Crutching, Drenching, Vaccinating, Dipping, Shearing, and Tailing

Q Belk

Mr. David Muller!

Peter Simer told me you were compiling something from our amazing class and I saw nothing. Then this afternoon I went to my “Junk E-mail” folder and here were these two missives from you! So…how are you and why are you in Florida? I am in New Zealand. And I am a new arrival to the “meat business” (memories of Muller’s Meats). I have two score beef cows outside in the mud eating sileage and 286 sheep, of whom ~ 150 are lambs…as well as bees, chickens, and far too many rabbits. So I could chew your ear off with questions about the meat business if you were here. I live with these animals: crutching, drenching, vaccinating, dipping, shearing, tailing…sometimes my son helps, maybe even my wife. But it’s mostly me and farming is HARD! You and I could talk Wagyu, grass-fed, hard feed…my learning curve is vertical. Nothing makes money in farming; we have a small vineyard as well: a glorious disaster and money pit. Or, as Warren Buffett put it when he visited us in Jack McDonald’s class, “Maybe grapes from a little eight-acre vineyard in France are really the best in the world, but I always had a suspicion that about ninety-nine percent of it is in the telling and about one percent of it is in the drinking.”

Uh…I am late to your tome. What do you want? Stories of Porterfield, Horngren, Haspeslagh…they were wonderful professors. Scholes? He ended up being a customer at LTCM…then we (yes, yours truly) helped shut down his hedge fund.

But what I really really really valued were my classmates. Like this guy from a family meat business in Niagara Falls…he worked I think at Goldman for the summer…at the end of the summer a partner, John Farmer, told him in a genteel North Carolina accent, “Ah just can’t imagine Goldman Sachs without David Mulluh…” I thought if anyone can see through that bullshit sales line, it’s Muller. And he did. He went back to the family meat business…then I lost track of him.

Now that I have too much time digging post holes or dealing with stinky sheep (who refuse to engage in my diatribes) as I try to understand the choices I have made…there was never any real plan. I either wanted something or wanted to get away from something. I left college (Dartmouth) after freshman year for a “short absence” which turned into almost four years. I was obsessed with climbing and working at the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS). There were almost no rules in the ’70s. I had my groups of students at eighteen years old, most were older than me, worked in Wyoming, Alaska, Utah…it was a wonderful peripatetic existence in tents, a snow cave, an igloo, or on someone’s floor or, when I later became “rich,” in the back of my pickup. Why I was not responsible for mass deaths is beyond me; I climbed Denali three times; I should have lost all my students in a crevasse or falling off a ridge. At some point it dawned on me that I would still be carrying a heavy pack and teaching belaying at…thirty? forty? But NOLS had an Africa branch in Kenya; I begged the director (Peter Simer, our classmate) to let me run it but…it meant I had to return to college. So I did, graduating with a degree in history, but really in some sort of latter-day Liberation anti-colonialist Marxism. Then went to Africa for two and a half wonderful years. In Kenya a guy named Noah Gottdiener, an ex-NOLS instructor, visited on his way to a “real job.” He said something like the following: “You know, you are kind of running a small business here. We studied this kind of thing in ‘cases’ at Harvard.” He said he was on his way to “Lehman Brothers.” He told me about “Goldman Sachs” (must be in the clothing business), and “Salomon Brothers” (no doubt, ski bindings). (He later was CEO of Duff & Phelps.) So I spent the following winter learning about and applying to business schools; I was certain I wanted to go to the GSB even though the closest I’d ever been to The Farm was Yosemite Valley. Spent one last season in Alaska. I got my acceptance on my way to a glacier climbing course in the Chugach. My last night, at 3:00 a.m., I was paddling a kayak into Whittier thinking, “I wonder when I will ever be back?” (Never went back to Alaska.)

The GSB…it took me several weeks to understand that I was seriously, seriously out of my depth. A few more weeks to grasp that I was academically hanging by my fingernails. The midterms and final exams were gut-wrenching. By the winter I had settled into a routine of study, study, study. Then came interviews. One banker held my resume like a piece of toilet paper and said, “What am I supposed to do with this?” I figured I’d “just shoot for the moon.” I had nothing to lose. My wonderful friend Joanne Tillemans, “the dancer” from Alvin Ailey, (another hopeless “poet”) and I compared notes. “I heard Salomon Brothers is awful, real pr*cks.” We signed up for the interviews anyway. I had no strategy. I got the usual guy in suspenders, asked a few leading questions. Then he said, “You just don’t know anything about risk, do you?” That was it, I’d had it…I launched at him “What the f*ck do YOU know about risk? You ever worked on a guy with a hole in his head and a busted femur on the other guy in a tent at 19,000 feet with two corpses outside on the glacier?” (Not my students; another party next to us had fallen down a couloir.) I just kept going. Shouting. Drownings, falls, storms, injuries, cold. We’d had the Cost Accounting midterm that morning (a mere four hours) and I was sleep deprived, fed up with the grind, the GSB, not knowing anything, getting beaten down, and this fat jerk with suspenders was challenging me about risk. He started sinking in his chair as I went “postal” on him. His boss walked in (the famous “Shoes” who later ran Pimco), and his boss said, “We’d like to see you at our office on Monday, we start at 5:00 a.m.” And that was that. I went to New York and figured out the trading floor: just like the baboon troops we’d studied in Kenya, it was a community with Alpha Males with cigars. They beat up on the weaker ones if they stepped out of line. There was a strict hierarchy. Also, just like manual labor (I’d done some time rough-necking on oil rigs in Wyoming) you watched out for each other, listened very carefully to the boss, tried not to get hurt, went to the bar after work, et cetera. Wall Street was easy; it was just a tribe.

But more importantly, what impact did my classmates have on me, how did they help me survive because I was “non-traditional,” coming from a climbing school and nonprofit? My classmates were everything. I would not have graduated without my classmates – too many to list … like Dave Jones, Joanne Tillemans, Anne Casscells, Al Sinsheimer ‘84, …they tutored me, mentored me. And the…so I was a “facilitator” in Feely Touchy with Bruce Golden – last term 2nd year. He said, “Wanna come to the Salmon River with us after graduation?” It was him, Edelson, Squeeze, and Chris Malone…I was kayaking and met the girlfriend of one of the raft guides … Sherry and I have now been married for thirty-two years. Thank you, Bruce for “introducing” us. Dave Jones, Squeeze, and Bruce came to the wedding, a very “alternative” affair in Marin.

I ended up at First Boston selling bonds in SF, Anne Casscells was right up the street at Goldman. We used to compare notes and stories. I took four months off to climb Everest (We were trying a new route, very hard, did not succeed, still hasn’t been done.) That was ’87. I finally (mercifully) got laid off in ’91, Sherry and I had a 29-foot sailboat, we sailed it to Mexico…then Hawaii…then NZ where our son was born. And First Boston hired me back (seriously, no shit, you can’t make this up). Spent four wonderful years in NZ, took citizenship, got transferred to OZ, then to Tokyo for 11 years. I got myself onto the hedge fund bandwagon, and it carried me forward to the point that I was a hedge fund “expert.” The real truth is that I no longer worried, as I did at business school, about the “Impostor Syndrome.” It becomes Existentialist. In Tokyo I used to see Furney-Howe. He warned me that Tokyo is seductive. It is; you become part of the furniture. I did a brief sojourn at Stanford in the endowment working for Anne; she was not only charitable for hiring me, she was a great boss. I owe her eternally. Back to Tokyo. Then to the Dartmouth Endowment, and Cambridge Associates (thank you, Brett Hewitt, for helping) and finally here to farming. I joke that I spent 25 years in four investment banks (three of which no longer exist) so that I could farm in NZ. It’s been worth the wait. Any classmates who can make it here would be welcome…and you can help with the farming. NZ is…obviously…many of the things that the U.S. currently is not…poles apart.

That’s all. Those two years were painful and transformative, and I really owe my survival to my classmates. Thank you.