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Foreign.
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Welcome to another episode of Goldman Sachs Exchanges Great Investors. I'm Allison Mass, chairman of investment banking and Goldman Sachs's global banking and markets group and your host for this episode. Today I have the pleasure of sitting with Steve Kalinsky, the founder and CEO of New Mountain Capital. The firm, which manages approximately $60 billion in assets, is widely recognized for its disciplined investment approach, emphasizing def growth and a commitment to building high quality businesses. I'm excited to talk to Steve about his career path, his approach to improving businesses and his view on the current financial landscape. So Steve, welcome to Great Investors.
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Thank you, Alison. Thanks for having me.
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So Steve, I like to start these sessions with talking about what got people interested in business and finance to begin with. And I know that for you that goes way back to your family's clothing business in Detroit. So can you talk a little bit about how that influenced your career path?
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A
Yeah. My grandfather and grandmother had a store in Detroit for 30 years selling women's coats and women's clothes. His name was Albert and they called it Albert's. And then when I was a kid, shopping centers were starting to roll out. That was the new idea at the time was major shopping malls. And my dad and uncle built into a chain of stores as the shopping malls rolled out. So that's where I first saw business. When I was in graduate school, my true goal was to be a constitutional lawyer. I was only going to business school to kind of appease my family that I might go back to the business. But private equity started when I was in graduate school and I ended up
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going in that direction and the rest is history.
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Well, and the other thing that happened is I got my grades at law school and I'm fine. I made honors, but I was not gonna be the next Supreme Court justice. Justice Roberts was one year ahead of me, he become a Supreme Court justice. So I became a lawyer in business.
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B
You did just fine.
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A
It's worked out okay.
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B
So your time in graduate school was in the late 70s, which coincided with the first leverage buyout of a public company. And this ultimately led to you working here at Goldman Sachs. We're proud that you're an alum where you co founded the first LBO group. So tell us about that moment in time.
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Yeah, I was in graduate School from 1977 to 1981. I did a law and business degree. And the first leverage bot of a public company was in 1979 when KCare bought Hudai Industries. So it was a totally new idea. I was about the youngest person at the business school. I Had no work experience. And I said, wow, this is a great idea. And I wrote my JDMBA thesis on what is a buyout and the whole new field. It's like going to Silicon Valley. The year transistors were invented. It was very early. I came to Goldman in 1981. It was the size of a law firm. I joined the merger department which had 12 people in it. And it was the first big hiring class. And this is when raids and Saturday night specials were the whole thing. So we were always on raid defense. And then I helped start the original private equity group in the 81 to 84 period. So it was a great formative early days to come in the interest rates. When I started, people say the interest rates are so high today. The highest interest rates in history were the day before I started work. The 10 year treasury was 15.84%.
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B
Wow.
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It had been 13 years of stagflation. The stock market was lower in 81 than it had been in 68. So that was the entry point.
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And I think prime rate was probably
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over 20, probably to get a home mortgage was about 20% to get a home mortgage. And it was kind of the bottom of the market. And then it's been kind of a 40 year, 45 year up market since then, which explains my career, a lot of other people's career. So it's been a good timing of my parents to give birth to me at the right time.
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B
At the right time, yeah. So you and I both cut our teeth in the early days of private equity in the 80s when debt fueled LBOs and junk bonds were the norm. And fun fact, you were actually mentioned in the Barbarians of the Gate book that epitomized that era, which I need to reread because I haven't read it in probably 20 years. But can you talk a little bit about the most significant changes to the private equity industry in the decades that you've had such a bird's eye view?
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Yeah. When I started, private equity was totally a cottage industry. You know, I worked on Goldman's first ever proprietary deal which was a $12 million acquisition of a paper bag company.
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Paper bag company?
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Yeah, Trinity Paper bag. And I remember the founder said, you remember the movie Tootsie when the guy had a white Haagen Dazs bag? That's my bag. So I mean it was a very little company. And we put in a half a million dollars of Goldman Sachs partners money. Both CEOs were watching over my shoulder. The heads of investment banking were watching over my shoulder.
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B
Who Were the heads of investment banking at that time?
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Well, the CEOs were John Whitehead and John Weinber. Legendarily great. And so it was very early days back then. And there were only 20 private equity firms in the world back then. And what I keep saying is I've also now been the chair of the industry, which has 5,000 firms that private equity has gone from a form of finance into a form of business where in the early 80s inflation was so high, prices were so low, it was really about borrowing a lot of money. And if you were 95 parts debt and 5 parts equity and it had 10% inflation, you could triple your money with no growth at all. 45 years later. It's all about really knowing industries, building business after business in a very high form of business building. So I think there's been a very positive transition over the 45 years. And my firm tries to be at the front of that.
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B
So, Steve, can you talk a little bit about what motivated you to leave Goldman Sachs join Forceman little after your three years here?
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Yeah. So Goldman Sachs was a fantastic place. They were working me pretty hard as they were working everybody.
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B
They still do.
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I think that changed. I don't know. With computers it should be so easy now. But for somehow the job keeps staying tough for people. I love Goldman Sachs. I love the guy I was working with. But the opportunity to get onto the side of being the principal where you actually own the business. The leverage by work I was doing at Goldman was advisory to families taking their own businesses private and so forth, other than this one little paper bag company. So the idea of being the owner of the business myself was very appealing. So I was with Goldman from 1981 to 1984. I got poached away in 84 by force. Melittal again. There were only 20 private equity firms. The largest firm in the world was KKR with 400 million of assets. That was the giant of the space. They had eight people at that firm. Forrest Melittel was the second biggest in the world with 200 million of assets. And it was the three founders, another young guy and myself. So I came in as a former young guy.
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B
Tom Lister.
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No, Tom I hired later. Tom was a junior guy that I brought in. And Sandra Horbach was a junior person I brought in. There was a guy named John Sprague who went off in the 90s and started a firm called Jupiter. But it was just very early days and I was there from 84 to 99. And it was a very. And it was an Exceptionally glamorous place. Totally dysfunctional. Totally glamorous. Ted was famous for dating Lady Di. And we had our own hangars of Gulfstream jets. We had more people flying the jets and the helicopters than working at the firm, which is why the firm doesn't exist anymore. But it was a great period of economic success for the firm, so I had a good run of it there.
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So what year did you leave to start New Mountain Capital and what did you set out to do?
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So I left Forcemello officially January of 99. I said I was going to leave. I had just finished an investment called General Instrument that was maybe one of the first great tech deals done. It went from a billion of value to 20 billion of value in the 90s, introducing high definition TV and digital compression and all the technology behind the cable systems. And a lot of it went into the building the broadband Internet system. So I left after that. I actually went off for a year and started the first charter school in New York. I got in my head I was going to get very involved. I had been involved in education reform and I got very deep into that. So I was actually in a church basement in Harlem in the middle of 99 and then started New Mountain. We got our first money officially January 2000. So we've had our. It's our 25th anniversary of actually investing money this year.
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B
That's fantastic. Well, congratulations.
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Yeah, well, thank you.
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B
So what was the original mission of New Mountain like? What was your original business plan?
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Yeah, there. Well, there was no formal business plan. I was as focused on. I was as focused on charter schools as anything. I said to myself, if I could, you know, have a little fund and do say, four $40 million companies, wouldn't that be great? And it's turned into 60 billion. But the principles were always the same. We've always, if you look at our website, we've always said New Mountain building, great business. It's always been about business building, not about financial engineering. And it's always been about picking non cyclical growth sectors. We call those defensive growth sectors, becoming deeply advantaged in those and then building the business. So. And the culture. You know, Forestman did have a great track record in the 80s and 90s when I was with them. But the culture was based much more on the Goldman culture of the very early 80s and more of a family business culture combined with some of the techniques that we had developed at Forestman. Little to, we used less debt, we were more focused. Like again, General Instrument went from a billion to 20 billion. And we Increased R and D. We did a lot of great things. So that was the mindset. But I never thought it would get to the size it got to. I never had any ambition or thought that it would turn out to be what it's become.
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B
So I have to ask you, how did the name New Mountain Capital come to be?
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Well, because, number one, I didn't think Klinsky Capital was very melodious. I didn't really want to, and I didn't want to name it after a single person. The original idea, after having been at Forcemen, after having Force Little, where the fight over was there a comma or not, became a feud Point. For 15 years. I was there between Forcemen a little. So anyways, I didn't want to have that sort of culture. And so the original idea in my head was to call it Mountain as kind of a symbolist idea of permanence and upwardness. And so it's not about mountain climbing or hanging on a cliff. It's about the idea of the mountain. I got my first pledge as the name Mountain, and there was a little squib in a newsletter, and Fuji Bank's legal department read it and called me up and said, very sorry, we own the mountain name for our money fund of 2001. So I said, oh, no, I have no money, no team, I don't even have a name. And I went through months of every Greek God, every Norse God, every type of oak tree, and eventually it was January of 2000. New century, new firm, New Mountain.
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Okay, that makes sense.
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And the lawyer said, okay, we'll let you through with New Mountain.
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Okay.
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And what's funny now is there are other firms that are called Mountain or Old Mountain or something. It looks like we spun out of them, but we were, I think, the first mountain name anybody had used.
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B
That's great.
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And now there's other versions that people use the mountain.
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See, I never knew that story. That was an interesting story.
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Yeah. Yeah.
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So you've said that you're more interested in building businesses than in just financing them.
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Yeah.
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B
And there was a Harvard Business Review article written about one of your companies that encapsulates that approach. Can you tell us about that?
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Yeah. So I wrote it a couple of years ago about a company of ours called Blue Yonder. I've been the chair of the private equity industry. There's something called the American Investment Council that represents all 5,000 firms. And I had been the chair. And I keep trying to explain to people that private equity, properly done, is just best in quality. Business building, not some financial trick. So I used a case study. Blue Yonder was a business that we had bought when it was 600 million in value called Red Prairie, Very sleepy little, the supply chain software company. We built it up in all sorts of ways into the world's leading supply chain software company with AI and other things. And it sold it for over 8 billion of value. So 600 million to over 8 billion, that's spectacular. And I was just trying to explain that it wasn't, we didn't have some special invention, it wasn't some special trick. It's just there's 20 or 24 ways we try to build businesses and just tried to go through a case study. But you know, there's other case studies as well. But people, the skeptics still think it's a trick or a theft or something, which I keep trying to fight against.
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B
So talk a little bit about how you build value and build those businesses.
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Yeah. So as we buy businesses, first of all, we're dealing in sectors that we've been spending years in building advantages. As we buy the company, we've developed effectively a five year plan with the specific value creation things that we plan to do. And the plans are frankly getting better and better over time as my team gets bigger and more operational as the years go on. And we actually even write a thesis letter to our investors as we're buying the business. This is why it's a good industry. This is why it's a safe company. These are the five areas of growth we're really going to focus on. We call our shots pretty clearly. There's no single tool that we use. It's not like we have one trick that we always do. There's 20 or 24 different ways to build businesses. It's the pricing, it's the sales force, it's add on acquisitions, it's international expansion, it's getting better management. So we work on all of those and then we're constantly monitoring how the team is doing and what adjustments we should make as situations change. But it's a very thoughtful plan and it's actually getting, I think, stronger for us as we have managers we trust who can really be more specific about exactly how to improve things.
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B
So I want to talk a little bit about how you identify a good CEO. And how do you know when a company is well led and when it needs a change at the top? Like what are those criteria you're looking for?
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Yeah, it's a really tough question. It's a high value question to make the decision on the right CEO. So we're very hands on. The way we're set up as an organization is we start by saying what industries do we want to be in? I mean, if there are some industries that melt underneath you and there's nothing you can do, no matter how good the CEO is. And there are other industries that have the wind at their back. So we look for the right industry. We now have 12 sectors staffed up with 25 subsectors. We look at 1,000 companies a year to buy eight. So we're very deep in those sectors, meeting all the management. And we've had a lot of good management work with us. When we buy a company, if there's a great management team there, we love it. We'd love to just back a great management team. Very often though, we're buying a division that's been orphaned or the founder's retiring and wants someone else to build it. So you do have to go out and get a new co and there's a skill to it. We've made mistakes along the way. You know what I most look for is who succeeded in the past. Somehow or other. When someone has good luck or bad luck, it turns out if they have good luck all the time, you're not quite sure. Every little thing they did that led to the right answer. If they had bad luck, every little thing they did wrong that led to a bad answer. But past success means a lot. You know, having worked with people that, you know, people that have been pulled along by their former bosses to their next job, there's a lot, and it's a gut judgment, but we do our best at it.
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B
So you talked about sectors that have strong, stable growth ahead. And picking the right sector is important. So what sectors are you heavily invested in now and how has that landscape shifted in recent years at your investment committee?
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Yeah, so again, we go through a formal process every year where the whole firm suggests sectors and we nominate and vote and discuss and we slowly shape the list. So there are sectors we made a fortune in 25 years ago that we won't touch anymore.
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Like.
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Like our first transaction was in post secondary education for working adults. So in 2001 we bought a company called Strayer, which was a very high quality university system. Went from 400 to a billion 6 of market value as the first Internet was crashing. And we got out of it in 05. We've never gone back into another post secondary. The tuition gets higher, higher, higher. And I now run the biggest charity for free college in the country with 800,000 users, so we've never invested again. I think we still know the most about this space. So that's the sort of sector we're not doing anymore. The sort of places we've been having some very good success at in recent years are things like infrastructure services. So we're not spending a trillion building the data centers, but we just bought a company that's the leading force of technicians maintaining data centers. It grew 50% organically last year. Has no capex would still be needed if data center construction stopped. You'd still need the technicians for the centers that exist. Very high free cash flow. Or we have companies that are building in infrastructure, building the power grid design, building the water grid. So we've been very good in that area. We bought the first accounting firm anybody bought, a firm called Citron Cooperman that we bought and sold and now we own Grant Thornton which is one of the seven largest accounting firms. We've done great in insurance services and healthcare tech and life science supplies. We do like software, but we only win it at a value price. We didn't. We're very skeptical about just high multiples in general, we're kind of growth at a value price shop. So it's those type of sectors.
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B
So we can't talk about investing in 2026 without talking about AI. So how are you thinking about AI opportunities and also which of your portfolio companies or investments it could disrupt and how are you approaching that the same or different than your peers?
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A
So you know, AI is a very important development, you know, in my career because I've been doing this a long time. I saw personal computers come in when I used to be at Goldman in 1981 and we were doing an LBO model. I used to have to fill out a questionnaire and hand it to a computer operator who would sit at a big terminal and do one run and it would take like a day to get it back. So that's where I came in. So personal computers, the Internet, the cloud, other things. Now AI, AI is very important. Before Genai we used AI for example at Blue Yonder, that company I just mentioned, it was named Blue Yonder because we bought a little company in Germany with 72 PhDs called Blue Yonder and changed the name of the whole business. So we were using AI before Genai. But since ChatGPT and Genai came out, we've had a major, major task force project on it. And the way we're using it is effectively at every business that we own, which are usually technology enabled services Businesses, we're just trying to go business function by business function. And what can we improve with AI either to raise the margin or you can do business that was too hard to do with humans that you can, you know, you can look at smaller bills than you used to analyze, you can do better audits than you used to do, that sort of thing. So we're using it very intensively, both to take the companies we have and make them the best in their space and to try to make sure no one gets in front of us by being better than us. And we also, like I say, have the infra companies that are wiring the data center servicing them. So, you know, working about the whole infra buildup.
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B
So let's talk about the macro for a moment. What do you see as the biggest headwinds to the private equity environment right now, and how are you managing those potential downside risks?
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A
So I continue to think private equity is a great space. And let me speak about my own firm and then the industry more generally. We've had a good run of it. Our cash back has been very strong. Our deployment's been very steady. So we raised our last fund a couple of years ago and we're oversubscribed. So we've, we've had a very good. In general, the biggest headwinds to private equity as a class have been a slowdown in deal volume, less cash back to the investors. And also there was so much optimism and so much kind of faith in unicorns in 21 that some people bought companies that were overvalued in 21 that they're still stuck with. So those are the headwinds for the private equity space. That being said, I think the tailwinds or the advantages outweigh those, which is we've been the highest asset class for institutions for, you know, decade after decade, highest performing, highest performing in returns, much lower volatility and drawdown than. So the public markets and private equity are the two highest compared to infrastructure or government bonds or something like that. In the last year or two, private equity has fallen behind because you can't beat Nvidia when it's on a run. But on the other hand, even if we're second highest, we're still above kind of any other class. And I think we'll get, you know, up to number one again. And it gives diversification. You can't, as an institutional manager for your own 401k to have all your money basically in 7 stocks is pretty difficult. There are more private companies than public. You can add more value to them. So I think it's just an inherently good asset class. And but to me, within private equity with 5,000 firms, it's like when they say, well, how does private equity do? It's like, well, what does restaurant food taste like? You know, there's 5,000 restaurants and it's up to the chef. So it's firm by firm. But I think if you are a business builder and we have a team of 300 people at Newmountain, it's not me as the business builder, it's the team that we put together. If you have the right team and add value, I think it's a great asset class.
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B
So talk a little bit about your approach to investing in private credit right now.
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A
Yeah, so we also love private credit and we've been in the private credit strategies ever since 2008. So we've been in it now for 17 years.
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B
Are you investing out of the same fund?
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So here's what happened. When the Great recession hit in 08 and Lehman went bankrupt, you could buy the first lien of the safest companies we had studied that someone else had bought that were on plan and non cyclical. The markets were so distressed we could buy first lien at 60 cents on the dollar and make over a 30% return just holding it to maturity. So we first went into private credit as a private equity line item. But the key to our private credit is we've had 100 billion of enterprise value creation at our private equity funds with a 0.2% loss rate since we started. We're very focused, kind of a family business mentality. We don't have portfolio theory, we have family business theory. So we try to keep companies safe in safe industries. If someone else buys a business we like and we just don't want to outbid them, we can drop down and be a lender in that same industry to that same company with all the knowledge that we have as owners of private equity businesses, we have one central analytical engine. So let's say it's a great software company and another firm paid 20 times for it and we didn't want to pay 21. We're happy dropping down to 6 times debt with 14 parts equity underneath us. And we use our private equity team to educate our credit portfolio managers. This is a good software business because there are good businesses and bad businesses in every sector. So it's been a very successful strategy. And you know, and also we're essentially a family office. All of us of our own families as well as an executive So I only want to be in asset classes that I and my family want to be in. So I'm a big personal investor in our credit effort. We have a net lease strategy, we have non control equity. We're going in a continuation vehicle strategy. So we're in things that we really believe in, but we use the, you know, if we can't buy the company, we use that same knowledge to whatever the company wants. If they're not for sale, we can work with them in any way they want to.
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B
That's great flexibility.
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A
Yeah. And it's all tied together. So it's not like we're marketing for five different firms. It's one team that we can use more and more and make stronger and stronger. That's how we got up to 300 people. When, when I left Forestman Little, it was the second biggest firm in the world with eight professionals and you know, lots of jets. And I have 300 people and no jets. So that's the difference between, you know, and I love Force Mobile. I had a great time there, was very well treated, but it's a little bit of a different culture.
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B
Yeah, some excellent investors came out of there.
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A
Yeah, absolutely.
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B
So outside of the office, I want to talk a little bit about that. You've long been involved in educational reform and you talked about your charter school.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Why is that a personal passion of yours? And tell me about your latest project, the Modern States Education Alliance.
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A
Yeah, so I'm involved in a bunch of charity. First of all, I do think it's not because of guilt of business. I think what we do in business, if you're building something, is very proper. We have a social dashboard. We've added, created over 70,000 jobs, net of job losses. We pay very well. So I mean I'm proud of what New Mountain does. That being said, you just want to have a full, active, meaningful life. So I and my family involved in lots of charities. A lot of them are children's health, a lot of other things. But education has been really fundamental. And back in, even before charter school, six year before charter schools, I set up after school centers in the most crime ridden part of New York City called the Gary Klinsky Children's Centers that are still running. I had an older brother named Gary who when I was a kindergartner, he was a seventh grader and he would give me school after school was incredibly important in my life. My mom was trained as a school teacher. He died of a genetic illness when I was in graduate school. So when I made partner at Forceman. And I had some means. I went and created an after school program in his name, which is still going. That's what gave me the hands on experience to say I was in what was East New York, which at the time was the crack war capital in New York City, had more murders than the state of Nebraska in this one neighborhood. And yet when I would go visit the school, the kids were fantastic, the teachers were fantastic. So there was something about the system, not the kids. So that's what led me to say, well, let me get into charter schools and take that concept and make a full day out of it. And then that got me onto deeper into education again in the modern states. We did the Strayer deal, which was a wonderful, very high quality company, great education for people. But all tuition for college has gotten higher, higher, higher every year since, you know, since 2000 there's $1.7 trillion of student debt.
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B
It's an unreal number.
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A
It's an unreal number it's gotten. Even if you're an in state person in a place like Indiana, purdues like $33,000 a year and they're trying to keep the tuition down. So what modern states is, is there's a set of exams that people had forgotten about called the CLEP exams that are like advanced placement exams, but anybody can take them. They're also from the college board. They're in 32 subjects and they've been around for 50 years. And basically every state school, community college will say if you pass the college algebra clep, you're done with college algebra, you have the credit so you can do about a year of college just by passing these exams. We hired the best professor in every one of these subjects, created an online course we give away for free at modernstates.org, go on your phone or whatever and anyone can go to them. And we give you a free course, free readings, free practice questions. If you pass our exam, we pay the CLEP exam fee, which is 100 bucks. And if you're Abe Lincoln and you're totally impoverished, but you're ambitious, you can get a year of college this way and save a year of time and 30 grand of money. So we have 800,000 people have used it without advertising. We've given away 250,000 courses, which is 25,000 free years of college. And it's just getting started.
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B
That's spectacular.
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A
So that's the biggest charity thing I do now.
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B
So you've had a front row seat to the evolution of private equity. Over the last 40 years, as we've discussed. But what changes are you predicting in the next 10?
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A
So again, I think more and more about business building and true value add and the other big evolution that's recent is this idea that you don't have to sell your best company in five years, you can continue it. Let your investors out if they want to be out, let new investors in if they want to come in. You know, do a trophy asset continuation vehicle. I think that's a very, very important and proper evolution if you do it right. We've done two of those trophy asset CVs ourselves and we like the strategy. If another firm is doing that with their best asset instead of selling it the way they would have a few years ago, they're saying, no, we're not going to sell it, we're going to keep it, but invest as we keep it. We want to have a strategy to do that as well. So I think it's very important, both from the GP point of view and as a investment strategy.
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B
I'm going to ask you one last question off script before we go into our lightning round.
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A
Sure.
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B
Which is, I heard that you like to ask every prospective person who comes to work for New Mountain what the last book they read is or what book they're currently reading. So is that true? And why do you ask that question and what do you learn?
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A
All right, well, I'm going to blow up all future interviews by giving my secrets away. But when I hire somebody, like as a new associate, I'm looking for someone who can run the firm one day, I assume they can run the computer models before they ever get to me. So besides trying to get to know them and what they're good and bad at, I ask them what do they read and who do they admire? Because I'm looking for intellectual curiosity and breadth and I'm looking for what they're their value system is. So that's a good question. Yeah.
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B
All right, so we'd like to end these with a lightning round to sort of run through a couple of questions, get a quick answer. So what do you think your greatest strength as an investor is?
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A
I think my greatest strength as an investor is pattern recognition and being able to put teams together where the weakness of one person is supplemented by the strength of another to get a coherent team together and to keep the eye on what is the key objective? How do you get to the key objective?
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B
So what's the best piece of advice you've ever received? And if you remember who gave you that Advice.
- [30:06]
A
Well, I have two answers. I'll give you one, which is when I almost got fired from Goldman Sachs. If you have enough time in the. In this podcast. I was a first year associate. It was a client of John Weinberg, Knight Ridder Newspapers. They had. They were selling two little newspapers where they gave us the secret papers. And they say, protect these secret papers. And I was carrying those papers and I was running around. We were on merger time, we were late, we ran from plane to plane. And I was using my brother's briefcase, the one who had passed away, which was very narrow, and I couldn't put all the papers in it. And I left the secret papers in the pocket of an airplane.
- [30:41]
B
Oh, no.
- [30:42]
A
And I left. And I come back and go, this is John Weinberg's favorite client and I've lost the secret paper.
- [30:48]
B
Oh, my gosh.
- [30:49]
A
And so I had to go to the head of mergers, who at the time was Mike Overlock. And there's no way around it. I couldn't doubt. I had to tell him the truth. He said, let me talk to John Weinberg. And I'm thinking, and I deserve to be fired for many reasons. But, you know, they came back the next day and he said, John Weinberg says, get a bigger briefcase.
- [31:09]
B
And that was it.
- [31:10]
A
That was it. So I went out and bought what at the time was called a nerdbag, the biggest briefcase I could. So the best advice I ever got was get a bigger briefcase. A little further from that, I read a book once by a theologian, Martin Buber, about there's hallowness and everything, and it's your job as a human to kind of bring the hallowness out. So that was very involved in my thinking about charter schools and charity and other things and also just how to deal with people in your own firm, the companies you're buying. It's kind of an idea of there's a spark of divinity in everything, and bring that spark out and it could be a shelter dog you take home or whatever it is. So that was probably the most meaningful thing I read.
- [31:51]
B
So which investor do you admire the most?
- [31:54]
A
You know, I don't really admire stock pickers so much because I find it kind of. I don't know how consistent that really is. I admire anyone who truly builds a business and I admire from whatever their starting point is to wherever they got to. So they started with absolutely nothing and they built the best Greek diner on the Lower east side. I would admire that tremendously. You know, if elon Musk gets SpaceX going and SpaceX can catch the rocket when it lands. I admire that. So anybody who's building things in a good way and you know, from wherever they started to wherever they got to.
- [32:28]
B
All right, so we've talked about your passion for education. Where do you spend your time outside of the office, outside of the charitable work you do?
- [32:36]
A
Yeah. So the most fun is when my kids were young enough and I had four of them at home. They're now all young adults. So I feel like my kids, my friends on the playground have moved away and I've left on the playground without them. So I'm a little, you know, I'm a little bit forlorn and all that. But I love movies, I love theater, I love reading, I love the city, I love, you know, going to someplace warm, we'll get away for the weekend, you know, so it's just, I don't have. I'm not like a huge sailor or golfer. I'm not. The only thing I'm really competitive about is business. I'm not at all competitive. Only I gravitate towards is building new mountain, you know, building my family and building new mountains.
- [33:10]
B
You've done well with that so far.
- [33:12]
A
So good. So you wouldn't want to see me on the golf course though. And, and people say, when are you going to retire? I have no golf game. I'd rather be in the office, you know, until, you know, they can't fire me. They can all quit, but they can't really fire me. So I love just doing what I'm doing.
- [33:25]
B
If it makes you feel better, my dad retired when he was 93.
- [33:27]
A
Well, there you go. There you go.
- [33:29]
B
And he's 99 today, so I think it gave him longevity.
- [33:32]
A
Yeah.
- [33:33]
B
So thank you so much, Steve, for joining me.
- [33:35]
A
Thanks for having me.
- [33:36]
B
And thank you all for listening to this episode of Goldman Sachs Exchanges Great Investors which was recorded on February 18, 2026. I'm Alison Mass. If you enjoyed this show, we hope you'll follow us on Apple podcasts, Spotify or YouTube or wherever you listen to your podcasts and leave us a rating and a comment.
- [34:01]
C
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