John Zito

When I joined Apollo, that was what I was stepping into.

And really, I was pretty intimidated about that.

And over time, what's been unique is we've taken a lot of people that are wired that way, that are super competitive, super smart, know the entire capital structure from a loan to a bond to a pref to an equity, which there's not many people in the market.

Typically, people are very narrow.

They don't look at the whole capital structure.

And we've taken those people who typically worked in opportunistic, high-octane, high-returning vehicles, and we've taken a lot of the most creative people and put them on investment grade, which you think about innovation is how do you take a deal for like an Intel, $11 billion deal for Intel,

And structure it in a way that's north of 30 years, really equity-type capital, but where we feel like it's more debt-side protected.

You have to have some creativity to do that because it's not something you go to a bank or you go and you just get it off the shelf.

It's highly structured, highly creative, working with the company to actually execute on that.

And because we put all of our people, we put our best people on that stuff and we have full open architecture.

What does that mean?

So what is the directive to those people?

Is the directive do the best risk return?

Most firms are set up by fund.

They're set up by, OK, go buy, go find a company or a preferred or a debt instrument that's going to make 15 percent rates of return.

And we're set up, let's assess the company.

Let's assess the best solution for that company.

And we have pools of capital from 5% to 20%.

It could be a buyout.

It could be an investment grade solution, regular way bond deal.