Marty Chavez, the former CIO and CFO of Goldman, helped create the company's internal risk analytics system and led the development of the firm's high-profile trading and risk offering Marquee., he explored his road to sobriety and the problems with Wall Street's hard-drinking culture.
Chavez, who stopped drinking in 1997, was in the oil business at the time. He had served as a senior energy strategist at Goldman as well as a director of global energy derivatives at Credit Suisse. Years later, he said he's been approached "a hundred times" at industry events by colleagues and clients about his decision to get sober and how they could get help.
But in 2005 he returned at the behest of Gary Cohn, then global co-head of the firm's securities business. During his second stint at the firm, he championed, the firm's high-profile trading and risk management offering that made much of SecDB available for use by clients. "I will say for a long time, I didn't talk about sobriety at all. It was, of the many parts of myself, probably the last one that I started talking about, especially publicly," Chavez said.