Goldman Sachs' new office in San Francisco, which has no dress code and offers kombucha (a kind of fermented tea) on tap, is a visible manifestation of a deeper transformation taking place within the storied New York investment bank.
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The new office, which will eventually be home to 80 people, is headed by Managing Director Jeff Winner, whom Goldman Sachs hired in January to help lead the engineering team for Marcus by Goldman Sachs.
To staff a tech-oriented office in San Francisco with the brightest talent, the stuffiness traditionally associated with Goldman Sachs — the expensive suits, the lack of fun amenities — will not do, Bloomberg reports.
Marcus by Goldman Sachs is the company's digital consumer bank, started in 2016, whose roots date back to the worst of the financial crisis, when Goldman Sachs became a traditional bank holding company as part of its survival strategy.
Trading revenues are not what they used to be for the company, so it has expanded into online consumer banking. The company is predicting revenue of $1B for Marcus by 2020.
Winner moved to Goldman after leading engineering teams for Twitter, Uber Technologies and most recently Stripe Inc., a software company. He is pushing a startup culture at the new office, but the overall reinvention of Goldman Sachs is coming from CEO Lloyd Blankfein, who envisions the bank as a tech company.
The new Goldman Sachs office includes more than just the kind of amenities associated with tech companies full of millennials. Winner has instituted procedures associated with that world as well, including updated interviewing techniques for new engineers, such as pair programming, in which two people sit together and take turns writing and evaluating code, he told Bloomberg.
Goldman Sachs has long used sophisticated tech in its operations, such as its risk-management system SecDB, but the online Marcus by Goldman Sachs represents a new entry into tech for the company, as it recruits engineers to improve the product and make the customer experience better.
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