Master of the Universe

October 2, 2009

In 1998, two years before the bloody tech bubble burst across the Northern California peninsula, the Firm opened their Menlo Park office, in an ill fated attempt to chase young or increasingly not-so-young Silicon Valley Technocrats and fulfill their financing needs. The Firm relocated a well-known and famously aggressive New York investment banker, specializing in technology, to lead the West Coast charge.  During an interview with the Wall Street Journal the reporter inquired how he enjoyed his new pastoral view of fog shrouded hills, so different from that of New York Harbor.  He curtly replied that he was too busy constructing sophisticated financial deals to notice something as insignificant as the view.  The insinuation being that the Divine Power of Capitalism was above the Almighty himself and his natural order.  Wall Street’s Fin de Siecle behavior dictated that if you stopped to admire the daisies, you belonged not in the exalted profession of i-banking, but at an artist’s colony throwing ceramic pots for your living.  Such was the money and title-obsessed measure of importance that Penny’s cohorts lived, breathed and believed.