David Haber

There's a handful of people.

There's like ultimately one decision maker.

And a firm, I think, by contrast maybe has to deliver exceptional returns because that's a prerequisite.

But the other, I think, variable is like building sources of compounding competitive advantage.

Like, what are your moats?

You know, if you think about Blackstone as a company, not just a collection of individual funds, like...

you know, it's a much more entrepreneurial question because every entrepreneur wakes up every day asking about their competitive advantage.

I'm curious, you know, if you agree with that distinction, how you sort of think about that in the context of Blackstone or GLJ.

One of the things I've read, certainly in a lot of like Blackstone materials over time is just, you know, they'll identify kind of a big secular trend and find ways to express conviction in that thesis across different asset classes.

And one of my kind of core beliefs, both it's kind of an investment philosophy, I think it's a bit of a metaphor for my career maybe today, which is that opportunities live between fields of expertise.

And it seems like very well expressed there.

At least like, you know, we're believers in e-commerce, so we'll bet in the e-commerce brand, but we're also going to buy warehouses.

We're also going to invest in the cloud infrastructure.

You talked about kind of retail distribution.

You know, everybody I've spoken to has said you were, like, incredibly early kind of in that way, both just covering the wirehouses.

By the way, treating LPs as true partners, that was something that was kind of core.

You talked about driving IRRs, not just sort of scaling AUM for the sake of it.

I think you also helped catalyze kind of the creation of Blackstone's insurance, you know, insurance solutions business.

I imagine both of those became kind of sources of like perpetual or permanent capital to some degree, you know, for the business as well.

I want to talk about the IPO because it was, you know, obviously a huge deal in the kind of history of the firm.