AT A GLANCE
Vice Chairman and Partner
Sixth Street
Alma Maters: Harvard University, Stanford University
R. Martin (“Marty”) Chavez, Ph.D. is widely renowned as a trailblazer and leader who turned the Wall Street trading business into a software business, revolutionizing the way that capital moves and works. Since January 2021, he serves as a senior advisor to Sixth Street Partners, where he works on research and development; diversity, equity, and inclusion; the sourcing engine; and the More Than Capital business, driving deeper engagement with the portfolio companies. Before joining Sixth Street, Marty served in a variety of senior roles at Goldman Sachs, including Chief Information Officer, where he oversaw the firm’s 9,000 engineers; Chief Financial Officer; and global co-head of the firm’s Securities (now Global Markets) Division. Marty was also a partner and member of the Goldman Sachs management committee.
Marty has achieved singular acclaim in the financial-services industry for his work on SecDB, an early platform that transformed the trading business into a software business. He is also known for bringing the front and back offices together. By training, he is a computer scientist who successfully advocated for the elevation of engineers. Yet Marty is also a highly regarded investor in his own right, leveraging his background in machine learning to push the industry forward.
Far from the stereotype of a banker, Marty is a disrupter at heart. He was among the most senior Latinos on Wall Street, as well as the most senior openly gay executive at Goldman Sachs. In 2016, a New York Times profile described Marty as “a departure in sensibility from the buttoned-down partners of Goldman lore.”
Adept in both Wall Street and Silicon Valley, Marty co-founded San Francisco start-up, Quorum Software Systems. Later, he was CEO of Kiodex, a New York risk management systems company that SunGard Data Systems acquired in 2004.
Beyond finance, Marty has long held a passion for converging the life sciences and software, and has an eye for new applications of AI and technology that will transform industries. Since retiring from Goldman Sachs, Marty serves as an advisor and board member to multiple startups and projects that are accelerating breakthroughs in their fields.
Marty serves as an advisor or board member to Abacus.AI, an AI startup developing new approaches to deep learning; Paige.AI, a New York-based start-up that uses artificial intelligence techniques to improve the diagnosis and treatment of cancer; the global bank, Grupo Santander, where he chairs the Board Innovation and Technology Committee; and the Digital Dollar Project, a partnership between Accenture and the Digital Dollar Foundation to advance exploration of a United States Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC).
Marty serves on the Board of Directors for Recursion, a digital biology company industrializing drug discovery by harnessing the power of cloud-based machine learning models, and health intelligence company Sema4, which leverages a unique analytics platform to help providers better manage data for healthcare systems. He advises numerous other companies, including block.one, a leading blockchain developer; Earli, which delivers new technologies for identifying and localizing early-stage cancers; Cambrian Biopharma, a distributed drug discovery company developing medicines to extend healthy lifespans; and Ketch, which delivers responsive infrastructure for compliance and data security.
Marty serves on the Board of Overseers of Harvard University (recently appointed President for the 2020-2021 academic year), the Stanford Medicine Board of Fellows, the Advisory Council of the Stanford Center on Longevity, the Board of Trustees of the Institute for Advanced Study, and the Board of Directors of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Previously, he served on the Board of Directors of PNM Resources, Inc., and the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA). A passionate patron of the arts, he previously served on the boards of the Friends of the High Line, amFAR (the Foundation for AIDS Research), and the Santa Fe Opera. Marty resides in the Berkshires, and is the proud father of two.
He holds an A.B. (1985) magna cum laude in Biochemical Sciences and an S.M. (1985) in Computer Science from Harvard, and a Ph.D. (1990) in Medical Information Sciences from Stanford (Architectures and Algorithms for Probabilistic Expert Systems).
