YouSaid · the spoken record

Martha H. Smith

lines on the record: 41
first: 2019-02-19
most recent: 2019-02-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think London more so. And I do think about this with Brexit. I get up in the mornings and I have a Lithuanian chap who makes my coffee. And I always go to the same coffee place. And then I get my lunch from a Polish shop. It's just very multicultural. And I really hope that that doesn't change.”
2019-02-19 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Tech in Europe: Innovating Amidst Constraints · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I always leave these business trips with a set of ideas and a way to do things differently than when I arrived. One of the examples in the Technology Division is we've been really focusing on our adoption of cloud. I'm going to go home and I'm going to kind of think about some of the major cloud providers and think a little bit differently about how we're using them in Europe.”
2019-02-19 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Tech in Europe: Innovating Amidst Constraints · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't particularly like New York, but I have lived in New York. But I love Americans. There's an optimism about Americans and their work ethic that I really appreciate. I'm going to talk about it enough, but you can see why America is so successful. The idea that you can work hard and be successful and change your life, that optimism, there's an intrinsic optimism. I actually read a book about Mrs. Thatcher and she felt the same way when she visited here. But what I particularly like about coming here, I don't like the weather. But I do like the fact that I get to see a lot of the friends I've worked with for a long time. And it's very collaborative. Like if you think about the last two days that we've had.”
2019-02-19 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Tech in Europe: Innovating Amidst Constraints · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Keep going. I think that to have a career, you've got to want to have a career. People say to me, well, you've had this exceptional career, Joe. Like you're a partner of Goldman Sachs. I say, well, yes or no. I've had a career. Like I've worked, this is my 30th year of working. I've been a junior programmer, a senior programmer. I've kind of just had a normal career, which I've really enjoyed. And I'm lucky to work for a company which has allowed me to have that career.”
2019-02-19 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Tech in Europe: Innovating Amidst Constraints · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We are partners of a charity in the UK called CodeFirst. And they aim to train 20,000 women, young women, to learn Python and Ruby. And as part of our partnership with them, we've offered female analysts in our London office the ability to have free training on Python. And the courses that we offered were completely oversubscribed within the first 30 seconds of us sending this email out. Young people want to learn how to program. I'll get you to do it, Jake, I promise.”
2019-02-19 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Tech in Europe: Innovating Amidst Constraints · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I still very much am rooted within programming. We don't talk about programming as much, but we have at Goldman Sachs two point five billion lines of code. And in my job in terms of quality assurance, I'm responsible as a custodian for 2.6 billion lines of code. And so, most of my days start with me doing a code review. I'll ring up a junior developer anywhere in the world. And sometimes it's the afternoon and I'll call the US and I will do a code review with them and we'll talk about why they felt that piece of code was suitable to solve a problem and some of the things they could do better. Some of the advances we see in coding is modern languages are easier for people to learn. One of the languages that is very straightforward to learn is Python.”
2019-02-19 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Tech in Europe: Innovating Amidst Constraints · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Day they were meant to change every day, but Fortunately for the Allies, they didn't change every day. And so every day you had to basically start again. And these children are taught to do that. They code and decode using this machine and then they solve problems using it. Hopefully from that program, we're going to be encouraging children to think about this is a career.”
2019-02-19 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Tech in Europe: Innovating Amidst Constraints · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm amazed by the history. I mean, there's Bletschy Park, the site itself, which is, you know, if you're ever in the UK, I would advise people to visit. But I think that this history of female cryptographers is little known. Myself and some of my fellow partners have actually created a scheme with Bletschy Park called Ultra. And we sponsor a teacher to take an Enigma machine, which is very much used in the Second World War, into schools and underprivileged areas and teach children to decode. That program has been running just over three years and we've trained 10,000 students in the UK. The reason it's so successful is obviously the history is kind of cool to have an Enigma machine, but more importantly you're teaching them an actual scenario. They actually reenact a day in the life of that Enigma machine in the Second World War, which basically involved the Enigma codes changed over”
2019-02-19 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Tech in Europe: Innovating Amidst Constraints · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But there is a long history of women as cryptographers, and particularly in the military. And the history is amazing. It's well publicized that the Second World War would have lasted a lot longer if it hadn't been for the efforts of those female cryptographers. And they were working with early stage digital machines. I mean, arguably the first use of computers. And so it's incredibly insightful for GS to actually have someone of her standing on the board that would understand not just modern day cryptography, but being able to advise on cyber and cyber security. Increasingly, you see modern day crime is happening on the internet. It's related on cyber.”
2019-02-19 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Tech in Europe: Innovating Amidst Constraints · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I liked him and I wanted to join Goldman Sachs. I wanted to join Goldman Sachs because I had heard that there was a very strong culture of diversity here. I wanted to work in a firm that didn't look at my gender or didn't look at the fact that I was British just would just value my work. And when I look back, it was one of the best decisions I've ever made because that's exactly my experience of working here. My experience of working here has been that I've been judged on my work, not myself as a woman or the fact that I'm from the east end of London or the fact that I'm this type of person or the fact I have this characteristic I've been judged on my output. And that's all you want from a company. That's what most people want from a company.”
2019-02-19 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Tech in Europe: Innovating Amidst Constraints · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's how I really got into financial services. And I was working for a couple of years, and at that time, I mean, this is a long time ago now, you could have looked around me and I could have seen no women that were successful. It was a tough environment as a woman back then in the City of London. And I wanted to work in an organisation where I felt was really a meritocracy. So I decided I'd come to Goldman Sachs. I'd actually heard through the Great Vine that Goldman Sachs was investing in technology. I mean, this is 23 years ago. And the head of research in London at the time basically wanted to hire a programmer to automate research. And I worked directly for him. That's how I joined the firm as a financial analyst in research, but automating research products. It's a testament to this firm that we're so far thinking to do that back then, to actually hire a programmer and be non-technical to automate a product in that way was just unheard of. I mean, I thought he was kind of crazy.”
2019-02-19 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Tech in Europe: Innovating Amidst Constraints · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I actually wanted to be an academic and I did an internship in another financial institution. Kind of a funny story, but I wanted to buy my sister a realised wedding present. And so basically decided I was going to kind of work for the summer.”
2019-02-19 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Tech in Europe: Innovating Amidst Constraints · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, I went to an all girls school. They had a very strong history of science education, physics, chemistry, maths. My maths teacher, who's about five years away from retirement and she decided that she should start teaching computer science. So she taught herself computer science and started running it and asked if girls wanted and I subscribed to her course. And I loved every minute that she actually was quite a funny story. She actually said to her class, why don't you go home? Instead of buying your mother flowers for Mother's Day, automate her finances. So the very first program I wrote was to take all of the futility bills in our house and I produced a program that would basically automate them for my mum.”
2019-02-19 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Tech in Europe: Innovating Amidst Constraints · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Different problem sets, they were fascinating problem sets, it's highly creative. And where did that perception get created that it wouldn't be like that? When I was younger, that's how it was described to me. I think a lot of those biases we have to kind of continue to reset and educate people. But it's self-fulfilling. The more women do this, the more women will be encouraged. We know that role models are really important, not necessarily female role models, but role models that people can relate to. And so as a firm, we're doing programs like this, so thank you for the opportunity today to just demonstrate that you can have a long, successful, happy career as a computer programmer. And it's really not that hard.”
2019-02-19 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Tech in Europe: Innovating Amidst Constraints · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some of the things that we're doing as a firm to kind of help that is we are training teachers in schools to teach computer science. We are creating programs or sponsoring programs that allow girls to actually realise through role models what it's like to be a programmer and to educate them. I mean, we feel, for example, that one of the most successful programs we have in terms of encouraging women into the firm to do computer science is a summer intern program. And we have about 50% gender diversity on that program. And one of the things that we see is that women will give us a chance for 10 weeks just to try it. And at the end of those 10 weeks, all of their biases about what it would be like to be a programmer have been completely reset. And often they'll say to me, I didn't really realise what a great career this would be. It wasn't what I thought about at all. I wasn't sitting on my own programming. I was working as part of a team. We were working on very”
2019-02-19 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Tech in Europe: Innovating Amidst Constraints · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Somehow, over the last fifteen years in particular, something has happened to make it almost Off putting to women There's a kind of dynamic in the vocabulary that you see where it's become even more about the kind of career a man would do as opposed to a woman. And that negativity, that's not something that I experienced when I was younger. And I don't quite know where that's come from. I have some theories. But the reality is it is a great career for women. You can basically be a programmer from whatever location you want. It allows you to have flexibility. It's a technical skill. It allows you to balance. I mean, in the UK, there's more women going into mathematics and chemistry and physics than there are computer science.”
2019-02-19 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Tech in Europe: Innovating Amidst Constraints · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wish I had a clear answer to you. I've only ever done technology. I did computer science degree at computer science PhD. And although there were very few women doing it, there were women doing it. And now I've reached 30 years into my career, I look around and I think where have those women gone? It's an amazing career. It's very creative. I love programming now as much as I did 30 years ago. And much of the programming languages that I use 30 years ago are in museums now. But it's been such an amazing career. And I think there's some practicalities not all schools teach computer science. Access to computer science teachers is limited. I also think the ones that one of the things that's happened in my career, 30 years ago I was encouraged to go into computing. It was actually considered 30 years ago to be a really great job for a woman, like a really great career.”
2019-02-19 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Tech in Europe: Innovating Amidst Constraints · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, you can actually do quite a lot with that. You can actually kind of, it turns our lights on when we come home That's unthinkable five years ago that you would have technology crossing into your everyday lives in that way. It'd be interesting to see over time where we draw the boundaries of where we stop that.”
2019-02-19 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Tech in Europe: Innovating Amidst Constraints · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Too much travel But the idea that this crossover between technology and our everyday lives, although it's enriching, it's kind of disconcerting for a lot of people. I largely think it's great. But you think about the last five years, I mean, do you have an Alexa at home?”
2019-02-19 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Tech in Europe: Innovating Amidst Constraints · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, for example, what's now on my smartphone used to take up an entire room with the idea that you could actually have a car that was computerized, you'd have to have a trailer behind it with a computer the size of your car. Like it wasn't practical. But now computers are so small you can put them in things that make them realistic to do so. You can put them in your car, they can drive your car. You can put them in your vacuum cleaner. You can mow your lawn with them. We've automated most of our house now and I have in my fridge at home basically automated milk buying. We haven't actually calibrated this so correctly because I have lots of milk.”
2019-02-19 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Tech in Europe: Innovating Amidst Constraints · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How many times do you use the internet every day to find things or find information? I remember as a child if you wanted to look something up, you had to actually go to an encyclopedia. It's unthinkable now, isn't it? You'd go to a shelf and pull out a book. And so there's an apprehension, I think, in the public about some of these new things that are happening in technology. But really, my point is that we've only benefited from it so far as a society, which is really the internet. When I was young, and I just started out in my career 30 years ago, Much of the technology was constrained by the size of the computers.”
2019-02-19 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Tech in Europe: Innovating Amidst Constraints · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not without controversy, but my personal opinion of this is that there Are two forms of AI, as you mentioned. There's the one that we're most used to, which is based upon cognitive and biological systems. So people really associate that with robotics. Most of the robotics that we see is really driven by the artificial limb industry. So the fact that it's so centered around movement and being able to think about how we use our limbs, people could have think about that in terms of AI. But the AI, which is most prolifically used in our society, is ontology or semantic definition. The best example of this is really the internet. If you think about your internet browser, underneath that is a very rich semantic layer that allows you to do word searching. And that's ultimately been the biggest breakthrough in AI that we've had. And the most life-changing, I mean, can you imagine living your life without the internet?”
2019-02-19 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Tech in Europe: Innovating Amidst Constraints · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of apprehension around data security when you think about it in the context of the cloud, but I actually think that the way that the world will go is it will actually create more opportunities to share information more easily, but huge quantities of data. And so this idea that you can actually mine information, large quantities of information, and be able to share information in that way, I think would be very transformative, and I think it will create association between different types of organizations that you haven't seen before.”
2019-02-19 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Tech in Europe: Innovating Amidst Constraints · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think about the cloud in the context of academia again. It's very difficult for academics to collect large quantities of data. You have to basically buy the hardware. Well, if you think about the cloud, what stops organizations being able to share large quantities of data seamlessly if they're on the same cloud platform?”
2019-02-19 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Tech in Europe: Innovating Amidst Constraints · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I am fascinated by cloud. Cloud is something that's got a new term for most people, they understand the concept of a cloud. But the transformative qualities of the cloud, I think, are yet to be fully realised. So I'll give you an example. I'm always fascinated by how Netflix, which is the predominant video streaming technology, their entire infrastructure runs on AWS. And Amazon is really one of their predominant competitors That would have been unthinkable once that you'd be able to be using infrastructure and commoditial infrastructure in a way that actually kind of transcends those types of boundaries.”
2019-02-19 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Tech in Europe: Innovating Amidst Constraints · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really far ahead in terms of being able to automate education in that way, not just learn, but also provide universities to run more efficiently, that's yet to really extend beyond the US. And I think when that comes to Europe, that will be incredibly important, especially in a post-Brexit environment.”
2019-02-19 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Tech in Europe: Innovating Amidst Constraints · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think you'll continue to see the trend in being able to have more customized treatment programs through the use of technology. I think the second trend would definitely be within education. I mean, you're seeing it more in the US. It hasn't quite reached Europe. But in the US, because of just the size of the US, you see more and more universities moving to online education. If you think about, as I said earlier, the desire to actually have more engineers and create more talent, if you are a less wealthy country and you have less access to education, online education, so that you can actually be online and seeing a lecture that's based in the US and you can take degrees, let's say that you're in a refugee camp, you'll give you access to education that can't lead inaccessible to you. I think that's a fascinating area in terms of the impact that could have on the world. There's companies in the US which”
2019-02-19 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Tech in Europe: Innovating Amidst Constraints · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think disruption in medicine will continue. We've lost engineers to go into medical research who are basically using the kind of applications that we have for market risk or credit risk they're applying to cancer treatment.”
2019-02-19 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Tech in Europe: Innovating Amidst Constraints · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“quickly. From a European perspective, many banks say to me, How did you do that so quickly? Joe? How did you manage to kind of develop that infrastructure and have a consumer facing application in the time period you did? And one of the things I think is very important to our culture is you do it with your existing engineers predominantly.”
2019-02-19 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Tech in Europe: Innovating Amidst Constraints · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the issues that many of the retail banks face is that they have significant legacy technology, been able to pivot towards a richer consumer interface is actually quite difficult for them. We've managed to do this because we don't really have a history of consumer facing applications and so we've been able to leverage some of our core technologies payments processing for example and be able to apply that to the consumer space and we've done that remarkably quickly but the way we've done that has really been quite astounding. I mean we've basically built Marcus in the UK within a year which if you think about starting up your own company and being able to produce an online bank it would take you probably a bit more than a year and we've done that not by creating a separate organisation we've done that with our existing engineers we've asked them to kind of work a bit differently we've asked them to work in a very agile way and we've done that in a way that allows us to take the best of our existing technology and use that but also invest heavily in buying software that allows us to grow very”
2019-02-19 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Tech in Europe: Innovating Amidst Constraints · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I'm going to talk about engineering, I'm predominantly talking about computer science. But if you think about, on the other end of the kind of STEM education, even quantitative modelling, France has a wealth of history in terms of producing one of the most amazing mathematicians and quantitative modellers, which we actively take advantage of when we think about trading strategies. And so education and the impact of free movement of this wealth of technical talent that we have in Europe at a post-Brexit scenario is going to”
2019-02-19 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Tech in Europe: Innovating Amidst Constraints · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wouldn't say lagging. I think the areas that really, when you go there, you kind of feel the idea that you feel the kind of investment. I mean, certainly Berlin, when you think about areas which you're kind of attracted to and you see the most talent from, then certainly kind of Berlin from a fintech startup scene. One of the things though about Europe which really makes it stand out is that it has a long history of technical education. So for the firm, we've been investing in a site in Warsaw. And one of the things that attracted us to Poland was that Poland has a long track record of technical education. There is a significant number of that population in Poland that take first degrees and second degrees and they have well-established technical institutions which have a history. And that's something that is pretty much across Europe. There's many technical colleges. There's a high number of engineering graduates.”
2019-02-19 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Tech in Europe: Innovating Amidst Constraints · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Moving beyond the UK, what countries do you see that are a little bit ahead of the game in terms of adapting technology, both in businesses and maybe in the consumer space? And are there any particular parts of Europe that are lagging?”
2019-02-19 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Tech in Europe: Innovating Amidst Constraints · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so the equivalence that we have to maintain will mean that we still have to have the same data protection. If you think about the recent financial regulations under MIFID 2, that would have to continue. I don't really see that's making a huge difference in how companies deal together. I think the biggest thing for technology has to be that we continue to be able to find talented engineers. And what you don't want is to not be able to have freemen or free employment of people who can foster the kind of technology startup area in London. It's well recognised that London really is the capital for technology investment in Europe. And for that to continue, we really need to be able to continue to employ and access technical talent from across Europe. And I think that would be the biggest issue that we face in being able to kind of keep the current accelerated growth that you see.”
2019-02-19 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Tech in Europe: Innovating Amidst Constraints · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We've been planning as a firm for multiple scenarios. It could happen for Brexit. And those scenarios vary from the kind of most extreme, which is that you have to assume that in order to deal with an EU entity, you have to be within the EU. The least extreme is that we can carry on as we've historically done. It's going to fall out between those two spectrums. For technology has limited impact, I would say, for one reason. I think you can assume that in a post-Brexit world, the UK have to abide by the current regulations that they abide to today.”
2019-02-19 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Tech in Europe: Innovating Amidst Constraints · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I suppose there's an argument that you're better off having the protections and knowing what's coming than the Wild West, which is certainly true in a lot of other places in the world. So Brexit, obviously a big unknown, hard to predict sitting here today. Technology oftentimes doesn't respect boundaries. What could be the impact of some of the different outcomes on the tech sector in UK and Europe more broadly?”
2019-02-19 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Tech in Europe: Innovating Amidst Constraints · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is very sensitive to the signals that you produce in terms of the results. And so if all of a sudden, let's say as a consumer technology, there's a piece of data which helps product recommendations. If I suddenly as a consumer say, I want you to remove my data, the impact that that has on that overall set of AI makes it very difficult. But data protection, when I think about Europe, I think Europe is leading the way in terms of being able to protect data protection rights for consumers and for all individuals.”
2019-02-19 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Tech in Europe: Innovating Amidst Constraints · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of the biggest challenges when we think about big tech from a European perspective is data protection. Europe has a history of protecting civil rights and its connection through data. So in recent years we've had GDPR. But what you're seeing in the US is privacy and data protection laws becoming into effect. And it asks some very difficult questions when you think about collaboration. So going back to the subject of AI, the data set that you use for AI”
2019-02-19 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Tech in Europe: Innovating Amidst Constraints · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I spent some time in southern Spain, in Maligar. They are heavily investing in technology and technology education. And you feel in Europe that the physical distance doesn't really stop people being able to really kind of come together and communicate. And I still think that even in a post-Brexit environment, that won't change. People will still talk and work together. And one of the trends you see in technology, of course, is the idea that technology does bring together these are collaboration tools, whether it's Slack or Instagram or Snapchat. They're all geared about bringing people together and transcending geographical boundaries.”
2019-02-19 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Tech in Europe: Innovating Amidst Constraints · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What that could really mean for the technology industry? And so you're beginning to see a movement of the technology sector away from some of its historic premises into that particular area. And you're seeing companies who are very interesting, who are beginning to use AI in areas that you wouldn't normally anticipate it. Education, legal. I mean, financial services, it's very difficult to disrupt financial services externally. And so the idea that you could disrupt medicine using AI is fascinating. But one of the trends that you see, I think not just in Europe but globally, is this idea that if you get a group of people that don't historically mix and they begin to share ideas, really interesting things happen. And you're certainly beginning to see that in that area. And there's other cities, it's not just London, other cities in Europe arguably have the same experience. I just spent some time in Lisbon. There's a huge technology sector in Lisbon.”
2019-02-19 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Tech in Europe: Innovating Amidst Constraints · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Way to categorize technology in Europe is really, I think we should separate it between the kind of political environment and the impact that that may or may not have on the technology sector and then let's just talk about the technology. You could make a case that London is the capital of artificial intelligence in the world. And that's for a couple of reasons. In the King's Cross area, which is a very interesting story in itself, historically it's been an area that's experienced quite a lot of social deprivation and in recent years has undergone a complete transformation. In one area you have the Crick Institute, which is one of the foremost cancer research institutions in the world. Next to the Alan Turing Institute for AI Research, next to Google DeepMind, and near the new headquarters for Facebook. And many people recognize the physical proximity that that brings and the type of people that are associated in that area”
2019-02-19 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Tech in Europe: Innovating Amidst Constraints · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT