David Saferstein

Between Two Firms is an interview series accompanying Economics@Work. We ask alumni speakers the candid questions students can’t ask in person. This week’s guest is David Saferstein, co-founder, co-owner and Chief Executive Officer of Titan Capital ID, LLC. David discusses the benefits of writing a life plan and revisiting/revising it every few years.

 Q: How does it feel being back on campus as a speaker instead of sitting in the audience?
A: It’s a little nerve-racking to be honest with you. It’s much easier to speak in a small group setting like we were doing earlier sitting at the table, but really like what I said in the very beginning, I’m jealous. I wish I were you guys…sitting in the audience. You have a lifetime of experience here in four years. I wish I could do it again.

Q: What is something you wish you spent more time doing on campus while you were here?
A: I really wish I had spent more time walking through the museums on campus. I walked through the modern art museum (UMMA) yesterday, and I was really impressed. I’ve gone to a couple of benefactor dinners in New York, and if I wasn’t so concerned with business and entrepreneurship, I probably would have been an artist.

Q: What was your favorite class you took while at U of M?
A: Current Development in Entrepreneurship really changed my life. That class changed my life because the teacher was a genius. Never in my whole life have I encountered somebody like this teacher.  The first assignment was to write your life plan. It’s probably something that you should redo every five or ten years. Writing that life plan and thinking what I was going to do with myself in the future was an intense undertaking. Every once in a while, I go back and I pull it out and read what I wrote and see what divergences I had over my lifetime. That class also taught me the idea of making big decisions. What might be a big decision for you might not be a big decision for me. Everyone has big decisions at some point in their life.  For example, if you are in a relationship with the same person all through high school and college, it might be a no-brainer that you’re going to get married. Alternatively, maybe you just met somebody, and you think they are the right person for the rest of your life, and then you get a job offer to go across the country. That may become the biggest decision in your life. How you handle big decisions and how they shape your life was a crucial understanding especially because most people only make three or four big life decisions in their entire life. And like I said, they could be different types of decisions for each person. For me that first big decision was quitting my first job and starting G&D Trading Company. It was a huge decision to say, “I’m going to risk everything and not work for another person.” To get to the point, I think I started learning how to make big, important decisions in that one class.

Q: How do you recommend approaching decisions in your life?
A: It’s a hard question because each person’s process of making a decision is different, and it also depends on the level of seriousness of a decision. The average person makes hundreds of small decisions a day and some of them they may regret, but the biggest thing to take away is understanding that when you make a regrettable decision, those are the biggest learning opportunities in your life. I learned so much about business from the decisions that I made that were poor decisions. The decisions that turned out to be great you never think about again. Thus, you have to be willing to enrich yourself through examining the bad decisions that you made and deciding how you would do things differently if you had another opportunity.  Be confident that something similar might come up again in your life and you’ll handle the situation differently….more effectively.

Q: Going off of the last question, one of the big decisions that you mentioned in your lecture was deciding to leave the stock exchange and start Titan. What inspired that decision and how was your transition from such a fast-paced sometimes chaotic job to a more slow paced, person to person type job?
A: It was very difficult, to be honest with you. The stock exchange was so fast-paced and it was a constant source of adrenaline and I loved it. But like I said to you before, I had been very sick and I was making a specific decision to not be in such a fast-paced world. Real estate can move at a snail’s pace, construction moves very slowly…foreclosure work takes forever.  It was definitely a hard transition regarding pace and speed, but some of the things are the same.   I dealt with my employees on the floor of the exchange and my employees at Titan in the same manner.  I try to give everyone the opportunity to speak, and listen to their opinions.

Q: You mentioned enjoying teaching people on the stock exchange how to become good traders and you work very closely with your employees now. If you could take your experiences and create a class to teach university students. What would it be?
A: At one point long ago, I was thinking about teaching Option Theory at NYU or Columbia but now I don’t think it’s as relevant. I would like to teach an alternative real estate finance class.  I think that I could do a good job giving people a broad understanding of real estate from a finance perspective. Another interesting idea would be a real estate seminar on an actual Titan deal where students actually have the opportunity to invest in the project after doing a case study.  I actually offered to do that here at Michigan, but it never took off.  I think it would be a great opportunity for the Real Estate Club. We could work in monthly updates on the status of the loans.  I think it would be a great learning experience. Ultimately, students could leave college with a little more real world understanding of real estate finance.