YouSaid · the spoken record

Steven Klinsky

lines on the record: 90
first: 2023-01-20
most recent: 2023-01-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“And a final question Well, I didn't know anything about the world of investing 30 or 40 years ago. I could tell you more about Supreme Court decisions than I knew about investing. And again, what I've learned, or I'm trying to get people to accept, is that good investing is owning and building businesses. You're not the bookie in the stands. You're the player on the field. And you're the coaching player, you control the play, you play better, and you can make money either gambling on the team or being the team. I think the best results and kind of the most fun is actually being the team, owning the business, building the business rather than betting from the outside on the business. And that's what I think good private equity is.”
2023-01-20 · Masters in Business · Steven Klinsky on Building Businesses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am a big fan of private equity. I don't think at all that it's too late. The golden days are done because, you know, again, the advantage of private, one of the great advantages of private equity is you can always move into the industry that's emerging for the next 10 years. I don't have to be in my grandfather's store selling coats. I can be moving into DNA sample preparation. I can be moving into proteomics or whatever, wind farms, whatever. So private equity is a great field. You should think of it as building businesses, not levering businesses. And if you think about it that way, it's a wonderful place to be. And I'm not a fan of stock market investing. I just find it too dang difficult and arbitrary. I am a big fan of private equity and credit investing.”
2023-01-20 · Masters in Business · Steven Klinsky on Building Businesses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I read a lot of nonfiction, and the best nonfiction I've read is we're on Cherno has some great biographies. I love the grant biography. I love the biography of Vanderbilt. I'm a big fan of George Washington and Winston Churchill and Lincoln and guys like that. This is a new Churchill.”
2023-01-20 · Masters in Business · Steven Klinsky on Building Businesses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, some of the things I'm finishing up, like I say, I'm finishing up this book about Maximilian and Carlotta, which is an old history book that I came across. I read Chip Wars, which I thought was very good about the semiconductor industry. It's a great book.”
2023-01-20 · Masters in Business · Steven Klinsky on Building Businesses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like a kaleidoscope. That's very interesting. That's the thought process. Yeah, look, the biggest mentor in my life was my father and incredibly influential to me and a wonderful man. I read a ton of history, so every time I read a history book, whether they failed or succeeded, they're kind of a mentor for like I'm just finishing a book now about Emperor Maximilian and Carlotta in Mexico who ended up getting shot by a firing squad. But you learn a lot in everything. And as far as investment mentors, I was very influenced by Goldman Sachs. And its culture. Ted Forceman and the Forsman little guys were incredibly good investors and very thoughtful. And so, I mean, everybody's a mentor. I'm reading everything I can. And I read a lot of nonfiction, and I try to. Let's talk about...”
2023-01-20 · Masters in Business · Steven Klinsky on Building Businesses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You entertained. Well, during the lockdown, we of course had to watch Tiger King. And when we were stuck for months going crazy at home with... We have young adult kids now who had their significant others over. We once had a Tiger King dinner party where we all dressed up and we were going so crazy under COVID that everybody said, look, let's all come down and have dinner as a Tiger King character. That got us through COVID. These days, though, and I don't have to be locked down anymore. These days, I love White Lotus 2. And I love succession. I'm waiting for succession to come back. So, those would be the shows today.”
2023-01-20 · Masters in Business · Steven Klinsky on Building Businesses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Got her master's in fine arts at Columbia, wrote both a great book that's in a lot of school libraries called Walls Within Walls for like Harry Potter readers and wrote a bestseller called Opening Bell for Adults, which is about a woman named Bell who is working through Wall Street as the breadwinner with a husband who's like an audiovisual guy. So everybody thinks that I'm an audio visual guy who's lost his job. But otherwise, it's a very accurate book. And it's a great book and it was going to be Reese Witherspoon movie and it's still kind of out there. And so I recommend anyone who wants to know what it's like to be a woman on Wall Street.”
2023-01-20 · Masters in Business · Steven Klinsky on Building Businesses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That sounds quite fascinating. I'm very blessed I have a beautiful, brilliant wife who was a managing director at Bear Stearns, lived through all the Me Too movement before there was a Me Too movement.”
2023-01-20 · Masters in Business · Steven Klinsky on Building Businesses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's just a great way to save money. So, like Purdue has made it a key program at Purdue. They call it Purdue Fast Start. They're encouraging every poor kid in Indiana to take these courses and enter Purdue as a sophomore. We're working with all sorts of people. So it's my major charity cause.”
2023-01-20 · Masters in Business · Steven Klinsky on Building Businesses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, anybody, if you were the poorest person in the world and you have ambition, go to modernstates.com or dot org modernstates.org, you'll see all the courses laid out. All you got to do is download them like you would a Netflix movie. When you pass the course, we give you the voucher to pay for the exam. And when you have those exams passed, every admissions catalog will tell you which CLEP exams they'll take for credit. So we have over 300,000 users. We've saved tens and tens of millions of dollars for people already. And it is so efficient because we spent some millions to prepare the courses, but it's like if you do the godfather on Netflix, you don't have to do the godfather every time. I mean, once it's on the site, it's on the site. So if a million people use it, they can all see the same course. It doesn't cost us anymore. And we are paying the exam fees for as far as we can keep affording it.”
2023-01-20 · Masters in Business · Steven Klinsky on Building Businesses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are, and so what we did at modern states, and it was an idea I had that we're now doing, is we hired the best professors we could find in the country, like Johns Hopkins math professors, to teach the basic freshman courses online as a top quality online course, but instead of charging, which everybody does, we just give them away for free. They're like a library of free courses with practice questions. They qualify. So, in other words, you.”
2023-01-20 · Masters in Business · Steven Klinsky on Building Businesses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, thanks for asking about that. That's a cause that's very near and dear to my heart. So, you know, I'm proud of what New Mountain does and the way we build companies. I'm also trying to do philanthropy alongside a New Mountain. I've been very involved in education reform for many years and after school centers, I set up the first charter school in New York State. Oh, really? I'm the chair of Harvard's public education policy group. I succeeded Jeb Bush there. And the cost of college has gotten incredibly expensive. The average college, even at a state school, is $30,000 a year all in.”
2023-01-20 · Masters in Business · Steven Klinsky on Building Businesses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the private equity fund and strategic equity fund, it's the big pension funds in the US, it's the big Canadian asset plans, it's the sovereign funds around the world in Europe and Asia. In our credit funds on the public one at some institutions and retail investors, just high net worth investors who are looking for double digit yields, also a net lease. That's kind of the breakdown.”
2023-01-20 · Masters in Business · Steven Klinsky on Building Businesses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Along those lines? We haven't. I mean, it's not a bad idea to do that. We want to let each limited partner choose just what they want for themselves. We haven't done the umbrella fund, but people can be, we do have people who are on multiple funds. But we've done it a la carte.”
2023-01-20 · Masters in Business · Steven Klinsky on Building Businesses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like Libor anymore. Yeah, people do use Libor. And again, I'm not talking about us specifically, but you might see a 13% type return on loans where it used to be 10% last year. I mean, and the interest rates are still going through working through because as the interest rates reset from the borrowers, they're setting higher at the moment.”
2023-01-20 · Masters in Business · Steven Klinsky on Building Businesses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is like a three or four bagger on the investment. That's kind of, and again, we've had better and we've had worse, but that's kind of our standard target in private equity and strategic equity. And then in the credit and net lease funds, we're trying to have a current yield. It used to be, it's about 800 basis points over the base rate. So it used to be kind of a 10% type target and as rates have moved up that target moves up as well. So, and that's supposed to be current yield paid out every quarter. Like LIBOR Plus.”
2023-01-20 · Masters in Business · Steven Klinsky on Building Businesses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So in investment committee for private equity or strategic equity, we have two questions. Is it safe on the downside even if the world goes bad? And do we think we have a fighting chance to make 30% gross returns on the investment or better? That's our what's”
2023-01-20 · Masters in Business · Steven Klinsky on Building Businesses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And net lease is similar, where what's nice about it is you have rent escalators for 20 years that more than cover inflation and you have both the credit of the business and the real estate if you need the real estate. And so we do the credit in the net lease for good steady yield and we do private equity and strategic equity for big returns.”
2023-01-20 · Masters in Business · Steven Klinsky on Building Businesses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so that is our private credit. We run about $10 billion of private credit. We have one of the largest and oldest of the what's called the BDC, these publicly traded credit arms. What's great about them is it's floating rate debt So, as the interest rates have gone up with inflation, it's actually better for this type of lending. It's not like owning a long-term fixed-rate bond. You get all the advantages of inflation and the higher interest rates. The key is to avoid defaults. And we do that by focusing on these safe industries and really knowing the businesses and being able to fix them if we need to go in and fix them”
2023-01-20 · Masters in Business · Steven Klinsky on Building Businesses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's always been nichey within real estate. There was one guy who did it very aggressively, who bought every restaurant chain and stuff, who overstepped. The people who've been doing it the long term, it's been an extremely safe asset class, and it's actually, I think, kind of an undiscovered asset class.”
2023-01-20 · Masters in Business · Steven Klinsky on Building Businesses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the way we think about it in these defensive growth sectors, our first choice is to buy majority control and build the business. That's our private equity fund. If the founder says, I love you guys, you can add a lot of value. I don't want to sell control. We have a non-control fund called Strategic Equity to buy the same sort of businesses. We just don't have control, but we're very involved in building the business. If equity is not for sale, but we think it's a great, safe business, like a great software business that someone else bought, we can lend to them. That's our credit arm, which trades publicly as New Mountain Finance Company, and we have private versions. And since we've been so safe at the equity level, we've been very, very safe at the debt level. And if they don't need a loan, we can lease them their own building back in a net lease and have both the credit of the company and the real estate as collateral. And that's like to us a very another high version of that.”
2023-01-20 · Masters in Business · Steven Klinsky on Building Businesses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I don't have coming from a family business, we say we don't have portfolio theory, we have family business theory. When we go into a company, we want to preserve and protect it. We're responsible for it. If there's a problem, we work twice as hard to fix it. On the other hand, a lot of these businesses, you know, the entrepreneur had built it up to a certain size, had never done an acquisition, had never built the sales force, had never made technology investments in the full way, had never gone international. So we take the business and then take it up to the next level of growth.”
2023-01-20 · Masters in Business · Steven Klinsky on Building Businesses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A better way to describe it. What we do is we have a whole very formal top-down process for 20 years where we choose the sectors that we think can grow with sector growth for the next 10 years. Those are defensive growth sectors. And we really become the best, we try to become the best there is anywhere in those sectors. So life science supplies, healthcare, IT, managing wind and solar farms, niche software and consumer, different things like that. We buy a business that's already safe. How high we can build”
2023-01-20 · Masters in Business · Steven Klinsky on Building Businesses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Signify is the leader in sending doctors and nurses into the homes for medical checks. And we took it from. 250,000 home visits a year to two and a half million home visits a year and then CVS if they own it could really do even better and save lives by combining CVS with what the doctor visits do. It could be really a great thing for society if they buy it. So those are just some examples. We've had a bunch of good successes.”
2023-01-20 · Masters in Business · Steven Klinsky on Building Businesses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we've had some good IPO successes. And, you know, I'm only going to tell you what's in the public record because I don't want to try to, you know, give returns or anything. We had bought a business that was called JT Baker for $290 million when it was going to be discontinued by Mallencrat. We renamed it Avantor, changed the management, changed the strategy, and built it from $290 million to $20 billion plus. It's unfortunate, not too shabby. And it's now... With Thermo Fisher, one of the two leaders in lab equipment and life science supplies around the world. We had another business like that called Signify, which is in contract to be sold to CVS. What Signify?”
2023-01-20 · Masters in Business · Steven Klinsky on Building Businesses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it was considered one of the first great kind of technological deals. I used to go out to Kleiner Perkins and have a regulation with them. So, I mean, it was a really kind of a cutting-edge deal and other deals were similar at Force Mill. So the idea of... Safety but growth, really growing businesses. The whole name New Mountain comes to the idea of building new mountains and industries where we invest and protect the downside first and then really build something instead of levering things or risking things was very attractive. And the fact to build a culture that was Kind of more of a Goldman Sachs family business culture plus those approaches were compelling.”
2023-01-20 · Masters in Business · Steven Klinsky on Building Businesses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, and besides the value went up, we had been the first company in the world to propose an all digital television standard. We helped pioneer cable modems. We created the thousand channel cable systems on demand. It was a really great experience for nine years.”
2023-01-20 · Masters in Business · Steven Klinsky on Building Businesses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I Really enjoyed the general instrument experience where we took it from a billion of value to 20 billion and we had imagined.”
2023-01-20 · Masters in Business · Steven Klinsky on Building Businesses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was not a calm, happy place inside. So I broke off to start New Mountain. And, you know, it's gone better than ever would have expected, and it's been a great experience.”
2023-01-20 · Masters in Business · Steven Klinsky on Building Businesses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you know, I had had a great 20 years working with Goldman Sachs enforcement little. Forceman Little was a top-top performing place. It was a very quirky place. We had eight professionals at the firm And more people flying the jets in the helicopters and working at the firm. And Ted was kind of a very large, who was a great mentor to me in a lot of ways, was also known, you know, he's passed away, was known to be a somewhat difficult personality. Larger than life. Larger than life dating lady die, you know, flying in the Gulf Streams and all that, but it was always kind of a...”
2023-01-20 · Masters in Business · Steven Klinsky on Building Businesses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Go build it and take you two years. Why would I pay more than the value of the accounts receivable? So it is totally different today, but also... The skill sets. Again, when we get into more New Mountain, there are 8 billion people in the world who get up every morning trying to make their life better, make the world better. And there are pockets of innovation at all times, including now where things are getting better, cheaper, better ways to do things. And if you're part of those trends and you accelerate those trends and improve those businesses, there's wonderful opportunities at all times, but it isn't just a general be dumb, lever things up, wait for things to rise. That is like dumb private equity that isn't around anymore, I think. If it is, it's going to be bottom quartile.”
2023-01-20 · Masters in Business · Steven Klinsky on Building Businesses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's what I tried to say my first day at work. Ten-year treasuries were $15.8% versus 3.7%. Six today. And a house mortgage could be 20%. People are paying 20% of their house mortgages. And the stock market was, I think, six times net income. When I used to sit in the Goldman merger department on like what we could sell the company for, and we'd all sit around the table, I mean, if we really stretched 10 times net income, I think if we find the hot buyer, we can get to 10 times with no adjustments, no trickery after tax net income, that would be a great price for most businesses. Or I remember reading a book when I was in graduate business school, never pay more than tangible book value for any business. I mean, if you did that, Amazon, you know, I mean, Google would be worth the penny or something.”
2023-01-20 · Masters in Business · Steven Klinsky on Building Businesses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's definitely been a 40 year secular bull market. After 13 years of stagflation from 68 to 81, it's been 40 good years from 81 today.”
2023-01-20 · Masters in Business · Steven Klinsky on Building Businesses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And now it's thirty thousand. So, I mean, I tell people I show them the curve of the stock market. I had a pretty good career, right? I mean, because my timing was quite good. Plus, you know, I'm trying to be good at what I do as well. So that is what led to. The use of high debt to all the enthusiasm for the field, I truly believe things have evolved when we get to current day. Unit growth didn't matter because of inflation and rising markets. I would say for any good firm today for the last 10 years is really about unit growth, business improvement Making the business better because you can't just count on rising stock markets and falling interest rates anymore. If you do, you're a really bad private equity firm.”
2023-01-20 · Masters in Business · Steven Klinsky on Building Businesses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of debt involved. Yeah. Well, absolutely. They absolutely do affect it. So again, the reason leveraged buyouts took off and became a wild stallion in the 80s was because you had interest rates going down for the decade. You had the stock market going up for the decade. I was walking Goldman's floor when the market broke a thousand. You know, the market didn't get over $1,000 until like 81 or 82. Right.”
2023-01-20 · Masters in Business · Steven Klinsky on Building Businesses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And we think it's a good company that we've studied. You know, we use our private equity people to study the credit. So we say, look, it's in a defensive growth industry. It's a very good company. It's a very good sponsor. And we're almost always under 40% of the value. So we've had a very good safety record there. But it's a different mindset than the 80s. I mean, it was a much wilder debt market in the 80s than it is today. It's a very different industry. And a lot of the political criticism about private equity, I think, is a holdover of the 80s where you had, you know, Michael Douglas on the giant cell phone in Wall Street and stuff. And that's what people think private equity is today, and it just isn't anymore.”
2023-01-20 · Masters in Business · Steven Klinsky on Building Businesses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, even worse than levels and levels on that. But lending was getting very effusive in 07 and 08. And again, banks, whether junk bond or not, were saying, well, we're not even lending. We're syndicating. So we don't have to worry about it. I would say today. It is a much different environment, even though the so called junk bond markets are strong and high yield is strong, there is much more equity in companies than there used to be from the private equity firm. We have a lending arm at my firm as well. We have both a public version called New Mountain Finance Company at private versions. And when we're lending to other people's deals, we're usually under 40% loan-to-value, not 95% to value, which is what it was in 1981.”
2023-01-20 · Masters in Business · Steven Klinsky on Building Businesses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, they can get out of hand. So, I mean, in 07 and 08, what killed the economy in 07-08 were mortgages going down. Those were”
2023-01-20 · Masters in Business · Steven Klinsky on Building Businesses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The fees line. Yeah, the fees were irrelevant to us. We were all about, we would have been investing our fund in a huge way. And we couldn't get anybody even to like focus on the business itself. Everybody was so focused on the The arrangements around it, it was a wild time.”
2023-01-20 · Masters in Business · Steven Klinsky on Building Businesses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's no way to do it without junk bonds. And they eventually used, you know, and again, they used something called reset notes, which said, well, if the bonds aren't doing, well, we'll pay you a higher interest rate, which means, of course, you're killing the company even further, which means you have to buy. So it's like a vicious cycle of destruction. And it almost destroyed KCAR. KCAR ended up buying it, and it was kind of a pyrrhic victory because it was a very tough deal for them. They've done great at getting through it and they're a wonderful firm today. But I don't think it was a happy experience for KCAR to have bought it. And, you know, so we looked at it very hard, decided not to bid. So I'm proud of our role in it. I mean, we gave it a hard study and said no, but it was a wild time. And the investment bankers at the time were just, every time we went to a meeting on due diligence on, is this a good company or not? All they wanted to do was talk about the fee splits. Well, there's 400 of fees. This is what we said, no, we don't want to talk about that. We're trying to figure out.”
2023-01-20 · Masters in Business · Steven Klinsky on Building Businesses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like we need 20 billion of debt. And if you know Bank Santander will lend 300 and we tried to total it up and it barely got to the, it was just an astoundingly big thing.”
2023-01-20 · Masters in Business · Steven Klinsky on Building Businesses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Study, is it a good deal or not? We spent weeks, night and day studying it, decided it wasn't a good deal, decided not to bid, which I'm fine with. And then when we decided not to bid at 90, it eventually went up to. 111 or something like that. What was interesting was the size of it. I think it was with all the debt like a $35 billion deal. Huge. And at the time, it was the 19th largest company in the Fortune 500, I think, at the time. So it would be like a 300 billion dollar deal today. It was just huge for the time. And I remember literally sitting with the bankers at Manny Hannie, and we went through every lending bank in the world, every major bank, and said, if they lend their full legal limit, could we raise enough debt?”
2023-01-20 · Masters in Business · Steven Klinsky on Building Businesses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And KKR felt well, that was a break of a word. They were entitled to still go after the company. And it was very cheap by a lot of measures when the whole thing started. And then Ross Johnson and his investment bankers didn't have enough money in the world to do the deal. And so they came to Forceman Little as the second biggest firm after K. Ayar and said, would you back us because we need your capital to get the deal done? And this is why, again, in the book, there's a meeting where Ross Johnson comes in to meet Ted. I'm a partner, so Ted and I sit with him. And he says, I wanted to do the deal. I don't want to do the deal. It makes sense. And Ted says to me, after, what do you think of him? And I say, I think he's totally insane. And again, I wasn't quoted again in the book, but we actually spent, you know, night and day for weeks working. You know, we thought we should study it. I mean, it's a huge opportunity. We should, you know, it's our job.”
2023-01-20 · Masters in Business · Steven Klinsky on Building Businesses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then Ross Johnson decided not to go with KKR, and he teamed up with Lehman Brothers and Solomon Brothers who had a chance for $400 million of fees by doing the deal, which was astounding amount of fees for Wall Street in the 80s.”
2023-01-20 · Masters in Business · Steven Klinsky on Building Businesses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Write the first draft of for him and all that. We had fought against junk bonds in the Revlon situation. We had fought against junk bonds in Lear Siegler situation. And we were the alternative to junk bonds as a firm. And Ted, who was a very colorful, glamorous guy dating Lady Dye bigger than life also was kind of had grown up in a very white shoe preppy way in Connecticut and I think was just kind of offended by the whole junk bond world and just opposed it and liked it.”
2023-01-20 · Masters in Business · Steven Klinsky on Building Businesses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it was an amazing time. And just to give some context to it, it was part of a bigger, longer-term battle, which was there was the whole junk bond world building behind Mike Milken, who I now like and respect and I think he's become a great philanthropist. At the time, my firm was just dead set opposed to anything. Doing battle with them, right? Doing battle with him, not using his money. And there was a famous editorial Ted Forstman wrote that I helped.”
2023-01-20 · Masters in Business · Steven Klinsky on Building Businesses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, you know, if you go off, I guess the equivalent would be instead of saying, I'm going to go into the middle of the desert and build a building and hope people come around me, which may or may not work if you're in a neighborhood, you know has rising values and you search for the right value and then you improve that house and you fix the plumbing and you paint it and you clean it up, it's safer than taking the speculation on whether People are going to move to the jungle and create the village and the jungle or not.”
2023-01-20 · Masters in Business · Steven Klinsky on Building Businesses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was pick the sectors that at least for 10 years ahead have clear, stable secular growth and then buy in at a reasonable price. So don't use that much debt. My firm has never had a bankruptcy, never missed an interest payment in the history of our private equity effort. We've generated over $70 billion of enterprise value gains without one missed interest payment and added over $61,000 without one missed interest payment. So if you start safe, the question is how high you can build it, how big a mountain you can build, and that gets to operational skill. So it's those two things.”
2023-01-20 · Masters in Business · Steven Klinsky on Building Businesses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was no way to save it. Or the initial internet boom where if you own coffee cups.com As a name, you are worth a billion dollars and you had no earnings and no revenue. I mean, there are things that just go away. I mean, Bitcoin and crypto could totally vanish. And if you put your money in there, it's not how well you manage your business. You're just in the wrong space. So the idea of New Mountain was, and this is kind of evolving from Force Mittle.”
2023-01-20 · Masters in Business · Steven Klinsky on Building Businesses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was the idea that you could go in against the, there had been a regulatory change that said the big bell telephone monopoly is going to share its equipment with the nice new entrant and be very friendly and let the new entrant use its equipment. And that sounded great. Let's go into the new entrant. And then lo and behold, for some reason, the equipment didn't work for the new entrant as well as they had expected. And so these things went from $15 billion to zero. There was exocommunication in McCloud. So anyways, that was, because the industry, and once you've gone into that space,”
2023-01-20 · Masters in Business · Steven Klinsky on Building Businesses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source