Officer Golten Sells 5208 ($3.3M) Of Goldman Sachs Group Inc/The [Gs]

By Miriam Gottfried and Lauren Thomas

Michael Dell thinks his fellow technology founders need more tailored advice. BDT & MSD, the merchant bank whose advisory board he chairs, is expanding its business to help them get it.

The firm is hiring Ryan Nolan, a top banker at Goldman Sachs, to co-lead its technology practice, executives said. Nolan is close to artificial-intelligence leader OpenAI and is advising on its planned restructuring and other matters. At BDT & MSD, he will partner with former Kleiner Perkins partner Juliet de Baubigny who joined in 2023.

BDT & MSD is a merchant bank, meaning it advises founder- and family-owned businesses on things like deals and succession planning and invests in them through a fund whose backers are business owners themselves. It is the product of a 2023 merger between merchant bank BDT, founded by Goldman alumnus Byron Trott, and MSD Partners, an investment firm with roots in Dell's family office.

Part of the merger rationale was extending the combined firm's blend of advice and capital to tech founders and giving other business-owning families in its network access to technology investments. Many tech founders hold most of their wealth in the stock of their own companies, said Gregg Lemkau, BDT & MSD's co-chief executive alongside Trott.

When it took a stake in software-company Qualtrics in 2023, for example, BDT & MSD brought families from its network into the deal. Qualtrics founder Ryan Smith is now part of the firm's network. Other tech founders in its network include Mel Perkins of design-software developer Canva, Joe Gebbia of Airbnb and John Collison of Stripe.

"We tell founders: We can give you trusted advice on your business, give you capital to invest in your business and give you options to diversify your wealth," said Lemkau, previously co-head of investment banking at Goldman.

BDT & MSD is also launching a fund to invest in fast-growing, founder-led, technology companies, according to people familiar with the matter. The fund's backers are expected to include Dell, the founder of the eponymous computer maker, and other families and founders in BDT & MSD's network, the people said.

Nolan joined Goldman in 2012 and was most recently a partner in its technology, media and telecommunications group and global co-head of software investment banking. Before Goldman, he was a lawyer at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, where he advised the underwriters in Facebook's initial public offering.

Nolan has worked on more than 20 tech IPOs at Goldman, including those of Monday.com and GitLab.

He has also worked on some of the biggest tech deals in recent memory, advising VMware on its $69 billion sale to Broadcom and Canva on its recent equity raise. Nolan helped defend HP from a hostile takeover attempt by Xerox Holdings.

De Baubigny's path has previously crossed with Nolan's. She invested in Canva, for example, while she was at venture-capital firm Bond.

"Our skill set is so complementary, but we approach the founder in the same way," she said.

Write to Miriam Gottfried at Miriam.Gottfried@wsj.com and Lauren Thomas at lauren.thomas@wsj.com