February 22, 2022

​​No Filter The Inside Story of Instagram by Sarah Frier

 ​​No Filter The Inside Story of Instagram by Sarah Frier


[A very interesting true story of Instagram; the patience & the perseverance of Instagram's main founder’s high artistic standard is equally scintillating.


Main actors:


  • Mark Zuckerberg - While Kevin Systrom studying at Standford, Systrom was pleased to be recruited by Zuckerberg, who he thought was hyperintelligent, and even asked Systrom to drop out of school to join Facebook. But Systrom rejected that idea.
  • Kevin Systrom - When he’d first applied to Stanford, he’d thought he would major in structural engineering and art history. He imagined traveling the world, restoring old cathedrals or paintings. His passion for photography eventually led him to his world-famous creation, Instagram.
  • Jack Dorsey - Systrom went for an internship at Odeo which made a marketplace for podcasts on the internet and there he met Dorsey. Its CEO Evan Williams was already tech-world famous for selling Blogger, a blogging website, to Google. Dorsey & Williams later became founders of Twitter. Though Dorsey had initial reservations about Systrom, they become close buddies. Dorsey was very instrumental in popularizing Instagram during the initial phase by tweeting to his million followers.
  • Mike Krieger. Gregor Hochmuth was Systrom's buddy at Stanford and was Systrom's first choice for co-foundering his Burbn app. Since Hochmuth was happy with his job at Google, he suggested his Brazilian international student at Stanford,  Krieger to Systrom.  Krieger thus became the co-founder of Burbn and eventually co-founder of Instagram.
  • Marc Andreessen - Co-founder of Netscape who funded Systrom's Burbn app initially.
  • Cole Rise - a local designer who created around 20 filters for Instagram, including the logo. One of the main filters is named after him the 'Rise' filter.]



Kevin Systrom imagined traveling the world, restoring old cathedrals or paintings. He loved the science behind the art, and how a simple innovation—like architect Filippo Brunelleschi’s rediscovery of linear perspective during the Renaissance—could completely change the way people communicated. The paintings for most of Western history were flat and cartoonish, and then, starting in the 1400s, perspective gave them depth, making them photorealistic and emotive.


Born in December 1983, he was raised, along with his sister, Kate, in a two-story house with a long driveway on a tree-lined street in suburban Holliston, Massachusetts, about an hour west of Boston. His energetic mother, Diane, was vice president of marketing at nearby Monster.com, and later at Zipcar, and introduced her children to the internet back when the connection took over the phone line. His father, Doug, was a human resources executive at the conglomerate that owned Marshalls and HomeGoods discount stores. Systrom was an earnest, curious kid who loved going to the library and playing the futuristic, demon-riddled first-person shooter game Doom II on the computer. His introduction to computer programming was creating his own levels in the game.


Photography was one of his longest-running personal interests. Ahead of his trip to Florence, the epicenter of the Renaissance he’d learned so much about, he saved up to purchase, after intensive research, one of the highest-quality cameras he could afford, with the sharpest lens. He intended to use it in his photography class. His teacher in Florence, a man named Charlie, was unimpressed. he took the prized purchase away into his backroom and returned with a smaller device, called a Holga, that only took blurry, square black-and-white photographs. It was plastic, like a toy. Charlie told Systrom he wasn’t allowed to use his fancy camera for the next three months, because a higher-quality tool wouldn’t necessarily create better art. You have to learn to love imperfection, he instructed.


The idea—of a square photo transformed into art through editing—stuck in the back of Systrom’s mind. More important was the lesson that just because something is more technically complex doesn’t mean it’s better.


Systrom needed a startup internship as part of the Stanford Mayfield Fellows Program he’d been barely accepted into. Systrom read in the New York Times about a trend in online audio and saw mention of a company called Odeo, which made a marketplace for podcasts on the internet. That’s where he decided he wanted to intern.


Jack Dorsey, a new engineering hire at Odeo, was expecting to dislike the 22-year-old intern he had to sit next to all summer. He imagined that an exclusive entrepreneurship program and an elite East Coast boarding school were both sterile, formulaic places and that a person shaped by them might be devoid of creativity. To Dorsey’s surprise, he and Systrom became fast friends.


Later that year, Systrom built something called Burbn, after the Kentucky whiskey he enjoyed drinking. The mobile website was perfect for Systrom’s urban social life. It let people say where they were, or where they planned to go so their friends could show up. The more times a user went out, the more virtual prizes they got


In January 2010, determined to make his pitch and justify quitting Nextstop, Systrom headed to a party for a startup called Hunch at Madrone Art Bar in San Francisco’s Panhandle neighborhood.


Over cocktails, Systrom met two important VCs with checkbooks: Marc Andreessen, a co-founder of Netscape, who ran Andreessen Horowitz, one of the valley’s hottest venture capital firms, and Steve Anderson, who ran a much quieter early-stage investing shop called Baseline Ventures. Anderson liked the fact that Systrom, with pedigrees from Stanford and Google and a confident personality, didn’t have any investors yet for his mobile idea. Anderson liked to be the first to notice something. He borrowed Systrom’s phone to type an email to himself: Follow up. “The biggest risk for you is you’re the sole founder”, Anderson told Systrom. “I usually don’t invest in sole founders. He argued that without someone else at the top, nobody would tell Systrom when he was wrong, or push his ideas to be better”.


Mike Krieger was another Stanford student, two grades younger, whom Systrom knew from the Mayfield fellowship. Systrom had first met Krieger years earlier at a Mayfield networking event, where Krieger read Systrom’s Odeo name badge and quizzed him about what that company was like. Then Krieger disappeared for a while to complete a master’s degree in symbolic systems—the famous Stanford program for understanding the psychology of how humans interact with computers. He wrote his thesis about Wikipedia, which had somehow cultivated a community of volunteers to update and edit its online encyclopedia. 


After the investment from Anderson, Systrom told Krieger the idea was turning into a real company, with real financial responsibilities, and asked Krieger if he wanted to be an official cofounder. Count me interested, Krieger said. 


Krieger and Systrom started the exercise by making a list of the top three things people liked about Burbn. One was Plans, the feature where people could say where they were going so friends could join them. Another was photos. The third was a tool to win meaningless virtual prizes for your activity, which was mostly a gimmick to get people to log back in. Not everybody needed plans or prizes. Systrom circled photos. Photos, they decided, were ubiquitous, useful to everybody, not just young city dwellers.


Systrom and the girlfriend who would become his wife, Nicole Schuetz, whom he’d met at Stanford, went on a short vacation to a village in Baja California Sur, Mexico, called Todos Santos, with picturesque white sand beaches and cobblestone streets. During one of their ocean walks, she warned him that she probably wouldn’t be using his new app. None of her smartphone photos were ever good—not as good as their friend Hochmuth’s were, at least.

You know what he does to those photos, right? Systrom said.

He just takes good photos, she said.


"No, no, he puts them through filter apps", Systrom explained. 

"Well, you guys should probably have filters too", Schuetz said.


Systrom realized she was right. If people were going to filter their photos anyway, might as well have them do it right within the app,


While they were building it, they received an unsolicited email from Cole Rise—a local designer who had heard what they were working on and wanted to be a tester for it.


Systrom and Krieger asked Rise a lot of questions about his beta-testing experience, and he started to sense that the founders didn’t know their potential. This is going to be fucking huge, Rise explained. In the tech industry, leaders rarely had any experience in the industry they were disrupting. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos had never been in books and Tesla’s Elon Musk had never been in car manufacturing, but Instagram’s filters had clearly been made by a photographer. Earlybird was the best Rise had ever seen, he explained—far higher quality than anything on Hipstamatic.


After a few drinks, the founders asked Rise if he would like to create some filters of his own, as a contract job. Rise agreed, thinking it would save time to have an app that would automatically edit his pictures exactly how he wanted them to be edited. He’d built up a complicated system after spending years collecting textures from things he saw around him. He would overlay those textures on files in Adobe Photoshop, then add layers of color change and curves.


Neither Rise nor the founders thought there was a downside to the fact that filters when used en masse, would give Instagrammers permission to present their reality as more interesting and beautiful than it actually was. That was exactly what would help make the product popular. Instagram posts would be art, and art was a form of commentary on life. The app would give people the gift of expression, but also escapism.


Systrom and Krieger wanted to come up with a name that was easy to pronounce—and spell, after Burbn. They also wanted it to portray a sense of speed in communication. They’d borrowed Gmail’s trick, and would start uploading photos while users were still deciding which filter to apply. A lot of the good photo-related startup names were taken, so they came up with Instagram, a combo of instant and telegram.


The founders picked their first users carefully, courting people who would be good photographers—especially designers who had high Twitter follower counts. Those first users would help set the right artistic tone, creating good content for everyone else to look at, in what was essentially the first-ever Instagram influencer campaign, years before that would become a concept.  Dorsey became their best salesman.


Once Dorsey was addicted to Instagram, the product seemed so obvious and useful that he wished Twitter had managed to build it first. He asked Systrom if he would be open to Twitter acquiring his company. Systrom sounded enthusiastic.


Williams was CEO and was still trying to establish himself as Twitter’s leader. Dorsey’s strategy was not welcome. After that, Dorsey had another motivation to promote Instagram—to prove Williams wrong. Everything he posted on Instagram would immediately cross-post to Twitter, reaching his 1.6 million followers there. He told the world it was his favorite new iPhone app, and they listened.


Articles would later reflect on Instagram’s origin, crediting the app with perfect timing. It was born in Silicon Valley, in the midst of a mobile revolution, in which millions of new smartphone consumers didn’t understand what to do with a camera in their pockets. That much is true. But Systrom and Krieger also made a lot of counterintuitive choices to set Instagram apart.


Instagram’s early popularity was less about the technology and more about the psychology—about how it made people feel. The filters made reality look like art. And then, in cataloging that art, people would start to think about their lives differently, and themselves differently, and their place in society differently.


If Facebook was about friendships, and Twitter was about opinions, Instagram was about experiences—and anyone could be interested in anyone else’s visual experiences, anywhere in the world. 


With so much to get done, the founders divided and conquered based on what they were good at. Systrom was the public-facing guy, navigating the relationships with investors and the press, and working on the look and feel of the product. Krieger was behind the scenes, learning on the fly how to solve the complex engineering problems that supported Instagram’s growth. Krieger, who owned much less of Instagram than Systrom did, embraced the hierarchy. He didn’t want Systrom’s job, and Systrom didn’t want his. That’s why it worked.


The first big celebrity to sign up was the rapper Snoop Dogg. He posted a filtered Instagram picture—of himself wearing a suit and holding a can of Colt 45—and simultaneously sent it to his 2.5 million followers on Twitter.


Siegler wrote for TechCrunch at the time: Step one: obtain a ton of users. Step two: get brands to leverage your service. Step three: get celebrities to use your service and promote it. Step four: mainstream. In his estimation, Snoop put Instagram on step three, just a few months after its launch.


By the summer of 2011, Twitter had about 100 million monthly users, and Facebook had more than 800 million. Instagram was a much smaller player—with 6 million sign-ups—but had reached that milestone about twice as fast by building off the existing networks.

Nowhere was the effect more apparent than with celebrities. Justin Bieber had more than 11 million followers on Twitter. So when the 17-year-old pop star joined Instagram and tweeted out his first filtered photo, a high-contrast take on traffic in Los Angeles, Krieger’s alarm sounded. The servers were stressed as Bieber gained 50 followers a minute. Justin Bieber Joins Instagram, World Explodes, Time magazine reported. Almost every time the singer posted, throngs of tween girls would overload the servers again, often taking them down.


Bieber’s following was enough to change the nature of the Instagram community. All of the sudden, Instagram was emoji heaven, Rise later recalled. As younger users joined, they invented a new etiquette on Instagram, which involved trading likes for likes and follows for follows. 


Instagram kept getting more valuable, finding its footing and a path to the mainstream. Despite Costolo’s doubts, celebrities continued to sign onto Instagram, including Kim Kardashian, Taylor Swift, and Rihanna. In January 2012, Instagram added one of Twitter’s most valuable users: President Barack Obama. Obama’s account launched the day of the Iowa caucus for that year’s presidential campaign.


When Van Damme and Hochmuth got to the office the next morning, it was clear that everyone else had gotten the same message. The employees whispered their theories to one another. Maybe there had been a major hack. Maybe something had gone wrong with the recent venture capital fundraising, and Instagram was actually out of money and would have to shut down.


Every employee got a call on Sunday night to be in the office at 8 am in the office and there was a surprise waiting for them.


“​​So over the weekend, we had some conversations about a potential acquisition”, Systrom said. “I talked to Mark Zuckerberg”, he continued. Still normal.  “We said yes to Facebook. We’re getting bought—for $1 billion”. Not normal. Not believable. Employees let out gasps and guttural sounds. Some of them laughed, unsure how to control their surprise, while others failed to hold back tears.


The public statements from Systrom and Zuckerberg attempted to reassure them. It’s important to be clear that Instagram’s product is not going away, Systrom said on the Instagram blog. We’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently, Zuckerberg’s Facebook post said. 


On the same Sunday, Michael Schroepfer, Facebook’s head of engineering, was in Zuckerberg’s kitchen with Zoufonoun while Systrom paced outside in the yard, on the phone with his board.


Usually, when Facebook acquired a company, they found ways to absorb the technology, rebrand the product, and fill some gap in what their own company was capable of. If Instagram was going to be its own product, it broke Facebook’s normal acquisition process, and it wasn’t clear how it would work. How do we integrate something like this? Schroepfer asked.


“Schrep, we are buying magic. We’re paying for magic. We’re not paying $1 billion for thirteen people. The worst thing we could do is to impose Facebook on them prematurely”. After hours of discussion and sleepless nights, Zoufonoun who was Facebook's deal man was fully converted into an Instagram believer. “It’s blossoming, and you just need to nurture that plant. You don’t need to trim it or shape the plant at that point”.


Zuckerberg agreed. He fired off an email to the Facebook board, letting them know what was happening. It was the first they were hearing of the massive deal, which was all but completed. Because Zuckerberg held the majority voting power in the company, the board’s role was merely to put a rubber stamp on his decisions.


The same Sunday night, Systrom’s board conversations faced more resistance. Anderson, in particular, was confused and opposed as he could arrange better financing deals.


Systrom gave four reasons. First, he reiterated Zuckerberg’s argument: that Facebook’s stock value was likely to go up, so the value of the acquisition would grow over time. Second, he’d take a large competitor out of the picture. If Facebook took measures to copy Instagram or target the app directly, that would make it a lot more difficult to grow. Third, Instagram would benefit from Facebook’s entire operations infrastructure, not just data centers but also people who already knew how to do all the things Instagram would need to learn in the future. Fourth, and most importantly, he and Krieger would have independence.


Zuckerberg understood that the hardest part of creating a business would be creating a new habit for users and a group they all wanted to spend time with. Instagram was easier to buy than to build because once a network takes off, there are few reasons to join a smaller one. It becomes part of the infrastructure of society.


Systrom said. It was about creativity, design, and experiences



Ultimately the team came up with three Instagram values. 


  • The biggest was community first, meaning all their decisions should be centered around preserving a good feeling when using Instagram, not necessarily a more fast-growing business. Too many notifications would violate that principle.


  • Then there was simplicity matters, meaning that before any new products could roll out, engineers had to think about whether they were solving a specific user problem, and whether making a change was even necessary, or might overcomplicate the app.


  • There was also inspire creativity, which meant Instagram was going to try to frame the app as an artistic outlet, training its own users and highlighting the best of them through an editorial strategy, focusing on content that was genuine and meaningful. 





Data collection using Onavo.

Facebook in 2013 acquired a tool called Onavo. The acquisition generated little buzz, as it wasn’t a flashy consumer product. It was a wonky-sounding thing called a virtual private network, or VPN, which was made by Israeli engineers to allow people to be able to browse the Internet free from government spying on their activity, and from having to go through firewalls. Once Facebook purchased the VPN company, they could look at all the traffic flowing through the service and extrapolate data from it. They knew not only the names of the apps people were playing with, but also how long they spent using them, and the names of the app screens they spent time on—and so, for example, could know if Snapchat Stories was taking off versus some other Snapchat feature. It helped them see which competitors were on the rise before the press did.



About WhatsApp takeover

After the failure with Snapchat for $3bn, Zuckerberg asked Systrom to help acquire the app he wanted to pursue next: WhatsApp, the messaging app that had 450 million monthly users all over the world. According to Onavo data, the app thrived especially in countries where Facebook wasn’t as dominant.


Systrom dutifully helped Zuckerberg sell the vision. The money was perhaps even more convincing to Koum than Systrom was. When the deal was announced, everyone at Instagram was shocked all over again. The price was a stunning $19 billion. Plus, Koum got a seat on Facebook’s board, and WhatsApp got to stay in its own offices in a nearby town called Mountain View, with about fifty employees who were all now tremendously wealthy.


About Trump Clinton issue with FB

In the internal paper, the employee explained that Trump had outspent Clinton between June and November, paying Facebook $44 million compared to her $28 million. And, with Facebook’s guidance, his campaign had operated like a tech company, rapidly testing ads using Facebook’s software until they found the perfect messaging for various audiences.

Trump’s campaign had a total of 5.9 million different versions of his ads, compared to Clinton’s 66,000, in a way that better leveraged Facebook’s ability to optimize for outcomes, the employee said. Most of Trump’s ads asked people to perform an action, like donating or signing up for a list, making it easier for a computer to measure success or failure. Those ads also helped him collect email addresses. Emails were crucial because Facebook had a tool called Lookalike Audience. When Trump or any advertiser presented a set of emails, Facebook’s software could find more people who thought similarly to the members of the set, based on their behavior and interests.


Clinton’s ads, on the other hand, weren’t about getting email addresses. They tended to promote her brand and philosophy. Her return on investment would be harder for Facebook’s system to measure and improve through software. Her campaign also barely used the Lookalike tool.



Personal conflicts

Mark Zuckerberg's mentality is all about speed and monetization and Systrom is slow to make changes and believes in artistic aspirations. He was reluctant to enable Ads on Instagram but was forced to do so by Zuckerberg. Even then, Systrom was very selective on Ad content as he wants Ad to look like an artistic expression than an Ad. 


When Snapchat’s popularity was going up, he was forced to incorporate disappearing stories on Instagram, which was a huge success; mimicking Snapchat’s core feature. 


Facebook pushed to put advertising in WhatsApp Status, their version of Stories. But in order to place those ads in front of the right people, WhatsApp would have to know more about the users of the chat app, which would mean chipping away at the encryption. The founders, Brian Acton and Jan Koum, stubbornly resisted the idea, which violated their motto—No ads, no games, no gimmicks—and which they thought would break users’ trust. Acton decided to leave Facebook: his decision cost him $850 million in stock options.



When Instagram’s user base reached 1 billion, faster than facebook’s same milestone, Zuckerberg was getting upset. He felt Instagram reached the milestone because of Facebook’s network effect, but at the same time, Facebook did not grow much with Instagram. He felt Instagram is making Facebook irreverent and being a creator of Facebook, he felt offended; He wanted to stop the cannibalization of Instagram. ​​Facebook's growth team was asked to look into cannibalization, with help from about 15 data scientists at both Facebook and Instagram.


When Schultz completed his research on whether Instagram would cannibalize Facebook, the leaders read the data very differently. Zuckerberg thought the research showed that it was likely Instagram would threaten Facebook’s continued dominance—and that the cannibalization would start in the next six months. Looking at the chart years into the future, if Instagram kept growing and kept stealing users’ time away from Facebook, Facebook’s growth could go to zero or, even worse, it could lose users. Because Facebook’s average revenue per user was so much higher, any minutes spent on Instagram instead of Facebook would be bad for the company’s profitability, he argued.


The rift between them got worsened when Zuckerberg appointed a CEO for Instagram and eventually both founders of Instagram left Facebook.

February 13, 2022

Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever by Robin Wigglesworth

Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever by Robin Wigglesworth

[insightful book on the current state of the stock market; esp. Index funds & EFTs]

The hedge fund industry first emerged in the 1960s but had enjoyed explosive growth over the last decade, and by 2007 managed nearly $2 trillion on behalf of investors around the world. 

Index funds (dubbed as passive investing) are investment vehicles that simply try to mimic an index of financial securities. An S&P 500 index fund buys every single one of the five hundred stocks in the index, exactly according to their relative stock market value—so it buys more of Apple than it does Alaska Air Group.

During his Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholder meeting on May 5, 2017 speech, Buffet said, There’s one more person that I would like to introduce to you today and I’m quite sure he’s here. I haven’t seen him, but I understood he was coming, Buffett said, scanning the audience. I believe that he made it today and that is Jack Bogle . . . Jack Bogle(Vanguard founder) has probably done more for the American investor than any man in the country. Jack, could you stand up? There he is. To thunderous applause, the gaunt but beaming Bogle, dressed in a dark suit and checkered open-neck shirt, stood up, waved to the crowd, and took a small bow toward Buffett and Munger’s podium.

The public universe of index funds stood at almost $16 trillion by the end of 2020, according to Morningstar, a prominent data provider in the investment industry. But many big pension plans and sovereign wealth funds also have huge internal index-tracking strategies or pay an investment group to do it for them outside of a formal fund structure. BlackRock, the world’s biggest money manager, estimated in 2017 that there was another $6.8 trillion in nonpublic passive equity strategies, managed internally or by the likes of BlackRock. Assuming a growth rate similar to the public index fund world, that means that over $26 trillion—and that is likely a conservative estimate—now does nothing more than slavishly track some financial index, whether the S&P 500 for American stocks, the Bloomberg Barclays Aggregate for the US bond market or the JPMorgan EMBI index for developing country debt. The biggest equity fund in the world is now an index fund. The biggest bond fund is as well. The leading gold index fund now holds more of the yellow metal than most central banks, an astonishing eleven hundred tons.

Financial math behind index fund:

A little-known turn-of-the-twentieth-century French mathematician named Louis Bachelier with ideas astonishingly far ahead of their time. Bachelier’s thesis Theory of Speculation is now widely considered one of the seminal works in the history of finance, the first-ever rigorous, mathematical examination of how financial securities appear to move in unpredictable and random ways. Although little appreciated in his own time, Bachelier is today considered one of the great academics of the nineteenth century, the father of a field now known as mathematical finance. 

In 1932, Alfred Cowles (his family-owned Chicago Tribune and owner) set up the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics, with the motto “Science is Measurement. The Cowles Commission would go on to host and support an all-star cast of great economists and financial academics over the years, such as James Tobin, Joseph Stiglitz, Abba Lerner, Kenneth Arrow, Jacob Marschak, Tjalling Koopmans, Franco Modigliani, and Harry Markowitz, several of whom would go on to win Nobel Prizes for work at the commission. In fact, one could argue that in its heyday it was the most influential economic think tank in history.

Success always has many parents, and there are many people who can make a plausible claim to have launched the first index fund, depending on one’s definition. Wells Fargo arguably got there first with its venture for Samsonite. Yet it was a small, unwieldy account rather than a formal fund, and it tracked a cumbersome, equal-weighted NYSE index, leading some of its rivals to claim they got to the promised land first.

The S&P 500, as it was called, despite initially tracking only 425 companies, was calculated by a Datatron computer linked directly to the stock market ticker machines now set up on Wall Street, and could continuously measure the new index. That was a tremendous improvement. By 1962, the S&P 500 was computed every five minutes (and every fifteen seconds by 1986).

In 1973, Sanjoy Basu, a finance professor at McMaster University in Ontario, published a paper that indicated that companies with low stock prices relative to their earnings did better than the efficient-markets hypothesis would suggest. Essentially, he showed that the value investing principles espoused by Benjamin Graham in the 1930s—which revolved around buying cheap, out-of-favor stocks trading below their intrinsic worth—was a durable investment factor. By systematically buying all cheap stocks, investors could, in theory, beat the broader market over time.

Behavioral economists, on the other hand, argue that factors tend to be the product of our irrational human biases. Investors tend to overpay for fast-growing, glamorous stocks, and unfairly shun duller, steadier ones. Smaller stocks do well because we are illogically drawn to names we know well. The momentum factor, on the other hand, works because investors initially underreact to news but overreact in the long run, or often sell winners too quickly and hang on to bad bets for far longer than is advisable.

Nonetheless, the origin story of index investing is still incomplete. If Wells Fargo’s Management Sciences unit was the original Manhattan Project of index funds, most of the subsequent iterations were important but arguably incremental. They mostly consisted of proliferation, of spreading the approach to new corners of the investment world. Vanguard brought it to the masses, and DFA showed that index investing could be done with a twist. But these were still mostly natural evolutionary steps, building on the initial foundations established by Wells Fargo, American National Bank of Chicago, and Batterymarch.

The next stage would be the development of the equivalent of the hydrogen bomb to Wells Fargo’s atomic bomb, a sea change in the history of financial markets, and investing with ramifications that we are still grappling to understand today. Ironically, while Wells Fargo’s crew of economic rock stars had helped develop the first index fund, its next major mutation was engineered by a group of finance industry nobodies.

“I had no idea that, within a decade, the ETF idea [proposed by Most at their meeting] would ignite a flame that would change not only the nature of indexing but also the entire field of investing”, Bogle admitted. “I can unhesitatingly describe Nathan Most’s visionary creation of the ETF as the most successful financial marketing idea so far during the twenty-first century. Whether it proves to be the most successful investment idea of the century remains to be seen”.

Most’s eclectic background also provided the spark behind the invention of what would become known as the ETF. During his travels around the Pacific, he had appreciated the efficiency of how traders would buy and sell warehouse receipts of commodities, rather than the more cumbersome physical vats of coconut oil, barrels of crude, or ingots of gold. This opened up a panoply of opportunities for creative financial engineers.

You store a commodity and you get a warehouse receipt and you can finance on that warehouse receipt. You can sell it, do a lot of things with it. Because you don’t want to be moving the merchandise back and forth all the time, so you keep it in place and you simply transfer the warehouse receipt, he later recalled

The Amex could create a kind of legal warehouse where it could place the S&P 500 stocks, and then create and list shares in the warehouse itself for people to trade. The new warehouse-cum-fund would take advantage of the growth and electronic evolution in portfolio trading and a little-known aspect of mutual funds Stock exchange specialists—the trading firms on the floor of the exchange that match buyers and sellers—would be authorized to be able to create or redeem these shares according to demand. They could take advantage of any differences that might open up between the price of the warehouse and the stock it contained, an arbitrage opportunity that should help keep it trading in line with its assets.

In basic terms, investors can either trade shares of the warehouse between themselves or go to the warehouse and exchange their shares in it for a slice of the stocks it holds. Or they can turn up at the warehouse with a suitable bundle of stocks and exchange them for shares in the warehouse. Moreover, because no money changes hands when shares in the warehouse are created or redeemed, capital gains tax can be delayed until the investor actually sells their shares—a side effect that has proven vital to the growth of ETFs in the United States. Only when an ETF is actually sold will investors have to pay any capital gains taxes due.

Hayne Leland, John O’Brien, and Mark Rubinstein—the founders of the eponymous investment advisory firm LOR—were determined to find another big idea to restore their luster. The trio set about devising something they dubbed SuperShares. The essence was an ingenious but fiendishly complex investment product that would slice and dice the entire S&P 500 into return segments for investors to choose from according to their risk appetite, and trade on an exchange. At its core was something called the Index Trust SuperUnit, which in some respects resembled what would later be known as an exchange-traded fund

On March 9, 1990, the TSE unveiled what would be the world’s first successful exchange-traded fund, the Toronto 35 Index Participation Fund, or TIPS. Although the Canadians might have crossed the line first due to a more relaxed regulator, the design of the first-ever ETF was still inspired by the Amex and State Street Spider team’s frustrating but pioneering work

Seeing Canada copying a US invention and bringing it to life so quickly was grating to SPDR’s supporters. Luckily, they also had a supporter in the SEC’s chairman, Richard Breeden.in December 1992 the SEC finally gave its blessing. ​​Like Vanguard, SPDR didn’t pay sales fees to financial advisors and brokers. That meant they had no incentive to push their clients into the new product. Although it traded like a stock, it didn’t earn banks' underwriting fees either. The situation was so dire that the Amex at one point even considered scrapping it

Not only was SPDR by then a $125 billion behemoth, but it was also comfortably the most heavily traded stock in the world—a source of immense pride to the people who had slogged their way through its creation and troubled early years. SPDR was a product that launched an entire vibrant and still-growing industry.

After a hefty internal debate, the Amex team decided against trying to patent their invention—with seismic consequences. Given SPDR’s public filings, it was easy for rivals to copy the design. 

The index fund revolution had finally won. From its modest, iconoclastic roots, it had now finally established itself in the heart of Wall Street and is now gradually taking over more and more of the investment world. The finance industry may be unpopular, but this has so far been a boon to humankind, with everyone directly or indirectly reaping the benefits through cheaper savings. Just over the past two decades, the cost of a US mutual fund has now nearly halved. Fink compares the impact of ETFs to how Amazon has transformed retail, with lower prices, convenience, and transparency. The asset management industry was never designed for those things. It was designed with opaqueness and complexity, he says.

The ETF has supercharged index funds, yet the ease with which almost any financial security can be packaged inside means that it is now allowing investors to make the same costly mistakes that first nurtured the industry in the first place

In 2000, there were still just 88 ETFs with just $70 billion of assets, compared to over 500 index mutual funds that managed $426 billion, according to data from the Investment Company Institute. A decade later, the number of ETFs had swelled to 2,621, narrowly surpassing the number of index mutual funds, but in money terms still trailing slightly behind the $1.5 trillion that their more conventional, mainstream counterparts managed. By the end of 2020, there were nearly 7,000 ETFs globally with $7.7 trillion of assets, according to the ICI. That is over twice as many traditional index funds tracked by the ICI, in money terms as finally large as their older cousins, and approaching the number of actively managed mutual funds in the United States.

The vast majority of the money is housed inside the big, mainstream ETFs, such as State Street’s pioneering SPDR, or the equivalent S&P 500 ETFs managed by rivals BlackRock and Vanguard. It is also still primarily a US-based industry. 

There are only about forty-one thousand public companies in the world today. In reality, probably only three to four thousand of those stocks are tradable

Nonetheless, the explosion of indices and index funds of various stripes is emblematic of a worrying trend. The best long-term results come from buying a big, well-diversified portfolio of financial securities, and trading as little as possible. Jack Bogle built a vast financial empire around these two basic principles.

The newest trend is for actively managed ETFs. Essentially, they are traditional funds with the usual medley of analysts, traders, and portfolio managers who use the superior ETF structure—tradable and in the United States tax-advantaged—rather than the conventional legal vehicles that have been the norm for most of the post–World War II era.

It is telling that the industry’s Big Three—BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street—and many of their smaller rivals have eschewed these, concerned that these more niche, complex products may tarnish the entire index fund universe. AFTER A RELENTLESS DECADE, there are signs that the index fund launch bonanza is slowing down. Most major tracts of industry real estate are now utterly and likely permanently controlled by a handful of big players, chiefly BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street.

The companies that provide financial market indices were long considered humdrum utilities, often started as adjunct businesses to big financial newspapers like the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and Japan’s Nikkei. No one really considered them a big revenue stream. Today, creating benchmarks is a wildly profitable industry in its own right, dominated by its own Big Three—MSCI, FTSE Russell, and S&P Dow Jones Indices. Together, they have a market share of about 70 percent. Collectively, they arguably constitute the most underappreciated power brokers of the financial world.

Quite simply, they have morphed from simple snapshots of markets into a force that exerts power over them—largely thanks to the growth of index funds, which in practice delegate their investment decisions to the companies that create the benchmarks.

Despite its dramatic stock market gains over the past decade, S&P Dow Jones Indices—one of the biggest providers of financial benchmarks—had long refrained from adding Tesla to its flagship index, the S&P 500, for one simple reason: To be included, a company has to be consistently profitable, a requirement that Tesla had struggled to meet. But Tesla’s notching up four consecutive quarters of profits by the summer of 2020 finally made it eligible, with the mere possibility of helping fuel the rally.

Although Tesla would henceforth become an investable company for all fund managers who benchmark their performance against the S&P 500, they at least have a choice whether to buy or not. The trillions of dollars in passive index strategies that slavishly track the index have no option but to acquire stock in the proportion to the company’s weight in the benchmark, whatever the price or attractiveness of Tesla’s business.

Without looking under the hood, many investors may be surprised to learn that State Street and Vanguard’s US technology ETFs—which together manage over $80 billion—don’t actually include Amazon, Facebook, and Google’s parent Alphabet, simply because they are classified as a retailer and communications companies, respectively, by S&P Dow Jones Indices. In contrast, Apple, primarily a maker of physical devices, and credit card companies Mastercard and Visa are classified as technology stocks.

The power of MSCI, FTSE RUSSELL, and S&P Dow Jones Indices is largely over only stock markets. Of even greater and direct importance to countries are their presence and weighting in various influential bond market indices. These may not have the cachet of the brand-name stock market benchmarks bandied about on TV bulletins, but indices like the Bloomberg Barclays Global Aggregate or JPMorgan’s EMBI and GBI-EM are also powerful in their own way

Given that most index funds are capitalization-weighted, that means that most of the money they take in goes into the biggest stocks (or the largest debtors). Critically, and contrary to popular conception, an index fund does not automatically buy more of a security simply because it has gone up in price, given that it already holds that security. But if the fund takes in new money, then that will go into securities according to their shifting size, and that can in theory disproportionately benefit stocks that are already on the up. For instance, over the past four decades, on average 14 cents of every new dollar put into the Vanguard 500 fund or State Street’s SPDR would have gone into the five biggest companies. A decade ago it was closer to 10 cents. Today, it is over 20 cents—the highest on record.4 Although those bigger companies are, well, bigger, those extra cents can have a disproportional market impact, according to a 2020 study.5 In other words, size can beget size, a dynamic that could contribute to the tendency of financial markets toward bubbles, according to critics

On the Impossibility of Informationally Efficient Markets was a frontal assault on Eugene Fama’s theory, pointing out that if market prices truly perfectly reflected all relevant information—such as corporate data, economic news, or industry trends—then no one would be incentivized to collect the information needed to trade. After all, doing so is a costly pursuit. But then markets would no longer be efficient. In other words, someone has to make markets efficient, and somehow they have to be compensated for the work involved.

The old days of have a hunch, buy a bunch, go to lunch are long gone. Once upon a time, simply having an MBA or a CFA might be considered an edge in the investment industry. Add in the effort to actually read quarterly financial reports from companies and you had at least a good shot at excelling. Nowadays, MBAs and CFAs are rife in the finance industry, and algorithms can read thousands of quarterly financial reports in the time it takes a human to switch on their computer. These days, even Ph.D. economists aren’t guaranteed jobs in asset management, unless they have married their degree with a programming language like Python, which would allow them to parse vast digital datasets that are now commonplace, such as credit card data, satellite imagery, and consumer sentiment gleaned from continuously scraping billions of social media posts.

The result is that every facet of the money management industry is being altered by the advent of index funds. Many financial advisors no longer bet on the latest trendy stock or rock-star fund manager at Fidelity; they put their clients into a mix of index funds. Private banks in Zürich or Singapore are starting to eschew hedge funds in favor of constructing diversified portfolios of ETFs. Even hedge funds themselves increasingly use ETFs to implement their trades.

Although asset management remains a lucrative business, most trends are pointing the wrong away. Fees are under relentless pressure. When Fidelity— which eventually swallowed its misgivings and belatedly jumped into the index fund game—launched the first-ever zero-fee ETF in 2018, it sent tremors through the stocks of rival money managers, as people started to realize that the end game is likely to be cost-free investing, at least for simple, plain-vanilla index funds.

This was the subject of an eye-catching paper by Harvard Law professor John Coates, entitled The Problem of Twelve, where he argued that the mega-trend of passive investing threatened to hand unsurpassed power to just a dozen or so people working inside the index fund giants, the proxy advisors, and a handful of traditional investment groups that will likely continue to thrive. 

Over the past decade, about 80 cents of every dollar that has gone into the US investment industry has ended up at Vanguard, State Street, and BlackRock. As a result, the combined stake in S&P 500 companies held by the Big Three has quadrupled over the past two decades, from about 5 percent in 1998 to north of 20 percent today. Because not all investors actually vote at annual meetings, Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street account for about a quarter of all shareholder votes, according to a study by Harvard Law School’s Lucian Bebchuk and Boston University’s Scott Hirst.

Assuming that past trends continue, they estimate that the Big Three will account for over a third of all voting shareholders within the next decade, and about 41 percent inside the next twenty years. In this ‘Giant Three’ scenario, three investment managers would largely dominate shareholder voting in practically all significant U.S. companies that do not have a controlling shareholder, Bebchuk and Hirst pointed out in a 2019 paper

https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/John-Coates.pdf


February 10, 2022

What Happened to Goldman Sachs An Insiders Story of Organizational Drift and Its Unintended Consequences by Steven G. Mandis

 What Happened to Goldman Sachs An Insiders Story of Organizational Drift and Its Unintended Consequences by Steven G. Mandis


There are two easy and popular explanations about what happened to the Goldman culture. When I was there, some people believed the culture was changing or had changed because of the shifts in organizational structure brought on by the transformation from a private partnership to a publicly-traded company. Goldman had held its initial public offering (IPO) on the NYSE in 1999, the last of the major investment banks to do so. The second easy explanation is that, whatever the changes, they happened since Lloyd Blankfein took over as CEO and were the responsibility of the CEO and the trading-oriented culture some believe he represents.


Some at Goldman have even claimed that having many alumni in important positions has disadvantaged the firm


The philosophy behind the firm’s rise was best expressed by Gus Levy, a senior partner (with a trading background) at Goldman from 1969 until his death in 1976, who is attributed with a maxim that expressed Goldman’s approach: greedy, but long-term greedy.15 The emphasis was on sound decision-making for long-term success, and this commitment to the future was evidenced by the partners’ reinvestment in the firm of nearly 100 percent of the earnings.


Another common misperception among the public is that today Goldman primarily provides investment banking services for large corporations because the firm works on many high-profile M&A deals and IPOs; however, investment banking now typically represents only about 10 to 15 percent of revenue. Today, the majority of the revenues come from trading and investing its own capital. The profits from trading and principal investing are often disproportionately higher than the revenue because the businesses are much more scalable than investment banking. Today about 40 percent of Goldman’s revenue comes from outside the United States and it has offices in all major financial centers around the world, with 50 percent of its employees based overseas


There’s always a natural tension between business owners who want to make the highest profits possible and clients who want to buy goods and services for as low as possible, to make their profits the highest possible. Being a small private partnership allowed Goldman the flexibility to make its own decisions about what was best in its own interpretation of the long term in order to help address this tension.


Goldman and McKinsey compete for the best and brightest graduates every year, and there are elements of the McKinsey culture that are similar in many ways to Goldman’s, especially to the Goldman I knew when I started. When attending McKinsey training programs, I could have closed my eyes and replaced the word McKinsey with Goldman, and it would have been like my 1992 Goldman training program all over again. McKinsey has an intense focus on recruiting, training, socialization of new members, and teamwork. It also has long-standing, revered, written business principles. Lastly, it has an incredible global network.


Shared Principles and Values

  1. Our client's interests always come first. 

  2. Our assets are our people, capital, and reputation. 

  3. Our goal is to provide superior returns to our shareholders. 

  4. We take great pride in the professional quality of our work. 

  5. We stress creativity and imagination in everything we do. 

  6. We make an unusual effort to identify and recruit the very best person for every job. 

  7. We offer our people the opportunity to move ahead more rapidly than is possible at most other places. 

  8. We stress teamwork in everything we do. 

  9. The dedication of our people to the firm and the intense effort they give their jobs are greater than one finds in most other organizations.

  10. We consider our size as an asset that we try hard to preserve. 

  11. We constantly strive to anticipate the rapidly changing needs of our clients and to develop new services to meet those needs. 

  12. We regularly receive confidential information as part of our normal client relationships. 

  13. Our business is highly competitive, and we aggressively seek to expand our client relationships. 

  14. Integrity and honesty are at the heart of our business. 



Goldman executives were conscious of sustaining this culture when recruiting and tried to hire the best of the best, but not just for their intelligence, drive, or experience. The partners looked for people who fit a certain profile: people who had all the requisite skills and knowledge were hardworking and driven, and also espoused a value system consistent with Goldman’s


Goldman’s practice was to hire directly from top business schools rather than from other firms because recent MBAs were more malleable; the plasticity of a young MBA’s character made it easier to inculcate the Goldman ethos.


Soon after I was hired, I was asked to review résumés from Midwestern schools for candidates to interview. When I was given hundreds of them bound in three-ring folders, I asked the vice president who had given me the assignment, How should I go about choosing?


  • He shrugged and told me to take anyone who didn’t have a certain grade point average and SAT score and throw them out, and then get back to him.

  • I did that, but I was still left with what still seemed like hundreds of résumés. So I asked, Now what do I do?

  • Take out anyone who doesn’t play a varsity sport or do something really exceptional or substantive in public service, he told me, waving me out of his office.

  • Once again I culled the folders, but still, I had too many. So I went back again.

  • Now throw out any that don’t have both sports and public service, and raise your grade and SAT requirements.

  • After this round, I came up with the thirty people we would interview to select the one or two who would get an offer.



Partners also created stronger networks because of the trust. Building a network involves connecting the dots, or rather connecting Goldman people to each other and to important people outside the firm. Almost a decade before he crafted the firm’s business principles, John Whitehead wrote a set of guidelines for the investment banking services area, one of which was, Important people, like to deal with important people. Are you one? Gaining access to important people requires introductions from people willing to make the call. 


A Harvard Business School case study about Goldman’s training found that Goldman used the Socratic method to explore questions through discussion and debate.


Another significant innovation in the late 1980s and early 1990s was the heavy use of the emerging technology of voicemail, adopted much earlier and used more effectively at Goldman than at other firms. Voicemail helped improve coordination and teamwork because multiple people could be given information simultaneously and they could hear the tone of a message. The technology resulted in better execution for clients and gave Goldman a competitive advantage. Goldman continued to rely on voicemail heavily even after it had e-mail capability because e-mail lacked the inflection and expressive capacity of the human voice and was less effective in maintaining the firm’s social network.

Goldman people responded quickly to voicemail (and later e-mail messages) because the culture demanded that they do so. A quick and comprehensive response was and still is the norm; it would be culturally unacceptable not to respond as soon as possible.


AT A GOLDMAN PARTNER MEETING, THE STORY GOES, A SENIOR partner asked the new partners to identify the two men who were most important to the firm’s business. The new partners responded with last names: Goldman, Sachs, and Weinberg. The senior partner then revealed the answer: Senator Carter Glass and Representative Henry Steagall.


Between 1987 and 1994, the firm had downsized six different times in different divisions in response to different earnings


Equity-holding partners were now called managing directors, as were almost one hundred of the thousands of vice presidents (the more experienced ones). Those who were partners in the firm were internally called partner managing directors, or PMDs. 


Non-partner managing directors are likely to earn $2 million or more each, recruiters say. Additionally, the firm changed its compensation practices. All MDs received participation shares, whose value was tied to the overall profitability of the firm and not to an individual or departmental performance. 


Along with limited liability, however, the firm instituted changes to the capital obligations of those leaving the partnership; under the new regime, retiring partners were required to keep their capital in their firm for a longer period, on average six years


In 1995, the firm revamped its governance structure, forming two new eighteen-person decision-making groups: the partnership committee and the operating committee. The operating committee focused on the coordination of strategy and operations among the firm’s departments, divisions, and geographies. The partnership committee oversaw the firm’s capital structure as well as the selection of partners. Soon afterward, the firm established an executive committee—the ultimate decision-making group—which was much smaller than its predecessor, the management committee. The executive committee’s charter included all issues that did not require a vote by the full partnership or a partner’s individual consent


In addition, two new eighteen-person committees were formed. The six individuals on the executive committee had much more power than the management committee had enjoyed, including the ability to change the leadership


Less than six months after Goldman went public, in 1999 certain provisions of the Glass–Steagall Act were repealed by the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act, and President Bill Clinton signed the legislation that year. Former Goldman co-senior partner Bob Rubin was secretary of the Treasury at the time, and he later joined Citigroup.


The repeal meant that commercial banks, investment banks, securities firms, and insurance companies could be combined.43 Commercial banks started to buy investment banks, spawning a massive consolidation in the banking industry. Some believed it was inevitable that Goldman would be bought. The firm suddenly looked small compared to its new direct competitors, and, with its market position, brand, and relationships, it would have been a prize. Rather than be taken over, the partners decided to grow.


 Morgan was considered a white-shoe firm, referring to white buck shoes—laced white suede or buckskin shoes with red soles, which stereotypically were worn at Ivy. ​​League colleges, while Dean Witter Reynolds was a firm with strong retail distribution: nine thousand stockbrokers serving more than 3 million customers. Dean Witter also owned Discover Card. Generally, white-shoe investment bankers often looked down on retail stockbrokers, whose alma maters typically were not the elite schools.


Hedge funds also changed the landscape. Unlike many traditional mutual funds, which had a buy and hold mentality, many hedge funds went in and out of securities with high frequency. They typically borrowed money from investment banks to buy securities, and they shorted securities.


Goldman established Goldman Sachs Asset Management (GSAM) to serve institutional and individual investors worldwide.GSAM became a strategic priority, in part, because it was not as capital intensive as proprietary trading and it offered consistent fees, which were a percentage of assets under management. When Goldman went public, establishing the asset management business proved to have been a wise strategic decision for this reason. Institutional investors buying the stocks of investment banks, and research analysts covering investment banks, liked the consistency of earnings and gave a higher valuation to the earnings from asset management divisions than to trading earnings


In its quest for growth and profits, Goldman also began to adjust its business mix. The prioritized opportunities for growth required more capital: trading, proprietary trading, merchant banking/principal investing, and international. Trading and principal investments grew 20 percent annually from 1996 to 2009, whereas investment banking grew 7 percent.

The changing business mix at Goldman, with so much more revenue beginning to come from trading in particular both reflected and contributed to organizational drift. The balance between banking and trading was changing. Also, international growth started to become a challenge. From 2005 to 2007, trading and principal investing accounted for about 70 percent of revenues, and investment banking had plunged to 15 percent.


How big and important are proprietary trading and principal investing activities at Goldman? Glenn Schorr, a Nomura Securities equity research analyst covering Goldman stock, estimated that the Volcker Rule, which is intended to restrict proprietary trading and principal investing at investment banks, would impact 48 percent of Goldman’s total consolidated revenue. To put this into context, he estimated the impact at 27 percent, 9 percent, and 8 percent of total consolidated revenues of Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, and J.P. Morgan, respectively.


One of the basic principles of the financial system is that risk is rewarded. Exactly how well Goldman partners were rewarded—what they earned or owned—had been a closely guarded secret, but it became public information in the filings for the IPO.


Goldman still has its leading market share, in part because it effectively manages conflicts to its advantage—and it also faces reputational and legal questions and consequences, because conflict management is an art and not science. If Goldman had not managed conflicts, its ability to grow and maintain market share would have been challenged. The management of conflicts maximizes opportunities to access scarce resources.


After Sarbanes–Oxley passed, and in compliance with new requirements of the NYSE, Goldman added two outside directors. Thus, the majority of its board (60 percent) was comprised of outside, independent directors.


Whether Goldman would have survived without government intervention is debatable[2008 fin. crisis]. In fact, in the days immediately following the collapse of Lehman, it became apparent that both Goldman and Morgan Stanley could have shared the same fate as Lehman.


dissonance is the term used by Columbia University sociologist David Stark to describe the ability of those in an organization to challenge one another, to ask questions, and explain their own views. The dissonance of this type leads to more scrutiny of decisions as well as greater innovation and performance. The financial interdependence of partners during Goldman’s partnership days, as well as the social network of trust among them and the less hierarchical structure, encouraged this, and though the new organizational and incentive structure of the company has limited this residual dissonance, a strong enough social network among executives at the firm still exists that these were key factors that differentiated Goldman during the credit crisis. They helped to break through structural secrecy, and that, combined with more expertise at the top of the firm in trading and risk assessment, enabled Goldman to do a better job of perceiving and managing the risk that led to losses.


Goldman was the only firm that had so many risk experts in the highest levels of management. As mentioned earlier, Goldman had learned from its 1994 experience. Value at Risk (VaR) is a widely used measure of the risk of loss on a specific portfolio of financial assets, expressed in terms of a probability of losing a given percentage of the value of a portfolio—in mark-to-market value—over a certain time. For example, if a portfolio of stocks has a one-day 5 percent VaR of $1 million, there is a 0.05 probability that the portfolio will fall in value by more than $1 million over a one-day period.


During an interview for this book, an executive at a competing firm (who had earlier worked at Goldman) explained that his firm simply did not give the same attention to risk management. He explained that Goldman’s biggest advantage was that its top people were real traders and risk takers or had access to and dialogue with such traders, as well as the culture to support investment in the systems and the dialogue. He explained that this was why he hadn’t been surprised when Hank Paulson and the board had bypassed John Thornton and John Thain (to whom Paulson allegedly had verbally promised the CEO position) and picked Blankfein to succeed him as CEO. Thornton and Thain did not have as much real-time and extensive expertise in trading and risk. The firm gained trading expertise at its top with Blankfein, and that helped it navigate the credit crisis.


In late 2006, Goldman recognized the need to de-risk and moved swiftly to do so without warning clients or the government. After a period of mounting concern about Goldman’s overexposure to mortgages, in late 2006 Viniar and a group of executives drafted a memo describing their course of action for reducing that exposure. Goldman’s critics are quick to point to this statement: Distribute as much as possible on bonds created from new loan securitizations and clean previous positions. Matt Taibbi translates this to, Find suckers to buy as much of [the] risky inventory as possible. Taibbi then provides an apt analogy: Goldman was like a car dealership that realized it had a whole lot full of cars with faulty brakes. Instead of announcing a recall, it surged ahead with a two-fold plan to make a fortune: first, by dumping the dangerous products on other people, and second, by taking out life insurance against the fools who bought the deadly cars.32 According to Taibbi, within two months of the memo, Goldman had gone from betting $6 billion on mortgages to betting $10 billion against them—a shift of $16 billion.


Despite public outcry and even disappointment among clients, Goldman doesn’t lack business. Its brand is still highly rated, and Goldman offers a unique value proposition to clients for several reasons, primarily related to access, information, risk management, and people. Goldman is in the center of a large information flow that it gathers from clients. Goldman uses its risk management capabilities and its culture of teamwork to gain insights and then packages the insights and information, makes timely introductions, and executes smart trades. According to client interviews, the firm will continue to excel and dominate, because, relative to its competitors, it generally provides better advice, information, access, and liquidity. 


with trading and principal investing contributing 68 percent of the company’s 2007 revenue, compared with 9 percent from advisory fees, some clients questioned whether they could count on Goldman to provide unbiased advice


There is also strong competition for the best talent. Many talented individuals interested in finance go to private equity firms and hedge funds, which offer attractive opportunities.69 Many smart people are going into technology or other fields. But clients felt that Goldman would probably be considered the best alternative generally, not necessarily in every area of specialization, if one is interested in banking or wants training and credentials.


Many at Goldman subscribe to the notion that because the firm serves a higher purpose, they are more driven to excellence and are more dedicated than their peers at other firms. The pursuit of profit is portrayed as virtuous, and hard work is viewed as a kind of, for lack of a better phrase, religious duty.


The sense of higher purpose is reinforced by the relationship between Goldman and the government. The White House has often looked to Wall Street experts for advice, and Goldman partners have advised several presidents and cabinet members, leading to an incestuous web between government and Goldman—hence the nickname Government Sachs. Goldman also realized the wisdom of hiring former senior government officials. At the highest levels within Goldman, there was, and is, a conscious effort to build and maintain relationships with important people.


A concerning issue about the organizational drift toward a legal definition of ethics is that Goldman and the other banks have a significant influence or role in determining the legal line. For example, Goldman has reportedly spent over $15 million in lobbying related to Dodd-Frank and less than two-thirds of the regulations have been implemented.2 Securities and investment firms spent more than $101 million lobbying regulators in 2011, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan research group. That is on top of $103 million spent lobbying lawmakers and regulators in 2010


The following summary should help leaders and managers think about the organizational drift that has, is, and will be happening at their own organizations


  • Shared values, whether codified or uncodified, tie an organization together. 

  • Social networks can create competitive advantages and improve performance. 

  • Financial interdependence is important as a self-regulator. 

  • Public disclosure supports an organization’s values and strengthens the organization itself.

  • Generating dissonance or perplexing situations that provoke innovative inquiry can create competitive advantages and improve performance. 

  • A sense of higher purpose, beyond making money in a materialistic society, can help people make sense of their roles.

  • An organization’s culture is transmitted from one generation to the next as new group members become acculturated or socialized.

  • Organizational exceptions may address short-term issues but may cause long-term ones.

  • The ability to make rational decisions is limited, or bounded, by the extent of people’s information.

  • Firms must think about long-term greed and what it means. Through actions and training, leaders must explain the pressures on short-term thinking and how the firm resolves the conflicts of short- and long-term goals.

  • Leaders must understand that external influences can shape the culture. 

  • An organization needs to understand to what extent models impact behavior, decisions made by business leaders, and organizational culture. 

  • Leaders get too much credit and too much blame. Leaders need to uphold the firm’s shared values—and that is a key component to leadership.

  • An organization’s structure, incentives, and values last longer and have more impact than those of individual leaders.