9/11 - 25 Years Later: The Company That Lost 700 People and How They Rebuilt

Jake Humphrey (0:04)

Sean, welcome to High Performance.

Sean Windeatt (0:05)

Thanks very much.

Jake Humphrey (0:06)

So, I want to just start by rewinding the clock. 25 years, you're sitting in a London office. You're on the phone to a colleague of yours in New York when the line suddenly goes dead. And that colleague was inside the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

Cantor Fitzgerald would lose 658 people that morning, around two thirds of their New York workforce. And the next day, you were pulled out of accounting and told to help rebuild the business. And what followed, I think, is not just a story of survival, but of responsibility, of leadership, of culture, of extraordinary generosity. All of the values that we hold so dear here on High Performance. And today we have this conversation with you as the co-CEO of BGC Group and the charity day born from that tragedy has now raised more than $220 million.

So in this conversation, I want to explore how you rebuild a business when the human loss makes business itself in some ways kind of feel irrelevant. Where ambition and success sit once you've been reminded how fragile life is, how adversity can create an extraordinary culture, and how you stop success, scale and money from slowly destroying that culture. And ultimately, I guess, what 25 years of rebuilding of learning and giving back has taught you about what really matters. Does that sound okay?

Sean Windeatt (1:20)

That sounds great.

Jake Humphrey (1:21)

So what is September 11th like for you 25 years later?

Sean Windeatt (1:27)

Look, I mean, as you're reading the timeline, firstly, it takes me back to that day. And, you know, as you rightly say, I was a 27, 28-year-old young guy working in the finance department of a large broker.

And I think that day, every morning, every morning I would speak with my colleague in the US, go through the business that had been done in the US treasury market and the interest rate swap business in London every morning. And that morning on September 11, 2001, like nothing different on the phone, 15 minutes into the call, the line went dead. And I was sitting there in that finance department, big open plan office. You look across one of the screens. You're talking 2001, so it wasn't full of screens in that particular office. But back then, and firstly, we're trying to work out, oh my goodness, is that our building? Was it the North Tower? And then within a few moments, you realize exactly what's happened.

And the shock that goes through your whole system on that day, I'll never forget it. And so you say to me, what do I think even 25 years on? Every charity day, every September the 11th, my first thoughts are always back to that morning and that time. But then, and I think as time goes on, our view and my view in particular is, turn that into something incredibly positive. And I think, so now, you make sure, on September 11th, when we do our charity day, the most important thing is, get all of those emotions out in the morning, be ultra focused, therefore, that way, we're going to be as positive as you can to make as much money as you can for the charities.

Jake Humphrey (3:45)

And when it comes to dealing with your own emotions, as I guess you have to do every September 11th, when you wake up in the morning, how long did it take to sort of come to terms with the randomness of the fact that you could easily have been in New York, you could very easily have been in that building that day, and how that kind of informs the way you've lived?

Sean Windeatt (4:04)

Yeah, well, first, you remember my, the ultimate boss of the company, so Howard wasn't in the building that day, by chance, because he was taking his son to kindergarten. So he could have been in the building, number one.

What became my boss, as in Sean Linn, who became the president of the company, he could easily have been in New York that day. In fact, I think he was there the week before, from memory. The person who hired me, the CFO who'd set up the Finance Department in London, was back in New York and obviously did not survive. And so, what I think it teaches you straight away is, you have to make the most of opportunities that you get, because life can throw really weird curveballs at you.

Jake Humphrey (5:04)

And the very next day, you were asked to kind of help take this business from its knees and try and find a way forward, right? I don't even know how you would have begun to do that.