Alan Waxman

It was the firm's balance sheet.

At its peak, I think we were like $25 billion in the firm's balance sheet.

Our mandate was basically you could do anything, different asset classes, different sectors, different geographies, different durations.

So we could do stuff that were two-, three-year investment horizon or 10-year investment horizon, different return profiles.

Some of us 10% return stuff, some of us 20%, 30% return profits.

Literally, we could do anything, but we couldn't lose money.

So what we learned at the time is this group, we were a substantial amount of goldman's net income with a very small team for 10 plus years.

is really the ability to unitize risk reward across different asset classes geographies sectors return profiles duration profiles take a real estate type investment compared to a us corporate loan compared to buying a company compared to starting a company and we unitize risk units and return units and we did that across a bunch of different sectors a bunch of different geographies

asset classes.

And just that skill of being able to do that, you're constantly comparing relative risk units and return units.

And it gives you the ability to find the best risk reward at that time and the key principle there.

And we learned this the hard way.

So if you go back, Goldman was a bunch of fiefdoms of principal investing business.

There were 10 fiefdoms, different partners running investing businesses, and none of them talked to each other.

They all had their own balance sheets, never spoke to each other.

So during 2001, 2002, a number of the businesses lost a lot of money.

For example, we had in the US, the business I was in, which is a US corporate investing business, was pretty negative on fiber builds.

If you remember Exo Communications or Williams, remember all the fiber, which was overbilled, all that.

There was another group at Goldman who are great investors, but they were all in on fiber.

Even though we were literally one floor apart,