Blackstone

“Now that the Apollos and Blackstones and KKRs of the world you know, I think in a lot of cases the leveraged buyout is a very small part of what they do today, but I do think it's still like in the core culture.”

“The sandwich chain, Jersey Mike, filed for IPO today. It's looking for a twelve billion dollar valuation after being acquired by Blackstone last year for eight billion.”

“They're marching towards a trillion. They're going to be the next Blackstone, which I think is an incredible feat.”

“We have folks from Blackstone, TPG, HIG, and mostly the reason they come to Long Lake is because, you know, even though these firms are extraordinary firms at what they do, they're not AI native.”

“And that, and we built that business when we sold DOJ to Credit Suisse, it was about a twenty-nine billion dollar AUM business. Blackstone at the time was high teens”

“By the way, we agreed 98% of the time.”

“To give that Element of control, that level of control to someone else. Not one in a hundred would have done that.”

“The private equity business, they'd raised a fund and had made a couple of disastrous investors so that, that were within a year write-offs with about a third of the fund.”

“AIG had just put a hundred million dollars 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 a 170.”

“I think virtually every, the leader of every business almost was changed, because a lot of culture comes from leadership.”

“And also, for a firm like Blackstone, it's investment committees that are the cultural crucible of what defines the firm.”

“There's no other firm that could have afforded to build the retail distribution. We have 500 people in that.”

“That I think is the, now the one, 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.”

“Blackstone wasn't a firm. It was a 173 independent partnerships, all with different percentage ownerships. Every fund had a different percentage ownership than every other fund.”

“Added seventy-five million dollars a year at the time to our operating cost, which is not nothing, a lot more today.”

“We did that first of all, by basically telling people they can't sell any stock for eight years.”

“And we didn't lose anyone that we didn't want to lose for eight years.”

“Steve delegated to me, and I did really with no one else in the firm actually helping for nine months. I did it at night, and worked out all this with bankers, outside bankers and lawyers, but not internal people.”

“So we bought it for a hundred and nineteen million. It's a hundred and twenty billion dollar business today. It's worth tens of billions.”

“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.”

“We'd 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 of the growth to our shareholders.”

“I had at one point, I think, 50 direct reports.”

“The nature of these partnerships is eventually they want to monetize and the best way to monetize is go public. This happened in all the investment banks. They've all went public. And so Yeah, I mean, they'll, most of them will eventually go public, and then t…”

“When Bcred had 7.9% of redemptions, they thought about, listen, we're gonna do everything we can to get everyone their money back.”

“Anthropic is running a parallel deal with Blackstone, Hellman, Friedman, and Permira. One billion common equity, no guaranteed return, more of a Palantir style consulting venture.”

“I think it's probably a good time to be in the LBO business. I think it's probably a good time to be in the Toma Bravo Vista Blackstone KKR business. There will be homes for a lot of those companies, you know, who get themselves to a sustainable place and they…”

“I joined the group when it was on Fund Two. The group only had 12 professionals.”

“REITs would be trading at a significant discount to NAV because people were selling public real estate stocks to buy the technology stocks. Conversely, those stocks did better when the technology stocks blew up.”

“But I think it's tremendous that individual investors now get access to the likes of Blackstone and KKR and Aries and Apollo. These are tremendous firms. It's a great evolution for all individual investors.”

“The public markets value them on their fee stream much more than on their investment returns.”

“I sometimes joke that the big AI companies should become LBO shops. And what they can do is they can partner with KKR or Blackstone and all they get is the data. KKR and Blackstone pride the capital, get all the returns. Fine. But all the data comes back to, y…”

“Airtrunk, which we can talk about, because that's a company we started, literally started the white sheet of paper, which is actually just got bought Blackstone for, I think sixteen billion dollars or something like that.”

“When we were in the midst of negotiating the acquisition, we saw it as an asset that we could unlock, but it was really interesting period of time in 2002 1001, whenever it was, Blackstone, because of their early lead in the market, had a roughly 60, 65% marke…”

“There are now four or five firms, including Blackstone and Aries, that have probably 30 or 40% market share at the top of the stack.”

“Blackstone, about 40 years old, started with 300,000 dollars of capital under management. They're now over a trillion dollars of assets. About a fourth of that, two hundred fifty billion or so, comes from the wealth channel today.”

“Blackstone has a team of hundreds of people. Blue Owl, hundreds of people, KKR, Apollo, hundreds of people to serve the Wealth Channel.”

“Easy to look at it now. They have a four hundred fifty billion dollar credit fund. I was having dinner with the heads of one of the banks in New York, and we were talking about Blackstone and I, and Steve in particular, and I said, would you have ever thought …”

“So if you're a private equity firm, if you're Apollo, or Blackstone, or BlackRock, or whoever it is, right, and you're this big entity the people within your firm can't really leave and compete with you, because there's so much institutional infrastructure aro…”

“CADRE is a technology driven real estate investment platform. I started the business to democratize access to real estate and ultimately alternative investments. And you know, it's a platform where people can log in, they can invest in either single real estat…”

“We were buying thousands of homes, you know, on a weekly basis.”

“There's only six firms at level 10, and they are enormous. They look more like Goldman Sachs than they look like Arctos. Aries, Apollo, Blackstone, KKRA, it's the biggest of the big.”

“The funds at the top of the game are still, I think, doing really well there, but they've been there for 20 years. KKR, Blackstone, Carlisle. The next tier down, if you're a twenty billion dollar fund, a fifty billion dollar fund, and you don't have the same b…”

“India has been very, very successful for them. I think it's been their most profitable market outside of the US.”

“KKR owns Cyrus one, Blackstone owns QTS, fantastic investments. There's gonna be huge money-making investments for those firms.”

“And so you know, Blackstone did this core weave deal. They were one of the first and Blackstone are generally very good at structuring these type of creative deals. Good on them. And I think we'll see more of that type of deals going forward.”

“As with all things, when you're successful and you try to scale, returns decay. And this is not a slight on YC's returns, but it's what happens to everybody. So if you look at Blackstone's returns, they were incredible when they started, then they're Ok today.…”

“It is very alluring when people call you and say, hey, do you want a hundred million dollars to go invest in all these small businesses? And instead I got to kind of check myself because I do have an ego and I do think I'm kind of good at this and say like, ac…”

“I think second is confidence when not to be interesting. I think certain institutions, Yale, MIT, have the resources to always be interesting. Everything they do is interesting. But for something without resources, without that access, maybe the answer is an E…”

“I had my first child, took Blackstone on as a shareholder, all within the same few weeks.”

“One of the examples that I was looking at was Blackstone's acquisition of Apria Healthcare, which ultimately had to enter into a deferred prosecution agreement with the Justice Department because of allegedly selling medical devices that were never actually us…”

“If something happens to Blackstone or Apollo or KKR, we're going to get the same question. What does your exposure look like? How do you guys think about this? So it's, yeah, there's an interrelatedness of eight or 10 of these companies for sure.”

“John Gray is arguably the best real estate investor of my lifetime, right? And I say arguably because somebody may disagree with me, but I, you'd have a hard time finding someone who would disagree with that statement, I think, generally. One of the best real …”

“The infrastructure of it is a little bit reminiscent of the Apple, IBM computer debate of the nineties, where it's like you were never incented to buy an Apple product if you were a corporate purchasing person, because you got no penalty for buying IBM and you…”

“The irony is the stronger the firm, the harder that assessment is. So it's harder to assess people actually out of Goldman or Blackstone or some of the really great firms, because it's just harder to tell was it them or was it the firm. If somebody just did an…”

“You know, you had Blackstone and others after to the 2008 financial crisis. Buy up a bunch of properties. That used to be for ownership and now are only rental.”

“You're picking a CEO for a company they had just bought for 4.7 billion dollars. Blackstone did the entire interview process in zoom.”

“I don't want to go compete against Blackstone and Brookfield in real estate on price. We're going to lose all day long. But if we can compete on duration, we'll do that.”

“And so they went to the University of California pension system, and they essentially got a huge infusion of capital. I think it was about four billion dollars where they guaranteed 11 and a half percent interest to these guys for the four billion dollars. And…”

“Read lately Stephen Schwarzman from Blackstone. Which I wasn't really impressed, actually, but that was the latest one I read.”

“You need to, as somebody with a retirement account, know about Blackstone, Cardile, etc. You should, because these are kind of the equivalent of those big tech names that I talked about. It's big finance, or it's what I call, you know, mainstream active asset …”