Tony James

And we did that for not just Merrill Lynch and UBS and the BYUs, but thousands of RIAs.

And that, I think, is the now...

the dominant strategic asset that Blackstone has that no one else can really replicate because no one else has the breadth of product so that you're always in the market.

You always have something that a customer wants or a broker wants to sell it.

The number of products that were always open that you could put money in any time.

No one else has the revenue scale to justify the overhead.

and it becomes reinforcing of the brand and the value.

So that, I felt like, you know,

In the investment business, you can be really good or you can have a cold hand.

And I didn't want to... I mean, you can live by the sword or die by the sword.

I didn't want to die by the sword.

You didn't want to die, period.

So I was okay to live by it while we had the hot hand in investing.

But I wanted a hedge so that we would still have an unassailable business when we didn't have the best returns.

We could spend an hour on the subtleties and complexities of this, but just to give you some windows on it.

Blackstone wasn't a firm.

It was 173 independent partnerships.

all with different percentage ownerships.

Every fund had a different percentage ownership than every other fund.

All that somehow had to be rolled together into one entity, and everyone had to have the right number of shares in that entity.