Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership
Episode publishedPodcast: The a16z ShowThe a16z Show
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Anybody who's investing, you know, you're doing two things. You're trying to make money for yourselves and your clients. And so you're trying to get out there and take risk. And you're also trying to be a risk manager, and you have to do both.
I think it was your quote that it's like, if you're so good at predicting the future, tell me what's
gonna happen Once the present turns into the past, everybody's a genius. Most of what we do with respect to risk is not so much predicting. It's a lot of contingency planning.
We are on the precipice of some of the largest IPOs ever.
What are risks that you think are underappreciated? Before this technological age, not just AI, but in general, could you have had a mistake that could cost billions of dollars? Not really. But now you can leave a piece of software, could go out and do 70,000 transactions. The leverage in these things is themselves a big problem. Not because it's smarter than us and it's going to turn us into pets, but because we don't have the ability to test whether it's right or not.
What does it take to lead through a crisis? Most organizations are built for normal conditions, but the real test comes when uncertainty is highest, when information is incomplete, and when decisions have to be made quickly without knowing how things will play out. In those moments, success isn't about predicting the future it's about preparation, judgment, and the ability to act while others hesitate. Few people have operated at that level as often as Lloyd Blankfein, leading Goldman Sachs through some of the most volatile periods in modern financial history. A16Z general partner David Haber
Your tweet, by the way, about the White House Correspondent Center was amazing. I think for the good of the timeline, we need you back on Twitter more often.
I know. You know what? It's a funny thing is, you you would think that you see something and you're activated to tweet about it. For me, I said, oh, gee, I haven't tweeted for a long time. Let me find something to tweet about. And also being in the risk management business, I always know that everybody keeps doing that, eventually you get canceled because you do something. You step over some invisible line that nobody knew about. And so I realized that from a risk reward point of view, it's all ego and no real value other than that. But that was saying when you retire, you'll grasp at straws.
Why not? Mean, was like 10,000,000 views later or something.
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