TechCrunch
Goldman Sachs Chief Financial Officer Marty Chavez shared what the investment bank looks for when investing in a startup.
- Goldman Sachs trading chief Marty Chavez has announced his plans to retire from the Wall Street firm at the end of the year, according to internal memos Tuesday.
- Chavez has been thinking about retirement for some time, enlisting friends and mentors to help him think through the possibilities in what became known as "Project Kids, Freedom and Sunshine."
- The Goldman exec will move his family to Los Angeles. He'll teach a course next spring at Stanford's business school, and may advise some private equity and venture capital funds.
- Read more of our Goldman Sachs coverage here.
Goldman Sachs surprised Wall Street on Tuesday by announcing the retirement of long-time partner and technology evangelist Marty Chavez.
Chavez, most recently co-head of the firm's securities division and the former chief financial officer, will stay on at Goldman until the end of the year. He'll then become a senior director.
Chavez joined Goldman's J. Aron commodities group in 1993 and left four years later, taking a turn at Credit Suisse and a spell as an entrepreneur. He rejoined Goldman in 2005, making partner the following year. He was named chief information officer in 2013 before taking on the CFO job in 2017.
Chavez has been thinking about his retirement for some time, taking counsel from friends and mentors, he said in an interview Tuesday afternoon. He's close to former Goldman co-president Harvey Schwartz. The idea was to find something that allowed him to stay true to a set of priorities that he's kept for years, which he listed in order: his own piece of mind, his children and his job.
"It's just becoming more and more clear to me that to stay consistent with that list I needed a new project," Chavez said in an interview. The search eventually earned a name "Project Kids, Freedom and Sunshine," and culminated, or perhaps began, with the announcement. He's started a Google docs list with retirement ideas.
To start, he plans to move to Los Angeles. Growing up in New Mexico, he always simply survived the East Coast winters, with the pull of finance forcing him to endure another winter. He harbored a plan to move to southern California, though in the early years of his dream, LA didn't have much technology or finance scene. It was hard for Chavez to envision himself there. As the city has developed a tech scene, that's changed, he said.
"A galvanizing moment for me was in February, actually of last year," when Chavez was still CFO. "I was at a gathering in Venice Beach and my friend Peter Thiel, who has a very direct and remarkable way of speaking, stopped me mid-sentence and said when are you going to stop talking about moving to LA and actually move to LA."
Once he gets there, Chavez said he plans to do nothing for some time. He's made just one commitment so far: agreeing to teach a class next spring at Stanford's business school on software in finance, he said.
Long term, Chavez, who has degrees from Harvard in biochemistry and computer science and a PhD in medical information sciences from Stanford, may try his hand at the burgeoning field of biotechnology. He's long been fascinated by the idea that DNA and organisms and living things might be programmable, much like making money and risk management has proven to be.
"That intersection of computation and life sciences is happening now," he said. "We're talking about things like figuring out how the protein folds itself, doing that in software, and using that to accelerate drug discovery because you can just simulate it all in software and run the clinical trials. These ideas would've been considered crazy talk not so long ago, but they're all starting to happen. And I think that's incredibly exciting."
He may also advise some private equity and venture capital funds, he said, though nothing has been arranged beyond some preliminary conversations.
As CFO last July, Chavez went to Solomon and suggested he give up the finance role in favor of becoming a co-head of Goldman's securities division, where he could help spur some of the technological changes he felt were needed. Since then, Goldman has thrown resources into developing its Marquee trading platform and greenlit a multiyear, $100 million plan to improve the infrastructure of the equities trading unit.
"When I went to David last year, I saw with a clarity that I don't get everyday some very specific things that I could do and needed to be done in the securities division," he said. "And David agreed with me."
So, why did he decide to leave Goldman now?
He finally feels like the projects that he's passionate about - increasing the importance and stature of engineers inside Goldman, improving the technological ability of the firm's securities division, and getting needed funds dispersed for those and other projects - would be preserved and advanced under Solomon and a cohort of execs he's mentored and developed over the years.
He name-checked execs including Ezra Nahum, Adam Korn, Raj Mahajan, Ericka Leslie and Sinead Strain,who he said are increasingly deciding Goldman's vision and simply looping him in. A couple years ago, it was much more of Chavez explaining his vision and asking them to execute it, he said.
And as a partner for 13 years, Chavez also felt it was the right time to invoke an older Goldman custom and stand aside so that the next generation can have its time.
"David and John and Stephen have been been incredible backers and allies of the securities division, specifically, and how securities division is evolving," Chavez said. "And so I think if it had been hard to make these transformations and assessments happen, potentially I would have stayed longer. Because I don't give up."
Get the latest Goldman Sachs stock price here.