#Goldman Sachs rebel’s dad is tough on TPG employees

An entry-level banker helped spark a workers’ revolution at Goldman Sachs, but would he have tried to pull those shenanigans with his dad? 

Last month, it was revealed that among the first-year bankers who assembled a viral slide presentation that detailed brutal working conditions at Goldman was Joey Coslet, 23, son of buyout baron Jonathan Coslet, who is the vice chairman of private-equity giant TPG. 

What’s lesser-known, however, is the fact that the elder Coslet has a reputation himself for driving underlings hard — and may be even tougher than Goldman’s boss, David Solomon, when it comes to cracking the whip. 

In 2012, when the younger Coslet would have been 14 years old, Jonathan Coslet put down a similar uprising at TPG, where entry-level associates were chafing at their long hours, according to sources close to the firm. 

“They were saying, ‘We don’t mind working 80 hours a week, but not 100,’ ” according to one former TPG employee. “The culture was all hands on deck,” a second employee from that time-frame said. “Twenty-four seven. I never worked harder in my life, and I had already been at a New York City law firm.” 

As TPG’s chief investment officer at the time, Coslet could be quite particular about the way financial models were presented at meetings on potential deals, insiders said. If a slide presentation wasn’t up to snuff, Coslet didn’t hesitate to force a dealmaker to redo it multiple times ahead of companywide Monday meetings, a source with direct knowledge of the situation said. 

“You had to give it to him in the way he wanted. This table, this model and this forecast,” according to the direct source. “Associates would work all day Saturday and Sunday night for the noon Pacific time Monday meeting.” 

The result? A weekly routine that looked an awful lot like the one at Goldman, where the younger Coslet and his cohorts griped of “inhumane” working conditions that were hurting their physical and mental health. 

At TPG, the junior associates’ laments over lost weekends never took written form in a letter to Coslet, much less a Power Point presentation that got leaked onto social media. Nevertheless, Coslet caught wind of the grumbling and “he felt he had to address it,” according to the source. 

Wasting no time, Coslet addressed the situation on a regularly scheduled call with the firm’s rank and file. 

“He said to them on the call, ‘You have to go above and beyond. If you don’t like it, you can go somewhere else,’ ” the source said. “He talked about all the things he did when he joined TPG as its first associate — including carrying Bondo’s bags,” the source added. 

“Bondo” would be TPG’s billionaire chairman David Bonderman, who has famously tapped big-ticket acts including the Rolling Stones to entertain at his lavish parties. 

TPG declined to comment. 

“So excited you will be working just a block away from my office,” the elder Coslet wrote to his son on Facebook last May, celebrating his son’s graduation and the Goldman gig. “Lots of lunches, if they let you out of work.” 

He added a smiley face.