William D. Cohan Quotes

Investment banks started recruiting at Harvard back in the day, and they'd fly me down to New York City and I was so poor so I would take advantage of the free flight, the per diem, the hotel. And then I would go audition for stuff.

The vast majority of the people employed by Wall Street are the secretary who goes in to work on the Long Island Rail Road, who makes fifty, sixty, seventy thousand dollars a year.

One thing that founders always underestimate is how hard it is to recruit.

By no stretch of the imagination can you describe me as a Wall Street lawyer. If you're going to do that, you'd have to say that 7,500 people who work here in Southwestern Pennsylvania for the Bank of New York Mellon with good family jobs are Wall Streeters.

I left Goldman Sachs. I was thinking about going to another Wall Street place. I didn't want to do that. That was crazy. After you work on Wall Street, it's a choice: would you rather work at McDonald's or on the sell side? I would choose McDonald's over the sell side.

LinkedIn is increasingly becoming a very strong place for companies to develop their talent plans, their recruitment plans, and so there are ways in which we can track some of the momentum there.

Goldman in the '80s was like a priesthood, a monastic experience where you worked all the time but were incredibly dedicated to client services, to building and growing companies.

Goldman Sachs isn't the firm it once was when I worked for it, but it's still one of the building blocks of our capitalist society.

I was an athlete in college, and Wall Street likes athletes because they're very competitive people that are willing to do anything to win. So I got a job at Bear Stearns in the summer of 2007.

The number one thing in recruiting in terms of making it a great job is players in your own area.

Every company, regardless of size, is competing for the same pool of talent, which is why top recruiters can even command equity for finding key hires. Internships give startups a chance to hire the best and brightest from our universities at a fraction of the cost that these same minds will command when they receive their degrees.

I was in banking because it was high-paying, intense, a real meritocracy, and the afterwork part was fun, but I found everything to do with banking so boring.

Obviously, I wasn't expecting Wall Street to be a laid-back place. I was prepared for hard work. Sadly, much of the work the new guys were asked to do and the insane hours we were expected to keep had little to do with making the bank more productive. It felt more like hazing.

Manhattan is just all bank branches.

If you want to hire the best people, the best people are already doing pretty impressive things. They have their life plans, their picture for what they want to be doing. To figure out a way in which those trajectories align really takes time.

I think very few people still understand the distinction between CEOs on Wall Street and the hedge-fund billionaires operating separately.

If I could hire a coach in this country and I could get Tony Bennett, there would be nobody in second place. Nobody.

Wall Street's biggest fight with Obama was over the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which Obama signed into law in the summer of 2010.

I worked in investment banking for two years. I was in a program where they kind of just owned you. And you - I didn't realize that I've signed up for that, which was one of the problems. I didn't know anybody who'd done this.

A winning model would mean trying to get the best possible players that you can, at whatever age they are; it doesn't matter.

Wall Street has played a role in everyone's life, and it has been vilified by everyone, but I think that the average trader didn't have a sense of what was coming. The culture is so vacuous, it's possible to come to it straight out of college and never have a real adult life, even if you have the wife and kids.

As soon as I go to Wall Street, my customer - all of a sudden, I'm working for people that don't know me. They don't know how much I love what I do.

I'd like to build a superteam. I'd like the superteam to come to me.

I had come from a middle-class family in Port Washington, Long Island, and I was really clueless about Wall Street. My first job there I basically got fired from.

The whole icon of a bull that stands for Wall Street - you couldn't come up with an image of a more male environment. Women feel that the brand doesn't speak to them.