At age 61, Thomas Weisel knows who he is. He’s brash and ambitious, yes, but he has suffered enough career setbacks to have learned some humility and maturity -- and that was even before the dot-com bust decimated his latest investment bank.
For that reason, it’s disappointing that Richard Brandt’s book about the financier’s life, Capital Instincts: Life as an Entrepreneur, Financier and Athlete, suffers from such a serious identity crisis. Journalist Brandt and Weisel trade off as authors: Brandt writes a chapter, to which Weisel appends lengthy observations. The result is a disjointed book that tries to be biography, autobiography and textbook for would-be entrepreneurs and financiers -- but succeeds in none of those roles.
That’s a pity, because the controversial Weisel is an intriguing figure: He helped nurture Silicon Valley and its many remarkable high-tech start-up companies. Moving back to the Valley in 1966 after finishing Harvard Business School, Weisel joined a new partnership founded by Sanford Robertson in 1970, becoming a partner himself in 1972. When Robertson left in 1978, Weisel renamed the firm Montgomery Securities. It took public such companies as Yahoo! and Micron Technology before selling out to NationsBank in 1998. Weisel left in a spat over control and founded Thomas Weisel Partners, which succeeded spectacularly before falling precipitously after the tech bubble burst.
Brandt, a veteran Silicon Valley reporter who was editor-in-chief of tech magazine Upside, skillfully chronicles Weisel’s development as an aspiring fi-nancier just as entrepreneurs like Intel Corp.'s Gordon Moore were transforming the Valley from a dusty stretch where Weisel and his Stanford University fraternity pals went target shooting into the epicenter of global technological innovation. Brandt studs his narrative with little-known anecdotes gleaned from extensive interviews with Weisel’s old college friends and business associates.
Weisel’s own essays at times reveal a redeeming self-reflection, intimacy and honesty. In one, he tells the story of how a close friend beat throat cancer only to contract leukemia two months later and succumb to that disease. For Weisel, the experience underscored that “in sports, in business and in life, luck always plays a major role.” Not many highly successful people would admit that.
But the book’s structure destroys any sense of continuity to the tale. One chapter, for instance, shifts from Brandt’s granular narrative of the mid-1970s ferment that led Weisel to split with partner Robertson to a magazinelike shaded box detailing Weisel’s passion for skiing, then ends with two pages of “Thoughts for the Entrepreneur” by Weisel.
Brandt’s unmitigated admiration for his subject, often expressed through hyperbole, also hurts the book. On the growth of Thomas Weisel Partners, launched in 1999: “TWP came out of the gate faster than Lance Armstrong soaring down the side of a mountain with the wind at his back.”
To be fair, one of the most difficult challenges biographers face is telling the unsanitized truth about their best source. It’s especially tough when dealing with Weisel, whose personal magnetism and considerable success make him easy to like. Although it took months of coaxing, Weisel sat for a series of interviews, as did several family members, close friends and business associates -- grant-ing the kind of access that makes objectivity all the more difficult. Weisel also had the power to strike or change portions of the book that he believed were inaccurate or inappropriate.
Still, for a veteran journalist, Brandt lacks the skepticism that would have made the book more compelling. Take the recent wave of Wall Street scandals. Weisel’s firms “have actually come through with surprisingly little taint,” Brandt writes, ignoring that TWP is one of 12 firms that collectively agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle investigations by regulators into tainted stock research.
Brandt notes accusations that Montgomery and TWP engaged in overly aggressive business tactics, including taking lousy companies public, but chalks up the charges to competitors crying sour grapes. Even when he mentions a host of Montgomery- and TWP-led stock offerings for now-bankrupt or reeling 1990s start-ups like Fogdog and InfoSpace, it’s to make the case that Weisel’s firms dominated tech underwriting.
By all but giving Weisel a pass on these issues, the book does its readers a disservice. Had Brandt been a little tougher, today’s kinder, gentler, wiser Thom Weisel just might have taken it in stride.
