YouSaid · the spoken record

Josh Steiner

lines on the record: 72
first: 2026-05-18
most recent: 2026-05-18
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

“There's a difference between being polite and being kind. I grew up in a household where my parents certainly were both. I probably picked up too much on the politeness as opposed to the kindness. I've always been pretty well mannered. I could have afforded to be kinder over the years and I'm working on that.”
2026-05-18 · Capital Allocators · Making Mistakes – Josh Steiner (EP.502) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hypocrisy. I'm a believer that the things that bother you most in other people, the things that bother you about myself. And I try really not to be hypocritical. But I find it annoying when people say one thing and then do the other. As I've gotten older, I hope that I've gotten much less judgmental about a whole variety of things and probably more judgmental about hypocrisy.”
2026-05-18 · Capital Allocators · Making Mistakes – Josh Steiner (EP.502) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As a result of climate change, we don't remember this. There used to be a lot of snow. Shoveling snow was incredibly lucrative. I lived in a neighborhood where there were a number of older residents. I would be up early before school. I would go knock on their door, ring their bell, and ask them if they wanted their sidewalk and driveway shoveled. You could make what felt like an enormous amount of money before school even started, let alone if there was a snow day. It reminded me that being outdoors and doing hard work could be very satisfying. I felt wealthy at the time. And I don't think they were paying me that much, but it was terrific.”
2026-05-18 · Capital Allocators · Making Mistakes – Josh Steiner (EP.502) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love to hike. I am a happier person when I spend more time in nature. And it doesn't have to be in the Tetons or the dolomites or Fiji. It can be going for a walk in Central Park when we're at our house on Martha's Vineyard and going for walks in some of the preserves there. There's a lot of evidence that spending time in nature is good for your mind. Certainly, I think good for your soul. I'm definitely the beneficiary when I'm able to do it.”
2026-05-18 · Capital Allocators · Making Mistakes – Josh Steiner (EP.502) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About this, or how do I go about and cope with it? There was a recognition that most of us don't have the opportunity to work on these big monumental failures. We all make mistakes. The book has given people permission to talk about it and then some tools to deal with them more effectively.”
2026-05-18 · Capital Allocators · Making Mistakes – Josh Steiner (EP.502) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“International fame, Ted You know, it's very embarrassing. I can't go through an airport. Everyone just stopped me. Children running up to me on the street, the most satisfying part about this book is without a doubt, as an example, your willingness to talk about your mistake. Michael and I have been fortunate to go on a whole variety of television, the Good Morning America, Morning Joe, and then also spoken out at Microsoft, for example, or at the New Orleans Book Festival. After each of those things, the thing that has had the greatest impact on me is people's willingness to come up to me and say, thank you. And by the way, I made this mistake. Complete strangers who have revealed the most remarkable stories about their lives. Some of them had to do with very serious mistakes, which we don't really cover in the book, issues around substance of use or their involvement in the criminal justice system, some of them very personal. I was up at my old high school and then I met with a lot of students afterward. The number of students who came up to me one-on-one waited in line and said, this friend hurt me or I hurt my friend. What do you think?”
2026-05-18 · Capital Allocators · Making Mistakes – Josh Steiner (EP.502) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The sort of condemned fashion of system one and system two thinking, wise mind is a little bit easier to appreciate. We go into any investment with our rational mind. We think we're rational actors. We want to apply that rational prism to the information in front of us. If we don't remember that we're also driven by emotion, either our attraction to a particular business because we think it's interesting or an old schema where we made a previous investment that makes us fearful of that, we're unlikely to make as good investment decisions. I try as best I can, not always with perfect effect, to keep that wise mind in place, both my rational and my emotional mind when I'm looking at an opportunity.”
2026-05-18 · Capital Allocators · Making Mistakes – Josh Steiner (EP.502) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's one I like also, which is called The Wise Mind. Over the last 20, 30 years, there's been a change in a whole bunch of psychological literature starting a little bit earlier than that on something called cognitive behavioral therapy. For many years, we thought of therapy that it was all about the why. Why did you make this decision? What is it about your childhood? Why do you feel that way? And that's incredibly powerful. That's the basis for a lot of psychoanalysis and for talk therapy. Cognitive behavioral therapy and then ultimately dialectical behavioral therapy is a recognition that we are going to have these feelings. We need the tools to deal with them. It's trying to provide the tools to help us manage our anxiety, our fears. Coming out of DBT is a recognition that the best decisions are made what's known as the wise mind, a recognition that we need to use both our rational and our emotional minds to make a decision. In some ways you can think of this.”
2026-05-18 · Capital Allocators · Making Mistakes – Josh Steiner (EP.502) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Birthday party, and they're going off and they're passing pets around, and one of which is a giant snake. Suddenly you feel anxious about that snake, even though you didn't feel anxious about that pit full of them. In investing, there's a recognition that almost every compelling investment has an approach avoidance capacity. It's that willingness to understand what is compelling about it and what is making us fearful, not in a binary sense. It's the word and not but. That's why when we're looking at investment I don't like risks and attractions. These things aren't diametrically opposed. A more effective tool is to say, what do you have to believe to be true in order to be attracted to this? We are trying to be attracted, to be investors, we have to put money to work. Just thinking about the risk is ineffective.”
2026-05-18 · Capital Allocators · Making Mistakes – Josh Steiner (EP.502) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most decisions that we make involve both a desire to approach something and a desire to avoid that very thing itself. If you think about it within the context of travel, many people are curious about going to an exotic location. Let's just pick something which isn't so exotic anymore, but Japan. They love the food. They're intrigued by the history. Then they see a picture of the Japanese subway system. They think to themselves, there's no way I'm going to Japan. It's completely intimidating. I don't understand a word of the language. I'm going to get lost. They both have a desire to approach it. They're curious about it. And they're hesitant. They want to avoid it. Anxiety is caused when you want to do something, but you're fearful of it. We're not anxious about things that we have no desire to do. No one feels particularly anxious about falling into a pit full of vipers because you don't really face that as a possibility. You might well feel anxious if you're at your child's”
2026-05-18 · Capital Allocators · Making Mistakes – Josh Steiner (EP.502) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things that I liked about talking to people about the book is a recognition that different things resonate with different people. I'll give you a couple, and the answer may be none of these resonate, but maybe one of them does. In the 19th century, Jeremy Bentham goes off, the father of utilitarianism, and comes up with the concept that everything is pain or pleasure. Those are the two things we're motivated by the avoidance of pain and the desire for pleasure. We should judge decisions based on the net effect of those. How much pleasure are you providing relative to the pain that you might be causing? That binary approach is echoed a little bit when you think about fear and greed in the investing world. People think of themselves, am I greedy? Am I going to go for it? Am I fearful? And am I going to avoid it? In the 20th century, there was a concept that came along which worked somewhat better. That's the theory of approach.”
2026-05-18 · Capital Allocators · Making Mistakes – Josh Steiner (EP.502) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say you're making an investment decision. There's a lot of people talk about getting the group of people together, getting all the information on the table that are common in modern decision-making theory. Wondering if there's anything else that you uncovered from doing this work that would help people make better decisions?”
2026-05-18 · Capital Allocators · Making Mistakes – Josh Steiner (EP.502) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There were a lot of avenues that one would want to explore to understand this. The thing that we tried to do and we tried to do consistently both when we were interviewing people of the book and subsequently is to say you don't have to do it all at once. Just the act of your willingness to do it was very generous.”
2026-05-18 · Capital Allocators · Making Mistakes – Josh Steiner (EP.502) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very hard for people to talk about their mistakes. One of the things that we tried to do would be careful about was allowing them to go at their own pace. When you and I spoke before, it was clear that something that you hadn't done on this broadcast before and it wasn't something that you intuitively felt was an obvious thing to do. If this was ever something you wanted to explore, this isn't the moment to go deep. You have to start someplace. The mistake you described is very powerful because it cuts across all aspects of your life. I can hear that in your voice the way you talk about where your career has gone. You've talked about a personal relationship with David. You talked about the people pleasing aspect of your childhood. There's some things which are probably less emotionally fraught but might be very relevant, which is you were at a hockey game. That context is a very specific context, which may or may not have been the right place to speak to David. Maybe you were trying to signal something.”
2026-05-18 · Capital Allocators · Making Mistakes – Josh Steiner (EP.502) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You asked a question earlier, which is what techniques have we used if we had been doing this in the context of the book, I would have asked you a whole series of follow-up questions in fairness to you since we did tee this up before you had said I was allowed to ask you one, which I just did, and not more.”
2026-05-18 · Capital Allocators · Making Mistakes – Josh Steiner (EP.502) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have lied. David made many people's careers. He could have made mine had he chose to. After that day, he decidedly chose not to. That wasn't true to myself and my instincts of what the right way to behave was. I just followed the lead of someone telling me what to do, which also comes from deep in my childhood.”
2026-05-18 · Capital Allocators · Making Mistakes – Josh Steiner (EP.502) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I always wanted to be on his team. When I was in the office, there was a way of relating to him. It worked for me. Some of that was that jocularity. We'd make these side bets. I would always lose them. Kian Dean Takashi won every bet they ever made. That was part of it. The bigger problem was when I suggested he might want to think of investing. I knew that was something he would never do. I deeply understood how Yale invested and it wasn't that. At the time I had started a partnership with someone who had been quite successful. He had nudged me. You're going up there. Everything to him was a transaction. It wasn't a value that I held. It was certainly a value that he had held. I felt like I had to do that coming from a people-pleasing upbringing, trying to please everyone at the same time when they conflicted was not something I had wrestled with before. It still is difficult for me to understand where should my loyal”
2026-05-18 · Capital Allocators · Making Mistakes – Josh Steiner (EP.502) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thank you. You've had a very successful career in all sorts of ways. David is such a legend in our business that telling a story where you don't look flattering. You acknowledge that it had a real consequence in terms of your personal relationship with him somewhere between fraternal and paternal, also professionally. No one wants to be on the outs with someone as influential as David was. So thank you for doing that. That was generous of you. You've given some thought as to why you did it. What do you think the reasons are?”
2026-05-18 · Capital Allocators · Making Mistakes – Josh Steiner (EP.502) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Money with, and I was back on the team. This was a point in time where I had just started a hedge fund to funds, which was very black in his eyes. It was not something he thought well of. I went there and very much felt like I was back on the team. Kim Sargent was there the late Randy Kim, Seth Alexander. We were all there that night. Somewhere along the way, I made a comment to David in very much the jocular way we would in the office. Oh, I bet our fund's going to beat Yale's hedge fund portfolio because we're doing all these neat things with smaller managers. Maybe he should think of investing. That was not something that you said to David. I didn't know this till many years later as Randy Kim who told me that that day for many years I became back on the out with David probably for just having said that. I think I understand some of why it happened, but it was a big mistake.”
2026-05-18 · Capital Allocators · Making Mistakes – Josh Steiner (EP.502) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm going to go to one that relates to what you just said. I am driving to New Haven to join David for a hockey game and poker. I'm two years out of business school. I had worked for him for five years. It was about four years later. David, when I worked there was not only my greatest mentor, but also like a father, part fraternal, part paternal relationship. I think he had that with a lot of people that he mentored. He also is someone who when you're on the team, it was white and when you were off the team, it was black. He hadn't wanted me to leave to go to business school. So in those four years, I occupied an unusual gray role. There were times where I wasn't sure where I stood with him, which was very painful for me. And then there were times where things seemed like they were great. I left after business school, I joined a manager. Yale had”
2026-05-18 · Capital Allocators · Making Mistakes – Josh Steiner (EP.502) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the ones I find most effectively is going topsy turvy. And this is the moment. One of the things that has been most satisfying has been the opportunity for people to think and reflect on their own mistakes. Michael and I wrote this book in the hope that if we spoke openly about our mistakes and then encouraged other people in the book to talk about theirs, we would effectively give people permission to talk about theirs. And so, Ted.”
2026-05-18 · Capital Allocators · Making Mistakes – Josh Steiner (EP.502) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had before. It was clearly something that had been lacking in my leadership style, and I'm very grateful for Dan's willingness to confront me with it directly.”
2026-05-18 · Capital Allocators · Making Mistakes – Josh Steiner (EP.502) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're doing great. We're happy to have you here. We appreciate the intensity and the drive and the directness you bring to this. The people on your team do not feel like they know you. They don't really understand what's motivating you. I would encourage you to try to be a little bit more open. For a lot of my career, I had been in a hurry to get things done. I had been focused. I had been trying in the case in the investment business to drive great returns. In the case of what we were doing at Bloomberg to improve the operations, I don't think I appreciated the extent to which to be ineffective leader requires a level of transparency not only about what you think about the business, but also what you feel, how you're relating to the people around you, expressing disappointment and excitement, allowing my underlying ambitions, both for the business and for the people to come out more clearly led me to have much more honest and open conversations with people.”
2026-05-18 · Capital Allocators · Making Mistakes – Josh Steiner (EP.502) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I spend a lot of time on the investing side, and then I took a sabbatical move with my family to India. I came back and I thought I was going to go off and buy a business and try to run a business as opposed to investing in businesses. Instead of doing that, I went to work at Bloomberg, partly because I had such respect for Mike and partly Dan Doctoroff, who was running the business at the time. There were a bunch of businesses that they had either bought or built, which were underperforming. I went to work on the parts of Bloomberg where they had been disappointed in the results. I went into that having managed investment firms before and having been on the boards of very large companies, I had never managed thousands of employees before. It was a very different challenge than what I'd taken on. After probably the first six, eight months or so, Dan and I were sitting down and talking about how I was doing. We had put through a number of good changes and the team was growing in ways they hadn't before. Dan said to me,”
2026-05-18 · Capital Allocators · Making Mistakes – Josh Steiner (EP.502) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Provide him the independence and leeway that is appropriate for a CIO and at the same time continuing to exercise our fiduciary duty. That's a hard one to navigate. The best boards manage that probably as well as anything. We think of fiduciary duty, a most important duty is choosing that leader, whether it's the president of Yale or the CIO, then helping to set the strategy and then holding that individual accountable for executing on the strategy. The place where a lot of boards run into trouble is overstepping as it relates to not respecting the role of the executive or deferring too much. I'm constantly trying to be both respectful of the individuals who are doing their jobs and then remembering what my own fiduciary duties are as a board member. I'm quite sure that I do not always get it right.”
2026-05-18 · Capital Allocators · Making Mistakes – Josh Steiner (EP.502) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Happily, the investment committee limits the voice and role of people like me, which accounts for why it's been so successful. One of the things I had to learn is in its most formal sense, the delegation of authority, what really are the decisions that the executive team should be making? What are the ones that should be reserved for a committee or a board? I'm on the Yale Corporation and the issue is the same there as well. I don't think I always find that line perfectly. It's one of the things I've continued to try to improve, which is the recognition that in the case of the endowment near Matt Mendelson, who's a fantastic investor and a very good leader, respecting his role, recognizing that there's a committee place and structure for a reason. That committee has a set of obligations and duties to Yale, and finding the ability to respect Matt's role, to encourage it, to”
2026-05-18 · Capital Allocators · Making Mistakes – Josh Steiner (EP.502) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From David, but it went far beyond that. It was the mentorship and the values that he instilled in those teams that made him so distinguished.”
2026-05-18 · Capital Allocators · Making Mistakes – Josh Steiner (EP.502) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was fortunate to work with David. He was the OG as it relates to this business. He was very generous to me in a whole variety of respects, including putting me on that committee. I'm grateful for it because I learned a lot from him. I learned a lot from the quality of the people that he was able to recruit and retain. It's really astonishing the people who went off and left Yeom became the CIOs at other major endowments and it's just an incredible track record and the team that's there today led Mendelson is fantastic. Almost all the senior leadership was hired by David and mentored by David. David was the master at portfolio theory thinking about the efficient frontier and thinking about risk adjusted returns. I don't think people fully appreciate how adept he was and how much he cared about the people with whom he worked. People sometimes think that those individuals exclusively learn the technique.”
2026-05-18 · Capital Allocators · Making Mistakes – Josh Steiner (EP.502) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Vast majority of firms that I see and my friends are running are highly successful. I'm not going to be in the business of criticizing my peers. Almost all universally of whom have been more successful than I have. So close, you almost got me, but I'm not going to do it.”
2026-05-18 · Capital Allocators · Making Mistakes – Josh Steiner (EP.502) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Build a really interesting career, a satisfying one where you take on more responsibility, do even better financially. It's going to be within the constraints of what we think will drive great returns. We're not going to compromise those great returns in order to satisfy your career aspirations.”
2026-05-18 · Capital Allocators · Making Mistakes – Josh Steiner (EP.502) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Drives them to thinking I really need to be on the West Coast as well as the East Coast, or I need to understand or see opportunities in Europe as well as the United States. It's often driven at times by the fact that you have more junior colleagues who would like to take on more responsibility. You think about geographic growth and you think about AUM growth. Sometimes they can serve firms incredibly well. There are definitely times where both forms of growth can dilute the returns and lead to a drift in strategy relative to what made the firm successful initially. That's driven by the fact that you had people who wanted to grow their careers, but there hadn't been an honest conversation about whether in fact that desire to grow their careers was consistent with what you were trying to achieve for your investors. What really helps is transparency and honesty, explaining to people, this is what we are and this is what we aren't. We think we can help you.”
2026-05-18 · Capital Allocators · Making Mistakes – Josh Steiner (EP.502) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are human capital businesses. If you don't have the financial capital, you can't start one of these businesses and you can have the financial capital. And if you don't have great human capital, you're going to be unsuccessful. One of the mistakes I see investment firms making is not understanding how the career aspirations of the people who work there shape the investment strategy. I'll give you an example. You can start with a relatively small firm, two partners been off from someplace or start their own firm, and they have a couple of people working for them. They raise a fund and that fund does well, and then they raise a second fund, and that fund's doing okay. Those people who they hired six or seven, eight years ago understandably would like to take on more responsibility and perhaps they'd like to get paid a little more as well. How do you solve for that one of a couple ways? You raise a larger fund, that allows you to pay them more, great. Often you see people opening other offices. Why is that? Well, sometimes the investment strategy”
2026-05-18 · Capital Allocators · Making Mistakes – Josh Steiner (EP.502) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of her five or six direct reports are the likelihood that she's a really good manager of those people is quite high. The mistake that I made at quadrangle was not understanding Spending enough time making sure that I, as their colleague, in some cases their boss, was helping them achieve those aspirations.”
2026-05-18 · Capital Allocators · Making Mistakes – Josh Steiner (EP.502) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thought a lot about the difference between what looks like a really good manager, someone who reviews people carefully, has a careful compensation plan, who is clear in the feedback, and still not do the thing that ultimately I didn't do as well as I wish I had. And then I now view as one of the characteristics of a really good manager. When I go off in interview management teams, I'm thinking about making an investment in that company. One of the questions that I like to ask is how many direct reports you have. The manager or the CEO or the CFO will say, well, I have six. I say terrific. Why don't you walk me through those five or six? Tell me the career aspirations of each of those individuals. Tell me what she wants to do next in her life. What job is she trying to get to? Where is she going from here? The vast majority of the time, if you talk to a CEO and she can tell you what the career aspirations are.”
2026-05-18 · Capital Allocators · Making Mistakes – Josh Steiner (EP.502) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Institutions. They've made different choices. We had LPs who had made very, very significant commitments to illiquid assets going into the great financial crisis and felt very constrained from a liquidity perspective. And we saw other ones who had reserved a lot of capital and were looking to take advantage of the downturn. What we tried to do was to remember what we had said to them when we started, what commitments we had made to them and what commitments we felt that they had made to us. We went back and reviewed the marketing materials and our offering perspectives and what we'd said to them. We tried not to be too buffeted by that change in the environment. If we allowed ourselves to do that, then we were going to be constantly trying to solve for the person who complained the loudest. And that didn't seem fair to the people who made commitments under different circumstances.”
2026-05-18 · Capital Allocators · Making Mistakes – Josh Steiner (EP.502) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We saw that most acutely during the Great Financial Crisis. Many of us, myself included, thought that period of time in 07, 0809, was one of the most compelling opportunities to invest in generations. You saw assets trading a really depressed values. You were able to buy credit instruments which were providing equity type returns, notwithstanding the fact that they were very senior in the capital stack. At the same time, there were a number of our LPs who were focused almost exclusively on liquidity. their assets returned to them as quickly as they could and they didn't want to be making new commitments. There were other LPs who saw the opportunity similarly to the way we did and said yes please why aren't you drawing more capital and going out and doing it? It is unquestionably a problem in that overwhelmingly positive construct of private equity and hedge funds that you are going to find LPs who have divergent views. It's understandable. They represent different kinds of”
2026-05-18 · Capital Allocators · Making Mistakes – Josh Steiner (EP.502) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we recognize that we may not have the liquidity that we want when we want it, that you're not going to change your mind and suddenly come to me and ask for your money on short notice, that I have the flexibility to ride through cycles and really high quality business. That's terrific alignment. My guess is you can achieve really good returns. The problem comes when well-intentioned people either change their mind or aren't as transparent as they should be about their objectives. And that leads to a misalignment. That's often the problem.”
2026-05-18 · Capital Allocators · Making Mistakes – Josh Steiner (EP.502) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Question that I would be asking myself is alignment. What are you trying to achieve? If you're working with a group of institutional investors or families and there's really clear alignment about the objective, the opportunity to be as successful is every bit as great as if you're investing on your own behalf. The problem comes when firms are neither as transparent as they should be about alignment or fundamentally structured in ways that don't allow for that alignment. Having seen so many of these firms over the years and been involved in a number of them, that's the most important question. Can you look your partners in the eye and say your incentives and my incentives, your objectives and my objectives are as closely aligned as possible? If the objective on your behalf is to have long-duration capital that is compounding over an extended period of time and I, as the GP, are willing to put a lot of my own capital to achieve that.”
2026-05-18 · Capital Allocators · Making Mistakes – Josh Steiner (EP.502) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As soon as you're managing money on behalf of anybody else, it's a totally different ballgame. You have an obligation to go off and run a completely different process, won a real diligence, understanding the structure, protecting yourself on the downside of you can, reading the legal documents carefully, getting the best advice you can. It's a very different process.”
2026-05-18 · Capital Allocators · Making Mistakes – Josh Steiner (EP.502) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've been doing both, but SSW, we have committed capital from a series of families. That committed capital is what allows A pretty binary choice when you're managing anyone other's money. I don't care if it's your mother's, your cousins, a few families, or large amounts of institutional capital. As soon as you're a fiduciary for anybody else, the standard is entirely different. And the process you have to use is entirely different. I think it's appropriate, maybe foolish, but I don't feel guilty about the fact that on occasion someone will call me up. They're working on an investment. They see a company they think is appealing. The conversation lasts about seven minutes. I make a commitment. Happily, it's money that is my own and my family's. I have a fiduciary duty to no one but ourselves. If it feels like a plausible opportunity, if it's something about which I'm very curious, it will lead to other opportunities. I don't feel compelled to run an extensive diligence process. It may be unwise not to do that. I certainly don't feel any compunction.”
2026-05-18 · Capital Allocators · Making Mistakes – Josh Steiner (EP.502) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A dynamic you intimated that there's a difference when you're managing money for other people on your own now for the last bunch of years you've mostly been managing your own. What's different in trying to make good decisions and make fewer mistakes when it's your own money or there's very few number of people you're serving compared to say quadrangle regular private equity business?”
2026-05-18 · Capital Allocators · Making Mistakes – Josh Steiner (EP.502) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Made me risk adverse. I thought about the kinds of deals to which I'm most attracted. I'm attracted to deals which have a disproportionate emphasis on protecting your downside. The less good growth investor as it relates to managing other people's money than I am looking at risk adjusted returns. Many of the deals that have worked out best for the firms in which I've led are ones which had very attractive risk adjusted returns because there was some embedded downside protection.”
2026-05-18 · Capital Allocators · Making Mistakes – Josh Steiner (EP.502) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We invested in distressed dead as well as doing regular way private equity. There are times when within the private equity context, we were able to invest in the debt of a company, often a company that where we had looked at acquiring the equity. An LBO would have gotten done. We didn't win that process, went to a higher bidder. A couple years went by. Business may not have been doing as well as they want. And we were able to buy the debt on attractive terms. Occasionally that debt would move in our favor more rapidly than we had assumed it would, often for reasons that had nothing to do with our basic investment judgment. The best example would be a change in the interest rate environment. I'm not an investor who would make an investment decision based on the macro environment. The macro environment can move sometimes in your favor, sometimes against you. When it moves in your favor, you shouldn't be patting yourself on the back unless that was an explicit part of your investment judgment.”
2026-05-18 · Capital Allocators · Making Mistakes – Josh Steiner (EP.502) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“His view was you had an obligation to keep gathering facts, to debate the issues. Bob was excellent at empowering everyone in the room who had expertise to speak up. He wanted to hear from everybody. He would just wait and he would gather more information. Once he made a decision, if he felt that he had run a process where he was able to avail himself of all the available information, he didn't look backward. That's very different, however, than if you make a decision and you didn't do that. You didn't avail yourself of all the information that you could. That's a process failure. Some decisions or mistakes because of bad process. Some decisions don't turn out well. That doesn't necessarily mean you ran a bad process.”
2026-05-18 · Capital Allocators · Making Mistakes – Josh Steiner (EP.502) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bob Rubin has a great line, which is you should never judge a decision by its outcome. Bob, when I worked for him in Washington, was awesome at this. Sometimes to the point where his staff would be unbelievably frustrated, someone would come to him and say, you know, Mr. Secretary, there's the following decision that we have to make. He'd say, okay, when do I need to make that decision by? They'd say two weeks from Tuesday, and he'd say, terrific. There would be 19 meetings between the moment he learned he had to make that decision and two weeks from Tuesday.”
2026-05-18 · Capital Allocators · Making Mistakes – Josh Steiner (EP.502) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Investment committees, in my experience, are very good about talking about the specifics of this underlying investment. Here's this company. Why do we think its cash flow characteristics are? What's the competition like? We were much less adept at discussing what's going on in the firm or what's going on in the individuals investing process that might lead to a less good outcome. If in the beginning of quadrangle we had an open conversations about the fact that we were all feeling pressure to invest, if we had open conversations about the difference between growth, investing and more traditional buyout investing, as well as discussions about very specific investments, we would have made mistakes for sure. We would have been open about the fact that we were all feeling pressures that might have led us to make decisions that we regretted.”
2026-05-18 · Capital Allocators · Making Mistakes – Josh Steiner (EP.502) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of small investment, we probably got back half of that investment. We didn't lose all the investors' money. But it was my first deal and it was not a good one.”
2026-05-18 · Capital Allocators · Making Mistakes – Josh Steiner (EP.502) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In Cleveland. You're not very incentivized for improving the efficiency of your station. You're certainly not incentivized if you're able to run the newest ad, the fastest. You're highly disincentivized to make any mistake. The mistake for them would be if that technology breaks and the ad doesn't run at the right moment or you run the wrong ad. They want to stick with the technology that works. Pathfire showed up and said, great news. Here's what we'll do. You don't have to worry about the video cassettes. All you have to do is install this new equipment. By the way, the insertion process is going to change. You have to train some text differently. The stations all looked at them and said, not my problem. The mistake was underestimating the hesitancy of people who are running mission-critical roles to change the way they do business. There was another mistake. We were impatient. We felt the heat of having raised the money and then not gotten it to work. Fortunately, it was”
2026-05-18 · Capital Allocators · Making Mistakes – Josh Steiner (EP.502) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Were a bunch of mistakes. Some of them had to do with knowing what you know and knowing what you don't know. In the case of Pathfire, the premise behind it was terrific. It's hard to imagine in today's digital world. In two thousand most television stations were still inserting ads using video cassettes. The way the business worked. Someone wanted to run a national ad. You sent out video cassettes to all the national affiliates. There's a control room which is inserting these cassets in at the right time, and you're hoping it all meshes up. It was incredibly inefficient. It prevented both the advertisers and the television companies from updating regularly for improving their performance. Pathfire had a simple and clever idea. Let's just distribute those ads digitally. It sounds obvious. What we didn't appreciate is how conservative some businesses actually are. And I use that in the lowercase meaning of the word conservative. Imagine you're the chief engineer at the network affiliate.”
2026-05-18 · Capital Allocators · Making Mistakes – Josh Steiner (EP.502) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We started quadrangle in 2000. It was right after the internet bubble had busted. Three of us, Steve Radner, Peter Zersky, and I had worked together in M&A and our fourth partner, David Tanner, had a distinguished private equity background. We all knew each other really well. That was part of the thesis, that we didn't want to start a firm with people we didn't know. It's very different to go from investment banking into investing. Brian Roberts, who was the CEO of Comcast, still the controlling shareholder, said to us, I'm so glad you guys are doing this because you're finally in a business where you can actually keep score. His point was, it's fine to give advice when you're in the investing business. You know whether you're in fact producing returns. We raised a billion dollars primarily on the back of Steve's reputation, certainly much more than my own. Then we got to work. The first deal I worked on was a company called Pathfire, based in Atlanta, Georgia. It had a terrific premise and a really”
2026-05-18 · Capital Allocators · Making Mistakes – Josh Steiner (EP.502) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source