It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when Wall Street simply didn’t take Silicon Valley seriously.
New York, with its financial powerhouses and bankers with slick backed hair, was where the action was in the 1980s. California was a backwater. That is, until Frank Quattrone got interested in the fledgling tech companies popping up on the West Coast. As Fortune memorably wrote in 2001: “Quattrone came to Silicon Valley in the early 1980s, a time when the big Wall Street firms regarded tech banking as just an interesting niche business. But Quattrone believed that the tiny, struggling companies that then made up the tech galaxy were destined to become fast-growing giants. Building relationships with them was certain to pay off, he argued, even if it took a long time. All that, of course, seems obvious in hindsight. But at the time it was revolutionary. ‘He was the first guy in the New York investment banking world to take Silicon Valley seriously,’ says well-known tech investor Roger McNamee. "He was the first guy at a major firm who bet his career on Silicon Valley.’”
