• Don’t die: Goldman survived 150 years, including depressions and crises and scandals and potential takeovers. Many once thriving firms did not (Lehman Brothers, Bear Sterns, Solomon Brothers, Long Term Capital Management). It came close a few times though…

• The top surprise: perhaps the 3 most crucial heads of the firm all took multiple years, even a decade, to gain real recondition:
• Sidney Weinberg: started as a janitor and mail clerk in his teens, eventually became a low level commercial paper salesmen for many years before eventually rising up and eventually leading the firm for 3 decades
• John Whitehead: “I was only serving time, not learning much, in my first years at Goldman.” and “I’d been at GS for 8 years and no one had even mentioned me being a partner”
• Lloyd Blankfein: barely avoided layoffs in his second year; when he eventually was given a major business to run years into his tenure within a few weeks they rescinded the leadership role (though he eventually earned it back)

• It was (at one point) generally on the side of the underdogs. It worked with entertainment and technology and airline companies because the top investment banks wanted to work mainly with railroads abs manufacturing companies. When hostile takeovers became much more permissible in the 1980s, it was the only major bank that refused to support companies trying to do the takeovers (only working with those trying to avoid or navigate being acquired) - this led to gain great trust with smaller firms that eventually became leasing ones.

• Recruiting was tremendously prioritized: Partners spent a lot of time recruiting, not just junior folks. In one year a partner interviewed 900 candidates from 35 schools for his department and selected just 23. There were very high standards to get in, and lots of training (both formal and informal) once you were in. 

• And this: Said an employee of Goldman Sachs in the early 90s: “Why so intensely engaged, so early in the morning every day? Because that’s what we truly wanted to do, and where we wanted to be. And that’s the way it was all the time for everybody at Goldman Sachs. At Morgan Stanley where I also worked for awhile, people saw their work as personally defining - it was what they could do and did do. But at Goldman Sachs it was much more. It was life.”

A few other excerpts from the book:

• Day after day Hank Paulson (CEO in early 2000's) took as his first priority completing whatever loomed as the one most difficult or unpleasant task on his to do list
• It was the decision of Paulson alone at the top not to combine Goldman Sachs with JP Morgan
• More than any Wall Street firm, the partners at GS turned up for weddings, funerals, and bar mitzvahs, and the people who left were still kept as close key members
• One business opens up opportunities for additional business lines. Happened time and time again for GS and was critical for its growth into the from it became. Commercial paper -> Investment Banking -> Block Trading / Market Making -> Arbitrage -> FX/Commodities -> Proprietary Trading -> Asset Management
• John Whitehead (one of the most crucial leaders of the firm who turned it to top tier investment bank): “we had no big and bad ideas…we knew it would take a generation to complete the change of our position. Doing thousands of little things day after day, inching along as consistently as you can in the right direction as best you can tell…as we made changes almost continuously we had many many failures."