Wall St. Courts Start-Ups It Once May Have Ignored
On the first day of a hackathon at the Manhattan headquarters of Goldman Sachs, participants from the Wall Street bank showed up in suits. The programmers from Kensho, a start-up that had recently gotten money from Goldman, were there in jeans and ripped shirts.The next day, many of the Goldman employees took off their jackets and ties. And the day after that, many of the Goldman employees were wearing the gray hoodies and Beats headphones that had been made especially for the event. (This being Goldman Sachs, the headphones were custom engraved — “GS Kensho Hackathon 2015” — to commemorate the occasion.)
The evolution of the dress code during the hackathon was one indication of the changing relationship between Wall Street banks like Goldman and start-ups like Kensho, a data analytics company, which received a $15 million investment late last year in a financing round led by Goldman.
In the past, Goldman and its big competitors kept their distance from start-ups like Kensho that were trying to disrupt the Wall Street business model — especially start-ups as young as Kensho, which was founded in 2013. Goldman and many other Wall Street banks have historically done most of their significant technological developments in-house, viewing their business as the product of decades of experience.
Wall St. Courts Start-Ups It Once May Have Ignored - NYTimes.com
