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A RopesTalk podcast series brought to you by the Women’s Forum at Ropes & Gray, featuring conversations with extraordinary women who have had successful careers and interesting lives, and are also making a positive impact in their workplaces and in their communities.
Christine Moundas: Welcome, and thank you for joining us on our latest installment of Women @ RopesTalk, a podcast series brought to you by the Women’s Forum at Ropes & Gray. I’m Christine Moundas, a health care partner at Ropes & Gray based in New York and co-head of the firm’s digital health initiative. On this episode, I’m thrilled to be joined by my colleague, Jen Harris, who’s based in Los Angeles. Hi, Jen. To begin, could you please introduce yourself and provide a brief overview of your practice?
Jennifer Harris: I’m Jennifer Harris, a partner in Ropes & Gray’s capital solutions and private credit group. I specialize in bespoke finance, so special situations, distressed and stressed finance. A subset of my deals is direct lending and in the private credit space, but usually with an atypical asset class.
Christine Moundas: Who’s the special guest that you’ll be interviewing on this episode?
Jennifer Harris: My special guest today is Morgan Dean from Sound Point.
Christine Moundas: How did you meet and start working together?
Jennifer Harris: Morgan and I worked in and around each other for a number of years, in a number of different institutions, but it was only in the last couple of years that we’ve gotten to know each other below the surface. Morgan and I have an easy rapport—we both enjoy talking shop, for example, the double-dip liability management transaction, but we also relate on a personal level as women in finance.
Christine Moundas: What would you say is most notable about Morgan?
Jennifer Harris: We’re really lucky to have Morgan with us today. Morgan is driven, articulate and insightful on an evolving marketplace. I would say Morgan is one to watch.
Christine Moundas: Wonderful. With that, I’ll turn it over to you and Morgan.
Jennifer Harris: Hi, Morgan—thank you so much for being with us today. Can you please introduce yourself to our listeners?
Morgan (Dean) O’Neill: Of course. I am Morgan Dean—I’m a portfolio manager and managing director at Sound Point Capital Management, and I run the day-to-day operations of our capital solutions group. The easiest way to describe my mandate is asset-backed lending into special situations. Think about a struggling company that supplies clothing to Walmart, or seatbelt components to General Motors. We like to look past their situational struggles and find quality assets to lend against. I’ve lived in New York my entire adult life, but I grew up in Philadelphia from a very big Irish Catholic family. It was a shock to all when I went to the University of North Carolina for college, and an even bigger shock when I made it onto Wall Street upon graduation.
Jennifer Harris: Like most of us, you probably didn’t start at Sound Point. So, could you just give us a little bit of your background and your career trajectory?
Morgan (Dean) O’Neill: I started my career at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, as an investment banker—I worked as an analyst in the leveraged finance product group. This was what I would call the last peak of the bank finance market a couple years after the great financial crisis (“GFC”), right at the beginning of the upswing of the shadow banking system, so we were very busy. A normal day back then would start at 9:00 a.m. at 1 Bryant Park, and end at around 1:00 a.m., with a full 9:00 to 5:00 on the weekends, if not more. After banking, I joined a firm called Highbridge Principal Strategies, which was a private credit fund owned by JPMorgan. Today, it’s called HPS Investment Partners, and it’s a market leader in special situations private credit. After about five years at HPS, I joined Sound Point, where I am now. I loved my time at HPS and was lucky enough to be there when it was smaller, in transition from being JPMorgan-owned to standalone. And that’s really what attracted me to Sound Point: same energy and same start-up vibes.
Jennifer Harris: I’m still trying to get over the 9:00 a.m. until 1:00 in the morning. Those are long days, but I guess you learned a lot during that time. With that in mind, what attracted you to finance in the first place? A disproportionate number of women do not go into finance, so what drew you to this area?
Morgan (Dean) O’Neill: For someone with my upbringing, and the situation I was upon graduation, I really needed to make money. I was a scholarship student at UNC, and I matriculated into college during the summer of 2009, during the GFC, so that’s what led me to Wall Street. What kept me on Wall Street, and continues to fortify me, is the energy and my love of credit. I ended up investing in credit mostly on accident, due to the fact that I worked in a debt product group during my investment banking analyst days. But what’s kept me in credit investing is the ability to articulate an ultimate downside. There are very few situations in life where there is certainty to the question, “What will happen if the absolute worst event takes place here?” And in credit, you’re asking yourself that every day, you’re back-solving in your approach to either prevent that from happening in the first place, or to build protections so that, if the worst thing does happen, you’re going to be okay. The game theory within credit is always evolving and it’s incredibly interesting.
Jennifer Harris: I think some of our most interesting conversations have been about game theory. As someone who does a lot of liability management, which involves a lot of game theory itself, what do you think is the biggest obstacle that you have faced in your professional life?
Morgan (Dean) O’Neill: I would say a few years ago: My boss at Sound Point left the firm for another opportunity and I really was left at a crossroad internally. I felt I had just left my very stable job at HPS to come to Sound Point where I was going to build this product with someone, and at the time, I felt directionless and honestly a little bit panicked. My now-CEO and co-portfolio manager at Sound Point called and said, “Yes, this is unexpected, but this is going to work. We’re going to raise money around you. You might not feel like you’re ready, but you’re going to have to be.” And it turned out that this event happening was the best thing that has ever happened to me in my career. I got exposure to investors. I had to rely on my own network to source deals. It was a huge test for me to see what I could do without cover for the first time in my career. Even though it was really hard, and it still is—it’s still hard—the lesson I choose to take away from that experience is that sometimes the things that happen to you are happening for you, you just don’t have that perspective at the time.
Jennifer Harris: I think I want to make that a bumper sticker: “What is happening to you is actually happening for you.” I think that would be a pretty good slogan. So, given the high rate of attrition among women in finance, what do you think has helped you ascend and remain in the field?
Morgan (Dean) O’Neill: I think one thing I’m pretty good at is being brutally honest with myself. The hardest days of my career have been when I struggled to accept facts as presented to me, when I experienced resistance at work. At this point in my life, I’m pretty good about questioning myself by saying, “Am I struggling to accept the facts because I disagree with them, or I just wish they were different?” I think we’ve all had hard reviews, or received feedback we didn’t agree with at all. In investment banking, I’ll never forget, I got the feedback from somebody I worked with that he felt like I didn’t deserve harder deals because I couldn’t nail the basics and he had to read all my emails before I sent them out—it just drove me crazy. When we drilled into the problem together, it was clear to me this was stemming from me not cc’ing everyone on emails in order of seniority. The content of my work was excellent, the content of my emails was excellent—both had resulted in very few comments, if any—but he was very clear in telling me that something as simple as email hygiene was the reason I was not inspiring confidence to him. So, while that’s super-frustrating to hear, it’s a great unlock to have feedback like that. To this person, who influences whether or not I get what I want at work, while I think email hygiene is, frankly, pretty stupid, to him it’s extremely important, and therefore, it needs to be important to me if I want to progress. My disagreement with the facts didn’t change the facts, and I had to adapt and move on. Whenever anybody gives you feedback at work formally or informally, verbally or non-verbally, you are collecting facts about what matters to them, and with all those datapoints, you can adjust course.
A mantra I have that is a little bit silly, that I remind myself of, is: “We are living the wildest dreams of the women that came before us.” Looking at the generations of women around me, and comparing it to the experience of my grandmothers, for example, it’s just very humbling. Both of my grandmothers came from working-class families—they didn’t have the opportunity to attend college, didn’t have the opportunity to have fulfilling careers, and their lives were very hard. So, when I’m sitting in my gorgeous office building whining about something that doesn’t really matter, it pulls me out of that trap of resentment. I don’t think a lot of our grandmothers could have imagined the lives we have, and it makes me feel very grateful. I recognize I’m really lucky to be here, and remembering where I come from helps prevent me from feeling entitled or even ruminating on the really unfair things that still happen to women at work, and it fortifies me to keep going, which is all we can do sometimes.
Jennifer Harris: I have a sticker from my grandmother—she had a slogan: “Go for it.” So, the grandmothers are powerful reminders. Switching gears, we agree that careers are built on relationships—you and I, and many others—but can you talk about the value of building relationships and the maintenance of your career through those relationships? And then, how do you do it—how do you actually go out and keep relationships?
Morgan (Dean) O’Neill: I think your network, and who you are to your network of relationships, is something that nobody can take away from you—it’s completely portable and it’s your intellectual property. So, if you approach networking as just that—as today, instead of “Sound Point Capital,” I’m “Morgan Dean, working for Morgan Dean, LLC,” you’re going to be more inclined to network, and this reframe has the added benefit of being true. Building my own relationships has been an organic process and I always try to bring an element of “give and get” into networking. You want to make sure the people in your network know what you need from them by asking for it directly, and you want to make sure you know what matters to people in your network and you’re delivering that to them. You’d be very surprised if you ask someone you have known for years, “How could I help you at work this year?” Their answers might be surprising to you. I was working with one female lawyer for years—not at Ropes & Gray, but at a competitor—and at this firm, if you opened a matter 10 years ago with Sound Point Capital, the lawyer that originally opened that matter would get the origination credit, and not my female lawyer. So, it made it extremely hard to get her credit for sourcing new deals and support her own business plan internally. When she told me that, I emailed her boss and I made it very clear that I was coming to that firm for her and not someone else, but I never would have done that if she didn’t explain to me how it worked at her firm.
I’d also emphasize that it is great to have a vertical network—people more senior than you to call upon if needed. But personally, my lateral network has been everything to me. And by lateral network, I mean a network of your peers—these are the people you should go to for support. This relationship group will compound, and it’s more likely that you’ll have goal alignment within this network as you move forward in your career.
Jennifer Harris: Appreciating the horizontal network, I still want to go back to your vertical network for a second, because it makes me think of mentorship and its importance. What would you say to someone who’s trying to get a mentor—trying to find someone to guide them?
Morgan (Dean) O’Neill: I struggle with the concept of traditional mentorship for a host of reasons. I think if you’re to assign an image in your head to “mentorship,” I picture somebody putting their arm around you and really guiding you. This is somebody that you want to emulate, someone who makes you feel seen and heard, and also advocates for you in the rooms you’re not invited to be in. If you think about this objectively, that is an extremely high bar to find someone who will serve you in this role. So, I’m reticent to put yet another responsibility upon the shoulders of young women by telling them, “You got to go find mentors.” I would say that if you do have a mentor, that is incredible. If you don’t have a mentor, you don’t need one, but you do need an advocate. The difference, to me, between a “mentor” and an “advocate,” is that a mentor doesn’t have to be someone you want to emulate and doesn’t need to appreciate you for the person that you are, but they do need to advocate for you in the rooms that you’re not in. To build advocacy for yourself, the recipe is pretty simple: Number one, do exceptional work. Number two, make what is important to them important to you. There have been dozens of times in my career where I was a young banker or a young investor, and I wanted so badly the deal I was working on to just die already so I could finally sleep, but when you’re a senior person, you want all your deals to hit. So, as a junior person, you already have this advantage if you approach a new staffing with the energy of, “I’m so excited to work on this. Bring this deal into reality, and I will run through walls to get this done.” You’ll inspire confidence, and it’s really hard for a senior person to not advocate for junior people who promote their own agendas.
Jennifer Harris: Morgan, do you think your horizontal network can act as your mentor for mentees?
Morgan (Dean) O’Neill: I think that your horizontal network can satisfy a lot of what traditional mentorship is supposed to satisfy. It can make you feel seen and heard, it can really validate the experience you’re going through, and it can fortify you to keep going. And if you’re looking for that from mentorship, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to garner that from your lateral network.
Jennifer Harris: I just want to express how much I appreciate you sharing with us today and going through your experience. To close out our podcast, I’d like to ask: What is the most important piece of advice someone has given you in your career?
Morgan (Dean) O’Neill: I don’t know if it’s the most important advice I’ve received, but it’s definitely different advice. The advice is: Do things for people’s kids. The idea is that, especially in New York, our lives are moving so fast, we take for granted a lot personally. And people will forget the favors that you do for them, but they are less likely to forget the favors that you do for their kids, and it’s a way to bond with people.
Jennifer Harris: Does that include pets for people who don’t have kids?
Morgan (Dean) O’Neill: Always—it always includes pets.
Jennifer Harris: Alright, Morgan, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with us today.
Morgan (Dean) O’Neill: Thank you so much, Jen—really appreciate it.
Christine Moundas: Jen and Morgan, thank you both so much for that insightful discussion. And as always, thanks to our listeners. For more information about Ropes & Gray and our Women’s Forum, please visit www.ropesgray.com/women. You can also subscribe to this series wherever you typically listen to podcasts, including on Apple and Spotify. Thanks again for listening.