For much of the 1980s Drexel was the hottest firm in investment banking, thanks to its dominance of the market for high-yield corporate bonds, of which Mr Milken was king.
Austin's own architectural spectacular, a new building for the university's Jack S. Blanton Museum, was stalled when hidebound members of the Board of Regents raised so many objections that the architects, Herzog & de Meuron, probably the hottest firm in the world at the moment, threw up their hands and quit.
Why is Skype Technologies, maker of software that lets anyone with a high-speed Internet connection make free phone calls anywhere in the world, suddenly the hottest firm in tech, lusted after by giant companies like eBay and News Corp. and valued as high as $3 billion?
Just a decade ago, Providence was one of Wall Street's hottest firms.
In exchange for the huge check, Yasir Al Rumayya, managing director of the Saudi public investment fund, will join Uber's board, giving the Middle Eastern government a voice in one of Silicon Valley's hottest firms.
Another husband-and-wife team, Roman Delugan and Elke Meissl, who have one of Vienna's hottest firms, have entered 80 state-sponsored and private competitions over the past 10 years, winning about 10percentt of them.
There has even been talk that Mr Elop, the Finnish firm's first American chief executive, will fire senior managers and move the firm's headquarters to Silicon Valley.This would be an astonishing upheaval for what was one of Europe's hottest firms.
Nearly two decades later he is one of Silicon Valley's great deal-makers, connecting entrepreneurs to top venture capitalists and in the process becoming one himself with stakes in some of the hottest firms including Dropbox, Backplane, Addepar, Reveltouch, Causes, and most recently, DailyMuses.
A successful woman, a leader who stepped out of the workforce for 12 years to raise children, an accomplished community volunteer, and a recent hire by one of Silicon Valley's hottest firms, now a successful employee sharing her personal, inspirational story.
On the most basic level, said Ms. Gachot, a designer with the white-hot firm of Studio Sofield, "it allows you to make a real statement, to take risks with color and form that you might not normally".
They look like meatballs but the hot, firm orbs are way more interesting.
