Shortly after Sandro Dazzan, a Realtor in Malibu, was featured last month as one of Forbes magazine’s 30 under 30 – which spotlights rising young business people – he got a call from a New York financial adviser named Jason Goldstein. Goldstein was similarly featured in OnWallStreet magazine’s 40 under 40 in November.
The two started talking about their shared clientele of high-net-worth individuals – the type who could be in the market for a private wealth manager in New York or a plot of real estate in Malibu.
Now, they’re planning to meet up and talk business when Dazzan visits New York in a couple of weeks.
But there already is a little strain in the budding friendship between the two high-fliers.
Dazzan is 29, which meant he was grouped in with the under-30 crowd. Goldstein is only a year older at 30, but he was put in the older decade.
“I squeezed in there in my last year,” Dazzan said. “He joked it was a bummer he didn’t make it in.”
Istanbul Christmas
Ben Stilp and his partner were looking for a quiet place to go during the holidays, away from the Christmas rush and far from the protests that had become a fixture in downtown Los Angeles late last year. So they went to Istanbul, Turkey.
Stilp, 42, and his partner stayed a block from Istanbul’s embassy and consulate row. Right after arriving a couple of days before Christmas, they noticed a crowd of protesters gathered around one of the consulates. Each day, the crowd grew larger and more raucous. Finally, on Christmas, the pair ventured out to find out what was going on. The crowd was gathered around the French Consulate; a few days earlier, the lower house of the French Parliament had voted to make it a crime to deny the Armenian genocide.
“Having a loud angry mob chanting in Turkish was a bit disconcerting,” said Stilp, who is the chief financial officer for the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce. “It was the first time I had ever been caught up in something like this.”
They were able to navigate around the protests and went on to enjoy the rest of their trip.
“The best part was mentioning to someone there that it was Christmas Day, and that person not even knowing that it was Christmas,” he said.
Staff reporters Jonathan Polakoff and Howard Fine contributed to this column. Page 3 is compiled by Editor Charles Crumpley. He can be reached at [email protected].
