One of Goldman’s most visible female leaders is leaving the bank and Wall Street altogether.
Stephanie Cohen, one of the few women in Goldman’s history to run a major division at the firm, went on a personal leave last June to focus on her family. During her sabbatical, she said, she considered her career — she’d increasingly been drawn toward the most tech-oriented parts of the organization, most recently serving as the head of platform solutions.
“I just got to this place where it was, ‘I want to do this for real,'” Cohen told Business Insider in an interview. “This is what I want to do. I don’t want technology to be just a part of it; I want it to be what I do.”
Cohen, 46, will join Cloudflare, a San Francisco technology company aimed at helping businesses improve their internet security and performance. Cohen will be its first chief strategy officer, based in Utah. It will be a familiar role, as she served as Goldman’s strategy chief from 2018 to 2020.
“One of the things that happens when you spend a really long time at one place, a quarter century at one place, is you start to feel responsibility for a lot of things related to the organization and the people in the organization,” Cohen said. “And I realized that the best thing I could do for me and everyone else was to do what I wanted to do, to make the right decision for me and my family.”
CEO David Solomon tapped Cohen to help craft Goldman’s digital bank as cohead of the consumer and wealth-management division in late 2020. Goldman reshuffled that division in 2022 amid significant losses and plans to sell the consumer-lending unit GreenSky, which the bank bought for $1.7 billion the year prior. She went on leave as Goldman continued to pull back from the business.
Her exit also comes as several Goldman partners and senior women have left the firm. Beth Hammack, a longtime Goldman partner and cohead of the global financial group, is also set to step down.
From Goldman to Cloudflare
Cohen told BI that while she was on sabbatical, she was in regular contact with Solomon — as well as John Waldron, the president and chief operating officer, and others — about coming back.
She said that more recently she started gathering advice because “it would be crazy for me while on sabbatical to not make a proactive decision about what I was going to do next.” It was during those conversations that Cohen decided to think about doing something different.
Cloudflare is different; it’s an enterprise technology firm with much less brand-name recognition than Cohen’s former employer. But it plays a significant role in the world of technology.
The company aims to make the internet more secure and dependable. That could mean ensuring that sensitive company data handled by remote employees is protected from hackers, or enabling large websites to load quickly. It has said that more than 20% of internet traffic uses its security services and that it blocks an average of 182 billion threats a day.
“Everything that we’re doing right now is impacted by the reliability and security of the internet,” Cohen said. “I have young kids. The world that they’re going to live in will be massively impacted by how companies like Cloudflare evolve.”
Cloudflare says its clients include IBM, Shopify, L’Oréal, and Canva. Founded in 2009, it went public in 2019, and Cloudflare’s stock price is up about 70% over the past year. Goldman was one of the lead banks on the initial public offering, a Cloudflare announcement at the time said. Cloudflare said it had nearly 3,700 employees globally at the end of 2023.
Cohen has long known the Cloudflare cofounders Matthew Prince, its CEO, and Michelle Zatlyn, its president and COO, but she didn’t work with them while at Goldman. She said that during recent discussions with Prince and Zatlyn she realized moving to Cloudflare would allow her to marry her Wall Street experience and passion for technology.
“It was in the context of having that conversation, the ‘aha’ of not only am I really interested in enterprise technology, but there are real things that I’ve done over the last 25 years that are additive to a company that’s at this stage,” she said.
Having spent 20 years inking deals within Goldman Sachs’ investment-banking unit, Cohen is no stranger to the boardroom. She’ll bring experience in connecting with C-suites, but it’ll be to sell them on the idea that “security and the connectivity cloud are board and CEO-level topics,” she said.
“I’m really excited to be at the center of what I think is driving the world, and not just read about what’s going on in cloud and AI, but actually be part of building it and helping the world build a better internet,” she said.
Cohen’s advice to Goldman’s top brass
Cohen joined Goldman in 1999 as an investment-banking analyst after graduating from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Seen as a rising star, she made partner in 2014 and joined the bank’s management committee — responsible for strategy, policy, and management decisions across the firm — in 2018. She became the youngest person to join Goldman’s management committee.
After nearly 20 years in M&A, she was tapped by then-CEO Lloyd Blankfein to be the chief strategy officer. She said this role set her up to learn more about integrating strategy with emerging technology, which became a driving force at Goldman Sachs.
When she was named cohead of the consumer and wealth-management business, Cohen became part of a major pivot for Goldman Sachs, which for most of its history ignored retail customers in favor of institutional clients. While the appointment entered her into the discussion about CEO candidates, the move to retail had already been in motion and had internal critics. The bank ultimately shifted away from its money-losing efforts to sell Main Street products and restructured in 2022. Cohen also went on medical leave during that year.
Cohen and other leaders have acknowledged they did “too much too quickly” regarding the consumer business. “We did some things well, we built a great deposits platform that we have continued to scale, and we created a credit card that is incredibly popular with consumers,” she said. “And there are other things that we didn’t do as well.
“We entered that business when I was in the investment bank, and a lot had already been done by the time I became involved,” she added. “I certainly wasn’t perfect, but it’s always difficult when you show up where lots of decisions have been made and lots of things have been done, and then figuring out what are you going to undo, focusing on the undoing and the fixing, plus focusing on growing and the people and everything else.”
That restructure resulted in Cohen’s most recent role, as head of platform solutions overseeing transaction banking, credit cards, and enterprise partnerships. It’s one of Goldman’s three major business divisions.
Several female executives have left the bank in recent years, with many of them pursuing career opportunities elsewhere. Still, Cohen said her story “is aspirational to any woman that walks inside of Goldman Sachs.”
She described diversity and inclusion as a “strategic imperative” and said she believed leadership would continue to focus on diversifying its top ranks. “No one’s giving up inside of Goldman Sachs on this topic,” she said.
“They know that having inclusive teams will help them be a better company, ” she added. “And so has everything gone right? Absolutely not. Is there more work to do? Absolutely.”
She said that the more diversity and inclusion are discussed as strategic imperatives in the same meetings where leaders talk about revenue growth and margins and market share, “the more it becomes part of running the business.”
When asked what advice she’d give to leaders on bringing more women into senior ranks, Cohen said to “just keep going” and “keep trying new things.”
Running toward her future
Cohen has encouraged people to consider whether they’re happy in their jobs and whether they’re still learning.
“If you decide to be here, and decide to do what you’re doing, you own it,” she told the Financial Times last March.
Cohen said that while she’s had the chance to learn from successes and failures during her time at Goldman, this career move is “really more running towards than running away from something.”
“As you think about my career at Goldman, I was inching towards this whole idea of how do you take technology platforms and use them as client-facing solutions. Goldman Sachs has built world-class technology platforms. We run one of the best trading businesses in global banking and markets. We could not do that without a world-class technology platform,” she said.
“But the reality is Goldman Sachs is not a technology firm,” Cohen added.
In a statement, Prince described Cohen as “incredible.”
“Anyone who has worked with her can attest she operates at a different clock speed,” Prince said. He added that after her 25 years at Goldman Sachs, “she could have gone anywhere, and we’re honored that she’ll be joining us as our first-ever chief strategy officer.”
While the departure of one of Goldman’s top executives may surprise some, it’s an obvious fit to those who know and have worked closely with Cohen, like Goldman’s chief information officer, Marco Argenti.
Cohen recalled that when she broke the news to Argenti, he told her, ‘This is exactly what you should do,” adding, “This is exactly the right company.”
“I think it’s just one of those things where it all lines up,” she said. “The sector lines up, the company lines up, the team lines up.”
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