In 1869, Marcus Goldman starts a small business buying and selling promissory notes in Lower Manhattan. His strong relationships and reputation as an honest broker form the foundation for a company that will grow to become one of the most influential financial institutions in the world.
Marcus Goldman, the founder of Goldman Sachs, was born in Bavaria in 1821 to a Jewish family led by a peasant cattle drover. Marcus sailed to America as part of a wave of migration resulting from the European Revolutions of 1848 and antisemitism in Germany.
Marcus landed in the United States with a brother and began work as an itinerant merchant peddler in Philadelphia. There, he met his future wife, Bertha, and they started a family. In 1869, the Goldmans moved to New York City (the undisputed financial capital of the United States since the 1840s) with their five children.
Marcus’s entrepreneurial instincts served him well in New York. He set up a one-room shop on Pine Street and developed a small business buying and selling promissory notes, financial instruments similar to commercial paper. His strong relationships with merchants allowed him to evaluate their creditworthiness and act as a reliable intermediary between small borrowers and institutional lenders.
