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Obama dinner guest - Steve Westly of Westly Group Discusses Investments, Tesla, UC system, Jobs

Steve Westly – Managing Partner
steve.westly(at)westlygroup.com
Prior to founding The Westly Group, Steve Westly served as the Controller and Chief Fiscal Officer of the state of California – the world’s eighth largest economy. As Controller, he chaired the State Lands Commission and served on 63 other boards and commissions, including CalPERS and CalSTRS, the nation’s two largest public pension funds, which together invest more than $350 billion. During his four-year term, Mr. Westly spearheaded innovative tax programs that helped close the State’s budget deficit and also led an effort to commit more than $1 billion to clean technology investments.

In the 2008 election cycle Mr. Westly served as a California co-chair and a National Finance Committee member of the Obama for America campaign. He currently serves on the Secretary of Energy’s Advisory Board as a representative for the venture capital industry.

Before running for office, Mr. Westly helped guide the online auction company eBay through its period of most rapid growth, serving as the Senior Vice President of Marketing, Business Development, M&A and International. Mr. Westly helped bring eBay to Europe and Asia and developed the marketing and acquisition strategies that paved the path for the firm’s exponential growth.

Mr. Westly began his career in Washington, D.C., where he worked first on Capitol Hill and later in the Office of Conservation and Solar at the U.S. Department of Energy. Mr. Westly returned to California to become special assistant to the President of the California Public Utilities Commission. While there, he published two books on alternative energy and the utilities.

Mr. Westly holds a bachelor’s degree from Stanford University and an MBA from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, where he served on the faculty for five years.

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Time was, the MBA candidates at Harvard were by and large white boys of debatable attractiveness looking for a cushy gig at Goldman upon graduation. Those guys are still there. But know who else is too? Chicks! Good looking ones! Who don’t give a rat’s ass about working on Wall Street. What praytell are they doing at HBS? Looking to get a leg up in the fashion world. For example, former model Olga Vidisheva. This her story.

…the 25-year-old Russian model with piercing green eyes and a 24-inch waist, struts into class, her fellow students at Harvard Business School snap up from their laptops. The 5-foot-8 stunner, who loves labels like Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent, stands out in a sea of crew-cut, khaki-wearing nerds. After graduating from Wellesley in 2007, the beauty from Moscow logged two grueling years working at Goldman Sachs. “I really gave it a shot,” she sighs. Upon realizing that finance wasn’t for her, she enrolled at HBS for an unlikely reason—to get a leg up in the fashion world. She spent this past summer in a coveted internship with Chanel’s marketing department in New York and hopes to score a plum job in fashion after graduating in 2011.

And Olga’s not just some sort of freak accident. Apparently there are lots of Olga’s running around campus.

They are a growing breed of well-groomed, well-heeled women who know as much about modern capital markets as they do about hemlines; who strive to work in chic lofts in Dumbo rather than a trading floor on Wall Street; and who claim that forgoing a “serious” career as an i-banker to hawk beauty products and designer dresses marks them as a new breed of feminist. With their perfectly blow-dried locks and lip-glossed smiles, these women lend a new glamour to the fusty business school, famed for churning out financial eggheads like Michael Bloomberg, JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and ex-Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain.