The Gold Standard

After four years in high finance, Lane Kimbro stepped away from Goldman Sachs to pursue a calling of faith and risk, leading to the cofounding of his own creative agency and a spot on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list By Jaime Handley, photos by Tristan An

Type “investment banking firms” into your browser and your AI overview will quickly generate a list of global giants. At the top of that list is a name most of us are familiar with: Goldman Sachs, a leading global investment management firm headquartered in New York that is among the most influential financial institutions in the world.

It was into that high-finance world that George Fox alumnus Lane Kimbro found himself as a new graduate in 2020. By 2024, he had embarked on a different adventure, bringing his business acuity to a field he never expected: high-end media production.

An Entrepreneurial Spirit

From a young age, Kimbro was surrounded by the spirit of entrepreneurial life.

“Growing up, I’d always done entrepreneurial things,” he recalls. “I was fortunate to have a mom who owned a couple of small businesses. She literally did manufacturing in our garage. The running joke was that I was the ‘chief bottle officer’ because I would bottle and package everything.”

The opportunities leveled up when Kimbro’s grandfather, an antiques collector, became interested in online sales during the eBay boom of the early 2010s. “My grandpa said, ‘I’ll buy it, you put it up for sale, we’ll split whatever we make.’ It was super generous,” he says.

That partnership led Kimbro to flex his own entrepreneurial muscles, dabbling in everything from selling real estate and medical equipment to pottery and jewelry. “I was blessed because those experiences sparked my entrepreneurial desire to create value and have autonomy and agency,” he says.

Journey to George Fox

As Kimbro approached high school graduation, he received an invitation to play baseball at George Fox. Though raised Catholic, he didn’t have faith at the top of his list when looking at colleges.

But a visit to Newberg on a sunny spring day sealed the deal. Between the school’s intimate feel and the opportunity to experience something beyond his home state of Colorado, Kimbro decided to move to Oregon and study finance in the business department.

“What I loved about Fox was that I was able to choose my own adventure, and the professors were so supportive,” he says.

Kimbro even started an investment club on campus and secured donor funding, foreshadowing the work he would eventually step into after graduation.

The Power of Mentorship

Along with the tailored educational support he received at George Fox, Kimbro also found exceptional mentors. One of them, Craig Inglesby, had been hired by the university’s athletic department to cultivate spiritual formation in student-athletes.

“I remember him meeting me where I was and asking about my faith,” Kimbro recalls. “God used Craig to highlight the gift of having a personal relationship and walking with Jesus.”

During his senior year, Kimbro even lived with Inglesby and his wife, helping out with what is now The Bridge Network, a mentorship program run by the university’s athletic department that fosters one-on-one relationships among students and mentors from the professional world.

“I moved to New York out of ambition and career success, to make a name for myself. What I found on the other side is that none of those things fully satisfy – only the Lord does.”

He also found opportunities to connect with people who inspired him. It was common for the business department to host high-profile guest lecturers, and Kimbro took advantage, asking several of them out for coffee. “Every single person I asked said yes, which was incredible,” he says.

One such guest was George Fox alumnus Drew Van der Werff, who had carved his own path to Goldman Sachs – an uncommon career trajectory for a graduate from a small West Coast school. He served as inspiration for Kimbro’s journey to the Manhattan super firm.

“Drew carved that path first and then was really instrumental in paving the way for me,” he says. “He even helped me prepare for my internship interview, thinking through what to ask and what they might ask me. I ended up getting the internship after my junior year.”

That opportunity would open the door to Kimbro’s first full-time role on Wall Street.

Graduating to Goldman Sachs

Though Kimbro’s long-term goal was success in finance – specifically investment banking – he landed an accounting internship at Goldman Sachs the summer before his senior year. Once there, he leaned into his personal formula for success: intentional networking. “In that accounting internship, I did the same thing – networked and met a ton of people,” he recalls.

Before long, he was brought on full time with an investment banking team, eventually landing a role helping private companies raise capital before they transitioned to public ownership – a role that helped raise billions of dollars for businesses such as Canva, Figma and Stripe.

Though Kimbro was at the top of his game, he realized that the pinnacle of success can be a litmus test for where hope and identity actually lie.

“I moved to New York out of ambition and career success, to make a name for myself,” he says. “What I found on the other side is that none of those things fully satisfy – only the Lord does. It took me four years to realize that.”

Finding His Calling

While Kimbro found success at Goldman Sachs, he also found God calling him into a season of redefining. It opened up new avenues for what his future might hold as he let go of a singular vision of success in the financial world – namely, working on Wall Street.

“What the Lord taught me was that my greatest purpose and calling is in him and what he has for me,” he says.

For Kimbro, this redefining meant not only trusting God with his future but also surrendering his present. “The Lord took me through a season of being very hidden,” he says. “In his kindness, he completely reformed my vision.”

This reforming of Kimbro’s spiritual calling coincided with a rekindling of his entrepreneurial dreams, leading to opportunities to create in ways and spaces he had not yet explored.

The resulting move was the cofounding of a new business, PRIV.Y, along with his business partner Noah Berghammer. Together, they launched an art gallery, a creative agency and a production company that, today, works with some of the biggest names in the fashion and tech world. “In this season, the Lord is showing me how to use my gifts and inclinations for what he wants to do through me in these unique creative spaces,” Kimbro says.

The Path to PRIV.Y

When Kimbro met Berghammer, a multi-passionate creative with a career in high-fashion production – working on campaigns for brands like Louis Vuitton, Prada and Dior – the connection fanned a flame.

With Kimbro’s business and financial savvy and Berghammer’s creative vision, PRIV.Y was eventually born. “Noah is the visionary. He has an incredible network and is so talented on the creative side,” he says. “I come from the business side, the sales side. In the creative space, it’s pretty rare to have both.”

Berghammer leads the creative side, directing, shooting and building the visual worlds for their clients, as well as building relationships with potential new partners. Kimbro runs the business side, from project execution – scoping, budgeting and contracting – to building business systems and processes to scale, as well as growing the business through outreach, pitching and account management.

The PRIV.Y partnership has been a huge success – one that Kimbro didn’t anticipate when he came to New York in 2020. “Being in the creative space was never part of my 10-year plan,” he reflects.

Together, Kimbro and Berghammer found their focus as a boutique agency serving some of the top brands in the world of fashion, hospitality and technology with high-end media production. Berghammer also has a heart for fostering in-person spaces for the creative community. With these two aligned values, they launched PRIV.Y Agency and PRIV.Y Art Gallery.

While PRIV.Y surpassed $1 million in revenue in its first year, there were moments of uncertainty. “At the end of 2024, we weren’t making much from production yet and didn’t think we had enough to pay the gallery rent,” Kimbro reflects. “We just prayed, ‘God, we need your help. If you want us to keep going, we need you.’”

Help came that same day in the form of two separate calls to rent the PRIV.Y Art Gallery space. It was just enough to get through December.

In February, they received a call from Whoop, one of the largest fitness wearable companies – their biggest campaign yet. Soon after, they were contacted and eventually hired by a $10 billion tech company. Since then, PRIV.Y has worked with brands that include Vogue, Rosewood Hotels and Levi’s.

Kimbro accepts each moment with a posture of open-handed surrender and alignment. “Instead of going into these spaces of success to feel worth, I get to now come from the place of the worth I have in God,” he says.

Forbes’  30 Under 30

In August 2025, Forbes magazine reached out to Kimbro and Berghammer, inviting them to apply for its “30 Under 30” list. Kimbro saw the invitation as another God-opened door and a celebration of the collaboration behind PRIV.Y.

“Getting to do business with someone who also looks to the Lord in this space is incredible,” he says. “We are very complementary while being very different. We would both say we could not have done it without each other.”

In December 2025, the two business partners were named to Forbes’ “30 Under 30” list in the “Art and Style” category.

New Avenues of Creativity

As PRIV.Y approaches its second anniversary, Kimbro and Berghammer are identifying opportunities to create and iterate in new directions.

“The times I have chosen Jesus and the gospel, he has been so faithful. Doors have opened that I never thought could.”

“We’re coming into the creative and media ecosystems and feeling the Lord say, ‘I’ve given you inclinations to build things, to build solutions.’ We keep asking, ‘How do we grow and become better at production? But also, is there anything else you want us to build?’” Kimbro says.

And that’s exactly what PRIV.Y is doing as it launches two new business trajectories: producing its own social media shows and potentially launching a consumer product Kimbro and Berghammer are ecstatic about, doing all of the creative and media in-house to scale it.

Through the excitement of this season of building and growing, Kimbro has stayed grounded in his first calling: following Jesus.

“The times I have chosen Jesus and the gospel, he has been so faithful,” he says. “Doors have opened that I never thought could.”

For Kimbro, it’s a faith-aligned metric of success that has become the gold standard.