Tony James

One of the tricks of running a firm is making people in a fund care more than just about their fund, right?

So that's a sensitive balance.

And

You want them to care enough, but not too much.

And then within funds or within sub-businesses, maybe private, how do you get the guys in India to care enough about the guy that deals in New York?

And for me, I have my way of thinking about that and how to balance the rewards on both sides, really from trial and error and what's worked over the years.

There's no theoretical model that makes it right.

But the first thing is to make – you do want even people in the fund to care a little bit about the firm for lots of reasons.

Yep.

Okay.

the issue as Blackstone became successful, the issue was we weren't in, we weren't a monoline boutique investor anymore, which is what, which is what all the LPs wanted.

No, no, no.

I want, I want,

You know, I want Andreessen Horace to do one thing, and there's a genius who sits in the corner, and he divines the right answer.

We were becoming, right or wrong, not only a supermarket, but a big supermarket with lots of different... And that was not where LP's heads were.

Today's different, but back then.

So my challenge as a firm manager was to figure out, how do we take our disadvantages and make them advantages?

Mm-hmm.

because we don't want to stop growing and we don't want to descend into mediocrity.

I mean, as we've talked about before, growth in and of itself creates opportunities for new talent.