Rob Goldstein

And if you look at the founders of BlackRock, they were a group of people who were pioneers with regard to structured products and the evolution of the mortgage market.

And what they realized is that banks at the time, the sell side, as you guys sort of laid the groundwork, banks at the time were using supercomputers, and they were very expensive computers.

to structure things.

And then the way they were selling those products was literally by faxing yield tables all over the world.

And I know when I say this to 20-something-year-old, 30-something-year-olds, including my own children who are in their early 20s, a lot of the people back then didn't even have computers.

Computers were like there was one for a group of people as opposed to everyone had one on their desk.

So the thesis behind forming BlackRock was that we could actually build models

that would help provide risk transparency for those type of instruments and help the end asset owner, we could build those models and through the Sun Workstation as the innovation, if you were reasonably clever, you didn't need to be a genius, but if you were reasonably clever, you could buy 10 Sun Workstations for $10,000 each

and link them together and effectively do what previously only supercomputers that cost millions of dollars could do.

So the founding thesis of BlackRock was really about how do we bring those technology capabilities

which were not really available on the buy side, how do we use them as the core of building an asset manager?

That was the founding thesis.

And I think one of the real success factors, and I think that when you look today, what I'm about to say seems like very odd, but I guess this is odd lot, so it's perfect.

But when I started at BlackRock in 1994, when we had roughly 80 people, $19 billion in assets under management, I was in the data and analytics team.

I was effectively a data analyst.

And like today, data, technology, analytics are where the cool kids are.

Back then, it was not where the cool kids are, trust me.

And the whole concept of recognizing very early on that the asset management business at its core is an information processing business today is so obvious.

But if you rewind back 10, 20, 30 years ago, that was a very unique, novel concept.

Well, it's interesting, though.