Tony James

I had a lot of people encouraging me to do that, both LPs and also other professionals.

But, you know, I kind of, what I like doing, if you think about the development of a successful company, there's kind of an S curve.

It starts off small and entrepreneurial.

It's kind of, if it's not a tech company, it's kind of flat for a while, bumps along.

Sometimes ours are like that too.

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

And then you get, if you're lucky enough, you could be very successful and it's kind of protect the bastion.

What I like doing is that steep part of the S-curve.

I like taking something small and growing it and making it better and making it very successful.

And then once it's very successful, it's not that much fun to protect the castle anymore when it grows back.

And so I felt, when I looked at Blackstone, they were in, every business Blackstone was in,

DLJ had been in and had reported to me.

And there was no one else in the world that had had that mix of businesses under their authority.

So I thought I'm uniquely knowledgeable about every business.

And I'd seen, and Blackstone had growing pains at the time, but DLJ had had those same growing pains a few years before.

So I knew how to work through them.

And I thought, gee, if I could get my hands on Blackstone, I could be dangerous.

The other thing is if you start, you know, when you're used to running a big firm, after the merger of DLJ and Credit Suisse, it was the largest by headcount, the investment bank in the world.

Didn't stay that way because of all the bloodletting and the, but,

Once you've been on, I wanted to pay it on a somewhat bigger canvas than starting my own firm with two guys in a corner.