E409: The Leadership Lessons That Built a $6.5 Billion Firm

25:22And so I thought, oh, well, that's clever. Now, we want everybody to make a lot of money and grow. But to your point, titles are a cheap way of recognizing people. But I do think you got to put meaning around it, because it should mean something. If we're going to do it, it should mean something. And so the way that we approach it is you have to, it's almost like, I remember learning how to ski in Michigan at a little hill, and you had to be able to do a certain turn, a stem turn and a certain hockey stop. So same thing with titles. We got to make sure people can do the STEM term. We got to make sure they can do the hockey stop.

25:56Maybe they can hit the moguls properly. So that's kind of, that's how we approach it. Started with the$60 million in assets. You're now$6.5 billion in assets under management and$13.5 billion in assets that you own and manage. What's been the biggest challenge in terms of scaling? The biggest challenge of scaling has been, I'll get back to leadership and management. Because the investments and the assets, like we're doing from an investment point of view, what I kind of preach to everybody is like we should be like McDonald's. We should be doing the same thing over and over again. We don't need to reinvent the wheel once we get that flywheel going.

26:41that's hard to do by the way to get people to do the same thing over and over again because people seek that novelty again they do seek it's exactly right how do you solve for this novelty that people need you're constantly course correcting i find it amazing it's a little bit i don't sail but i imagine it's like sailing like you set your due north and you find that over time you've like drifted it's even with investment presentations we created a template it's a simple template like just fill the boxes in and put the things in there and after about three or four months the template looks nothing like we've given to people they're kind of going all over the place extrapolating I can't read it quickly enough and so then you just have to sit back and ask people to do it again and redo it and it's actually contrary to what you and I talked about because we started these businesses with the idea that we're going to do something totally totally different and I actually think I almost like in being an entrepreneur like you're on a pirate ship and we're going to be the pirates and we're going to sail to the different islands and we're going to raid and pillage and we're going to do all these wonderful things.

27:38But I really want a bunch of bean counters on my pirate ship who are just doing the same thing over and over and over again. Over time, you want also other pirates with you because you can't really conquer new lands unless you have other pirates with you. It's this constant balance. And I think it's healthy because if you don't bring other people that are coming up with new ideas and asking you to do things differently, then you're going to miss it too. It's that innovator's dilemma, right? So we kind of have to balance it that way. You used the analogy of pirates and conquering new land. Just use a baseball analogy.

28:12Is that a position issue, which is you want your pitcher to be extremely good at starting new products and you want your catcher to be really good at using these templates? Is that a positioning issue? It becomes a positioning issue. I think initially, as you're growing your business, you have a lot of utility infielders. And then over time, as you kind of move up the ranks in the majors, you realize that like, okay, great. I need great starting pitcher and I need a great shortstop and I need a great center fielder. And so over time, you either have to train those utility infielders to become specialists or you have to bring in specialists.

28:52So I do think, and again, this gets to your question, going back to your question about what's the hardest thing. I think the hardest thing is, from my point of view, it's actually letting go and bringing in those specialists and not directing every single play to all those utility infielders, but being a manager who's sitting back and saying, okay, great. I've got my top starting pitcher that I frankly paid a lot of money for. He's really good. he knows or she knows what they're doing and letting them do their job. I think that's unbelievably hard to do. I find it very confusing because we all read a lot of books about what makes good managers and what makes good leaders.

29:34And I talk to a lot of great managers and great leaders to learn how they manage. And I find these two constant threads that are contrary to each other. The first is that these founders and leaders and managers know everything about their business. They can tell you the scheduling, the different small P &L items. They know all the minutiae. But at the same time, they're clever enough to hire really great people where they give those people the room to make their own choices. And I don't think that those two things don't always come together naturally, and they also seem like a bit contrary to me.

30:10So I'm very much in the details and know everything that's going on. But at the same time, I'm bringing on new talent and letting them kind of grow and run the business themselves. You mentioned that at some point you want to get that star picture. Does that kind of coalesce with the organization growth that at some point you're actually able to attract that star picture? Or is it just a matter of it's not yet time to get that person? From a hiring perspective, one of the things that I've learned is that you got to hire one to two to three years out. If you really want to grow and you really want to scale your business, you got to hire for the future, not for today.

30:38There's a couple things that come together. One, you have to think about tomorrow. Almost everything that we're doing, we don't think one year out. We think three, five, ten years out. So the same thing goes for hiring. Same thing goes for organization structure. Two, you have to find people that agree with your ethos. And so for example, what I tend to say to folks, and Blackstone's a great partner for us, and we work with a lot of these big banks, but if you wanna go work for a big institution, you're probably not gonna wanna come work for us, right? So we're looking for those people that are really looking for a smaller, flatter, more organization that will think about things a little differently, will constantly feel pressure because we know the bigger folks are looking at us and could come at us.

31:23And so you've got to be a step ahead all the time. So I think it requires a certain type of person. I think you've got to hire in advance. And then I think this is where the leadership comes in, which we talked about before, which is that I think you have to really paint them a vision that they believe in. Support for today's episode comes from Square. It's all in one way for business owners to take payments, book appointments, man's staff, and keep everything running in one place. whether you're selling lattes cutting hair running boutique or managing a service business square helps you run your business without running yourself into the ground it's actually thinking about this the other day when i stopped by a local cafe here they use square and everything just works check out as fast receipts are instant and sometimes i get loyalty rewards automatically there's something about businesses that use square they just feel more put together the experience is smoother for them and it's smoother for me as a customer square makes it easy to sell wherever your customers are in store online on your phone or even at pop-ups and everything stays synced in real time you could track sales manage inventory book appointments and see reports instantly whether you're in your shop or on the go and when you make a sale you don't have to wait days to get paid square gives you fast access to your earnings through square checking they also have built-in tools like loyalty and marketing so your best customers keep coming back and right now you could get up to two hundred dollars off square hardware when you sign up at square.com slash go slash how I invest.

32:40That's sqare.com slash go slash how I invest with Square you get all the tools to run your business with none of the contracts or complexity. Run your business smarter with Square get started today. Support for today's episode comes from Square. It's all in one way for business owners to take payments, book appointments, man staff and keep everything running in one place. Whether you're selling lattes, cutting hair, running boutique or managing a service business Square helps you run your business without running yourself into the ground. I was actually thinking about this the other day when I stopped by a local cafe here.

33:11They use Square and everything just works. Check out as fast, receipts are instant, and sometimes I get loyalty rewards automatically. There's something about businesses that use Square. They just feel more put together. The experience is smoother for them and it's smoother for me as a customer. Square makes it easy to sell wherever your customers are, in-store, online, on your phone, or even at pop-ups, and everything stays synced in real time. You can track sales, manage inventory, book appointments, and see reports instantly, whether you're in your shop or on the go. And when you make a sale, you don't have to wait days to get paid.

33:42Square gives you fast access to your earnings through Square checking. They also have built-in tools like loyalty and marketing so your best customers keep coming back. And right now, you can get up to$200 off Square hardware when you sign up at square.com slash go slash how I invest. That's S-Q-U-A-R-E.com slash go slash how I invest. With Square, you get all the tools to run your business with none of the contracts or complexity. Run your business smarter with Square. Get started today. Support for today's episode comes from Square. It's all in one way for business owners to take payments, book appointments, man's staff, and keep everything running in one place.

34:16Whether you're selling lattes, cutting hair, running a boutique, or managing a service business, Square helps you run your business without running yourself into the ground. I was actually thinking about this the other day when I stopped by a local cafe here. They use Square and everything just works. Check out as fast, receipts are instant, and sometimes I get loyalty rewards automatically. There's something about businesses that use Square. They just feel more put together. The experience is smoother for them, and it's smoother for me as a customer. Square makes it easy to sell wherever your customers are, in-store, online, on your phone, or even at pop-ups, and everything stays synced in real time.

34:48You can track sales, manage inventory, book appointments, and see reports instantly, whether you're in your shop or on the go. And when you make a sale, you don't have to wait days to get paid. Square gives you fast access to your earnings through Square checking. They also have built-in tools like loyalty and marketing. So your best customers keep coming back. And right now you can get up to$200 off Square hardware when you sign up at square.com slash go slash how I invest. That's S-Q-U-A-R-E dot com slash go slash how I invest. With Square, you get all the tools to run your business with none of the contracts or complexity.

35:20Run your business smarter with Square. Get started today. Right. Because I have to believe in it and they have to believe in it. I think people can tell when you're being genuine and they can tell when you're excited about it. So those three things come to play. And I think everybody that's joined us has been somebody who didn't want to go work for a large organization, particularly our leadership, didn't want to go work for a large organization, felt a little bit that they had something to prove, and then also liked the idea of being a little bit on the pirate ship. And I think that's really important.

35:51You mentioned something that didn't surprise me, but the scale of it did surprise me, hiring one to two to three years ahead. Maybe you could double click on why you do that. First of all, hiring is unbelievably hard. I did distress buyouts for about 10 years. And I think the number one thing that I learned is culture is everything. We came up with pithy sayings like a fish stinks from its head. But culture is critical, and I saw more good businesses blown up because of bad leadership and bad culture. The cultural element was so important. So what we really looked for are we hire and we think far ahead.

36:31We really look for people that are focused on teamwork, that are comfortable initially with a lack of a clear path. because when you're creating a business and you're investing, like we own, we started with rail and now we own chassis and trailers and containers and tank containers and we moved into aviation and engines and we're doing some work in kind of port and infrastructure. All those things you have to kind of create yourself. So you have to have people that are really comfortable with working as a team, being collaborative, but also being a little bit uncomfortable about where the direction is going to go because it takes us a couple of years to actually figure out what we're doing and where we want to go.

37:13So all of that boils down to like, I spend a lot of time looking around. Like, I think one of my biggest roles is to find people, right? As a leader now, I think about growth. So it's people, opportunities, and frankly, in raising capital. The people part's the hardest. You meet a ton of people. It takes six to 12 months to find the right people. It takes another 12 months for those right people to actually figure out where the bathroom is half the time, like where to go. So I'm already two years behind if I start now, right? So I'm starting now thinking three, four years from now that I'll have that person that's going to be working and doing the job by the time we need it.

37:52It's the same thing for investing, by the way. Like if you're waiting for when the investment makes total sense, you're going to have missed it. You got to take a little bit of a leap about where you want to go. I wonder if a lot of that is when you bring in new people, they don't just fit into specific box. They bring a new way of thinking to the organization and you need that new paradigm in order to grow. So the new person will come in with a different paradigm and say, holy, like, why aren't you guys doing this thing? And it pulls you in that direction versus just plugging an existing hole.

38:25I think that's right. But also on the flip side, we work with a lot of folks from that come from big industry. We've found like the people that our best leaders are not the investors, not people that come from the banks, it's people that come from industry. Because they understand the assets, they understand the industry, and they're going to approach it a little differently. But they've also come from really big organizations sometimes. And we want to make sure that they're not bringing in some of those big institutional habits, which I think can be dangerous. What's an example? I'll tell you a funny one was really like, maybe this is a little simple, but we hired somebody and the first thing they said is, where's my EA?

39:04Where's my executive assistant? And I said, we have this saying, like, you got to screw in your own light bulb. And I said, we don't have executive assistants here. I think it was emblematic of like, we're in the weeds. We're doing our own work. You got to do your own thinking. And it also is a cultural element of you, like, we want to be lean and hungry. That was just one area where we're not just managing, we're doing and we're managing. And I think that's a really important cultural element. So to me, that's always a red flag when people say, well, where's my executive assistant? Eventually, we do need them because it ends up wasting time.

39:42But we tend to eschew that. We really want people to. Talking about doing and managing, there's also this paradigm of great individual performance versus being a great teammate. How do you find people that have both? It's a balance of ego. It's the hardest hire. The best folks that we have hired are people that have succeeded and then failed and then succeeded again. And you can see it within their career path. And I don't mean failed, but they just were in experiences that were hard or terrifying or they made bad choice here and there. That is the experience that we found works well because they've got the confidence to move forward.

40:26They have been leaders before, but the humility again to know that they can't do it all themselves. I do think that comp structure, we're all incentive driven at the end of the day. I think comp structure is incredibly important. So we do spend a lot of time thinking about compensation. So we've got a bunch of different verticals that are, and we've got a bunch of different teams that are investing in those different verticals. but all compensation goes into one pool. And I think that folks are compensated in part by their own performance and in part by the pool because we want people to be working with each other.

41:02So I'd say you've got to have the humility from past experience. You've got to have compensation aligned. And then I do think we spend a ton of time just breaking down walls. Like walls are constantly built up internally. People get focused, they get siloed. They want to do their own thing. and there's no great answer to this. We've hired somebody whose sole job was to make people talk to each other and make people go to lunch with each other and make people like do things with each other. We found that didn't work all that well. We started creating meetings with different groups just so they could share and talk with each other.

41:39I think that works to a degree, but too many meetings are too many meetings. So now we do create organizations where people periodically have to come together and we create random groups that meet over the course of the year just to talk and share what they're doing, to just break down walls all the time. I think that's really important for teamwork. I've done now hundreds and hundreds and over a thousand of these conversations and how consistent human beings are across organizations. And I still can't figure out why there's such a natural inclination to silo yourself within organizations. How do you explain that?

42:15I can only speak for my organization as I watch it. I think one, within our organization, people work really hard. And I think people get really focused on what they're doing. And so I do think the siloing comes up because they want to do a good job. They are working to control what they can control. and so you end up we all want people to be accountable people to be responsible and people to take ownership right those are great employees and great leadership traits so if you're going to do that you tend to want to just own it and do it yourself or bring in your team and run it and do it you don't want to ask for help so you end up building up these walls the compensation is a big one a lot of private equity funds you get compensated based on what you kill we don't do that.

43:04Only the most senior leaders of each group have a small part of their compensation based on what they kill, but it is really about what the whole pool is. So I think that the personalities, how they're driving and what they're doing, I do think it's, again, it starts from the top. I have a lot of confidence in my ability to direct traffic and drive where we're going, but I do spend a tremendous amount of time listening. To be a good leader, you have to be a really good listener. When I was younger and I used to see an email and I disagree with it and I'd fire back an email really fast and say, this is wrong and this is why you should do it.

43:38And now I've learned like, it's okay to take a beat and probably not send it back so aggressively. And I think that is really important because it sets the tone for everybody else where they can start to learn to be listeners and like you're valued even if you're not speaking all the time. So I think it's their natural inclination is to own it. You kind of have to set compensation so that they're taught to kind of support other people. And then I think also from a leadership point of view, you have to be a good listener and bring people in as much as you can all the time. It's that truth, transparency culture that we try and preach.

44:13And the downsides of your model of a lot of shared economics are pretty obvious. You don't have these kind of savages that go out and kill and bring in these big pieces of business. You're not at least compensating exclusively for that. What are the upsides of your model? I'll start with the downside, actually. The downside is that you do get a couple people that are like driving everything, right? You end up getting that. And you also get a couple, you do get a bunch of people that just think that I'm here and therefore I should just get it, right? I'm always going to get paid. So I do think you have to be really vigilant about making sure that people understand their goals and their roles and like what defines success.

44:59Because otherwise you do get a free rider problem. And I do think that we're really focused on making sure that we have great people working hard. And the flip side, we feel like we owe people the responsibility to care about their career and care about their compensation and care about their family. So you've got to work those two together. The upside is that I'm constantly told by folks that come into our office how great our culture is. We have one advisor. He worked at an enormous asset management firm. And he comes in and he gives me some advice about how to grow firms. And he sits in the office and he meets people and he talks to people.

45:37And he just kind of hears what's going on. And after the first week, he said to me, this is a remarkably functional organization in ways that I've not seen from other investment firms. And it's not to say that many investment firms are very functional, but he was surprised and he said, people seem to really like each other. And I think that's really important. I also do think that people are pretty nice. And I think that Wall Street and particularly in investing, you can get really sharp elbowed. So I think the upside too is that people treat each other with a lot of respect. Again, I do think that comes from the top.

46:11I do think it's important to kind of acknowledge people and respect them and treat them well. And again, they have a lot of options about where they can work and how they can work. And I try not to lose sight of the fact that I've got a great responsibility for them to work with us. And it's a privilege that they've chosen to work with us. So I think you got to kind of think about that as well. So the upside is really you get real camaraderie. I think people really try and care about each other. you have to find the right people. We've spun people out because they didn't fit the mold. They were too sharp elbowed.

46:46And again, the downside is you got to just make sure that you're constantly getting folks that are pushing to be the best, be the best, be the best. So it's hard to find those right people, but when you find them, you got to hold onto them. I just had the co-head of private equity at Goldman Sachs, and perhaps it's not a novel example, but what they've built this culture over so many decades of partnership. And I think their secret sauce really getting into the organization is that the bar to entry is just so high. You have to be so elite to come in that once you're in, now you could be both compensated individually, but there's a collective aspect to it that works when you have the brand, when you have the partnership model, but you have to keep that entry so extremely high to make that sustainable.

47:28I think that's right. They've got a lot of friends that are partners or work there too. And I think Goldman is an amazing example of what you just said. There's a real prestige about being there and rising in the ranks. And you become, you feel, my sense, and I've never worked there, is that you feel like you're part of something special. And that if you feel like you have access to something unique, and you'll even take less money for that, right? And I think that, but you also think that you're working on the cutting edge. And that's a real moat around why people want to work there. We try and do the same thing.

48:03We're obviously not Goldman Sachs, but I do think that people really have felt engaged that they've been working on something different. We're constantly told by our LPs or people that meet us that I've never seen anything like you before. And that's hard because people like to invest in what they know, right? There's boxes and I don't mean that in a bad way, but it's also great because we do feel special and we're trying to explain to people and we're proselytizing and explaining why we're doing what we're doing. I think we've grown in a way that it does create that moat. It's really hard to replicate what we're doing.

48:37We've been doing this for 15 years. We're trying to take what Goldman does in a different way and say, this is unique. This is special. We're doing things the way other people aren't doing. I try and paint a really big vision about where we're going. I believe in it deeply. And also, you know, I think you can do quite well, like if we're successful. Part of what I believe Goldman Sachs' secret sauce is, is not only the high barrier to entry, it's also their self-policing culture. Yeah. Someone's a low performer, people will know very quickly. Have you seen these self-policing behaviors in your organization?

49:11We're obviously smaller. We have about a little under 100 people. I think Goldman is 10th. A little bit over. Yeah, a little bit over 100 people. Again, this is the funny thing about the culture. I think that people always know when somebody's underperforming. And I think people always know when someone is like not carrying the weight or is maybe a little bit cancerous to the culture. And we've had our own share of folks like that. I found that I was too slow to make a change. And I found within our culture, like we preach this teamwork culture. We preach this collaborative culture. We preach this supportive culture.

49:49Like I don't think we're not a sink or swim culture. Like people are there to help you. don't make the same mistake twice, but we're going to help you. And what I have found is that people don't raise their hand fast enough when they see problems. But when I do make a change, they come to me and say it was about time. And Goldman does a really good job of getting folks in that self-policing way. I think that's something we're trying to work on because, and I'm trying to get people to kind of vocalize that. How do you speed around that process? Also, it's on me too. I think this is the harder part of being a leader is that I was invited by one of my LPs actually to join a CEO organization.

50:31And I joke, they're all real people. I'm running a financial firm. They're running large organizations and industry. And one of the things that I've learned from them is you got to make choices. You got to make these decisions quickly. And the longer you wait, everybody knows it. So I think it's also on my end to do things more quickly. And then I think then people will raise their hands more quickly. I have a master's in business administration, MBA, but I also have a master's in psychology. And one of the things I think is highly underrated in human beings is not only how consistent they are, but how they look at these cues and these hierarchies.

51:08We've talked about a couple of those kind of very human traits. Ego talked about titles. This is ingrained. I'm sure. If apes evolved further, they would start to request titles as well. This is like in our DNA. But also this highly underrated aspect where human beings want to be led, and they're always looking at the tribal leader to see what he or she is doing. So this memetic copying of culture doesn't sound sophisticated. It sounds like human beings are closer to apes than some sophisticated people. but this is such an underrated aspect of great leadership. This is one of my favorite topics.

51:51I think that leadership and investing is more psychology than anything else. And again, it gets back to listening. I don't know that I have a lot of great traits, but I think I'm a pretty good listener. You have to spend a lot of time just sitting there and listening. And again, this gets back to leadership, which is also just sitting there and eating a garbage sandwich every day because you have to sit there and listen to everybody's issues and everybody's problems. And what you're listening for is a little bit of like what's driving them. Like what do they care about? Why are they behaving the way they're behaving?

52:31It's the same thing for investing. We think that all investment decisions are completely rational, but they're not. Like behind all those decisions are a CEO or a seller, and they've got their own reasons for behaving the way that they're behaving. Like why are they selling? Why do they care about these things? What's motivating them? And so being able to listen and frankly understand people, to me, is the most important part about both leadership and about investing. I think they go hand in hand. It's one of the things I've really tried to teach. Again, it sounds too egotistical, but to demonstrate to folks within my organization about it's getting back to that question of why.

53:18Like, why did they say that? Why are they agreeing to that? Why do they want to sell? Because once you understand all that, it becomes a lot easier. And I do think there's an element where once you understand all that, too, you can point people in the direction. Like you understand what their motivation is and why they're behaving the way they're doing. And then you can think about that and say, okay, great. Like now I can use those and signal where we're going, both from a leadership perspective and from an investment perspective. So I spent a lot of time actually reading psychology papers about how people are behaving.

53:52I do think my wife is an executive coach. She was a lawyer as well. And then she morphed into an executive coach. And I've kind of listened and watched her and listened to kind of how she's coaching other people. And I think she spends similarly a lot of time listening and asking questions. I joke with her that, what's that movie, Inception? She's doing a little bit of like slowly leading people where they want to go. In some respects, I suppose I'm doing the same thing by listening. So I think that part is, it's super fun and fascinating. And to your point, we're not that complicated. There's a couple, like many things are, we joke around, it's a little bit of kabuki theater, like particularly when you're negotiating a transaction.

54:35You all know where it's going to go after the second or third turn of the card. but you still have to go through the motions and you still have to act out your role. You still have to do your piece because that's how you're going to get there. It's, and again, it's a little bit like poker. You have your cards, you see what other people are having, you're watching them and you kind of know where the betting is going to go, but you still got to turn the cards over. I learned this the hard way. Whenever I jump on Zooms or meetings, I always start with rapport and how's your weekend? How's the weather?

55:12And one of these calls, I decided, well, I'm just going to skip that. I don't want to be performative. I don't care how their weather or how their weekend was. I'm not going to ask it. Didn't talk about it on the call. Lawyers ended up getting into each other. There was almost a lawsuit. I was immediately slapped. I'm like, okay, lesson learned. I will never not do the whole rapport, Kabuki theater, to use your term. It's just such a critical thing. You have to do these machinations as annoying as they are. On your point on listening and soft skills, my theory on this, I call it the birth canal of finance, which is the things that make you successful the first five years in finance are not what makes leaders in finance successful.

55:58A hundred percent. And if you look at the top founders like yourself, but even the people managing Blackstone or managing Goldman Sachs, they all have extremely high EQ. So why is it that so few people in the industry have high EQ? And the answer I think is because there's a adverse selection essentially at EQ the first five years. What got you here won't get you there. I'm also unemployable. The only job I've ever had three months at Jeffries. Great organization. But I knew very quickly it wasn't for me. And I quit. People thought I was crazy as well. How could you quit such a prestigious bank?

56:36I knew it wasn't for me. And I knew that I didn't have what it takes to make it those five years to be successful there. But maybe if I had stuck with it, I would be leading one of these organizations because I do have that EQ. I just don't have that IQ. So I have this theory that EQ is actually extremely useful. It's just nobody really makes it through that birth canal. I just had a conversation with one of our, I would call it mid-level employees, who's super talented. And I explained to this person that in order to grow into the next phase, they have to start communicating. And they have to start listening.

57:13And they have to start sharing information. And I explained to them that it's really the first five years, this person working for five years, the first five years, their job was to do a great job, right? Their job was to own it, do a great job, and like prove that they were good at their job. And that is a very individualized sport. But then to elevate to the next level, you need to bring people in. You have to manage people. It becomes less of an individualized sport. And again, it becomes a team sport. And so that requires an entirely different skill set of communication and team orientation, subsuming the ego again.

57:50And that's really hard. And you also, Wall Street attracts people that are really good at math and really good at numbers and really good at working really, really hard. And a lot of times they really never were required to, whether they can or can't, I have no idea, were required to develop those skills where they needed to listen, they needed to lead, they needed to get people to follow them. So it's remarkable. A lot of these large organizations, I find it a really amazing, for lack of a better word, thing that they do, where they're able to bring in talent and are able to figure out who the right people are, where they can start developing them into leaders.

58:34And it's why it's a pyramid, because I really think most can't do it. What's an example of an organization that has this talent development down? Well, again, getting to Goldman Sachs, just watching what they do. I think they, and also we have a Blackstone's a minority owner of IT. I would say I've sat in meetings where I've watched the senior leadership of both those organizations talk to more junior but very talented folks and address issues about people, not about content. And I've watched them talk about, well, you should think about how you're managing or take time off. Like they were actually telling them to slow down and be a little bit more human.

59:16And so I think there's a real conscious thought around them about that and how you manage people. It's funny. Again, I've referenced my wife a couple times on this, but when I was first starting the firm, it was a Saturday night and we were staying home. We had really young kids. And so my default was just to do email and to do work. And she, I think it was like eight o 'clock on a Saturday night, and I was sending emails. And she looked at me and said, what are you doing? And I said, well, I'm doing this. I'm sending emails. And she said, listen, there's only two people that send emails at eight o 'clock on a Saturday night.

59:49She said, it's real jerks. She used a much more aggressive word. She said, it's really a jerky person or somebody who has no life. And I refused to be married to either one of those. And so actually, like, it was kind of a funny little thing, but it actually made me realize, like, okay, Like just because I'm thinking it, I got to think about other people and like how they're receiving it and what they're doing. And I've watched Goldman and Blackstone and others kind of that's really how they preach and think about how are you going to get the most out of folks, giving them a little space to grow and to learn as they're elevating.

1:00:21What's the number one thing you've learned about developing people? The number one thing I've learned is that people don't change.

1:00:29and I think that we spend a lot of time being critical and trying to get them to change when really again this gets back to listening we have to think about what are they saying and how are they saying it and then how can we create the structure and the game and the organization where they can be successful. And so this gets a little bit to you can't have one size fits all. And it also means really understanding and recognizing people's, both their strengths and their weaknesses. What's that saying from Einstein? Like the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different outcome.

1:01:12If you're asking somebody who just can't jump higher to jump higher, you're never going to get it. And the subtlety there is people don't change, but they improve. But they don't left-handed, they'll never become right-handed. But if they're right-handed, they could become better at being right-handed. It's also like how they think about risk, how they approach. A good example is like I approach investors in a particular way. Again, I spend a lot of time listening to investors because I think it's really important. You want to hear what they're focused on. See if you can provide what they're focusing on.

1:01:42If you can't, you should let them know. I've also watched folks that work in my organization that don't listen. They just go and talk and talk and talk. They're actually effective too in a different way. And I spent a bunch of time kind of explaining to them like, well, you should listen to what they're saying. Like they're not here to hear you. They're here to solve their problem. And I said that like over and over and over again and they just didn't make a difference. They didn't listen to me. They didn't listen to me. They didn't listen to me. And so at some point I just said, all right, well, that's just who they are.

1:02:15And as long as they're successful and crafting their own way to do it, then that's okay. And I think also just it almost gets back to what we talked about too, like trying to get people to follow the rules. And we create templates for investment memos and we create templates for like how we're communicating. And there's one person who's really talented and I've been giving them the same thing over and over again. And they just, for the life of them, they cannot fill it out properly. They never ask the right question. They never answer the questions that I'm always asking. But they do come up with other different things, different ideas.

1:02:47And I've tried to get them to form over and over again. I've tried to get them to summarize it, dumb it down, be a little simpler. And they simply can't do it. But they're good at what they do. And so at some point I said, okay, we have to accept you for who you are. If you could go back to when you had just graduated Worden's MBA program, and you can give yourself one timeless piece of advice, what would that be? I'd go back even further than that, actually. Again, this is a cliche, but I do think that you have to do what's interesting to you. I think that life is long. It is uncertain. And I think if you follow a path that people tell you to follow that you don't enjoy, you may make money if that's your goal.

1:03:36but you're not going to be as successful as you can be, both personally and professionally. And I do think that's the most important thing I can give anybody advice on, which is you have to scratch your own itch, right? You can't scratch somebody else's itch. And there's two anecdotes. I remember I was in law school, and there was my contracts professor. He was a young guy, and I remember sitting with him, and he was an engineer by training, and he worked for Exxon, and then he went out to Alaska, and he was working in one of the, you know, like an offshore drilling platform. And then he wrote a book, like totally separate than that.

1:04:16And then he went to law school and now he was my law contracts professor. And I said to him, like, I don't even understand your career path. And he said, you know, I just did what was interesting to me. And I was lucky enough. Listen, you have to have a lot of luck and you have to have intelligence. It doesn't work for everybody. but he said, I just did what was interesting to me and I ended up here and I like this and I'll see where it goes. I remember again, as a lawyer, it was my first transaction. This is well before like there used to be something called the printer. You would go to the printer's office and you were preparing a public filing and you'd spend 48 hours or 30, 72 hours up all night working to get these S1s or shape.

1:05:01And everybody sat around all night and people thought it was fun. And I remember I was a first-year attorney and I was talking to a senior partner from one of the major law firms. I think we were up for 48 hours and he looked at me and said, don't you just love this? And I thought, oh my God, I hate this more than anything else in the world. And then I realized I'm never going to beat this guy because he loves it. And all I want to do is go home. And so that made me realize you got to just scratch your own itch and you got to do what you find the most interesting. And I think we overvalue personal risk.

1:05:32And so if you follow what you like, don't overvalue risk too much. I think you'll be successful. Jason, this has been an absolute masterclass. Thanks so much for jumping on.