If you think about the development of a successful company, there's kind of an S-curve. It starts off small and entrepreneurial. Then there's this kind of escalation where you create a lot of value and a lot of size. People know Blackstone today, a trillion dollars in AUM. It did not look anything like that when you join. Running an investment organization like Blackstone, I think you almost have to be a really good investor. If you're going to catch the signals early, they're never obvious. By the time they're obvious, it's priced in. You led the Series A into Costco. Charlie Munger was still on the board, and you guys served together for 30 years. What did you learn? Focus, focus, focus. Flawless execution of details. Build for the long term. Everybody that I spoke with literally attribute the success that they'd had in their careers

to you.

If a young person came to you today, what would you tell them about building a career?

What does it take to build a firm that lasts across decades?

In finance, most success is measured in funds, but a small number of people have built firms,

organizations that compound talent, capital,

and culture over time.

Tony James is one of them, from joining DLJ when it was a subscale firm to helping transform

Blackstone into a trillion-dollar asset manager.

His career traces the evolution of modern private markets.

The question is not just how to generate returns, but how to build systems that keep generating them. A16Z general partner

David Haber sits down with Tony James to talk through the decisions, inflection points, and principles

behind that kind of enduring success.

Tony, thank you so much for being here.

You're very welcome, David.

You joined DLJ as an investment baking associate in 1975, I think just after business school.

Maybe give us a reminder of what the shape of that business looked like at the time.

Well, if I'd known what I was doing, I probably wouldn't have joined DLJ. It was nothing, honestly. It was a sub-major firm or a sub-sub-major firm, as they used to say in those days. So there were at least 100 firms bigger than it was. We had an investment banking team of five. Wow. We hadn't done a financing or a merger in two years. So we hadn't done any business in two years. Oh, wow. But I like the people. I like the unstructured nature of it. I decided that I'd give it a shot. And, I mean, you ultimately stayed for 25 years, I believe, which is a pretty long tenure, generally, but certainly for Wall Street at the time. I guess what were some of the kind of key inflection points in that journey, maybe that led to your success or kind of the evolution of the business, which grew obviously massively during your tenure. Well, the good part of getting in on the ground floor is if it starts to work, you get pulled up with the growth of the organization and you get responsibilities earlier than you deserve them. And that kind of feeds on itself. You're learning,

accelerates, everything accelerates, your confidence accelerates maybe to an excess,

but it feels really good. And your expectations are low. So when you start winning business, it's always a positive price.

If you lose, well, that's par for the course.

So you got a very positive feedback loop.

...