Building Blackstone, Backing Costco, with Tony James
Episode publishedPodcast: The a16z ShowThe a16z Show
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If you think about the development of a successful company, there's kind of an s curve. It starts off small and entrepreneurial. Then there's this kind of escalation where you create a lot of value and a lot of size.
People know Blackstone today, a trillion dollars in AUM. It did not look anything like that when you joined.
Running an investment organization like Blackstone, I think you almost have to be a really good investor.
If you're gonna catch the signals early, they're never obvious. By the time they're obvious, it's priced in. You led the series a into Costco. Charlie Munger was still on the board, and you guys served together for thirty years. What did you learn?
Focus. Focus. Focus. Flawless execution of details. Build for the long term.
Everybody that I spoke with literally attribute the success that they've had in their careers to you. If a young person came to you today, what would you tell them about building a career?
What does it take to build a firm that lasts across decades? In finance, most success is measured in funds, but a small number of people have built firms, organizations that compound talent, capital, and culture over time. Tony James is one of them. From joining DLJ when it was a subscale firm to helping transform Blackstone into a trillion dollar asset manager, his career traces the evolution of modern private markets. The question is not just how to generate returns, but how to build systems that keep generating them. A 16 z general partner David Haber sits down with Tony James to talk throu
Tony, thank you so much for being here. You're very welcome, David. You joined DLJ as an investment banking associate in 1975, I think just after business school. Maybe give us a reminder of what the shape of that business looked like at the time.
Well, if I'd known what I was doing, I probably wouldn't have joined DLJ. It was nothing, honestly. It was a sub major firm or a sub sub major firm, as they used to say in those days. So there were at least 100 firms bigger than it was. We had an investment banking team of five. We hadn't done a financing or a merger in two years, so we hadn't done any business in two years.
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