Good morning! AMD competes with Nvidia, Waymo gets ready to expand, and a Goldman Sachs exec almost left on her way to the top. Have a mindful Monday.
- Speed bump. In 2016, Asahi Pompey was preparing to reach a career milestone: becoming a partner at Goldman Sachs. The firm's then-chief compliance officer had been working toward this moment since joining Goldman a decade earlier. And Pompey had set her sights on Goldman at 25, when as a junior attorney at Cleary Gottlieb she helped advise the bank on its 1999 IPO.
"Partner at Goldman Sachs is the crown jewel," she says. But that year, she found out, she didn't make it. Colleagues from around the world, whose trust she'd gained advising on regulatory pressures and deal stressors, consoled her and encouraged her to try for the partnership again. Still, Pompey almost gave up on her goal. "It was a low point in my career, and I considered leaving the firm," she says.
The moment echoed Pompey's experience a decade earlier, when she left Pfizer for Goldman after not receiving a promotion she wanted at the pharma giant. This time around, Pompey opted to stay put. She was going through a divorce, and decided she valued stability—in her day-to-day life and financially—for herself and her two young sons.
Two years later, in 2018, Pompey made partner. And two years after that, she got a call from Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon inviting her to join the firm's management committee, where she is now the only Black person among its two-dozen members.
Today, Fortune is the first to report, Goldman is expanding her role from global head of corporate engagement and president of the Goldman Sachs Foundation: She is adding a position as chair of the firm's $3 billion Urban Investment Group. The group is part of Goldman's impact investing portfolio, operating across asset classes, including real estate and small business financing. The addition officially puts an investing role under Pompey's purview, adding to her portfolio of philanthropic and community engagement work, including Goldman's One Million Black Women program.
Looking back now at her decision to stay on at Goldman after not making partner the first time she went up for it, Pompey says, "I'm glad I didn't take my toys and throw them out of the pram."
It was a learning experience, she says. "Sometimes when you think you deserve something and it doesn't happen on the timeline you envisioned, you've got to ask yourself some tough questions," she says. "You have to remember the path is not linear. Your timing is not necessarily the firm's timing. And you have to make the decision—how badly do you want it?"
To anyone else facing a career setback, she offers this advice: "You've got to have resilience, you've got to have grit, and you've got to invest in relationships—not just when things are going well, but when things are not."
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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