I’m listening to a podcast, something I almost never do, because my good friend Melissa (the one who is a therapist in Utah and partner to my good friend Deb), sent it to me and told me I needed to listen to Scott Galloway and his Prof G Markets podcast with Ed Elson. I didn’t know Ed Elson. He is a writer, analyst, and co-host of the Prof G Markets. Ed worked as a research assistant under journalist Michael Wolff, one of my favorite writers/editors at the Financial Times. Ed graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University in 2021 with a degree in classics and was a commencement speaker that year, which says a lot about what people think of what he says. Layer that on top of Scott Galloway, who I have admired for some time, is a prominent American professor, entrepreneur, author, and media personality. He is a Clinical Professor of Marketing at the New York University Stern School of Business, where he teaches brand management and digital marketing to MBA students (something I did in finance for 13 years). In 2012, he was named “One of the World’s 50 Best Business School Professors” by Poets & Quants, an accolade I never came close to achieving, but I do admire. After graduatting from UCLA in 1987, he worked as a fixed income analyst at Morgan Stanley before becoming a serial entrepreneur who has founded nine companies, including Prophet, a brand and marketing consultancy firm, RedEnvelope, an e-commerce site specializing in unique and personalized gifts, L2 Inc, a digital intelligence firm that was acquired by Gartner in March 2017 for $155 million and Firebrand Partners, an activist hedge fund that invested over $1 billion in U.S. companies.
I was an investor in and on the board of eMarketer for many years (and yes, we almost sold it to Gartner, but found a better buyer in Axel Springer) and have more hedge fund chops than I care to remember. In some moments I wish I could meet him and tell him how much our paths overlapped, but in others I would be fearful of bowing and starting an “I’m not worthy” soliloquy. We seem to share that unusual blend of interest in finance and marketing as well as that equally unusual blend of liberal ideology and extreme market capitalism. In addition to his teaching and podcasts, Galloway is a bestselling author of over five books on marketing and wealth. I’ve written as many, but I wouldn’t dare compare our book sales numbers. In sum, Galloway has done almost almost everything I have done, only much better and with greater influence. I will make my peace with that by suggesting that I am ten years older than Galloway and I must have helped pave a path that allowed a guy like him to find far greater success on that path than I ever did. I have zero ability to back up that supposition, but like I said, its my way of making peace with my inadequacies. I was early and now I am too late.
Both Galloway and I are very philanthropically inclined. He gives all his NYU compensation back to NYU and I spent ten years teaching at Cornell and donated far more to Cornell during those years than I ever earned from them. Galloway has stated that his goal is to spend or give away his wealth rather than hoard it. I admire that and believe deeply in the die-broke philosophy of life. In a nutshell, Scott Galloway is essentially a business thought leader who combines academic expertise with real-world entrepreneurial experience, using his platform to comment on technology, economics, and societal trends. He does what I do, but on a much bigger stage and probably with greater wisdom.
Imagine my surprise when the opening riff between Galloway and Elson on this podcast about whether the AI revolution will make or break our economy (a topic I spend a lot of time thinking about and trying desperately to gain perspective on), starts off about why some people are late and some people are early. Apparently, Elson was late to the broadcast that day and while admitting it, he went on to say that he is far more often habitually early. Galloway explained that his tendency was for being late and that it probably was some sort of passive-aggressive way of establishing dominance. Elson suggested that his earliness had to do with his dislike of being rushed and therefore being off-balance and that he was always early because he had a fundamental “I’m not worthy problem”. Elson sounds a lot like me only younger and smarter. I must be stuck in an inferiority loop at the moment because I’m saying that the guy I want to sit next to is Galloway, but that I’m unworthy and the guy who gets to sit next to Galloway (Elson) leaves me also feeling inferior to and unworthy of. Wow, I need an injection of ego and I need it now, It’s good that I’m listening to the rest of the podcast on AI in hopes that I will get smarter about using the stuff to have some ability to keep up with these guys.
But I will do that later. Right now I want to explore why I wasn’t as wonderful as Scott Galloway. He graduated college (UCLA) and became a fixed income analyst at Morgan Stanley. At that time I was in the first class of partners made at Bankers Trust (there were 40 of us). I was running the Emerging Markets Department, which I had founded, having already built the banks futures and options business and co-founded the Global Derivatives Department, that I went on to run just as Scott was doing what all Wall Street analysts did after two years, which was go back to business school. He went off to Berkeley Haas School of Business for his MBA while I went to Canada to serve a two-year sentence running our Canadian business. He was probably sleeping on a mattress in a shared cheap Oakland duplex while I was living in a luxury expat apartment fit for a bank CEO in Toronto’s posh Yorkville area. But when Scott came out of school in 1992, and I was being welcomed back from exile in NYC to take on a big job with 4.000 staff, he had the balls to start a marketing consulting consulting business that he parlayed into several other start-ups during the internet boom. He succeeded enough during those booming years that he pocketed some serious money (as did I, though in a more traditional path as a senior manager of hot ticket bank that sold itself to a big European bank at the end of the decade). I’m glossing over lots of details and pretending that I banked as much coin as he did, when the truth is that he took far better advantage of those fast lane days than I did.
From that point on, the key difference between us took hold. When the World Economic Forum declared him a “Global Leader of Tomorrow” I feel my star had already peaked and I was looking to be lower profile trying to get out of being a CEO of a big asset management business. I made one more go at the big time at Bear Stearns while Scott was busy building his brand as a professor, writer and eventually podcast guru. After I got bitten in the ass by the Bear debacle (you can Google that if you need to), I went in an entirely different direction while Scott’s brand and, quite frankly, his substance, just kept getting better. I don’t regret any of my moves or choices, but I do admire what Galloway has done with his assets, while keeping his liberal perspective in tact. My guess remains that my tendency to be early simply didn’t work out as well as his being late.