Tony James

and coast-to-coast hardware stores.

And we sliced and diced and sold them all.

And we closed.

We closed and we put up a couple hundred million dollars equity.

And the day after closing, we pulled out $400 million, some huge number, because we sold the discount business to another discounter and ended up essentially owning a great grocery store in Southern California called Vons for free.

Yep.

I grew up going to Vons, Southern California.

And around that, we did massive amounts of high yield in one thing and another.

And

That put us on the map and led to us raising a fund, and it was a very high return fund, so that then we got a lot of follow-ons.

But we were pretty aggressive about starting new businesses.

We started a secondaries business, a fund-to-funds business, real estate, as I mentioned, all these things, and they all pretty much all worked.

The private markets in those days was not as competitive.

And prices were lower as a multiple of EBITDA and whatnot.

And companies were asset heavy.

So there was a lot to work with there.

And we built that business when we sold DLJ to Credit Suisse.

It was about a $29 billion AUM business.

Blackstone at the time was high teens.

So just to put that in context.