Private credit investing with Ares Management’s Mike Arougheti

Allison: Welcome to Goldman Sachs Exchanges Great Investors. I'm Allison Mas, chairman of investment banking within Goldman Sachs's Global Banking and Markets Business and your host for today's episode. Today, I'm thrilled to be sitting down with Mike Arougheti, the cofounder and CEO of Ares Management. Ares is one of the world's largest and most respected alternative asset managers with more than $400,000,000,000 in assets under management and a market cap of over $40,000,000,000. Ares is a top player in real estate, private equity, secondaries, and many other businesses.

But what really makes them stand out is their prowess in private credit. Ares is one of the biggest direct lenders in the world, and that's no accident. Today, I'm so excited to find out how Mike built up that business and where he thinks this red hot asset class is going next. So, Mike, welcome to the program.

Mike: I'm so happy to be here. Thank you.

Allison: So let's start right at the beginning. You graduated from Yale where you majored in ethics, politics, and economics, then went on to a storied investment bank called Kitter Peabody

Mike: Yep.

Allison: Which I'm probably one of the few people left

Mike: still knows what that is. Yep.

Allison: Who knows what that is. So what attracted you to a career in finance? And do you have any memories from that first job?

Mike: Yeah. It's so funny because I now that I have a college age son and watching him go through his own process, you realize just how little you really know when you get out of college. And I always had an entrepreneurial bent, like a desire to build businesses, but I didn't really know what a career in finance would mean. Candidly, I graduated early for 3 years, and I had no friends around me that were actually going through the job process. So, luckily, someone who I was friends with the year prior to me got me this job at Kidder Peabody.