Eric Dobkin: The father of the IPO

IN ADDITION

Fifty years of capital markets Jim Amine Samir Assaf Jean-Francois Astier Allegra Berman Mandy DeFilippo Jerry del Missier Bob Diamond Tyler Dickson Martin Egan Jim Esposito Peter Hancock Guy Hands Jeremy Isaacs Conor Killeen John McNiven Chris O'Malley Vikram Pandit Hans-Joerg Rudloff John St John Paul Tregidgo Matthew Westerman

To hear Eric Dobkin talk about Goldman Sachs, you would assume he was heading in to work at 200 West Street before the markets open tomorrow morning. But after a tenure of 49 years that only finished in 2016 when he was 73, it’s hardly a surprise. 

“I may be the longest serving individual at Goldman Sachs who was a partner,” he says.

Life at Goldman began for Dobkin in 1967, when he started in the firm’s Philadelphia office. Most of his first 10 years was spent in or around equity sales, before he ended up running the institutional equity business for the whole mid-west region. 

For another five years after that he came to New York and was in a series of roles – “odd jobs”, as Dobkin calls them – executing transactions that sought to take advantage of changes in market thinking, particularly around the ways in which Wall Street firms could interact with the kinds of investors that were starting to rise in importance, like pension funds and mutuals.