Kudos to an incredible day for The New York Times, DealBook, CNBC, and Andrew Ross Sorkin.

Today’s DealBook Summit in Columbus Circle had a line up to make that massive set design seem worthy. The set design really was breathtaking!

My middle & high school friend’s dad, Larry Fink, was there. His house was two stops before mine on the way home and I loved it for so many reasons.

I digress …

So was Amazon CEO, Andy Jassy, Meta’s Zuckerberg, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Interviews with Janet Yellen, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Shou Chew, TikTok’s CEO, made the day’s agenda worth staying caffeinated for. The Reed Hastings mainstage interview was my favorite;

I digress, again.

The conference provided an incredible amount of content. And surely some good holiday cocktail party fodder.

The New York Times’ brand, Dealbook, hosted the conference today. Thanks to Andrew Ross Sorkin’s day job with CNBC, cable tv subscribers like me got to tune in live for the sessions. I couldn’t help but think the show was made possible by great B2B partnership teams between NYT, NBC Universal, and countless others. I’m looking at you, EAs to those panelists mentioned above and Columbus Circle security liaisons. Kudos for the interview line-ups, the gorgeous setting, and the access for inquiring minds, like me.

The best part is that it had a huge speaker line-up and it kept everyone, including the session hosts, on top of their games, to meet with and interview those at the top of theirs. And it was entertaining.

Perhaps (?!) the reason Andrew Ross Sorkin’s voice was cracking so badly introducing his last MainStage interview of the day, was because it will surely be the most buzzed about water cooler asset management chit chat topic to start the first day of the last month of yet another bananas year. Yay for 2023?

Mr. Sorkin’s reason to stay tuned was delivered, albeit after a delay where I wondered if the guest pulled the perverbial rip chord before going live to, you know, a live audience experiencing that awesome set/room.

From a corner somewhere in the Bahamas, Sam Bankman-Fried NBC Universal’ed-in to the summit. That’s right, the very man, the CEO of crypto exchange FTX, the man of the hour, this decade’s Bernie Madoff, was live and candidly answering questions on this screen, with a live audience who laughed audibly when he said “I’ve had a bad month.” A lot of people have had a bad month, thanks to you, Mr. Bankman-Fried.

Set design kudos, trip down high school commutes home memory lane, and the Reed Hastings interview aside, it was a great day for B2B partnerships.