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

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“We love Spotify as a theme. We love live music. It's hard not to like live music when you grow up in Austin, Texas, but great product, great unit economics. But if you remember in 2016, there was starting to be a lot of commentary about threats from Amazon, Apple. There was a cloud over the company at that time. A lot of people don't remember that. So there's a little bit of volatility in the markets, but more importantly, people are worried about the competitive threats. When this came in as an opportunity, obviously we had a number of themes, technology businesses or software businesses that we thought had really good unit economics. This was one of the tops of the list. That was at a time when they weren't producing cash flow, so they're still creating cash flow losses. They need some liquidity. So our investor group stepped in. We gave a billion dollar financing, a convertible instrument. I obviously spent time with Daniel. It takes one second to figure out that guy's generation.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's go Steam Plus, you're going to do the Sam did or you're going to do this. I'll do this. Borna, you're going to do this. And we just start doing. We called in some other people. We literally had a team of 12 people all different parts of the firm doing everything we could. And the reality is we ended up getting 50 cents on the dollar. We should have gotten two cents. And it was all because it was just game on. And that's what we do. When things are going well, obviously you don't have to do that. But again, what we always say, that's what defines cultures and you have those moments of what are you going to do in this situation? Are you going to do the right thing? Are you going to come together? Are you going to point your finger at someone else? What are you going to do? And our whole thing is let's face the tiger together. And that's what we do.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Human beings' natural reaction when there's a problem, and you can see this in so many facets of life. The first thing is to run, particularly in our industry. I saw this happen in other groups at Goldman. I've seen this happen in different companies and I have friends that have told me stories. All of a sudden there's a problem or there's a bad investment. And all of a sudden everyone starts to try to distance themselves from that and try to point the finger at someone so it's not them. Or some people freeze. They start to get hyperactive and they start to make rash decisions. And for us, let's go. We're going to do it together. There's one of our worst investments of all time. It was a plastic bottle company. Only time at 6th Street knock on wood. We got defrauded. We made a structured equity investment company. I won't say which one, but a European company. I'll never forget we were in the room in New York with 30 people. There was a bunch of different investors, a big company.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We hire it's designed around people that love to be investors. So that multi strategy, so this idea of the world's dynamic, it's always changing, laying that part out in terms of being a multi-strategy investing firm, migrating the best relative risk units and return units, thinking about that. And then the last thing is that whole cross-platform collaboration at scale because our business model doesn't work if we don't have that cross-platform collaboration at scale because otherwise information and relationship get traffims, fiefdoms, and silos. Six year, we have 10 investment platforms all organically built. You have all the people, the business leaders at each of our investment platforms, they all talk to each other all the time. We're all trying to think about where's the best place to think about comparing risk units and return units and obviously places where we can be value-added partners, the CEOs and management teams.”
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 huge five feet. You got you'll come to our office one day. The idea on culture is that when something goes wrong or there's a challenge, you go through different things. Most people are like pointing their fingers at other people or they're not my fault or they're running away. It's sixth street. We're like, good, let's go. And we say, let's face the tiger together. The first thing is defining values and culture in our investment philosophy, which we spoke about. But then what's our genetic code? For us, the most important thing about our genetic code is we want to be an investor first firm. We love investing. We love this idea, this process we go through. We love meeting CEOs and management teams, particularly today where it was starting to happen back then. There's a little bit of asset aggregation. Now it's a completely different thing. Our ethos and what we want to be, we're investors. If you talk to our partners the day we become non-investor first firm, we're not here. That's literally number one is every review process, every person.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A crazy person, he's like a black belt, yells at the TV. He's probably listening to this, but he's a pretty tough guy, but he always taught me growing up, you got to learn how to face the tiger. By the way, when you go to sixth streets offices, literally, you get off the elevator, there's a big tiger just staring at you. And there's three elevators no matter what elevator you get off. It's staring at you.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Values driven firm. Our values are number one what we call our one life principle. Do you have one life? Do you want to be average or great? Everyone wants to be great. So that's the first thing. We want people that are all in. It's a competitive world out there. We want people that are all in. The second thing, and this goes back to one of the things we're talking about, is we want curious people that are constantly learning, that actually are constantly trying to grow. If you think about the idea of having to develop new themes every year and new ideas, we need entrepreneurial people. And then the third thing is a one-team culture. So people that are over themselves know politics, no egos, no BS, just so we can all talk to each other. So those are the values. We always said we wanted to be the largest startup in the industry. That's literally day one. We want people that can play tennis so they can debate not the my baby's the prettiest people. And then the last one, and this is something my dad taught me about facing the tiger.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To equal the five-year strategic plan, so we're matching every single person in the firm with the clear mission of what we're trying to do and what we'd say in our Parliament's climbing up the mountain together. And that's just been a process. And it's something that we take very seriously, evidenced by we spend 18 months and hours and hours of debating it and thinking about what we want to be and how we want to go about it. But it's something we've been doing and it's our North Star, it's our compass. It's everything. It's an important part of the process and the business building of 6th Street.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“View on business building is if you don't have a compass, it's hard to know where you're going, and more importantly, it's hard to get everyone on your team matched up with that five-year strategic plan. We just finished our five-year strategic plan. It's an 18-month process. Was 200 pages? I mean, this is hundreds and hundreds of hours of all the partners debating and trying to really narrow down what it is, the direction of the firm. We first started our 2015 plan, what we wanted it to be, and most recently our 2030 plan. We typically have 80 ideas. We narrow it down to 40, what we call subplanks. And those are organized under five strategic planks. We actually just present it to our entire firm. But what we try to do, and this is something learned at Goldman, is we basically take that five-year strategic plan. We break it up into one-year increments, and then we have every person at the firm do their own personal business plans. What we always say, and this is from day one, is that we want the summation, all those personal business plans.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Never gave up control of our business. We always controlled investments, hiring decisions. We were kind of a firm within a firm. TBG had a minority equity stake and we're great partners for while we were together. But that's how it all started.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, told David Vineyard, who was a mensch in March 2008, that I wanted to basically rebuild what we did at Goldman, but doing it more entrepreneurial backdrop. I stayed through 2008 just to make sure everything was well because I wouldn't have felt good if the rails would have come off. There's no way I was going to leave those guys at that time. And then I took six months off, got married, went on a honeymoon. But before that, really started constructing the idea of Sixth Street, which was formulated in a business plan called Project Austin. Project Austin laid out our values, our culture, our investment philosophy, all laid out our five-year strategic plan, which is a big thing at Sixth Street. We're now in our fourth five-year strategic plan. We've been doing that since day one of the firm. And that set out the idea of Sixth Street. TPG, we're set up a little bit differently. So we were never employees of TPG.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I don't think there's enough people talking about how we're going to manage this transition as, again, there's going to be lots of productivity gains, which I'm all for, but there's not enough talk about that. It should be code read people talking about it, and that's not happened. So I'd say that's one. I think the other thing, and I think it's an opportunity, look at the average wealth investor. So the wealth channel, they're underexposed to private alternatives relative to, say, a pension fund at 40% or an endowment at 50%. So at three to five percent, that should probably go up. But again, the transition everyone's all about the wealth channel. Everyone's talking about that the transition to do that in a way that's responsible to those wealth investors, those end market. And I think getting to the right structures so that”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have experts at 6th Street, my partners Marty Chavez, who's on the board of Google and Adam Korn and Rand Goldman Sachs and Jr. are experts on AI. So I'm not an expert on AI. But I think one of the things that you've talked about on your podcast is just the whole transition once the productivity gains start to come, there's obviously going to be job losses and just the transition to sort of remobilize capital. How's that going to work with the real economy? I don't think enough people are talking about it. One of my good friends, Jeff Wiener, former CEO of LinkedIn, he's the chairman. Him and I have been talking about this for a while. And I think for the first time anthropic CO actually came out and said something publicly. So what I'm worried about there is that we're so focused on competing with the US stated against other countries, specifically China, the Maga 7, they're all focused on competing with each other.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Back in the late 90s and early 2000s, and there was a bunch of loss making businesses from all these disparate principal investing businesses. And that's why Goldman put them under one umbrella. I think that pattern of not thinking about things in a siloed way versus the overall periphery, I think that's what we're going to be talking about sometime here in the next two to three years.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it's all right in front of you. You know, 607, you could have looked at what's happened. There's over 100% loan-to-value loans, the houses. Anyone could get a mortgage. There were all these mortgage renters just pumping with no consideration for credit quality. And I think just the tunnel vision of ignoring not only the risk units on that particular deal, but the risk units of what's around you. That's one of the biggest mistakes that people make. And I don't know if people are surprised by that, but it's very hard to evaluate risk units if you're only looking at through one lens versus multiple lenses. That's what we learned back in 2001, 2002. We had all those 10 disparate businesses where no one was talking to each other. And that's why they were actually put together, give David Vineyard a ton of credit as probably the best CFO, in my opinion, ever on Wall Street. He is one of my mentors. He is exceptional. We're the biggest investor out there.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Human beings get into behavioral patterns. They look at the past and they just keep going. Direct Linux has oscillated between a really great time to invest and a less good time to invest. And it's all driven by capital flows. Somewhat recently, you see a whole bunch of new money coming into, let's say, direct lending. And I think people get caught in these tunnels and have a hard time stepping back either they don't have the periphery to look at it or they don't have people around them that have been through cycles, but they get in these behavioral patterns and they have an inability to look back. And I think whenever there's a crisis and people lose money, and we saw this in 0102, I saw a little bit in August 98, definitely saw it on GFC, saw it in COVID before the Fed billed, everyone out and made some people that shouldn't have looked smart look smart, but that's a whole other thing. I think people are surprised when that happens.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fit us in a bucket. They're like, wait a second, are you in this bucket? Are you in that bucket? And then he said, We need 20% returns. I was like, okay, how much leverage are you taking to get 20%? It didn't matter. No one thinks about uniturist. They only think about nominal returns. And that's why we've always talked about from beginning. And I think many LPs have gotten a lot smarter on return units and risk units. But nominal returns, they're just underlying risk because there's so much leverage out there. People can make returns whatever they want through leverage, but it's not capturing units of risk. And at some point, the AI is going to figure out how to quantify units of risk for private capital. That'll happen someday. That has not happened. People still think about nominal returns versus just the skill of investing.”
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 came out of Goldman, I'd never talked to NP before. I didn't know how to talk to an LP. That's a whole other story. One of my mentors, and we call him the godfather of Sixth Street Jamie Gates. Our first fundraising meeting we went to was with a large sovereign wealth fund. I'm like reading every word on every page. He's doing these hand signals like, let's go, let's go, kick him in. It was not good. We never talked to an investor, but I remember getting out and we first started talking to investors on 6th Street. We had a really hard time in the beginning because if you think about the LP world the way it's set up, it's very siloed. You have your private equity group. You have your fixed income group. Now you have your private credit group. You have your real estate group infrastructure. So we got lucky because David Vineyard was our CFO. We had one LP. So we were completely unconstrained and unsight. We just couldn't lose money. You grew up in the world today. When I first got out and we're talking LPs from, let's say, a very big pension plan. And at first, and I'm describing what we do.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We always talk about it. We just had our offsite. I talk about right brain thinking. And one of our core principles is don't groupthink. That's why I benefit being out in San Francisco. I live with all the AI tech guys that are all on your podcast. And I learned from them, I'm like a fish out of water there. But it's just that independent thinking. I mean, that's why I've never talked to competitors ever. Not because they're not super talented and great investors because I don't want to be infiltrated with their thinking so I get into group think. And that's why we try to really think about things through that right rein lens because that's how we start different businesses. That's how we find new themes. And we can't do our business if we're not using our right brain. It's a core part of what we try 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
“Long term investors. We're three years to tenure investors plus arbitraries. That's not what we do. But thinking about fundamental value, but also trying to find the right man.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We love investing. And it's really about trying to create solutions because our capital is so flexible. We could go sit down with any CEO or any management team. We go in there, we just listen. And this will sort of resonate what we were talking about earlier is one of our core skill sets is asking questions. So we just be asking questions. And we say that prototype deal at Sixth Street, but also back then is we can get on a whiteboard with the CO management company. They have an idea what they're trying to solve and we get up there and we start whiteboarding it and we come up with solutions. Maybe it's a structured equity investment. Maybe we buy an asset. Maybe we do a joint venture on one of their assets. It could be anything, but we walk in there with a very entrepreneurial mindset, bespoke mindset on every deal. That is a six-week deal. Whiteboarding with the CEO or management team. And we can do that at scale. Back then, I mean, that was really how we were thinking about things. When I think about arbitrage, that's short term.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Obviously, we did really well. There were a bunch of investments. I think the thing that we're most proud of is that during 2006 and 2007, when things were getting irrationally exuberant, we actually started to pause. We didn't know what was going to happen in the GFC. I think the only principal investment group, maybe there's one other that didn't lose money in 2008 on a lot of capital. We didn't make any returns, but we protected capital. And it was all from that process that we went through of really comparing relative risk units to return units. And we started to see things that just didn't make sense. We still invested, but we're investing in different things that we thought would be very protective. We didn't know when the party was going to end, but it just was getting out of whack. It's really what we didn't do leading up to GSC is probably what I'm most proud of. And quite frankly, had that not happen, I don't think we could have, when we started Sixth Street, raised the first fund we did.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I started running business. I think I was 25 years at Goldman. We always said no politics, no BS, no egos, nice people. That's what we wanted to be around. So I grew up in Austin, Texas, and I was always a scene into a Spurs fan. So I was always from afar a big fan of Popavich and RC Buford, who's literally one of the best sports executives. He's unbelievable and almost like a brother to me now. He's an exceptional human being. But we went in there. I was describing Sixth Street and RC based on one of our first discussions says, yeah, we have a stand for that. Popovich said the same thing. It's are you over yourself yet? I said, why do you say? He goes, that is literally the ultimate expression is can someone be a good teammate? And I thought about deeply, we took no politics, no BS, only nice people, and we translated that to now we say, are you over yourself yet?”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They have the ability to sort of what we would say at sixth street is to play tennis and like comparing a healthcare senior secured loan to buying a healthcare company to a European real estate deal to a Asian infrastructure deal, be able to sort of engage in what we call playing tennis to sort of compare relative risk reward and sort of the backdrop of whatever we think the macro environment is 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
“Sound When the Wall Street Journal called the group that Navy steals, I think that created a little bit of halo. So it wasn't finding people interested, it's finding the right people. And for us, what we were looking for back then and still today at 6th Street is first of all, we want really nice people. We have a saying at 6th Street and it was true back then, something we learned from the San Antonio Spurs is we want people that are over themselves. The enemy of a multi-strategy investing businesses, fiefdoms in silos. And if you have people who don't want to be team players and share information and share relationships, the whole unitization of risking its in return units, it all breaks down. So culture goes hand in hand with our investing self. So the first thing is, did they fit in culturally? And then the second thing, obviously, everyone's got to be smart enough, but we really wanted people that could think critically, but also we're open to the anti of my baby's the prettiest people. They don't fall in love with whatever they're spending time.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this is why we had the track record we had coming out of Goldman and do it sixth street is that we try to see through that and never get caught in that dynamic where Nathem becomes less good. We migrate to other things. So our average theme as a shelf life is a year to three years. If you take our themes from 2025 and you go back to 2022, the 15 to 25 themes might be a little bit over up, but most of them are different themes. And that's why we always think a sixth street, we have to be a firm of entrepreneurs. Because if you think about what we're doing, we're constantly migrating to the best risk units and return units, obviously also trying to be a value added partner to CEOs and management teams because the world's always changing. We have to be constantly coming up with new themes. And that's what we learned at Goldman.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What happens is with investors, everyone thinks their baby's the prettiest. So if you're just a healthcare investor, you think your baby's the prettiest, you're just an energy investor, you think your baby's the prettiest, if you're just in Europe, you think Europe's only good. So we try to do a step back from that and then constantly as we go through economic cycles, credit cycles, secular cycles, geopolitical changes, and we think about things on a real-time basis. And what we do is in 6th Street, we have about 450 to 500 deals coming into Sixth Street every month. Typically, we have about 15 to 25 themes running through our firm at any one time. And the key is, and this is what we learned at Goldman, is that any theme that is good as a shelf life of somewhere between 12 months and 36 months, because ultimately there's a lot of smart people out there. It comes in and it's a good thing, then it's a less good thing. Then it comes to okay thing, then it comes a bad thing, and then people are overcorrect and they start putting leverage on it, and then you have a correction. And our whole thing.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's say they leverage 70. You take a hyperscale data center that's got, let's say, a 50%. With an investment grade counterparty, that's going to be a required lower return. So that be an example. If you have a geography, let's say just as an extreme example, if you've got a 15% structured equity investment for a company, exact same company, exact same sector in Australia. If it were in Ukraine, you're probably going to demand higher than 15%. Let's say we're a minority equity investor in a company. And one, you've got the control party can literally do whatever they want. They could dilute you. They can put a bunch of debt ahead of you. That's one set of risk. And it's if you've got traditional, hopefully good minority protections, that's another set of risk units. So we take all that, we do that across asset classes, sectors, geographies, durations. So some stuff like our capital, we can do stuff that 10 to 12% returns. Some of our stuff is 20, 25%, two to three times your money. And our whole view of the world is the world is very dynamic. It's always changing.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we think about the relationship of risk units in return units. So, return units are easy, it's IRR, it's duration. Risk units are a lot harder. If you think about the two key variables of, let's say, evaluating any company or security, you've basically got the cash flows, the volatility of the cash flows, the risk of the cash flows, and growth. So the way we think about it, and again, this has been refined over 25 plus years, our framework is basically take three things. First of all, what's the quality of the business? What's this quality of the sector? The second thing is where do you sit in the capital structure? What we would say is your attachment points. And the last thing is documents. We take that framework and we sort of run that framework through that across sectors, geographies. And that's how we start to quantify risk units. So for example, if you take a consumer goods company that's a buyout of a consumer goods company, let's say a private equity firm buys it for a 20% return.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lost a lot of money. For example, we had in the US, the business I was in, which is a US corporate investing business, was pretty negative on fiber builds. If you remember exocommunications or Williams, remember all the fiber, which was overbuilt, all that. There was another group that Goldman, who were great investors, but they were all in on fiber. Even though we were literally one floor apart, one group lost a bunch of money and we were anti. We didn't lose money. And after that, the firm basically said, let's put all these disparate principal investing businesses. Again, we didn't have outside LPs, put them all under one umbrella, and that ultimately became what was a special situations group, which became a substantial part of the firm's profitability.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is really the ability to unitize risk reward across different asset classes, geographies, sectors, return profiles, duration profiles, take a real estate type investment, compare it to a U.S. corporate loan, compare it to buying a company, compared to starting a company. And we unitize risk units and return units. And we did that across a bunch of different sectors, a bunch of different geographies and asset classes. And just that skill of being able to do that, you're constantly comparing relative risk units and return units. And it gives you the ability to find the best risk word at that time. And the key principle there, and we learned this the hard way. So if you go back, Goldman was a bunch of fiefdoms of principal investing business. There were 10 fiefdoms, different partners running investing businesses, and none of them talked to each other. They all had their own balance sheets, never spoke to each other. So during 2001, 2002, a number of the businesses”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Different asset classes, different sectors, different geographies, different durations. So we could do stuff that were two, three-year investment horizon or 10-year investment horizon, different return profiles. Someone was 10% return stuff, some was 20%, 30% return profits. Literally, we could do anything, but we couldn't lose money. So what we learned at the time is this group, we were a substantial amount of Goldman with a very small team for 10 plus years.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You weren't a lot, and it just creates opportunities. He ended up getting me an interview and I got into this group, which ultimately became the special situations group at Goldman. That group was the largest principal investing business at Goldman. It was the firm's balance sheet. At its peak, I think we're like $25 billion of the firm's balance sheet. Our mandate was to basically, you could do anything.”
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 on an airplane coming back from Texas, my home, and I met a guy on an airplane. This guy, by the name of Jody Lenaston, I was just asking him a bunch of questions. I ask a lot of questions. My wife makes fun of me because I ask questions all the time. I go to dinner sometimes. People say, well, you ask me a thousand questions. I didn't get a chance to ask you. That's just how I am. So I was on the airplane and this guy, Joe Del Nassau, who had started in this group, he was reading like research reports like thousand miles per hour processing speeds I'd never even seen before. So I just started asking him questions about what are you doing and what's your group? And we just started talking on the airplane. He came from Wactel, a principal investing group at Goldman that literally was highly flexible, could really do anything, which by the way is the predecessor of the group that I was ultimately in, we ended up forming a relationship just because what I learned is the good thing about being curious is you know is”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lucky that I even got into that group. I met a guy on airplane. Basically, I was an international relations major at Penn, no finance history, anything, got out of school and I was basically working in the mail room for a bond-only management firm called Fisher Franchis Treason Watts and punching books and all my friends. They all had jobs. Basically at Penn, I had 35 interviews. Didn't have a job offer out of college. That's why I ended up in the mail room. But I was always interested in companies. I just didn't know a lot about it because I didn't have a corporate finance background.”
2025-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Alan Waxman - Building Sixth Street - [Invest Like the Best, EP.433] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source