Goldman Sachs Is (Almost) a Tech Company

European Straits #17

Dear all,

After several months where I mostly wrote materials for my ‘HEDGE’ manuscript together with shorter online formats, I’ve just published a new issue of our long-form series The Family Papers: 11 Notes on Goldman Sachs.

This is not the first time I’ve explored a large company’s strategy and business model using the ‘11 Notes’ format. 11 Notes on Amazon was published a bit more than a year ago. Another one, covering Berkshire Hathaway (co-written with my co-founder Oussama Ammar), fit in the same format, albeit with a slightly different angle. (In the future, we hope to publish ‘11 Notes on Facebook’, ‘11 Notes on Netflix’, ‘11 Notes on Apple’...)

For many people, Goldman Sachs is the new giant squid that is strangling the world in the context of financialization. But for us contrarians interested in technology and business strategy, it has recently emerged as an extraordinary case of an incumbent of the 20th century that can now be rightly defined as a tech company. Hence studyin…