The Goldman Texodus

Goldman Sachs is preparing to cut staff by 5% as high interest rates have driven deal volume down. Although the announcement may seem like a shock, the reality is that there has already been an exodus of talent from Goldman over the past three months. Punks & Pinstripes Insights analyzed 585 LinkedIn profiles of people who’ve left Goldman Sachs in the past 90 days to see  where they went next. Where they go after they leave offers valuable signals into how investment banking is changing, and who’s changing it.

Here’s what we found:

A disproportionate number of the people leaving are technologists.

• 21%, or 123 of the people who left are technologists. About 36, or 25% of them are VP or above. This isn’t a gigantic number - except when you consider that only about 17% of Goldman’s workforce are technologists.

Amazon hired more Goldman employees than Morgan Stanley, Blackstone, Blackrock, Bank of America or Citi.

• Our analysis uncovered 14 Goldman employees who went to work for Amazon. Five of which went to AWS. In a separate analysis we discovered that Amazon has been aggressively hiring from Apple, Facebook and Google, while its other big tech rivals contract. Our next phase of this analysis will examine Amazon’s hiring expansion from other investment and bulge bracket banks. 

JP Morgan is the most popular destination for Goldman expats. 

• 184 of the people who’ve left Goldman found jobs at other bulge bracket banks, with J.P.Morgan poaching 20 Goldman employees, and private equity giant Blackstone taking 15. 

Is MN8 the clean energy Marcus?

• Goldman has long stood out from its investment banking for incubating new ventures and growing them to scale. Marcus, Goldman’s consumer finance venture, is the most famous example. MN8, a new clean energy startup might be its next big venture. Fourteen people transferred from Goldman to this new energy venture.  

Is Amazon preparing to disrupt investment banking?

• It’s an open secret that investment banking is badly inefficient. People put in 90 hour weeks pulling data from a pdf file, copying it into an excel spreadsheet, and using those charts in a powerpoint deck. And even though bankers arrive at work at 8am, bankers don’t actually start their work until 6:30. Ever since I worked on Wall Street I’ve been wondering when Amazon or Google or Microsoft would puncture the investment banking industry’s seemingly invincible defenses. Is Amazon building the talent arsenal to break through the gates of investment banking? It’s too early to tell, but stay tuned. 

BIG Disclaimer - 

The data we analyzed is from Linkedin, and is primarily intended for prospecting for job candidates, potential employers, or sales prospects. It’s messy data. We cleaned it to the best of our ability (we carved the sample size down from 2,447 people to 585), but as with all data, it’s messy. Also, not every Goldman Sachs employee has an updated LinkedIn profile. In sum, think of this as the best best answer to an extremely complex, and opaque question.