Paul Wachter
Paul D. Wachter is the founder and CEO of Main Street Advisors. Founded in 1997, Main Street Advisors provides a wide range of financial, strategic, business-building, and asset-management advisory services to a select group of high-net-worth individuals and companies, primarily in the entertainment and sports industries.
From 1993 to 1997, Wachter worked at Schroder & Co., serving as managing director and head of the company's lodging and gaming and sports and leisure groups, and its West Coast investment banking effort. From 1987 to 1993, he was a managing director at Kidder Peabody, where he founded and was responsible for the firm's hotel, resorts, and leisure group, and managed its real estate group and Los Angeles investment banking group. He began his career as an investment banker at Bear Stearns, covering a variety of industries. From 1982 to 1985, he worked at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison as a tax attorney, and from 1981 to 1982, he clerked for Judge Dorothy W. Nelson on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.
A 1981 graduate of Columbia Law School, Wachter was a James Kent Scholar and a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar. He graduated magna cum laude and Beta Gamma Sigma from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1978 and is a member of the New York State Bar. His advisory and board-of-director roles include, but are not limited to, being trustee of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and first lady Maria Shriver’s blind trusts; serving as a key advisor and strategist for Schwarzenegger’s 2003 and 2006 campaigns and transition teams; serving on the board of regents for the University of California (2004–2016); seving as special advisor to the California Commission for Jobs and Economic Growth; and serving as chairman of the Austrian Holocaust Reparations Committee.
He currently sits on the board of directors for Ladder, a nutritional supplement company that he cofounded with Schwarzenegger, LeBron James, and Cindy Crawford. He also executive produces the award-winning show Survivor’s Remorse and the upcoming Muhammad Ali documentary What's My Name.