As much as I loved living in Orange County, the natural beauty and the glorious weather, I always felt my time there would be limited. Eventually, I made my way to the Bay Area. I had met a few people at a wedding who lived in the Bay Area, who regaled me with colorful stories of their very successful lives. They told me about the ever-growing tech scene and how much fun San Francisco was to live in - a real city with a long history - it all sounded like a very different way of life, and culture, far from the influence of Corona Del Mar or Newport Beach. Just what I was looking for. I was sold.
At the time, I remember one of my close friends asking me why I would ever want to leave the O.C. - I told her that I needed to find my life. I had tried on the persona of Orange County and it just did not fit. Los Angeles and Hollywood were never an attraction for me, even as a child. I was never impressed by the lifestyles of celebrities and the rich and famous, and had absolutely no aspiration to be like them. So I packed up and left.
After I landed in the Bay Area, I took on the customary temp jobs to help me get by as I interviewed for full-time positions. At one point, I simultaneously interviewed for sales assistant positions at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and another boutique investment bank. Of the three, I really wanted the job at Morgan Stanley, as Goldman Sachs did not allow their sales assistants to get registered (Series 7 and 63), and the Morgan job was much more appealing to me than the smaller boutique firm. As life would have it, I was actually offered the job at Goldman first, and the small boutique firm next, but I turned them both down and crossed my fingers that Morgan Stanley would eventually come through for me. Happily, they did.
Morgan Stanley proved to be an amazing training ground for me. When I describe to people today my work ethic, I joke that I was "raised by Morgan Stanely". Morgan had very high standards of excellence, and all the sales assistants were expected to maintain those standards at all times. The team of four brokers that I worked for in Private Client Services (PCS) held themselves to the highest levels of integrity, and the philosophy of getting your work done correctly the first time around was ingrained into me at Morgan. One of the first things I was told during training was, "Don't ever spell a client name wrong when opening a new account". The thought was that if you spelled the client's name wrong and it printed out incorrectly on their statement, the client invariably would not trust the rest of the data set forth in the statement - they would question everything. Consequently, I paid very close attention to all of my work at Morgan and double and triple-checked everything I did. This process set me up for success, literally, and many of the philosophies that I embodied at the time, I still carry through in my work today.
In the picture above of San Francisco, I worked for Morgan Stanley in the tall, brown building on the right—555 California Street.
During my time at Morgan Stanley, Frank Quattrone was the head of technology investment banking. The brokers I worked with often mentioned Frank and the investment banking side of Morgan, including the IPOs in progress. However, there was an "ethical wall" separating the PCS Group from the investment banking team, so I rarely interacted with the bankers. Part of my job involved sending prospectuses to clients, and only then did I learn about the deals Morgan was working on. At that time, I didn't realize how significant my work at Morgan would be for my future.