Early last year, Alex Virolle, a Paris-based managing director at Goldman Sachs, had to make an unwelcome call to one of his superiors in New York. A talented banker who reported to him was quitting. She liked her job, but for personal reasons could no longer spend as many nights at the office in front of her Bloomberg. She worried that if she didn’t burn the midnight oil, her career would stall, and she wanted more leeway to travel.
Virolle, who oversees sales and trading for family offices and hedge funds in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, phoned Sara Naison-Tarajano, the firm’s global head of private wealth management capital markets, to deliver the news and seek a solution. He assured his boss that the banker was one they wanted to keep. Serving family offices and hedge funds is an ultracompetitive corner of finance where relationships are vital and can be hard to establish.
Naison-Tarajano told him the firm would find a post for the banker, “And if it doesn’t exist we’ll create it.” It wasn’t easy. Naison-Tarajano started lobbying for the reassignment internally — a significant effort given the seniority of the others involved. Ultimately, a new, more flexible role in Paris was approved. The banker accepted and remains “tremendously successful,” Virolle said.
Naison-Tarajano, an attentive and exacting boss who has spent her whole 25-year career at Goldman, is known as a fierce advocate for colleagues in need. She’s also a go-to banker for a growing and increasingly important clientele — family offices. The firm had long ties to family offices but until 2018 had no banking group dedicated to helping the most sophisticated ones invest directly in private markets. Naison-Tarajano formalized that unit, called Apex, to send them deal flow, share expertise, and help them navigate the bank’s divisions.
Goldman doesn’t disclose financials on the group. But the firm did say Apex works with more than 600 family offices across the globe and does more than a dozen deals each year. The group is typically engaged in two or three transactions at any time, which could be private placements, secondary transactions, minority stake sales, corporate PIPEs, and bespoke fund placements. Apex revenue has doubled since it started in 2018.
“She has this big personality, big energy around this effort that is, in the scheme of Goldman Sachs, relatively new,” said Marc Nachmann, global head of asset and wealth management at Goldman Sachs. “But because of how big of a person she is — and [Apex] is a little bit synonymous with her — I think she’s built it into a really good business.”
Naison-Tarajano, who is a partner as well as the head of Apex, showed how she provides support beyond what her position requires when she helped retain the Paris banker.
“We needed literally 10 people to approve this thing.,” Virolle said. “Many people asked Sara, ‘Why are we doing this?’ And she defended it and that was great. She goes to bat for the team … whether it’s to push something internally, whether it’s to accelerate a process or a project, she will make the phone calls. Actually, she’ll make the phone calls even before I ask. Sometimes too quickly, but that’s OK. Better too quickly than not doing it.”
Naison-Tarajano seemed “intense and very direct” when Virolle met her a decade ago, which he liked; it made his life easier. Virolle’s first language is French, so the clearer and more precise messages and conversations were in English, the better. But he has also come to appreciate her for other reasons.
Virolle and other colleagues interviewed for this story say Naison-Tarajano is the opposite of a micromanager, someone who implicitly trusts her team members and leaves them alone to do their jobs. But she is far from aloof.
Those attributes have made Naison-Tarajano a sought-after banker to work for and collaborate with at Goldman Sachs, and a person family offices gravitate toward.
There are at least 10,000 single-family offices worldwide managing investments, taxes and other affairs for their beneficiaries and most were established within the past 20 years. Some offices have only a few employees and oversee (brace yourself because this might sound absurd) a relatively small and boring $100 million investment portfolio. At the opposite end of the spectrum, a handful have more than a couple hundred employees, including teams of specialized investment professionals operating much like those at institutions and overseeing $100 billion or more. Collectively, these investors wield more than $6 trillion in assets.
Naison-Tarajano, 47, is from New York but did not spend her childhood bouncing between an Upper East Side mansion and the Hamptons like some of her family-office clients and their kids. She and her younger brother grew up in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn. Her mother, an elementary school principal, and her father, a university professor, supported their children’s academic and athletic pursuits.
Like most people, Naison-Tarajano didn’t have a tennis court in her backyard, either. But she had aptitude for the sport, a father who played in college and coached her, and parents who could cart her around the Northeast to compete.
“Playing tennis required a lot of devotion from my parents, driving me around, getting me places. I trained all over the place. I trained at Brooklyn Racket Club, Roosevelt Island. And then I traveled around nationally, and I had success,” said Naison-Tarajano in an interview with II for the first profile of her. At points in her junior career, she ranked first in the United States Tennis Association’s Eastern section as well as 37th in singles and 11th in doubles in the country. For those who don’t play tennis: That’s quite good. Naison-Tarajano’s tennis success continued at Yale University, where she was captain of the women’s team.
Like many on Wall Street, she credits her experience as a Division I athlete for helping prepare her for a finance career. Tennis taught her focus, discipline and “how to manage a lot at once, which I think is required when you run a global business at Goldman Sachs,” Naison-Tarajano said. But she did not originally aspire to work at an investment bank.
High finance wasn’t a topic her family talked about. Naison-Tarajano, who likes to read, write and debate, has long been interested in the criminal justice system and helping the most vulnerable. She planned to be a lawyer and, as an undergraduate, interned at a district attorney’s office and worked as a legal aide.
As the end of college neared, Naison-Tarajano laid out her professional aspirations to her roommate, and the two friends realized they had a financial mismatch. If they wanted to live together in Manhattan after graduation, Naison-Tarajano’s public-interest law job might not even cover her share of the rent. It made little sense to sign a lease when she could return to Brooklyn and live with her parents.
Her bestie cooked up an idea. Internships and law schools would always be there and Naison-Tarajano had a GPA (she graduated cum laude) and a resume attractive to the finance and management consulting firms offering the hottest entry-level jobs at the time. Convinced that a quick stop at a high-paying job wouldn’t hurt, Naison-Tarajano sent out her curriculum vitae and lined up meetings at 12 companies, beginning with Goldman.
“I remember I felt like I met 25 people,” she said. “It was probably more like 12, but it was an exhausting day. And basically, I got back to campus, they offered me a job that night and I accepted, and I canceled every other interview because I was like, ‘I’m never doing that again.’”
The other companies were bemused.
“I remember calling McKinsey and other places and they’re like, ‘You’re canceling the interview?’ ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m good,’” Naison-Tarajano recalled telling them. “I mean, I literally thought I was going to go for a year.”
A quarter-century later, Naison-Tarajano is still at Goldman. Her college roommate — who convinced her to apply on a whim — also went to work there but lasted only eight months, which they still laugh about.
At Goldman, Naison-Tarajano was never fixated on becoming a managing director or partner. She followed what interested her. After 10 years of specializing in derivatives, she moved to the public securities sales and trading desk she now oversees.
“I give a lot of credit to the team. I came over as a relatively senior VP who had never done [that] job. I really had to lean on my derivatives expertise to differentiate myself with clients. But then I also had to be humble and get help from people who were younger than me. I’d never entered an equity order in a system,” Naison-Tarajano said.
Working on derivatives was different: She’d call a trader, explain a transaction and details were ironed out over email. That process could take months. On an equities desk, markets move fast and decisions often must be made quickly. “I was literally sitting on the desk like, ‘Oh my gosh, if I press the wrong button’ … it was scary at the beginning,” Naison-Tarajano said.
She has faced heavier challenges working at the bank, however. Naison-Tarajano married and had a daughter shortly after college. There weren’t nearly as many women working at investment banks then, and even fewer mothers her age. She feared what colleagues thought of her and how it would impact the professional career she was enjoying.
“For the first part of my career, I really separated out — I’d never talk about my personal life, I never talked about my kids. I felt almost uncomfortable to kind of bring that part of my life to work. And then I looked around and noticed that men were talking about their kids and their families, and I was sort of creating this wall that didn’t need to be there,” Naison-Tarajano said.
She added: “As I evolved and sort of brought my whole self to work, I think it made me so much better at my job and such a more authentic, confident leader,” she said. “Rather than trying to have these two areas so distinct and not feel like you could acknowledge that you’re a mother at work.”
Colleagues embraced that change, which was affirming for Naison-Tarajano and helped her become more outspoken about other things. Her first husband (whom she has since divorced but remains friends with) is Black and their oldest daughter is biracial, which Naison-Tarajano, who is a blonde, white woman, said has given her a different perspective from many others. She has spent most of her life living with people of color and has witnessed discrimination against them firsthand.
“I think through [my daughter’s] eyes. And also through my ex-husband’s. He was a Black professional, a lawyer, an investment banker, but seeing how different his experience was really shaped me and shaped my passion for racial and social justice,” she said.
It also moved her to become one of the most involved leaders at Goldman. She’s a member of the bank’s partnership committee, the firmwide suitability committee, and the inclusion and diversity council, as well as a mentor for the council’s Black retention pillar. Naison-Tarajano also heads the Americas group of the firmwide women’s network.
And (of course) she is one of the partners leading the One Goldman Sachs Family Office Initiative in the Americas, and the global head of the Goldman Sachs partner family office, which means she oversees the full suite of the firm’s wealth management offerings for current Goldman Sachs partners and partner alumni.
Outside 200 West Street, she’s on the board of directors for the Innocence Project, an organization that uses scientific techniques to free wrongfully convicted prisoners, and a member of the Wall Street division steering committee of the UJA-Federation.
As the head of Apex, her willingness to be herself — coupled with her support of others to do the same — has set an example, attracting a more than 20-person team that has more women and is more diverse than the broader Goldman ranks and its family-office clientele. (Naison-Tarajano’s groups include more than 200 employees globally.) It’s a bright spot for Goldman, which has fallen short of its own goals to promote more women to partner and other leadership positions.
Anushka Gupta, a managing director and the head of the Americas coverage group of Apex, recalled Naison-Tarajano giving her opportunities earlier in her career that eventually helped her become one of Goldman’s senior family-office whisperers, corresponding with the wealthiest private investors about deals they should consider and connecting them with colleagues across the bank.
“She always gave me, despite being an analyst or associate at the time, an opportunity in a client meeting or conversation to have a role, have a presence, have value to add. And I think that flows through very much today. I used to think, ‘Wow, I get to do this so early in my career, it’s really awesome,’ and she empowered me to do that,” Gupta said.
At the start of her 11-year stint working for her, Erin Riley said Naison-Tarajano went out of her way to make junior bankers feel included. Her boss asked them about their personal lives with genuine curiosity and cooked dinner for them at her home.
“That really stood out. It is part of why I stayed at Goldman as long as I did. I had the good fortune of working for Sara, and some other leaders like Sara,” said Riley, who left Goldman in 2022 to become the chief investment officer at Lemoko Investments. Lemoko is the family office of Bob Shaye, the founder of New Line Cinema, the Hollywood studio best known for “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy and “Nightmare on Elm Street.”
Naison-Tarajano may have initially done it for the money, but her work has become a passion. Riley added: “I have seen her hang up the phone after a client conversation, turn to me and say, ‘We have the best job in the world.’ It is such a wonderful thing to work with someone who feels that way and to see how they work. It brings a whole different level of energy.”
Her influence at Goldman extends beyond Apex.
“She’s very well-known across the various divisions within Goldman,” Nachmann said of Naison-Tarajano. “I think she’s a great partner to all the other people inside the firm, and that’s not just because she is a partner in the narrow sense, in terms of the defined words. I think she really kind of embodies what that means and what teamwork means.”
In hindsight, Apex was inevitable. Ultrawealthy families have always invested directly in private companies. It was only in the early aughts that many started hiring in-house investment staff and building more sophisticated portfolios. The problem was the lack of an organized effort to engage those clients at a place like Goldman, according to Adam Elegant, who worked there from 1999 to 2013.
The family offices were falling through a crack. They craved more than what Goldman’s private bank was providing; they wanted trading and deal flow like institutional investors. While it’s hard to believe these families weren’t worth the effort, Elegant, who was working with institutions, said too few were active enough to make their business worth pursuing. As clients, family offices also came with distinct challenges and quirks. Still, he ended up assisting a dozen of them and learning more about that growing group of investors.
Elegant, who is based in San Francisco, was farther ahead of the curve than he realized. In 2014, he joined a small global team at KKR to work with family offices, which meant fundraising for the firm’s funds, pitching co-investment opportunities, and “the most fun” part: sourcing deals with family-owned companies. By the time he left KKR in 2019, Elegant’s network went from 12 or so to more than 300 single-family offices (and 75 multifamily offices). His KKR counterpart in New York had an even bigger network, he said.
Today, almost all investment banks and asset management firms want the business a dedicated, effective family-office coverage group would provide. But building a business is tricky, said Elegant, who is now a partner at Baker Street Advisors, a San Francisco-based multifamily office that advises clients on $16 billion in assets.
Market knowledge, a great network, and some sleuthing are required because families don’t necessarily want to be found. “It’s very much parallel to building a wealth management business,” Elegant said. “You got to hustle, do your research, be a detective, and you have to network your way in. Some firms don’t really have the stamina to do that. And a lot of traditional Wall Street salespeople don’t really want to stick with that either.”
Goldman has an edge because it can serve family-office clients in many ways. Family offices average only 14 employees, so having a single organization or touchpoint for a breadth of services is valuable to them. That’s easier said than done, though. To engage the offices and thoughtfully present the whole lineup of things the firm offers — having something like Apex and someone like Naison-Tarajano — is the secret sauce.
More than 10 years ago, the family office of a prominent hedge-fund manager and billionaire hired a CIO to help shape its investment strategy. That also meant reevaluating the office’s ties with banks, asset managers and service providers. The relationship with Naison-Tarajano and Goldman stood out and Apex has pulled it ahead of competitors, the CIO said.
“When you look at all the different coverage groups across all the banks that have emerged to try and service this client base… nothing exists that’s as centralized and streamlined as the Goldman model, where there’s this team of people that act as quarterbacks for all parts of the firm. As a result, we don’t need to manage a direct relationship with a person in equities, and a person in fixed income and someone else in prime [services], because we have Sara as a central point of contact who funnels us the info and expertise in real-time as needed,” the long-standing client said.
As Elegant put it: “Goldman’s always at the center of the financial world. So it’s no surprise that the Apex platform is so prominent in the family-office world. And she’s built out an innovative platform that family offices gravitate toward.”
Naison-Tarajano doesn’t view the success of Apex quite the same way. She and her team work hard but a core part of what they do is facilitating. Without others to collaborate with, what they offer wouldn’t be as appealing.
“Our private wealth advisors have been our biggest fans. They’ve been a huge part of the growth of this business. This business exists because of the quality of our private wealth advisors, because of the quality of our investment bank, and because of the quality of our asset management firm. I didn’t build this in a vacuum,” Naison-Tarajano said.
In Naison-Tarajano’s office at Goldman’s New York headquarters, her desk is near the end of a small conference table. All she has to do is spin around when a meeting starts — or during it, if she needs to reference or tend to anything. She occasionally gets out to talk about markets on CNBC’s “Closing Bell.”
It’s natural to have a high metabolism for a job she likes so much. A lot of people with deep technical expertise at Goldman would like to work for Apex; recruiting talent for her team when a position opens hasn’t been hard. “I actually wish I had more headcount,” she said (and it’s safe to bet she has made some calls about that).
But she’s choosy about who can join her cadre of bankers.
“You’re literally covering the most interesting people in the world. You’re literally covering the captains of industry, the entrepreneurs. I don’t think there’s a more exciting client base,” she said.
