The Zeroes: My Misadventures in the Decade Wall Street Went Insane by Lane Randall

Author:Lane, Randall [Lane, Randall]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9781591844372
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 7906503
Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover
Published: 2010-06-29T00:00:00+00:00

Translation: Bill’s number wasn’t his number anymore. Yes, he got his multiple. But we now had every reason to fear a “revised” cash flow number, surely projected higher. Lucy was moving the football again. By this point, we weren’t even surprised. We had already agreed to go up to $220 million—more than 13x!—if necessary, recognizing that the SPAC’s cash, with all the regulatory steps required, wasn’t as green as private equity’s.

While we waited for Bill’s revisions, I traveled to Napa Valley to marry my personal passion—food and wine—with our new toy, Private Air. I had talked the heads of the Napa County Airport into letting us take it over for a weekend in 2008. The vision: an aircraft clearance sale during the day, private wine dinners at night.

One of my recruiting stops was at something called the Napa Valley Reserve, the world’s first “wine country club,” where your membership fee of $150,000, plus hefty annual dues, gave you access to a few rows of grapes, complete with your name on them, which they bottled into up to seventy-five cases of wine for you to brand and label as you saw fit. The man who had everything could now have his own Napa microwinery. Pulling up late in my rented Hyundai, though, it felt more like a parking lot, albeit one from Magnus’s dreams: Aston Martin V8 Vantage, Bentley Continental GT Speed, Ferrari 599, and the new Audi R8. A sign next to the gleaming white tent read “WELCOME TO THE ROBB REPORT CAR OF THE YEAR TESTING.”

Maybe this is fate, I thought to myself as I rushed into the administrative building to meet with Philip Norfleet, the Napa Reserve’s director. Waiting for him in a conference room, I ogled a stack of bottles, each labeled according to its owner’s whims: family crests or cute kid pictures or just standard sketches of trees and vines. Then my eye caught a familiar face: Wild Bill’s. He was apparently a member, and his bottles featured a cameo of himself, in full Roman statue mode, a toga draping his shoulders and a laurel around his bald pate like Julius Caesar. Or Nero. The emperor of luxury.

After the meeting, I detoured through the tent, and immediately encountered Bill. Hail Caesar! He in turn looked at me as if Brutus were upon him. He’d spent the past three weeks stalling us—unlikely to say yes, but unwilling to say no—yet here I was, three thousand miles from our last meeting, at his grand event, invading his club.

“Randall? What are you doing here?”

“Had a meeting with Philip to talk about an event we’re putting together,” I quickly spat out, attempting to demonstrate in one sentence that I was neither stalking him nor sitting around waiting for his call.

“Okay.” Then he paused, thinking about what next to say to me. Choice one would have been, Hey, since you might be running this business soon, you should hang out and see how our operation works. Alternatively, he could have kept

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