Goldman Sachs tapped Dallas for its engineering talent

The Goldman Sachs CEO spoke publicly for the first time about the firm’s upcoming tower near downtown Dallas

Why Dallas, Goldman Sachs?

“It’s about hiring engineers here,” CEO David Solomon told hundreds of members of the Dallas Citizens Council this week, the Dallas Morning News reported.

Half of the investment bank’s employees are in their 20s, Solomon said.

“I don’t believe that people should be working for Goldman Sachs and living in Jackson Hole,” he said. Solomon attended the powerful civic organization’s Wednesday meeting to speak publicly for the first time about why the firm’s $500 million, three-building employment center landed in North Texas — one of the nation’s foremost leaders in office occupancy.

Spanning nine-to-15 stories and nearly 900,000 square feet, Goldman Sachs’ upcoming base on the 2300 block of North Field Street in downtown Dallas, opens in 2026. It is one of the largest office projects on the way in North Texas. New York-based Goldman Sachs hopes it will be a magnet for fresh talent.

“One of the things that makes Texas so incredible is you have an incredible secondary education system here, both public and private,” Solomon said. “It creates an enormous pipeline of talented young individuals. People come down here to go to school, and they actually want to stay.”

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The City of Dallas welcomed the company with $18 million in economic incentives back in June.

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“So many people in the Dallas business community and the government here have reached out to Goldman Sachs to encourage us and support us and to welcome us,” he said. “That’s a great environment to have confidence in where we can invest.”

The Wall Street firm’s reported 4,000 Dallas-based employees currently work out of the Trammell Crow Center skyscraper in downtown and Galatyn Commons office campus in Richardson.

The Goldman Sachs Dallas campus marks the first phase of an 11-acre project planned by Dallas’ Hunt Realty.

The news wasn’t all positive. Solomon also provided council members with a bearish economic forecast, saying the firm was preparing for a “relatively bumpy environment.”

“There is more uncertainty right now on the economic trajectory for the next 12 to 24 months than we have seen in quite some time,” he said. “We are set up for the potential for a soft landing, but I also could easily see some sort of modest recession.”

Goldman Sachs economists are forecasting that the world economy will grow at a modest 1.9 percent next year, he said, “which would obviously be relatively slow-paced growth.” The culprit? Inflation, according to Solomon.

“We are in a tricky place,” he said. “We haven’t dealt with inflation in a long time.

“Inflation is a very, very punitive tax — a huge headwind.”

Maddy Sperling