YouSaid · the spoken record

Scott Kleinman

lines on the record: 87
first: 2026-01-19
most recent: 2026-01-19
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

“Is going to sound funny, but for the most part, it's turned out the way I expected it to. I always believed that my hard work and the head of my shoulders would get me to success. I never really envisioned how much success or what success means monetarily or otherwise. And I don't spend a lot of time dwelling on that. Went to Wharton. I knew I wanted to be in the financial industry, got out of school, started down the path, and had a vision. I was drawn immediately to private equity, an alternative asset management has continued to evolve. I'm one of these folks that you put one foot in front of the other and you don't think about it too much and you don't really spend a lot of time smelling the roses. You just think about what you can be doing next. I had a sense I'd be successful and never really put a specific quantification around it.”
2026-01-19 · Capital Allocators · Scott Kleinman – Apollo's Integrated Alternatives Platform (EP.481) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why are you talking to me? Go. Secondly, how is it that you have a Barmitzvah age son? I don't even have kids. And he said he got married young, and they had always talked about kids, but they finally just said, screw it, we're having kids. And he said to me, you're never going to feel like you're ready to have a kid, but just do it because once you have it, you're going to wish you did it five years earlier. I now repeat that advice to every newlywed couple that I come across because it is so true. You just want all the time in the world with your children. Now is the parent of adult children. I wish I had more time with them.”
2026-01-19 · Capital Allocators · Scott Kleinman – Apollo's Integrated Alternatives Platform (EP.481) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I was on the phone with my financing attorney. We were talking for about 10 minutes, and then he said, Scott, I hate to do this to you, but can I call you back either later or tomorrow? And I said, well, sure, but what's up? It's like, well, I'm about to go to my son's bar mitzvah. I'm like, you're about to go to your son's bar mitzvah. This is a lawyer who only seemed a couple years older than I was at the time. First off.”
2026-01-19 · Capital Allocators · Scott Kleinman – Apollo's Integrated Alternatives Platform (EP.481) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I was like, okay, great, thanks. Very specific. But this is one that actually has a lot of personal application and a lot of work application. We are all type A personality. If you ask me the opinion, which China pattern do I like, of course I have an opinion, but do I really care? At the end of the day, if I pick the one that she likes great, if I pick the one that she doesn't, then that's a half an hour conversation over the same is true in work. There's a handful of things that I really care about, but if you're going to be an effective manager, not micromanage, focus on the things you care about, let people make the last 20% decisions. Let them make their way on the things that aren't the most consequential. That's been a great piece of advice that has shaped not only my personal life, but my managerial style. The other one, which is truly a personal one, I was married probably for a couple years. It was a Saturday morning. I was in the office as I normally was on a Saturday morning. We were working on a deal.”
2026-01-19 · Capital Allocators · Scott Kleinman – Apollo's Integrated Alternatives Platform (EP.481) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Give you two because they're great and they were life changing. One I had just gotten engaged folks around the office were giving me congratulations and a former partner here. I'll give him a shout out, Andy Afric, said to me, I'm going to give you a piece of advice. Never tell your wife which China pattern you like until you know which one she likes.”
2026-01-19 · Capital Allocators · Scott Kleinman – Apollo's Integrated Alternatives Platform (EP.481) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Muscles versus if I can get my capital to work for me, you can do lots of things. And that was the first eye-opening moment of that.”
2026-01-19 · Capital Allocators · Scott Kleinman – Apollo's Integrated Alternatives Platform (EP.481) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bring us back to the early days of Edgemont, where we both grew up. My first real summer job was working at a toy store in Scarzo Village. You may remember it. It was called Child's Play. It's no longer there. It was a small single proprietorship owned by a fascinating and aggressive woman. There were two other older women who worked there and me, a 15-year-old boy who they shoved down in the stockroom for nine hours a day and didn't really let out very often. What did I learn from that job? I would say physical labor is hard work, that there had to be a better way than the hours in the day that you can put in. I wasn't against hard work. My first job out of college working at Smith Barney, working 100 hours a week, sleeping under my desk two or three nights a week. It wasn't the hard work, but it was the ability to see the old Andrew Carnegie. I can only do so much based on the labor of my...”
2026-01-19 · Capital Allocators · Scott Kleinman – Apollo's Integrated Alternatives Platform (EP.481) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm only in the first or second inning of this journey, but I've done it a bunch of times and it is a lot more fun than you would think, certainly coming from a small suburban East Coast town. But it's also given me a real appreciation for the two sides of the gun argument coming from a household that was very rapidly anti-gun. Now two years into this journey, I can totally see responsible gun ownership and responsible gun usage as part of sporting activity is part and parcel of a lot of people's lives. So it's a trickier issue than I think folks sitting here in New York think.”
2026-01-19 · Capital Allocators · Scott Kleinman – Apollo's Integrated Alternatives Platform (EP.481) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A couple years ago, I started getting into hunting of all things. It's something that for the last 30 years I would have loved to have done. It's always been an interest of mine. For better or for worse, I married a woman who is virulently anti-gun and anti-killing things for the last 28 years. I've suppressed that interest. But a couple years ago, I turned 50 and I said, I'm going to figure this out.”
2026-01-19 · Capital Allocators · Scott Kleinman – Apollo's Integrated Alternatives Platform (EP.481) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Investments are going to separate from those who are just buying what's available. And that's going to be the difference between who succeeds and can continue to have a premium product versus who is just providing a commoditized product and economics will follow accordingly.”
2026-01-19 · Capital Allocators · Scott Kleinman – Apollo's Integrated Alternatives Platform (EP.481) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's fascinating. The constraint on our business is clearly going to be the provision of good assets, good investments. If I'm right and that institutional investors are going to continue growing their allocations to private assets and wealth investors are going to continue growing their allocations to private assets. And 401k is going to open up to private assets. That's a $13 trillion market that has essentially zero private assets in it. Traditional asset managers, i.e. mutual funds, ETFs, they're going to start injecting some amount of private assets blended into their products. The demand for private assets is only going in one direction. And that direction may be pretty vertical, pretty fast. So those operators who can find and get ahead of and continue to generate interesting bespoke.”
2026-01-19 · Capital Allocators · Scott Kleinman – Apollo's Integrated Alternatives Platform (EP.481) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In general, institutional LPs recognize the value of private assets across the board. And institutional LPs have been ahead of the curve compared to traditional public investors or what have you on private assets in their portfolio and understanding what private assets can do to help the portfolio. And so whether you're talking about private equity or private credit, infrastructure, other asset categories, there's still a healthy demand. We mentioned a few minutes ago the private equity cycle being a little bit lower on the monetization side, which has put some pressure on certain institutional investors to be able to deploy private equity capital at the same pace because they've gotten a little bit less back. That's starting to right itself as portfolios in general continue to grow. Otherwise, across the board, allocations continue to go up in”
2026-01-19 · Capital Allocators · Scott Kleinman – Apollo's Integrated Alternatives Platform (EP.481) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right product, it's not going to give the client, i.e. the wealth client, a good experience in the long run. It goes back to being long-term greedy versus short-term greedy. I have peers who think will give you the exact opposite argument that I just gave you. I guess time will tell. Perhaps we've missed out on a big business opportunity to pursue this, but we're okay with that as a firm. We have a lot of other things going on. We do have a number of other equity products in the lab that soon enough are going to be coming out that could be interesting for investors that solve some of these issues that I'm talking about.”
2026-01-19 · Capital Allocators · Scott Kleinman – Apollo's Integrated Alternatives Platform (EP.481) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The access and availability of private equity to the next tier of investors, the problem is the liquidity mismatch there is even more profound because look at the current PE environment right now. We're going on to year four, year five of meaningfully depressed realizations for the market in general. I'll put aside in, Apollo's had some really nice monetizations, but for the industry, you ask anyone, it's been way below where it's supposed to be. And that could go on for a while. Had there been a huge pool of investors in private equity semi-liquid products, and they wanted to start getting their money back, or if we hit a downturn now and they want their money back, they're going to be stuck for a while. We don't think it's a great product. So we have decided not to bring a semi-liquid private equity product. We have a variety of semi-liquid other products, but for private equity, we've made the decision this isn't the”
2026-01-19 · Capital Allocators · Scott Kleinman – Apollo's Integrated Alternatives Platform (EP.481) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is something Apollo and I feel passionate about. The semi-liquid products coming to market is for a lot of asset categories a really interesting and really good asset class. In the credit market, for example, you could get to a point where investors want to redeem. They want their money back. They can't necessarily get it. They get gated, say, in a semi-liquid product. But credit is inherently self-liquidating. Weighted average life of about three years eventually if a fund stops taking in new money it'll allow those credit redemptions to run off and investors will get their money back in a reasonable period of time you go to the other end of the spectrum and that's private equity we have seen a number of folks bring private equity semi-liquid products to market those things seem to be selling pretty well wealth investors would like access to private equity and that does increase”
2026-01-19 · Capital Allocators · Scott Kleinman – Apollo's Integrated Alternatives Platform (EP.481) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the convergence of private and public securities, and particularly in the private equity world, there's so much potential demands coming from the wealth channel. We saw in the private credit side, there's a certain How do you think about the potential risk of liquidity mismatches working their way into the private equity part of the ecosystem?”
2026-01-19 · Capital Allocators · Scott Kleinman – Apollo's Integrated Alternatives Platform (EP.481) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Enough potential optimism to keep the dream alive. Each quarter, each six months will turn over another card and will see how that's shaping up. But that's representing at least a couple percent of GDP growth right now. That's driving massive investment in infrastructure and ship manufacturing and energy and all of these things. It's touching lots of different parts of the whole system.”
2026-01-19 · Capital Allocators · Scott Kleinman – Apollo's Integrated Alternatives Platform (EP.481) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have an economy right now that is being extensively fueled by AI CapEx. Valuations in the public equity markets are increasingly tied to a handful of companies that have gone very long AI that have made multi-trillion dollars worth of commitments to continuing to invest in that. There's an expectation of ROI on that capital. If those ROIs don't come to pass, I don't think the whole system is going bankrupt, but that clearly will have a weighing effect on the markets. Certainly, the biggest hyperscalers will be okay, but that cascades down to many, many players, some of whom have gotten very levered to this. There's big embedded risk there. Six months ago, no one was talking about this. It's shaved a little bit off the rose, but still the rose is blooming. I don't think it's flipped over because I don't think we know yet what the right answer is.”
2026-01-19 · Capital Allocators · Scott Kleinman – Apollo's Integrated Alternatives Platform (EP.481) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not really ready to roll out. They're still in the lab here. Have to wait and see one precursor to that. We have been scaling over the last several years our hybrid business. Hybrid is forms of equity that are more downside protected. So not swinging for the 20% rate of return per year, but low to mid teens, net rates of return that give you more downside protection, things that look and smell like debt but have enough equity levers to give you higher returns. We have built some fairly large pools of capital serving that structured equity market. That's one category of. It'll be on the back of that that we grow into some of these other things that I've been alluding to.”
2026-01-19 · Capital Allocators · Scott Kleinman – Apollo's Integrated Alternatives Platform (EP.481) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of oversight and management. Maybe that's what active management means. My only point is there are lots of ways that over the next five years we will begin to bring other forms of equity to investors that isn't necessarily private equity, i.e. levered equity buyout type capital that gives premium to the long-term S&P with more stability, more downside protection, and equivalent diversification, and even potentially a degree of liquidity that private equity doesn't necessarily bring. These are the types of things that you're going to see us grow in our equity business over the next five years.”
2026-01-19 · Capital Allocators · Scott Kleinman – Apollo's Integrated Alternatives Platform (EP.481) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“300 basis points. What used to be possible is no longer possible 95% of active asset managers don't beat their index because the indexation has become so big a majority of the flows on public exchanges are passive at this point. If you're not in 10 stocks, if you're in nine of the ten, you can't beat the index. It's become really hard. But what if we could do that? What if saying active isn't necessarily about picking stocks? It's about bringing private equity type skills to a more diversified portfolio with less leverage than PE does involve the risk of loss. We think we do a really good job. We don't have that often. But when you put a decent amount of leverage on a company, there's always risk that that equity value goes to zero. But what if there was a way to do that in a way that was more diversified, bringing the private equity skill set?”
2026-01-19 · Capital Allocators · Scott Kleinman – Apollo's Integrated Alternatives Platform (EP.481) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's only so much you can deploy in private equity. When you are making six or eight consequential decisions a year, there's only so much capital you can deploy on that basis. In the credit business, instead of buying 100 million of this particular bond, I can buy 200 million. The scalability is always there. We're 750 billion of credit. BlackRock's what, 13 trillion. There's just a much more scalable side of the credit business than there is of the private equity business. I do think there are other categories of equity that isn't private equity that weren't scratching the surface on over time. You will see us be one of the leaders, if not take the lead in. The concept of active management, for example, when you talk about active managers in the public equity environment, trying to beat the long-term S&P by two or three.”
2026-01-19 · Capital Allocators · Scott Kleinman – Apollo's Integrated Alternatives Platform (EP.481) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the equity side of the business, Mark has said you don't necessarily see that the $25 billion fund becomes the $50, becomes the $75, becomes the 100 the way that private credit has scaled over time. Curious why you think that's the case.”
2026-01-19 · Capital Allocators · Scott Kleinman – Apollo's Integrated Alternatives Platform (EP.481) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's part of our ethos. When I talk about the Apollo culture, it starts with we are an investor's investor. We look at investing not as in how do we grow the asset manager, but how do we make good defensive investments? We are constantly trading the last percent of upside for downside protection across every asset class that we invest in. That starts from the investment committee on down, no matter what asset class we operate in. If we don't like the risk return in a certain area, we would sooner not deploy the capital or even give capital back than just deploy in the next best available thing in that asset class that you gave me money for if we don't think it's a good investment because we're putting our own money in it in such a big scale.”
2026-01-19 · Capital Allocators · Scott Kleinman – Apollo's Integrated Alternatives Platform (EP.481) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Clearly, you have to say we are late cycle. Now, there's been a reset because when the cost of capital was so low, when the high yield index was four and a half percent, you could put a lot of debt on companies and cover that cash flow as those companies are having to refinance at a higher rate, that 4.5% bond is now 7% or 8 or 9 percent, that's going to put a little bit of pressure on things. But this is really a function of when the US economy cools off. I would have thought it would have happened by now. It hasn't. We'll keep cautiously watching. Certainly in our portfolios, we are more defensive. Our private equity portfolio is more defensive than most of our competitors. Our credit portfolio is for sure much higher rated, much less leveraged, much less portfolio leverage, our private lending portfolio has a fraction of the pick loans or other aggressive things that you see at late cycle than most of the markets.”
2026-01-19 · Capital Allocators · Scott Kleinman – Apollo's Integrated Alternatives Platform (EP.481) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Technical reset back in 22 when you pump that much money into a system inevitably inflation was going to rear its head, it surprised us that it took so long, shows you maybe the resiliency and stability of the US economy. But 2022, inflation rears up to 9-10%. The Fed had to then go raise rates from basically free to call it 5%. We've been drifting back down, but inflation isn't gone. That caused a reset in pricing, but it didn't really trigger an economic slowdown. It's pretty remarkable. The Fed jacked rates 500 basis points two and a half years ago, and the U.S. economy has kept powering on. Even now, our”
2026-01-19 · Capital Allocators · Scott Kleinman – Apollo's Integrated Alternatives Platform (EP.481) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You were asking a more macro question Where are we in the cycle? While I'd love to profess to have a crystal ball, we're clearly getting long in the tooth. We haven't had a real credit cycle since 2009. The post-GFC rates went to zero, stayed there. The central banks used whatever tools necessary to keep the party rolling from an economy standpoint since then. look like there might have been a credit cycle in covid, but guess what? Within three weeks, central banks poured another five, six trillion dollars into the capital markets and everything was good again. Nothing bad certainly from a credit standpoint really impacted things. Then, of course, all of the fiscal support that has gone on over the last decade as well has just kept the credit cycle going.”
2026-01-19 · Capital Allocators · Scott Kleinman – Apollo's Integrated Alternatives Platform (EP.481) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Moving away from public versus private credit because ultimately credit is credit. Public versus private really only speaks to who the holder is. Credit is simply the provision of debt capital to companies. The ultimate performance through the next cycle is going to be more determined based on the quality of the underwriting than was this a private credit fund or a public credit fund. I know that wasn't the crux of your question, but I couldn't miss the opportunity to hit on that.”
2026-01-19 · Capital Allocators · Scott Kleinman – Apollo's Integrated Alternatives Platform (EP.481) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Liquid and safe and private was illiquid and risky, while post GFC, that's been converging, and the way you cut the asset management industry in five or ten years, I'm not sure it's going to be based on public and private. It'll be based on other risk categories, but that's not a good definition of what's risky and what's not risky anymore. I think you're already starting to see that change by definition, you're going to see those worlds start to come together.”
2026-01-19 · Capital Allocators · Scott Kleinman – Apollo's Integrated Alternatives Platform (EP.481) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We don't spend a lot of time thinking about that. We spend a lot of time thinking about where's the puck going and what skills do we need to get from here to there and how do we go build it. We've been clear over the last four or five years continuing to scale our origination, continuing to scale our delivery to the wealth management side of the industry has been an important piece. In the coming years, we've been vocal figuring out how we're going to be accessing the 401k market, the traditional asset manager, so the mutual fund market, the ETF market, those are some of the places we're going now. Some of our competitors are starting to go there as well. I consider our competition to be some of the larger alternative asset managers, but also some of the traditional asset managers, this world of public and private that used to be so far apart where public was”
2026-01-19 · Capital Allocators · Scott Kleinman – Apollo's Integrated Alternatives Platform (EP.481) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You mentioned a couple times different aspects of something about your competition as you think strategically about the business, about growth, how do you consider your competitors, even if you're just thinking the competitors as the other large alternative asset managers, in where you take the direction of Apollo.”
2026-01-19 · Capital Allocators · Scott Kleinman – Apollo's Integrated Alternatives Platform (EP.481) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For us, it is about a specific asset category or specific skill set that we need that is going to either take too long or we're too far behind to go build ourselves. But where it's narrow enough and focused enough where we're coming in and we have a high degree of likelihood this is going to be successful. The hardest type would be for one PE firm to go buy another PE firm. There is more dissynergies than there's actual synergies in something like that. If you look at the acquisitions we've done, we've picked up specific skill sets in origination or specific small technology tuck-ins where we either have to go spend a bunch of money to build some internal technology or we've been able to go pick up an interesting startup or things like that. That's been the type of acquisitions that we've done.”
2026-01-19 · Capital Allocators · Scott Kleinman – Apollo's Integrated Alternatives Platform (EP.481) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tool to make us run a more efficient, better governed company, but it comes with cost, running a public company and the legal and compliance and all that good stuff that you need. That's not a small operation. The one thing that I would have thought we would have done more, having a currency for acquisitions was one of the reasons we went public. It hasn't materialized in the way we would have thought at the time. We tend to do a better job building our own businesses than going out and buying huge asset managers. The asset management industry is fraught with bad M&A. It's hard to merge two completely disparate cultures. Tuck-ins are fine, but bringing in big stock mergers are tricky in the asset management industry where your people are your asset. That's the ebb and flow at this point in time. It's a scale question. There's only a handful of alternative asset managers that have”
2026-01-19 · Capital Allocators · Scott Kleinman – Apollo's Integrated Alternatives Platform (EP.481) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's different now than it was, say, twelve or thirteen years ago when we went public. It's tough to be a public company. We just got into the S&P last year. To be a successful public company, you need a big diversified footprint. You need a scale that's relevant. You think about the concentration in the public equity markets today. Don't even get me started on the brokenness of the public markets. You need a big diversified business, single category asset managers. You're generally just not going to be of a scale that's going to be relevant. To be a five, seven, ten billion dollar equity public company, it may not be worth it for a lot of folks at this point. You're never going to get the interest level from investors. You need the breadth and scale to be able to do that. Now, the benefits, it's been an amazing unifying currency for us. It's been an amazing disciplinary.”
2026-01-19 · Capital Allocators · Scott Kleinman – Apollo's Integrated Alternatives Platform (EP.481) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Scheme of things in private equity and all alternatives, there aren't that many companies that are public. You mentioned the value that brings in aligning people in compensation. What do you see as those strengths and then some of the weaknesses of being public and why there aren't more companies who have done it?”
2026-01-19 · Capital Allocators · Scott Kleinman – Apollo's Integrated Alternatives Platform (EP.481) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Apollo citizen two, every employee at Apollo gets a portion of their comp in Apollo stock, and the stock only goes up if all the ships are rising, not if some and not the others, most importantly, the reason this integrated platform works is because I spend 10% of my time helping you on your deal in some unaffiliated fund make your deal better, and you spend 10% of your time helping some other and someone else helps me make my next deal better. That flywheel is what keeps this working. If all the benefit went from this direction to that direction, I don't care what the financial incentives are, people would throw their hands up and say, I'm not doing that. But because the system is a flywheel and our people see the benefit flowing in all directions,”
2026-01-19 · Capital Allocators · Scott Kleinman – Apollo's Integrated Alternatives Platform (EP.481) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're absolutely right. Fortunately for us, we went public a decade plus ago. The Apollo stock is an amazing tool to do that. We pride ourselves on running an integrated platform. The financial industry is very asset class focused. This is my asset class. This is your asset class. This is the next asset class. The whole industry was built on living within those asset classes. We've created enormous value by finding the spaces in between and connecting those dots, bringing the right type of capital for the right type of risk return. In order to do that, you need the whole organization rowing together. We call it our integrated platform. That takes a lot of work and a lot of effort. But when you go back to incentives to make that work, how do you do that? Well, for one, it goes back to everybody's bonus to some extent is based on a qualitative where they go.”
2026-01-19 · Capital Allocators · Scott Kleinman – Apollo's Integrated Alternatives Platform (EP.481) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In order to do that, you have to get incentives right. It's tricky enough when there's a small group of people in a pot of carry to go around. How have you thought conceptually about how you incent your people so that they're aligned the way you want and they're rowing in the direction you want?”
2026-01-19 · Capital Allocators · Scott Kleinman – Apollo's Integrated Alternatives Platform (EP.481) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The assessment of what fits in the box and what doesn't fit in the box ultimately we want the top of the top all the time everywhere because it's not just about judgment, it's about culture and fit and bringing the right ethos to what we do every day. We're a business where your assets walk at the door every night. I used to say in private equity those are the hardest types of businesses to go buy. I'd much rather buy business where your physical plant, your fixed assets are just there. businesses where your people walk out every night and your assets are your people. That's a lot trickier and you're much more reliant on the business model and the leadership to get it right.”
2026-01-19 · Capital Allocators · Scott Kleinman – Apollo's Integrated Alternatives Platform (EP.481) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is the rub. That is the whole shoot and match. We have two fundamental types of businesses. We have businesses that make a small number of decisions each year that have very consequential outcomes. And then we have other businesses that make thousands of decisions a week. And any one of those decisions is not going to have the most consequential outcome. The type of judgment and type of assessment you need sitting atop each are different. You need that judgment and that assessment to go way down in the organization in the former. The latter you need the right people with judgment sitting on top making sure the guardrails are right and the processes are right and those other businesses are much more about execution. It's the sourcing the flow and finding the right types of situations for that small group of underwriters to make”
2026-01-19 · Capital Allocators · Scott Kleinman – Apollo's Integrated Alternatives Platform (EP.481) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you start with 13 people, the top 1% of the top of what you saw at banks, you'd like to think the 5,000 are still that top 1%, but inevitably when you grow, it's hard to have that same level of individual excellence. How do you think about scaling the judgment and the experience that came from a smaller group of people to a much larger group of people”
2026-01-19 · Capital Allocators · Scott Kleinman – Apollo's Integrated Alternatives Platform (EP.481) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Been there, no one bats a thousand, bringing your partners in, talking about what can you do, how can you restructure the debt, what can you do operationally, getting others and their experiences involved is absolutely critical. We've always done a better job assessing how we can be better has always been a core part of the Apollo culture.”
2026-01-19 · Capital Allocators · Scott Kleinman – Apollo's Integrated Alternatives Platform (EP.481) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Growth, we were a 13 person organization, not that long ago in the grand scheme of things, managing 5,000 people across almost two dozen offices. Sometimes you grow too fast. You got to pull back. You got to assess what's working, what's not, and then make adjustments. One of the things Apollo has always done well, and this goes back to the days when we were a small group sitting around an investment committee table, we made a big deal about focusing on the deals that go wrong. private equity guys only like talking about their winners when i was leading private equity we would have what i'd call near miss review not just the deals that went wrong but the deals that went well but but for the skin of our teeth could have gone the other way what did we miss and what can we do better but apollo you historically didn't get in trouble for doing a bad deal you got in trouble for not talking about it 12 18 24 months before you hit the wall because we've all”
2026-01-19 · Capital Allocators · Scott Kleinman – Apollo's Integrated Alternatives Platform (EP.481) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just because you believe you have the right answer doesn't mean that everybody's going to get it right away or even agree with you. We're blessed that our CEO, Mark Rowan, is one of the greatest communicators, certainly in the financial industry today, sets a tone for the whole organization that has made it easier to drive in that direction. You can look at a lot of our competitors who tell a fine story, but it's not the same. I really do believe we do a better job, a more authentic job. That is the thing that we've learned is anytime you're trying to tell your story with a spin or with a pitch or you're out there just hawking product, it doesn't really work as well as you think. We've learned along the way to be incredibly authentic. Why are we doing what we're doing? Tell it like we see it. The good, the bad, and the ugly, where we've made mistakes, fess up to the mistakes and talk about how we're fixing it. And that has worked really well. Other things with...”
2026-01-19 · Capital Allocators · Scott Kleinman – Apollo's Integrated Alternatives Platform (EP.481) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Today we touch probably 25 or 30 regulators around the globe because insurance is a 300, 400 year old industry. We were doing things differently. We said we have a better way to do this and we want to show you that we had to find a way to be able to communicate effectively to our regulators around the globe so that they initially be skeptical of what we're doing, but take the time, understand, see that we're not financial guys coming into line our own pockets, but we are here on behalf of the policyholders, but we're doing a better job than the way it was done in the past, bringing those folks along as well. All of this forced us to hone our communication skills.”
2026-01-19 · Capital Allocators · Scott Kleinman – Apollo's Integrated Alternatives Platform (EP.481) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which was a new skill for all of Apollup. We had to do a much better job there, communicate our story externally, and communicate our story internally. We weren't 13 folks sitting on half a floor on Sixth Avenue anymore. We were thousands of people spread around the globe having a articulated strategy that was clear for our employees to understand where were we marching, where were we going, why were we investing in this set of businesses, and why were we cutting back on those? Why were we leaning in here? Employees needed to understand that. That was the biggest revelation as someone who grew up keeping it close to the vest for many years. That's been the biggest change. It's been a game changer. The other thing I'd add there is we had to figure this out. I'd say more urgently than almost anyone because when we entered the insurance industry, insurance is a different business than private equity. Insurance exists by the grace of your regulator.”
2026-01-19 · Capital Allocators · Scott Kleinman – Apollo's Integrated Alternatives Platform (EP.481) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Respect, then the organization will generally follow that. That's been the biggest learning along the way. The biggest change over the last five years, one of the things that was always ingrained in Apollo and quite frankly, the industry, private equities are secretive business. Information was power. Information was kept very close to the vest. The less the outside world knew about what we did, the better. We had grown up in a very non-communicative way, both externally and internally. When private equity was a cottage industry, it didn't really matter. But by 2020, private equity had become a meaningful part of the financial ecosystem. By the way, businesses like Apollo were way more than private equity at the time. We were in insurance. We were in credit. We were touching more of the broader economy. We couldn't live in that gel anymore. So communication.”
2026-01-19 · Capital Allocators · Scott Kleinman – Apollo's Integrated Alternatives Platform (EP.481) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I knew I wanted to be in the deal business. I never thought about being in the management business. I learned on the fly. We didn't have a management structure. This wasn't GE where we had a management training program. We were growing so fast and we were all figuring it out largely at the same time. I was always a lover of war movies and read a ton of history. The classic battlefield general who leads from the front was something that resonated with me. I believe never ask anyone to do anything you wouldn't do yourself, demonstrate the type of behavior that you want your teams to have and the beliefs and culture that you want your teams to have because organizations do reflect the cultural norms of their leadership. Normative behavior, if you're abusive and bad behavior, well, that trickles down. If you lead an organization with intellect and curiosity and lack of defensiveness and”
2026-01-19 · Capital Allocators · Scott Kleinman – Apollo's Integrated Alternatives Platform (EP.481) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was able to be a player coach at the time. Still one leg in the deal business, one leg in the leadership business. And I played that role until about 2018. So from 2011 to 2018, at the end of 2018, the firm had continued to grow in scale in a way when myself and one of my colleagues, Jim Zelter, we were elevated to co-president across the whole firm, looking after all of our revenue generating businesses.”
2026-01-19 · Capital Allocators · Scott Kleinman – Apollo's Integrated Alternatives Platform (EP.481) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“After the GFC, as Apollo and as me personally, did some of the best deals that I think we've ever done as a firm, I guess it was about 2010, the founders asked me to become lead partner for private equity. The firm was starting to grow for the first time into these other areas. Founders were spending more time in other parts of the business. But for the first time, the PE business needed a leader other than the founders. That was my reluctant first step into the land of management.”
2026-01-19 · Capital Allocators · Scott Kleinman – Apollo's Integrated Alternatives Platform (EP.481) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source