YouSaid · the spoken record

Lloyd Blankfein

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2026-05-12

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2026-05-12

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1. “Show. By the way, it's not my brilliance for sourcing him, it's his brilliance for being brilliant. I don't want to get confused, but I knew it. I knew it early. I think one of the things that I had in my time, and I tried, is that I wasn't a victim of the organization chart. These firms could be very Goldman Sachs is not very bureaucratic and not very. I remember when I was very, very early in my career, remember I came from left field to Jarren. Jarren was acquired by Goldman. Aaron wasn't doing very well. But I had this idea. I was in the precious metals business. That made me have to.”

   2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “The increment, but he has a big, you know, he's a substantial guy as opposed to being a bigger fish in a smaller pond. So found that attractive. Look, you have to, I think I'm a good judge of people. I like people. I care about them. I empathize with them. I want to be not so much liked as appreciated. I wasn't always liked. Read my reviews. But I was always appreciated. I wanted to make people better. I wanted, I didn't want to juggle for them or tell jokes or be, you know, I wanted them to think that I made them better than they otherwise would have been, that they got a lot out of it. And that's, you know, and I really took the core care about them. I think I can read people. But I identified.”

   2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “The platform is subordinate. Again, we weren't asking people to subordinate their egos forever or not hide themselves or not be famous or wealthy. We just said that if you subordinate it in the short term or at key times in favor of a platform, you can exploit that platform again professionally because the firm would have much more heft and power and authority. Nobody, people take Goldman's calls, even for a most junior person, and also it's good for your personal life too because away from Goldman saying that look, I was a partner in Goldman sat there. I'm not saying this is exclusive to Goldman, but saying your partner, at least people will, the presumption has shifted that you're not a dummy unless you prove you're a dummy, as opposed to other people out of the presumption you're a dummy unless you tell me why you're smart. Totally. And so we made that, you know, I tried.”

   2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “It doesn't mean people won't leave, and some people are just entrepreneurial, and they can't want to be partners and they don't want to subordinate their own interests. And there's a certain kind of person. By the way, there are people who do spectacular in the world, have great relationships with Goldman Sachs, but we improve their lives in Goldman Sachs by them separating. Because they just weren't going to be that kind of patient. They weren't going to be, you know, they”

   2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “So, again, you have to put your money where your mouth is sometimes, how you compensate people. And by the way, you can get people who will try to pick off your best people because if you're paying the people who are going through the doldrums, Better because other people are running more money, it could be coming at the expense of the people who made more money and someone will come in and take those. So you have to, you know, there's a, you know, there's a practicality to this thing. So you can't pay everybody the same through good times and bad times. You have to do it. But you have to mute the effect.”

   2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “It's a more volatile PL. And, you know, going back to the beginning of the conversation where people managers get confused between being wrong and being stupid, at times when the people on the investing side made a lot of money. They wanted to fire the firm and go off and do their own thing. And at times when they lost a lot of money, the firm wanted to disconnect from them. And because they couldn't bear the losses that Goldman Sachs and its view and its partnership culture was able to look through those short-term things and say, look, over psycho, great business. And the people who ran those businesses stuck it out. Maybe they could have done. Better here or there, but there were other reasons why they stuck it out, and they did.”

   2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “Trying to get good brokerage business. So we, you know, we spoke the same language. We were good, did put our clients first. We would forbear if our clients wanted to do something or we'd partner to them and bring them in if we sourced opportunities that they wanted. We'd work that out. And it's not always easy to work that out. But we were able to engage with our clients as peers. And not nearly as supplicants looking for business. And so Little more swagger, a little more understanding of what our clients are going through because we're principals also. Totally. We didn't want to lose that culture, which by the way is not evident in our peers. And there are other reasons for that. If you're going to be an investing business”

   2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “Cyril could see over time and you know Goldman Sachs and we didn't want to lose the risk taking culture at Goldman, because which is very important. I'll say why in a Beyond the fact that it makes money, it's very important. But we shifted a lot of that to off balance sheet vehicles. And by the way, means you have to do more of it. Because instead of earning $100 cent dollars, you're earning 20 cent dollars with lower risk. And a higher PE and a higher R return on equity as a result. That took some time because you didn't want to lose the people who do that. Now, one of the reasons why it was very important and apparently less important for other firms who don't have And those big investing arms is that we were able to approach our clients as partners. And not just as supplicants.”

   2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “And it could work out well in a private company, you care about the E, the earnings. In a public company, you care about PE. And if you have volatile earnings, your shareholders don't like that. They reward you with a lower multiple. Or they punish you with a lower multiple.”

   2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “2,800 pound guerrillas. 19 have to say, excuse me after you. And how do you get them to do that? And that's a bit of the art. And we did that. The firm did that. By the way, there were other things that we had to do in terms of reform and make a public company. A private company, your company turned. Your partner is presumably, you know, everybody cares about making money for their investors and their clients. But as far as you're concerned, you don't care whether you make money smoothly church. In 5% higher increments every year. You can have three in a 10 year cycle. You can have three fantastic years, make no money for five years and lose money two years.”

    2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “And there are three other investment bankers who represent three different potential buyers, and you have to pick one. And we sort it out together collectively, what's the right place for Goldman Sachs to be? Or maybe we should represent the seller, or maybe we should be a buyer ourselves. How do you decide that? And you explain it and you do it, you let everybody have their say, now what should we do here? And you convince people that if they throw in with the enterprises as a whole, And sacrifice in the short term, they get to use the platform and exploit it for their professional career and their personal career. So, you got to get that, you know, it's like, I use it as a metaphor, you know, you know, the metaphor of the 800-pound gorilla in the jungle gets his way. I'm the 800 pound. But what if you, what if you have...”

    2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “That naked partner like. We have partnership elections. We pay people based upon how the whole firm does. If your area does particularly well, you'll know it in your compensation. The most important thing in compensation. How does the whole firm do? And so you get people who are bankers sourcing investment things for the merchant bank. You have people who investment bankers who would like us to represent their client on an auction.”

    2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “When they repeal Glass-Steagall, once upon a time, the lenders were separate from the investment banks and the investors. That got repealed. And all of a sudden, people gave advice, can now implement the advice by financing it. So we had to. If JP Morgan was going to become an advisor, we had to become a good lender and a good financier. So it meant that we had to have a bigger balance sheet. Couldn't run that on impermanent capital of a partnership. And so we had to go public. But the big anxiety was we'd lose the partnership culture. We went public, basically, in an instant legally, but it's taken 25 years to get it done in a way that it wouldn't undermine. Partnership culture So we do those things”

    2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “Again, it's how it's a lot of times. It's crazy to expect a kind of loyalty if you don't show loyalties. It's crazy to expect commitment if you don't show commitment. I would say leadership, my predecessor did, my successor does. The challenge of Goldman Sachs, we had to go. I mean, I can get into this. We needed to go public.”

    2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “At the firm for three years, you know, not that long, but I still have a lot of affection for my time at the firm. It's a weird thing, right? And even people who've been out of Goldman for decades, Jim Kramer, you know, you mentioned in the book. So often defined by the”

    2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “Take that away with them. And people who've been out of the firm for a long time still self identify as ex-Goldman. By the way, how we treat one another examples of that kind of ownership, we treat our alumni very specially. Goldman has an alumni office, I put that in. An alumni office. Oh, Aar.”

    2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “I'm thinking about, well, first of all, generally, when you're on top, people want to get in line with you, but sometimes they can't. They just think you're wrong. So socializing and talking in advance had the benefit of just enlisting support from people who otherwise might be neutral, who just, you know, just not because they're sucking up, but just naturally they want to, you know, they want to compete, you know, they want to, they're flyable. And then you had to honor the fact that they felt like owners. Now, why do you care when they feel like owners? Because you get a much more stable organization They feel attached or they feel committed. Even people who've been there for a few years.”

    2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “And hear complaints, and maybe you actually don't do things that you want to do, or you table it for another time when you could, when things could be more revealed.”

    2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “Retail area? Are you really raising your hand asking questions about AWS? Totally. But if you owned it, you care about the whole. So one thing they own the whole. They care about the whole. They expect as owners to have a lot of information about the whole. They expect to have influence about the whole. They expect that any sudden moves by the senior partner is going to socialize them. They expect to have input into that. They expect the process to be slow enough for them to have that influence and input. And you have to have a certain amount of discipline when you're managing that if you want to perpetuate that. I'll get to why you want to do that. And so you have to socialize things. And maybe your decision making, maybe lightning bolts don't come from your fingertips. You're trying to make suggestions. Maybe you slow things up.”

    2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “But there's a really big difference between a partnership culture and a corporate culture, sometimes by necessity. And it was really to go public. And I'll tell you, we can go into that direction, but we had to go public. But one of the big impediments to going public was the fear that we'd lose our partnership culture. Now, what do I mean by partnership culture? Partners own the firm. The employees there, especially the senior people, are your co-owners of the partnership to the extent that you're a senior partner, a lot of it is by consent to the government governed. When you're looking at your senior cartridge, they don't just work for you. They're not just subordinates. They're your co-owners of their business. They have certain expectations that come from that. For example, their fortunes rest on the success of the whole enterprise, not just the narrow silo. If you work for Amazon in”

    2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “It's a partnership. So let me just say the difference because people aren't alert, and you know, in a partnership, now we're a big firm. You're dealing with small firms who want to become big firms, and some of them have become big firms.”

    2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “Right, but they know the culture of Goldman Sachs, which has its roots and is committed to the principles that were evolved from the partnership. So they may not know its partnership, but they know how we work.”

    2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “A lot about systems of record and their durability, and I think, yeah, to you was sort of an example of that certainly at Goldman One of the things I think was unique about your career as well is you spent half of your time at the firm kind of pre-IPO in a partnership and half the time post-”

    2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “After 40 years, not only are people still using, but looks like it could have been designed, you know, last year. It's an amazing thing. Well, RSECDB was kind of like that. It was also, but it wasn't a consumer device, but it was good like this. So I have a lot of admiration. For design, that real, you don't expect design to stand the test of time. Fashion doesn't. But this does. I'm telling you, the original iPhone looks like an old product to me. The HV12C looks pretty good.”

    2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “Yeah, I don't know if I accept whether or not for blame I accept anything that comes my way. But we did have very good early stage risk models. By the way, SECDB, which was a kind of a risk management system that we had and, you know, it's kind of modular, whereas other things were kind of rigid. We can always, you know, change things. It was so good and so flexible that I think it's like the system must be retruned 25 and 30 years old and the core of it is still implemented. The only thing I know like that, and I once tweeted this out. Because the battery, I still have my HP 12C calculator. Amazing. And the battery went out. And I know that battery must have been again for 22 years. I think I own that device for like 40 years. And I looked at that and I said, you know, I never thought of this before. But what consumer device?”

    2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “We implemented that, and then there was a newer system that we were also beta testing at the same time. So technology in the first instance always. Augmented our costs, never detracted from it. But as we go, as we went from one lily pad to another, things got better and more efficient. But we were always, always, always testing new stuff and always geared towards it and always very anxious about what would happen if somebody trumped us on something. By the way, in addition to execution capabilities and things that go to the efficiency, we also, you know, our risk systems, by the way, we had a huge technological advantage because of what we invested in early on. Hello.”

    2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “That we were. We weren't allowed to have mistakes. By the way, that's another schism between the valley and finance. So you could be, you know, I looked at Robin Hood, great company, but early on, you know, they declared a kind of that they had government insured accounts that weren't government insured. They had some slip-ups and a lot of apologies get made. You could do that. We weren't allowed to do that. We had to be right. We had to run things 50 times and had to be perfect the last 49 times before we could go that way. So we would always have the plan that the technology that we knew worked, inefficient as it was compared to the new and simultaneously run. And we got confidence in the new system.”

    2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “You know, invest and I still transact in the market. I think about that too. But I would say that no one is a better adopter or pays more, except obviously the hyperscalers themselves who want to be the providers of the technology. But in terms of use of the technologies, the financial area wants to be on top of it. And so interesting, by the way, there's a lot of you end up in a lot of cul-de-sacs, you'll end up going down bad paths because you just don't know. And you have to do this. And I know that everybody's talking about looking for cost savings, but we always had to do things twice. We had to do, we had to use the system we were confident in. And then simultaneously run the new system. We had high hopes for. We didn't have a high level of confidence. In our business and as a regulated company,”

    2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “Not only mattered, it was winner take all. You got everything. You got the offer, you hit the bid, and other people were left looking at it, looking at your dust for that. So you were always, always competing for the best technology in a winner-take-all situation. By the way, a lot of life, whether people realize or not, is winner take-all. I can see I know the opportunity set and the challenges and the anxiety people have about the current, about the current.”

    2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “If you had a risk, an execution system. That communicated digitally back to the floor of the exchange. You wanted your computers a half a block closer to the exchange than everybody else's because the milliseconds”

    2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “Oh my God, we were always, the technology was always changing everything. And by the way, in a lot of what we'd not everything, but a lot of things in finance, it's winner take all. Totally. You know, if you put your, I mean, I'm sure the world has moved on, but even, you know, even a few years ago, if you had a”

    2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “Exercise you can do. Now, some people are more intuitive, some people see things, but what I really do is for most people is that they thought about, I think X and Y and Z could happen if this happens, this is what I'm going to do.”

    2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “And if you're a good content and you'd go around the table, what could happen? Don't tell me about the probabilities of the improbability. What could happen? And again, we said this before. What are you going to do about it? But the act of going through that thing makes you so alert and on it when things get triggered and you so have a plan, you get off the mark so quickly that people think you did anticipate it. But when you really did is you heard the gun go off before anybody else, you know, and I don't know why I use sports analogy. I'm not the best sportsman in the world, but I know that in track and field, if you shoot the gun off, but you leave within a tenth of a second after it, they call a false start because your reaction time is at least a tenth. So you don't, you're not allowed to anticipate a start. And they'll call for, I said, I want everybody to be called for a false start because they hear the gun so much quicker than anybody else they get off the mark. And so that's the end.”

    2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “Yeah, so again, when pundits come up and said, well, I know this or that. So look, when anybody tells me, oh, I knew this. And I said, well, if you were so Prescient, tell me what happens next. And I was, oh, well, it was easy then. You know, and by the way, when somebody's telling me about the certain future, I say, you know, something, did you know that we would be doing this today or that the AI, you know, if you didn't know those things, why are you so sure that you know the future? People don't know this stuff. I'd say most of. Most of what we do with respect to risk is not so much predicting and not so much forecasting. It's a lot of contingency planning.”

    2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “And that's, you know, you have to be very careful about that. When you evaluate people, when you engage with people, you have to show an appreciation of what people have done in the fog, which always exists, because none of us know the future. By the way, most of us don't even know the present. Totally. You know, the present is a mass of things. Who can sort that out? But once the present turns into the past, everybody's a genius. Nobody voted for Nixon and everybody got, you know, and yet he won in a landslide. You know, it's like everybody remembers things differently.”

    2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “We could lose money because somebody's wrong. Smart people are wrong. Smart people tend not to do stupid things, but they tend to be wrong. They will, you know, saw about the best hitters in baseballs make out two-thirds of the time and that kind of stuff. But it's very important not when something goes wrong. Something is not right or somebody loses. It's very important not to treat somebody who's wrong like they're stupid. And people make a mistake because the big fault of risk management or bosses or managers is they let after acquired information seep into their judgment of what they would have done at the time.”

    2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “And say, oh, he must have heard about it from someone else. I want if a junior guy was telling me something and three people up the letterhead told me the same thing, I would sit and listen. First of all, you find out a lot about the person who's telling it to you. Also, so you're not just learning the content of what he's saying, you're learning a lot about the messenger. But secondly, I didn't want anybody an excuse to not tell me stuff. So I listened to a lot of redundant facts and circumstances. So I thought I thought about that a lot. About taking losses, you learn that the first day. I mean, of course, everybody. And I'll tell you one other thing that's very important on the loss side. People can lose money. You could lose money because somebody is stupid.”

    2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “But I don't want to undermine, but I always did. On that score I tried to make it so that everybody felt comfortable talking to me. One thing I never did is somebody was calling to tell me something that was bothering them, that they saw an opportunity or a challenge. I never said I already know about it. Because I never wanted anybody to self censor later.”

    2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “But it turns out that I had a kind of an appetite for risk. Yeah, then that's a little bit different than saying I was good at risk taking, but I didn't, I could live with a risky situation. I didn't, you know, I didn't shrivel up. On that. So, you know, I ended up having to do both things. We have a lot of risk takers. And I would say that the biggest challenge for management is the risk management side, which is really getting people To refrain from risk. Which is about a third of a time when you're in that business. And by the way, not the most important part, but probably the bulk of the time is getting people to take more risk when they don't want to. Totally. Because you get singed and you don't want to do it, but we're paid to put out money. Totally in the right place. And so you just can't be afraid”

    2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “When everybody needs it, and when the problem is dramatic, when the hurricane is coming and it's on its way, it's very expensive to buy insurance for your oceanfront property. But, you know, in the middle of the winter, when it's the furthest thing from your mind, it's a lot cheaper. And so what can you do? And so we did both those roads. I'd say what I might have had an orientation towards was the risk management part because, you know, I could find the cloud around any silver lining. My wife yells and he all walk, you know, she'll buy something new and I'll notice, isn't that a chip? On the lower part of something like that, I think my wiring was always to be a little bit fatalistic, a little bit nervous and a little bit looking for stuff.”

    2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “Risk, but yes, we're paid to take risks, so you have to take risks. So, what do you want to do when you have to exhort people? And sometimes shame people into taking more risk. And sometimes you have to get them, okay, we're not talking about worst risk we want to take. Let's go over our portfolio. I'm sure you do portfolio risk and saying, where are we overly exposed? What contingency plans would we have of X, Y, or Z or W or G happens? What can we do today to mitigate the adverse consequences of any of those things happen? And when you go around the table for those meetings, You're not so much interested in what people think about the future, where things will go, you just want to know, forget about what you think the likelihood, improbability of something happening is what will you do if it does happen? And what can you do today?”

    2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “It hasn't shifted the vehicles have changed, the thing, but the kind of judgments and the perspective that you believe. I think we were at Goldman and anybody who's doing this business and yourselves, anybody who's investing, you know, you're doing two things. You're trying to make money for yourselves and for your investors and your clients. And so you're trying to get out there and take risk. And you're also trying to be a risk manager, which is, you know, you look, you know, it's almost like you bifurcate yourself and say, are we two, I know we want to take risks, but let's go into risk management mode and let's consider, are we diversified enough? Are we overly committed to this? Are we managing it well? And that's kind of a different head that you have to bring. And you have to do both. And by the way, we get challenged on both sides. Sometimes things go badly and you have to, you know, and people, you know, the pleasure pain principles work. And people don't want to take...”

    2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “And the only place I got a job are, including, by the way Goldman, where I didn't get a job. And the only place that offered me a job was Jay Aaron& Company, the small commodity trading firm that I had never heard of, and they hired me as a precious metals salesperson. And right around that time, they were acquired by Goldman, which is how I got into Goldman.”

    2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “For one of the traders, and literally, and it was kind of almost like mafia like in a way, and that's how you rose in the organization by that. And I had been, I had gone through college, went to law school, took myself and my loans into a law firm and worked there for about four or five years and like a lot of other people at that time. I was doing pretty, I was doing well at the law firm, but it wasn't necessarily for me in the long term. Like a lot of people. And I look for jobs. I knew nothing about. I interviewed it. And being in New York, what do you go into when you're done with it? You go to, you become a consultant or... Go to Wall Street. I said, I'll go to Wall Street. And give there I go. I will bestow myself on them. They should be so grateful to have me. I knew nothing about it. And of course, I got a job nowhere.”

    2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “Was kind of like the upper echelon and upper echelon crowd. And Jarren was more of a kind of a streety guys. Goldman recruited from the Ivy League and people with NBAs. And JRon just recruited people. And the first, the entry-level job for most of the life of Jarren was the best job to get was the driver.”

    2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “And of course, the savvy guys at Jay Aaron extrapolated the value of the firm at the Peeky Peaky part of its thing and sold itself to Goldman. At the same time, DLJ, which was an investment bank at that time board, Ackley, and Solomon Brothers and Fibro got together. So it was in the air that the Wall Street firms needed a commodity arm. And Goldman Sachs got Jaron. Now, Jaron. Had a kind of a different culture. It was to the extent that this is kind of all lost now because all these firms have kind of blended and Hurricane wouldn't know the difference. But at the time, Goman was kind of an hour crowd kind of a firm, was a Jewishy kind of firm. So was Jay Aaron, but very different”

    2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “Where I was an inquiry, so I don't know what they thought at the time. I subsequently found out what they felt about it and was a disaster. And it was a little bit like Columbus trying to find the Indies and instead finds America. It turned out okay, but for different reasons, they discovered something but not what they intended to discover. So they ended up getting a bit of an entrepreneurial culture that they didn't know we were buying, but certainly at the time, this was in the early 80s, it was a moment of high inflation. That inflation in the manifestation was higher commodity prices, precious metals. Gold had only been recently freed up to be able to be owned by individuals. We'd been on the gold standard that evolved. It's hard to transport back to that time. But the business of Jay Aaron and Company was kind of a sleepy business except it erupted in a positive way at the end of before Volcker came in and clamped down on inflation, highly inflationary period.”

    2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

48. “Right. Even the retail that started, that went in a different direction after I left. That was an outgrowth of the merchant bank. Totally. Nurturing a business. And then somebody said, gee, we shouldn't be just a private equity firm here. We should be a strategic, our own strategic. And that's how that. Yes, that's how it was done.”

    2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

49. “Perfect. I think it was got like a 790. And what I was burning to do, the extent of my ambition was to go to an out-of-town college. And that was it.”

    2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

50. “I didn't have the burden of high expectations, and that's a funny way of putting it, but I did label the first chapter kind of advantages as opposed to burdens because I realize now, now that I'm on the other side of the ledger, I understand just what a burden high expectations can be on people. I did not suffer from that. But I also didn't know what was going on in the world. And I had never traveled. I've never been on an airplane for sure. So anyway, when I went up, I saw Harvard's first time. I really traveled. My sister took me up. So it was more of a culture shock. I went to high school. There was a family high school. I don't think I'd read a book. My board scores, I mean, I'm a pretty verbal person. My verbal scores were very low. My math scores were like almost.”

    2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source