Deal Labs and Pizza Securitizations

Goosery.

The job of an investment banker is to come up with ideas for deals. Preferably the deals will be big, so that the bank can get big fees. And preferably the ideas will be differentiated: If everyone else is pitching the same obvious deals as you, you may not get the mandate, but if you surprise and delight the companies you pitch, then they will be inclined to hire you. Of course investment bankers also do other things: They fly around the country and meet with company executives and play golf with them and help them with financial modeling. And when companies think up deals, they hire bankers to do them, and the bankers jostle to be the ones to get hired. (They do that jostling in part by giving the companies ideas over the years.) But a core aspect of the job is dreaming up deals and persuading companies to do them.