Hi everyone and welcome to our podcast in Good Company. I'm Nikola Tangan, the CEO of the Norwegian Southern Wealth Fund.

In this podcast, I talked to the leaders of some of the largest companies we are invested in so that you can learn what we own and meet these impressive leaders.

Today, I'm speaking to the legendary Stephen Schwartzman, the founder and CEO of Blackstone, the world-largest alternative asset manager.

Blackstone has grown into a massive financial company.

We own over half a percent of Blackstone translating into 5 billion crooner or 500 million US dollars.

Stephen Schwartzman is one of the most successful and influential people in global finance.

You're for sure don't want to miss this one.

It's a big honor to be here with you. Thank you so much for telling the time.

Well, it's my pleasure. You have written this book which I have in front of me, and it's called What It Takes.

So my first question is basically going to be, what does it take?

Well, it takes, depending upon what you're thinking of achieving, it takes enormous focus.

It takes emotional stability because you always have a lot of setbacks.

It takes something that is a pretty unique plan.

If you really want to have large success, it takes a big vision.

I've always found that just doing what other people do and trying harder is not nearly as good as doing something different than what everybody's doing.

When you left Lehman Brothers in 85 to start Blackstone, what was your vision and your dream?

Well, the dream emotionally was to feel the same way about what you were doing when I was

at Lehman, and that was to create an environment with enormous flow

so you could be continually learning and meeting new people,

because I really liked that feeling.

What we tried to do was create a new type of financial institution.

Hard to believe, but in 1985 there weren't what are now called M&A boutiques.

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