As the rest of Wall Street scales down, Ken Moelis aims to build the next great investment bank, one relationship at a time. By offering a lot of autonomy — and leaving a little bit of equity on the table — Affiliated Managers Group has found the key to successful acquisitions.

When Ken Moelis hosted a dinner last summer at Il Ristorante di Giorgio Baldi — a relaxed Italian hangout in Santa Monica popular with the Hollywood crowd — to commemorate the inception of his investment-banking shop, about 20 employees and their significant others paused to listen to the founder say a few words.

He invoked the old photographs of the original partners of illustrious Wall Street firms — Morgan and Stanley, Goldman and Sachs — and indicated that someone at the dinner ought to snap a picture, for posterity’s sake, of this current group of partners seated around a restaurant table in July 2007.

Moelis then said, as he recalls, “I hope this is the beginning of something that, a hundred years from now, people will look back on and say, ‘That’s when it started.’ ”

Moelis was fully intending to come across as boldly ambitious when he made the remark. It was, he says now, a motivational tactic, meant to inspire. “If people think they’re creating something permanent, meaningful, historic,” he says, “it changes how much they want to come to work.”

Not that this group required much of a pep talk. Moelis had assembled a team of veteran lieutenants supremely loyal to him, and even if not all of them were brimming with confidence that evening, they would be soon. Within two months of the dinner, Moelis & Co. completed its initial round of fundraising, reportedly having garnered around $1.8 billion in investment capital, even while the rest of Wall Street began taking punches to the gut from the growing credit crisis.

Meanwhile, Moelis started tapping into the network of business contacts he had developed over his 27-year career, which began in 1981 at the now-defunct junk-bond powerhouse Drexel Burnham Lambert; continued at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette through the ’90s; and marched on as he built an American investment-banking division from scratch for the giant Swiss bank UBS (from which he eventually resigned in terminal frustration with the conglomerate’s bureaucracy).

Those prized relationships landed the nascent firm its first fee, a true whale.

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