Latest Interviews
Showing 1096–1110 of 1,932 interview transcripts.
Clear all filters- Goldman Sachs21 min
Investing with The Carlyle Group’s Sandra Horbach
Sandra Horbach, Alison Mass, Alison Nathan
In a May 23, 2022 conversation, Sandra Horbach of the Carlyle Group discusses the private equity industry's evolution from a niche sector to a mainstream asset class while detailing Carlyle's specialized investment strategies focused on market leaders and ESG integration. Horbach outlines the firm's aggressive diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, including a compensation-linked mentorship program and a $2 million award pool, aimed at empowering women to secure high-impact leadership roles. Addressing current macroeconomic headwinds, she advises prioritizing companies with resilient business models capable of thriving through volatility while reflecting on her 35-year career trajectory from her early days at Forsman Little to her current advocacy for long-term, quality-driven value creation.
- Goldman Sachs26 min
The Boom in Private Credit
Lotfi Karoui, James Reynolds, Alison Nathan
On June 21, 2022, market participants discussed how the private credit sector has evolved from a niche alternative into a $1.2 trillion mainstream asset class that now rivals public high-yield and syndicated loan markets in size. The discussion highlighted that direct lending strategies offer borrowers bespoke, flexible financing structures while attracting a diversified investor base, yet the sector faces immediate pressure from rising interest rates that threaten borrowers with unsustainable capital structures. Despite concerns over potential defaults and future regulatory scrutiny, experts argued that direct lending remains structurally sound compared to the 2008 crisis due to lower leverage levels, locked-in capital alignment, and minimal asset-liability mismatches.
- Y Combinator28 min
Top Ways Startups Waste Money
Harj Taggar, Michael Seibel, Brad Flora
Early-stage founders frequently squander capital on premature hiring, marketing, and professional services before achieving product-market fit, a behavior driven by the "Sebastianism" fallacy of seeking external saviors rather than building internal foundations. The discussion outlines specific inefficiencies in seeking FAANG talent, over-relying on advertising and PR retainers, and granting unnecessary equity to advisors, all of which can be avoided by founders executing core tasks themselves. By prioritizing self-reliance and scrappy alternatives to validate hypotheses, companies can prevent costly mistakes and ensure that significant spending only occurs after proving the business model generates active customer demand.
- Goldman Sachs22 min
Goldman Sachs Chairman and CEO David Solomon on the Economy, Investing and Sustainability
David Solomon, Valentijn van Nieuwenhuijzen, Alison Nathan, Valentine Van Nieuwenhuizen
Goldman Sachs has completed its acquisition of NN Investment Partners to significantly expand its European asset management platform and accelerate its sustainable investing capabilities under CEO David Solomon's four-year strategy. While the transaction strengthens the firm's fee-based revenue streams and operational scale, Solomon warns that clients should brace for increased market volatility and a heightened recession risk in Europe driven by energy supply disruptions and geopolitical tensions. The integration aims to combine NNIP's sustainability expertise with Goldman's global capital resources to deliver active returns that outperform passive benchmarks amidst the current uncertain economic climate.
- Goldman Sachs23 min
Investing with Norges Bank Investment Management’s Nicolai Tangen
Nicolai Tangen, Katie Koch, Alison Nathan
Nikolai Tangen, chief executive of Norges Bank Investment Management, directs the world's largest sovereign wealth fund as it navigates a projected decade of stagflation and geopolitical instability through tactical portfolio adjustments and a rigorous negative selection strategy. Leveraging an interrogative background and a philosophy of active ownership, Tangen emphasizes capitalizing on undervalued opportunities in markets like China while excluding companies with weak balance sheets to preserve the fund's $1.3 trillion in long-term assets. His approach integrates diverse intellectual perspectives and a commitment to transparency, as evidenced by his "Good Company" podcast and a pledge to donate most of his personal wealth to educational initiatives.
- Goldman Sachs43 min
Howard Marks, Co-chairman of Oaktree Capital Management
Bill Marks and Bruce Karsh executed a massive $10 billion distressed debt strategy during the 2008 financial crisis by maintaining an $11 billion reserve to capitalize on market dislocation without relying on predictive forecasting. Marks argues that long-term investment success depends on buying quality assets at "absurdly" low prices while avoiding quantitative risk models, emphasizing that surviving catastrophic losses is more critical than chasing top-tier annual returns. He maintains that superior performance requires human judgment to navigate qualitative uncertainty and a commitment to idiosyncratic positions that diverge from market euphoria.
- Goldman Sachs21 min
Cybersecurity Deals Surge Amid Rising Attacks
David Campbell, Marco Poletti, Alison Nathan
Driven by projected cyber losses soaring to $10 trillion by 2025, the sector attracted over $30 billion in investment last year while facing an attack surface that has diversified from centralized data centers to cloud and IoT endpoints. Organized crime currently dominates the threat landscape, prompting a strategic market shift toward M&A consolidation, simplified security stacks, and defensive spending that is forecasted to exceed $100 billion. Investors, including Goldman Sachs Asset Management, are prioritizing early-stage platforms with proven teams and robust AI capabilities to navigate regulatory tightening and a global shortage of security professionals.
- Goldman Sachs33 min
Investing with KKR’s Joe Bae
Joe Bae, Alison Mass, Alison Nathan
KKR co-CEOs Joe Bay and Scott Nuttall oversee the firm's evolution from a pure capital provider into a global solutions provider managing a multi-asset portfolio while navigating macroeconomic shifts like supply chain resiliency and the energy transition. Under their leadership, KKR has expanded significantly into Asia and life sciences while prioritizing diversity initiatives that have increased female junior hiring to over 50% and established board diversity targets for portfolio companies. Complementing these business strategies, the firm launched the Asian American Foundation to combat anti-Asian hate and is actively investing over $27 billion in sustainability themes to address long-term social and environmental challenges.
- Goldman Sachs26 min
Equity Bear Market: A Paradigm Shift?
Allison Nathan, Cathie Wood, Cliff Asness, David Kostin, Kathy Wood
ARK Invest's Kathy Wood, AQR Capital's Cliff Asness, and Goldman Sachs' David Koston analyze the current market correction as a response to surging interest rates and inflation that has severely impacted unprofitable growth stocks. While Wood advocates for a return to high-growth disruptive sectors based on long-term innovation and temporary supply shocks, Asness and Koston argue for sustained value tilts or profitable growth strategies to navigate a structural shift toward higher cost-of-capital realities. The panelists converge on identifying rate-driven valuation regressions but diverge on whether the trend represents a permanent paradigm shift or a cyclical opportunity to acquire quality assets at depressed prices.
Gary Vee: My First 3 Angel Investments; Why I Changed My Mind on Facebook Video | 20VC #899
Entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk recounts his strategic early investments in tech giants like Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr, which were fueled by a calculated deployment of savings rather than luck despite his family's history of business friction. He attributes his success to a "practical optimistic" mindset and hard work that allowed him to recognize opportunities, while rejecting the notion that wealth created his confidence or public persona. Vaynerchuk concludes by outlining his long-term vision to maintain his role as the "captain of the ship," prioritizing sustained engagement in work and family well-being over traditional retirement.
Nick Jones: How I Founded Soho House; Brand Marketing Tips; Hiring Advice | 20VC #898
Soho House outlines a strategic roadmap to establish a presence in 85 cities within four years, utilizing a hybrid "Cities Without Houses" model to validate demand in markets like Mexico City and São Paulo before opening physical locations. Founder Nick Jones applies a philosophy of extreme simplicity and internal promotion to maintain the company's unique culture, building on lessons learned from early failures to prioritize long-term resilience over short-term luxury branding. This expansion aims to create a global "home away from home" for creative individuals while navigating complex international banking constraints and adapting to evolving consumer demands for flexible, high-performance environments.
- Goldman Sachs29 min
How Retail Investors Are Shaping Markets
John Marshall, Greg Tuorto, David Jeria, Allison Nathan
Retail participation in U.S. equity markets surged to a dominant 30% share of trading volume by 2021 before undergoing a sharp reversal characterized by systematic profit-taking and a structural shift from speculative individual stocks to passive ETFs and energy sectors. This behavioral divergence between active day traders and "buy and hold" investors has altered market liquidity dynamics, driving significant order flow off-exchange and increasing transaction costs for institutional players while prompting SEC Chairman Gensler to explore regulatory reforms aimed at improving price discovery. Despite these structural changes and elevated risks in single-stock herding, analysts project a stable market baseline supported by automatic investment flows, with future retail activity primarily contingent on broader macroeconomic factors such as inflation relative to wage growth.
- Goldman Sachs27 min
Investing with Advent International’s Tricia Glynn
Tricia Glynn, Alison Mass, Alison Nathan
Advent International's Tricia Glynn outlines a strategy for navigating a volatile macroeconomic landscape by prioritizing governance, downside control, and data-driven insights to drive growth at scale. The firm leverages its global network to advance decarbonization efforts and transfer cross-border technologies like live selling while championing aggressive Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion goals for 2030. Glynn concludes that future investment success will depend on balancing rigorous analytics with human-centric leadership to attract top talent in a transformed labor market.
- Goldman Sachs26 min
Angus Thirlwell, CEO and Co-Founder, Hotel Chocolat
Angus Thirlwell, Cameron Alley
Founded by CEO Angus Thirwell in 1993, Hotel Chocolat has evolved from an early e-commerce pioneer into a multi-channel empire that controls its supply chain through direct ownership of farms in St. Lucia and Ghana. The company recently achieved a 500% surge in digital sales during the pandemic while simultaneously implementing the Gentle Farming initiative to guarantee living wages for thousands of African producers. Moving forward, the brand plans to deepen its footprint in the USA and Japan by leveraging a large proprietary customer database to compete in the broader global gift market rather than relying solely on traditional retail expansion.
- Goldman Sachs31 min
A ‘Seismic’ Shift in Private Markets
Goldman Sachs co-president Mike Kester outlines a private market sector growing to $10 trillion that is undergoing a seismic shift toward individual investor participation while navigating a fundraising slowdown driven by the denominator effect. Despite regulatory pressures and a transition away from financial engineering toward active operational management, the industry continues to deliver consistent excess returns and is prioritizing sectors like infrastructure and life sciences. Kester projects that while capital raising will decelerate and valuation reporting standards will tighten, systemic risk remains low due to the pre-syndication of risk to long-term limited partners.