Hi everyone, welcome to the A6 and Z podcast.

Today's episode is what Stephanie Cohen, chief strategy officer at Goldman Sachs,

in conversation with A6NZ general partner, Martine Casado.

The discussion, which originally took place at our annual A6&Z summit in November 2018,

covers everything from the ins and outs of M&A to the always hot topic of build versus buy, as well as other things top of mind in big company innovation.

Okay, great. So thank you so much for joining us. So broadly we're going to be talking about innovation in large companies.

You know, you can kind of frame the problem in two ways.

There's inorganic and there's organic, right?

I mean, there's not a lot of options at the most macro level,

and Stephanie has been involved on both sides.

She's done almost two decades of M&A,

and now she's the true strategy

officer of Goldman Sachs, so involved in strategy and innovation broadly. So I thought to start off,

it would be great because the audience probably isn't as familiar with your background as,

for example, I am. So if you could kind of give maybe the long form of your bio, and then we'll kind

of jump into M&A first. We'll talk about that, and then we'll kind of streamline that into kind of more internal innovation.

Cool?

Great. So I started at Goldman Sachs almost 20 years ago, so out of preschool.

And it's the only full-time job I've ever had.

I started in our M&A group. I ended up then transferring

to our industrial group. I ran our general industrial business. I spent seven years on the West

coast doing non-tech MNA, so the least cool person in Silicon Valley doing non-tech M&A, flying

...