Welcome back to another episode of Goldman Sachs Exchanges, great investors.

I'm Allison Mass, Chairman of Investment Banking in Goldman Sachs's global Banking and Markets Business, and your host for today's episode.

Today I'm delighted to be speaking with Kathleen McCarthy, Global Co-head of Real Estate at Blackstone,

the world's largest owner of commercial real estate.

Before joining Blackstone, Kathleen began her career here at Goldman Sachs, starting in the

M&A group before moving to the firm's real estate principal investment business.

Kathleen joined Blackstone in 2010 and rose swiftly through the ranks to become the global

co-head of real estate in 2018.

Under her leadership, Blackstone's real estate assets under management have grown

more than 300% to over at 330 billion dollars and today accounts for more than 30% of the firm's

record $1 trillion of assets under management.

We'll be talking with Kathleen about her journey to become one of the leading investors in the

real estate industry, the forces shaping key sectors of the market, and her advice to the next generation of leaders.

So Kathleen, welcome back to Goldman Sachs and to the program.

Thanks Allison, nice to be here.

So let's start with your early career. You graduated from Yale where you

majored in ethics, politics, and economics. With that liberal arts background,

why did you decide to come into finance?

Liberal arts is a great place to learn how to process a lot of information and think and write,

which probably turned out to be the most important skills in any career.

But coming out of school, I really wanted to develop a set of

professional skills that could serve me no matter what I do. At the time I

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