Blackstone

“In February, 2007, he sold his equity office properties trust, the largest owner of office buildings in the world for a hefty thirty nine billion dollars to Blackstone. That was the largest leveraged buyout in corporate history at the time.”

“The fact that they decided to finance their thirty two billion dollar offer with six Team banks at two billion dollars each instead of three banks at ten billion dollars each might have suggested. Perhaps They were thinking that if they could get 16 banks for …”

“It's like, in the history of Blackstone, they've raised, what is it, like, call it half a trillion dollars. That's again, that's not the number, but it's an enormous number of capital. They've had, like, one fund in, like, 40 years that has done more than thre…”

“So when I completed the thirty nine billion dollar sale of Equity Office, that's his company, in early 2007, I didn't yet know how the story would play out.”

“So in May of I was diagnosed with stage three breast cancer. I didn't have a family history. I had no reason to suspect that I would have it, and so it was very blindsiding, and this was shortly after Bumble had been acquired by Blackstone.”

“When you leave an established place, apparently that changes people's views of you. Not in terms of your capability, but maybe it's not you. Maybe it's just the firm where you're working, but for your own ego-driven reasons, you think it's you working at the f…”

“I remember when we got our first assignment, that was from Squibb, which was a pharmaceutical company for 50,000 dollars, which was less than the smallest legal bill I had ever gotten on a transaction. But 50,000 dollars, we started with 400,000 total capital.…”

“That it's hard to be emotionally present when you're worried about completely wiping out financially.”

“First fund's aspiration was a billion. We raised eight 50, and then went back a year later, got another hundred for money in the firm. So I looked at it, we sort of, with two people with no investment capability, raised nine hundred and fifty million dollars, …”

“I remember each one of the investors because we were turned down 17 times for every one yes.”

“We never had in our whole first fund ever lost any money for any bank. And, you know, we've almost never, in the firm's history, lost money for any bank.”

“Usually in about 90% of the cases, if something goes wrong with the investment, it's about those risk factors, and we got them wrong. The team didn't get them wrong. We all got it wrong, and so if that's the case, and the outcome is suboptimal, the team doesn'…”

“The first rule is never meet a maturity. So if you're borrowing money, you can almost always pay the interest. In almost every case, you analyze it and you see how bad You know, the company performed in previous recessions, and then you take a discount from th…”

“There are just Some people who have that sixth sense of what's going on in, in their area, they can sense danger, they can see opportunity, they know how to hire people, they inspire loyalty, they tend to be really nice people as a rule, and they can build eno…”

“A nine is, like, really good person. They can execute anything. They're clever. They're hardworking. They're reliable. You can put them in charge of something where you describe the situation, and they can pretty much bring it home without, you know, coaching,…”

“You never terminate somebody because it's not fair. In other words, they're there because you asked them to be. And so the mistake is yours, right?”

“You knew what the right answer was, but if you went ahead and implemented that, you could blow up a whole part of your business, because other people become destabilized. So I learned that, that figuring out what to do wasn't hard, but how to do it, and what k…”

“So, so we bought and sold seventy billion dollars of properties in one month. The most anybody ever had sold in a year was like bought and sold 10.”

“We made 3.2 times profit on, on that ten billion.”

“If we had held all of it, we probably would have been buried.”

“And that deal turned out to be the biggest profit in private equity history. And I just read some articles somebody wrote which makes you wonder who said we were completely irresponsible doing that because journalists can say anything they feel like. But that …”

“The average stock of a financial company, bank, money manager, didn't matter, during the financial crisis went down 85%. So if you've ever been involved with something that went down 85%, You would not be a particularly happy Kemper. Blackstone's always been a…”

“We've just become more popular because the type of investing we do makes about double the stock market.”

“You always have to know where you are in the cycle, so if you're near the top, this thing's gotta really, it's got a lot to prove to deploy that money. It's gotta have a, just a rip-roaring, wonderful set of momentum thesis, so it'll power through a downturn, …”