Presto Magic

Part 4

After coming forward about my expenses, the expenses that I self-reported, I found myself under investigation by the firm’s compliance department. I took no issue with that. As previously mentioned, once I got notice that an investigation was underway, I was bummed that this meant that the individual I’d come forward to had already spread my secret around the company without talking to me. But, again, the individual was just following their Standard Operating Procedure, as they understood it. However, once the compliance department notified me that they’d be conducting a thorough investigation into my expenses, I’ll admit that I was a bit perplexed. Again, I had just come forward to self-report this list of expense-related transgressions. What basis did they have for running an investigation? It’s not like they had any previous investigations underway. It’s not like they’d even hinted at any previous suspicions. In their eyes, right up until the moment I came forward and told them what I’d done, I was the perfect employee. So, from my perspective, I’d just run their investigation for them. But now, after informing me that they could be charging me with a felony, they began requesting a whole host of information to aid in their investigation, most invasively, full access to my personal phone. (Noticeably absent from the Request for Information list was a sit-down conversation with me to hear my side of the story and discuss the grey areas of our firm’s expense policy. Instead, demands were made about the information that I was required to submit IMMEDIATELY. There was no time to entertain the nuance of the situation, nor entertain individual expense specificities. After all, this was a serious matter. And so, they had to follow their Standard Operating Procedure.) They didn’t bother to list the specific text or phone conversations that were of-interest, mostly because they had no clue which ones were relevant to their “investigation”. Instead, they just wanted access to all of them. The only evidence they had to suggest that they should launch an investigation in the first place was my word. My own admission. So, the irony is not lost on me. They launched a full-scale, multi-resource investigation into my expense reports because they trusted that I told them the truth that I was dishonest about my expenses. And yet, they also didn’t believe that I was telling the truth when I tried telling them that the figure I reported was me being overly-punitive. They didn’t care that I wanted to discuss expenses that I thought might be in the grey area. The way I saw it, despite all of this emphasis on sticking to strict Standard Operating Procedures, the expense policy was extremely (intentionally?) vague… If they were going to launch a full-scale investigation, then I just wanted to sit down and have a conversation about whether I was out-of-bounds on all of the expenses that I’d self-reported. I still offered to pay back the full $13K that I’d self-reported “and then some”. My plan was to payback the firm $20K, just to be safe. I’ll admit, sometimes I make mistakes, especially when it comes to math, so I wanted to add a buffer in case I was missing something. I’ll also admit, there were times that I charged Uber & Lyft rides to the company account which were grey area justifications at best and straight-up lies at worst. However, those were not included in my $13K count. Admittedly, I didn’t keep a record of which of those might be questionable and I didn’t see the point in consuming more company resources to get to the perfectly specific number. So, I figured adding a $7K buffer on top of the overly-punitive count to arrive at a figure of $20K payback seemed reasonably sufficient. I didn’t anticipate the ride sharing figures to be anywhere close to the questionable charges on my corporate card and along with the expenses that I knew would ultimately be considered OK — if only we ever had our sit-down chat about the grey areas of the expense policy — I figured $20K would be a number at which we could all call it a day. But, once again, I was exposed for my naïveté. Amidst all of this back-and-forth, I failed to notice that this whole situation stopped being about my expense reports. The compliance department seemed so irrationally angry with me and I didn’t get it. I understood that I’d broken their trust in lying on my expense reports. But, I didn’t understand why they were so insistent on demanding access to my personal phone in order to run their investigation, especially after I was the one who self-reported all of these expenses to which they previously had no issue or suspicions. I told them full access to the personal phone was a boundary I wasn’t willing to cross. I told them that providing access to my personal phone would sever one of my closely-held personal principles. But they didn’t seem to care. They persisted with their threats. They were being relentless. And they made no attempt to explain why this situation was so serious. It wasn’t until I was speaking to one of my mentors, weeks after the situation blew up, that I began to understand the gravity of the situation. I shared what had happened. “I came forward about the questionable expenses. I tallied up $13K. Now, they’re obsessed with getting access to my personal phone and they’re saying it’s non-negotiable.” At that, he helped pull me out of my ignorance and into the light simply by saying, “Trent, they don’t give a damn about your $13K of expenses. They’re worried about the SEC coming after them for insider trading.” Ahhhhhh. That makes way more sense. It was as if all of the irrationality of their actions were explained in an instant. Now, I knew exactly what I was dealing with. Honestly, the concern about insider trading hadn’t even occurred to me. But now, as I shifted my perspective to that of the compliance department, I began to see that this was always their biggest fear when trying to protect the firm and I was giving them mounting evidence that I was a perpetrator. (A side note of gratitude to my mentor in this situation. A good example of a confidant exposing a blind spot. Even though I didn’t heed his advice when he begged me, “Please don’t pay back $70K. That’s just silly. It’ll leave you feeling bitter at the whole situation and it’ll only serve to feed their fears that you were doing something more serious.” I did appreciate his ability to shine a light on a major blind spot. It feels so obvious saying it now. But, at the time, I was so tunnel-visioned on addressing the expenses situation that I didn’t bother zooming out and asking myself what might be the biggest concern for them. This leader at a multi-billion dollar company played the role of confidant for me. This exposure, as uncomfortable as it was, served to change my whole approach to the situation and go-forward strategy.) It feels quite comical to me now, the volume of evidence that points to the fact that I was insider trading. Although, I must state it, for the record, that I was not. However, from the compliance department’s perspective, I can see how it really looked like I was. Or, at least, that I could have been. So, again, I understand why they needed to follow their Standard Operating Procedure in dealing with a potential insider trading situation. I didn’t submit any text or phone conversations from my personal phone to the company repository. First off, I’ve already explained my personal principle of privacy. So, I won’t beat a dead horse on this one (if I spend all my time beating dead horses, then how am I gonna have time to trade them?). Second, I didn’t think it fair. Sure, I had text and phone conversations with founders and investors all the time. But, most of these conversations were with my friends. The lines blurred between work and personal relationships. From my perspective, my employer had no right to access and store conversations with friends, especially relationships that predated my employment tenure. I also had text and phone conversations with founders, primarily because I was encouraged to do so. From my first day of training, I was told by my managers, and the tactic was reinforced by Partners, that “getting on a texting-basis with a founder is a positive step in building a personal relationship.” I completely understood the tactic. But, it felt slimy to me to be texting a founder’s personal phone from my work phone. A work phone that would then be turned in, along with all of these personal conversations, to our compliance department’s repository. So, I gave founders my personal cell number. I didn’t want to ask them to give me their personal cell number if I wasn’t willing to offer up my own. That only seemed fair to me, even if it did put me in jeopardy of a compliance violation. But, I figured the compliance department and my managers would understand if I told them that these text conversations covered private, personal, deep content with these newly-formed personal relationships. The newly-formed personal relationships that they encouraged me to cultivate. I figured they’d understand that I wouldn’t want to betray my newly-formed personal relationships by submitting our private, personal, deep conversations to our company repository. I figured they would understand the nuance of the situation, especially since they were the ones who encouraged me to pursue the tactic in the first place. I figured I wouldn’t be reprimanded for the mixed messages I was receiving from two parts of the organization. And ultimately, I figured that my managers and the partners who had conducted my training would come to my defense, if necessary. Oh how I was exposed for my naïveté. Finally, I was the stressed out, overworked analyst that was ripping 25+ calls per week for years. I don’t mention this for pity. After all, I opted-in to this system. But I also did what I needed to do to manage burnout and keep my bosses happy. I carried my phone with me everywhere I went. I was convinced that I always needed to be online. I had to respond to emails from my bosses immediately. If a founder replied to me, then I wanted to schedule a call with them immediately (the seemingly simple act of scheduling 25+ calls per week, without an assistant, was a gargantuan time and energy suck). So, since my work life existed on my phone, and work was life at that time, my phone came with me wherever I went in life. In the office (of course). To the bathroom (not to be vulgar, but can’t waste time being offline in there). Traveling to conferences (again, for work purposes). Out on the weekends (to blow off some steam and convince myself that I had a sustainable work/life balance). I refused to go any place where I couldn’t be accessible at a moment’s notice. All the while, I’m a minimalist. I prefer to travel light. Be nimble. Adaptable. So, the thought of carrying two phones was just unacceptable. I was also on my phone constantly, but, I’m an efficiency freak. So, the Efficiencist in me wasn’t going to bother switching back-and-forth between work and personal phone unnecessarily. Context switching is a big no-no in the world of efficiency. I wanted all of my information right in front of me, at all times, always ready. So, I centralized my entire life on my personal phone. And it came with me everywhere I went. I did that for 5.5 years. I built habits around it. Long before our compliance department ever had a problem with it. Now, don’t get me wrong, I understand why firms mandate two phones. Personal phone vs work phone. It keeps everything easier from a compliance and cybersecurity perspective. Separation of church and state. But, by the time that my firm mandated that we have a second phone, because we were going to launch a public equities side to our business, the lines were already blurred for me. It was impossible to unmix the ingredients in the stew. Founders were friends. Friends were founders. And again, the way I was trained, this behavior was not only allowed, but encouraged. “Become friends with founders because it’ll put us in a position to win deals later.” So, at this point, years after I’d built habits around these working behaviors and developed very real relationships with founders, the decision to launch a public equities practice meant undermining the systems and relationships that I’d put in place. Now, I was being told that I would have to change my effective, value-producing ways in order to make room for an experimental, and comparatively very small, public equities division. I have nothing against them. I was all for them running their experiment in the public markets. But, it seemed so misguided to me to undermine one of the go-to tactics of our core business (building personal relationships with private company founders) to run an experiment. Investing in the best private companies was our core business. Investing in the best private companies was our WHOLE business. Now, we were handicapping our ability to do this at the highest level. Why? Because we need to make room for an experimental project in the public markets. It made no sense to me. It felt like an egotistical endeavor that threatened to cutoff the hand that fed it in the first place. Our compliance department, who had a particularly cozy relationship with the public equities division, was, of course, the one bringing down the hammer on all of these new Standard Operating Procedures. They forced the whole firm that, throughout its entire history was a square peg, to jam itself into a newly-misguided-misshapen round hole. Don’t get me wrong, I understand why firms mandate the use of two phones. Personal phone vs work phone. It keeps everything easier from a compliance and cybersecurity perspective. Separation of church and state. Especially important if the firm deals in public equities. But, when the core business, nay the WHOLE business, up until this point, is built on developing personal relationships with founders of private companies, then it might be best to apply the separation of church and state analogy to the public vs private parts of the company. Why not put the public equities division on a different floor? Why not put them on a different email server? Why compromise the workflow of your core business’s investors in order to run an experiment that’s comparatively very small and is completely unproven to work? Admittedly, I only elevated these concerns to my manager, who validated my frustrations, but informed me that these sorts of decisions were above his pay grade. So, rather than spend any more time getting flustered by the situation, I just made a conscious decision to not submit any of my personal phone conversations to the compliance department. I didn’t see it as fair. And I figured that if I was ever going to be reprimanded for my withholding of this information, then my managers, who shared my concerns, and the partners, who trained me in these tactics, would stand up for me. Sadly, I was, once again, exposed for my naïveté.

Part 6