Tuesday, December 3, 2019
6:30pm
(please note the time change of this event. Previously it was in the morning)
Charles Schwab
in conversation with David Lazarus
discussing his book,
Invested: Changing Forever the Way Americans Invest
Gensler
500 South Figueroa Street
Downtown Los Angeles, CA 90071
We regret that this event has been cancelled.
If you had a ticket, we have sent you an email about your forthcoming refund.
Charles Schwab is the founder, former CEO, and current chairman, of The Charles Schwab Corporation. Among the giants of the financial services industry, he is one of the most successful entrepreneurs and leaders in American business.
“Charles Schwab is a giant who transformed finance and investing for millions of Americans. His memoir is a textbook case on entrepreneurship and principled leadership.”—Hank Paulson, 74th Secretary of the Treasury
“Invested is a wonderful account of a textbook disruptor. By focusing on affordability and accessibility, what Chuck built in Charles Schwab has been a real blessing to mankind.” —Clayton Christensen, Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School; author of The Innovator’s Dilemma
The founder of The Charles Schwab Corporation recounts his ups and downs as he made stock investing, once the expensive and clubby reserve of the few, accessible to ordinary Americans.
In this deeply personal memoir, Schwab describes his passion to have Main Street participate in the growing economy as investors and owners, not only earners. Schwab opens up about his dyslexia and how he worked around and ultimately embraced it, and about the challenges he faced while starting his fledgling company in the 1970s. A year into his grand experiment in discounted stock trading, living in a small apartment in Sausalito with his wife, Helen, and new baby, he carried a six-figure debt and a pocketful of personal loans. As it turned out, customers flocked to Schwab, leaving his small team scrambling with scarce resources and no road map to manage the company’s growth.
He recounts the company’s game-changing sale to Bank of America—and how, in the end, the merger almost doomed his organization. We learn about the clever and timely leveraged buyout he crafted to regain independence; the crushing stock market collapse of 1987, just weeks after the company had gone public; the dot-com meltdown of 2000 and its reverberating aftermath of economic stagnation, layoffs, and the company’s eventual reinvention; and how the company’s focus on managing risk protected it and its clients during the financial crisis in 2008, propelling its growth.
A remarkable story of a company succeeding by challenging norms and conventions through decades of change, Invested also offers unique insights and lifelong principles for readers—the values that Schwab has lived and worked by that have made him one of the most successful entrepreneurs of our time. Today, his eponymous company is one of the leading financial services firms in the world.
David Lazarus is an award-winning business columnist for the Los Angeles Times.