The Growth Playbook: Goldman Sachs’ Darren Cohen on Building a Growth Investing Platform
Episode publishedPodcast: Goldman Sachs ExchangesGoldman Sachs Exchanges
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Welcome to another episode of Goldman Sachs Exchanges, Great Investors. I'm Michael Brammeyer, global head and chief investment officer of the External Investing Group within Goldman Sachs Asset Management. Today, I have the pleasure of sitting down with my colleague, Darren Cohen. Darren is the co head and chief investment officer of growth equity within Goldman Sachs Asset Management. I'm excited to talk to Darren about his career, his investing philosophy, and in particular, where he sees opportunity today. Darren, it's a pleasure to welcome you to Great Investors.
Thanks, Mike. It's a pleasure to be here.
So, Darren, this wasn't destined. You grew up in Texas. You're from a family in the jewelry business, and it really wasn't on the radar to be a tech investor when you were growing up. Talk about your formative years and how you got into it.
Sure. Yeah. I never had anyone around me that was in finance period. I happened to go to school at Emory. I was in the South, again, not close to the epicenter of Wall Street. This was in '96 graduating. The Internet was coming to be, and I always thought I was either gonna be a philosophy professor or maybe a lawyer. And I thought taking a few years off would probably be healthy and ended up going to work at Anderson Consulting, which put me right at the epicenter of the crosshairs of business and technology, amazing training program. I did that for two years and then realized that I became m
Yeah. So you were in research at Goldman Sachs. It's the late nineties and early two thousands. The technology space is really heating up. Tell us about what that experience was like.
Yeah. So if you go back to the late nineties, the research analysts were at the epicenter of a lot of this activity. It was an incredibly frenetic, exciting place to be. The role we played in helping to understand these companies, value these businesses was kind of instrumental to the evolution of a whole new category of great high growth companies. So I lived through that transition. Now, obviously, the world changed very fast in February, what was effectively the beginning of the tech bubble bursting. And so for a very brief period early in my career, I had the chance to experience both the
Yeah. As an investor, it's so critical to have experienced the cycle, and it's interesting in tech, there's really been two big cycles. You had the two thousand bubble bursting, and then you had a very long run almost until twenty twenty, twenty twenty one. You had a couple of mini cycles in between, but it was a very long cycle. And I just think it's invaluable to have had that experience. What were a couple of the lessons when you look back that you carried forward from the ninety nine, two thousand period?
Yeah. So if I go back to '99, you know, the thematic around how the Internet was gonna be transformative, obviously, proved to be true. You could tell it at the time. But there was that period of probably two years of irrational exuberance where the company's valuations just completely detached from the fundamentals. And I think as a young analyst, you really did believe the world was different in '98, and this is a whole new paradigm. And whether it was eyeballs or units or whatever underlying unit economic, you could justify the valuation. And I think in hindsight, you realize, you know, mar
I'd like to come back to that, but first let's talk about you got bitten by the investing bug, not only the technology bug, and so you actually left Goldman Sachs for a few years to work at a hedge fund. What was that experience like?
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