Goldman’s Eric Lane leaves for Tiger Global

Lane’s surprise move comes just a day after people with knowledge of the matter said that Omer Ismail, the head of Goldman’s consumer bank, is leaving to run Walmart’s fledgling financial technology startup. Ismail will bring along David Stark, who helped ink Goldman’s partnership with Apple and oversaw its tie-ups with JetBlue Airways and Amazon.

Just over a year ago, Goldman’s asset management business lost two other key executives. Sumit Rajpal and Andrew Wolff, two of the three co-heads of merchant banking at Goldman, with Salisbury, left just as the firm was revving up its fundraising efforts.

Goldman in September shuffled business lines and announced a raft of management changes, including that Lane and Salisbury would lead the combined asset management and merchant bank. Lane previously ran the investment management group, which also included Goldman’s consumer and wealth operations.

Biggest Hire

Lane is the biggest hire Tiger Global has made in recent years — and likely the most expensive. His addition comes as the firm searches “for ways to make our investment flywheel spin faster,” the firm wrote in an investor letter from Friday.

Lane will be responsible for managing the build-out of the firm’s infrastructure, including business processes, work flows, and collaboration​, according to a person familiar with the matter. Over time, he’ll be involved with shaping Tiger Global’s firmwide strategy and will lighten Coleman and Shleifer’s workload by taking on some communications with investors, the person said.

“He has overseen many functions that are essential to scale and support a complex global investment-management platform,” Tiger Global said in Monday’s letter.

Tiger Global assets have soared over the 20 years since the firm was started, and its performance has been strong. The hedge fund returned 48 per cent last year alone. Coleman topped Bloomberg’s list of the top-earning hedge fund managers in 2020.