YouSaid · the spoken record

James Clarke

lines on the record: 68
first: 2025-05-15
most recent: 2025-05-15
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

“And all the other people were capable of telling the story. And I think one of the things in the alternative space that I observed early on was it was more like CAP intro. Here's the person. What do you guys think? At PIMCO, what you got to learn was you had to be in front of people, bringing content, bringing value. I have a tremendous amount of gratitude to that organization. A lot of things I see them do are things that the alternative industry is going towards because the alternative industry is scaling quickly. The consolidation of relationships is happening. It's very much following the blueprint of what things will like back in the day.”
2025-05-15 · Capital Allocators · James Clarke – Building Enduring Partnerships at Blue Owl (EP.445) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Keep your learning curve vertical. You just cannot stop at a level and say, I know everything. You stick with the winners. And there are a lot of winners there. One of the great inspirations for me was the CEO there at the time, Bill Thompson. He was an old Solomon Brothers guy. He'd been around lies poker, the Merriweather days. I think it was 93. Bill Gross made the right decision. I want to focus here and I need someone to do all this. But Bill was all about price ass. There were no loose conversations. His values were impeccable, his institutional nous, the way to run an organization. And if you could tap into that and listen and learn rather than be didactic and dictate back, I think you were key for success. They put a very high premium on product knowledge. And if you'd go back to what I was talking about before, I had to get up the learning curve really quickly on that. They wanted to make sure there was a differentiation that the investment people were doing.”
2025-05-15 · Capital Allocators · James Clarke – Building Enduring Partnerships at Blue Owl (EP.445) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Blue owl. That's one of the things we're doing now. We have all these different facets to our business. The job isn't to go out there and just say, oh, here's our next thing. The job is there to understand where the fit is and direct the right resources to where you've qualified those groups that you think are of interest.”
2025-05-15 · Capital Allocators · James Clarke – Building Enduring Partnerships at Blue Owl (EP.445) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Comes back to understanding the entire organization, making them aware of all the different things that you do, not pushing them, but when you're talking to a sovereign wealth fund or a pension, there are so many different buying centers. The communication level was so high. And the reason for that was when you have public mandates, you can get fired the next day. It's not like being locked up in a vehicle that's around 10 years. So that means the dialogue is so intense across the organization. It's regular. It's robust. The conversation to ask ratio is about 15 to 1. 15 conversations to one ask. I think a lot of people pivot that the other way. They're not listening. They go in there. They've got an agenda. The agenda is to get this. Damn the torpedoes. Off we go. How do you scale that? It's partnership and it takes time.”
2025-05-15 · Capital Allocators · James Clarke – Building Enduring Partnerships at Blue Owl (EP.445) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stand being sold to. These are smart people. They have objectives. You work with a $300 billion firm and they give you a billion dollars. That's incredible. But you're like a 30 basis point consideration or something. How unfortute spend time thinking about 30 basis point position? But it's what is that position do for the overall portfolio? If you understand that, you're going to win. internally don't see all that.”
2025-05-15 · Capital Allocators · James Clarke – Building Enduring Partnerships at Blue Owl (EP.445) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, there's always that internal friction between people that don't do it on a daily basis and people that do, and it's natural and it's a state and will exist forever. But if you ground everything in what's the best interest of the client and you start to show results that that process works, people will buy into it. It never happens the way that people want. But the moment you put a firm's interest ahead of the clients, you're done. You have to be. They can sense it. The barriers to this industry in institutional asset management are so low. Anybody can start a fund. They can call upome it is, pension fund, and try and get meetings. Some of these CIOs will be out for dinner and they'll hold up their phone and it'll just go tick, tick, tick for meetings. Once you understand them and you understand the direction of where they're going, you'll put yourself in a position to win and you just have to show that over time.”
2025-05-15 · Capital Allocators · James Clarke – Building Enduring Partnerships at Blue Owl (EP.445) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I lit this thing up. I'd been an occasional smoker, usually around about four to eight milligrams. This thing was 16. I took a couple of puffs of this thing. I think I ended up in a snowbank. One day in 08 in August, he called up and he said, look, we've had an issue with one of the managers and we're going to give Pimco, I can't remember the amount, but it was in seven figures billions. That to me taught me so much, but it was just keep persevering. It's all about portfolio fit. This isn't a business where they want to be sold to. They want to gravitate towards a firm. And when there's a fit there, they'll work with you.”
2025-05-15 · Capital Allocators · James Clarke – Building Enduring Partnerships at Blue Owl (EP.445) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“1984 or something. About two or three years later, I got the gumption to say, howard, I don't know one of those with you. Why not?”
2025-05-15 · Capital Allocators · James Clarke – Building Enduring Partnerships at Blue Owl (EP.445) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd made a list of the people that I wanted to see. And Howard was there, and he's just a boisterous animated guy and just so affable and likable. I walked up and I said, hey, my name's James Clark. And he looked at my lanyard and said, I don't really like that firm. I don't really like the look of you. And he walked off having done the rejection of stand-up comedy. This was like, okay, challenge. So I sent Howard a fax. I said, you may not like the firm, but get to know me. So he goes, fine. It was January and St. Paul, Minnesota. I remember showing up to that meeting, having a meeting with Howard Beaker and the assistant said, wait downstairs. It was freezing. Howard comes down with a Malbro Red cigarette, lights it up, and goes, you got until the end of this. I would do this every year, go and see him in January. And he started to get more and more comfortable with the firm. And he had an issue that went back to 90%.”
2025-05-15 · Capital Allocators · James Clarke – Building Enduring Partnerships at Blue Owl (EP.445) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I grew up living in rejection. It was a normal state for me. I wasn't a standout athlete. I love sports to death. I had friends, but I wasn't the most popular person. So I knew what it was like to sort of have to put yourself out there. So I just called up people, probably one of the most interesting stories that I can.”
2025-05-15 · Capital Allocators · James Clarke – Building Enduring Partnerships at Blue Owl (EP.445) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where you had to trip people up. But it was an environment where you won by running faster. And I just had that internal drive to do that. And by 30, I was overseeing their public pension business development.”
2025-05-15 · Capital Allocators · James Clarke – Building Enduring Partnerships at Blue Owl (EP.445) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had literally no understanding. I couldn't have told you the difference between a stock and a bond back then. But I was fascinated by it. I was just intrigued with getting to know people. One of the influences on my life was a guy I met who actually works for me now, a guy by the name of John Wilson. He was running Pimco in Sydney. And we met and he said, I think you have the right personality that people want to be around and that can communicate well. So he gave me this job and I just remember reading Frankfurt and all these books and educated myself. I made so many faux, so many mistakes, so many times where people would give me the benefit of the doubt because I was 27. Pimco was one of the greatest experiences of my life. It was such a great foundation for anybody to start. There was just this institutional apparatus and it was a very tough environment. It wasn't overly competitive.”
2025-05-15 · Capital Allocators · James Clarke – Building Enduring Partnerships at Blue Owl (EP.445) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The mid 90s was a period of apathy. You had Navani, people were wearing loose clothes. They kind of was like, life will all work out, man. You know, it's a different time. I got into financial journalism. I could always write because I had a media background on radio, I ended up reading the financial stock market reports at the end of each day. My dad was in finance. And I would say the ASX was down three points. And my dad had called me up and go, yeah, the terminology for that is flat.”
2025-05-15 · Capital Allocators · James Clarke – Building Enduring Partnerships at Blue Owl (EP.445) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I look back on it. I got to the point with that where I'd go up with no material and I'd just riff. What it prepared me for was being in front of people, being very uncomfortable in front of people, not over preparing to the point where you had every word worked out. I just realized when I go to these meetings, what people are actually buying into is authenticity. And you can't be authentic in a conversational environment if all you're doing is reading from the script. But it was a great experience. I look back on it very fondly.”
2025-05-15 · Capital Allocators · James Clarke – Building Enduring Partnerships at Blue Owl (EP.445) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Saying okay, I had friends there, and I just remember their heads down. I ended up making it to a stage where I ended up on radio in a competition. And all those other guys went on to have very successful media careers being on TV, having their own shows. So the only one that didn't win was me. And I ended up here.”
2025-05-15 · Capital Allocators · James Clarke – Building Enduring Partnerships at Blue Owl (EP.445) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“University. I did a major in social anthropology studying Margaret Meade and tribes in Papua New Guinea. Then by hook or by crook, I got into financial journalism. But I had some really interesting episodes in university. And one that carried into this business, client-facing, meeting people. I did stand up comedy at Sydney University. And I got to tell you, that was probably what I graduated in. The first time I did it was one of the most painful experiences of my life. I'd written down all these jokes. I got up there and I'd memorized them. But I had no authenticity or flow. So I would get to the punchline and I would deliver it and everyone would be like,”
2025-05-15 · Capital Allocators · James Clarke – Building Enduring Partnerships at Blue Owl (EP.445) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was actually born in South Africa in 1975. It was during a pretty upheaval time. You had apartheid, you had all these things. My parents made the right decision that at the time we should leave. And we went to Australia with about 81,000 other South Africans in 1980. I got to Australia. It was such a phenomenal upbringing. But I think one of the things that I think about when I look back on it was how much of an influence American culture was on Australia. There was a survey done that the most popular athlete in the early 90s was Michael Jordan. So I got weaned on this culture and this country fascinated me. And I wanted to be part of it. To me, America was where the action was. So I grew up in Sydney, Australia, pretty middle class family. I had no inclination of all of getting into finance. I was kind of an unmoored person at U.S.”
2025-05-15 · Capital Allocators · James Clarke – Building Enduring Partnerships at Blue Owl (EP.445) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Guest on today's sponsored insight is James Clark, the global head of institutional capital at Blue Owl, a leading public alternative asset manager with $270 billion in assets under management. James joined Doug Ostrover and Mark Lipschultz shortly after the firm's launch and has been instrumental in its explosive growth over the last eight years. Doug was a past guest on the show, and that conversation is replayed in the feed. Our conversation covers James's path to asset management, lessons he learned over a decade at Pimco, equally powerful lessons from his subsequent, if less successful stops, and the application of those lessons at Blue Al. We discussed product knowledge, relationship development, balancing capital raising needs with long-term partnerships, the evolution of the institutional and wealth channels, the importance of transparency, and the benefits of the”
2025-05-15 · Capital Allocators · James Clarke – Building Enduring Partnerships at Blue Owl (EP.445) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source