Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership

The a16z Show

a16z

Entrepreneurship, Culture, Disruption, Innovation, Science, Software Eating The World, Business, Technology

4.2 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 12 May 2026

⏱️ 73 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

David Haber speaks with Lloyd Blankfein, former CEO of Goldman Sachs, about leadership, risk, and navigating moments of extreme uncertainty. Drawing on his experience leading Goldman through the financial crisis, Blankfein shares how organizations can build resilience, make decisions under pressure, and maintain culture while scaling. They discuss the importance of risk management as both a discipline and a mindset, the difference between being wrong and being reckless, and how great organizations balance taking risk with protecting against it. Blankfein also reflects on Goldman’s partnership culture, how it shaped decision-making and accountability, and what it takes to build enduring institutions over time. The conversation also touches on technology, from the role it played in transforming financial markets to the implications of AI today, including its potential, risks, and the challenges of operating in systems that are increasingly complex and harder to fully understand.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Anybody who's investing, you know, you're doing two things.
0:02.5	You're trying to make money for yourselves and your clients,
0:05.7	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 there. It's like, if you're so good at predicting the future, tell me what's going to happen next. 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.
0:21.6	It's a lot of contingency plan.
0:23.2	We are on the precipice of some largest... Everybody's a genius. Most of what we do with respect to risk is not so much predicting. It's a lot of contingency plan.
0:23.2	We are on the precipice of some of the largest IPOs ever. What are risks that you think are underappreciated?
0:28.2	Before this technological age, not just AI, but in general, could you have had a mistake that could cost billions of dollars?
0:35.3	Not really, but now you can leave a piece of software
0:38.3	could go out and do 70,000 transactions.
0:41.4	The leverage in these things is themselves a pretty problem.
0:44.7	Not because it's smarter than us and it's going to turn us into pets,
0:47.9	but because we don't have the ability to test whether it's right or not.
0:52.8	What does it take to lead through a crisis?
0:55.0	Most organizations are built for normal conditions,
0:58.0	but the real test comes when uncertainty is highest,
1:01.0	when information is incomplete,
1:03.0	and when decisions have to be made quickly without knowing how things will play out.
1:07.0	In those moments, success isn't about predicting the future. It's about preparation,
1:12.7	judgment, and the ability to act while others hesitate. Few people have operated at that level
1:18.4	as often as Lloyd Blankfein, leading Goldman Sachs through some of the most volatile periods in
1:23.4	modern financial history. A16Z general partner David Haber speaks with Lloyd Blankfein
1:29.3	about risk, leadership, and building institutions
	...

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