Transcript for complete interview. - Voices of September 11th

Interview with John Duffy, chairman & CEO of KBW
Conducted by Mary Fetchet
what I was looking for and said if there’s anything we can do, and one of our most pressing
needs after the first week or so was we actually needed a location. While Wachtell and BNP
were very generous in terms of giving us some space, you know the space was not ideal. It was
not equipped for what we were going to do eventually. There was a lot of scrambling for real
estate space. One of the calls I made was to a fellow that I knew, Kip Condron who was head of
AXA Financial’s US operation and just told him I was looking for space and one of the reasons I
called him was BNP was in the AXA building which is where we are headquartered now. Kip said
he didn’t have any space available, but that one of the accounting firms had three floors where
they had taken an option on I think immediately after 9/11, and he wasn’t quite sure if they
were going to exercise that option and if they didn’t he would call me and he put me in touch
with the head of his real estate facilities group to let them know that if any space became
available, we would get the first phone call. No conversation about cost, rent, I mean that was
really secondary, we needed some space. About three weeks later he called and said Ernst &
Young has decided not to take the fourth floor on 787 7 th avenue do you want it Because
BNP’s space that we were borrowing was up on the eighth floor we actually knew the space
very well and I said yes on the phone. Again, it was, we really didn’t care what the cost was, at
this point we were anxious to be able to tell the employees where their new home was going
to be, because we had people scattered out in five or six different locations. We really felt it
was important from kind of a morale standpoint that the survivors get back together because,
well, they were all happy they were alive. I really think they were looking to connect with some
of their former employees to have, you know, another set of shoulders to lean on because they
all lost very close friends.
[Mary]: So you built a community then, you hired all these new people but then you had this
community of people who were survivors.
[John]: Yeah, I think while we hired a lot of people in the first year rebuilding the firm, there
were some moments of awkwardness between new employees and survivors, because the new
employees knew they were walking into a job that had been filled by somebody that had been
lost in 9/11. I think some of those new employees felt some initial awkwardness in terms of
how they should behave, or should they mention the person who they were really replacing. I
remember several interviews with people that we were interviewing. We lost most of our
research department, and that was one of the areas we focused on, that we needed to rebuild
the research, and as we would bring in these candidates for interviews, frequently the thing the
candidate would first say is, “Listen, you know I really feel for you guys, I’d be delighted to join
you guys at the firm and I knew so-and-so personally.” It was frequently the analyst whose job
he was taking. The analyst community is pretty small; analysts from one firm to another know
each other very well; they’re following the same companies; they see each other at
presentations; and inevitably the beginning of the interview, tears would start welling up, this
individual started talking about David Berry or Tom Theurkauf, you know one of the senior
analysts that we lost and we’d start crying and then the candidate would start crying and you’d
kind of wonder how the hell are we ever going to get this interview done [Laughter] There
were many moments like that and as I said, there was a little bit of awkwardness I think in the
first six or nine months where I think some of the new employees felt like they were walking on
eggshells just in terms of if there was a moment that had some relative-ness to a 9/11 moment.