Tony James

Number two, people that want to really grow something and appreciate what Blackstone brings to the party.

You have to have balance between what the house takes from an entrepreneurial management team running a fund and what the house gives them.

When that gets out of balance, if you go buy a hedge fund and you're not doing anything for them, and three years into the deal, he's fully vested, you're going to have to buy the company all over again, essentially.

So we wanted people...

that were happy fitting in a bigger corporate organization if that helped them scale their business a lot.

That's a cultural thing.

Other people would just, I'd rather have a small business and not have to talk to anyone, right?

So the right culture, the right people, the right balance between what the house brought and what the firm, what the acquired company bought,

They had, we had to feel like we could be a leader in it.

I didn't wanna buy a company and be not a leader.

So we wanted to lead in a few big businesses.

We also had to feel we could be a top quartile investor consistently with this team.

I didn't wanna be an average investor in any business.

We wanted people that... And we wanted to buy small where we could scale them.

We'd never wanted to buy a fully built-out franchise where you're paying someone else for all the growth.

We wanted to deliver the growth, the value of the growth to our shareholders.

So those are...

You know, we had a seven or eight kind of criteria that we looked hard at and made sure fit.

And it's helped by the fact that you have a lot of discrete businesses and funds, right?

So everyone can feel like they're in charge of their empire.