The Profile: The ‘jerk’ running Goldman Sachs & the Uber CEO creating an all-purpose platform

This edition of The Profile features David Solomon, Gilbert Arenas, Dara Khosrowshahi, and more.

Good morning, friends!

As many of you know, we had our first Profile intern this summer. Her name is Alexis Derickson, and she’s a rising senior at the University of Georgia (Go Dawgs!).

She interviewed 25-year-old marketing entrepreneur Savannah Jordan. (Below is a short excerpt, but you can check out the full Q&A here.)

And of course, I’d love it if you extend a warm welcome to Alexis for joining The Profile family :) You can find her on Twitter here.

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Before there was [your marketing agency] Alpha, there was See Jane Go, a ride-hailing service you created by and for women. After having to sell the startup, what takeaways did you carry with you from the experience? What did you do differently when starting Alpha?

The biggest takeaway that I had was mentorship. With See Jane Go, we had never started a transportation company before. Uber was just really starting to take off, so we felt there was a huge gap in the market for female drivers or female passengers to help women feel safe.

I think it’s an incredible concept, but we did not have any mentorship from people who had already successfully started that kind of business and achieved the level of success we were looking for.

With Alpha, that was a massive difference. If you can get in the back pocket of somebody who has already created the level of success you’re looking for and you can learn from their mistakes, you can scale faster and more sustainably.

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PROFILES.

— The ‘jerk’ running Goldman Sachs [**HIGHLY RECOMMEND**]
— The NBA All-Star raising the next basketball star
— The Uber CEO creating an all-purpose platform
— The ultra-wealthy couple who was mysteriously murdered
— The woman living in a tiny cabin on a remote island

PEOPLE TO KNOW.

The ‘jerk’ running Goldman Sachs: Oh my word, the details in this profile! We learn a lot about Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon, beyond the fluffy story of him moonlighting as DJ D-Sol. Senior bankers are departing. The most recent quarter saw a year-over-year decline of more than 60%. And Solomon’s alleged comment, “I bet I was the only one who got a blowjob last night” earned him the mortifying new nickname: BJ D-Sol. The problem for Solomon is that lately he’s been wrong in consequential ways, opening the floodgates for criticism of his style of management by intimidation. (New York Magazine; reply to to this email if you can’t access the article)

“I can’t think of a more horrible thing to say about a person, but he’s just kind of an executioner.”

The NBA All-Star raising the next basketball star: Gilbert Arenas, the three-time NBA All-Star, is a father of five entering a new phase, training a brood of basketball prodigies who will exceed him in almost every way. Alijah, the second born, has emerged as a phenomenon — 16, skinny, with uncommon ability; the best guard in Southern California. This is the story of a father and a son, the son who became a father and the prodigy who will exceed them both … although he doesn’t know it yet. (Andscape)

“The places you go in your mind for your son. I was beginning to understand what fatherhood was.”

The Uber CEO creating an all-purpose platform: When Dara Khosrowshahi left the top job at Expedia to take over as Uber’s CEO six years ago, he had a grand plan to create Uber-as-a-platform, one app that provides all kinds of rides and food delivery services. In this Q&A, Khosrowshahi discusses Uber’s quest for profitability, its relationship with drivers and delivery people, and what he thought when he watched the TV series Super Pumped, which made Uber look like a street gang with venture capital. (WIRED)

“No, I don’t feel like we have proven ourselves. I’m very confident that we will.”

The ultra-wealthy couple who was mysteriously murdered: Almost six years after Barry and Honey Sherman became two of the wealthiest people ever to be murdered, police still haven’t identified the killers. But along the way, they’ve turned up no shortage of potential suspects—and a bare-knuckle family drama.

“There are people out there who would have a grudge against them and would have a reason to hurt them.”

The woman living in a tiny cabin on a remote island: Charlotte Gale, a licensed massage therapist from New Jersey, had a rough couple of years. Her business vanished overnight with the pandemic and the lockdowns. She had to sell her house with its Victorian garden she’d grown and tended over a decade. And then she came across a listing for a tiny cabin located on a one-and-a-half-acre island with no running water off of Maine. Stephen King said this about the island, “There’s a novel here, just waiting to be written.” (The New York Times)

“Instead of feeling small in this vastness, being on the island makes you feel that you are part of the vastness.”

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