YouSaid · the spoken record

Stephanie Cohen

lines on the record: 56
first: 2019-05-07
most recent: 2019-05-07
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

“The time it closed with a very short break for lunch. And so we're trying to figure out a way to nurture that in a way that doesn't make it crazy. He's asked us if he can ski race, and we'll do that if he wants to. But we've tried to make it very kid-directed.”
2019-05-07 · Invest Like the Best · Stephanie Cohen – The Evolution of M&A and Corporate Strategy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.131] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was an opt in and I won my first competition, which I think is like the whole reason why I did it, which is probably a bad reason, but it's probably true. And so we've tried to do the same thing with our kids. So six and two, the two-year-old, it's a little bit too young for, but my son, we've tried really hard to not push him and have him find something he loves. And I'll just give you the specific example because it's kind of fun. So we don't watch a lot of sports on TV. And so he's not big on soccer, basketball, or baseball. At some point in time, you have the New York City anxiety around, you know, what's your kid going to do? But my only, the people in New York absolutely understand what I'm talking about, probably in California too, for that matter. So my husband's a great skier. I am not a great skier because my skating coaches wouldn't let me ski, but I figured it out. And my son loves skiing. Of course, you find that out not that long ago, but he, like every chance he gets, he's going skiing. Like, no one's keeping him up. No one is forcing him to be on that mountain. He's on that mountain from the time it opens.”
2019-05-07 · Invest Like the Best · Stephanie Cohen – The Evolution of M&A and Corporate Strategy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.131] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there's this moment that I remember my parents always talk about it. I went to my parents and asked them to compete. I said, I want to compete.”
2019-05-07 · Invest Like the Best · Stephanie Cohen – The Evolution of M&A and Corporate Strategy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.131] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is a super tough question because I feel really blessed. People have been very kind to me. I'm going to talk about my mom for a minute. So I was a competitive figure skater growing up. And of course, you only realize this much later. You don't realize this when you're eight years old. But me skating was a real sacrifice.”
2019-05-07 · Invest Like the Best · Stephanie Cohen – The Evolution of M&A and Corporate Strategy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.131] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I worry that we are 100% culture. So when I started as an analyst, I vividly remember this. People said, I know when you were in school that getting a 90% was an A. And so you didn't need to study the extra time to get the 95 or the 100 just so we're clear here it's 100%. And what they meant by that was if you're doing a board deck and it had to be 100% right. Every number in the board deck had to be right. There was no room for error given what we were working on. That's true. But in a culture that's 100% culture, having people put stuff together and then asking them to not achieve 100% I think is hard. But I think if we don't do that then we're not pushing. We're not pushing ourselves hard enough.”
2019-05-07 · Invest Like the Best · Stephanie Cohen – The Evolution of M&A and Corporate Strategy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.131] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, achieving them. And then the last piece is around, and maybe this is because I remember my client days, I think it's really important to get outside the office and meet other people and just travel. And so that traveling in my current job is actually very expensive relative to my old job because it's much harder to do my internal job when I'm not here. And we'll continue to work on ways to make it easier for people to do that, but we tend to be at relatively in-person, less video culture. And so not being in the office is harder than it was in my old job. But I think if you're not out talking to other people, hearing outside perspectives, we're just doing a bad job. So there's some call it 20% of my time that has to be on talking to the outside world.”
2019-05-07 · Invest Like the Best · Stephanie Cohen – The Evolution of M&A and Corporate Strategy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.131] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'm still working on it. Again, an area I'll take advice, but a couple of things one, it's more important than it was in my previous job to find pockets of free space. So if I'm just back to back to back to back for weeks on end, I find it very difficult to have a broad enough perspective to do my job. So I try really hard. I have like a little, some of it's just blocking stuff off on your calendar. Some of it is I will accept certain things that I know I'm not going to go to, but it looks like it's full. And so then no one actually schedules over it. So there's that piece of it, which I think is really important to block off. Two, I do think you have to have a perspective on what are your objectives. What are you trying to achieve? There's a bunch of different ways to do this. Actually, some of my team is working on what everyone calls OKRs, but the point is just clear, which is you need to have what are your main objectives that you're trying to achieve. So I have that list. And every once in a while, you just have to read it. Literally just read it. And so you make sure that you're”
2019-05-07 · Invest Like the Best · Stephanie Cohen – The Evolution of M&A and Corporate Strategy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.131] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tells me that they want to leave and go do something new, and I don't want them to leave. I always say, and I think it's a good opportunity for them, I have to say, I can sit here and try to convince you to say when I've been preaching this all along, that we got to let people move around. The firm is a better place if people move.”
2019-05-07 · Invest Like the Best · Stephanie Cohen – The Evolution of M&A and Corporate Strategy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.131] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have something that comes up and you have a question, there's a group of people who you go to and ask the question to, and they're more senior, they're more junior, they're inside, they're outside, but you actually get a wide range of views on anything. And part of the benefit of the board of directors is you get a diverse perspective, but the other benefit is that you don't depend on one person. Because one of the failures is that if you're working here and you have a guy, a gal, and that person leaves or they get moved to another area, and then you feel abandoned orphans. And I think in a firm of 37,000 people, you can't have one person. You have to have a board of directors. And then the last thing is for managers, but also for the people at every level, you need to let people move around because people want to move around. And if you don't let people move around, they're going to get stale. And you can't make it harder to get a different job inside of Goldman Sachs versus getting a job outside of Goldman Sachs. And so whenever anyone comes to me.”
2019-05-07 · Invest Like the Best · Stephanie Cohen – The Evolution of M&A and Corporate Strategy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.131] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A couple things. One of the things I've learned actually from people outside the firm, which I think is a good lesson, is we do hire, we hire amazing people. So we get a tremendous number of applicants. We are blessed with that. And so we hire amazing people, but not everyone succeeds 100% of the time. And I think trying to figure out, are they not succeeding because they don't belong at Goldman Sachs or because you have them in the wrong job? So that's one of the things we're actually trying to get better at, which is this moving people around to make sure we actually have put people in the right seat. The second piece of it is the obvious, which is you need to make sure that people feel supported and mentored. And there's the very traditional, you show up at the firm, you get a mentor, that's fine. That's good. But what I always try to tell people is, one, you haven't failed if you and your mentor don't hit it off and you can't just have one. And so what I always tell my team is that they should have what I call board of directors. And a board of directors is.”
2019-05-07 · Invest Like the Best · Stephanie Cohen – The Evolution of M&A and Corporate Strategy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.131] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Clients, or what's the general public? And I think we have to remember that just because we communicated something in one way, we may have missed a whole population. So we're working on that. We'll take advice.”
2019-05-07 · Invest Like the Best · Stephanie Cohen – The Evolution of M&A and Corporate Strategy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.131] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really be open to feedback. And what I mean by that is there's an instinct when you start doing the narrative and you spend so much time making the narrative and it's all pretty and then you go out and say it and then people give you feedback and then you're like, are you crazy? Like you didn't understand this, you don't understand that and you get very defensive. And then you just shut everyone down. And so it's a natural instinct, but it's really important because what you find is people actually really understand the narrative when they're engaged with it, when they actually are allowed to debate it, when they're allowed to have a point of view around it. So I think it's really important that you're actually open to feedback. And then the last thing, and I will make an open call that we're open to ideas around this, actually the method of communication is almost as important as the message. And we have something like 60% of our population is millennials. We have a wide range of people inside this organization who are going to consume communication and media in a different way. In addition to, by the way, everyone outside of Goldman Sachs, whether that's our”
2019-05-07 · Invest Like the Best · Stephanie Cohen – The Evolution of M&A and Corporate Strategy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.131] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, one of the things that I've recently learned is that you have to say things multiple times, which actually, it's funny. So when I first started in the job, I came from the business and you're very clear eyed around what it's like to be in the business and hearing from the management team. But it doesn't take that long before you spend every day thinking about Goldman Sachs's strategy where it becomes second nature and you forget that people don't do that every day. And so I learned and then I was recently reminded again how important it is to keep repeating the same thing. And you basically need to keep saying it until you're completely bored with it. And then you should probably say it 10 more times. And then maybe people have heard what you want to say. So that's one. The second piece I've learned is you actually have to”
2019-05-07 · Invest Like the Best · Stephanie Cohen – The Evolution of M&A and Corporate Strategy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.131] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People, hopefully, people have had this experience, but we're certainly, we have had people come to us for us to invest in them. It's not the right stage, not the right sector, whatever it is, but we give them feedback on their presentation and we send them to five other people because one of the great things is so many people have called us. We've gotten well north of 3,000 inbounds since we announced this in under a year time period. And so we actually know where people are in terms of what they're interested in. And then the last piece around this is going to be broader, more digital content, which we're just in the process of creating. And so one of the questions we get asked all the time is about boards, right? I need a board member. We get, by the way, from all different places. I need board member. I'm a big company. I need more diverse board members. I'm a small company. I need someone with this specific skill. You are in front of boards all the time. How do you manage boards? And so we think we can build a lot of content around that to be helpful.”
2019-05-07 · Invest Like the Best · Stephanie Cohen – The Evolution of M&A and Corporate Strategy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.131] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, a lot around the marketing. Apart from this podcast. Yeah, exactly. This is very useful. Thank you very much. So, a couple things. One, I think most people actually know who we are. They know who Goldman Sachs is. What they don't know is that we're interested in them. And so what I mean by that is they say, no, no, no, I see. I see you do those $10 billion deals. So if my company's really successful, I'll be sure to call you. But they didn't feel like there was an open door around when it was earlier. And so one, it's literally just saying that. It's saying we're open for business. We're open to actually talking to you. The second thing is just old, like old-fashioned blocking and tackling what I mean by that is word of mouth. So we could say all that. But when people call or email us, we ignore them. Oh, we're not helpful, then people aren't going to come in. So what we've tried to do is in places, even in places where we're not investing, we've tried to be helpful. And so some of that is very analog.”
2019-05-07 · Invest Like the Best · Stephanie Cohen – The Evolution of M&A and Corporate Strategy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.131] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Network building look like we had an event in San Francisco not that long ago and we brought together very well-known founders and we brought together VCs who you would know and then we brought women founders who are very early stage just building their companies. We're very excited, but they wouldn't be in the room with those people. And then we also brought women who are working either in investing businesses today or trying to raise funds. We're bringing people together who wouldn't normally be in the same room. The other thing that we can bring together is we bring big companies to that room. So for example, if you bring companies who could be customers to those businesses, what we're trying to do is we think that a lot of the events that happen are good around getting people together who are doing exactly the same thing, meaning getting together a bunch of women who are just starting their own business. I think that's helpful because they can help each other. What they really need is the broader community.”
2019-05-07 · Invest Like the Best · Stephanie Cohen – The Evolution of M&A and Corporate Strategy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.131] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More. There's a group of people that actually know how the system works, and there's a group of people that don't. You'll see it in cohorts of business school classes, right? You'll look at certain business school classes and see there are a bunch of really successful companies in those business school classes. So maybe it was the water they were drinking when they were in business school. But what it really is, is that they were working together and they were helping each other. And so what we're really trying to do is have these women, but also men help.”
2019-05-07 · Invest Like the Best · Stephanie Cohen – The Evolution of M&A and Corporate Strategy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.131] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The network is actually really important. So there's a lot of data around the importance of warm introductions. And so depending on the data you look at, I think it's something like investment is 13 times more likely to get through investment committee if it's a warm introduction. And so what we're seeing is that diverse communities are not participating in the network because it's a casual network. It's a network of friends. And so what we need to do is create networks where it's not a woman's network and a black network, an Hispanic network, it's an everyone network. It's a network of people that have common desires as it relates to what they want to invest in. They have views around how to grow certain types of businesses. And so what we found is that the network piece of it is really important because the network piece magnifies a bunch of things. So what do I mean by that? It's the warm introduction, but it's also what's your investor deck look like? Who are the investors you're supposed to approach? Who are the ones that if you approach them and they say yes, you're going to get 10.”
2019-05-07 · Invest Like the Best · Stephanie Cohen – The Evolution of M&A and Corporate Strategy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.131] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that change is the dynamic, and that's very hard to do in a large organization, but I think you can learn a lot from talking to them around how they think about pivoting businesses, how they think about running multiple experiments. I mean, the idea of taking an idea and saying, you know what, I don't know what the right answer is, but there's 10 ways for us to go after it, and I'm going to let 10 go. I'm going to let 10 actually, that is hard in a big organization, but venture does that every day. Every day they're putting down multiple bets across different spaces. And so I think I've learned a lot in terms of how to think about what we should do, but also be practical about what we should let other people do.”
2019-05-07 · Invest Like the Best · Stephanie Cohen – The Evolution of M&A and Corporate Strategy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.131] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. As if it's a singular answer. So, okay, what's the future? Then what are the ways we can go after the future? And then what's the one answer? And then we're going to put a bunch of money into that one answer. And like, that's it. And then we're going to watch it. And I really hope it works. And the reality is the venture model of constant iteration, like constant, we may run out of money.”
2019-05-07 · Invest Like the Best · Stephanie Cohen – The Evolution of M&A and Corporate Strategy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.131] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They are very helpful to talk to people who are willing to be direct with you and who are going to give you real feedback. And so I think they've given us very good feedback on how to engage with them and how to engage with companies, how to make ourselves easier to deal with. What really matters, right? Obviously, everyone would like for them to show up, have a product, us buy it, and that would be the end of the story and not have to go through compliance and legal and cyber and everything else. But I think the ones who are quite thoughtful have really good feedback on how to make ourselves more attractive to them. So that's one comment. The second comment is actually around what I would call experimentation. And so one of the things that I think big companies struggle with is this idea of experimentation. And what I mean by that is larger companies tend to spend a lot of time studying, what's the future of X? As if it's like”
2019-05-07 · Invest Like the Best · Stephanie Cohen – The Evolution of M&A and Corporate Strategy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.131] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whether you're an individual or a corporation. So, right now people do most of their transacting on their phone, and it's still not seamless to transact your financial life on your phone. So if you wake up and you say, I want to go on vacation, I want to go on a very large vacation in the next two years, like how do I think about that relative to my salary or other expenses? We have a business called Clarity Money that's helping people manage their financial life, but I think there's a lot of work to be done around making that a seamless experience for people and whether that's buying a car, buying a house, retirement, managing your financial life is one of the harder things for people to do relative to some of the other transactions people do on their phones today. And I think that's where you're going to see big technology begin to work together. And again, I think the Apple cart is a really good example around financial wellness and other things. It's not just individuals, though, it's companies as well.”
2019-05-07 · Invest Like the Best · Stephanie Cohen – The Evolution of M&A and Corporate Strategy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.131] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Opposite of how we want people to view us because I think we've really helped our own innovation if people feel like we're the first best call when they're doing something new. The other thing that's unique, I think, in financial services relative to some other sectors is there are places where big institutions, whether they're company builders or other studios actually have to get together to build stuff from the beginning because if you don't do it that way, they're going to build something that's not needed. If we try to build it, no one else is going to want to use it. And so I think financial services is one of these unique places where I think actually companies can get built together. And I think you're going to continue to see that as it relates to big technology. There's some of it that's exactly the same as fintech, right? Which is that they are building products and services every day that are relevant to us and how do we make it so we're an easy customer, we're an easy co-partner. But then there's this question of how technology gets directly embedded into everyone's lives and how financial services gets directly embedded into everyone's lives.”
2019-05-07 · Invest Like the Best · Stephanie Cohen – The Evolution of M&A and Corporate Strategy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.131] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that we're a great partner. And so that's where I think the communities work best together. There are a lot of things that belong being built outside of a firm like Goldman Sachs, whether that's because that's where the talent is, where the capability is, because from a cost perspective, it makes more sense because there's so much experimentation required that it's better done in an environment that is not a big organization like Goldman Sachs. I think there is a very large place for that. But financial services in particular, given how regulated it is and given the size and scale of a lot of the players, I think it's a place where uniquely there's going to be a lot of back and forth interaction between fintech businesses and a place like Goldman Sachs. And so I think they work best together when they feel like they can come to us and we can be helpful, right? It's not the infamous place where we're going to steal their technology or reminded of the scene in the show Silicon Valley where they draw on the board and then they realize. Fermates steal their stuff. And so they go running out of the room. That is the exact.”
2019-05-07 · Invest Like the Best · Stephanie Cohen – The Evolution of M&A and Corporate Strategy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.131] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we believe FinTech is an opportunity for institutions like ours. So a couple points on that, just to be totally direct. So historically we've tended to build a lot of stuff on our own. We have excellent people in engineering and technology, and we've tended to build a lot of things on our own. I think our market's experience would show that we're doing a really good job of pivoting from that. And what I mean by that is, of course, we're going to build some stuff on our own, but we're going to figure out other places where we can partner, where we can buy things off the shelf. We don't have to do everything on our own. One of my examples is when I started, we basically had our own version of Word, and so we figured out we actually don't have to code our own version of Word, and so we can actually get that from someone else. And so we've tried to work really hard to figure out what should we build versus what should we buy. And I don't mean in the M&A sense, I mean in the technology sense. And so what I hope that creates is an environment where fintech and other business feel like they can come to us.”
2019-05-07 · Invest Like the Best · Stephanie Cohen – The Evolution of M&A and Corporate Strategy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.131] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a very good question. And so we spent a lot of time on this. So the idea is if it's your idea, if it's a team's idea, you can go with the idea. So you quit your job and you go do it.”
2019-05-07 · Invest Like the Best · Stephanie Cohen – The Evolution of M&A and Corporate Strategy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.131] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's because you take a part of the firm that's not a revenue generating division and then you take their idea, but there is an aspect of it that could be applied to a revenue generating division. We had people who could bridge that mentally, but that takes a lot of caring to actually take that product and move it over in a way that works for the organization.”
2019-05-07 · Invest Like the Best · Stephanie Cohen – The Evolution of M&A and Corporate Strategy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.131] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the common thread was what we wanted, which is that they tended to be cross-divisional ideas that were sitting in one division, but were relevant to another division. And that those were the hardest things to get done because you had a situation where someone had a really good idea, the people on their team would say, yeah, that's a great idea, but it's nothing to do with my day job, and no one could actually help them get the idea done. So we achieved what we wanted, which was that we found things where they needed outside help in order to get their ideas done. That would be the first thing. The second piece of it is by the obvious growth opportunity. So if you think about penetrating different clients with the same product, that we're doing. Like people are doing that every day in their business. But if you find something where it was developed in compliance, but it's a system that's relevant somewhere else, that's harder.”
2019-05-07 · Invest Like the Best · Stephanie Cohen – The Evolution of M&A and Corporate Strategy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.131] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so the thousand submissions was kind of a one page form. We then narrowed it down to about 150, and then we had those teams pitch. So not really long presentations, relatively short presentations. It's very good for the organization. It was a good learning experience for president. It was good for the people who are watching them in terms of learning about the business. And then we narrowed it down further. Before we actually funded anything, we put all of the teams through what we call a sprint because the idea was we wanted to make sure that we hadn't chosen things that sounded like good ideas, but a week of intensive work would just tell you it wasn't a good idea. And so we ran a bunch of things through sprints. And what that did is it actually allowed us to tweak some of the ideas and get them to a better place so that they could be funded.”
2019-05-07 · Invest Like the Best · Stephanie Cohen – The Evolution of M&A and Corporate Strategy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.131] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we had a lot of debate about this, and our original form was very simple because we wanted the barrier to entry to be very low, because we wanted to actually hear what people had to say. And we didn't want to waste people's time if we weren't going to actually do anything with their idea. Having said that, I think our barrier to entry is a little bit too low in the first round. It's okay. It was a good inventory of ideas. The second time we were more clear about pillars of what we wanted. And we also are trying to help people find sponsors because what we found out was that, of course, it's about the quality of the idea. Of course, it's about the people, but it's also about the sponsorship. And so what we didn't want to do was end up in a place where we were funding things that had great sponsors, but not funding the best ideas. And so we've tried to tweak a few things so that we can make sure the best ideas rise up. It's not just the ideas with the best sponsors. There should be a correlation, but there's not always a perfect correlation between those things.”
2019-05-07 · Invest Like the Best · Stephanie Cohen – The Evolution of M&A and Corporate Strategy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.131] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ways to partner with other companies to continue to drive forward innovation. I think the card we're doing with Apple is a really good example of that. On the everyone has ideas inside the firm, one of the things we launched when I started in my job was something called Accelerate. And the idea was very simple. We wanted people to feel like we were open to their ideas. We wanted a way to capture them and we wanted a way to make sure that they had ideas. We could actually turn them into businesses rather than have them get frustrated with having an idea and not being able to do anything with it. One of the things we learned from that, which we thought we knew was that, wow, we had ideas. So we went out, we gave people a couple months, we got a thousand submissions, and we ultimately have narrowed those down and we've funded around 10 of those. And so I think innovation is alive and well inside the organization. So what we're going to focus the most on is actually making sure when you have an idea, we can help you execute it.”
2019-05-07 · Invest Like the Best · Stephanie Cohen – The Evolution of M&A and Corporate Strategy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.131] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To have people inside the organization and make sure they're out in those communities just having exploratory conversations. And so I'll give you some examples of what I mean by that. We have a world-class investment bank in the technology space. They spend most of their time with technology companies trying to help them grow, do deals, raise capital. But by being in that community, we are seeing the future. You are seeing the future of where the world is headed in various different industries. And so figuring out a way to give them enough time to bring those back and to have conversations about it is important. Same thing on the investing side. We do a lot of investing that has nothing to do with financial institutions, but every once in a while is part of that. You're seeing trends in other businesses. You're seeing things that other companies are doing that I think help to inform where we want to go. And the last piece is, given how fast the world is moving, I have a bias that we can't do this on our own. And so we've got to figure out.”
2019-05-07 · Invest Like the Best · Stephanie Cohen – The Evolution of M&A and Corporate Strategy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.131] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Talking to other people outside the forum, by the way, talking to each other across divisions, I think they're going to come up with a ton of great ideas. And so part of what I think is special about Goldman Sachs is that innovation happens actually all over the firm. People feel empowered to have ideas. I think people want to have ideas. And I'll come back to how we're trying to foster that with some programs. But I think that's natural inside the firm. I think the exploration part of this is hard. And I think it forces people to do things that are a little bit unnatural, particularly inside our culture. So we are a high energy culture, client-driven, client calls, client asks for something. I think there's almost no one in the world better at client has a problem. We're going to solve it in a creative way. But the exploration side of this requires you to have quiet thoughts, to spend some time thinking about it. So I think it's our responsibility to give leaders time away. But I also think it's important.”
2019-05-07 · Invest Like the Best · Stephanie Cohen – The Evolution of M&A and Corporate Strategy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.131] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm gonna give you the obvious answer. So I think you got to do both. And as we, so we have new management team that has come in, I would argue that today we're doing both, like in a comprehensive way. So we're doing what we call these front-to-back reviews. So that I would call more of the exploitation side of your equation, which is understanding the businesses we're in and how can we maximize those. And then the exploration side of the equation, I think probably happens at a more senior level and takes people that have time away from their current job. So one, I think we need to do both. Two, I think today we're probably collectively as a whole doing both together. I think going forward, my own bias is the people who are running those businesses every day in many respects have the best perspective on how to exploit those markets. And as long as we have them client focused, outwardly focused,”
2019-05-07 · Invest Like the Best · Stephanie Cohen – The Evolution of M&A and Corporate Strategy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.131] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where we're saying we like this business and we don't like that business, we think we just need to create the right ecosystem that has the right mix of fee-based recurring revenue, has the right mix of deposits from a funding perspective, and therefore we continue to grow the other businesses.”
2019-05-07 · Invest Like the Best · Stephanie Cohen – The Evolution of M&A and Corporate Strategy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.131] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Talk to people, we'll just do fixed income because it's the place where people spend the most time and the most focus on us because we do have a leading franchise there. If you talk to our clients in fixed income, they would talk to you in the same way that our investment banking clients talk to you, which is they love our people. They think we're differentiated. They think we have great content. We have an amazing fixed income business. But that's not a reason why we can't have these other businesses that deliver more fee-based recurring revenue and support that business. I'll give you another example. If you think about our consumer business, which is markus, part of that business is growing deposits. So we're bringing in deposits and that's relatively low cost funding compared to other sources of funding. That low cost funding certainly helps the consumer business, but it also helps the sales and training business. It also helps the investment bank. It's the same thing for the cash management business. The cash management business is about corporate clients, but also brings in really high quality good deposits. And so we believe that that also helps these other businesses. So this is not a situation.”
2019-05-07 · Invest Like the Best · Stephanie Cohen – The Evolution of M&A and Corporate Strategy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.131] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you're actually seeing this across different sectors. So I noticed the other day Caterpillar actually came out with an announcement that they were focused on building their service revenue. And if you can think of any company that's had cyclical swings and big manufacturing, high fixed costs, I think everyone understands that by creating more repeatable, fee-based recurring revenue that people can actually predict, it's helpful from a valuation perspective, it's helpful from an investor perspective. So I don't think it's unique to Goldman Sachs. I don't think it's unique to the financial services sector. I certainly think if you look across the financial services sector, you would see that we certainly have on a relative basis, if you look at our pie chart, more businesses on the market side, on the securities side of our business, which tend to be viewed as more volatile than other businesses. And so what we believe is it's not an either or. It's not one instead of the other.”
2019-05-07 · Invest Like the Best · Stephanie Cohen – The Evolution of M&A and Corporate Strategy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.131] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Skills and change management, and how do you give people the skills so that you say to yourself, Well, if we want you to run your business more efficiently, how do you actually understand that? How do you actually understand the different layers of management that you have? How do you understand how to think about our high value locations? So what skills can we move to someplace like Salt Lake City or to Warsaw in Europe? And so understanding that in a way that's exciting, not scary for the organization, I think is where we, the rubber, throw it on that point.”
2019-05-07 · Invest Like the Best · Stephanie Cohen – The Evolution of M&A and Corporate Strategy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.131] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Businesses, particularly as it relates to outside funds, and they would talk about our consumer business, whichever one is really excited about, given what we're building on the market side of the business. And then the last piece that people talk about is operating more efficiently, which again would not be read as cost cutting, would be read as literally operating more efficiently. So part of that would be running the businesses, what we would call front to back, which means that the sales and trader is equal to the operations and tech person in our securities business, meaning you have to actually not only make the trade for the client, but you actually have to close it out. So they would talk about all those things. But on that third, they would start to feel the tension that you're talking about between innovation and change. Because when you're asking people to operate more efficiently, you're asking them to operate differently. And so that's uncomfortable for people. And so one of the things that we spend a lot of time on is it's not just the strategy and the communication, but it's also the training and the...”
2019-05-07 · Invest Like the Best · Stephanie Cohen – The Evolution of M&A and Corporate Strategy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.131] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What people would say is the first part they would talk about is they would talk about growing and strengthening our existing businesses. So that would not sound a lot like change. There'd be some innovation on it. So that would be a very safe place for people to talk about our strategy. They would talk about expanding the footprint in the investment banking division, which is basically just covering more clients, particularly clients that are a little bit smaller. They would talk about in the securities division business focusing on asset managers in addition to hedge funds. So they talk about things that are very adjacent to our business, but they would have innovative components to them. Then the next piece that people would talk about is they would talk about our business mix. And they would talk about making sure that our business mix has more stable, recurring fee-based revenue. Again, people would probably still be very happy innovation focused, which would be around things like cash management, which is providing cash management services to our existing corporate clients. They talk about growing our alternatives business, which is our investing.”
2019-05-07 · Invest Like the Best · Stephanie Cohen – The Evolution of M&A and Corporate Strategy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.131] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then the last piece for me is there's the we want to have leading total shareholder return. Very important. I also think we want to marry our strategy with the societal value that we're created alongside that. And I say that partly because I believe our people want that. I certainly want that as someone who works here, but I also think that's how you build sustainable businesses. So we've been around for 150 years. And I think if we're going to be around successfully for the next 150 years, what we're doing has to be related to broadly where society is going.”
2019-05-07 · Invest Like the Best · Stephanie Cohen – The Evolution of M&A and Corporate Strategy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.131] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So having a strategy for Goldman for me is if I walk in the cafeteria and I pick a random person and I ask them, what is Goldman Sachs' strategy or what do you think we're focused on? And they can say something to me that's coherent. And then if I ask four or five other people, they say something that's similarly coherent and consistent. And same thing, the general person walking down the street are investors. I think it's important that people have a perspective on where we want to go. And so that's important to me from a strategy perspective. That's as much strategy as it is communication. And so we bring those things together. The second thing is I think it's important for people to understand how what they do every day influences impact and is related to this strategy because it has to be because people, I think, want to show up at work every day and feel like they're part of the overall mission. They're part of the story, right? Exactly. So that's the second piece. And so that's more complicated than you think in a company of 37,000 people all over the world in multiple different businesses.”
2019-05-07 · Invest Like the Best · Stephanie Cohen – The Evolution of M&A and Corporate Strategy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.131] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Psychological non financial component to this. And then the last comment I'd make is my clients who are quite good at M&A know what their walkaway price is. So they know at the point where it's gone too far, but they also know how to take into account strategic value because it's very hard. No one has a crystal ball. No one knows what that business is going to achieve. No one knows what your core business is going to achieve. No one knows what the synergies are going to be. So to assume that there's one singular right answer for what the value is, I think is naive. But when you have a matrix of different growth rates and different margins or whatever the”
2019-05-07 · Invest Like the Best · Stephanie Cohen – The Evolution of M&A and Corporate Strategy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.131] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As part of your MA strategy. And so what I mean by that is ultimately most sellers will make decisions about who they sell companies to based on valuation. But so people just assume, well, it doesn't matter if I pay the highest price, then I'm going to win. The reality is those two things are linked in a way that's hard to understand unless you're sitting in the deal dynamic, which is if you've developed a good relationship with the seller, chances are you're going to learn things that will help you get to the right answer for you, whether that's a higher or lower price. You'll just get more information. And then depending on the situation, whether it's a private company or otherwise, there may be situations where the seller actually does get to pick the home for the business. So the term offensive is not soft and fluffy. It's really important. And you need to be pretty tactical about who the person is. And sometimes it's the CEO and sometimes it's the head of the business. And sometimes it's someone unexpected for various reasons. And so there is a whole”
2019-05-07 · Invest Like the Best · Stephanie Cohen – The Evolution of M&A and Corporate Strategy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.131] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then bringing that into the deal mode. The second piece of it is you'll ultimately have to think creatively about the business. So for example, you may have a perspective on the talent, how you're going to retain the talent. So how do you design the right compensation packages so that when you acquire the business, you can bring them in and then you take that into account once you've done the deal? How do you think about what the integration strategy is? This is one of the things that, despite the fact that I was an M&A advisor, you've learned very quickly that your clients who are really good at buying businesses are not just thinking about the deal. They have the integration people sitting next to the deal people so that they know what's hard and what's easy and what synergies they can count on, what synergies you can't count on. And so having those integration people helps you get to the right answer as it relates to valuation. The other piece of it is I would make sure that you have what I would call a”
2019-05-07 · Invest Like the Best · Stephanie Cohen – The Evolution of M&A and Corporate Strategy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.131] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the hardest ways to do MA is to get a call from a financial advisor and say this company is for sale, do you want to buy it? And you've never actually done any work on it. I think in today's day and age, I think it's really hard to compete by doing that. So taking ourself out of the deal mode, figuring out what your strategy is, figuring out who the companies are that you'd want to buy, and what the alternatives are. So you may have a specific strategy. You'll have what is my organic version of this, what's my top target, and then what are the three other things I could do or a couple other things I could cobble together that would be like that. Because when you get into the deal moment and people are telling you what you have to pay and you're hearing rumors about what other people are going to pay, I think it's very difficult to be clear-eyed on how you're thinking about the deal. So getting it away from the actual transaction, having a view on what you want to buy, having a view on what it's worth to you.”
2019-05-07 · Invest Like the Best · Stephanie Cohen – The Evolution of M&A and Corporate Strategy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.131] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of course, this is going to have to do like the Goldman Sach thing. So when I first started at Goldman Sachs, I worked with Tim and Gracia, who is amazing. He was an analyst at Goldman Sachs, and he's still here. And then when I was a partner on the M&A team, he actually sat right next to me. And the great thing about Tim is that he's amazingly creative. So despite the fact that he's been doing this for well north of 20 years, he actually comes to each deal and says, how am I going to get to the best solution for these two parties or these few parties? Well, he has all the experience in the world to just run a playbook. He doesn't run a playbook. And then the other thing he's done amazingly well is build great relationships, whether those are with corporations or with financial buyers. He's doing deals with people that he knows and that includes, by the way, the legal community and other people who support M&A. And ultimately, I find that he gets to a better outcome because people like him.”
2019-05-07 · Invest Like the Best · Stephanie Cohen – The Evolution of M&A and Corporate Strategy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.131] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That it is about partnership. It is about ways for the two businesses to work together, but it ultimately turns into buying or selling the business. So I think the most important thing is be honest about whether or not you're an owner of your own business and to build relationships. On the first point, you always say if you're not a seller, you're a buyer. So if you own either investments or you own companies in a portfolio, every day you're deciding to not sell your business, you're basically deciding to buy your business.”
2019-05-07 · Invest Like the Best · Stephanie Cohen – The Evolution of M&A and Corporate Strategy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.131] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things that I tell people, we tell people don't wait too long. And so what I mean by that is there are companies who decide that they have assets that they no longer own and they're no longer strategic. And the reality is the longer you wait, the longer you don't invest, the longer it's the last item on the list of things where you're putting new innovation or your best people in, the more that that business is going to atrophy. So having really proactive portfolio management of your business, I think is really important be one two, to build relationships early on with people who you think are potential buyers of those businesses, whether they be financial buyers or strategic buyers. One of the more awkward conversations is to set up a lunch with someone you've never met and say, hi, I have this business. Would you like to buy it? That's not what you want. And so spending time with people who can be partners or ultimate buyers. And you may find yourself building those relationships so early on.”
2019-05-07 · Invest Like the Best · Stephanie Cohen – The Evolution of M&A and Corporate Strategy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.131] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You basically needed a strategic buyer. You needed someone to feel like buying your business was a strategic imperative for them. Now you may have that, but you also can just talk about why it's a good business on its own and therefore sell it to a financial party. So I think that fundamentally changes the speed with which M&A gets done and the amount of M&A that gets done. And then the last piece, of course, is cross-border.”
2019-05-07 · Invest Like the Best · Stephanie Cohen – The Evolution of M&A and Corporate Strategy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.131] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source