Peter Orszag

This guy is the recent CEO of Lazard and both him and his brother have highly successful backgrounds.

Interestingly, he had never worked in investment banking and his first position in the field was as the Vice Chairman of Citigroup's CIB division. He then became a Vice Chairman and MD of Lazard, and recently their CEO.

He started off in academia as an economics professor and was an advisor under the Clinton and Obama administrations, and was a White House Budget director. He clearly had a very impressive career outside of banking and held positions on various economic forums, think tanks, and organisations.

But the fact that he had never worked in investment banking prior to becoming a Vice Chairman at Citi was quite surprising. Although he's clearly extremely intelligent, he's also well connected.

Are there any other cases that are unconventional like this?

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Funniest

I came name a few,

Christopher Columbus

Yep, he was initially going on a site visit in India to learn about new products that could impact price to sales ratio in the spices industry. However, upon his arrival at the premises, he discovered vacant land available for development thereby enriching his firm instantaneously. Although there have been come ups like you mentioned of the sort, I truly feel this one is the greatest one of all time

 

aryeh bourkoff of liontree - came from UCSD, did not have a job for 6 months after graduation, got stabbed in the back, and started out as a HY research analyst and only transitioned to IB when he was at UBS.

imo, what's most impressive about aryeh is that he has so much energy and is always so cheerful, despite the harsh realities of wall street.

u da man aryeh!

 

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