How to Dress
What happens when you take the former CTO from Alphabet’s Waymo project, a previous lead on Tesla’s autopilot program, and a former member of Uber and put them all on the same team?
Oh, and sprinkle in money from Amazon and Sequoia Capital, among others?
Well, that company would be called Aurora and it’s got my attention:
Its PitchBook description is what you’d expect to hear from its founders:
“Developer of an autonomous car technology designed to create self-driving cars. The company’s technology uses advanced machine learning software and hardware to power self-driving cars by leveraging a combination of camera, radar, and LiDAR, enabling clients to make roads safer and improve access to mobility.”
If I had many, many monies, which I do not, I’d be more gung ho into spreading capital around in the private market.
For now, Aurora is on my short list along with names such as Airtable, Affirm, Brex, and Neuralink.
As a further example: the founder/CEO of Affirm is Max Levchin, who was CTO and co-founder of PayPal ($PYPL), and he has led his new company to a point-of-sale loan deal with Walmart ($WMT), which is no small feat:
“The partnership, which was announced Wednesday, is a coup for the privately held Affirm. The San Francisco company makes loans to customers of more than 2,000 merchants — including Expedia, Orbitz, Wayfair, and Cole Haan — but Walmart is expected to quickly become its biggest retail partner.
Under the deal, Walmart shoppers will be able to get Affirm loans of three, six or 12 months to finance purchases ranging from $150 to $2,000. The loans are already being offered in Walmart stores, and they will be available to Walmart’s online shoppers in the coming weeks.”
Daniel Kahneman once wrote, “Investment bankers believe in what they do. They don’t want to hear that their decisions are no better than chance. The rest of us pay for their delusions.”
Even if a traditional investment bank like Goldman Sachs ($GS) formally allows casual attire, it’ll take more than a memo to bring its partnership model into the 21st century.
From Matt Levine’s Bloomberg Opinion Money Stuff newsletter:
“‘All of us know what is and is not appropriate for the workplace’? Look: You wrote those words in a memo changing what is appropriate for the workplace. Something was inappropriate for the workplace yesterday that is appropriate today. But you don’t say what it is! ‘All of us know’! Somehow!
Disclosure, I worked at Goldman from 2007 to 2011 (the dress code had been business casual for years), and I am biased, but I say to you: This right here is why Goldman is the best investment bank. This memo should be taught in business schools. Goldman’s dress code is that you should dress the way you’re supposed to dress at Goldman. If you have to ask, etc. The difference between a middling banker and a great one is this sort of tacit knowledge, a sense of appropriateness and nuance and savoir-faire, the ability to read and respond to — and shape — the expectations of your internal and external clients. What you wear is the least complicated part of that, and if you need explicit rules for how to dress then you’ll never master the really hard parts. ‘Important people like to deal with important people,’ John Whitehead’s famous commandment says. ‘Are you one?’ That is the dress code.”
The team at Affirm wears fewer suits.
