Steven Mandis

Steven George Mandis (born in 1970) is an American investor and the founder of Kalamata Capital. He is also adjunct associate professor in finance and economics at Columbia University Business School, having previously worked at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup and as a senior advisor to McKinsey. He is the author of What Happened to Goldman Sachs: An Insider's Story of Organizational Drift and its Unintended Consequences and The Real Madrid Way: How Values Created the Most Successful Sports Team on the Planet.

Mandis was born in Chicago, Illinois as one of three children to his parents, Greek emigres George and Theoni. He spent his childhood in Chicago and Grand Rapids, Michigan where he attended Forest Hills Central High School . He received an A.B. from the University of Chicago. While at Chicago he was on the varsity tennis and fencing teams and volunteered for the Guardian Angels, an unarmed crime prevention and safety patrol group. During his junior year at Chicago, he studied abroad at The London School of Economics and Political Science. After his career on Wall Street he enrolled in Columbia University and in 2010 received an M.A. in Museum Anthropology. In 2013 he received an M.Phil in Sociology and then completed his Ph.D. in Sociology as an honorary Paul F. Lazarsfeld Fellow.

Mandis began his career at Goldman Sachs in 1992 as a mergers-and-acquisitions banker. He then moved to the proprietary trading department, where he helped build the Special Situations Proprietary Trading Group (SSG) within the Fixed Income, Commodities and Currencies Division, which became one of the largest proprietary trading groups on Wall Street. There he worked under Henry Paulson, before Paulson was promoted from Co-Head of the Investment Banking Division to President and Chief Operating Officer of Goldman Sachs.

In 2004 Mandis left Goldman to co-found an alternative asset management company. Mandis later worked as a senior advisor to McKinsey & Company, where during the financial crisis, he worked on strategic, business process, risk and organizational issues facing financial institutions and related regulatory authorities. He then worked as an executive at Citigroup in various roles including Chief of Staff to its President and Chief Operating Officer; Vice Chairman of its Institutional Clients Group (ICG); and a member of ICG's Executive, Management and Risk Management Committees.

In 2013 Mandis founded Kalamata Capital, a small business finance company that he developed after investing in two companies in the field, including RapidAdvance—a company later sold to an entity controlled by Quicken Loans founder Dan Gilbert. Mandis funded Kalamata with his own money, naming it after the area of Greece his parents are from.

Mandis left Wall Street to become an academic in 2012. He has taught at Columbia University both in New York and abroad in Madrid. At Columbia Business School Mandis teaches MBA and Executive MBA students, focusing on investment banking and financial crisis topics. He is also an instructor in the Masters of Sports Management Program. He has also developed lectures and courses for underprivileged high school students in Harlem, New York on the subject financial responsibility.

In 2013 Mandis published the book What Happened to Goldman Sachs: An Insider’s Story of Organizational Drift and its Unintended Consequences, published by Harvard Business Press, based upon his PhD dissertation at Columbia. It covers the cultural change that occurred at Goldman Sachs between 1979 and 2013. It has been reviewed by the Wall Street Journal, Make T a small t The Financial Times, and the New York Times

In 2016 Mandis published the book The Real Madrid Way: How Values Created the Most Successful Sports Team on the Planet, published by BenBella books. The book analyzes how the club has been so successful, including both on the field and off the field performance. It has been reviewed by the Financial Times, Forbes, and ESPN.

Mandis was awarded an Ellis Island Medal of Honor in 2012.

In 2014 his book about Goldman Sachs won the Gold Axiom Business Book Award for Corporate History.

Mandis lives in New York City. He currently competes in triathlons, including having competed in the IRONMAN World Championships in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii; IRONMAN 70.3 World Championships in Zell Am See-Kaprun, Austria; and Escape from Alcatraz in San Francisco, California.