Andrew Milgram

Lots of the investments that we've made

The management teams have said, well, you're the first lender ever to show up and see the facility.

Crazy.

So we spent a lot of time just getting to understand how a counterparty is thinking.

Again, we also spent a lot of time looking at data because people have an intuition about what they want, what they need.

Data sometimes says something different.

Now, there are times where we want to share that data with somebody to help them understand their own needs.

There are other times maybe we want to keep that data to ourself in a negotiation.

But we're looking at all dimensions of how to inform ourselves about what the other person's needs are, understand what their real hard constraints are.

And one of the things that every time I deal with somebody, I try to guarantee them is you tell me

You've got a hard constraint and we can understand that that is true, that you have that hard constraint.

We're going to respect it in the negotiation.

Any negotiation, any resolution can't be a zero-sum game.

It has to be that both sides have to get something out of it.

By the way, also when we're selling assets, you have to leave something in for the next owner.

If you try to extract all the value that they're going to get, well, then they don't want to do the deal.

So trying to understand what the other guy needs is a huge portion of what we do.

Yeah.

So, you know, that saying, I learned everything I need to know in kindergarten.

That's really true.