Feature / Hispanic Executive
Conversations at the Top:
Marty Chavez
By Rubin Navarette - 6.29.21
Marty Chavez is renowned for his leadership both on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley. But he never would have made it without the support, determination, and sacrifices of his family.
“I had told myself that the day I successfully defended my dissertation, I was going to come screaming out of the closet. So, I literally went from the defense of my dissertation to a meeting of the gay and lesbian alliance at Stanford.”
From the article
Did you ever meet someone and get the feeling you already knew them?
I’ve never met R. Martin (Marty) Chavez—at least, not beyond an hour-long interview conducted via Zoom. Yet, in a sense, I’ve known the man most of my life.
That is, I’ve known of him and his family, and while we haven’t traveled similar roads, we do have similar backgrounds.
Still, before we spoke, it took me a minute to piece together that the “Marty Chavez” I was supposed to interview later that day—the fifty-seven-year-old investment banker, Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur, and former chief information officer and chief financial officer at Goldman Sachs—was the same Martin Chavez whose early claim to fame was being first in line in a family that’s likely considered Mexican American royalty at Harvard.
For Chavez—whose family roots in New Mexico date back to the founding of Santa Fe in 1610—a childhood spent in Albuquerque revolved around three entities that were both powerful and sacred: family, church, and education.
Good decisions and good outcomes aren’t the same thing—neither are bad decisions and bad outcomes. It’s possible to make a good decision with a bad outcome, and vice versa. But, over the very long haul, the compounding effect of good decision-making lets you know that you’re doing it right.
