Alan Waxman

I look back to it now.

He was 15 years older than me.

Here's some kid comes down from, even though I was Texan, I was coming down from a New York firm.

And I still had a little bit of my Southern accent back then, which got beat out of me by all my friends in college.

And here's this guy literally answering every week, every day, question after question.

I used to have these yellow notepads

And I literally would write down my 10 questions for Stephen Plus for the day, and I'd literally call him and ask him.

That whole process of him teaching me about investing and how to think about risk, how to think about return and just all that, it literally led to what made the start of my career at Goldman, where I started running businesses when I was like 25 years old.

Because that whole idea with Stephen is from that, I started to say, wait a second, these are really high rates of return.

And when I started to actually understand what it was, but

couldn't you take other businesses that are good businesses that banks, for whatever reason, won't lend to because they've got a very specific credit box and still earn a good return, but not that high and then have a much bigger TAM?

Could you do that in the middle market?

And I technically wrote it, but Stephen helped me write it, wrote a business plan when I was 23 or 24 years old.

And that business plan was basically to do middle market direct lending.

First of all, direct lending didn't exist.

It wasn't a word.

And Goldman Sachs had never done anything in the middle market.

This is when I first met David Vineyard.

But I just said, look, this could be new clients for Goldman.

We could go out instead of earning on that portfolio.