The Week on Wall Street: Ex-Goldman Banker Helps Apple Pick Up Beats

Published: May 30, 2014

A former Goldman Sachs banker helps bring Beats to Apple.
Behind every big M&A deal is a big M&A Wall Street banker. And Apple’s acquisition of Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine’s Beats Electronics is no exception. Adrian Perica—who joined Apple in 2009 and who is an alumnus of West Point, MIT, Deloitte, and Goldman Sachs—is the former Wall Street banker who helped put Apple and Beats together. Although little is known of Perica at the moment, the dealmaker will no doubt be getting more of the spotlight soon, as Apple is expected to continue to throw its big wad of cash around to make more acquisitions.

Meditating for dollars: Wall Street hitters say mindfulness boosts the bottom line.
Last year, hedge fund manager David Ford’s bond fund returned 24 percent. Which means “he almost beat the surging stock market with a bond fund.” Which is akin to hitting 40 home runs in the major leagues with a whiffle bat. And Ford attributes his slugging percentage to this: “the 20 minutes he spends in his pajamas each morning repeating a meaningless mantra bestowed on him by a teacher of Transcendental Meditation.” And Ford isn’t the only meditator on the Street. Ray Dalio, the CEO of the largest hedge fund in the world, is also a TM practitioner—and billionaire.

A job market grows in Brooklyn.
Forget Manhattan. If you want a job in New York City these days, your best bet is Brooklyn. “A report released Tuesday by state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli … found that the number of private-sector jobs in the city’s most populous borough jumped 19.8 percent between 2003 and 2012.” And the jobs aren’t just in cheese shops, breweries, coffee shops, and barbecue restaurants. They’re also available at online retailers such as Etsy, and Wall Street banks such as JPMorgan Chase, which recently announced that it will be moving some 2,000 jobs across the East River.

Will Harvard soon be known as the Stanford of the East?
This could get bloodier than the East Coast-West Coast hip-hop rivalry. According to the New York Times, “Stanford University has become America’s ‘it’ school, by measures that Harvard once dominated. Stanford has had the nation’s lowest undergraduate acceptance rate for two years in a row; in five of the last six years, it has topped the Princeton Review survey asking high school seniors to name their ‘dream college’; and year in and year out, it raises more money from donors than any other university.” Of course, it’s well known that Stanford is the place to be if you want to work in tech (exhibit A: this infographic in the latest issue of Wired that details where Googlers and Applers went to college). But will Stanford replace Harvard as the school of choice for those gunning for lucrative finance and consulting positions as well?

Forget an MBA, man. Join a band.
If you want to be a successful entrepreneur, don’t look for guidance from America’s top universities but from musicians like the Beatles. So says Panos Panya, the founding director of Berklee College of Music’s new Institute of Creative Entrepreneurship, who believes “the rock ‘n’ roll ethos is a better one for entrepreneurs to embrace. At its core, starting a business is much more of a creative, messy discipline, full of blurry edges and governed by hunches, experimentation, and instinct. Entrepreneurship has more in common with music than science, but it is taught as though careful planning and deliberate analysis inevitably yield success.” For further study, you might also want to check out this 2013 Colbert Report interview with Paul McCartney, in which one-fourth of the Beatles reveals a little bit of the British band’s hit-making/songwriting process.

Stanley Cup finals tickets are now trading at more than $3,000 a pop.
If you want to impress one of your institutional clients who’ll be in New York City during the next couple of weeks, you might want to jump on Stanley Cup finals tickets soon before prices rise any further. Currently, the average going rate for a ticket to game six (at New York) of the Stanley Cup Finals, which will involve the New York Rangers and either the Los Angeles Kings or the Chicago Blackhawks, is $3,150. Chances are that prices will rise significantly as the finals progress, especially given the fact that the Rangers haven’t raised the Cup in 20 years.

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