Andrew Ross Sorkin: From Copy Machines to Too Big To Fail

The common saying in the business world is that no one will take you seriously until you're 40. Well, don't tell that to Andrew Ross Sorkin, the editor of Dealbook and the financial columnist for The New York Times. It's hard to imagine that Sorkin was once just an intern for the Times, Xeroxing, stapling and doing other “grunt” work for the “real” writers. But today, he's hailed as one of the top authorities on the financial crisis with his recent book, “Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System---and Themselves.” Sorkin got his big chance in an unusual way. “I started here when I was 18 years old as an intern if you will, and I used to Xerox and staple,” he said in our recent conversation on Zing Talk. “I had no intention of putting two words together, let alone a sentence. I got lucky very early on; an editor who didn't know how old I was assigned me a story to write, and didn't realize I was still in high school.” He began writing technology articles while an assistant to Stuart Elliott, who was The Times' advertising columnist. Following that, he spent a brief stint with BusinessWeek before graduating college, returning to The Times and moving to London. This is where he truly made a name for himself covering mergers and acquisitions and eventually starting Dealbook. Speaking of this time in his life, Sorkin said: “This was during the M&A bubble around 1999, so it was really a trial by fire and a remarkable education. I moved back to the states in 2001, and one of the first things I did when I got back here was to start this thing called Dealbook, which was this email I used to send at 7 AM. I'd send it out to bankers, CEOs, hedge fund managers, and it really just grew. In the first year we had 30,000 readers, then 80,000, to over 200,000 getting the email every morning. Now we have the website, which gets over 2+ million people on it. It's been a remarkable little ride over the past few years.” Throughout his career with the New York Times, he has contributed to over 2000 articles, 120 of which were front-page articles. Ironically, some of his favorite stories were completely unrelated to Wall Street: "I must have been only 21 years old at the time. I was sent to Cornwall England, where the last eclipse of the millennium was going to take place. They normally wouldn't send a business reporter but they were out of people. So they sent me down there and all those people from around the world had gone to England because it was supposed to be the best location to see it and I got there, and it rained. No one could see the eclipse. And they said 'you still have to write a story.' So I went around and spoke to all the people there who had traveled for days about this horrible experience." When the economy began to unravel in the fall of 2008, Sorkin was probably better-positioned than anyone else to chronicle the events and find out what really happened given his contacts and his career over the past decade. He recalled, “I decided to write this book almost within a week or two of when Lehman Bros fell in the fall of 2008. My wife was actually the one who said, ‘Andrew if you ever were going to write a book this is the one to write.' In many ways I think I was well suited. Having covered wall street for over a decade at that point I knew a lot of people on the street. I didn't actually know a lot of the main characters, but I was able to, through some old school traditional reporting, getting in front of the right people and asking questions, getting people to tell me stuff they weren't supposed to.” Andrew, I'm confident that economic history students 20 years from now will be very grateful for your decision to take that leap and write Too Big To Fail. Be sure to check out my full conversation with Andrew Ross Sorkin on

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