Crain’s New York Business has inducted three Columbians into the Crain’s Hall of Fame, which recognizes outstanding lifelong achievement in business. Rochelle B. Lazarus ’70BUS, the chairman emeritus of the advertising firm Ogilvy & Mather, rose to the top of an industry that has not traditionally been kind to women: “Every woman who was in an executive position — there weren’t many — but everyone who was at Ogilvy had started as a secretary. They had worked their way up. It was like a Mad Men script. I had no role models, so I just kind of did things spontaneously,” she says.
A pioneer of venture capitalism, Alan Patricof ’57BUS helped paved the way for the startup economy, and particularly the recent technological boom in New York City. Before business school, Patricof worked as a stockbroker — a job that he says he got by walking down Wall Street and going from building to building and floor to floor until someone made him an offer. Later, he founded two venture-capital firms — Apax Partners and Greycroft LLC — and was an early investor in Apple, America Online, and the Huffington Post, to name just a few.
Richard Ravitch ’55CC is known as someone who “solved fiscal problems no one else could,” particularly in urban development. Over the years, he has built forty thousand units of affordable housing in New York and Washington. As chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority starting in 1979, he infused fourteen billion dollars into a failing system and created the Metro-North Railroad. “I was able to accomplish what I did because there are two things I understand well: finance and politics. I could always explain politics to the business world, and business to the political world,” he says.
