YouSaid · the spoken record

Alan Waxman

lines on the record: 85
first: 2025-07-15
most recent: 2025-07-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think I'm going to have to say that Stephen Plus being 15 years older than me and taking time to answer all my questions in a lot of firms, I think they would have gone around me and said, what are you doing? And he took the opposite approach. That's the kindest thing anyone's ever done for me and probably the most impactful. I wouldn't be where I am today without him.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You got to be able to adapt because think about software engineers. Every mom and dad in Palo Alto three years ago was telling their kids they got to do software engineers and now tell them not to do software. Things can change and you got to be adapted. And we're headed into the interesting times here.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The ultimate test we always talk about that when we're interviewing people, first of all, are they over themselves yet, which again in our industry, there's a lot of people not over themselves yet. Maybe they'll listen to this and get over themselves. That's a whole other topic. But what do you introduce into a family member? That to me is more important than anything is maintaining that and wherever that journey takes us, that's where it will take us. But again, for our business, we're an investing business, those things are what make up us trying to drive what we believe fundamentally religiously because we've been doing it for 25 plus years, great outcomes for our LPs. And if we can do that and ultimately serve your customer, which in our case is our LPs, our people, we do all those things. That's where it will take us. To be clear, we have five-year strategic plans and very specific objectives, but that's what I think about on the horizon. I've shared that broadly with our entire firm because it's how I think about it.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Want to stay an investor first firm. Other people in the industry want to be deployment factories? There's nothing wrong with that. All good. But that's not what we want Sixth Street to be. That's number one. Number two is culture is everything. To me, there's two tests I'm going to always run. One test is that we have an offsite every year in Austin, Texas where the whole firm comes and I go walk around, I meet a bunch of people and I'm like, did I meet any a-holes? Did I meet people that don't ask questions or just talk about themselves? And so far, we're undefeated. 16 and 0. But the other test I'm going to run is when I'm an old man and 80 years old and I come back in the firm and I sit in a random investment committee or a random meeting. Is that still true? And to me, that's the ultimate test. And would I introduce the people then to my family, to my grandkids and my kids?”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For why I was so focused on those yellow notepads and just that future self and that moment. Again, just to be clear, because my friends probably listen, I did have fun, but I was also thinking ahead about that future self.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it never ends. There's like you could spend all day on half a deal. It never ends. So I need to be able to be the most efficient at return on time. The way I want to be efficient at return on time, know we like have the biggest toolkit possible. And I got to build that toolkit as much as possible. That's why I started doing my own personal business plans when I was just starting the business. But it was always with the mindset of my future self so that when I got to that point, I could be a good husband, be a good dad, and be present like my parents were. I always talk about think about your future self. You got to have fun, but the more time you put in now when you don't have a spouse and kids, you're going to basically set yourself up or it can spend more time. I think some people mortgage the future by having too much fun where you could have a little bit less fun and spend more time building your toolkit so you could spend more time with your family when it happened. And that was kind of always a motive.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was very fortunate that my parents, we didn't grow up with a lot, but they always spent a lot of time with me. They were always present at all my sports games. They were just always there. So when I started working at Goldman, I had that in my mind. Whenever I had kids, I didn't know when. I wanted to be able to be very present with them. My idea was, and it goes back to those yellow piece of paper, is that if I build the biggest toolkit possible, if I invest all the time now prior to when I have kids and a family and a wife that I will be able to spend maximum time with them, I had a bunch of motivations. I was always thinking about my future self, not from a business perspective or career perspective, but that I could spend more time with my kids. These kids don't exist, by the way. So this is just like a future self. And my idea was it's all about return.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We don't tar it. Will that pop up every once in a while where two people get intense in the district? That happens as long as it's with respect and dignity. And again, people get intense, but that's not what we're doing because, again, our business model is predicated on people working together, not having features and silos. So they all work together, share information, share relationships. That is literally the essence of our business model. That's why we're so focused on it.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You got so many listeners, but you could argue maybe we should have lost some. Maybe there's a criticism there, but there's different forms of compensation. I think sometimes in our industry, everyone thinks about one form of compensation, which is monetary, but there's who you work with compensation, what's your culture-like compensation? Are you getting developed compensation? There's opportunity. Do you have white space in front of you compensation? We try to take a more holistic view to that, and we coach that and people like to work there and we don't have.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because if you're doing 100% of your plan of what you're trying to work on, you're probably not aiming high enough, but try to knock down 75% and keep adding to it. And you'll wake up one day and your future self will thank you because you get to spend more time with your kids and go to all their sports games like I do today.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Personal business plan is the same, the content's different. You have five things or three things on your listing to improve. You knock down 70% of them. That's part of your toolkit. You leave the ones that you didn't knock down for the next year. Those go to the next year and then you add two more. I talk about future self all the time. You go through that process. You do that for 20 years and you're deliberate about it and you keep notes like you do on the yellow notepad and you're intentional about it. Those people by the kind of get to 20, they're going to be optimizing the return on time because they have such a wide toolkit to go through. And by the way, the correlator to that is allows them to spend more quality time with their family and their kids. Oftentimes people try to skip steps and the whole purpose of these personal business plans is the intentionality to really knock them off and be deliberate. You're not on an island. You're in partnership with whoever your leader of that particular investment platform is. And that's how we think about it. We say, look, shoot high.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Guy's a smart guy. That podcast he did with him. I thought that was a great one. He's super talented. And for me, it starts with caring. You have to authentically care for that person. And you have to authentically care for their development. That's one, two, three. And what I always tell all our leaders all the time is you got to be proactively as part of your day and part of your week and part of your month thinking about how do I develop this person? What are the strengths? What are the weaknesses? How do we do that? And that's why we have this personal business plan that we make everyone do, but it's not only that we have everyone in the firm do it. Part of the process not only have them do it, the other part of the process is having them go to their leaders and really sit down with them to sort of identify that. So for me, it's being intentional. It's being deliberate. But you got to have a plan. You can't do it in an abstract. You got to be very explicit. And the way I think about the personal business plans is every year you have a personal business plan, the format of everyone.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sixth tree on the first day, and I've been working with him every day since. Whenever there's someone who I think at sixth street needs development or could be better at reaching the potential, gets who I have work with, Stephen Plus.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That, but again, doing something outside a credit box, but on good assets or good businesses. And that business at 24 years old, I went to present to Hank Paulson, Lloyd Blankfund, David Vayner, the executive committee. Now is the first time that Goldman ever got in the middle market is through that. By the way, that business joined Salisbury, one of my partners told me it's over $50 billion now. But it all happened because this guy, Stephen Plus, took the time, answered all those questions, would have never happened. And that just taught me about developing people because I saw what happened to me. And that's why we put so much emphasis on developing the younger generation. Age is just a number. Get people that buy in the culture, work hard, that are intellectually curious, ask questions, that really changed everything, but it really taught me a commitment to developing a couple of my partners born in Mogbel and Matt Tillard. They were associates when they joined.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stephen is from that, I started to say, wait a second, these are really high rates to return. And when I started actually understand what it was, but couldn't you take other businesses that are good businesses that banks for whatever reason won't lend to because they've got a very specific credit box and still earn a good return but not that high and then have a much bigger TAM? Could you do that in the middle market? And I technically wrote it, but Stephen helped me write it, wrote a business plan when I was 23 or 24 years old. And that business plan was basically to do middle market direct lending. First of all, direct lending didn't exist. It wasn't a word. And Goldman Sachs had never done anything in the middle market. This is when I first met David Vineyard. But I just said, look, this could be new clients for Goldman. We could go out instead of earning on that portfolio. They were like 30% returns on First Lane. Maybe 10 to 12% or 13% or something less than.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Buying the portfolio is about $400 million portfolio. And I was basically in charge of the portfolio. And Pretty lucky. He basically for two years taught me finance, taught me investing, taught me about risk units, taught me everything, taught me about how to go through documents. I look back to it now. He was 15 years older than me. Here's some kid comes down from, even though I was Texan, I was coming down from a New York firm. Now I still had a little bit of my southern accent back then, which got beat out of me by all my friends in college. And here's this guy literally answering every week, every day question after question. I used to have these yellow notepads and I literally would write down my 10 questions for Stephen Plus for the day and I'd literally come and ask him. That whole process of him teaching me about investing and how to think about risk, how to think about return and just all that, it literally led to what made the start of my career at Goldman where I started running businesses when I was like 25 years old because that whole idea was.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Asset value to the radio stations and TV stations, but they had no cash flow. A traditional bank couldn't finance them. So what these guys had done, this is a little pocket in this big bank called Amresco. They basically had gone out and given these companies first lien loans at like 15% coupons and warrants for 10 to 30 percent of the company. You can imagine it's breaking my brain. They called it stick value, but they would take a radio station, a TV station and these things traded, they were sold all the time of say $200 million and they would lend the first $50 million. So from their perspective, going back to sort of risk units, they were the first 25% of the value of the company in a first lien loan, which at the time broke my brain. And the guy who ran that was a guy named Stephen Plus. Stephen Plus, who's now sixth street chief risk officer, he's about 15 years older than me.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I got to Goldman Sachs, I met Jody on the airplane and I showed up to Goldman Sachs. I didn't know anything about finance. And I remember going to the first analyst session with all these super smart kids from the best schools, all 4.0s and super intimidating. I had something very fortunate and also one of the most impactful things in my professional career happened is that when I first started, there was a bank called Amresco in Dallas, Texas. And they were failing and they needed to raise liquidity. I got tasked and I literally knew nothing to basically lead the evaluation of buying a portfolio of loans from a group called RTV Ventures. So as part of AMRESCO is basically a bunch of loans to radio and TV companies. Back then, this is before direct lending or private credit because there was a lot of”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Starting to happen, you're starting to see what some of the larger LPs that are the traditional sovereign wealth funds or pinch fund. They're looking for access because they're worried about access in the future because they see what's happening. They see all this wealth capital coming in. I mean, there's not an earnings call where people aren't talking about the growth of the wealth channel and how much money they're raising the wealth channel, obviously seeing the insurance. So I think access to your best GPs, those conversations are accelerating because again, ultimately everything's a choice of alternatives. And I think that dynamic is the other part of this.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a little bit circular. That's really interesting when you start thinking about ETFs and now there's going to be trading private capital. So all this stuff is a little bit circular, but it's a real dynamic. And I think it's something that anyone that's thinking about investing and thinking about capital allocation needs to take real note of these dynamics because they're real dynamics. And by the way, I think for some of the traditional sovereign wealth funds and pension funds, they've had unfettered access to GPs. And I think they've got more competition coming in from the wealth channel and insurance channel. So it's going to be interesting to see how all that plays out.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of ironic when you step back and think about it, you basically have all these public companies. There's less public companies that's going more private. But now you have all these trends of people trying to take ETFs on private companies. So it's almost like a”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Keeping the culture the way it is and making those type of behaviors that life is too short, I just try to protect that with everything”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Groups. We have really good reportings. That's one thing I learned at Goldman communication and not fancier reporting. So I always know what's going on. And then obviously I talk to probably 20 or 30 people a day throughout the firm. My average conversation is probably two or three minutes. I literally talk to people all day, all the time just to figure what's going on. And if there's ever a situation where I need to go 10,000 feet deep, I'll go 10,000 feet deep. But then I try to go back up so I can just see everything that's going on. If I'm 10,000 feet deep every day, I'm not doing my job. And that's kind of how I think about it. But those are really how I spend my time. But the reality is we have great set of partners, a lot of partners we've worked together for 20 plus years. We have shared values, first principles on doing business the right way. So a lot of those first principles are already in place because we've worked together for so long. We all know what we're doing and we all buy into the mission of what we're trying to do.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tell what I try to do is keep the culture. Culture is everything. If I see something not working the way it is or some deal doesn't get passed to another group or some relationship doesn't do that in an unfettered way, it's so counterculture to like hive relationships or not call people back or not help people even though it's a deal not related to your particular sector. I'm trying to make that very counterculture. If I see people acting with ego or something I'll pull them aside and I'll be like, that's not how we do it here. And I'm maniacal about that because it's not just culture and abstract. It's how we actually execute our business model and deliver great outcomes for LPs. And then the last thing I try to do is what I call toggle like a hawk. So I got the right people in the right seats. They bought into the culture. They're good investors. They're good managers and leaders. They know what we're doing. They know what we're trying to solve. They're willing to work with other.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The bigger deals all step in and get actively involved. But in general, we have a great team, not only with the partners, but the next generation, the next generation. In terms of running the business, obviously I think a lot about our strategic plan and executing the core strategic priorities. So I try to think about big boulders and there's five big boulders generally very related to our strategic plan, maniacally focus on that. I got excessive amount of energy as you might be able to”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, my partners that run the 10 different investment platforms are great investors. When we first started the firm, an investment committee, I was very vocal, probably 20, 30 percent of the conversation, in some cases more than that. And each year that's gone by, people just keep growing. And again, these are great investors. And I just less and less. And to the point now in investment committee, I have views, but it's very rare where there's some issue or something we're thinking about or some way to create value in a particular company where through the course of all the conversation with Eston Committee, I can just sit there because everything that I would have said.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have 25 themes running through the platform right now. I'll just give you a few of them. Number one is partnering with big companies, big corporates to help advance their business. A firm we talked about thinking about partnering with asset originators and banks to basically help their origination, help their operating leverage. So that's a big thing in our asset-based finance business. Our real estate business, the idea of people getting older, wealth tech. So we talked about the wealth space, the percentage of private alternatives and wealth that's going to go up. There's a whole bunch of services and technology around that, so I'd say wealth tech is one. Sports and live entertainment. We've talked about, we talked about the sports piece, but again, live entertainment, the one thing we learned during COVID is that people like experiences, they value experiences more, as you know, from the younger generations, I know from my kids, they could care less about material things. They just want experiences. That is a big.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Obviously, that's not a good example because we started doing data centers back in 2017 with AirTrunk, which we can talk about because that's a company we started a white sheet of paper, which is actually just got by Blackstone for, I think, $16 billion or something like that. So we'll look at a deal. And it comes top down, bottom up. And sometimes we just have a view on something and we'll start doing a bunch of primary research. But a lot of it's through primary research, through relationships. But it comes from everywhere. It's not one place. It's everywhere. And that's the whole point of our firm is that because there's no silos and no fiefdoms, all those things get circulating up. All of a sudden we see a theme from our power people. We have a team that all they do is power, our data comms people, data communications, and we see a conference real estate people. And this is what's going on with AI that constrain a power, putting all those in one umbrella. I'm like, hey, let's have you guys all work together on this.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Each have five, so they're constantly bubbling, and then from that, there's really good themes, but they're not actionable. So we narrowed down to 15 to 25 themes. Where those come from, it's from sector knowledge. We have 16 different sector franchise. So each of those sectors is doing primary research about their ecosystems, thinking about not only what is that ecosystem look like today, but what's it going to look like tomorrow? There's research. Some of it's we've got a whole bunch of long-standing relationships with COs and management teams, and they'll call say, hey, we're seeing this in our sector, we're seeing this in our business, or we're seeing this. So, hey, that's interesting. Let's follow it up. Sometimes we're looking at a company and we're looking at SNOK business, and we look at the supplier to that company like, wow, the supplier is actually more interesting than the company we're looking at, or we're looking at a company and this customer is more interested. And then the last thing is just sometimes all of a sudden you start to see free deals data centers.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At any one time, we have 50 to 60 themes bubbling through sixth street. Because remember, we have 10 investment platforms”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All the history, it's the premium tickets, but in all these deals, there's different levers depending on what it is. In this case, it's a perimeter of assets, but it could be the whole company, a firm Max Levchen's company. We did a $20 billion partnership with them where we formed a joint venture with them so they could originate more assets and have more operating leverage. So that one, my partner, Michael Dryden, who runs our asset-based finance business, has known Max a long time, gets on a whiteboard, they start mapping up. It's not like you can pull it off the shelf. Most of our deals, you can't just pull off a shelf. It's right, Brand. And that's why when I say one of our core principles that independent thinking, stay away from the group think, just think differently.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In that case, you got premium VIP suits. You have food and beverage, but premium offerings. You have a museum. If you ever go to the Bernabaya, there's an incredible museum of all”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For every deal, they're different. If it's an equity deal, obviously price, if it's a hybrid deal where it's convertible deal, there's a yield component and a strike component. If it's just a private credit deal, it's just a yield component. Sometimes when we're doing joint venture, we're like, what are the value added operations in that case? One of our portfolio companies, Legends, is providing services to them that is helping them uplift their premium offering within the stadium. So we underwrote that and put our money where our mouth was on that. So in each deal, the levers are different. And that's the thing. It's a whiteboard because we've got a toolkit, which we've been using for 25 plus years, but we feel like we can price anything that's not binary stroke of the pin risk. And then it's got to work for them. If it doesn't work for them, we go back to the drawing board and try to construct something that does work for them. But in all these deals, you see where it all takes place is the whiteboard, and it's not what we initially proposed to them or what they initially proposed.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, what are they trying to solve? They say this is what we're trying to solve. We're investing a bunch of money into the Burnabaya Stadium. So this is the use of funds. So what structures they didn't want to do debt, so we had to do effectively an equity joint venture with them. We come up with solutions. We price those solutions. We say, look, here's option A, here's option B, here's option C. They say, we kind of like a combination of option A and option B. We go back to the drawing board. We come back and we say here's a hybrid of option A and option B, which is what happened on that deal.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now we've got San Francisco Giants. We're partnering with the Dallas Cowboys and New York Yankees. And then two of the biggest brands in the world, FC Barcelona and Real Madrid, we started calling on building relationships. I mean, the deal with Real Madrid was they wanted to do business with us and we wanted to do business with them. And it was, again, a whiteboarding exercise. That structure we did with Real Madrid where we basically formed a joint venture with them, partner with them on their stadium renovation, which is the Bernabea. That was the use of funds, but we formed like a company that sort of owned the stadium assets. When they came to us, they had an idea. We had an idea. And it was literally multiple whiteboard sessions to come up with that structure. And now a number of people have tried to deploy that structure elsewhere. FC Barcelona, again, because of COVID, it impacted their financials. They needed to do something. Joan Laporte, incredible human, as well as Foreign.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This was a theme coming off of COVID sports and live experiences. So 2020, a lot of the investments in sports teams, you weren't actually able to do as an institution. Once COVID happened and all these big franchises, revenues went to zero. People weren't going to games. They still had some of their media deals, but it went to zero. So for the first time ever, they started to reach out to institutional partners. Our whole thesis in sports is the biggest global brands in the world. And our whole thesis in sports, and we can talk about live entertainment, is that these are historically local brands. And because of technology, you can be on your phone and you can actually watch anywhere in the world. You can be a Dallas Cowboy fan, Australia watch or Real Madrid fan in China and watch. That whole local to global, that was our thesis. So we literally just started through our relationships calling on the top global sports franchise in the world.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our investors have expectations, but ultimately we're an absolute return investor. Sometimes if you just take an extreme example, let's say that every single asset class is flooded with liquidity. Maybe that's not the right time to invest. And sometimes the best thing you can do as an investor is not invest. But in terms of returns, it really depends on the level of risk units. In 2017, we saw 15 to 20 percent deals, but it was too far out on the risk spectrum. So we said, listen, that's too much risk, even though that return is there and some people kept doing that. Some of it worked out well until COVID. But we try to think about the environment that we're in and what things are giving us, also our investors have a set of criteria for each fund that we try to meet that expectation as well.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We like complex things, but in terms of the ultimate call, I mean, we do all the fundamental analysis, but ultimately investments come down to three or four or five things. I wouldn't say we simplify the overall investment, but we try to simplify what are the three or four or five things that matter. And we know those things inside out. We also understand, and this is the other thing investors do, people only think about explicit risks. They don't think about implicit risk. So we always try to put that lens on it. What are the implicit risks that we're assuming away? One of them in the case of Airbnb is we're assuming away that there will be a cure. We can't all be locked in our houses forever. We're willing to take that risk, but we had to think about that because that was part of the investment. But ultimately, it comes down to three or four or five things. So I'd say yes, simplify things. But it always comes down to those three to five things.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where, what we thought, making sure that the management scheme and the CO were what we thought. But the other thing, it was really a liquidity analysis and then making that not in the spreadsheet judgment, which sometimes you have to do. That was as much a risk unit as anything is the liquidity analysis to make sure how much runway do they have.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That one was, first of all, we had to be right on the business model. So from afar, we wanted to make sure that the business model what it was. The second thing is they wanted to get it done in seven days. So we had a team at 6th Street in Asia, a team at 6th Street in the US, a team at 6th Street in Europe. So we had to do all that in a compressed time period. It was at the beginning of COVID. There wasn't a vaccine or anything. So our view is for us, it was as much about the fundamentals of the business as it was how much liquidity runway can they have. And we had to make the bet with that liquidity runway that there would be a cure something would get better. They obviously had a lot of leverage to manage the business, but it gave them up to like four or five years of liquidity. This led to another theme on sports and live entertainment because we learned that we like experiences. Humans like experiences. But that was our analysis. So the fundamental business analysis, make sure everything in the unit economics.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“David Vineyard, special humans, but they wanted to fortify their balance sheet so they could play offense. We and our friends over at Silver Lake basically gave them a billion dollars was in a loan form, had some warrants attached to it, ended up getting them through the period. Obviously things started to get better, but the most important thing after that happened, they were able to start playing offense versus playing defense. And I think the other thing it did is it really solidified what we already knew that Brian was such a great leader and he was able to get this done.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what our next 15 to 25 themes, one of the themes there was best business models most impacted by COVID. Airbnb, great business model. If you remember at the time, there was a lot of negative press on Brian Chesky at the time, which was, by the way, unfair and unwarranted, but there's a whole bunch of stuff going on at the board. That didn't deter us. So we literally started calling into the board people we knew on the board, calling in the bankers because we didn't have a pre-existing relationship with Brian, but we knew people that were around him. And ultimately came in, and that was an interesting time because the thing that Brian did that was really smart, he did a lot of things that were smart. The way he operated through that, and the first time we met him on a Zoom call, he had a lot of advisors. And despite all that, his values, the mission, the principles, were all the same. We talk about a lot of special humans today, Daniel and Brian.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the few firms in the world playing offense at the beginning of COVID, and the reason we were playing offense because we had a good defense, very similar to what we saw in 0607, we started to see those same dynamic tunnel vision of investing. We started to see some of those same dynamics in 18 and 19. We couldn't have called COVID, but things were getting skewed in a wrong way. protected the portfolio. We're in a position to play offense right when COVID hit. We went around and said, What are the best business models in the world that are most impacted by COVID? Think about 60 people across Sixth Street working weekends all day, every day, trying to figure out our 15 to 25 themes before COVID.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You never know at that particular time or this particular environment where's the best opportunity going to be. We always want to have that flexibility to migrate to wherever the best opportunities are. I think the most important thing about Tal is that it's consistent with who we are as a firm and our ethos about we want to be an investor first firm.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our fund over the top across the entire firm, we have the ability to keep the fund sizes small, but at the same time speak to the larger deals. And then also anything that doesn't fit within any of our investment platforms, we have the flexibility to do that. TAL is flexible from asset classes. So it's got everything in there, real estate infrastructure, private credit, growth, mostly private, but as the ability public, it can go anywhere in the duration spectrum. So it could do a two to three year investment, but we have investments in there. We have a strategic partnership with Real Madrid and also a strategic partnership with FC Barcelona. We're probably the only people in the world that actually partners with Real Madrid and FC Barcelona because they trust us, but those extend further than 10 years. So we have maximum flexibility or unconstrained because again, that's what we learned at Goldman. The world is dynamic. It's always changing and you need that flexibility.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Larger deals, but because we have TAL, we want to keep the fund sizes to the level of the opportunity, but we also want to be able to do the largest deals in the market. I mean, we want to be able to do the billion, two billion. We're one of the few handful of firms in the world that can consistently write billion dollar plush checks across asset classes. But architecturally, we keep our investment platforms funds at modest sizes matched to whatever the opportunity is over whatever the investment horizon that fund. And then we have this vehicle called TAL on top, which is effectively, in our words, was when we first raised it the synthetic Goldman Sachs balance sheet, which could do anything, obviously with the same principles that we've had for the last 25 plus years, we started investing at Goldman. That gives us the ability in a growth deal. Let's say the next Spotify deal comes. And let's say it's a $2 billion deal. Well, if we only have a $4 billion growth fund or $3 billion growth fund, there's no way we're going to be able to do that in the growth fund. But by having a $30 billion.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When we were doing Project Austin, we literally studied every GP. We had case studies on every single GP, what they did right, what they did wrong. And we also spent a lot of time on figuring out some of the GPs that were big brand names and then just faltered away. What we concluded, and this is a pretty obvious thing now, but where people get into trouble as they raise larger and larger funds in a strategy that maybe it's the right time to raise a larger fund, but maybe it's not. What's the opportunity set? They kept raising larger and larger funds and we didn't want to have that pressure. And this is getting to tell, we want to design our architecture 6G, which is different than any GP out there, at least the ones that I know as an investor first architecture. And what we did is, although we have 10 investment platforms at 6th Street, each one of the platforms, so think about our growth business. If we didn't have TAL, we'd probably raise an $8 billion fund because we want to be able to do the”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reasons. And for us, it worked out. It was almost like an engineering and whiteboarding. And again, a lot of times the ideas aren't, here's the Holy Grail idea. It's from just talking plain tennis, asking questions and listening. And that's what we do. That's what we train our team to do, how to ask questions, how to listen. That's literally the process that we went through with the other investors.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actual way you did it on that one, what they were trying to solve is at the time, they didn't want to raise common equity because of the competitive threat from Amazon and Apple or perceived, I should say, because the market volatility, they didn't want to sell equity because it was going to be at a lower equity than the last round. So they were looking for more of a whiteboard solution. Literally, Barry McCarthy whiteboard, what are we doing here? He had certain principles and we just tried to solve around those principles and that came up with it was a convertible debt instrument. It had a cap. I think the cap was at $25 billion. It had a current yield component. And then obviously the whole idea was to bridge them to get public. So it's like a pre-IPO security to bridge them through that. And ultimately it was successful and went way through the cap, which created a win solution for them because they got to their IPO, which they were very focused on doing for a whole bunch of.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The rest of the team that Daniel had put around him was Grade Barry McCarthy at the time was the CFO, really smart guy. And then everyone we met on the management team mission aligned, they had values, they had a culture. It was very clear everyone was on the same page. And sometimes in companies, you go in and you talk to the CFO, what's the vision? And that's different than the CEO, different than the head of revenue. And for them, it was just very clear that they were just dialed in. They obviously had first mover advantage. They ended up being a great investment for us, but it was a little bit contrarian when we made the investment.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source