hedgefund.wiki — institutional knowledge base

Josef Menasche

People · CC-BY-4.0

Josef Menasche cold-called Goldman Sachs and told them to hire him. It worked. At 34, Menasche is a Managing Director and Global Co-Head of Secondaries Advisory at Goldman Sachs — leading a team that has executed transactions across infrastructure, real estate, private equity, and venture capital in what has become one of the hottest segments of alternative investments. Secondaries — the resale market for private fund stakes — hit a record $103 billion in activity in the first half of 2025, and Menasche has been at the center of the surge. His path to Goldman was characteristically unconventional. Menasche studied chemistry at Cambridge, found the lab environment too slow for his temperament, and pivoted to finance. Early experience at secondaries-focused boutique Campbell Lutyens gave him expertise in a niche that, at the time, barely registered on most people's radar. When he saw Goldman building out its secondaries capability, he picked up the phone and made his pitch. The highlights of his work include a $3.1 billion single-asset continuation vehicle with New Mountain Capital for Real Chemistry — half providing distributions to original investors, half primary capital for future M&A. "The fact that they're willing to put so much fresh money into the new M&A through another business is pretty unusual," he has said. "It's a general sign of people feeling good about the world." His team has just over a dozen bankers competing against the largest competitor with approximately 150. Clients consistently tell him: "You give us very different advice to other bankers, and it seems to work out well for us." That differentiation — doing more with less, thinking differently about structures — is what defines the best advisory practices. Menasche's contrarian thesis from 2021 was simple: "Big banks are going to dominate this space eventually." Secondaries were historically the domain of specialist boutiques. Menasche bet that Goldman's platform, relationships, and capital markets access would give it an insurmountable advantage once the market reached scale. That bet is paying off. "I think fundamentally, if you just pick what you're interested in, you will do well," he has said. For a chemistry student turned Goldman MD advising on billions in secondary transactions, the evidence supports the thesis.

Details