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The a16z Show
Building Blackstone, Backing Costco, with Tony James
01:23:48
David Haber speaks with Tony James about building enduring firms across multiple eras of finance. From joining DLJ when it was a subscale firm to helping grow Blackstone into one of the largest asset managers in the world, James reflects on the decisions, structures, and cultural principles that enabled long-term success. They discuss the origins of leveraged buyouts, the evolution of private markets, and how identifying structural opportunities early can create lasting competitive advantage. James also shares lessons from backing companies like Costco, where culture, customer focus, and long-term thinking drove exceptional outcomes. The conversation covers leadership, talent development, and the challenges of scaling organizations while maintaining performance. James also reflects on succession, firm-building, and why culture, incentives, and alignment ultimately determine whether an organization compounds or stagnates.
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- [00:01]
Tony James
If you think about the development of a successful company, there's kind of an S curve. It starts off small and entrepreneurial, then there's this kind of escalation where you create a lot of value and a lot of size.
- [00:09]
David Haber
People know Blackstone today, a trillion dollars in aum. It did not look anything like that when you joined.
- [00:14]
Tony James
Running an investment organization like Blackstone, I think you almost have to be a really good investor if you're going to catch the signals early, they're never obvious. By the time they're obvious, it's priced in.
- [00:25]
David Haber
You led the Series A into Costco. Charlie Munger was still on the board and you guys served together for 30 years. What did you learn?
- [00:31]
Tony James
Focus, flawless execution of details, build for the long term.
- [00:35]
David Haber
Everybody that I spoke with literally attribute the success that they've had in their careers to you. If a young person came to you today, what would you tell them about building a career?
- [00:44]
Podcast Host/Narrator
What does it take to build a firm that lasts across decades? In finance, most success is measured in funds. But a small number of people have built firms, organizations that compound talent, capital and culture over time. Tony James is one of them. From joining DLJ when it was a subscale firm to helping transform Blackstone into a trillion dollar asset manager. His career traces the evolution of modern private markets. The question is not just how to generate returns, but how to build systems that keep generating them. A16Z general partner David Haber sits down with Tony James to talk through the decisions, inflection points and principles behind that kind of enduring success.
- [01:29]
David Haber
Tony, thank you so much for being here.
- [01:31]
Tony James
You're very welcome.
- [01:32]
David Haber
David, you joined DLJ as an investment banking associate in 1975. I think just after business school. Maybe give us a reminder of what the shape of that business looked like at the time.
- [01:43]
Tony James
Well, if I'd known what I was doing, I probably wouldn't have joined dlj. It was nothing, honestly. It was a sub major firm or a sub sub major firm as they used to say in those days. So there were at least 100 firms bigger than it was. We had an investment banking team of five. We hadn't done a financing or a merger in two years. So we hadn't done any business in two years.
- [02:04]
David Haber
Oh, wow.
- [02:06]
Tony James
But I liked the people, I liked the unstructured nature of it. I decided that I'd give it a shot.
- [02:12]
David Haber
And I mean, you ultimately stayed for 25 years, I believe, which was a pretty long tenure generally, but certainly for Wall street at the time, I guess what were some of the kind of Key inflection points in that journey. Maybe that led to your success or kind of the evolution of the business, which grew obviously massively during your time.
- [02:28]
Tony James
Well, the good part of getting in on the ground floor is if it starts to work, you get pulled up with the growth of the organization and you get responsibilities earlier than you deserve them. And that kind of feeds on itself. Your learning accelerates, everything accelerates. Your confidence accelerates, maybe to an excess, but it feels really good. And your expectations are low. So when you start winning business, it's always a positive surprise. If you lose, well, that's par for the course. So you got a very positive feedback loop. We ran dlj. Ultimately it was renowned for its culture. People just loved working there. And that created a really nice environment. And you spent so much of your career or your life in your office. That was fantastic. And we grew DLJ from essentially nothing to the fifth largest securities firm. We grew it at over 15% for 25 consecutive years. That's kind of one of your tech companies and I love that. And every few years the business changed and my opportunity set changed radically. The big turning point I would say was 1980 when KKR did a LBO for Hu Dai Industries, the first big public company that was taken private. And I thought, wow, you can buy these huge companies with almost all debt. And it struck me that DLJ at the time was competing with dozens of other firms that had more of everything than we did. More bankers, more clients, more of a track record, more capital, more distribution. There was nothing we had that should win. So that struck me as a way to kind of end run. They weren't really doing it themselves. It was a new sector. We could buy clients we couldn't actually win competitively and then do all their investment banking business. And that really fed on itself out of the. We built a private equity business. I think our first fund had a 90% IRR. Those days it was easier because prices were lower. Companies were more under managed and essentially you could borrow 100% of the purchase price. So just by rolling your fees you could kind of own the company. And then that drove, then we had to, could and had to build a high yield business and other debt businesses. A lot of those were our biggest IPOs. One thing led to another. So we built the whole investment banking business cheek by jowl with the principal business. So it was in essence it was a true merchant bank. There was no reason really that a KKR or a Forceman little that were the big players back then should ever existed. Your Old firm Goldman should have beaten them. But the big firms were ambivalent about this business. They were ambivalent because it wasn't quite an agency business. There were old line bankers that didn't understand it and didn't actually want to understand it, really. They just didn't want their clients to complain about competing with something that the firm bought. And so that institutional ambivalence gave us a huge Runway that we just plowed through. And it became a magic synergy between the investment banking and the merchant banking. And ultimately we built funds of funds and real estate businesses, venture capital. We had a business back then called Sprout, which was one of the big three back in the 70s. Gone now.
- [05:46]
David Haber
Yeah. And I want to dig into the merchant banking business in a bit. One of the folks that I spoke to in preparing for this conversation was Bennett Goodman, who you've had a long history with. And he told me a funny story of you recruiting him when he was, I think, at Drexel at the time.
- [05:59]
Tony James
Right.
- [06:00]
David Haber
And Mike Milken was sort of at top of the power chain in terms of, like, the junk bond ecosystem and kind of the growth of the private equity world. And he said, he asked you, what makes you think you can compete with Drexel? And you gave an amazing answer, or at least his recollection. I'm curious if you remember that conversation.
- [06:15]
Tony James
You said, I don't. What did he say?
- [06:18]
David Haber
He basically said you had the whole theory for why Drexel's business model was flawed was basically that all they had to do was sort of say that they had high confidence that they could raise the capital. And you had a very different point of view, that you were going to actually have dedicated pools of capital. You were going to start effectively a bridge fund.
- [06:33]
Tony James
Bridge fund, Right.
- [06:34]
David Haber
And Bennett, I think, had said, okay, well, so These are like $250 million, $500 million financing. Like, how big's your balance sheet? And you're like, I don't know, 300 million bucks? And he's like, okay, how does that work? You're like, well, we were controlled by Equitable, which was one of the biggest life insurance companies. And it was just. This is something I've heard from a lot of people. But the confidence that you had and the confidence that you instilled in others to go compete against people who are far better capitalized had much bigger businesses, he would argue, drove a lot of the firm's success. I'm just curious if you could talk through kind of that dynamic in the 80s.
- [07:07]
Tony James
Yeah, well, of course, back then, Drexel was the big gorilla and we were second in High Yield. We were more of a client than a threat to Drexel at the time because of our principal business. Drexel had the high Yield, the highly confident letter. If we said we were highly confident, people would say, well, so what? You don't matter. So we created this bridge fund and we turned it heavily. We bet the fund and we bet the firm on every bridge loan. And ultimately that lack of capital became an Achilles heel. But we had a remarkable stretch of making the right credit assessments and the right market assessments. So every time we got would win the business and we would have the distribution because we were often controlling the issuer. We could put a little extra vig in the interest rate. So we became known as the distributor of High Yield that people should buy on the issue because we'd price it to trade up with debt. It doesn't have to trade up much. It's not like equities.
- [08:04]
David Haber
Sure.
- [08:05]
Tony James
It doesn't have to trade up much to be juicy. So we use that. And we developed quite a following. And then when Drexel went under, the bigger firms were also ambivalent about High Yield. It had a taint, especially when Drexel went under. And so we were sitting there in second place. And we just inherited the world in that sense. And it became the most profitable part of Wall Street. We accounted for all of 40% of all trading volume and high yield for 12 years. It was a huge. Drexel's going on was a huge boost to our banking business. It didn't really help our principal business much, but it was a huge boost to our business.
- [08:38]
David Haber
And you were able to recruit like real talent from Drexel.
- [08:40]
Tony James
We were. Ken Mullis was a big one and Bennett, although Ben was only an associate at the time. But I always believe in young talent, great young talent and unleash them. So that's always served me well throughout my career.
- [08:53]
David Haber
Totally. And that has definitely shined through in a lot of my conversations. Yeah, maybe just kind of talk through the inception of the merchant banking kind of Schultz platform and how that grew. Ultimately, I think it became one of the largest or the largest in the world at the time.
- [09:06]
Tony James
Right. Well, again, KKR does that Huda ideal back in 1980. And I said, wow, this is something we can do. We don't even have to have a client. We're the client in a way. And so I went to the firm and I said, we should do this. As I was running M and A at the time, which in and of itself was some kind of distortion of reality because I was like 30, maybe not 30, 29. And they said go back to work. We have a principal business called Sprout the venture capital. And they know how to buy things and you know how to advise, so go back to advising. And I sent them a few deals over the next year or so and they said no, that doesn't work. And then someone else would do it and make a lot of money. And I kept going to the firm and saying this is ridiculous. These guys don't know how to get out of their way. So ultimately they gave me the responsibility and we started off with a landmark deal I think was the third biggest LBO ever called. We bought the retailing subsidiaries from Household International. We ended up with Vons and Ben Franklin TGI and coast to coast hardware stores and we sliced and diced and sold them all. And we closed and we put up a couple hundred million dollars equity. And the day after closing we pull down $400 million or some, some huge number because we sold the discount business to another discounter and ended up essentially owning a great grocery store in Southern California called Vons for free.
- [10:29]
David Haber
Yep, I grew up going to Vons San Diego, Southern California.
- [10:32]
Tony James
And around that. We did massive amounts of high yield and one thing and another and that put us on the map. So and, and led to us raising a fund and it was a very high return fund. So that then we got a lot of follow ons. But we were, we were pretty aggressive about starting new businesses. We started a secondaries business, a fund to funds business, real estate, as I mentioned, all these things and they all pretty much all worked. The private markets in those days was not as competitive and prices were lower as a multiple of EBITDA and whatnot. And companies were asset heavy. So there was a lot to work with there and that. And we built that business. When we sold DLJ to Credit Suisse, it was about a $29 billion AUM business. Blackstone the time was high teens. So just to put that in context and so that was a key asset once it got put into a Swiss bank. They had all of the institutional issues and the lack of commitment to the principal business that all the other big firms had. So it kind of started to waste away.
- [11:46]
David Haber
And what was the kind of core motivation to sell DLJ to Credit Suisse? Was there some like a macro reason or just good timing? I'm just curious.
- [11:54]
Tony James
I think there were macro and micro reasons. DLJ had had A hell of a run as I mentioned. And this was 2000. And honestly I looked around and said mile, the market's at some kind of peak. And at the same time the industry was changing. Glass Steagall was coming down. So the banks were coming in with very deep capital pockets. Regulations were changing about how closely research, which was DLJ strength, could work with investment banking. Markets were changing. We'd gone from negotiated rates to very low commission rates. And so the big firms were essentially doing the cash business on break even basis to make money on the derivatives. We didn't have a derivatives business and we didn't have the technology to build one.
- [12:50]
David Haber
Interesting.
- [12:51]
Tony James
And then our success in high yield and private equity meant we running out of balance sheet. Our bridge fund was $1 billion and all of a sudden you were doing $1 billion bridge loans. So you can do one deal at a time and if one mistake and you're out of business because 100 million of that was ours at the bottom by the way, which was 40% of our equity or something. So it just seemed to me like everything looked great right then but was unsustainable. And I tried to push the management, I was number two. But I tried to push the CEO to kind of like invest in the future a little bit, but he didn't really want to honestly. And. And it would have meant some tough years for earnings. So we decided to sell the company. And I think in retrospect a lot of people blame me for that decision, for pulling the rug out for them because working at DOJ had a little bit of kumbaya feel to it that people still talk about. They still get together twice a year.
- [14:02]
David Haber
That's amazing.
- [14:03]
Tony James
And pine over those days,
- [14:07]
David Haber
not so much.
- [14:07]
Tony James
Swiss bank, we sold it for 14 billion of cash and two or three years later Morgan Stanley sold for 8. So I would say our timing was if you're going to exit because you don't have a winning hand, the timing was really good.
- [14:21]
David Haber
Totally.
- [14:22]
Tony James
Now that happened to be. It happened to be essentially a merger of equals. But that's never pretty, especially when you have two firms of such different cultures.
- [14:35]
David Haber
Totally. One of my favorite fun facts about your time at DLJ and we're sitting in a venture capital office, was that you led the Series A into Costco in the 1980s. I have to hear more about that story.
- [14:50]
Tony James
Starbucks too, by the way.
- [14:52]
David Haber
Is that right? Yeah. Oh wow.
- [14:54]
Tony James
I mean a few others, they weren't all that successful.
- [14:56]
David Haber
It's amazing. You might be the best retail venture capitalist of all time. I guess. How did you meet, you know, Jim Sinegal and Jeff Brotman and then ultimately, like, what did you see in them at that time?
- [15:08]
Tony James
Well, they walked in, they walked in, unknown to me, and said, gee, we have, we have what we think's a really interesting opportunity. There was one unit like that called Price Club. It had opened in San Diego.
- [15:20]
David Haber
That's where I grew up.
- [15:21]
Podcast Host/Narrator
Yeah.
- [15:22]
Tony James
Where Jeff had been the number two. Sorry, Jim had been the number two there. And Jeff recruited him to come start Costco and open the same thing in the Pacific Northwest.
- [15:31]
David Haber
Yep.
- [15:33]
Tony James
There was a research report from a Goldman analyst named Joe Ellis that sort of laid out the business model and it was very, very powerful and elegant and so. And it was proven in one case. And the Pacific Northwest was a very good market, very affluent and very good market. Jim was one of the best executives I've ever met, maybe the best. He's driven, he's excellent on the smallest details of execution, but also the biggest principles. He knows exactly. He never compromises. He never does something that's expedient. It's always about serving the customer and driving the competitive advantage to where no one else can, can go. Totally just relentless about that and incredible standards of excellence and focus, focus, focus. And you know, the guy, guy traveled 225 days a year. So, you know, as a CEO and was at every opening, knew the price of every item in the store. And so you can't meet a guy like that who's a total force of nature and not be blown away at the same time. He was coupled with Jeff Brotman, who's a clever lawyer, real estate law, and also owned some retailers up in Seattle. So he really knew that market. And the economic model of the store was so powerful that it was compelling. I thought, totally. And you're not like betting on a new technology. Is the market going to embrace it or is it going to work? Because it was pretty prosaic and someone like even me, I could understand it. But also there was a working model. So we did that and then. And it was one of the all time great investments, I have to say. One thing I learned is a lot of people, I think, hold things too long. I'd probably sell too early.
- [17:36]
David Haber
We'll get into that. I mean, again, the other amazing fact about your time with Costco is that you've been on the board, I think, 38 years, which is probably one of the longest tenures in American corporate governance that I can think of. Why, like, what has Costco meant to you and why have you stayed on the board or affiliated for so long?
- [17:55]
Tony James
Well, I mean, David, when you find a couple of executives and back them before there's a company, before there's a dollar of revenue, before there's an order, you feel as much as they do that you're a founder totally. And so it becomes like. And I'm, you know, I've been a director, now I'm on my third CEO. So it feels like I identify with a company as if it's mine. I don't want to take any credit away from the great management we've had. We have had great management, but emotionally I feel that kind of connection and that sense of ownership also. It's just such a great company. I'm constantly learning from them, the things they do and the way they think about it. And they're not. They're very down to earth and very focused, but they come to such good decisions all the time. And then if you're an investor, as I was for many years at Blackstone, the window on the world that you get from the second largest retailer in the world, what goods are working, what goods aren't working, how are consumers reacting? What's the cost of supply, what's happening, what are tariffs doing to our income, our costs, how are we handling, how are we handling shipping and all that stuff? It's a huge source of value added information. So for a lot of. I mean, I love it and I feel like a real sense of identity there, I guess.
- [19:31]
David Haber
What have you learned from watching Costco grow in terms of business building or. They're so famous for culture and how they treat their employees and ultimately the value they deliver back to the end customer by keeping prices low and really making money through the membership more than they do on margin on the products. But I'm curious if, I mean, the business has grown, obviously, so much. I mean, from nothing to what it is today.
- [19:53]
Tony James
Yeah, 250 billion. Yeah. I think there's some similarities between DLJ, Costco and Blackstone, actually. But focusing on Costco, we built that. It was first of all, all about taking care of the customer. If you really take great care of the customer, then a lot follows from that. You have a robust business model with a fantastic following franchise and you get a lot of growth and your shareholders do fine. So take care of your customer, build quality long term. Don't ever worry about short term expediency. Gee, we're having a soft quarter. Let's raise prices or let's sell some real estate. We don't have to own the real estate or this other thing. It's so easy to get enticed into short term expediency. Similarly, people have been coming to us for years of you should buy this or you should buy that. And we really, we've always had so much growth in doing just what we do. If we do it really well, we just have never been distracted by that. So focus, focus, focus execution, flawless execution of details. Build for the long term, build quality and keep driving your prices down. Keep enhancing your value to your customer. Never let that be static. So the more value we give. So whatever, if Costco can go find a new source for batteries and save a nickel, 100% of that nickel gets lower prices. None of it goes into higher margin. And so they're always driving down prices. So their customer value proposition keeps growing.
- [21:38]
David Haber
Totally.
- [21:39]
Tony James
Most companies either nibble away at it because they're tempted to have a little more earnings, or they let it be static. And Costco's always driving to increase the customer value proposition. So I think those are all good lessons for any business.
- [21:54]
David Haber
Totally. I know we originally met, I think in the context of the Costco board meeting and he wasn't there in person, but when I spoke met with the board, Charlie Munger was still on the board. And I think you guys served together for 30 years.
- [22:12]
Tony James
30 years, yeah.
- [22:13]
David Haber
You know, he's such a legend, I guess, you know, what did you learn from Charlie Munger over, you know, those few decades?
- [22:21]
Tony James
Well, first of all, Charlie never compromises intellectually. If he doesn't like something, you're never in any doubt what he thinks about things. And he isn't either, by the way, which I love. It doesn't mean he was always right, but he was right. Hugely high percentage of the time.
- [22:45]
David Haber
I believe in that.
- [22:48]
Tony James
Charlie believed in the company. So even when we would have doubts, the management and the board, gee, is this going to work? Is Amazon going to flatten us? Now they're buying Whole Foods? Oh my God, are they going to do this or that? And before Amazon, it was Walmart. He believed in the company. No, you're the best. Just go right at him. Open that unit in Bentonville, you'll beat the heck out of Walmart. And it happened. And no, don't worry about Whole Foods, you'll crush them. It happened. And so he was really a believer with good reason. He wasn't blind. But sometimes that sense of confidence, and I tried to put that in the businesses that I've run too, that sense of confidence. You are good. You're really, really, really good. Believe in yourself. You can do anything and people lose that. That Charlie could distill everything into a sound bite. You know, I. We were, we. I was, you know, they owned a newspaper, and I think Wall Street Journal was up for sale. And I said, charlie, what do you think about newspapers? It says the newspaper business. This is not a business, Tony. It's an oil well. It's depleting to zero. I said, well, what about the Wall Street Journal? Well, that's not a newspaper. That's a trade journal. I mean, everything gets right. He distills it into such an accessible, understandable way of thinking about things. Charlie was my rock. I talked to him every two weeks, whether we were in the board or not. We talked about the world. There are many times when I'd say, Charlie, I'm starting to worry about this other thing. And he was an absolute rock. So, I mean, I love the guy, honestly. I have a bust of him in my conference room, my office. Real mentor, so loyal, so supportive, and very, very high principles. There was no cutting corners on anything.
- [24:46]
David Haber
Totally. And he was still coming to board meetings at like 98 years old. You know, I mean, it's pretty, Pretty unbelievable.
- [24:51]
Tony James
All the way to his death. Yeah.
- [24:53]
David Haber
I mean, that is remarkable. So I want to transition to Blackstone, which I think most people know you for, because you had such a huge impact on the growth of that business. Talk through. Kind of when you first met Steve Schwarzman. I know it was kind of before you joined the firm.
- [25:07]
Tony James
Sure.
- [25:08]
David Haber
And what was sort of the conversation like for him getting you to join?
- [25:12]
Tony James
Yeah. Okay. I think our first serious engagement dates back to 1989, I think it is, when we were working on a deal together to buy a railroad company called cnw. And it was a hairy time because the markets were falling apart. We were sort of pregnant with this public bid for this railroad company. We were an equity shareholder, but we were also providing all the high yield debt and the M and A and on and on and on and on. Part of our business model. Put a little equity in, get all the investment banking business. And we had a big high yield deal which had a reset note. And Steve was balking at the concept of a reset. No, I think we're pricing at 15% and it could reset up to 18. Think of those rates today.
- [26:03]
David Haber
Totally.
- [26:04]
Tony James
But Steve said, no, I'm not going to do the reset because I know you guys will reset it to the max. That's just, you know, and this is. And, well, Steve has a great nose for how to get screwed and how to avoid it. Yeah, and how to avoid it. But what might happen, and we couldn't sell it without the reset. And of course what that tells you is the market all thought it would be reset.
- [26:29]
David Haber
Interesting, right?
- [26:30]
Tony James
Or at least you want to take the risk at it. So we kind of went round and round around that we had done a bridge loan, so we needed to get this financing done. And you know, the story is Steve said, well, are you willing to put your money on your own personal money on the line? And I said, yes. And so we had, okay, if it resets to the maximum, you'll pay me a certain amount of money. And I said, okay. Frankly, the amount I would pay Steve was dwarfed by the amount the firm would lose if we didn't get the deal done. And Steve might have knuckled under anyway. But to me, this was a very good example of losing a battle to win the war. And I felt like if I could give Steve a pound of flesh, then I could get the whole thing done. And the idea of someone putting money up and actually if Steve had to pay more interest rate, which wasn't Steve really, It was the LPs had to pay a higher interest, I would lose some money, all that appealed to him. So that did the trick and he agreed. We got the deal done. And we both looked back on that slightly differently. But I think we each accomplished something in our own heads, which is sometimes what it takes to make a deal. So then after that, I was running investment banking for a long time and Steve was a client, not necessarily the closest client. He did a lot with Chemical bank and Jimmy Lee and other banks, but we would have a casual like a once a year lunch or something like that. And then after DLJ was sold, I had to agree as part of the condition of the merger agreement, to stick it out for two years. No other employee did, by the way. But I'd stuck my two years out and then decided that it wasn't fun and that I wanted to do something else anyway, my dlj, that I felt that same sense of proprietary ownership for, that I felt for Costco, was gone. Steve called out of the blue and said, can we have lunch? And one thing led to another and he said he'd been looking to hire someone for a couple years and would I consider coming in and helping run the firm. And my first reaction was, geez, Steve, you're a tough boss. And I really haven't had a boss in like 15 years totally. And I don't really, you know, DLJ went public and went private a few times, so I didn't really need to work. And I said, steve, I don't know that I want to be told what to do or what not to do. I haven't had that a long time. He said, no, no, no. You come in, you run the firm day to day. We'll talk all the time. I'll back you if, you know, if we don't agree. By the way, we agreed 98% of the time, I'll back you. But if performance not good, I reserve the right to get rid of you. I said, that's fair.
- [29:30]
David Haber
Yep.
- [29:31]
Tony James
So we cut a deal where he could get rid of me at a drop of a hat. I got, I was vested up to the minute and whatever I had and we agreed to try it. Like, like so many entrepreneurs, we've all seen this, right, where they say they'll or they want to bring someone in. And there were issues around Blackstone at the time and all the businesses. But then once those issues are kind of fade, then the entrepreneur wants to kind of reassert control. I have to say, Steve was an absolute prince. I mean, he always respected my role and running the day to day firm when a lot of the. I made a lot of changes. And when I made those changes, a lot of people didn't like him. He backed me 100%, even when he wasn't necessarily sure they were right. They turned out to be right. But he was a great boss, really, I have to say, and that's hard. It's his baby. To give that element of control, that level of control to someone else. Not one in a hundred would have done that. So credit to Steve.
- [30:42]
David Haber
Totally. Well, and I guess you could have obviously started your own firm. Most of the people I've spoken to, whether it was Joe Parotta or Michael Che or David Blitzer, any of these folks talk about Blackstone before Tony James and Blackstone after Tony James, because you joined, I think, what, 17 years after the firm's founding?
- [31:05]
Tony James
Thereabouts, I think.
- [31:07]
David Haber
How did you think about joining a firm versus potentially starting your own? And then we'll talk about kind of the trajectory of the business because it grew.
- [31:14]
Tony James
I did think about starting my own firm. I had a lot of people encouraging me to do that, both LPs and also other professionals. But, you know, I kind of what I like doing. If you think about the development of a successful company, there's kind of an S curve. It starts off small and entrepreneurial. It's kind of if it's not a tech company, it's kind of flat for a while, it bumps along and then there's this kind of escalation curve where you create a lot of value and a lot of size and then you get, if you're lucky enough, you get very successful and it's kind of protect the bastion. What I like doing is that steep part of the S curve. I like taking something small and growing it, making it better and making it very successful. And then once it's very successful, it's not that much fun to protect the castle anymore. And when the growth buy. And so I felt when I looked at Blackstone, they were in every business Blackstone Inn was in. DLJ had been in and had reported to me and there was no one else in the world that had had that mix of businesses under their authority. So I thought I'm uniquely knowledgeable about every business and I'd seen and Blackstone had growing pains at the time, but DLJ had had those same growing pains a few years before. So I knew how to work through them. And I thought, gee, if I could get my hands on Blackstone, I could be dangerous. The other thing is if you start, you know, when you're used to running a big firm. After the merger of group DLJ and Credit Suisse, it was the largest by headcount, the investment bank in the world. Didn't stay that way because of all the blood letting and the. But once you've been on, I wanted to paint on a somewhat bigger campus canvas than starting my own firm with two guys in a corner. And so that was the choice I made. And Steve, as I say, I was originally not going to do it. But Steve was very convincing and he lived up to everything and it was a great partnership, I have to say. I mean we worked really well together for 18 years.
- [33:20]
David Haber
Totally. People know Blackstone today, a trillion dollars in aum. It did not look anything like that when you joined in 2002. I think the firm was maybe $14 billion in total assets, something like that, which is shock, like I don't know, a sixth of our size, which is, you know, kind of insane. Again, maybe, maybe just give folks kind of a reminder of what, what was the shape of the business then, what businesses existed and you know, we'll talk through kind of the 50 fold increase I guess, you know, during your tenure.
- [33:51]
Tony James
Yeah, I mean Blackstone, Blackstone was, was, was in, in private equity and real estate, in hedge fund funded funds and a tiny credit business and then an M and A business and a restructuring advisory business. All those businesses were kind of subscale a little bit. The private equity business. They'd raised a fund and had made a couple of disastrous investors. So that were within a year write offs with about a third of the fund. The advisory businesses, the M and A business was down 50 or 75% from its peak and not going up. The funded funds business was tiny and not very profitable. And the real estate business was again a small business. So all those, there were things to do to grow all those businesses. And what I'm prouder of honestly than moving the AUM from 16 billion to nearly a trillion is the market cap of the company. Because aum is just AUM and AIG had just put $100 million into Blackstone for 10% of the company and the rights to invest in our funds. So at best it was worth a billion dollars. And when I left it was worth 170. So that's 170 fold value increase. And while we're growing the business, increasing the value, our IRR and all our funds went up. So we weren't, we weren't driving down. Sometimes an asset Manager can drive 100 down in return for, for commodity, more commodity returns. We weren't doing that.
- [35:42]
David Haber
Yep.
- [35:43]
Tony James
And so that, that was, it was a great run, I have to say. But it, it was, we got very lucky and but you know, I started focusing right away on culture again coming from DLJ where I had and my experience with Costco, culture is so important and that required making some changes in people and talent. I think virtually every, the leader of every business almost was changed because a lot of culture comes from leadership. We move from being a, a collection of real talented people but difficult people that didn't work together to a team orientation. We put in place processes that people initially said why should any process is by definition bureaucracy. So I don't want that. But processes that encourage better decisions, sharing of information and more efficient use of time actually frees people up. So and I'm very much against bureaucracy and hierarchy. So we did a lot. We added, there were some businesses I felt we should be in, we added those and there were some businesses we shouldn't be in, like the buyer business. So we spun those out. So it was a long journey, but it was a fantastic journey.
- [37:04]
David Haber
I mean people again, one of the other kind of common threads that I mean literally everybody I spoke to highlights was that you were both an incredible investor and probably one of the best managers of high potential talent and firm builders that they've seen. It's a rare combination to have both people talk about being in an IC meeting with you and you finding the detail on page 16 that conflicts with the thesis on page 36 from six weeks ago and being able to hold kind of people accountable to that while also kind of seeing the bigger picture of the fund and the firm.
- [37:38]
Tony James
Yeah, well, I think I'm a good manager of small elite teams, Navy SEAL type teams. I don't think I'd be a good manager of the US army or Costco or a huge Swiss bank, for that matter. And I think my style is. There's certain principles that I have around which those kind of smaller elite investment organizations react well to totally. I mean, one of them is robust debate. There's lack of hierarchy, lack of status hierarchy, not just organizational hierarchy. So that if we're talking about a business, I want you to argue with me, I want you to challenge me, but you've got to be able to. And I want to be able to challenge you, but I got to do that so that you don't get insecure or hurt feelings. And creating a culture where you can have robust debate because you're all in it together in a search for truth and people don't take it personally, is not so easy. And you really want to be very direct about this, because the more indirect you are, it's so inefficient. You're not really saying what you're thinking. You got to take some weeks to get around to it. So robust debate's a big one. Lack of hierarchy is a big one. I feel so strongly that you have to model the behavior that you want your people to have, which means you've got to work as hard as they do. And it extends into personal values and things as well. I think it's. Running an investment organization like Blackstone, I think you almost have to be a really good investor. I know there'll be exceptions to that, but our firm, where you earn your chops, your respect, is being able to talk to some of the best investors in the world on an equal footing, and you're not losing a step with them. And similarly, when I go over those investment committees, I mean, if I'm not gonna go over them carefully, then the sloppiness will go up a lot with the same amount of care. So I want people coming in there, working really hard to have great investment and great thought process. And part of those catches, those little things, is sending a message. Someone's watch, you're paying attention. You gotta be Flawless. And also for a firm like Blackstone, it's investment committees that are the cultural crucible of what defines the firm.
- [40:16]
David Haber
Say more about that.
- [40:17]
Tony James
Yeah, well, how we talk to each other, how we think, our analytical rigor, frankly, the lessons we learn from our failures and our successes. All that is transmitted from senior management, me and the partners, let's just say, to the junior people through investment committees. And so if you're not able to hold your own in those, if you're just presiding over them or you're not engaged or you haven't done the work, you lose a lot, in my opinion. So. And I could go on and on. There are lots of, lots of principles that, that for me, work well in an elite investment organization, but they might not work in another organization.
- [41:05]
David Haber
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Blackstone by and large was more kind of consensus oriented, or at least the stories that I heard was that if there was a tie, you would always back the deal team. David Blitzer told this story. I think he was in London. You were maybe three months into the job, and he gets a call saying you have a new boss. And I think he's a little bit apprehensive. Made him feel really comfortable. But there was a particular deal I think that you were working on pretty early in your tenure at the firm. I think it was for Houghton Mifflin, like a spin out or a carve out of Vivendi at the time. And I think the investment committee initially didn't sort of deny the deal, but basically created too narrow a bounding from a price perspective. And he was describing how he was bummed. He was having a drink in a pub. And basically I think you met with him and was like, how strongly convicted you are. Are you in this deal? Do a bunch of work over the weekend, let's go back on a Monday. And you really, like. He believes, like, put your weight behind him, which gave him the confidence to sort of like champion the deal.
- [42:15]
Tony James
Well, that's true in that instance, but there are times when. There are times when you're not on that side of it, of course. But I would say in general, when a deal committee comes in, I don't want them coming into. When a deal team comes into the committee with a recommendation, they better want to do it, otherwise what are we doing there? Right. So if they're coming in with conviction to do it, almost by definition, I'm going to challenge them and I'm going to try to find the weakness or the things they haven't thought about or whatnot. And so people often accuse me of, no matter what they say, arguing the other side, there's some truth to that, but there's a reason for it. Right. There are times when I feel like there's something in investing, there's something that's not on the page. You've got to have a feel. You got to. You know, we kind of talk about seeing around corners a little bit. And partly that's the partner and his conviction. Partly it's my own gut, even though it's not provable. Partly it's the process becomes a little unfair sometimes because someone gets on something if there's a mistake or there's something and they just stay on it, and the whole committee kind of loses momentum. So definitely there were times I put my finger on the scale to level that out for sure. And I'm sure there were plenty of times when it went the other way.
- [43:43]
David Haber
Yep.
- [43:44]
Tony James
But that's kind of what you have. You know, you're more than just a referee. But I really felt strongly that it's a collective decision. So when I put my finger on the scale, it wasn't that I was deciding I had to get the other people there.
- [44:01]
David Haber
Sure.
- [44:02]
Tony James
And I just think groups make, especially in investing, makes better decisions than any one individual. And Blackstone came from a lot of, as I say, independent, talented people that wouldn't challenge each other, wouldn't even do the work to look at someone else's deal. One CIO that was a very smart guy, but a bottleneck, and it wasn't a scalable model.
- [44:23]
David Haber
This is a distinction that I've written about, I think a lot about here, in the context of Andreessen Horowitz, which is this notion of firm versus fund. The contrast that I try to draw is most people run funds. Very few people, in my definition, build firms. And the objective function of a fund is how do I generate the most carry with the fewest people in the shortest amount of time possible? Often that's run by a single cio. There's a handful of people, there's ultimately one decision maker. And a firm, I think, by contrast, maybe has to deliver exceptional returns because that's a prerequisite. But the other, I think, variable is like building sources of compounding competitive advantage. What are your moats? If you think about Blackstone as a company, not just a collection of individual funds, it's a much more entrepreneurial question, because every entrepreneur wakes up every day asking about their competitive advantage. I'm curious how, if you agree with that, Distinction how you sort of think about that in the context of Blackstone or glj?
- [45:20]
Tony James
I do and I do. One of the tricks of running a firm is making people in a fund care more than just about their fund. Right. So that's a sensitive balance. And you want them to care enough, but not too much. And then within funds or within sub businesses, maybe private. How do you get the guys in India to care enough about the guy deals in New York. And for me, I have my way of thinking about that and how to balance the rewards on both sides, really from trial and error and what's worked over the years. There's no theoretical model that makes it right. But the first thing is to make you do want everyone, even people in the fund, to care a little bit about the firm for lots of reasons.
- [46:05]
David Haber
Yep.
- [46:09]
Tony James
The issue as Blackstone became successful, the issue was we weren't a monoline boutique investor anymore, which is what all the LPs wanted. No, no, no. I want Andreessen Horace to do one thing and there's a genius who sits in the corner and he divines the right answer. We were becoming right or wrong. Not only a supermarket, but a big supermarket with lots of different. And that was not where LPs heads were. Today's different, but back then. So my challenge as a firm manager was to figure out how do we take our disadvantages and make them advantages because we don't want to stop growing and we don't want to descend into mediocrity. I mean, as we've talked about before, growth in and of itself creates opportunities for new talents so we could keep talent that would otherwise get frustrated and go do their own thing. I mean, I always wanted to have the most talented people in the world and train them so they were better than they would have been any other place. But those people have tons of opportunities. So I had to create new opportunities, not just a war of attrition with the more senior people.
- [47:29]
David Haber
Yep.
- [47:30]
Tony James
So growth was important. And so how do you mitigate the negatives that come with that? And so we spent a lot of time thinking about that. We tried to add businesses that were made the other businesses around them better. They brought insights, access, relationships, capital. Something that made each of the other businesses better. I also, it was. This is why we were lean so early in our stealth effort to build retail distribution. Again, just distribution power. I mean, it was a hedge against the time when maybe all the funds aren't high top quartile returns. And so how do we still drive business and customers and AUM and so on and so forth. And so we're constantly thinking about ways to take our disadvantages and make them advantages to drive growth.
- [48:24]
David Haber
One of the things I've read certainly in a lot of Blackstone materials over time is just, you know, they'll identify kind of a big secular trend and find ways to express conviction in that thesis across different asset classes. And one of my kind of core beliefs, both it's kind of an investment philosophy. I think it's a bit of a metaphor for my career maybe today, which is that opportunities live between fields of expertise and it seems like very well expressed at least. Like, you know, we're believers in E Commerce, so we'll bet in the E Commerce brand. But we're also going to buy warehouses. We're also going to invest in the cloud infrastructure.
- [48:57]
Tony James
And that's an area where these different. You take a mosaic tile from each different business, you put it together and you have a clearer view of. So yeah, so we could see what was happening in E Commerce, but we could also see what was happening in warehouses. And we could see. And so that ability to develop to see themes. Because the early sign, if you're going to catch the signals early, they're never obvious. Right. Because by the time they're obvious, it's priced in, right? Yep. So you gotta catch em early. Especially if you're Blackstone and you wanna move a lot of money into it. Right. So how do you see things early? You get reinforcement from independent. No one signal is dominant. This is so clear, of course. But you get reinforcement from multiple different businesses and insights and so on and so forth total. And that was one of our competitive advantages that we tried to maximize.
- [50:01]
David Haber
Totally. You talked about kind of retail distribution. Everybody I've spoken to has said you were incredibly early, kind of in that wave. Both just covering the wirehouses, by the way, treating LPs as true partners. But that was something that was kind of core. You Talked about driving IRRs, not just sort of scaling AUM for the sake of it. I think you also helped catalyze kind of the creation of Blackstone's insurance solutions business. I imagine both of those became kind of sources of perpetual or permanent capital to some degree for the business as well.
- [50:34]
Tony James
Yes, definitely. I mean the insurance both were big untapped asset classes. So the institutions have generally 25% of their assets in alternatives, let's say the more sophisticated ones like endowments are 50. Retail was at 2%. So it kind of screamed. And insurance was very low too. Now insurance has regulatory Restrictions, There's a keep it lower, although there are increasingly structural ways to kind of nudge that boundary. But those seem like there was just as much insurance assets as there was pension assets and just as much 401k assets or retail assets. So how do we tap. We're living with one third of the market. How do we open up those other thirds? And again, it's all about how do we use our scale and our size. There's no other firm that could have afforded to build the retail distribution. We have 500 people in that. And we started off not just by hiring salesmen. You know, we started off because the wirehouses, they need training. So we ran Blackstone University, and people would come through, and every broker of every wild. The only place they're going to come and learn about alternatives is Blackstone University. There was no other alternative university. And then we had a masterclass where you go back and go get the equivalent of a master's in this. And then we. We built our own proprietary data CRM system and data system. So we knew more about every Merrill lynch client and whatever question they've ever asked us than Merrill lynch knew about that client. And we did that across the board. And. And we did that for not just Merrill lynch and UBS and the big wirehouse, but thousands of RIAs. And that, that. That I think is the. Now the dominant strategic asset that Blackstone has that no one else can really replicate, because no one else has the breadth of product so that you're always in the market. You always have something that a customer wants or a broker wants to sell it. The number of products that were always open that you could put money in any time. No one else has the revenue scale to justify the overhead total. And it becomes reinforcing of the brand and the value. So that I felt like in the investment business, you can be really good or you can have a cold hand. And I didn't want to. I mean, you can live by the sword, die by the sword. I didn't want to die by the sword.
- [53:04]
David Haber
You want to die, period.
- [53:07]
Tony James
I was okay to live by it while we had the hot hand in investing, but I wanted a hedge so that we would still have a. An unassailable business when we didn't have the best returns.
- [53:16]
David Haber
Totally. I want to talk about the ipo because it was obviously a huge deal on the history of the firm also, I imagine very complicated, both tactically, but even culturally. I imagine you talk about firm dynamics and how do you create incentives for people in a given Fund to care about other funds. I imagine going public, part of that is you're creating a new currency in some ways by which to compensate people. You have kind of LPs, you have employees, you have public shareholders. Maybe just talk through the IPO and all those dynamics.
- [53:52]
Tony James
We could spend an hour on the subtleties and complexities of this. But just to give you some windows on it, Blackstone wasn't a firm. It was 173 independent partnerships, all with different percentage ownerships. Every fund had a different percentage ownership than every other fund. All that somehow had to be rolled together into one entity and everyone had to have the right number of shares in that entity. Just number one. Number two, at that time there was nothing like Blackstone. We had three different ways to count for carry. We could account the way we did it and now the industry does it now, which is kind of you get carry when it's realized. You could do it on a mark to market basis. So an accrued carry, you could use option models to compute the option value of the carry. And then how do they vary over time? We had lots of choices just on something as basic as the accounting for carry. So there was not even an accounting standard that the tax structure and all that. Should it be a publicly traded private partnership? We thought that was more value added because that's what all the insiders wanted because they don't like paying taxes. Turns out the market, it didn't like. It actually didn't really like it. So, you know, we converted. But I don't think that was a compelling error. But we were making it up as we went along. And then, you know, the reason we could get public is Blackstone had a hell of a run. We didn't want to ruin that. So how do you protect your day to day working partners that go in to work every day and try to make good investments from being distracted or influenced by the public. So. So first of all, we built an elaborate corporate overhead so that we didn't involve any of them in any of it. Not only the going public, but once we were public, added $75 million a year at the time to our operating cost, which is nothing a lot more today. We also were making people wildly rich. So in those days, if you were work for one of these firms, if you got paid a million dollars this year, that was great. But the next year maybe you get paid a million or 750 or a million a quarter, whatever it was. But it was year to year. We were coming in saying for that, you know, we're going to give you hundreds, hundreds of millions in many cases, or tens of millions. And you're going to give up a little, you're going to give up a million of your annual income, but we're going to give you essentially 30 in. Of a stock that's forever and grows over time in exchange. So how do we not demotivate our. Not only how we not distract them by looking at the stock every day, but how do we not demotivate them from just, well, I'm worth a hundred million dollars today. I'm just gonna put my feet up and come to work three days a week.
- [56:55]
David Haber
So all of that, how did you do that?
- [57:00]
Tony James
We did that first of all by basically telling people they can't sell any stock for eight years.
- [57:04]
David Haber
Okay, okay.
- [57:06]
Tony James
And then we had unusual vesting, whereas what was unvested we could take away. So most companies, if you have five year vesting, if you let someone go, that triggers the acceleration of their vesting. We didn't do that. We could let them go. And the last three years of their vesting, or if they were demotivated and weren't working, we say, I'm sorry, you're not working hard anymore. We're going to take away your unvested stock. So, so what's vested is yours. But the unvested stuff on an eight years, we had eight year run at it and we didn't lose anyone that we didn't want to lose for eight years. And people were totally motivated for the whole time. So that part of it worked. But all these things are just little small pieces of the whole that you have to think about totally. And as I say, I could go on and on, but it was incredibly complex. And the other thing I would just say and file on this, Steve and I and Pete Peterson, who was still around them, wanted to take a hard look at this and see what it'd be and do all of the plumbing to make sure we had the option. But we weren't sure we wanted to do it. So how do we go through this and not have it loom over everyone in the firm and everyone's trying to come into. And so essentially this was something that Steve delegated to me and I did really with no one else in the firm actually helping for nine months and did it at night and worked out all this with bankers, outside bankers and lawyers, but not internal people. And I would report back to Steve, of course, and the Pete Peterson, but Steve was much more front and center on this, but it was kind of A secret project. Because otherwise people would have been, Tony, I should be the number two person. You know how it is.
- [59:01]
David Haber
Totally. No, I remember we had lunch one and you said, yeah, literally like went into a room and it was deciding who was going to become a billionaire, you know, on the other side of the ipo. And it's kind of a. Blows my mind. The other thing that I imagine being a public company then gave you was currency that you could then use to acquire other businesses. And again, one of the folks I spoke to was, was Bennett Goodman, the, you know, the G&GSO. I know he had worked for you obviously at DLJ. He had then I guess gone off and built GSO, which was a small credit business at the time. Maybe talk through that acquisition. Obviously it became kind of the basis of a much bigger credit business.
- [59:39]
Tony James
Well, we had a very small credit business. Blackstone had about a billion and a quarter in it. And the people running that business then were solid insurance company debt investors, but they were perfectly happy with the business of the scale that it was and really didn't see a lot of ways to. To drive it. At Blackstone, we. We wanted to have a few large businesses. We didn't want some other firms have gone to a million little businesses, little popcorn stands there. We wanted a few big dominant businesses. And so as when I mentioned before that a lot of the leadership of the groups needed to be changed. This was one of them. You could, you know, sometimes an acquisition, especially if you have a lot of the purchase price contingent on future earnings and this and that, that. It's almost like a team hiring. You see this all the time in tech, right. You have all kinds of big tech companies buying smaller companies to get the team. So it's a little hard to say was it an acquisition or was it a group hire? But either way, I knew these were talented guys and I knew they were very ambitious. And most of the purchase price was contingent on future success. So I knew that we could. I thought we could build a big business around them. And we did. We built $100 billion credit business around them. But GSO was the first. But it was only one of about a dozen acquisitions.
- [61:01]
David Haber
Oh, interesting.
- [61:01]
Tony James
We did a lot of acquisitions. I mean, maybe the best acquisition we ever did was Strategic Partners, our secondary business. We paid $119 million from that business.
- [61:11]
David Haber
Was this the secondary fund from credit from dlj, Credit Suisse or from Credit Suisse?
- [61:15]
Tony James
Right. Because again, they're ambivalence about the business. So we bought it for 119 million it's $120 billion business today. It's worth tens of billions.
- [61:22]
David Haber
Yeah, that's AM.
- [61:24]
Tony James
And we've made about a dozen of those acquisitions every single. And the book on financial services firms buying other financial services firms is not very positive. They almost never were. Every one of our acquisitions worked. There were two that didn't really move the needle strategically, but we made a very good return on the investment. We probably made three or four times our money.
- [61:46]
David Haber
Was there anything non obvious about what made those acquisitions work? Like kind of the industrial logic or, or the culture, you know, I'm just curious.
- [61:54]
Tony James
Yeah, culture is key. Having people that fit in is key, number one. Number two, people that want to really grow something and appreciate what Blackstone brings to the party. You have to have balance between what the house takes from a entrepreneurial management team running a fund and what the house gives them when that gets out of bound. If you go buy a hedge fund and you're not doing anything for him, and three years into the deal he's fully vested, you're going to have to buy the company all over again, essentially. So we wanted people that were happy fitting in a bigger corporate organization if that helped them scale their business a lot. That's a cultural thing. Other people would just. I'd rather have a small business and not have to talk to anyone. Right. So the right culture, the right people, the right balance between what the house brought and what the firm, what the acquired company bought. But we had to feel like we could be a leader in it. I didn't want to buy a company and be not a leader. So we wanted to lead in a few big businesses. We also had to feel we could be a top quartile investor consistently with this team. I didn't want to be an average investor in any business. We wanted people that and we wanted to buy small where we could scale them. We never wanted to buy a fully built out franchise where you're paying someone else for all the growth. We wanted to deliver the growth, the value, the growth to our shareholders. So those are, you know, we had a seven or eight kind of criteria that we looked hard at and made sure fit.
- [63:33]
David Haber
One of the things Bennett said which resonated a lot was he's like, I never felt like an employee. Like it never felt bureaucratic, you know. And again, I think about that a lot here. One of the things that surprised me about, about Andreessen, you know, it says Andreessen Horowitz on the door is actually there's not a ton of top down direction. I think Mark and Ben have done a very thoughtful job of trying to make the firm feel like a platform for smart entrepreneurial people to build on top of. And I think it was really wise if you want to attract and retain some of the folks here who've been very, very successful entrepreneurs in the past. Like, if they needed to be micro, they would never work here if they were micromanaged.
- [64:06]
Tony James
And it's helped by the fact that you have a lot of discrete businesses and funds. Right. So everyone can feel like they're in charge of their empire.
- [64:12]
David Haber
Totally.
- [64:13]
Tony James
I completely agree with that. And I always bent over backwards to minimize bureaucracy and process and hierarchy. And so I had, at one point, I think, 50 direct reports trying to.
- [64:29]
David Haber
You were the Jensen before Jensen.
- [64:31]
Tony James
Trying to minimize hierarchy, because with hierarchy comes bureaucracy. And. And I'd learned from dlj, that in contrast to Credit Suisse, that putting more controls in doesn't necessarily protect you. That a lot of it, if you have good people and you trust them and you hold them to very high ethical standards and that becomes the behavioral norm, that's much better than having lots of watchers and watchers of watchers trying to check every little thing that you do. And so Credit Suisse had all kinds of ethical lapses. DLJ had none. But they had immense controllers and processes and whatnot. DLJ was scalable.
- [65:11]
David Haber
Totally.
- [65:12]
Tony James
So I kind of brought that attitude to Blackstone.
- [65:15]
David Haber
One of the things that I think is rare to see is that my understanding is when you first had that conversation with Steve, you basically told him you were going to retire at 70.
- [65:23]
Tony James
Right.
- [65:26]
David Haber
That's not normal. Most people try to sort of hang on, especially at that level. How did you think about that decision?
- [65:34]
Tony James
Well, I'm glad I did, because if I hadn't committed myself, I'd probably would have been harder to let it go. But first of all, remember, Blackstone was my, like, since my third run. I had dlj. I had Costco, which started the same year as Blackstone, but became even more successful, and then Blackstone. And I felt like I'm kind of a peripatetic kind of person, and I have a lot of interests. And I felt like. Like there's something else out there. I. I don't. I don't want to do this for the rest of my life. I want to do it. I want to do it well. I want to build something I'm proud of, but I've got more potential. And so. So that was. That was one thing. And I just felt by then, and I, you know, Steve's only four years older than I am, so. So and I'm fine with that. I didn't, I didn't aspire to anything but what I had there then too. I have to say, leadership transition is the Achilles heel of an alternative of any asset manager, in my opinion. It's really not so easy and you don't even see the problems right away necessarily, but you might see them three, four, five years in. So for me, one of my top priority, if I did a good job managing Blackstone, all the statistics we talked about of the growth of AUM and market value and all that, that, that was fine. But succession planning was one of them. I had to nail that.
- [66:58]
David Haber
Yep.
- [66:59]
Tony James
And that's a process. At least for me, it was a process. It meant picking the succession and grooming him and making sure that there was no breakage around his movement, either in lawsuit, his business or people being disappointed. It meant picking the right succession, making sure he was 100% ready, on and on and on. Yep. So you start down that process and it comes to an end. I mean, if you do that. Well, totally, you know, three or four years in, he's ready.
- [67:27]
David Haber
Totally.
- [67:28]
Tony James
And you know, credit to John, he said, what do you think, Tony? And I said a couple times, give me another year. But I felt that obligation and I felt he was ready. And so. But it's never easy to let go of that seat. It's such a great seat, it's such a profitable seat.
- [67:45]
David Haber
Totally.
- [67:46]
Tony James
It's such an ego gratifying seat. So I would say most people, as a result, hang on too long and I believe you've got to move out of that seat while the company still, while you have plenty of gas and you're still at the peak of your performance and the company's still on the arise. If you wait till it tops out, you're going to lose momentum for a while before maybe the new guy can correct it. And there was no reason to lose that momentum. And I'm going to love my, I love my years at Blackstone, but I've loved my everybody every day since. So, you know, and it seems like
- [68:21]
David Haber
you obviously did an amazing job, I guess, you know, what did you see in, in John Gray early on? Like why, why was he the logical kind of successor?
- [68:31]
Tony James
Well, we had, we had a lot of great talent, some of whom you've talked to and, and you know, they're all, they're remarkable people. I would say, first of all, John ran our biggest business. So let's start with that. But. But beyond that, he's a great leader. He's a very natural leader. He's a wonderful external spokesman. He's much better than I am about that. John has a knack for seeing in a very complex, cluttered environment. He has a knack for seeing the simple path and right path through it. He works incredibly hard. And so I think John was a great choice and he's very decisive and he's got very good investment instincts. So. So, I mean, how lucky was I to have John that I could hand the reins to because it would have been a failure if I hadn't the reins to someone who could take Blackstone on up.
- [69:32]
David Haber
Maybe we'll spend a minute just kind of looking ahead into kind of the alternatives ecosystem. We're sitting here amidst, I don't know, fear mongering and private Credit. It, the SaaS apocalypse. I don't know where is this all going? How do you sort of view the. Maybe private markets or maybe markets generally, but private market landscape and yeah, this ecosystem.
- [69:54]
Tony James
Well, I try to look at private markets not as a series of individual business, but kind of a whole. And I still think private markets over time can significantly outperform public markets. Before we leave public markets, so many people have the vast bulk of their assets into stocks and bonds they could trade tomorrow. Not only don't they need that liquidity, it has a real opportunity cost, but they also entices them to often do the wrong thing at the wrong time. So a hidden cost. So I'm a big believer that over time you can outperform in private markets. But markets evolve. I mean, it was clear to us that the private credit capital, it was good for a while. You know, yields were 12%, capital flooded into that and yields kept coming down into the sort of mid to high single digits for the same risk. But there was so much capital, there was more competition for deals. So you also lost covenants and things like that. And the kind of capital that was started to be raised with retail money where it comes in one month and it's gotta be invested right away or you have, you have. The negative drag means that you kind of have to buy the market what's out there, you can't. One of the great things about drawdown funds is always there's nothing good to do. I don't have to do anything.
- [71:18]
David Haber
Right.
- [71:19]
Tony James
You kind of lost that with this structure. So I think there'll be some correction in private markets. But it's not gonna be 2008 where you were destabilizing the system cause it's not owned by Banks. At 30 to 1 leverage these days the leverage is lower, but plenty were 20 to 30 to 1. So okay, there'll be a correction. There'll still be an opportunity when that shakes out to buy private, get debt and get higher returns than publicly traded high yield debt.
- [71:48]
David Haber
Yep.
- [71:49]
Tony James
Okay. You know, the AI revolution, I would say you get these things periodically where a new technology makes you question the old business models. And, and that's an adjustment, but it's just an adjustment. I think one of the great opportunities right now is there's about 30,000 portfolio companies of mid market private equity firms that can't be sold, can't go public. There's no strategic 20 trillion or something worth of value. All those companies need to be will and etten eventually need to be sold. So for capital pools there's going to be an immensely attractive being able to pick company by company, whether it's co investments or it's continuation vehicles. You're getting a seasoned investment at an attractive price with much lower fees and you're able to with a sponsor that's doubling down his commitment and you're able to really analyze it. I think it's one of the great eight times to put money to work. Similarly, look what's happened in your business. You know more than I do. But the scale of the business is so radically larger than it used to be. You know, a big venture fund used to be a billion dollars. And you know, and, and there weren't, there weren't firms like Andries Norowitz that had lots of different, different funds. And companies are staying private longer and, and I think there's an opportunity to ride those companies longer. I love that if you're good enough about picking them. What I don't like about drawdown funds, the traditional private equity fund is you commit to them, they charge you managing fees for a while. They find a deal, they draw it down so your money's not been in the ground for a few years and then a few years later, if it's a successful deal, they sell it for two times their month. You know, you've paid a couple of tenths of turns in management fees, they take off 20% of the gain in carry and you've got 1.4 times your money and you've tied up your money for five years. Go buy a New York municipal bond after taxes, you're getting almost as much totally. So I think the opportunity to hold assets longer in a private context and really let them grow is Very attractive. And I think the industry models need to reflect that. LPs and certainly private capital and family office capital is much more towards the long hold.
- [74:31]
David Haber
Totally.
- [74:32]
Tony James
LPs are getting there, but they need to evolve that way.
- [74:34]
David Haber
Yep.
- [74:36]
Tony James
So I think they'll be, you know, and life sciences. I mean, it's another explosive upside. Longer holes harder than the rest of venture just because you're in the body and the regulatory and so on and so forth. But man, there's going to be some huge fortunes made in that. So I'm optimistic about private capital, but it evolves totally.
- [75:01]
David Haber
You mentioned you had lots of interests outside of Blackstone, Costco and dlj. I know one of the things that you, you know, have been passionate about is spending time with historically black colleges. Maybe talk about that nonprofit and kind of the impact that you've had.
- [75:17]
Tony James
Yeah, well, in 2018, a friend of mine who had worked for Obama and in their department of Education came in and said, and he, he had been an M and a banker at dlj and then I think bank of America. And then he went into the government and he ran the student loan program for the government.
- [75:36]
David Haber
Government.
- [75:37]
Tony James
And he came in and said, you know, I'm out here. The one thing that we didn't clean up in the financial crisis was student loans and maybe we should come up with something. And we started thinking about that, but. And we started working with some historically black colleges and universities around income share agreements so that, that a graduate would get his college education for free and then would agree in return to give a certain percentage of his or her income over a minimum wage to repay the college. And then the college would take all those receivables. This is the Blackstone opportunity and securitize it. And you know, we'd make a lot of money while doing good for society.
- [76:17]
David Haber
Yep.
- [76:19]
Tony James
And we started down that path. But while we were doing that, a number of HBCUs came to us and said, geez, we really need help with this or help with that. And so we kind of morphed the idea to much like, I don't know about Andreessen Horowitz, but much like a private equity portfolio management capability, we have IT people, we have lean people, we have pricing people, we have on and on and on and on, marketing people. And if we could set up a capability like that and then donate them to HBCUs, we could help them a lot. And HBCUs do remarkable things for educationally. So 8% of African Americans that go to college go to HBCUs. But 16% of black graduates graduate from HBCUs, so twice the graduation rate. And then those graduates earn, on average, 50% higher lifetime income than black graduates of non HBCUs. So they get more kids through college for a better life. And they start with the highest percentage Pell Grant and first generation college. So they're doing great things with the toughest kids with one third the money, but they are skeletal in their ability to manage themselves, track students, get students jobs, offer students loans, prepare their own financial statements. So we thought this would be a wonderful thing to empower the HBCUs to be stronger and better. And we now have 11 offices around the country, and it's. And we work with about 70% of the students in America that go to HBCUs.
- [78:01]
David Haber
Wow.
- [78:01]
Tony James
So it's been a spectacular success.
- [78:03]
David Haber
That's awesome. I know you're also a passionate fly fisher.
- [78:08]
Tony James
Yeah.
- [78:09]
David Haber
I don't know. What has fly fishing taught you about life or.
- [78:13]
Tony James
Well.
- [78:13]
David Haber
Or what do you love about it?
- [78:14]
Tony James
Yeah, what I love about it is, like, so many things, like investing, it's lifelong learning. You never know everything. And there's a randomness to it and a connectivity to it that defies analysis but rewards that sort of almost sixth sense, that instinct, which I think great investors have. So that all appeals to me a lot, the connectivity. When you are engaging with nature in a really tactile way, you connect it and you see it much more, much more, in much more detail, and you appreciate its nuances much more. So that connectivity to nature has been an antidote to the rest of my existence, which has always been so. So driven and analytical. I don't know if you ski or anything, but if you're going down and, you know, going down through bumps, whatever concerns are in your head, you're not thinking about that. You're just thinking, turn, turn, turn. And fly fishing is the same way. You can't worry about anything else while you're out there doing that. But it's not stressful intellectually, but it unplugs you from intellectual stresses. So I think those elements have always really appealed to me.
- [79:29]
David Haber
That's awesome. We have a lot of young people that watch our content. If you were a young person, if a young person came to you today with a lot of the same kind of raw materials that you had in 1975, you know, somebody obviously super sharp and very ambitious, what would you tell them about building a career?
- [79:51]
Tony James
Well, first of all, there's a lot of luck in that. And I never really planned, but I reacted. But I Would say some of the attributes you're looking for are some of the attributes that I looked for. I mean, it's a better way to put it. First of all, I wanted an unstructured opportunity where someone didn't tell me how to do something, then expect me to do it, where I could figure out what and how to do and do it my way. And so I. So that was non hierarchical, non structured organizations. I wanted something where I could change the paradigm because that's how I felt, frankly, intellectually engaged. But it's also where the upside comes from. I think an opportunity that really provides a lot of economic, firm, personal and professional growth. Growth is very important. What not to do is worry about, I'm going to move over to the next firm because they're going to pay me another $100,000 next year. I wouldn't do that at all. Make sure you've got lifelong learning. Make sure you're empowered to do stuff and take risks. Make sure if you take smart risks, your firm's got your back. And then roll the dice and be lucky.
- [81:12]
David Haber
It's awesome. Again, I just want to say, I guess on the record, that one of the things that was most remarkable to me about preparing for this conversation was just everybody that I spoke with. These are some of the most successful people on Wall street, at Blackstone and elsewhere. All of them were instantly willing to jump on the phone and just wax poetic about the impact that you. I mean, they all literally attribute the success that they've had in their care you. So I really admire kind of the impact that your career, but also the impact you've had on other people.
- [81:44]
Tony James
Well, and that's mutual. I mean, I'm so lucky to have had incredibly talented people playing their hearts out for the firm. But for me, I'm only as good as they are. Right? And if they play their hearts out and do really well, I benefit. And so, so I'm. And I think they always knew at the end of the day, no matter what, I was out for the firm first, never for myself. And that created a sense from them of loyalty and trust. Because none of them, if you're out for the firm, they don't really want undue rewards, they just want fair rewards. And then if you, if you can, captain a winning team and it carries everyone along, it's a virtuous circle.
- [82:38]
David Haber
It's awesome. Tony James, thank you so much for your time. This is awesome.
- [82:42]
Tony James
Thank you.
- [82:45]
Podcast Host/Narrator
Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z podcast. If you like this episode, be sure to like Comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Follow us on X16Z and subscribe to our substack@a16z.substack.com thanks again for listening and I'll see you in the next episode. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investor investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see a16z.com disclosures.