Forty-eight years after his first start-up, Bill Donaldson is helping with another.
After stepping down as Securities and Exchange Commission chairman in 2005, Donaldson is lending his expertise to Perella Weinberg Partners, the corporate advisory boutique founded in June by exMorgan Stanley vice chairman Joe Perella.
Donaldson, 75, will help organize and chair the firm’s advisory committee, assist with strategy and advise the occasional corporate client.
His first firm, Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, which he co-founded in 1959 with two Harvard Business School classmates, invented modern-day equity research and was long known as a small firm that could punch with the big boys before it was acquired by Credit Suisse in 2000. “The corporate advice business is a growth business right now, and I’ve had the experience of a start-up,” says Donaldson. “What they’re doing reminds me of the DLJ days.”
