Dumbest question in a meeting?
Based on your IB or PE days, what is the dumbest question you’ve heard asked in a management or lender meeting?
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Most egregious experience for me was a lender meeting for a portco financing. The company was in the pharma space but had zero exposure to any controlled substance or opioid related. We made sure to hammer that point home several times over the first 30 minutes of the deck yet, low and behold, the first question out the dumbass commercial banker’s mouth is whether they have any opioid exposure.
I rarely remember silly questions because we all make mistakes, but it was clear this idiot hadn’t paid attention at all.
Good stuff. Lenders (myself included) can be morons
I've gotta say some of the most useless questions (can be considered dumbest) have come from legal counsel. Having some partner at Skadden reiterate a question which he obviously knows the answer to is even worse than having someone ask an uninformed and otherwise stupid question given you know they're doing it for the billables.
Wow, our external counsel does the same exact thing. Asks blatantly obvious questions just to hear the sound of their own voice. They try desperately to pretend they’re adding value
Yeah exactly, Managing them is an actual thing you have to do from preventing them going down some bullshit rabbit hole. Unless we are doing SPA turns etc, I'm not really about having external counsel input in almost any situation unless we explicitly ask for it.
It always grinds my gears when lawyers ask (often very basic or misguided) questions about operations or financials. Like, a) it's a dumb question; b) it's irrelevant to your job; and c) you're charging me >$1,000 an hour for this conversation.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but those people who are "of counsel" (ie. too senior for associate but not partner for some reason) are always such tryhards with the Financial/Biz DD stuff.
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