Inspirational Leadership with Jeff Solomon

Speaker 1:
Welcome to TD Cowen Insights, a space that brings leading thinkers together to share insights and ideas shaping the world around us. Join us as we converse with the top minds who are influencing our global sectors.

Yaron Werber:
Thank you for joining us for another exciting episode in our Biotech Decoded podcast series. I'm Yaron Werber, Senior Biotechnology Analyst at TD Cowen. I'm super excited to be joined by Jeff Solomon in this episode called Inspirational Leadership that discusses career, the merits of TD's, acquisition of Cowen, his view of the broader market, and whether biotech stocks are on their way to recovery.
Jeff was president of TD Cowen and Vice chair of TD Securities. He was chair and CEO of Cowen prior to its acquisition by TD Bank. Previously, Jeff served several roles at Cowen as President, COO, and head of Investment Banking. Prior to Cowen, Jeff was a co-portfolio manager at Remius. Jeff, thank you so much for joining us. Jeff, you've had somewhat of a non-traditional career path to Wall Street. What led you to Wall Street to begin with?

Jeff Solomon:
I went to the University of Pennsylvania as an undergrad and I came to New York to be an actor, or at least that's what I thought I was coming to New York to do, and I figured I probably should have some critical skills before I try the whole acting thing and maybe a little bit of money in my pocket. The great thing about the Wall Street two-year analyst program in corporate finance was that it was a two-year analyst program and you could leave at the end with no strings. I'm like all right, I'll do that for two years and then I'll do the acting thing, and that's how I ended up in New York.

Yaron Werber:
You've talked a lot about mentorship in your career and the importance of having great mentors and there became your lifelong colleagues, essentially. What learnings do you have from your early careers that you're still applying today?

Jeff Solomon:
First of all, I witnessed the amalgamation of three very large firms: Shearson, Lehman, and Hutton. By the way, interestingly enough, none of which are around anymore for different reasons, but it's really fascinating to think about that in retrospect because I was in the middle of that. I joined the firm in 1988 after the combination of those three organizations.
Watching what happened was just an exercise for me and understanding how you blend culture, how you actually attack marketplaces, and I had a ringside seat at that because midway through my second year, I got drafted onto the internal corporate finance team, and the firm became my largest client as a junior person.
I basically had free rein to go all over the entire organization and talked to whoever I wanted to. We were in the process of looking at a number of strategic alternatives, including doing a public offering because we were owned by American Express and American Express was exploring the possibility of de-consolidating, so it was target rich environment for me in terms of knowledge.
Every day, I was learning something new about the industry that ultimately, I would end up going to work in. At the time, I had no idea that the things I was learning about the investment banking and brokerage world would ever matter, but I was fortunate that I worked with a team, including our former CEO, Peter Cohen, who embraced me and shared information with me, and I was like a sponge. It was a very, very part luck, but also I worked. I worked like crazy to try to gain access, and I got some great exposure to young age and it set me up pretty well.

Yaron Werber:
As you think about what you know now, if you had to go back and do one thing over again or give yourself advice, what would that be?

Jeff Solomon:
I probably would've tried to enjoy the journey more. I think a lot of people our age say that. Yaron, I'll put you in my category because I know we're close in age. I just think so much of what we're programmed to do is go after the goal, whatever the goal is. What's your goal? That's important. It's important to have goals, it's important to set things that you want to try to accomplish and achieve, and it's important for those goals to be stretch goals because you always want to be trying to do something that's beyond maybe what you think your capabilities are, but along the way, to recognize that it is a journey and you move up, you move down, you move sideways.
I put a tremendous amount of stress on myself on a day in and day out basis that was probably unnecessary. I think that's really something that you can only fully appreciate when you get to the age that we are, you recognize how much energy you spent on things that probably didn't amount to anything productive.
I tell a lot of folks in their 20s, that's the only decade when it's really all about you and you should be selfish with the exploration that you go through during that decade because it sets you up foundationally for whatever it is you're ultimately going to be and whatever you're ultimately going to do. It's really the only time in your life when you can do it when there's really not other people involved, for the most part, statistically speaking. Most people by the end of their 20s will find another person and then in their 30s they'll have other little people around. Statistically speaking, it's not always the case, but oftentimes it is.
Once those things start to take shape, it's just much more difficult to go through self-exploration because you're worried about everybody else. I just think I ended up doing that, I just didn't think I did it with enough intentionality in retrospect, and that's what I would say.

Yaron Werber:
Yeah. The precious element of time doesn't dawn on people until later on, especially with me, I'm watching my mom, she's elderly now, and you watch the cycle of life and you realize time is precious.

Jeff Solomon:
Yeah. I'm not sure in your 20s you're supposed to be thinking about the preciousness of time. Maybe you are, but that's something that we think about at our age because of the unique aspect of how much time do you actually get with family versus your work family. We think about those things now with a little bit more deliberation precisely because our parents are older, our children are out of the house. My kids are out of the house now. I still pine for some of those days when they're in the house.
I remember being stressed about those days. I remember traveling to soccer games, and dance recitals, and play practice, and all those things. It was a lot to do and have a full-time career, and I still ask myself was I there enough as a dad? Was I there enough? What did I miss? I think we all go through that process of optimizing our own time. What I always like to say is it's not the quantity of time you spend, it's the quality of that time.
We all have lots of things to do, be present, be in the moment, and I was fortunate enough to have a few mentors, to go back to that for a second, that highlighted to me the importance of going at your personal life with the same degree of intensity that you go with your work life. Not the same kind of stress maybe, but when you're in the moment, are you absorbing it? When you're at the dance recital and watching your child dance, are you in the moment or are you worried about something at work?
Listen, I'm not 100% on this, but I'm pretty good at being able to block out the noise so I can be in the moment and absorb what's happening so that I can come back to those moments. In time later on, I can go back and relive those experiences because got a full sense of what it smelled, what it sounded like, who was with me. I think honestly, that's a great piece of advice. In the world we live in with all of the distractions that people have, you have no idea what you're missing when you're distracted. You just don't because you're distracted. When I've been able to block those other things out, my life is so much more three-dimensional, really. That's been a great piece of advice.

Yaron Werber:
I've been hiking a lot, the Appalachian Trail in parts, and that takes you out of your element completely and allows you to be in a different zone, and it really makes you appreciate whoever you're spending time with of being present and being very attentive to your surroundings.

Jeff Solomon:
I'm a big believer in that too, which is we all have routines. It's important sometimes to step out of your routine so you can do a reset. We have places where we can go, it could be walks around the block, could be going to the beach, could be whatever it is where you literally... I go through this process where I try to blank out all of the stress and all of what's in my head, just wipe the screen so that I can recalibrate.
Usually after the back of that, I get a creative surge, I'll get an organizational surge, other things happen as a result of that because most of us, we have cluttered minds. Our minds don't really function linearly, they function more like individual packets with synapses that fire at different times. That's why we're easily distracted. I just think having those moments, and sometimes you could do it, and people call it mindfulness, you should do it maybe on a daily basis. Other people say you don't need it on a daily basis.
When I do it, and it's usually for me when I'm running, I run a lot, so when I'm out running and I'm listening to music or listening to a podcast or listening to a book on Audible, my mind is just like the process... I can feel it just resetting. I come home and I'm ready for a bunch of other stuff.

Yaron Werber:
You talk a lot, for those of us who work at Cowen, you're omnipresent, you're everywhere and you're really inspiring. You talk a lot about the things that move you, the things that inspire you and talk a lot about finding meanings. How do you weave all of those into your leadership style, for the audience? Those of us who work here, we see this day to day.

Jeff Solomon:
I'd like to tell you there's some secret to it. There isn't. I'm present in the moment. When I'm with our colleagues or our clients, I'm really there and I'm listening intently, actively. Maybe that comes across in those conversations, but I'm usually listening for one or two things in those conversations where I can be helpful.
If someone's complaining, I can either get annoyed that they're complaining or I can listen to what they're complaining about and figure out if there's one or two things I can do to help and alleviate that. That's actually what it is. I am not omnipresent. I appreciate the fact that people think I am, and it flatters me when people say that. I'm not. In the subject of cloning, you can't be in more than one place at one time, despite our efforts to do that but you can be there when you're there.
It goes back to the same concept of when I'm with people, I'm in the room with them, I'm on Zoom with them, and so they feel my presence, they see my presence, and it allows for there to be more meaningful connection. I appreciate when people do it with me. I can tell when people aren't really there with me and then I wonder how much time am I spending with this person who doesn't seem to care whether I'm there or not?
I'm not perfect at this. It's a work in progress. Some days are better than others, but I think part of that that maybe you're referencing isn't omnipresence as much as it is intentional presence. That's probably more what it is, and then figuring out ways to be helpful. You'll hear me say this all the time, how can I help? People will take you up on that and then you have to be prepared to do be helpful actually, which is something I take great pride in.

Yaron Werber:
Let's shift a little bit. The TD acquisition of Cowen is about a year and a half in, roughly, years old where we are now. What drove your decision to pursue the deal. As you think about how is that transforming Cowen and Cowen's capabilities?

Jeff Solomon:
First of all, they approached me, Riaz Ahmed, who's our CEO at TD Securities, and Robbie Pride who used to run Investment Banking, they approached me, so I wasn't thinking TD, but we were thinking about what the next iteration of our organization was going to be. That was true. We knew that we had had some incredible performance years as an organization in '20 and '21 that were probably not going to be replicable for a while.
We were looking at different ways for us to extend our reach and our importance to clients, so we were thinking about wow, we don't have a balance sheet and maybe in some industries, we do need one to be more effective. We knew that growth was going to be out for a while because it was going to be a rate rising cycle that was going to make it difficult for people to invest in growth and that we're skewed to growth. These were all really meaningful conversations we were having. Honest, candid conversations we were having as a senior leadership team coming into 2022 when they showed up.
I think first of all, it was just we were open to the idea of doing something when it walked in the door. The second thing I would say is, and this is just a personal thing for me, I've seen so many leaders make it all about them all the time. When I took over as CEO, I made it really clear I'm thrilled to be the CEO of Cowen. I'm honored and humbled to be the CEO of Cowen, but I will not put my CEOship ahead of what's best for Cowen and what's best for the people at Cowen because in the end, when people look at me, what do I care about? This is a selfish thing. I want them to think that I help them to be in a better place. That's what I care about.
I came to work every day open to this idea that maybe I'm not supposed to be the CEO forever, and maybe I'm supposed to just be the CEO E for this period of time and I'm just going to do the best I can. If you have that mentality as a leader when something like this shows up and it means that you're not going to be the CEO anymore, you've already worked through that.
Now it's just about are you getting the organization and the people you care about in the organization, which when you're the CEO, I'm sure it's everybody. Let's be really clear. I care about everybody. When you make the decision to do this, you've already crossed the Rubicon about yourself, and it's not about you, it's about everybody.
When opportunities like this present themselves, you're in the right frame of mind to explore it because maybe that's the way things are supposed to be. I'm thrilled to have been the CEO of Cowen. We did so many great things as an independent company and that, nobody can take away. I'm excited about the future of us together with TD because it's going to be new and different, but whatever it ultimately ends up being, the success that we enjoyed, and the partnerships we had, the friends we made, the clients we impacted, all that still exists and I feel good to have played a role in that.

Yaron Werber:
Naturally, as you think about the join capabilities now, how are they different than what they were, let's say, two or three years ago, and where will they be two years from now specifically for let's say biotech corporates and biotech and institutional investors, our core clients on the biotech side?

Jeff Solomon:
I think from the standpoint of, I'll speak generally and I'll speak specifically to biotech. Outside of biotech, the balance sheet capabilities of an investment bank are really critical. At TD Securities, we have 750 billion assets, which we go to work every day in service of trying to drive client outcomes.
Now, the vast majority of that is not being applied in the biotech space because biotech needs very specific types of capital. It is mostly equity centric, though we do finance a lot of people in the royalty space. As the industry matures and you see more people doing things in fixed income because they have approvable drugs with royalty streams that we can make meaningful, much more meaningful. We have the DNA to understand that, and we're already financing people like Healthcare Royalty Partners and Royalty Pharma, so as the business matures, we'll be there for that in a different way and I feel pretty good about that.
I think when you look at what we can do on the global transaction banking side, we have spent no time with the treasurers and directors of finance in biotech land trying to figure out how to do what I would call the plumbing and the electricity, and we can do that today. We'll look for other ways to be meaningful to clients because again, what we love about being in this industry is that we're intimate with a lot of folks here. We have great relationships and we want to figure out ways to help. As we build our organization and have led the two organizations together, we're always thinking about healthcare and what can we do to help even further.

Yaron Werber:
What about as you think about private finance and what we can do now on the institutional client side and early capital fund formation versus what we're able to do two years ago, what comes to mind now?

Jeff Solomon:
First of all, when you talk about equity distribution, equity distribution is the mother's milk of capital raising. What a lot of people don't realize is IPOs are still episodic, financings are actually still episodic but every day, somebody comes in to trade equities. It's consistent, and so you have to be there every day trading in the secondary market so that you're having a consistent dialogue when a company decides it wants to finance itself.
People listen to you and your colleagues and research not because you're talking about deals, but because you're talking about the industry, what's happening in the industry, what's happening in therapeutic categories, and then a deal comes along and you can figure out how to articulate it in the context of what's happening in the rest of the industry. You have to be excellent at equity distribution every day in order to be there to raise money for clients when they need it.
That was a huge understanding that I did not have when I first came to Cowen. Coming to grips with the fact that the primary client is the capital provider and allowing us to be meaningful to the capital providers is actually the reason why companies talk to us in terms of financing. We'll continue to invest in that. I think a big rationale, I don't think, I know, the first five minutes of the conversation with Riaz and Robbie a few years ago was you guys have amazing research in equity trading. I'm like thank you, and they're like, "And we don't yet and we'd love to explore the opportunity to do that." I'm like, "Wait, what? Oh, wow. Flattered. Hadn't really thought about it, but are you asking me to do something strategic?" And they're like, "Actually, we are."
I read this strategy piece that they wrote subsequent to... That they wrote that led to the idea of acquiring Cowen, and it was all about high quality research and equity distribution with banking. It turns out there's a lot we could be doing on all of those fronts, but it goes without saying maybe, or it should not go without saying, I should say, that being there and having a preeminent equity distribution platform unlocks so much value for us, and that hasn't changed one iota. Now we're just figuring out how to do equity, fixed income, which TD was already good at. We can be so much more meaningful to the capital providers up and down the capital stack.

Yaron Werber:
Jeff, the broader market has been doing extremely well. It's been weighted by large cap tech, some of the smaller indices and some of the more alpha generating riskier subsegments, obviously. We've been down in that, but definitely coming back. As you're thinking about where the broader market stands now, what are the main drivers ahead in the coming, let's say one to two years?

Jeff Solomon:
Let's start from the standpoint that this entire industry, we happened to be born at an opportunistic time. I like to say to people we're fortunate to have been born when we were born because in a financial world, at least from the time that I was 14 years old until the time I was 55 years old, interest rates went in one direction, down. It went to zero twice, which means that the environment for investing in growth assets has been the best it's ever been historically.
Not surprisingly, the explosion in biotech and technology attacks to that. If you think about the explosion in what's happened in terms of innovation and tech investing broadly and then specifically in biotech, it all attacks to the fact that people are looking for high rates of return and money is ostensibly free, or it was for a long period of time. I don't think that's going to be the case anymore.
I've also made the case that what happened over the last four years doesn't necessarily mean the next four years are going to be like that. In fact, I think it's not because there'll be some other reasons why we'll be operating in a higher rate environment. Now we're going to go through a period of culling.
People will have to back business models that are less about lottery tickets and more about substance, and there will be winners and there will be losers and if you are good at what you do, either on the company side or on the investing side, you can make a lot of money and you will help a lot of people but there'll be a lot of pain along the way because not everybody's going to get funded and not everybody's going to get financed because people will be judicious. There are other things for them to do with their money in a higher rate environment.
I think that's the predominant thing that's happening in the market today, probably more than anything else, is rate structure. We may bottom out here or top out here in terms of the current rate structure, and we may go through a period of time in which there's cuts. We're not going back to zero.

Yaron Werber:
No, and I'm going to now zone in on the biotech sector specifically. We're talking to a lot of companies, a lot of funds, and certainly on the fund side, there's an interesting dichotomy. Funds are bigger than they've ever been, they're more successful than they've ever been, a lot of smaller funds have become fairly sizable, very much have led to a lot of innovation, but they're getting a little bit concerned, melancholic a little bit that the sector's broken a little bit, there's a continuous capital requirements, there's a lot of companies, a lot of hedge funds and a lot of specialists and the generalists don't really see a reason to invest in the sector.
Every time, personally I hear this, I think of 2008, 2010, biotech is over, never going to come back. The 2000 sell off, biotech is over, it's never going to come back. As you going to think about the cycles and you think about the sentiment, what comes to your mind?

Jeff Solomon:
Beyond the rate structure, which is really critical, again, I think we've adjusted to that already. Part of the pain that happened in '22 and '23 is a function of the fact that interest rates went up at the short end, went up 500 basis points. Never before in history has that happened, but it's not over, it's just different. We are seeing a lot of consolidation.
A lot of companies have ended their clinical trials, they still have cash left over, so they're doing reverse mergers. There's a whole cadre of companies that are developed new technologies that deserve to be public. People will be more discerning about which ones should be public, and which ones should not be public, which science gets whole categories and classes of therapeutics and modalities will appear because the innovation cycle still continues to grow. People will have to be more selective in that.
On the point of being bigger, we saw this in the tech space, and so it could happen this way in the biotech space. There's reasons why outside the biotech space, it's hard to do an IPO for less than $1 billion. It's math. If you have a growth and technology fund on the buy side, that's $100 billion, how much of a $50 million IPO are you going to do? The answer is zero because even if you got a 50% allocation, which you'd never get on that IPO, if that company isn't going to quintuple. Even if it does quintuple, it barely moves the needle for you.
What's likely to end up happening is you'll see private biotech. Companies will stay private a little bit longer because the biotech funds have gotten bigger and the size of biotech IPOs will probably have to increase, or there's going to have to be much smaller funds that spin off that are willing to do some of the earlier stage biotechnology deals.
People just don't understand. End of the day, if you raise $100 million in an IPO, you allocate the top of the book. Let's say the top of the book, it's 15%, it's $15 million. If it turns out that this IPO is a ten-bagger, how big of a fund do you have to be in order for that to matter? If you're a $30 billion fund, it might not matter, actually. This dynamic is yet to play out.
I think we went through a period of time here in the last few years, certainly in '20 and '21, where a lot of companies got public for all the reasons I mentioned before, but the zero interest rates and free money, many of those companies probably didn't deserve to be public because they didn't have business models that worked. Some did. The ones that did probably end up getting bigger and they'll end up aggregating more capital. But is it broken? No, it's going to evolve. It is because there's unmet need.
I think you might've been one of the people that pointed this out to me. What is the percentage of cure rate in a successfully approved drug? I don't know, is it 20%? If you can cure 20% of the people who have it, it's probably approval rate. What are you doing with the other 75? Do you think they don't deserve more innovation to try to cure them too? I think they do, and I think people will try.
This is a very unique industry with very unique attributes to it, maybe unlike any other industry. It's an industry of success, it's an industry of failure, and rebirth, and renovation, and renewal, and all that. I think earlier we were talking about this, but thalidomide, let's just talk about thalidomide for a second. I know I'm going way back, but that's all reason why we have the FDA A is because of thalidomide.
Who would've thought, in the 90s, that thalidomide would be back and create one of the all-time great biotech companies? Nobody. Somebody. A few people did and they figured out a way to raise money. I think I was involved in that rescue financing in '97 or something like that. Literally, my fund, they did a pipe. I remember the stock was $1 or something like that. I sold at five. I thought it was a hero. That's the nature of this business. I don't count it out. There's ebbs and flows and it's a little bit like forest fires. The forest regrows, burns out, then it regrows. Long-term, I'm still a bull.

Yaron Werber:
Thalidomide was an incidental finding, right? In the hospital, in the lab in Jerusalem, there was a literally thalidomide by mistake went into a Petri dish and they realized it's doing a lot. That was the genesis of Celgene.

Jeff Solomon:
It's a remarkable story. Just again, it's emblematic of so much in this industry and it's also... Let's be real here, this industry is a ring-fenced industry. You had to be really smart to get on the inside. If you're on the inside, we're not manufacturing... Somebody just can't graduate from college and decide all of a sudden, without a lot of work, that they're going to be in this industry. People like me who came to it later in life or who came back to it later in life, I like to say this.
In the 90s, I could price option value. What's the likelihood of a drug being approved or a clinical trial being successful? Is the market pricing it right or not? There's going to be volatility around that event. Can I buy a vault cheap or sell it expensive relative to what the expectations are? That's just math, but I didn't really need to actually know anything about the science and then all of a sudden all the scientists showed up, like you, and you know stuff that I didn't know anything, so I left for 10 years and the business...
In the 2000s, I left and I did other things. I only came back to it because my firm acquired Cowen and it was a powerhouse. I'm like I should probably pay attention to this. The only thing I knew is that biotech companies are good at raising money and we're good at raising money, so that seems like a natural place for us. It wasn't more complicated than that.
I just feel really fortunate to have been honestly embraced by the industry. There's nothing about my background that would suggest that I belong here. I will tell you, not once has anybody made me feel like I don't belong, even though there's a lot of times when I feel completely out over my skis with everybody in the industry, but I love it. I love it. It's been one of the true joys of my career is oh my God, I got a ringside seat and I got to be an active participant sometimes in some of the greatest innovations of our generation. Oh my God, really? How lucky am I?
That's why I love it. I just think there's a specialness around this ecosystem that doesn't exist in other places. We need to care for it and make sure that it stays that way so it's not like we don't all have a social responsibility to the biotech ecosystem we do, but it's an amazing, amazing organic place.

Yaron Werber:
Let me move to actually my favorite part of the Biotech Decoded podcast because at the end, it's not just about content, it's really about getting to know the people. This is the little personal touch and humor section, so drum roll. I do need to get some better props. As you think about your first job growing up that was meaningful to you, what was it?

Jeff Solomon:
My first job was I was a paperboy. I delivered the Pittsburgh Press, rest in peace. There's no more Pittsburgh Press, but I delivered the Pittsburgh Press in the afternoon. I wanted a ten-speed bike. My parents told me that if I wanted a ten-speed bike, I had to buy it myself and I had to get a job. So I got a job delivering newspapers.
Fun fact, by the way, I had a partner on that route who lived next door to me. He was a few years older than me. His name is Rich Lesser. Rich Lesser went on to become the chairman and CEO of BCG. We lived in houses next to each other and we grew up next to each other, and we shared that paper route. Sure enough, after a year, I saved up enough money to buy myself a ten-speed bike. I loved that. It was green, TD green, it was TD green back even then. I loved that thing. It was the first time I actually bought anything with my own money, and it was just such a fulfilling experience.

Yaron Werber:
How old were you?

Jeff Solomon:
I was 9 when I got the route. 9 years old.

Yaron Werber:
Wow.

Jeff Solomon:
I was 10 when I bought the bike.

Yaron Werber:
The bike was a Schwinn or a Raleigh. What kind of bike was it?

Jeff Solomon:
That's a think. I don't even know. It might've been a Schwinn, but I don't have to think about it.

Yaron Werber:
My first job was at Joe's Pizza, not even making pizza, I was literally cleaning dishes, sweeping the floor, cutting the pepperoni and the cheese, and then slowly, slowly started making pizza. Until today, I answer the phone, "Joe's Pizza."

Jeff Solomon:
Joe's Pizza. It's funny how those jobs are so formative. I had a lot of jobs that weren't in this industry that were formative. Many of those jobs led me to believe I shouldn't really do a lot of work academically because I don't want to end up doing them.

Yaron Werber:
That's why I got my first stereo that way. Those jobs meant a lot. What's your dream job if you weren't the president of TD Cowen?

Jeff Solomon:
I'd want to be the general manager of the Pittsburgh Steelers, truthfully. I think that would be so much fun actually. Maybe I'd love to be the general manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Now, maybe for those of you who are a sports fans, you're like why would you ever want to be the general manager of the Pirates? Because actually, if you could ever put a team together... The Steelers are a great franchise, and there's whole dynamic around free agency and salary caps in the NFL, there is not that same dynamic in baseball.
If you could figure out how to win a World Series with a constraints of a small market team like Pittsburgh, that would be a phenomenal challenge. Maybe for another time, I'll share with you the time that I got to spend with the former general manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates in 2012 at a batting practice where he laid out for me the strategy for how to try to build a world-class organization with all those constraints at a time when we were trying to figure out how to rebuild Cowen.
I remember that 90 minutes, everything we talked about, and there were so many parallels between trying to make the Pirates into a winning team after 20 years of losing and how to win consistently with those constraints. That just resonated with me, and we followed a lot of that playbook early on at Cowen, so I'd like to be the general manager of the Pirates.

Yaron Werber:
For those of you who are listening, Jeff is a real sports buff. I remember Jeff, you and I got to know each other about 10 years ago well, that was the beginning when I was actually a client at the time of Cowen. Over the years, we're talking about to come back to Cowen originally, you actually gave me a book. It was called The Captain's Class. That book, I recommend to everybody, whether if you care about leadership and if you care about sports, it's a book that you're just not going to sleep for a couple of days and you're just going to get through it.

Jeff Solomon:
On that book, the big solve for me was that there's a variety of different types of captains. You and I made captain differently, and there's not one that's better or worse, there's just different types of captains, all of whom have had success. As a senior leader in the organization, being able to recognize that we have types of captains in various groups was an eye-opener for me. Of course we do. Why do I keep trying to have all of our captains do the same thing or act in the same way? I shouldn't. That was a huge solve for me.

Yaron Werber:
Let me ask final question. This is a love as well. Tell us one fun fact about you that very few people know.

Jeff Solomon:
Very few people know? I don't know. Lifelong passion, I want to sing on Broadway. That would be amazing. If I could figure out a role to play, I would love for it to be in a Broadway show where I got to act and sing. That would be a dream for me. Probably not a lot of people think about that.

Yaron Werber:
Just recently, I went to a couple of musicals and both of them ended up winning a lot of awards. You literally sat there in the audience and that you're watching performances that are extremely unique. In both of them, they won some of the best awards. What struck me is how hard it is day in, day out to give that kind of performance. It really takes a special person to do that. I don't know how you feel about this.

Jeff Solomon:
Listen, to make it fresh every day is really hard, and to not mail it in. Yeah, no. This is why most actors don't run with the show, the show outruns them because you can only give so much of yourself on a day in and day out basis. My dream role would be, I'd love to play King George and Hamilton. If that opportunity ever shows up, I'll rehearse all day, all night. If I just get to do a one time, it'd be huge.

Yaron Werber:
Jeff, thanks so much for joining us. Always really, really great to see you. This was a podcast that I was super, super excited about. I was looking forward to this for a while, so it's a real pleasure. We appreciate it.

Jeff Solomon:
Thanks for having me. I'd just say for anybody who's listening here, I owe a deep sense of gratitude to everybody in this industry for embracing me and embracing us. I don't take that for granted at all. It is very humbling to be a part of something so amazing. In retrospect, when we all look back at this period of time, people may or may not remember my involvement personally, but they will remember Cowen's involvement in TD, Cowen's involvement and the efforts that you and your colleagues have made in research and banking, and they will remember all of that.
The fact that I got lucky and was along for that ride is one of my great treasures in my career. I'm super grateful to you, your colleagues, and to everybody who might be listening for their support of our organization and for allowing us to do what we do.

Yaron Werber:
Jeff, thanks for joining us.

Jeff Solomon:
Thanks, Yaron.

Speaker 1:
Thanks for joining us. Stay tuned for the next episode of TD Cowen Insights.

This podcast should not be copied, distributed, published or reproduced, in whole or in part. The information contained in this recording was obtained from publicly available sources, has not been independently verified by TD Securities, may not be current, and TD Securities has no obligation to provide any updates or changes. All price references and market forecasts are as of the date of recording. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are not necessarily those of TD Securities and may differ from the views and opinions of other departments or divisions of TD Securities and its affiliates. TD Securities is not providing any financial, economic, legal, accounting, or tax advice or recommendations in this podcast. The information contained in this podcast does not constitute investment advice or an offer to buy or sell securities or any other product and should not be relied upon to evaluate any potential transaction. Neither TD Securities nor any of its affiliates makes any representation or warranty, express or implied, as to the accuracy or completeness of the statements or any information contained in this podcast and any liability therefore (including in respect of direct, indirect or consequential loss or damage) is expressly disclaimed.