clients. Which sounds to me like writing "decks" for consultants, and "briefs" for lawyers. Lots of work that really has fairly few real ideas, but justifies big price tags, and by all means has to look "professional".

I also didn't realize that the bonuses were basically fixed in a range by class. I had always assumed a commission based compensation system.

Anyway, Knee's book is terrific, even if you already know what bankers do, because you get an inside look and comparison between Morgan Stanley and Goldman in the 90's. He thinks banking as a profession has gotten too big and has lost its way/values, but its hard to think of any major business/industry that criticism doesn't apply to ("the kids these days"). This is a great place to start if you are interested in the subject; next I will check out some of these other histories that he has cited extensively, namely House of Morgan by Chernow, and Goldman by Lisa Endlich.

I would add that it becomes clear that like say Michael Wolff (who wrote Burn Rate and has a similar style) that Mr. Knee is probably somewhat of an unreliable narrator and potentially a polarizing figure in person (you get a strong whiff of this from hints like his unapologetically messy office, or the mere fact he is willing to write a tell-all book)...but like Mr. Wolff he wears that more or less on his sleeve, so I don't have a problem with the fact that the narrative is unreliable. It is more fun to read between the lines.

The cover of this is so misleading that you wonder what the publisher was thinking. This book does not do for IB what Liar's Poker did for fixed income trading (no slobbish bond salesmen throw telephones around here - though on a couple of occasions people make inappropriate comments at parties and irritate clients, and towards the end, during the internet bubble, they decide to dress down on Fridays, then, when the bubble bursts, they stop doing it again). What it delivers is a critical assessment of the state of the IB business, framed in terms of the author's own experience and observations of life at Goldman and Morgan, together with an apologia pro vita sua.

Both are pretty good and pretty useful. If you work in any branch of professional services, then there is a lot of interesting stuff here (pitch books are, alas, not unique to IB) and it is also readable. Knee's prose is a bit, um, prosaic, he is not Michael Lewis, but it goes by easily - there is a bit of New-Yorker-itis (people are introduced as 'slim, handsome and elegant', even 'elfin' a couple of times - does no-one read Leonard's rules for writers?), but nothing on the scale of Barbarians at the Gate, which, it if it were not so unreadably, incompetently badly written, would be the Liar's Poker of IB. And there are some definite gems, such as the description of the Goldman IBS team as resembling 'a German olympic swimming team' (which is even better than 'the Chets') which must have made some people wince.

In fact there is one possible reference to BatG here, where Knee describes the final negotiations in the sale of West, where he and his team successfully engineered that the 'right' bidder won an open auction, albeit at an extra cost of 50-100m (exhibit A in the 'apolgia'), to be compared and contrasted with the climax of BatG, where Felix Rohatyn efficiently extracted an extra 230 million dollars from KKR. Rohatyn would point out, in his defence, that there were no 'right' bidders for RJR, there were just different packs of predatory carnivores, and RJR was a public company, etc. True, but the parallel is still striking.

Neither Goldman nor Morgan come out of the book looking very good, but Goldman definitely comes out far ahead of Morgan.

What else? Knee crashed into the middle ranks, and moved up fast, so he does not say a lot about the endless diet of midnight pizza and the regular crashing under your desk in your suit which also go with the job, at least in my - very occasional - experience. There are also some interesting notes about Hank Paulson, which must have been written just before he left GS to be Treasury Secretary - Knee is, shall we say, not so impressed.

In conclusion: Definitely worth reading, but not for the jokes, or the madcap anecdotes - there aren't any. Knee comes across convincingly as an honorable, intelligent and likeable man and he delivers a lot of useful information and analysis. Finally, I can also reassure him that his somewhat self-conscious author's pic at the back is enough to guarantee that no-one will ever describe him as 'elfin'.

This book is one of the most convincing accounts of the investment banking industry, and how it has changed in recent history, that I have come across. I feel that it is the author's firsthand experience during this period that gives the story its edge. Although certain of the historical material (e.g., the early history of banking) is covered in other books, the account of the boom and, more importantly, the bust is not to be missed.

I think comparisons to Liar's Poker or Monkey Business are potentially misplaced, as in my opinion this book has an entirely different purpose. The funny moments in this one are simply an added bonus.

This is a must read for anyone in, interested in, or soon to be joining the industry.

As a fellow banker, this book served two very important purposes unlike any other Wall Street book I've read (Liar's Poker, Monkey Business, Beyond Wall Street, etc.). First, it provides a unique, compelling and entertaining first-hand perspective of the evolution (both positive and negative) of the investment banking industry. Second, it delivers an easy-to-read explanation of the role of an investment banker in connection with its account of the industry changes. For those in investment banking or financial services, more broadly, this book is a "must read" to understand the past events, the present state, and future possibilities of the profession.