YouSaid · the spoken record

Steve Rattner

lines on the record: 72
first: 2025-07-28
most recent: 2025-07-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“You start in 2008 and you're thinking about a model that Yale and others probably started in the mid to late 80s. How did you approach the thought process, whether it's competition or accessing what you'd want to access when there's a big time gap in between some of those existing relationships and where you're starting out?”
2025-07-28 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Single Family Offices – Steve Rattner (Willett Advisors) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mike started talking to me probably in 2006 plus or minus. We actually opened our doors for business, his business, on January 1 of 2008, which I mentioned because you know what happened in 2008. And so we went right down the water slide with everybody else. Fortunately, most of our money was in cash in 2008, but that which wasn't certainly suffered. And then we went from there.”
2025-07-28 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Single Family Offices – Steve Rattner (Willett Advisors) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had actually, oddly enough, been a colleague of David Swenson's at Lehman Brothers. We were both young associates at Lehman Brothers. And while we hadn't really stayed in touch, I had certainly followed his career and knew what he had done for the whole business of endowment management. And again, the charitable part of what we do is the biggest part of what we do. And so I thought that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. And that he had a model that made a lot of sense to me. And as we'll, I'm sure talk about, like everybody does, ended up tweaking it a bit, but we started with the basic idea that we would follow an endowment model. It's also fair to say that Mike Bloomberg was mayor. The money was in a quasi-kind of blind trust. He could know some things like performance without knowing details. And so it was for all the obvious reasons critically important that we not fail. And therefore the idea of going way out on the risk spectrum and coming up with some whole new way of doing this.”
2025-07-28 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Single Family Offices – Steve Rattner (Willett Advisors) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not in the business of false modesty, so as most of my friends know, but let me just say this was another assignment that I was asked to take on that I really didn't know a heck of a lot about people assume, and maybe Mike assumed this, that because I had been a banker and a private equity guy, I could run an investment management firm. But it's like asking a cardiologist to look at your elbow that you think you might have broken that really belongs to the orthopedists. These are different sub-specialties within the world. So I didn't know much. And that was a disadvantage. It was also maybe an advantage because we set out, and I was at quadrangle when we designed this with my colleagues and really tried to evaluate all the different ways that people handled this kind of money. And we have a mix of both philanthropic money as well as personal money. So that is a level of complication and try to really figure out what were best practices, who was successful, why were they successful, how do you manage risk, how do you build a team.”
2025-07-28 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Single Family Offices – Steve Rattner (Willett Advisors) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So somewhere along the way before you took the seat in government through your relationship with Mike Bloomberg, you started effectively what became his family office within Quadrangle. And then you finished the job auto restructuring, you step into this. So why don't we start with Willet and how you think about this challenge of there's a whole lot of money to be managed, how are you going to go do it?”
2025-07-28 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Single Family Offices – Steve Rattner (Willett Advisors) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oddly enough, the biggest challenge was something I didn't even know I was responsible for when I took the job, which were the auto finance companies. So what I learned on the job was that 80% of car purchases are financed in one way or another, and a significant portion, not a majority, but a significant portion by what is now called Ally, used to be called General Motors Acceptance, or by Chrysler Financial, which has now gone. And there were a whole series of regulatory problems, as well as the fact that this was the one, almost the one place where we had to deal with other agencies of the government, particularly the FDIC, which was run by Sheila Baer, who was particularly difficult. And this caper, as my deputy Ron Bloom used to call it, almost fell apart over that problem.”
2025-07-28 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Single Family Offices – Steve Rattner (Willett Advisors) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, the two most important things were that Tim and Larry, I'm sure with the approval of the president, said to me, we want you to do this in a way that is commercially sensible. We're not here to put lipstick on a pig. We're not here to paper over the problem. We're not here to do a lot of giveaways. We want to fix this. So you should assume you're operating in a commercial environment. And the second thing that made this all work was that we had access to the so-called TARP money, the $700 billion that Congress had voted in the middle of the panic, and then immediately regretted because it gave the administration more authority than they usually get to actually disperse money. So I had a checkbook and I had the support of my bosses. And that's what allowed this all to work. And so we went out and hired 15 people, almost all from the private sector, who wanted to serve, and some Republicans, some Democrats, some independents, and we approached this as a business problem, not as a political problem.”
2025-07-28 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Single Family Offices – Steve Rattner (Willett Advisors) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think my interest in serving was fairly well known at this point, and I knew both Tim and Larry very well, Larry especially. And so after the two of them were appointed, I think it was literally the day before Thanksgiving in 2008, Larry called and said, are you interested in serving? And I said, sure. And then I don't remember the exact time, but then Tim called, his office called, said, come on down. And I went down and he said, look, I got a lot of jobs to fill. I've got a housing issue. I've got banks issues. I've got autos. What do you want to do? And I said, look, you have enough problems without my being a primadonna about it. So you tell me what you want me to do and all things being remotely equal, I will do it. And so a few weeks later, he called back and said autos. And I said, autos. And he said, autos. And I said, okay. And that's how it happened.”
2025-07-28 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Single Family Offices – Steve Rattner (Willett Advisors) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Work differently in the government than they do in the private sector. There are a thousand people they could have picked who knew more about restructurings, who knew more about autos than I did, but they wanted someone who had these different pieces of the puzzle.”
2025-07-28 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Single Family Offices – Steve Rattner (Willett Advisors) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Minimal way, we had added a distress debt investing business at quadrangle. I had done some of it as a banker. We, of course, had one or two private equity investments that had to be restructured. So I knew a little bit about it. And you may ask, what did I know about autos? And the answer was absolutely nothing. And so you then may ask, so why did they give you this job? And at the time, I really didn't know, to tell you the truth, I figured it out later, which was they did not view, and there was a lot of blowback after my appointment was announced about why me, but they, by which I mean Tim Geithner, the Secretary of the Treasury, Larry Summers, the head of the National Economic Council, they did not view it as a job of managing the auto companies or even of restructuring their operations. They viewed it as a financial restructuring job. And they thought, I knew enough about that to do it because they also wanted someone who had some idea about the sensibility of Washington and how things”
2025-07-28 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Single Family Offices – Steve Rattner (Willett Advisors) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was happily going about my business working in a private equity firm and we were investing, we raised a second fund, we were thinking about a third fund because I think my journalistic experience in Washington where I spent five of my eight and a half years in the business, I had an interest in public policy. I had an interest in public service and I had begun to work in the mid-90s in that world a bit, mostly raising money for candidates or giving money, a little bit of policy stuff, a little bit of writing. And so I had always had it in the back of my head that there might be a time to go into public service. The stars never lined up, not the right administration, not the right time in my life. Children, all that kind of stuff. But then the financial crisis came. And it wasn't perfect because we were building this firm, but my kids were mostly grown. We were looking at the greatest financial crisis of my lifetime since the Depression.”
2025-07-28 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Single Family Offices – Steve Rattner (Willett Advisors) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's an old joke about the difference between an expert and a dilettante, and we'll get to some of this probably later in the conversation. But an expert is somebody who knows everything about nothing, and a dilettant is someone who knows nothing about everything. I had spent my whole career as an expert, and I thought it was the easier way to do it, that if you could focus on one industry, know it pretty well, it was a lot easier to get clients or make investments or do whatever it is you were trying to do, that if one day you were working on an industrial zeal and the next day you were working on a financial services deal and the day after that, something else. So yes, we started with that focus.”
2025-07-28 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Single Family Offices – Steve Rattner (Willett Advisors) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was even then somewhat well worn. KKR had been born in the 80s forced Mittle, which was one of the other original firms in the 80s, Carlyle Group, Apollo. They all came into fruition in the 80s sometime for various reasons. And so by 2000, it was actually a fairly obvious path that if you basically said, what's the next step from investment banking, if you want to get even closer to the action in a way it was private equity?”
2025-07-28 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Single Family Offices – Steve Rattner (Willett Advisors) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Investment bankers, certainly at the age of 30, had seen, and that was a benefit. So I brought a few things to the party, so to speak, but I had a lot to learn.”
2025-07-28 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Single Family Offices – Steve Rattner (Willett Advisors) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Investment banking people ask me whether it was a complete change in my life from being a journalist and certainly there were many aspects of it that were a complete change, but there are actually some that were not a complete change. For example, journalism is to some degree, as is investment banking, a business of relationships. If you're a journalist, you want your sources, so to speak, to trust you, to tell you things, to cooperate, to sit for interviews and so forth. And working with clients as an investment banker is not that different. When you're a journalist, you're trained to ask a lot of questions, to get information. They call that due diligence in investment banking. So I kind of knew how to do that. I learned as a journalist how to write, which is not an essential skill for a banker, but it doesn't hurt to be able to write. So there were some things that were transferable. I had also seen, frankly, more of the world, not literally, although some degree literally, but people and experiences than most of them.”
2025-07-28 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Single Family Offices – Steve Rattner (Willett Advisors) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was a young associate at Lehman Brothers working on a whole variety of things. And then somewhere along the way, there was a deal that came in to sell a newspaper in Houston, and they looked at me and said, well, you were a journalist, so you should know how to do this. And I said, well, I don't know anything about the business of it. But in any event, they put me on that deal. And then I started working on other things in media. And then in 1983 or 4, Lehman Brothers was sold to American Express. A lot of people left, including some of my mentors. One went to Morgan Stanley. He said, you should come here and start doing what is now called TMT, then called media. And so I went there and started a media and communications group for them. Morgan Stanley went public, got very big. I like this idea of a smaller partnership environment. I went to Lazard. I spent 11 interesting years there. It's an interesting place. And then I decided to go into private equity with some of my partners.”
2025-07-28 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Single Family Offices – Steve Rattner (Willett Advisors) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely no idea what I was doing. I was 30 years old. I was assigned to work for a 24 year old young woman analyst who had to show me how to turn on my calculator. I barely knew the difference between an income statement and a balance sheet. There was no training program, so to speak, at Lehman Brothers back then. And so it was a trial by fire.”
2025-07-28 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Single Family Offices – Steve Rattner (Willett Advisors) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, when people ask me that, I always say how or why, which questions do you want me to answer? But as I said, I kind of fell into this job at the time. It was a great job. I saw things and did things at the age of 22, 24, 26 that most people don't get to do probably ever, let alone at that age, met a lot of very interesting people, learned a lot from them. But I realized somewhere along the way that I at least wanted to try something else. And particularly, I was tempted by the idea of doing rather than writing about it. And I don't want to disparage in any way many of my friends who are still journalists, but I thought I wanted the old Teddy Roosevelt quote, you want to be in the arena or the man who holds the coat of the man in the arena. And so I started thinking about it and I ruled out stuff that either I wasn't suited for, wouldn't be good at, medicine, realized I didn't want to be a lawyer, whatever. I had a lot of friends who had gone into investment banking, and it sounded interesting. And so I started trying to figure out if I could get a job in investment banking.”
2025-07-28 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Single Family Offices – Steve Rattner (Willett Advisors) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I ended up as an economics correspondent, which may not be entirely surprising given both my background and what I've done since then. That was sort of a bit of a backwater in journalism at the time. And so it wasn't the toughest place to succeed as it might have been if I had decided I wanted to be a political commentator or cover foreign policy or something like that. And it was 1974, as you'll recall, was a time of a fair amount of economic turbulence in the world and the United States. And so there was lots for me to do and a lot of demand for people who had an interest in doing what I was doing.”
2025-07-28 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Single Family Offices – Steve Rattner (Willett Advisors) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, only to the extent that by the end of it, I didn't think I wanted to be a journalist for the rest of my life. And so I was starting to think about and explore other things to do.”
2025-07-28 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Single Family Offices – Steve Rattner (Willett Advisors) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. So I was a college journalist as a hobby, thought I was going to end up in business or law or something like that, some profession at the urging of my father in particular. But suffice it to say, I was a college journalist and then I was offered a dream job for a journalist, which was working at the New York Times in 1974. So I went there and spent eight and a half mostly happy years there.”
2025-07-28 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Single Family Offices – Steve Rattner (Willett Advisors) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, most of the time we go through someone's career. It strikes me you've had five different careers. So why don't we just start at the beginning and journalism and maybe touch on all of them and some of the lessons you learned along the way?”
2025-07-28 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Single Family Offices – Steve Rattner (Willett Advisors) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source