When a Wall Street law firm was asked to advise on investing in Hungary in 1989, it fell to Douglas Rediker, then a 30-year-old attorney, to do the research. "When we asked the opinion of a Hungarian lawyer," Rediker remembers, "we'd get back a hand written note saying: 'Dear Mr Rediker, It is okay to do what you ask.' It didn't give us a whole lot of comfort. On the other hand it was quite intriguing."
A bit bored with the law, Rediker, an easy-going native of Manhattan, headed to Budapest. He saw, in his words, "the opportunity to do well and to do good at the same time". He spent the next year starting up ventures ranging from laundromats to coffee shops. Then, after a spell on the political staff of Bill Clinton's first presidential election campaign, he was asked by Salomon Brothers to open an office in Hungary. "There weren't many of us then [in 1992] who knew the difference between debt and equity and had also spent a year in eastern Europe," he recalls.
Rediker has covered the region as an investment banker ever since. Now at Lehman Brothers, he is leading the team advising MediaOne on the sale of its wireless telecoms assets in central Europe.