There is a recognition on Wall Street that it no longer gets first pick of the best engineering students graduating college.
Silicon Valley is now an attractive alternative for the best and brightest graduates, especially as big salaries in NYC have shrunk. In response, Wall Street has been courting financially minded starts ups it might once have ignored. A recent get together between Goldman Sachs employees and programmers from Kensho, shows how Wall Street is embracing the culture of these new firms as Goldman employees shed their jackets and ties in favour of hoodies and headphone of day two of the GS Kensho Hackathon 2015.Goldman Sachs invested $15 million in Kensho, the big data analytics start up last November. Its cloud-based software can find answers to 65 million question combinations by instant scanning of more than 90,000 actions such as drug approvals, economic reports, monetary policy changes and political events and their impact on nearly every financial asset on the plant.
On the first day of a hackathon at the Manhattan headquarters of Goldman Sachs, participants from the Wall Street bank showed up in suits. The programmers from Kensho, a start-up that had recently gotten money from Goldman, were there in jeans and ripped shirts.

The next day, many of the Goldman employees took off their jackets and ties. And the day after that, many of the Goldman employees were wearing the gray hoodies and Beats headphones that had been made especially for the event. (This being Goldman Sachs, the headphones were custom engraved — “GS Kensho Hackathon 2015” — to commemorate the occasion.)

The evolution of the dress code during the hackathon was one indication of the changing relationship between Wall Street banks like Goldman and start-ups like Kensho, a data analytics company, which received a $15 million investment late last year in a financing round led by Goldman.

In the past, Goldman and its big competitors kept their distance from start-ups like Kensho that were trying to disrupt the Wall Street business model — especially start-ups as young as Kensho, which was founded in 2013. Goldman and many other Wall Street banks have historically done most of their significant technological developments in-house, viewing their business as the product of decades of experience.