Chapter Nine:
Gap Year and University
Gap Year
I took a gap year in Israel from September 1977 to June 1978 at Machon L’Madrechi Chutz La’Aretz, the Institute for Jewish Youth Leaders from Abroad. We lived for five months at Kiryat Moriah in Jerusalem, then for three months on Kibbutz Ketura in the Negev, then for one month at Moshav Yinon and then one month travelling.
The greatest impact on me in that year was taking the famous course on the Holocaust given by the renowned Professor Ze’ev Mankowitz. Professor Mankowitz instilled in me, and the rest of us on the program, a deep understanding of the responsibility we have as a part of the fraction of Jews who remain alive after the Holocaust. He taught us that that responsibility extends from knowing our history, knowing what happened in the Shoah, trying to understand why it happened, and the responsibility we have in perpetuating the memory of those millions of Jews who were murdered by the Nazis. One cannot overexaggerate the impact that Professor Mankowitz had on a whole generation of Machon graduates. Many of the Machon graduates made a career in Jewish education and Jewish social service, and although I did not, his impact on me was still enormous.
A fun fact is that Sacha Baron Cohen attended the same Machon L’Madrechi Chutz La’Aretz as I did, albeit a few years later.
Another impactful part of my Gap Year was the three months that I spent living on Kibbutz Ketura. This kibbutz is located in the very southern Negev, just north of Eilat. It is the embodiment of the dream to “make the desert bloom”. All of the agriculture was a result of drip irrigation, a process in which Israel was a pioneer. For the three months, we lived in a socialist nirvana. Everyone worked according to their abilities and consumed according to their needs. I picked peppers and packed peppers. I loved it. To this day, whenever I eat or even smell a pepper, it brings me right back to my time on Kibbutz Ketura.
Brandeis University Sept 1978 to June 1983
In the fall of 1978, I started college at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. That first day was the beginning of my life-long friendships with Ted Bigman and Phil Lerner. They both lived with me in the basement of Swig. Phil and Ted both remained enduring friends and walked down the aisle at our wedding. We lived together for all four years of college, with the exception of Junior Year, as Phil did not join Ted and me at LSE because he had too many pre-med courses he had to take at Brandeis.
In Senior year, Phil, Ted and I lived in a house in Watertown, about a ten-minute drive from campus. Phil took the MCATs and got into medical school at the University of Cincinnati. Ted and I took the GMATs. I went straight to Business School at Stanford and Ted went to work for Bain Consulting for two years before going to Harvard Business School.
Phil became a doctor. Ted became a Wall Street tycoon. He is one of the world’s experts on something called Real Estate Investment Trusts.
The person who had the greatest impact on me during my college years was Rabbi Al Axelrad. He took a great interest in me to my great benefit. Over the years we spent together, Rabbi Axelrad instilled in me the worldview that we have been put on this earth to serve G-d by making sure that everyone in the world has the opportunity to fulfill their own destiny. He was one of the great leaders in the Civil Rights Movement, leading a generation of Jewish students to join him in that cause. He spearheaded the movement to free Soviet Jews from the Soviet regime.
I trace my lifelong commitment to civil rights directly to Rabbi Axelrad’s mentorship, and it would not be an overstatement to say there is an entire generation of Brandeisians who feel the same. Few people on earth have had the enormously broad impact on a generation as Rabbi Axelrad has. I feel honored and privileged to have had the close relationship with him that we had. To this day, I speak with him regularly, and I get more inspiration from those conversations than hundreds of other conversations combined.
Brandeis was a great place to go to college. I understand that it has diminished somewhat over the decades, but when we were there, we loved it. I have tremendous gratitude to Professor Larry Pulley, who took me under his wing and introduced me to Behavioral Economics, the study of which I have continued to this day. I had Professor Pulley my first semester for Introductory Economics 2a and then I was his Teaching Assistant for Advanced Microeconomics. During my senior year he was my thesis advisor when I wrote my thesis entitled Empirical Refutations of Expected Utility Theory. Decades later this subject became part of general lore when Freakonomics was published. Other great economics professors who I loved were Barney Schwalberg, Yale Braunstein, Anne Carter and Trenery Dolbear.
One of the greatest courses I took at Brandeis was The Sixties with Professor Jacob Cohen. His lectures on the Kennedy Assassination, the Alger Hiss Case, the Rosenbergs, and Sacco and Vanzetti were amongst the best lectures I have ever heard anywhere. Two other great professors who I loved were Stephen Whitfield in American Studies and Nancy Scott in Art History.
London School of Economics Sept 1981 to June 1982
For junior year, Ted and I both went to London for Junior Year Abroad to the London School of Economics. We went there specifically to study with Professor Lucien Foldes, who was on the forefront of a new field of study called Expected Utility Theory. For the whole year, we were engrossed in the unfolding of this fascinating new field, which was being spearheaded by two Israeli economists named Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. For the first time, economists were building theoretical and mathematical models to try to explain why people misjudge situations of risk, leading people to behave in ways that seem irrational and inherently contradictory. I wrote several papers that year on how people behave in casinos, and this led eventually to my Senior Thesis at Brandeis the next year.
One of the papers I wrote was on the St. Petersburg Paradox. To describe the St. Petersburg Paradox is outside the scope of this book; however, I was fascinated by it and continue to be to this day. I strongly encourage the reader to look it up and read about it. Another paper I wrote that year was entitled “The Role of Utility Theory, Or How to Explain Insured Gamblers”. This paper dealt with the fact that by buying insurance, one is paying to avert risk, and by gambling, one is paying to obtain risk. Thus, on its face, it seems like inherently contradictory behavior for one to buy insurance and gamble at the same time. This paper tries to explain why some people do exactly that. As a result of years of study these topics, I currently neither buy insurance nor do I gamble, a behavior that many friends and acquaintances find curious and misguided, and I do not try to change their minds.
After I left my formal education, I stopped writing on these topics. However, as it turns out, in the decades following, the field became enormously popular and became known as Behavioral Economics. It made it into pop culture in a significant way with the publishing of Michael Lewis’s book The Undoing Project and other books such as Freakonomics, SuperFreakonomics and Thinking Fast and Slow. Daniel Kahneman even won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work in the field.
In the future, I hope to write a separate book on these topics, but for the reader who might be interested, I strongly encourage reading the books of two of my favorite writers, Martin Gardner and Gary Becker, both giants in their fields.
David and Michael Gross, 1982
Stanford Graduate School of Business Sept 1983 to June 1985
I went straight from college to the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. I was there from September 1983 to June 1985. I lived with Guy Weissberg in a rented condo at the Oak Creek Apartments at 1600 Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto. I knew Guy from my year at the London School of Economics. I had met Guy at the Hillel in London and we had kept in touch and decided to room together in Palo Alto. We lived together for both years of Business School except for one semester when Guy went to Europe to Insead.
Most of my classmates at Business School had worked for at least two years between college and graduate school. Since I came straight from college to business school I was at least two years younger than many of my classmates and probably four or five years younger than the average classmate. In retrospect that was not a good idea because I did not fit in socially but my Dad was anxious to have me finish school so that I could work with him in and frankly I was anxious to get going in business also.
Many professors had a big impact on me at the GSB, but none more so than Lynn Phillips, John (Jack) McDonald and Charles (Chuck) Horngren.
Professor Phillips was world-renowned, not so much for his research, but for his presentation of the case method. It really was an honor to see this master teacher at work. It is difficult for me to come up with the name of any educator who had more of an impact on me than Professor Lynn Phillips. It would not be a stretch to say that all of us in his class felt honored to be in the presence of such a master educator. There is a word in Yiddish – moyre – which is difficult to translate, but google translate translates as have anxiety, fear, be afraid of, afraid but also reverence. That is how we felt walking into Professor Phillips’ class.
My biggest takeaway from that class though is the level of preparation exhibited by Professor Phillips. His example is a guiding light to me to this day. Whenever I prepare to speak to a crowd, I think to myself, am I as prepared as Professor Phillips would be?
Professor Jack McDonald passed away in 2018. He taught at the Stanford Business School for fifty – that’s right, fifty – years. I used up all 100 of my elective points on his class, and so did everyone else in the class – that was the only way to get in. And to say it was worth it is such an understatement. Where else are Warren Buffett and Charles Schwab guests in the class? (And so was Steve Jobs, but that was before our time – Professor McDonald brought Jobs into the class the week before Apple’s IPO for the students to make an educated calculation as to what a fair IPO price should be).
One of my great memories is the day Professor McDonald brought in Stanford Wong as a guest speaker for our class. For those of you who don’t know who Stanford Wong is, well, he is the world’s expert on blackjack. That is not his real name, and he goes incognito so that he can enter casinos. As I had written my senior thesis in college on how people behave in casinos, I had studied everything Mr. Wong had ever written. Meeting him was for me like meeting Babe Ruth or Mickey Mantle. What a gift.
Professor Charles Horngren passed away in 2011, having taught at the GSB for forty years. To use the rhetorical expression “he wrote the book” would lose its rhetoric, because he did write the book. Professor Horngren basically invented accounting as we know it today. But more importantly, he made accounting fascinating. He made the numbers dance on the page, and we loved every minute of it. It was an honor to learn from him.
Many famous people emerged from our class. Some of the most famous were Penny Pritzker, who became the Commerce Secretary in the Obama Administration; Geoff Yang, the founding partner of Redpoint Ventures; Steve Krausz, a founding partner of US Venture Partners; Bruce Golden, a founding partner of Accel; Marko Dimitrijevic, founder of the famous hedge fund Everest Capital (which became famous when he lost billions of dollars in one day in 2015 when Switzerland unexpectedly released controls on its currency); John Pasquesi, who founded Arch Capital, the reinsurance behemoth; and Kien Pham, the Vietnamese private equity giant and founder of the Vietnam Foundation.
I recently edited a compilation of submissions from members of our business school class. It is entitled Vignettes, Lessons & Stories.
Many famous people emerged from our class. Some of the most famous were Penny Pritzker, who became the Commerce Secretary in the Obama Administration; Geoff Yang, the founding partner of Redpoint Ventures; Steve Krausz, a founding partner of US Venture Partners; Bruce Golden, a founding partner of Accel; Marko Dimitrijevic, founder of the famous hedge fund Everest Capital (which became famous when he lost billions of dollars in one day in 2015 when Switzerland unexpectedly released controls on its currency); John Pasquesi, who founded Arch Capital, the reinsurance behemoth; and Kien Pham, the Vietnamese private equity giant and founder of the Vietnam Foundation.
