‘Culture is Everything’: Sixth Street’s Alan Waxman on Flexibility and Alpha

Welcome to another episode of Goldman Sachs exchanges great investors. I'm Allison Mass, chairman of investment banking in Goldman Sachs's Global Banking and Markets Group, and your host for this episode. Today, I'm very excited to be sitting down with Alan Waxman. Alan is the cofounding partner, chief executive officer, and co chief investment officer at sixth Street, a multistrat private capital investing firm with over $115,000,000,000 in assets under management. Founded in 02/2009, sixth Street focuses on identifying the best relative risk reward across asset classes, industries, and geogr

Thank you for having me.

It's gonna be fun. Alright. Excited. So good. So I I wanna start by talking about your path into finance to begin with before we even get to Goldman Sachs. What interested you in coming into the finance industry?

The path for me to finance was not linear. I was an international relations major in college, and I graduated college with, I didn't have a job. So I had 35 interviews, four of which, by the way, were different groups at Goldman Sachs. Didn't get called back once.

That was our loss.

Yeah. It's all good and, you know, built some resilience, but I ended up getting a job at a long bond manager called Fisher Francis Trees and Watts as a client service analyst. And, really, what that was, the job's to do stuff helping clients, but, really, what it was, I was in the mailroom punching books. So that wasn't that cool because all my friends were out who all had jobs, by the way, before they graduated, and they were out, you know, looking, you know, cool things, visiting companies, worrying about companies. So I started studying for the CFA just to learn some basic finance principl

It's just amazing how so many of these connections are just fortuitous. Happened to be sitting next to him on an airplane. So at that time, what was the mandate of the special situations group, and how did that influence the type of opportunities that you pursued back then?

I think Goldman figured out very early that, you know, starting really in 02/2001, 02/2002, that that piece of change in the world was accelerating. It obviously started with the Internet, you know, then it went to social media, then AI. So the mandate was basically complete flexibility, but you couldn't lose money. So we invested in real estate assets, infrastructure assets, direct lending, private equity. We started a company from scratch, which ended up being one of the second largest wind companies ever sold at that time. So it's complete flexibility, but all with the principle of, again,

So you became a partner at Goldman in 2006 at the age of 31. You were a great firm leader throughout the financial crisis. So what did that period teach you about how capital behaves under stress? And how did that shape your approach to risk return today?