YouSaid · the spoken record

Scott Bok

lines on the record: 50
first: 2026-04-03
most recent: 2026-04-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And so, the real challenge is going to be if a client has access to all the information you do and they're getting all the feeds of various data they like and so on and you have a one hour meeting with that client, how are you going to use that one hour meeting? They already know a lot as you're walking in there. So how do you use that? It's got to be more about the human dimension, the tactics, why this company may be more amenable to a deal now than they were in the past, things like that that are more about psychology really than about math.”
2026-04-03 · Odd Lots · Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No one really knows the answer to that question, of course, because it's such a fast moving technology. But look, I do think it will change a lot about how bankers interact with clients because the information now is going to go from kind of available, but you have to sort of work to dig it out to available just literally at your fingertips. And by the way, not just to you, the banker, but also to your client. So I think differentiating yourself as a banker inside one of these firms or as one of these firms relative to your peers trying to win the IPO, trying to win the M&A deal, trying to win the bond offering is going to be more complicated. You'll be more efficient in preparing your materials. You'll be more efficient in communicating with that client and delivering interesting, insightful information to them. But a lot of that information is going to be commodity-like.”
2026-04-03 · Odd Lots · Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look into the footnotes and it would say, you know, this includes all deals for radio stations with a market cap more than $250 million. And if you're trying to pitch some immediate deal or something, and you'd always have some way to slice and dice like US IPOs, UK IPOs, this industry, this deal size, now it's kind of all out there. And it's, you know, there's ten or a dozen firms that are very, very competitive. And the fact that one ranks number one versus four is not a big deal.”
2026-04-03 · Odd Lots · Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think whether you're, frankly, if you're number one or number four or number seven or number nine or 11 even, you probably have a pretty equal chance at pursuing something. But look, the bankers do aggressively fight to try to be number one in something. But again, with the increase in just availability of information and transparency, I mean, it used to be that... There was a lot of”
2026-04-03 · Odd Lots · Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People used to do that sort of thing. I think, by the way, I can't remember his name. He was kind of slightly after my time, I think, but that banker is still at Morgan Stanley and is, I'm sure, going to be the one driving the. Pursuit of Elon Musk's large IPOs to come.”
2026-04-03 · Odd Lots · Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, that's still a thing. You still want to be on the left. But, you know, what also, again, industry became very, very big, very, very competitive. And so, you know, it used to be like there was one lead underwriter. And then you got into, well, you're the global lead, you're the co-global lead, you're the lead left. Massive lead inflation.”
2026-04-03 · Odd Lots · Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're often that used to be the case. That was the original idea. That you go public to raise capital. And to some extent, That's still true. But you look at even take these mega technology companies, say, do they need capital? They can raise all the capital they want in the private markets. So it really has evolved from that to wanting liquidity, I would say. You want to have a marker that says, here's what my company is worth, and you want to have the liquidity to be able to transact at that price on any given day. So I think that has driven more IPOs in recent years than the kind of the earlier notion of, wow, we need to build a new factory or we need to invest a lot to build an overseas business or launch a new brand. So we need to do an IPO to raise money.”
2026-04-03 · Odd Lots · Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, for us, it was that there had been a long, I mean, obviously some bigger firms like Morgan Stanley went public in 1986, and I think Goldman in 99 or something like that. But for a firm like ours that was kind of a smaller, more focused firm, the long history of that was that you normally sold the firm, and even in its fairly early days, you'd kind of build something, you know, prove you had a team, prove you had a brand, prove you had some clients, and you'd go out and sell the firm. There were many, many cases that happened. And we viewed the IPO as an alternative. And IPO is a way to realize the value you had created, but also keep what you thought was the special culture, to go back to that word. You didn't want to change things. You don't want to give up control, et cetera. And so that was really what drove us to go public. And I think many others as well.”
2026-04-03 · Odd Lots · Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's not like the industry has been some sort of where the fees are fixed and there's nothing you can do about it. I mean, for a long, long time, an IPO was, I remember it was 7%. That was an underwriting commission. I remember we worked and advised a visa when it did what was then the biggest IPO in 2007 or something like that. And that was like a fraction of a percent. So it sort of succumbs to competition, right? And somebody says, okay, yeah, if I'm doing a classic early year Silicon Valley IPO and we're raising $100 million. Yes, I think a $7 million fee is fair for that and probably your competitors feel that way too. It's a lot of work. It's a little bit risky. But when you're doing an IP that's in the hundreds of millions, the billions and maybe today the tens or hundreds of billions, you know, the fees will be very, very small and driven by.”
2026-04-03 · Odd Lots · Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is a bit like that. I mean, I remember for our own IPO back in 2004, we had like 60 something one-on-one meetings, as well as big group meetings in places like New York and Boston and so on. But if you're trying to get known by a lot of investors in a real hurry, you kind of need to go through something like that.”
2026-04-03 · Odd Lots · Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, first of all, start with public companies, right? That's what you have after you do an IPO. You know, that market really has shrunk. I mean, it fell in half. The number of public companies in America fell in half in the 25 years or so that our firm was an independent firm. So I don't think that's a good thing. I think it's a good positive thing to have more companies in the public realm where there's more information and more transparency to what they do and so on. But I think to go from the world of private where nobody really knows much about your company to public, I think having a lot of sort of activity around that, you know, a big, almost like PR campaign, you know, lots of information.”
2026-04-03 · Odd Lots · Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's kind of flat. I think this is probably a function of scale of activity and of things like technology and of things like just so much open information on everything. Everyone can sort of copy everyone else, right? It's pretty obvious what a good culture is. Hire smart young people, train them well, treat them decently, and they'll grow up to be good bankers. Pay attention to your clients, have integrity, et cetera. You'll build a good business, but those aren't secrets, right? Everybody knows.”
2026-04-03 · Odd Lots · Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe you can swim upstream toward the more prestigious clients. So I think at one point the cultures were a lot more different than they are today.”
2026-04-03 · Odd Lots · Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, there was a day one of the interesting things not to bring up the Epstein files, but there was a day when the firms had a lot of rigor over who they would do business with. And I know that Morgan Stanley, that was the case, I think Goldman Sachs, that was the case. I mean, look, in the law firm business, there were firms that didn't like hostile takeovers. They thought that, oh, that's kind of unseemly for us to be trying to buy somebody else's business on a hostile basis. And so these firms that, you know, you could put in the category of scrappy were the ones that were trying to be a little more like, hey, if the client wants that help, I'm going to give the client that help. Or if the client has a little bit of a dollar. That's right. And also by, you know, maybe doing a transaction for someone that's a client that may be of, you know, back in the day, Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs wouldn't have worked for. Now you've got a credential in that industry. Now you've done a media deal. Now maybe you can do the next media deal.”
2026-04-03 · Odd Lots · Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, there were some firms that sort of, you know, the word scrappy sometimes gets thrown around on Wall Street, right? And if you're the elite firm, like say, you know, back in the day, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs were, of course, there's still elite firms in many ways today. But as opposed to someone who's kind of scrappy trying to get business that maybe you wouldn't do.”
2026-04-03 · Odd Lots · Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's probably fair to say every firm aspires to the same culture, right? You aspire to be driven by excellence and attention to detail and client service and you produce that great coverage through teamwork and training and mentorship. I mean, everyone aspires to all that. There are, though, different cultures. There are some places I think are much harder to work than others. Although I think the industry has become a little more in common. I mean, I think there was a day when, you know, the difference in culture between a Morgan Stanley and a Bear Stearns was vast, I would say.”
2026-04-03 · Odd Lots · Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, and it's kind of a free for all where you've got a lot of parties out there, and you being special because you invite somebody to something and get to know them better. I mean, everyone else is doing that too. And as a matter of fact, if you don't have the relationship, you're probably more prone to do that because you're trying to break in, get to know them.”
2026-04-03 · Odd Lots · Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whether you're talking about sort of personal wealth management or corporate financial management, what the advisors have to realize is like everyone in the world is calling on this guy and trying to get either his personal money to manage or trying to manage his corporate affairs and help him do acquisitions and so on. I mean, it's not, that's another thing really that changed a lot in the industry. It used to be that people, you know, firms had clients. That's my client, and this one is your client. Now they're just all clients.”
2026-04-03 · Odd Lots · Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, of course, that's at quite the high level, right? It doesn't matter how fun you are to be with as a senior associate at JP Morgan. That's not necessarily going to win the business, but maybe your boss's boss, whether he's in the right golf clubs and inviting clients and getting to know them on a personal level. Look, there's always going to be that element to the business. But that's a pretty small piece. And of course, everyone has that too, right? I mean, you can one up others. You can bring somebody to the masters. You can, you know, rather than to a country club on Long Island, you can, there's different levels of sort of client entertainment. But, you know, that, look, it's important to build relationships, it always is. I think what...”
2026-04-03 · Odd Lots · Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Period of time, and this discount rate, what's the number? I mean, it will give it to you without you typing a single number onto the page. But I think that with everyone having access, equal access to that information, I think it will come down to maybe are you smarter than the other guys? Can you execute better? But probably in most cases, what else are you doing for me? And, hey, I could give this to anyone, but I'm going to give it to you.”
2026-04-03 · Odd Lots · Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's true to some degree, you know, particularly among sort of the so-called independent firms like Greenhill was for a long time and many others are today. But I think among the larger group of competitors, I think a lot is going to come down to what else is in the relationship. Are you in their revolving credit facility? Did you do their bond offering? Are you doing equity research for them? Are you touching them in just every, are you doing their hedging? Are you talking to them about currency, talking to them about commodity prices? And so I do think it may, that's why I think sort of the one-stop shopping is kind of a little more appealing again, because if nobody really has the magic anymore, right? The magic is now your fingertips. And even a lot of things, like you don't even need to do the Excel model. I mean, you can say into AI if you have this stream of cash flow.”
2026-04-03 · Odd Lots · Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because you're going to be really leveraging technology to do a lot of things. It used to be somebody sitting up all night trying to find out what PE multiple Coca-Cola was trading at. And now you can get it at the touch of a finger.”
2026-04-03 · Odd Lots · Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. Yeah, I mean, look, in the early days, even companies weren't even that aware of their own share price, right? I mean, everybody had a Bloomberg terminal or a CNBC screen on their desk if you're sitting in Dayton, Ohio, so you didn't know. As bankers, you could bring very little information. And it was new to the client. It was interesting to the client. Over time, we used to do a lot of laborious work to create sort of a comparable companies analysis. Here are the 10 companies in your business segment. You trade at this PE multiple or this EBITDA multiple, and here's where the other guys trade, and here's how their leverage is different than yours. And here's how their stock has performed. And that used to be a tremendous amount of work. You know, now really a machine can largely do that. And a lot of the other”
2026-04-03 · Odd Lots · Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it will evolve and fluctuate and probably decline over time. The industry is all about cycles, right? Markets are all about cycles. I mean, we've had incredible run, incredible run. Okay, COVID was a little bit of a hiccup, right, where markets sort of plummeted and things slowed down. But then it exploded in activity in just a matter of months later. So it's been a long run really since the financial crisis of really wonderful times largely on Wall Street. And, you know, at some point, there's going to be a retrenchment from that. There's going to be some kind of decline. Who knows? Maybe a war turns things around. Maybe a private credit problem turns things around. But something will happen, I think, and sort of dampen the interest again, just as happened with the dot-com crash or the financial crisis.”
2026-04-03 · Odd Lots · Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Job at Goldman Sachs. You know, you've got like five names on your resume that look like wow, this person's been around the industry a long time, even though they're 21 years old at that point.”
2026-04-03 · Odd Lots · Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think maybe in the sort of the post.com bubble bursting kind of in the early 2000s when business really started to pick up again and you had those several great years leading into what of course became the financial crisis but there was such an increase in opportunity then and there was and now everyone was in on the secret right I mean they could read about the industry they could understand the you know compensation structures and the potential for for themselves to get ahead in life and and so these students started kind of working backwards like okay I want to get a first year analyst job how do I do that okay what what internship should I get after you know freshman year well you can't get a very good one then but maybe you can get something tangentially you know does your you know somebody has works as a stock broker can you be a you know work in the mail room there or something after sophomore maybe you can do a little better than that after junior year maybe you can get you know something better than that and by time you show up you know as a college junior looking for that first year analyst”
2026-04-03 · Odd Lots · Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe I'm sorry to say, I think they should probably be doing other things in high school. But, you know, it's become a very, very competitive world, right? Even though there's many, many more opportunities for students to get a job on Wall Street today as they come out of college. At the same time, it's very, very competitive.”
2026-04-03 · Odd Lots · Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In English at Yale. Now, today, what's changed is that the typical student, wherever he or she sits as they're in their senior year of college, I mean, they've had like four internships by now. They've taken various online courses. They come in so ready to roll, even if they majored in something that's completely unrelated to what Wall Street actually does. So you're getting someone who's almost trained before they even arrive. Now, you give them a lot more training, of course, but it's not the kind of thing where you bring in an English major, you know, as we did in the early days and teach them, like, here's what a stock is and here's what a bond is. You know, these students have been working on that since they were in high school.”
2026-04-03 · Odd Lots · Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That also, of course, has changed dramatically as the industry has grown. If you go back to the early days, we recruited very few schools. I mean, it really was sort of the Ivy League and maybe a few others. And it was for a small number of jobs. So there were plenty of students there for that. Now, when the industry really exploded, those schools weren't producing enough people. And I can say in the early days of Greenhill, we had in terms of like what knowledge these young people had, we had a little bit of a strategy of, you know, let's take half of the class be just kids who are really smart, they can do math, they can speak, they can write. They just got great grades all the way through. They're really, really smart. And let's take the other half as people who actually have some substantive knowledge that's useful. They went to Wharton. There are other great business schools. University of Virginia had one. We recruited a lot from University of Texas, Indiana University, University of Michigan. And so we'd kind of do half and half and figure, you know, the kid who majored in finance at Wharton can teach the kid who majored.”
2026-04-03 · Odd Lots · Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The rise of the private equity industry created a client that was kind of permanently in the transaction business, right? Not like a public fortune 100 or 500 company that might do a deal every year or two or three. These were firms that did 10 or 20 deals a year. And so they became the most important clients.”
2026-04-03 · Odd Lots · Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We could put 100K together. I think you may have missed the opportunity. Unfortunately, prices went up from there. But, you know, these things kind of fed on themselves, had some early success. And so really in the 1980s, beginning, then you had the rise of the private equity industry, you know, these huge players that for a long time did very, very well taking companies private, kind of doing a number of things to boost their returns and then putting them back out into the public. That has also changed quite a lot where the industry is looking at all kinds of private capital, right? I mean, Blackstone really pioneered this model of, oh, let's do real estate, let's do hedge funds, let's do private credit. And so you've expanded to so many different fields. But that really fundamentally.”
2026-04-03 · Odd Lots · Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Private equity really became the biggest client base for the whole industry, right? And that also was a very, very small nascent industry. You go back to the early days like Morgan Stanley had its first private equity fund. I can't remember exactly. I think it was like a 40 million dollar fund. And you go back to KKR's initial fund. I mean, people used to do leverage buyouts with like, you know, buy a $10 million company with a hundred thousand dollar down and buy the rest with debt.”
2026-04-03 · Odd Lots · Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, because they had, you know, there was this thing that became known as the market for corporate control, right? If you don't buy into my mantra of maximizing shareholder value and therefore you don't, I will bid for your company and I will maximize shareholder value. And the difference between the value today and the value later is going to be mine. And so there was pressure on public companies. Of course, private companies, there were a lot of sort of family-owned companies that had a longer-term point of view and some that are still there. The Mars family, you know, some companies like that are huge. Cargill, some really big ones that have remained kind of steadfastly private. But today, of course, private company really means private equity-owned company. And that has grown, what, 30,000 plus companies owned by that sector, a bit of a logjam right now, and they really are the masters of that universe. They're the masters of trying to maximize shareholder value.”
2026-04-03 · Odd Lots · Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it's not like it was there forever. If you're the HIM, you started what I did, you sort of feel like it did. But if you look just a tiny bit further back in history, you realize, no, this is all new.”
2026-04-03 · Odd Lots · Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Less outstanding? Is it combining with this other company? Is it spinning off a business you've already got? Maybe this year it's spinning it off, maybe four years later it's buying it back. This game really, in a way. Hedge funds grew up to sort of play that game, to bet on that game, and investment bankers grew up to really drive the transaction activity from that. So the industry that again was very, very small back in the 70s and as it turned into that sort of Reagan era when all those rules changed, just really exploded. And the number of transactions has been very, very high and growing for a long time. I think the interesting question is, does that go on forever?”
2026-04-03 · Odd Lots · Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Income. The tax rates got cut quite a lot. Deregulation increased, the kind of pressure on unions. Reagan breaking the air traffic controllers union, the ability to buy back stock, even the sort of theoretical notion of, you know, what is a company for, right? Milton Friedman said the company's sole purpose is to make money. A professor at Harvard Business School named Michael Jensen wrote all these stories or analysis about why he had to maximize shareholder value and you can't serve two masters. So that has to be the only thing you're trying to do. And, you know, and he had this long-running debate with my first boss, Marty Lipton, founder of Wachta Lipton, about, you know, should a company serve, you know, the community, its employees, its customers, et cetera. And that, all those things mix together really made for a tremendous focus on transactions. How do you maximize value? So with more shares outstanding.”
2026-04-03 · Odd Lots · Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's no exaggeration to say that there really was an epical change, that the world of sort of post-World War II, big companies building conglomerates work at the same place for 35 years like my father did and not a massive amount of intense competition, not a lot mergers, kind of stable companies. And maybe that meant slow growth at some point and maybe that was part of a problem. But in the early 80s, you had really a lot of things change. I think corporate culture changed a lot. You know, Jack Welsh took over from a guy named Reg Jones, who was very involved at Penn where I went in a very, very different kind of character, the tax law changed, capital gains started getting taxed differently from Oregon.”
2026-04-03 · Odd Lots · Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it was replaced with going from the sort of very intermittent meetings with a limited number of clients to talk about ideas to a place the industry is today where you go very, very regularly to almost every company on the planet of any real size, right? Someone is there and you're there with analysis of their industry, their performance, their stock price, their competitors, what's for sale, what might be for sale. And so it's more like a saturation coverage. It's a little bit, I think investment making is very, very different from consulting. But where it has some similarity is this kind of this attempt and desire to sort of almost get inside the business and really know your client's business. And that was not something that was even attempted back in the 1980s. But that's what all those people are doing with all those extra hours now.”
2026-04-03 · Odd Lots · Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I guess that's not an opportunity for me. No, there was going to come a day when you would have 25 people covering the retail industry. But there's always been that sense of few opportunities at the top, even when it wasn't true, even when there was going to be more opportunity.”
2026-04-03 · Odd Lots · Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The desire to sort of over please, you know, to just go over the top. And yeah, that certainly is there as well. I remember back, I don't know why I remember this, but back, you know, kind of in the late 80s, I was probably in late 20s at that time, not even a vice president yet at Morgan Stanley. Remember we had this meeting once with the head of investment banking at Morgan Stanley, a guy named Joe Fogg, very, very sort of very sort of tough guy of that era. And we're sitting around the table. I don't know. There must have been, I don't know, 20 some associates in New York at that time, something like that. And people are asking the question, hey, you know, we have someone who covers the retail industry, someone who covers the industrials, someone who covers insurance companies. Like, what are we going to grow up into? What are the roles going to be for us? And so people did try very hard to differentiate themselves. Now, of course, what none of us around that table knew is this business was going to be like a hundred times bigger. So it wasn't like, oh, we have somebody to cover the retail industry.”
2026-04-03 · Odd Lots · Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think if you go back to the beginning, really the 1980s, I think it grew initially out of neither of those things. I think it grew out of the fact that business was growing so fast And you had a limited size team, and you had twice as many deals to work on as last year, and next year you had 50% more than that. And, I mean, it was a really extraordinary growth. And so they're just like weren't enough hands on deck that you could go home at 7 o'clock at night. Now, over time, that generation of bankers, including myself, they bore the scars of those years throughout their careers. And so, yes, there probably was in the industry some element of, hey, I worked like this, you're going to work like this. But initially, it was just a genuine business issue of, hey, there's so much business to do, so few of us here to do it. We have to work very late to get it done.”
2026-04-03 · Odd Lots · Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's true. I mean, it literally was, I don't know, I'm not sure it was called anything. I think it was like a typed page, you know, of numbers. It was kind of the early version where there wasn't all the software that put it in pretty pictures. And so, you know, look, that came along with a pie charts and bar charts and things like that fairly early, but it wasn't nearly as kind of. Beautiful is it, and I mean, now it almost looks like what Vanity Fair magazine used to look like, right? You open up, it's got beautiful color and pictures and charts and all that sort of thing. But people always worked very long hours. That was always the sort of ethos of the industry. There's a lot of work to be done. We want it to be perfect. And hey, if you can make it a little bit better by staying another half hour, you stay another half hour.”
2026-04-03 · Odd Lots · Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very good question. You know, I think one, and this kind of relates to the future of AI and efficiency in investment banking and so on as well. I think maybe the dirty little secret of the industry in terms of how the sausage is actually made is that the actual building of the model, the creation of the math that says why it makes sense or doesn't make sense to buy something at a certain share price, that takes a limited amount of time. The fiddling with the PowerPoint pages that express that information, so it makes just the right points in just the right way and just the right color theme and just the right things in italics and other things in bold and things like that. Bankers tend to be perfectionists. And so they will fiddle with that for a very long time. And a lot of times, I mean, if you ask people who are in the early part of their careers, like, what are you really doing when you're there late at night? It's very often it's fine-tuning math that was done long ago.”
2026-04-03 · Odd Lots · Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The business exploded suddenly, there's just massive amounts of transaction activity. There aren't that many investment bankers. You're not just going to hire more people who are 22 years old and train them. You need someone who's 26 or 28 or 30 years old, who actually has kind of been around the business. They may have some skills to learn, but they bring other skills to the table. And so they brought in the lawyers, including myself, as kind of a way of sort of ramping up the scale of the team rather than just saying we're going to just hire more 22-year-olds and train them. But you didn't have the time for that. There was such a growth in transaction activity. That's why a lot of lawyers made that move.”
2026-04-03 · Odd Lots · Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There were many who made the move. And as a matter of fact, while I was interviewing the New York Times Sunday magazine, I had a cover story called Lawyers Becoming Bankers. I mean, it really was a big phenomenon. And I think literally the reason was”
2026-04-03 · Odd Lots · Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No longer the one doing it all yourself. You're the one who's doing a bit of conceptualizing and giving it to a very smart person who's going to stay late at night and build you a beautiful model.”
2026-04-03 · Odd Lots · Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For me, I was probably a little bit different since I came from a legal background than some. I mean, there were some people who were, you know, the XL, and by the way, XL wasn't even around then. It was Lotus 123, who are, you know, the XL jockeys who built these enormous models and so on. And I did a bit of that myself. I think my strength was more in sort of structuring, conceptualizing, negotiating, you know, marketing, talking to CEOs on boards. It was more of that kind of, in many ways, the qualitative skills. The math you can pick up what you need fairly quickly. And as I sometimes tell, you know, people of my son's generation, he's 30 years old. I tell his people at his pure love, I see, you know, the great Rubicon Da Cross in the world of, you know, Wall Street and related fields is when you get to the point where there's somebody smart working for you. You're no longer the one training some complete newbie.”
2026-04-03 · Odd Lots · Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know that changed an awful lot over time because it's the beginning. There were lots of companies and very few investment bankers. And so they didn't get a visit all that often. And so when they did, the banker would try to bring ideas that maybe they hadn't heard before. Now there's thousands and thousands of investment bankers, many, many different firms of many different types. And they're all maintaining relationships. So it really turns into more of a dialogue where you don't just, you know, you never met the client before. You show up and say, hey, I think you should buy this company down the street. And wow, that's a great idea. I hadn't heard that before. And they do it. It's more like you have an ongoing dialogue with a client. You figure out what they want to do, what their appetite of their board is, what their balance sheets like, how their business is going, how they feel about their share price, what they think is kind of the next big thing for them. And over time, you come to an idea almost mutually, I would say.”
2026-04-03 · Odd Lots · Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Industrial company. And so I think I'll buy the Hartford, a big insurance company. You know, today people would think that's crazy idea, but that was kind of the predecessor to what became the M&A and transaction business around maximizing shareholder value. That really began, I would say, right at the beginning of my career. Perfect.”
2026-04-03 · Odd Lots · Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I feel like I started at the very beginning of really the explosion of the investment banking business. You know, as I said in my book, when I graduated from Wharton, I did not know what an investment banker was. I knew exactly one person from our entire class who got a job on Wall Street. So it was a very small place back then. M&A was very rare. What year were we talking about? 1981. Okay. See your interest rates peaked. It's the stock market had been flat for more than a decade. Private equity is a phrase that didn't even exist. Hedge fund didn't exist. I mean, it was a very, very different world. By the way, it wasn't even legal to buy back your own stock back then. That happened a year later. It was viewed as market manipulation to do that. So the whole thing of sort of playing with balance sheets, putting companies together and so on, I mean, there'd been a bit of that in the 1960s, mostly around building conglomerates, which I think in part was because they couldn't buy back stock because if you're generating cash, what are you going to do with it? You could be ITT a big.”
2026-04-03 · Odd Lots · Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source