YouSaid · the spoken record

Lloyd Blankfein

lines on the record: 113
first: 2026-05-12
most recent: 2026-05-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I mean, it's back to kind of where we started the conversation. I don't personally believe people should drop out of school. I learned so much from my peers. It changed my life. It changed my perspective of what's possible. And yeah, I think it makes you more well-rounded person too.”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And everyone will learn what you need for your career afterwards. And I think you'll be my humble opinion. But this is why you interesting. You know, I'm an older guy.”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Humanities learned history, learned those things. And that's what you're, you know, we're at a point now where most people who are young are going to live to be, you know, they're going to actually live longer and they seem to be in much more of a rush to be a success in your kinds of enterprises. And some people will encourage it. I don't think that you're only productive years are when you're 18 through 24.”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And over the edge of cliffs. Totally. And over your horizon of what you could see about the future. Totally. And so learning, you know, look, when I was growing up, everybody wanted to learn, you know, my predecessor, Hank Paulson, spent so much of his time, as did I, in going to China. Well, at least temporarily, we're not going to be making as many investments in China as we once did. There's not none, but it's not going to be as much. Or when I was growing up, everybody wanted to learn Japanese because those were the winners in the, you know, in the tech stuff. And I remember a time when Silicon Valley was route 128 in Boston. Yep. And there was no Silicon Valley. It was the Harvard and MIT, not around Stanford. So I would say things change. And in order to be resilient, a better person and also I hate to minimize this for your own sake. Yep.”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I totally agree. I think range is going to be even more important now than ever. And one of my, I've written about this, but it's sort of life and maybe business philosophy too is that opportunities live between fields of expertise. I like living at the edge.”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we were at DEF CON too. So it's very bad that we're fighting a regional war in Iran. We were at DEF CON 2 with the then Soviet Union stopping their ships in international waters on their way because of a blockade of Cuba. I would say that was a more polarized time and more dangerous if our parents could get through that. We should get through this. And I think knowing that. Me, and I think it should be to everybody else, is knowing that something has been done should give people comfort that it could be done again. And so every time is different, but this is not more extreme.”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a good thing to know that we've lived through times like this before. You know, everybody talks about, oh my God, you've never been there. Was ascension human being in the late 60s, young but still aware when the National Guard was shooting people on campuses. It was political, successful political assassinations. And, you know, the college-age kids were leaving the country and going to Canada to avoid the dress. I would say those were pretty. And by the way, internationally, Russian tanks went in 68. I would say that was a bit more danger. The country during the Cuban Missile Crisis was at DEF CON 2, you know, by the way, the lower numbers of the Moor sphere. DEF CON 1 is nuclear war.”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here's one thing I would say to the youngish young young people. And with all deference to the success of Peter Thiel, I think people should make themselves complete people. I think you should get your early life is for becoming a complete person, a range of activities, for your own sake. To make you appreciative of things, and also few commercial life, because in the long run, you're going to get by and be good and get investors and have the goodwill of your colleagues and your subordinates because you're an interesting person. You're the kind of person that other people want to deal with. And if you make yourself so narrow and exalt, you know, your narrow silo, even if you make a lot of money in the first game, your life will be better and your commercial life will be better if your resilience will be higher. Learning history”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have a lot of, again, young people just kind of starting out their careers, likely listening. I guess what advice you have for young people that want to have a fulfilling career, beyond working hard and maybe becoming good at whatever you choose to do, anything.”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's the Marxist ideology. That's what he was striving for. But it's funny to quote Marx. But anyway. I am not mournful of the opportunities. I'm apprehensive about it. I think that you should get a lot of focus. But I'm not for I was listening to Bernie Sanders wring his hands over there. Oh my God. You know something. I'm for all this stuff. Let's let the official sector get on there, catch up to it. I'm not slowing down. First of all, you can't. You're not going to get people to be stupider than they are or unlearn thing they've already learned. You can wish that atomic, that the atom had never been split because maybe the adverse consequences of atomic bombs are worse than the benefits of nuclear power. But guess what? You're not going to unlearn it, so don't waste any time thinking about it.”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not against anything that makes us everybody more leveraged. Yep. We'll find more goods or services to provide. Maybe we'll have more massage therapists. I don't know. Turn back the clock at the beginning of the 20th century. More than half the country was in agriculture. Exactly. Guess what? A single digit percentage is today. People found stuff to do. We'll find something to do. And by the way, if we're generating all this wealth because of the leverage, maybe we'll have a four-day work week, six hours a day, and we can all be poets in the afternoon or hunters or fishermen.”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not because it's smarter than us and it's going to turn us into pets But because we don't have the ability to test whether it's right or not. And so, how do you build reliance on things that fundamentally you can't test? And then these things will test each other. Well, what if they're coordinating with the tests themselves are flawed? You will think of more of this stuff than I do because you're a technologist. I'm a user. But I have, you know, again, if there's right to be anxious of it, but you might as well be turning back the tides. Now I'm going to waste no time in thinking about whether it's good or bad. It's happening. And you're not going to unlearn stuff.”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The leverage in these things is themselves a big problem. So before this technological age, not just AI, but in general, could you have had a mistake that could cost billions of dollars? Not really, because your intuition, you wouldn't. But now you can leave a piece of software, could go out and do $70,000 transactions or even industrially. I think the biggest industrial accident that we ever had was in Bhopal. Know terrible Single digit thousands of people died horrible. In the atomic age of Fukushima, if the wind had blown in a different direction, it could have been tens of millions of people. So these are risks, these are consequences. People may be loath one of the big risks, our governmental and regulatory, and they may be right. We may want to have to regulator slow some of these things up.”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You could check. When you get into some of these large language models, you don't know the thought process. You lose intuition in these things. When I started out in the business, people would be shrieking each other, noisy trading rooms, blah, blah, blah. People be fighting with their wives or their husbands. They were sitting at the desk. At the same time, people were transacting. But if somebody said the wrong price. Or did a trait backwards, bought something when he should have said sold, the whole room would come to a dead stop and you'd hear it. And today You don't have that intuition because everything is whirring behind the scenes and you don't get the trail or the thought process of these things. That's a problem.”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh my gosh, you know, things will work, things will look different. Somebody else in a basement is doing OpenAI 7 that everybody else knows about just the way same way nobody, all the stuff that's coming out today of things that happen. I'm reading with interest. I never knew this stuff and nobody else, you know. 10 people knew all that stuff. And so there's always, you know, there's always upside surprise. We may be over-enthusiastic about the changes, the reliability function. If it's unreliable and if you're in a business of horseshoes. We're throwing hand grenades. You don't have to be precise. But if you're running a big institution and you can't make mistakes. And numbers really matter. You know, maybe you have to run things in parallel for a lot longer. And, you know, one of the things that Google gave you was a bibliography.”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, again, I know you don't want to predict the future, but we are on the precipice of, I don't know, some of the largest IPOs ever with SpaceX, with likely open AI anthropic, others coming. Know where do you think we are kind of in this cycle, or maybe what are risks that you think are underappreciated in the markets today?”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Forever. I mean, at the beginning and reinvesting all the money, you know. And that's so there'll be things, there'll be genius pundits and professors will talk about how stupid somebody was because he won't be able to put himself in the shoes. Without the after acquired information. And I'm sure there's some stupid stuff being done too. And I'm sure you have better visibility on that than things that you pass that you see other people doing. I have more forgiveness for that because I know that I don't know. But I would be making those bets today, and I know that the people who are making the biggest bets and putting their money where their mouth and their corporate money are themselves principles and not just professional managers.”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The answer is this is going to be very, very important. Will we go through a tech bubble kind of situation where we'll weed out the stuff that should never have been invested in, never been made, you know, again, in hindsight, you shouldn't have done it, but at the time, in prospect, you didn't know what looked more speculative than Amazon. Sure.”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“10 large language models. Maybe it needs four will be winners and two will be very big winners and the other two will get by and maybe it'll get reduced over time to two. Who knows? And so there's forks in the road where people are taking the wrong fork. We don't know. So I would bet, and I think you do too, you know, obviously you want to have an idea, but there's going to have to be a lot of forgiveness down the road where people are going to come and say, how could you be so stupid? You weren't stupid with the information available today. You place your stack of chips on more than one possible technology. And within the technologies on more than one place, maybe you can't because maybe you have to show commitment.”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It seemed to me that their convictions are very deeply held And so that's another thing. Will all these technologies, and you could say talk about AI or anything else, will all these technologies work? No. Will the people who have technologies that work all succeed? No, the world may not need.”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Generally, things don't never repeat, but often they rhyme. Sure. Is this like electricity, you know, the electrification of the country? Those were very big deals. Internet, very big deals. Could this be a bigger deal? I don't know. I don't think anybody knows. I don't think the people who are driving it. They have opinions that they express, but I don't think they know. So we're in the realm of contingency planning. It might be. And one of the observations I'll make is that the people who are the big hyperscalers are firms that are dominated by founding shareholders who are putting their own money where their mouth is. These aren't professional managers making bets on the future with other people's money. This is their own money. This is their own ego. I'm not saying that that necessarily makes them right, but it certainly makes”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hear maybe your just broader perspective on AI, and you're a student of history. Does this strike you as sort of a similar technology to past product cycles? Is this time different? Where are you on the spectrum of excited, scared?”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Guess what? It's time to explain that. And you perform a super important function, you're taking risks on entrepreneurs and companies. And risks that your predecessors took 15 years ago are manifesting today in decisions you're making are going to manifest in the future. I think there's no being modest and understated carries a lot of disadvantages. And I think you have to explain the role you are in the market so that there's some appreciation of what you do one day if people decide that you missed that, whether you misstepped or not, they may decide that you did and you want to have a counter argument to that. And it's very, you don't want to be fumpering for one at the event.”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I would say before then. And I know that people will think this is a you go driven, you don't want to do it, people are embarrassed to be out, go out and let people know who you are, know the value of what we do. Businesses wouldn't exist today, important business, but for Goldman Sachs taking a risk. In some ways, the invisible hand that licks people with capital, with people who need capital, we were early financiers of dark moments. We took mentioned Elon, we took Tesla Public at a time when, and this sounds like a quaint time, when companies didn't go public until they made money. Sure. And that was a big deal at Garman at that time to go out and do that. And a million, you know, do things, I think. This is Microsoft too, and other companies like that. That's a very important function in the world.”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then, of course, I was necessarily picked for my being so photogenic and being such an outward person. I was an inside guy, that ok, or I had a, and then I had to make up for it by getting out. And when you're being defensive and people are trying to kill you, it's not the best time to try to make friends with the public.”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so nature pours a vacuum and the official sector poured us. What are we going to do? Kick the shit out of Lehman Brothers, almost didn't exist anymore, Mayor Stearns? Or how about the big commercials banks that lost $50 billion literally those amounts in the crisis? We were an example, we were there. And also my predecessor at that point was Secretary of Treasury and a lot of the government officials there, by the way, doing a great job were going. And so we were, you know, we were that kind of target and we had no anchor in the world. They didn't know who we were. And so we were very easy, no reputation. My advice.”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think one of the things, and I learned this the hard way, one of the things that we didn't do is we were a wholesale firm. We didn't have, you know, go get a mortgage from Goldman Sachs. Go open a checking account at Goldman Sachs or how do you get local Goldman Sachs branch? Doesn't exist. So people didn't know us. Institutions knew us. Companies knew us. Governments knew us. We were the biggest in that world. We didn't advertise ourselves. We had a whole PR department to help our name out of the paper It turns out we were too important, too influential, too big to be anonymous, especially in a crisis, and especially to come out of a crisis as well as we did.”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Beyond our firm, because, you know, but I think a lot of the AI labs are, you know. Going to create a lot of change in the world, in our economy. And I think there'll be a lot of negative backlash to them. I guess what advice do you have for the leaders of an open AI anthropic or maybe Elon for how to navigate through that, even from a communications perspective?”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Once upon a time, we were you, right? We were the investment bank and all these other commercial banks, and then it evolves. And now you're an institution now, and there's people who market themselves as a more flexible current version of what you used to be.”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's great advice. Know, maybe to transition more to present day, for better or worse, I think, or maybe for worse, I would argue, but I think a lot of the technology companies who are going to inherit a lot of the public that affirms.”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're not there to be their friend. You'd also be their friend. You're there. It's like, if you're a military leader, you don't want your commanding officer to be a good juggler or tell you good jokes. You want them to lead you well, worry about your safety, and not make you take risks, stupid risks for no purpose. And that's what you want. And if they like you, that's good. But you want to be, you want them to appreciate you. You want them to feel they're going to be better by partnering with, by following your flag and not someone else's.”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With people, I said, how many of you go home? And to your spouse, to your wife, to your boyfriend, or your girlfriend, and talk about your boss. And everybody twitters and say, I do every photo. Well, guess what? And they would do this to the people who just got newly promoted. Guess what? The people who report to you are going home to their spouse and every night they're talking about you. Totally. Do you realize that? They don't realize that. You have to think of who you become, and you have to have that sense of yourself before you can have an impact on others. You have to realize that. And so at the end of them, then I would say, what do you want them saying about you? You're not there to be. You can be their friend.”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your reputation with those people 30 years from now, believe it or not, are going to be how they remember you act today in this crisis or regularly. And you must see that yourself. You came up, we were talking about before, people you knew at Gohman and they could become fixed in your mind at certain things told us. I said, remember, keep in mind that, again, this cohort that you're a cohort going through this, and I thought about that in our business, the financial crisis now is old. But let me tell you, There are grudges and memories and good feelings and hard feelings that come out of that that are sticky. And the important thing is to get people will learn that through experience. But one of the things you could do as a leader, mentor, advisor to people is get people to appreciate that without having”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And also, you're going to go through life. And I would say this to new people in the firm. Know the dopey people that even for the most junior person, the dopey analyst in your class, roll the clock, you know, you can't imagine this, and believe me, looking at you, I can't imagine it either. But your cohort is going to run for all the important institutions 35 years from now, or 30 years from now, or 20 years from now. And you're going to make”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your reputation. It's your firm. You're going to own that. It's open ended. And so we're going to be there when this crisis is over. So it worries sometimes about, you know, in the alternative space when it's maybe a 15-year-old firm, but then the guy, you know, I joined Gorman and Saxon. Gorman and Sachs were already dead It's an institution by the time I got there 150 years old. We're going to be there for another 150 years. So we're not going to honor all our commitments because we have to be in business on the other side of this. By the way, I think about that when I'm dealing with someone else. Are you going to stand by this? Are you going to shut down and open up a firm with a different name with three different partners later?”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I have in the financial crisis. I'll get to that. Let me get to that in a second, but yes, I mean, there was a time we had this loan outstanding to Chrysler. I remember the CEO then at Chrysler calls me up. And are you going to honor that commitment? And I said, yes. And I think it was due at a certain. And I said, and he said, can you do that now? I said no. I said, I'm going to honor it. And I'm not going to, it's not going to be for more than we committed to and it's not going to be sooner than we commit. I promise you, we will honor our commitment. But in this market, we're not going to do more and we're not going to do it earlier. And we did all of that. We did all of that stuff in the high integrity. Here's another thing that's in your head in an ownership culture.”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What was interesting also, I heard this from Allison, which is it was your money, but you also cared about relationships. She said, I'll forget the cast of characters that were in this meeting, but I think it was about your kind of LBO financing exposure at the time. And you said, look, like commitments are in the past and relationships are in the future. Like go out and make sure that our clients know we're still good.”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We should play Rage. She was like, so who have the temerity to ask them for a margin agreement? But we had the margin agreement with them, we had their collateral. And so that was because, again, it was our money And so it wasn't like other people's money, it wasn't speculative.”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly, and what we did. So, one of the things, and there were a lot of things, we had a lot of exposure on paper to AIG, but we also had... We were fully hedged because we had bought credit protection, but we also had a collapse. So we, a single A credit. Got a collateral agreement with AIGA. I think we may have been the only ones to do that because we insisted on it and we wouldn't have otherwise transacted with”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, guess what? We're going to keep marking it down till you find, to market to a price where you could sell it. And by the way, and therefore it became easier to sell because it wasn't like it had big. The losses were already embedded in their books. Hold on, because we marked it to market.”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And guess what? And that's what got it. We had that mark to market is not just a PL system. It's a risk management system. Because we, that was our early warning that something was amiss here. We had things that were marked, things that were AAA. When you went, when we made people sell them, the bids vanished. And they weren't there, and the bids were much lower and then much lower, and then much lower. By the way, I didn't think it was the market was right. I thought there was a big opportunity to accumulate it. But that would be like fighting with the tides or gravity. It is, that's the market.”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It would have been tougher because it's hard to mark to market. Now, what we did, we also had instruments that were one off. We had a lot of loan commitments related to our M&E. We had the biggest M&A franchise. And so we made commitments. Those were outstanding. Those were commitments that were, you know, had to be, but we marked them down. We made an analogies. And we also had a very separate bureaucracy in the firm away from the investors and the traders whose job they were partners. They got paid a lot of money to mark those things. And when there was a dispute, we always sided with that side of the house. And we said to the traders, investors, very easy way for you to challenge the marks that you're being given. Go out and sell Fract”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, but it did focus your attention, and NATO's very, very honored and risk management very attentive to risk. And now one of the consequences of that concern, we marked things to market rigorously, religiously, and other people didn't. Yep. They didn't have. Do you think”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're investing client money and you're not leveraging your own money. The Parters not only had capital accounts at risk, they had their homes at risk. I remember when I became a partner, I said, should I be putting my house in my wife's name? And it was very funny because then the Minister of the Interior, this was back when we were partnership, said, you know, Lloyd. No partner at Goldman Sachs has ever lost money because the firm, you know, because of losses at the firm, but plenty of Goldman Sachs partners have lost money because they put assets in their spouse's. So that was anyway. So it was a funny one. But by the way, like a lot of funny lines, truth, truth.”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Risk management, the lack of a big consumer business hurt us in the back end on the reputational side because people didn't know us. We were a big, influential government sack. So people get left gold and became very big officials, prime ministers. And by the way, not just in the US, overseas as well. And so, but... In the beginning, you know, risk management culture, and maybe that stemmed from the fact that we were a partnership lately, an unlimited liability. There's nothing that focuses your attention. Better than being a, you know, your partnership”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where the iconoclast is in your business, the iconoclast and the young guy. Not only celebrated the, you know. They're the focus and not so much in bigger organizations. Always wanted her cheating. Now, that's another thing to try to be an entrepreneur in an institution.”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he said, that could be interesting. He called upon somebody on the equity desk, said, work with Lloyd. I didn't even have a title at that point. So I remember I asked when they emerged into Gomez, I said, What's my title? And the guy said, call yourself Contessa if you want. So no title. And he said, don't somebody work with me? And they did. And the first order they came in, and this was like back when this was real money, was for $100 million worth of this. That was by far the biggest trade ever. And then they was doing anyway. So that's how, and you want to be that way in your organization. And by the way, that's an easier thing in your line of work. Where the entrepreneurs are advantaged by their lack of attachment to history and tradition and the old way of doing things,”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Commodities in effect. And those were big. And so in talking to them, I said, well, Holly, I'm at Goldman Sachs, biggest equity trader, blah, blah, blah. What if we did this in the equity market in Manhattan? We went out and they bought 500. Of the SP 500 and put out the money in the market and hedged it By selling it in the forward market, would that give them what was the embedded rate of return? It was very high because they were the other side. Speculators who didn't have the capital. I know this is a little bit complicated, but the short story was I had the idea, I went to the then number two guy in the firm, Bob Ruin Lydvin. Treasury Secretary. I never spoke to. It was Gorman of the whole firm, and I was in the tucked away in the jail. Was in a separate building at the time. He never moved.”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what they were doing, and we can go into details or not, I don't want to be complicated here. Cash and carries what people were doing arbitrages between a spot market and a commodity And the forward market that effectively, if you buy, if you are selling somebody. Know buying the cash product and selling somebody a forward in effect, you're lending that person money, especially the risk of the investment, but he doesn't have to put out that much cash. You're the one who's hedging it by buying the commodity and giving him a forward in it. And that has an embedded interest rate to it, but it looks a lot like an investment for churn. And so, in chatting with them, but the markets weren't big enough to do the scale they wanted to do. And that was a few years earlier it was when they came out with the S&P 500 financial.”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Deal with people from the Mideast who are investors in gold and that I'm chatting with people on the other side. And what are you doing? What do you need? And it turns out that even though they were speculating in precious metals, what they really, really wanted to do. Was they wanted to be able to invest money and get an interest rate-like predictable return? But under their rules of engagement, their law, they weren't allowed in those days, the real strictly religious crowd wasn't allowed to take interest. It was usurious. And what they were looking for ways of making kinds of investments that would read like an investment. They were allowed to make investment returns. They just weren't allowed to collect interest Have the stability and predictability of an interest.”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source