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David Blood

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2020-06-22
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2020-06-22
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  1. “With sustainability skills, public policy skills, and truly integrate that thinking into one philosophy, we could create some really interesting insights about business and about investing. And that's how we've developed our firm over these many years now.”

    2020-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Sustainable Investing 5: David Blood - Pioneering a Generation (Capital Allocators, EP.143) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Peter Knight, one of his colleagues, Miguel Nogales, who was a good friend of Marx, and then another colleague from Goldman Sachs, Peter Harris. And we were the seven founders. But the day that I met Al, two really important notions that have driven the founding of Generation kind of came to light. The first one was my interest has always been in poverty, in social justice, and Als has been in climate. Obviously, I care about the climate as well. But what we realized at that day is that the question about climate change and the question of poverty, they were basically the same coin but different size. And that from that point on, we always wanted to ensure that we integrated all aspects of sustainability into how we were talking about sustainability. And secondly, we recognized that if we could bring together finance skills, business skills coupled”

    2020-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Sustainable Investing 5: David Blood - Pioneering a Generation (Capital Allocators, EP.143) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “And it was a very small acquisition. I think it would have been $35 million or something like that, an acquisition that Goldman Sachs wasn't going to do. And Murphy phoned me up and said, look, you are supposed to know something about asset management. You now claim your interest in sustainability. Would you do me a favor and go to Boston to meet Vice President Gore and try to help him? At least Goldman Sachs can say they're trying to help. And so I brought the business plan that I had been developing with Mark Ferguson and one of her other co-founders, Common Le Duke, and I brought the business plan to Boston to meet with Al, not because I wanted him to be our partner, but because it was a good example of how you build a company or buy a company. And as we spoke that day, we realized that we were trying to do the same thing and that perhaps we should partner together. And ultimately, there were seven of us that founded Generation.”

    2020-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Sustainable Investing 5: David Blood - Pioneering a Generation (Capital Allocators, EP.143) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Ten different strategies. It was early in terms of people thinking about sustainability in the ESG, and it was at that point I thought, you know what, the best thing to do would be to retire and go set up a small boutique. And I spoke to Goldman Sachs about it. They knew what we were going to do. And actually, when I told my partners I was going to retire to set up a sustainable investing firm, I think they probably thought I really had lost my marbles once and for all. My boss at the time was Phil Murphy, who is the current governor of State of New Jersey. And Phil had been approached by Al Gore about Goldman Sachs representing Gore.”

    2020-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Sustainable Investing 5: David Blood - Pioneering a Generation (Capital Allocators, EP.143) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Period, I realized that it was probably time for me to go do something different. But along the way, going back to the early story of my summer associate experience, we had begun to talk about sustainability at Goldman Sachs Asset Management. This was at the time of some of the terrible corporate crises, Enron WorldCom, etc. In governance corporate governance became really quite important. Hank Paulson at the time was quite interested in it. We began to think about that. And actually one of my colleagues, Mark Ferguson, one of the co-founders, he and I spent a lot of time thinking about that. He also was the person who introduced me specifically to sustainable investing. And I began to think, well, you know what? Perhaps we should do something like that or bring sustainability into Goldman Sachs asset management. And then I realized, no, that was going to be pretty hard. Goldman Sachs asset management was 1,400 people, something like that.”

    2020-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Sustainable Investing 5: David Blood - Pioneering a Generation (Capital Allocators, EP.143) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Well, as I mentioned earlier, I was very committed to Goldman Sachs and its business principles and culture, and I was one of the partners who voted to stay private in nineteen ninety nine, actually originally nineteen ninety eight, but Goldman Sachs went public in nineteen ninety nine. And I thought it was going to be close, and I obviously was quite wrong about that. I was concerned that the culture of the firm was going to change and that it would evolve. And I probably was going to change anyway. I probably was very naive in retrospect. But at that point, I had a sense that my career, Goldman Sachs, was going to be limited going forward. So I was in a fortunate position to be running the asset management business, actually co-heading the business at the time. I felt I had a very clear commitment to our clients, my colleagues, and I said, well, I'm just going to do the best I can for five years or so. And as we got to 2003,”

    2020-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Sustainable Investing 5: David Blood - Pioneering a Generation (Capital Allocators, EP.143) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “So I kind of think of myself as someone who knows a little bit about how to build businesses as opposed to being an expert in investment management or investment banking or anything like that.”

    2020-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Sustainable Investing 5: David Blood - Pioneering a Generation (Capital Allocators, EP.143) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Whether Goldman Sachs should set up an online discount broker, which we ultimately included was a bad idea, which I guess maybe today they're re-examining. But we'll see about that. But certainly in 1996, it didn't seem like a very good idea to me anyway. And then I was very fortunate to be asked to help build Goldman Sachs asset management in 1996 and have spent the rest of my career in the asset management business. But when I think about my skill set, actually, first of all, I think of myself ultimately as a debt guy because that was my early career at Banker's Trust and the Debt Capital Markets business. But I really think of myself as have had an opportunity to help build businesses. And that's continued at generation. I have helped found some not-for-profit businesses, social finance being among them. And then more recently, on the edge conservation is another business that I'm helping to start.”

    2020-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Sustainable Investing 5: David Blood - Pioneering a Generation (Capital Allocators, EP.143) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I ended up working in just about every division of Goldman Sachs, the only one I didn't work in was research. And I actually had kind of an unusual career. I was involved in actually helping to set up businesses. So in my career at Golman Sachs, I worked on four major new business initiatives over the eighteen years that I was there. I worked first in investment banking and capital markets, growing a private capital markets business. I was involved in when Goldman Sachs began to truly expand outside of the United States and really began to ramp up its trading businesses. They brought John Thane in to run the finance business. They brought David Vinier in. They brought myself in, and a handful of others to help augment the control and treasury businesses of Goldman Sachs. And so I spent a number of years in that side of the business. I was actually asked in 1996 to consider.”

    2020-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Sustainable Investing 5: David Blood - Pioneering a Generation (Capital Allocators, EP.143) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “And they've mostly gone out of business for failures of culture and business principles. And it was ultimately not a surprise to me that Drexel went out of business. It wasn't a surprise to me that Solomon Brothers had the challenges that they had. Same for Kidd or Peabody, et cetera, et cetera. And so what I began to realize is that understanding companies and understanding management teams, you could get a sense of whether they would be successful or not dependent upon how they treated their people, their compensation structures, their leadership structures, their governance structures. And those lessons, for me anyway, were critical learnings as we began to think about setting up a firm like generation.”

    2020-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Sustainable Investing 5: David Blood - Pioneering a Generation (Capital Allocators, EP.143) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Culture than major investment banks, and ultimately concluded that the culture that would be most aligned for me was Goldman Sachs, because its business principles, its commitment to integrity, its commitment to clients, its commitment to teamwork, meritocracy, all the things that I felt very, very strongly about, and I was lucky enough to get an offer at Goldman Sachs and went to Goldman Sachs. But I tell the story for two reasons, actually. One is it gives you a sense of why I thought working at Goldman Sachs was going to be the right place for me, and I was very blessed. It was a great experience. But secondly, the experience of understanding the culture of all those investment banks in the mid-80s turned out to be a great indicator of success of those organizations. Turns out that since I've been in finance now thirty five years, there have been, I think, probably 10, 15 major organizations that have gone bankrupt.”

    2020-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Sustainable Investing 5: David Blood - Pioneering a Generation (Capital Allocators, EP.143) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “So I went back to school and spent most of September, October thinking about it, and I then had this sort of, I guess, epiphany and said to myself, well, wait a minute, what if I chose the wrong firm? What if actually I like finance and I just went to the wrong organization? So this was in the autumn of 1984. I had this idea because culture was always important to me and how people worked and teamwork. And I thought, well, why don't I do an analysis of all the cultures of the major investment banks in the United States? And it was easy to do at business school because you had lots of colleagues who had worked in different places for the summer. You had all the firms coming up to do cocktail parties and introduce themselves. So you had a very easy time of assessing people and culture. So I did this analysis of all the”

    2020-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Sustainable Investing 5: David Blood - Pioneering a Generation (Capital Allocators, EP.143) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Business school and then to Goldman Sachs. My experience between my first and second year at business school really was a quite, I think, illustrative and instrumental in helping us think about studying a firm like generation. I worked in corporate finance at a firm called E.F. Hutton. And at EFTO I had really a pretty terrible experience to be honest with you. I was working from six in the morning to midnight. There really was no sense of teamwork in the organization. I had no idea what I was really doing. I didn't actually see a client until my And I became quite disillusioned and I thought, really, you know,”

    2020-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Sustainable Investing 5: David Blood - Pioneering a Generation (Capital Allocators, EP.143) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “To the Peace Corps, and I've been rejected, I applied to the University of Michigan to get my doctorate in psychology, and I've been rejected. And my dad said, you know, you've got to get a job. You've got to do something. And he said, you should apply to banks. This was in early 1981, spring of 1981. He said they might hire people like you, whatever that meant. And I applied to 70 banks in the United States and was rejected by 69 of them, but ultimately got one job at Banker's Trust Company in New York to go into finance. And I found out that I was pretty good with numbers, actually, as it turns out, and then went from bankers' trust to”

    2020-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Sustainable Investing 5: David Blood - Pioneering a Generation (Capital Allocators, EP.143) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “I grew up in Michigan in Brazil, and I have to confess when I was growing up, I never thought I would be in finance or investing. My mom was a teacher, and most of the role models I had growing up were either teachers or coaches. And I went to a small school in upstate New York called Hamilton College with the idea of being a teacher or a coach, or actually ironically a forest ranger was the other thing I was interested in. And in my sophomore year at Hamilton, they discontinued the education department. And so I had to look around to find a different degree, and I chose child psychology because that was the closest thing to education that I could find. And in hindsight, child psychology was a perfect degree to manage investment bankers and investment managers, so it turned out just fine. I got towards graduation and didn't have a job.”

    2020-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Sustainable Investing 5: David Blood - Pioneering a Generation (Capital Allocators, EP.143) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I recently got involved with the Alliance for Decision Education, an educational nonprofit dedicated to the belief that better decisions lead to better lives and a better society. The alliance is building a national movement to ensure decision education is part of every middle and high school student's learning experience. I wish I had learned the science of decision-making back then, and I'm keen to spread the word and do my part so that my kids and yours learn to make better decisions throughout their lives. To learn more and join me in this movement, visit alliance for decisioned.org. That's alliance for decisioned education.org. Please enjoy my conversation with David Blood in this fifth episode of Sustainable Investing The Next Frontier. David, nice to see you and thanks for doing this.”

    2020-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Sustainable Investing 5: David Blood - Pioneering a Generation (Capital Allocators, EP.143) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “My guest on the fifth episode of Sustainable Investing The Next Frontier is David Blood, a co-founder and senior partner of Generation Investment Management, a pioneering sustainable investment firm he started with seven partners in two thousand four, including Vice President Al Gore. Our conversation covers the importance of culture and organizations, building businesses at Goldman Sachs, and David's fortuitous introduction to Al Gore. We turn to Generations Investment Philosophy, Principles, and Investment Process, including its focus on desirable industries, great businesses, and integration of ESG factors in research. We close by looking out at the next 5 to 10 years and addressing the urgency of the initiatives to improve the climate and social injustice.”

    2020-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Sustainable Investing 5: David Blood - Pioneering a Generation (Capital Allocators, EP.143) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source