Justin Ishbia

And basically I heard over and over again was,

No one is investing as part of the market because when you're good at private equity, what do you do?

Raise a bigger fund.

When you're not good, you wash out.

So who stays small for the long term?

The answer is really nobody.

And so we decided to do a franchise, a microcap franchise that would stay small for the long term, but have a bunch of different products.

And so those early formative days, that is when we had a pre-fund.

Like pre-funds,

are something I think that people zoom past these days.

I want to go raise the first fund one, $200 million.

It is really hard raising $200 million.

It's really hard raising $100 million.

And so the reason why we did it that way, I wish I could say I was smart enough this was a plan, but my mentor said to me years ago, it was like 2007 or 2008, and said, Justin, when it's a good time to fundraise, it's a bad time to invest and vice versa.

And he said, when you start, make sure you start when it's a bad time to fundraise.

So I knew it until 2009.

I didn't know 2009 March was the bottom.

I didn't know that was exactly, but I knew it was bad.

I didn't know how much worse it was going to get.

But I said to myself, well, you got to do it when it's bad out there.