More Than 85 Broads

When Christopher was born two months later, all of my business plans went on indefinite hold. For the next 10 months I battled every single day to keep my head above water. I was mind-numbingly depressed and could barely get myself out of bed in the morning. I don’t remember a single happy moment.

I think it would be fair to say that I hated my life and felt like the walls were closing in on me. I was out of shape, had never lost the 50 pounds I’d gained from my pregnancy, and as a result, I had a totally shattered self image.

Jeff and I decided we’d try our hand at consulting so we formed Hanson Consulting Group. We named our new firm Milestone Capital Management. One of the dictionary definitions for milestone is “turning point.” After six very tough years, it certainly was exactly that.

On November 17, 1997, I sent an invitation out to 30 of my closest former female Goldman colleagues to join me for dinner at the Water Club in New York City for the “first GS women’s reunion”. None of the invited women knew that 85 Broads was about to be unveiled. My sister, Mary, had designed the T-shirt, which showed a woman standing on a ladder, nailing up an “s” on a signpost that read “85 Broad”. 85 Broads was now a reality, and Goldman’s headquarter address, 85 Broad Street, would never again be thought of in quite the same way.

In the spring of 2000, I happened to be at Harvard Business School talking to students who belonged to the Women’s Student Association. Everyone present knew that 85 Broads was a network for current and former Goldman Sachs women and that I was the founder. Finally one gal raised her hand and said: “I think it’s great that you launched the network, but I never worked at Goldman and don’t see myself working for Goldman in the future, so you’re talking about a network I can’t join!”

The next day I sent an email out to the women at Harvard Business School announcing the launch of Broad2Broad – a unique “co-mentoring” initiative. For the first time, a women’s network embraced its youngest members as professional equals and as true partners, which was a major paradigm shift. Over the next few years, our Broad2Broad co-mentoring initiative would be rolled out on over 30 graduate business school campuses, both in the United States and abroad.

After 9/11, wanting to be part of a “community” seemed to grow exponentially. Wall Street was undergoing a furious “headcount reduction” and many b-school grads weren’t able to land a single job offer. The need to connect seemed more critical than ever. By 2002, our network had grown to over 5,000 members who lived in 150 different cities around the world.

In September of 2002, it was I who needed to reach out to the community of women in our network. I had just been diagnosed with breast cancer and was scheduled for surgery on October 21. I sent a letter to everyone in the network imploring them to get a mammogram and a sonogram if they were “at risk”. What astounded me was the number of emails I received from other members of the network who told me that they had had cancer too, not just breast cancer, but ovarian cancer, uterine cancer, and leukemia. Almost every one of them had been diagnosed in their late 20s or early 30s. Each and every one of them faced life threatening challenges and every one of them shared their courageous stories with me.

For the next six months, I struggled with the fallout of my diagnosis. Only weeks after I was out of the hospital, I was back in again to have my ovaries removed as the type of breast cancer I’d had made me a likely candidate for ovarian cancer. A month after that, I had two skin cancer operations – one on my lip and one on my chest.

Throughout 2003, I met several times with Joe Gregory [then co-chief operating officer] at Lehman Brothers because he wanted me to come work there. I told him I couldn’t do that because I already had a “day job”, which was to run Milestone Capital in addition to my growing network “empire”. But by the end of 2003, he had talked me into coming back to the Street at the age of 51.

Mine is just one story. In the chapters that follow you will hear the stories of women who have had luck, success, failure, sadness, happiness, doubts, triumphs, depression, and everything else in between. They come from different cultures, different backgrounds, and different economic circumstance. What they all have in common is a keen desire to share their stories so that other women will “recognize” their voices. They are some of the smartest, hardest working women on the planet. They are a gutsy bunch. And most of all, they are unique.

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