For a man with a bona fide Wall Street pedigree, Bill Weld had a tough time finding a job in finance after leaving the Massachusetts governor’s mansion in 1997. He interviewed widely and says he was considered for a senior post at J.P. Morgan, but in the end no offers were forthcoming. Now, Weld, whose grandfather co-founded brokerage firm White, Weld & Co. (sold to Merrill Lynch in 1978), is bringing the family name back to the Street. This month he joins Leeds Equity Partners, which invests in education-related companies, as a general partner; the firm will be renamed Leeds, Weld & Co. Weld previously served as chairman of Leeds’s advisory board while working full-time for the Boston law firm McDermott, Will & Emery. After witnessing the layoffs related to the 1998 financial markets crisis and the job cuts that followed Morgan,s sale to Chase Manhattan, Weld says he’s glad he got passed over for a job the first time around. “I probably would have wound up out on my butt within a year,” he quips.
