#019 Marty Chavez On How Software Ate Finance

Joining Julia La Roche on episode 19 of the podcast is R. Martin (“Marty”) Chavez, a partner and vice chair of Sixth Street Capital and a former Goldman Sachs executive. Before joining Sixth Street, a global investment firm with more than $60 billion in assets under management, Chavez served in various senior roles at Goldman Sachs, including Chief Information Officer, overseeing the firm’s 9,000 engineers; Chief Financial Officer; and global co-head of the firm’s Securities Division. Chavez was also a partner and member of the Goldman Sachs management committee. In this episode, Chavez shares his background, growing up in a large family in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His parents strongly emphasized education, and as Chavez’s mother put it, he had to “work twice as hard to get half as far.” As a student, Chavez excelled in math, and by the 7th grade, he was taking college math courses at the University of New Mexico. That’s also where he discovered his love for computers. A Stanford Ph.D., Chavez shares his unlikely path from Silicon Valley to Wall Street. He was the first openly gay employee at Goldman Sachs in 1993 and was among the most senior Latinos on Wall Street. Chavez is widely recognized for helping transform the Wall Street trading business into a software business, revolutionizing how capital moves and works. He is also known for bringing the front and back offices together. The episode delves into Chavez’s views on the future of finance, his thesis on how software ate finance, his thoughts on regulating fintech, and the powerful trend of dematerialization. 0:00 Intro 0:23 Growing up in Albuquerque, New Mexico 4:15 Education is the answer 6:40 Harvard sophomore at age 16 8:00 Early work on the protein folding problem 10:00 Creating a ‘digital twin' with software  12:10 Focus was on AI, not finance 16:00 A ‘free trip’ to NYC from Goldman 17:17 First openly gay employee at Goldman 19:13 ‘Just being me’ 22:50 Building trust and connectedness with colleagues 23:48 Leaving Goldman in 1997, choosing sobriety 25:35 Launching a startup before the dot-com bubble 28:30 The call from Gary Cohn 30:20 A vow of silence and cleaning toilets in a monastery 31:50 Evolution of tech at Goldman 34:04 Connecting with clients in Spanish 36:00 How software ate finance 40:50 Application Programming Interface (API) explained 44:10 Same number of people, different skills 46:27 future of fintech is banks 50:14 Digital assets, and the powerful trend of dematerialization