The San Francisco Bay Area–based bankers at Centerview Partners, the investment bank that advised Silicon Valley Bank’s owner and Credit Suisse through recent turmoil, got two doses of bad news last week. First, they learned officially what many already suspected: The firm had fired a male banker in its San Francisco office after he made vulgar comments to a female colleague at a party following a Centerview event last month.
Then, on Thursday, employees got a reminder of a new threat to their business: A rival boutique investment bank, Tidal Partners, would reap big fees tied to the largest tech merger of the year—Cisco’s $28 billion purchase of cybersecurity company Splunk. Tidal founder David Handler, who advised Cisco in the deal, was previously a Centerview partner and had set up its first office in Silicon Valley. But last year he sued Centerview as part of a bitter split from the firm, and he recruited a dozen Centerview tech bankers to join him at Tidal.
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