Meet up with Kim Posnett, Goldman’s youngest, to start with lady to run IB companies

• Kim Posnett is the youngest individual and 1st female to helm the expense-banking companies group at Goldman Sachs.
• Her remit is to tie with each other Goldman’s many IB expert services and market place them to new and existing shoppers.
• She instructed Insider how 2020 accelerated the rate of innovation in dealmaking.
• Visit Company Insider’s homepage for extra tales.

When she was just starting out at Goldman Sachs in 2007, Jane Dunlevie leaned on expenditure-banking exec Kim Posnett to clearly show her the ropes.

Again then, Dunlevie was contemporary out of faculty from Stanford and an analyst at the firm. In a current call with Insider, she recalled investing extended hours alongside Posnett, her previous boss, and studying from her.

“I vividly recall sitting in a space with Kim, marking up a deck and outlining examination,” reported Dunlevie, 35, who currently has come to be a person of Goldman’s youngest partners, and serves as its world co-head of Online expenditure banking.

And instead than be exclusionary about bringing younger bankers into the dealmaking fold, Posnett was a single of the a lot more enthusiastic senior companions when it came to pushing young bankers to have their possess IPO pitches, Dunlevie reported.

“Kim was the to start with man or woman that enable me go pitch by myself,” she explained. “Individuals dry-operates and rehearsals and the candid coaching are points that absolutely stand out for me.”

Go through a lot more: Kim Posnett just turned the youngest solo head of a Goldman Sachs unit identified for remaining a launching pad for some of the bank’s significant-profile executives

Posnett, 43, is a single of the most senior figures inside Goldman’s financial commitment bank. Previously the co-COO of the bank’s storied engineering, media, and telecommunications (TMT) team, she’s been at the helm of its investment decision-banking solutions unit, a kind of salesforce for the worldwide IB division, considering the fact that September.

To begin with appointed to run IB providers alongside Matt Gibson, she has lately taken sole possession of the team.

Previously this thirty day period, Gibson was named to a new function as co-head of world TMT together with Sam Britton, leaving Posnett to head up IB companies. She is the youngest person and 1st lady to lead the team in its record, which stems back again to the mid-20th century.

Posnett spoke to Insider about the her new purpose and how her group is working to maintain rate with a dealmaking setting that is fast evolving as a final result of the pandemic. 

Adhering to her ‘North star’

Posnett attended Yale University, graduating with a bachelor’s diploma in history 1999, according to her LinkedIn profile. In 2003 she enrolled at the Wharton Faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, where she graduated with an MBA in finance in 2005.

That identical calendar year, she joined Goldman Sachs.

“My North star has been masking my shoppers and our firm’s purchasers, and continuously imagining about how ideal to serve them with the greatest assistance and most imaginative solutions,” Posnett told Insider in a cell phone job interview this 7 days.

About the several years, that has meant functioning point on essential discounts for clientele who are served by Goldman’s high-profile TMT division. Posnett’s document has bundled major things to do like IPOs for tech companies Wayfair, Pinterest, and Etsy or advising on divestitures like the sale of StubHub from longtime client eBay to Viagogo, or the announced sale of Uber’s self-driving unit to automobile-tech company Aurora.

Among the people whom Posnett counts as a mentor is Gregg Lemkau, the former co-head of Goldman’s global financial investment banking division who still left the organization in December to consider on a new part as CEO of the Michael Dell-backed expense business MSD Associates.

Posnett also named two other mentors: Dan Dees, a latest co-head of world-wide expenditure banking and George Lee, co-main facts officer, who was beforehand a co-chair of world-wide TMT and co-head of engineering inside the expenditure bank.

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Lemkau instructed Insider that he very first achieved Posnett additional than a 10 years ago when he was global co-head of the TMT group at Goldman. The two have because preserved their friendship.

“Kim is phenomenally talented — extraordinarily good, terribly challenging-working, and is an extraordinary relationship banker,” Lemkau reported. “Even in her earliest times covering clientele, she was ready to create relationships with quite senior executives.

“She’s quite personable, receives to know customers and what they’re making an attempt to resolve for, and makes use of that to create reliable relationships,” Lemkau included. “She’s usually been excellent at that.”

A holistic tactic to consumer coverage

Considering the fact that stepping into her most modern position in IB solutions last calendar year, Posnett said that 3 central goals are among the her best priorities: fostering extended-time period shopper interactions, obtaining in the doorway with new clientele, and “driving a holistic method to consumer protection.”

That final objective is a nod to Goldman’s ‘One GS’ solution, which encourages collaboration throughout the bank’s divisions when serving the bank’s purchasers. 

For its section, the investment decision-banking products and services group has a extensive heritage of accomplishing just that. It was the brainchild of progenitor John Whitehead, a Goldman companion and co-chair who later on served in President Ronald Reagan’s administration.

In the mid-1950’s, Whitehead proposed separating bankers who promoted and marketed IB services to clientele, and those who performed advisory solutions on day-to-working day deals. The previous would end result in the IB providers group, which features, in influence, as a gross sales pressure.

See a lot more: Goldman Sachs’ Sam Britton expects much more ‘dream deals’ like Salesforce-Slack in 2021, and reveals the next very hot M&A strategies

Management of the team has traditionally been one thing of a catapult for other senior Goldman bankers favored John Waldron, who is now Goldman’s president.

“The move to head investment-banking expert services was a terrific possibility to broaden her tasks outside of TMT, so that she could have higher effect throughout the division,” Lemkau claimed. “This platform gives her the likelihood to engage with and interact with a broader team of individuals, which enable her to support create and mentor the future era of protection bankers.”

In the meantime, Posnett has however preserved a job as a single of Goldman’s senior-most tech bankers.

As to how she balances the time needed to satisfy the requires of both roles, “I would like I had an reply,” she stated. “My lifetime would be simpler if I did.”

Distinct consumers will need diverse points

The broader landscape of financial investment-banking in a COVID world is a person of immediate transformation, considerably of which is very likely to persist in a publish-pandemic earth, according to market watchers.

Electronic management shows and remote roadshows have changed regular M&A and IPO rites, for instance. Two-thirds of the mergers and acquisitions that Goldman recommended in 2020 ended up completely virtual, Posnett explained, hence opening the doorway to clean approaches to executing diligence or other areas of hammering out bargains.

“You start out to see the innovation like digital facts rooms,” she stated, “but also the use of drones, and other instruments that were being pressured on the field simply because of the pandemic. It just accelerated what was currently happening.”

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As that innovation continues to drive customer calls for, Posnett’s group performs to fully grasp what the bank’s clients are principally hunting for, and will help make connections to the suitable staff. Often, innovation is incubated internally from the IBD’s respective groups, or it may possibly appear as a reaction to a particular consumer request.

People exchanges have created effects like Goldman’s hybrid public offerings, or its leveraging of airlines’ frequent flyer points to create liquidity in a sector that was hit tough by the coronavirus pandemic.

“We want to serve up impressive, resourceful, bespoke options,” Posnett reported. “Some may well resonate, some could not, but we want to be holistic in our strategy, we want to be prolonged-expression in our technique, and we also have to be dynamic in our tactic.”

The ability of ‘practical’ mentorship

Posnett, who is also co-head of diversity in just the expense financial institution, pointed to her operate as a mentor to an impending generation of talent at Goldman as among her most essential roles. She cited mentorship as a key section of the lifestyle in just Goldman, contacting it a “privilege” to perform with younger bankers and see their progress. 

Dunlevie said that persons within Goldman see Posnett as a dependable fount of advice and comments, irrespective of whether on operate or personalized matters.

“Kim is exceptionally practical at advising people today on how to handle do the job and daily life and associations and parenthood,” she claimed. “Lots and a lot of persons in the Goldman group run all their daily life questions, issues, and commiserations by Kim. And she’s a excellent, good advocate for her people.”

Lemkau also named mentoring early expertise as between Posnett’s strengths.

“I feel she’s completed a terrific job in leaning into young bankers, feminine bankers in particular, but not solely,” he claimed. “Just as she’s benefitted from energetic mentors, I consider she’s figured out, ‘If I can give advice and way to a wide team of subsequent-technology bankers, they’ll all be better and the business will be superior.'”

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Some of Posnett’s protegés have already attained stratospheric concentrations at Goldman, and are very likely to keep on increasing.

Dunlevie, for instance, realized in November that she was 1 of seven TMT bankers who had created companion, Goldman’s maximum designation outside the house of the C-suite. Amongst her very first calls were to her mentors, in purchase to split the information.

“The morning I made partner, I known as one mentor who explained, ‘Why are you calling so early?'” Dunlevie recalled. So she hung up and dialed Posnett.

“I referred to as Kim, who I consider place her mobile phone on speaker and screamed into it in celebration,” she explained. “That offers you a perception of her brand name of celebration and mentorship. She shares a whole lot of pleasure with the successes of her individuals.”