Tony James

If you think about the development of a successful company, there's kind of an S-curve.

It starts off small and entrepreneurial.

Then there's this kind of escalation where you create a lot of value and a lot of size.

People know Blackstone today, a trillion dollars in AUM.

It did not look anything like that when you joined.

Running an investment organization like Blackstone, I think you almost have to be a really good investor.

If you're going to catch the signals early, they're never obvious.

By the time they're obvious, it's priced in.

Well, if I'd known what I was doing, I probably wouldn't have joined DLJ.

It was nothing, honestly.

It was a sub-major firm or a sub-sub-major firm, as they used to say in those days.

So there were at least 100 firms bigger than it was.

We had an investment banking team of five.

We hadn't done a financing or a merger in two years.

So we hadn't done any business in two years.

But I liked the people.

I liked the unstructured nature of it.

Well, the good part of getting in on the ground floor is...

If it starts to work, you get pulled up with the growth of the organization and you get responsibilities earlier than you deserve them.

And that kind of feeds on itself.