866: Metrics for the Masses | Jeremy Klaperman, CFO, Rho

Not unlike many of his CFO peers, Jeremy Klaperman spent the early years of his finance career in trying to rectify the damage brought on by the irrational market behaviors of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Unlike most, though, he found that his repair duties frequently involved visits to a remote Japanese fishing village.

“A lot of the work in investment banking during that 2001 to 2003 time frame involved picking up the pieces of all of these different failed businesses,” recalls Klaperman, who shortly after joining Goldman Sachs as an analyst in 2001 was bequeathed a lengthy “to do” list related to the 2002 bankruptcy of telecom giant Global Crossing.

As Internet traffic projections in the late 1990s had continued to spike, Global Crossing’s undersea cable business had helped to boost the firm’s value to $47 billion by 1999. Still, the business had never had a profitable year, and as headwinds from the dotcom bust bore down, staggering losses and an accounting scandal followed.

For Klaperman, the “cleanup” began wherever the undersea cable ended.

“I found myself trying to sell this subsea cable station built in the middle of a remote Japanese fishing village,” reports Klaperman, who was tasked with completing the due diligence behind Goldman Sachs’s efforts to sell portions of the undersea cable itself or giant substations or both.

“It then became apparent to me how bad business decisions can be made when you overextrapolate the current environment or don’t appreciate the cycle,” observes Klaperman, who adds that his days of working with the fishing village in mind enabled him to better appreciate the stiff price of “overextrapolation” as well as the nuances of the local economy.

Remarks Klaperman: "If you like uni or sushi that village was the sea urchin capital of Japan.”