Jared Cohen

Jared Cohen is the President of Global Affairs and co-head of the Office of Applied Innovation at Goldman Sachs. He joined as a Partner in 2022 and is a member of the firm’s Management Committee and the Firmwide Client Franchise Committee.

Prior to joining the firm, Cohen was Chief Executive Officer of Jigsaw, which he founded at Alphabet Inc. in 2016. In this role, his work focused on applying frontier technology to the greatest challenges facing humanity. Prior to that, he was Google’s first Director of Ideas and Chief Advisor to Google’s Chief Executive Officer and Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt. From 2006 to 2010, Cohen served as a member of the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff and as a close advisor to both Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton.

Cohen is a New York Times bestselling author of six books, including One Hundred Days of Silence: America and the Rwanda Genocide, Children of Jihad, The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Business, and our Lives (co-authored with Eric Schmidt), Accidental Presidents: Eight Men Who Changed America, Life After Power: Seven Presidents and their Search for Purpose Beyond the White House, and the forthcoming children’s book Speaking of America: United States Presidents and the Words that Changed History. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, TIME Magazine, Financial Times and Foreign Policy. Cohen has been named to the “TIME 100” list, Foreign Policy‘s “Top 100 Global Thinkers,” Fortune‘s “40 Under 40”, and Vanity Fair‘s “Next Establishment.”

Cohen is a member of and an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, and a member of the Trilateral Commission. He serves on the Board of Directors of Gilded, Stanford University’s Freeman-Spogli Institute, and the Chapin School. He serves on the advisory boards of RAND, the National Counterterrorism Center, Schmidt Futures, and the Anti-Slavery Collective.

Cohen received his B.A. from Stanford University and his M.Phil in International Relations from the University of Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. He speaks fluent Swahili.