Jon Winkelried on Lessons from Goldman Sachs and TPG’s Next Chapter

**Jon Winkelried** (0:05)
The one thing that I feel is really important from a leadership perspective is, you're working in an organization or leading an organization that's filled with very motivated people, smart people, very high quality people. You can't do things in a vacuum. And so one of the things that is always sort of a guiding principle of mine is kind of bring people along.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:21)
Welcome back to Talks at GS, where we speak with pioneering leaders about their careers and the future of their fields. In a live conversation, Goldman Sachs' Matt McClure joined Jon Winkelried, CEO of TPG Capital and Goldman Sachs alum. This episode was recorded on June 9th, 2026 at Goldman Sachs headquarters in New York City. Let's tune in now.

**Matt McClure** (0:47)
Welcome everyone to another session of Talks at GS. Delighted to be joined by Jon Winkelried, CEO of TPG and Goldman Sachs alum. Just to recap on some of your career, you were a summer analyst in 1981 You became a partner in 1990 at the remarkable age of 31, and in 2005, you became co-head of IBD. Then a year later, you were named co-president and co-COO with Gary Cohn, reporting initially to Hank and then subsequently to Lloyd. And then you retired from the firm in 2009 So you joined TPG in 2015 as co-CEO, one of the world's preeminent firms with over $300 billion of AUM.
You became sole CEO in May 2021 And since then, there's been some really important milestones in taking the company public in 2022 and then the Angelo Gordon acquisition in November 2023 Walk us back to how your career started at the firm. Did you know what Investment Banking was?

**Jon Winkelried** (1:42)
I was intrigued by Wall Street, but I didn't know anything about it. I found out that when you were a junior, you could apply to any of the graduate schools. And if you got accepted, you could replace your senior year in college with your first year in grad school.
And so I said, well, that's great, because first of all, I was on financial aid to go through college, and I could save a whole year. And so I did that. So I applied to business school, got in, and my first my senior year in college was really my first year in business school. So I started to try to quickly figure out like, well, what do people do? You know, like, how do you get a job in between your years in business school? You know, I started hearing about Wall Street. So I didn't get a job, but I did meet a woman who was an investment banker at Lehman Brothers, and she was very, very nice to me. And so the next year, you know how Chicago has a bidding system for interviews? So I bid all of my points for an interview at Lehman Brothers. The day where the bidding closed, I got a letter in the mail from Goldman Sachs, from a guy in investment banking, and it was a really nice letter. And I thought to myself, wow, I mean, I don't know what to do now because Goldman seems very like solicitous in this letter. I didn't realize, of course, it was the letter they sent everybody.
And bidding closed at midnight that night. At like 11.15, I picked myself up, I went to the business school, I changed my bid to Goldman Sachs. Wow. And I bid all my points on the Goldman Sachs interview. So I go into this interview and I'm interviewing with a guy who is in sales and trading in the Chicago office. And I think I'm there for an investment banking interview. And I'm talking to him or whatever and he goes, hey, Jon, he goes, do you know what you're interviewing for? And I said, yeah, like investment banking. He goes, no, this is like sales and trading summer program.
And he was like, listen, there's a lot of characteristics about you I like, okay, but like, you've got to get your head out of your, you know what, okay? And figure out what you're doing here, okay? I said, I got it, I got it. So I left, I figured, okay, I'm dead. And I got invited back to the Chicago office. And then one thing led to another, I got invited to the New York office. They basically, the summer program in sales and trading then was six people, okay? Six people. So anyway, I got the job.

**Matt McClure** (3:46)
At what point, or how long had you been at the firm when you figured out, you know what, this is the career for me?

**Jon Winkelried** (3:51)