Not as magic bullets, but as helpful reference librarians.
Remember in middle school when you had to write a report about how many lobsters were caught in Maine each year? You went into the library and told the librarian your project.
She (and in my middle school days, it was
You are the Chief Investment Officer screening possible targets for a $5 million investment in a non-public asset. Whether you work at a family office, a private equity fund or somewhere else, the prospective deal flow should be coming at you good and hard.
If you
For those of us who thought Jeffrey Epstein probably had a larger group of rich and powerful acquaintances than we had known about, the Wall Street Journal appears to have proven us right.
A story over the weekend says the following people spent a little (or quite a lot of time) with Epstein even after
Hiring good people is getting a lot harder, and not just because there are fewer candidates in a lot of industries. With AI-enabled cheating, grade inflation, and the shunning of standardized tests by colleges and graduate schools, how is a hiring manager supposed to know who’s a good fit?
My prediction: Good companies will have
ChatGPT now comes up in most of the extended conversations I have with lawyers about how things are going. Many rave about how easy it is to have this robot whip up a simple motion or even, in one example, “a short speech about NATO defense capabilities.”
While it may be true that ChatGPT can
Investors in Madoff Securities and FTX were both warned, but by different sets of people.
If it turns out to be true that without customer knowledge FTX took billions of dollars of customer account money to invest in a risky company owned by FTX’s CEO, this will truly compare to the Madoff scheme for audacious
Listen to me explain why putting people at ease is the best way to elicit information from them. I don’t have a badge or a subpoena, so the key is to be nice to them and be interested in what they do, think, and feel. Get the podcast chat on Ernie Sander’s “You Said What?”
One indispensable part of due diligence is to check for regulatory sanctions. Was a company found by the SEC or FINRA to have misappropriated investor money? Put them in unsuitable investments? Lied on a filing to induce people to invest money under false pretenses?
While we never pronounce “Invest” or “Don’t Invest,” “Hire” or “Don’t
When not at work, I like to do many things, and one of my favorites is to watch New York Mets baseball. Since moving to New York I’ve grown to love the team and I make common cause with the many Mets fans I run into (even in my Bronx neighborhood just a few stops
Many of us love optical illusions. It’s a safe thrill to know we’re being tricked, and yet are still unable to tell our brains to “get real” and stop the illusion.
When you’re doing an investigation, the same kind of thing can take over