YouSaid · the spoken record

Vlad Barbalat

lines on the record: 65
first: 2026-06-23
most recent: 2026-06-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“The shining city on a hill, and I want to do whatever I can to remind people of that, to contribute to it. And every single day, be grateful for being an American citizen.”
2026-06-23 · Invest Like the Best · Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is the one question I knew was coming. I've thought about it. I had so many thoughts on who I should describe. I've been fortunate to have many. I'm going to come back and maybe do something that I haven't seen others say on your podcast. I'm going to come back and say the kindest thing is this group of people that have fought for constructed pathways for legal immigration to the United States. So my gratitude is to America and my gratitude is to the people that for reasons they didn't have to allow people like me to come to America to have a very, very, very different life than I would have otherwise had to allow me to have an impact on people that are in my vicinity and surroundings, hopefully a positive one, and to find a way to learn from that gratitude and continue to have pragmatic optimism that America is essential to the world. It is...”
2026-06-23 · Invest Like the Best · Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All your stakeholders in order for you to ride those waves. Because if your business is opaque, not understood and volatile, that's a recipe for ultimately not being supported through difficult times. I try to always remind myself and my leadership team that transparency is what allows you to have autonomy. No transparency, no autonomy. Critically important, difficult to deliver, and people don't always focus on it.”
2026-06-23 · Invest Like the Best · Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But very few businesses actually have those horizons. This is another one where you have to hold both truths, particularly when you're responsible for the organization. Your business is not a one-year business. We know this. Anything can happen in a one-year window. And yet, you know that that one-year result has importance to your stakeholders. The way I therefore try to navigate that is to, one, be cognizant of the one year of the calendar year, but try to establish some three five-year targets and do put yourself on the hook for those in a much more meaningful way than the one year, or at least say more people in this organization really are on the hook for the three to five year and be explicit about what that is than it is for the one year. The other part is all businesses that have this dynamic, they require a great degree of transparency from”
2026-06-23 · Invest Like the Best · Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've always almost had like this strange fixed income version of my thinking around long-term versus short-term. It's like the 10-year rate is just a series of shorter rates that build up to it. Yes, you can talk about the long term, but the long term is constructive of a bunch of short terms. And so you have to actually hold both truths. The ability to make long-term decisions and focus on the long-term is really valuable. But if it becomes a crutch and an explanatory variable as to why you're either inconsistent or things are not going the way that you'd like them to go, then it's not very useful. In fact, it's an impediment. I think all businesses have a constraint of an annual calendar. That's just the way we've structured ourselves. Some have it very acutely, have quarterly constraints. The annual one is important for everybody. Everybody has some notion of a financial plan or objectives. They try to hit on an annual basis.”
2026-06-23 · Invest Like the Best · Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and doing the best we can to deploy capital for the right opportunity, for the right rate of return, and seeing the fruit of that come to the organization. The other part that you mentioned is very real. There's a downside to having that permanence because you can make the argument that it makes people a little bit more complacent about the notion of the long term. And I mentioned that before. I always am careful with saying we can make long-term decisions that others can't. I think when people say that for the most part, what you end up with, I do mean the most part, is some form of excuses as to why, sure, this is not great, but it will be if you wait long enough.”
2026-06-23 · Invest Like the Best · Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To the world, get the right rate of return on it, and see the fruit of what that capital does. It's just inherently different. You are able to sustain what I describe as much better investment hygiene. You don't have to react. You don't have to worry about doing an investor update where some of your investors may have circumstances or priorities that differ from other investors in your fund and therefore creating tension, polluting your investment process with the nature of the business. We just don't have that. We are singularly focused on being in the service.”
2026-06-23 · Invest Like the Best · Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But you are ultimately running a business. And so your business strategy is going to always dwarf your investment process. No matter how many times you can talk about your long-term horizon or whatever else, ultimately the time comes when new funds need to be raised. If you're a public alternative asset manager, you care about how the market will give you the highest multiple, which will then drive a certain way, you will structure your business. The craft of investing is inherently diluted one way or the other. It just is. It doesn't mean that there aren't excellent investors, but they have to think about other things. In some case, that really does take the business away from the bespoke nature. In some cases, people stay small. And many examples of that and ultimately try to just deliver truly outsized returns because of how they approach that problem. When you don't have to think about any of that and all you're thinking about is how do I take my capital, deploy it?”
2026-06-23 · Invest Like the Best · Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Downside of permanence is people change, even though the capital may be permanent, people come through the organization ultimately and you're always dealing with some version of, but another team made that investment or there was a decision made in the past and you can dwell a lot on that. Usually the ones you're discussing are the difficult ones and not the good ones that people are happy to absorb into their window of time. What I have found about managing your own balance sheet as opposed to managing third-party capital, which is inherently not permanent, it completely changes what you think about because when you're in a fun cycle, when you have to deliver returns to a fund and to your investors and then think about the next one, you are consumed by the business that you're running. Investment outcomes are kind of a product that you sell.”
2026-06-23 · Invest Like the Best · Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What it means to be a good father unbelievably important, what it means to show them love and support and care, try to do that best I can every single day. I think they would find that they get a healthy balance. And that balance moves through time. My 17-year-old, my firstborn, literally needs a lot less of me today than he did 10 years ago. I think that's less of something he thinks about because it's so natural. It's something that I think about and I grapple with is it okay that we interacted for 10, 15 minutes. It was maybe a high quality interaction, but it all was 10 to 15 minutes. I go to bed thinking about that sometimes. But I also think about this is a forever thing. You think about your parents a lot less than they think about you. That will forever be true. It's true of your kids. It's true of the way you probably interact with your parents, but your parents probably think about you much more than you think about them as just reality.”
2026-06-23 · Invest Like the Best · Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“have you help other people progress through their careers? You don't think about that when you're younger, but it is truly satisfying. I've gotten more comfortable through time with spending more of myself at work than I have before. Before I would be very wary of that because I didn't want to have somehow my kids see less of me because I am a workaholic. But my whole frame around that has evolved. I don't think I'm a workaholic, but I am obsessed with making things better and being part of this organization and team is not about you. It's about the organization as a whole and how it can continue to get better gives me real satisfaction. I have three boys. So inevitably I want to set an example for them best I can through my experience of what it means to be a productive human being.”
2026-06-23 · Invest Like the Best · Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think about this a lot. First of all, I clearly don't know the answer to it. But I think as I've gotten older, I think about this in a very existential way. When you have a family, when you think about the incredibly important lens that provides, particularly through the lens of your kids, you could split your identity in so many different ways. And if you overswing to one or the other, something suffers. Everybody's got their own equilibrium. But I've continued to find that I get an incredible amount of personal satisfaction from building and being part of an organization that is making progress, that is making things better by things. I mean, that can mean product. I can mean customer experiences. I can mean the careers of the people that are in my vicinity. My God, it's one of the most satisfying things in the world to...”
2026-06-23 · Invest Like the Best · Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Goldman's one of these places where when you're there, you're amongst such talented and driven people. It's a hard place to be. And it's a thrilling place to be. But you particularly actually appreciate it once you're not in it because of all the things that you didn't know you were learning that you were, in fact, learning. I think we brought a drive for excellence. I find it implausible to just sit still, to take something and say, this is good enough. Why should we do this? This involves risk. It's just this motor that I think people that come and have been reasonably successful in order to the organization that it's inherent to them that they are always pushing forward, even though another person may look at that and say, why do you bother?”
2026-06-23 · Invest Like the Best · Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what's driven the growth of private markets. And some of those things may mean revert. So maybe regulatory burden reverts. That's least fixable. But the main reason of capital being available to you as a private company, I think that stays. And so this balance will persist. I think if you are an equity investor, you should look at the equity risk first and then decide what is the best way to get it. We have not stopped by any means investing in the private markets. There are other reasons why our balance sheet specifically is probably not best suited for public market exposure that is specific to our balance sheet. Doesn't mean we don't participate. It doesn't mean we don't take opportunities when they look particularly compelling. But we will continue to largely focus in the private space for our equity exposure.”
2026-06-23 · Invest Like the Best · Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“go public, that was a thing. And the trade-offs would be you give up a significant amount of control, the ability to make decisions for longer horizons and sit through difficult moments because public markets punish you, shareholders react, boards react. Private markets have more or less addressed those challenges. You can now raise gigantic amounts of capital. So the capital need has been solved. The prestige and milestone thing that's kind of gotten diluted. These companies have grown so large. We all know what they are. And now the cost of being public is actually quite high, whether that is a literal cost of the amount of compliance required to people being really careful about saying, do I want the kind of pressures that are naturally present in public markets in the way I'm going to run my company? And what is it that my company does? Can I operate on a more of a quarter to quarter or maybe year to”
2026-06-23 · Invest Like the Best · Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So public markets are substantially more difficult to hold than private markets. Many parallels to this. You don't think about the value of your house every day, even though it changes arguably every day. But if you own a public reit, real estate, you'll probably look at it every day and have some kind of feelings from it. But fundamentally, equity exposures, equity exposure. So we don't think about moving between the two based on this dynamic. It comes back to what do we own in private markets. And I think the more significant reason private markets have evolved the way they have in the past decade is you went public historically for very specific reasons. You needed to raise a certain amount of capital that was simply unavailable in private markets. They were just not robust enough. And if you wanted to grow your business, you would have to go to the public markets. There was a clear element of prestige with going public. So that was a milestone in a company's history to...”
2026-06-23 · Invest Like the Best · Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Will they ever use Salesforce as part of their ecosystem? And if the answer is no, that should absolutely be a massive headwind to the valuation of Salesforce, even though every Fortune 500 company may use Salesforce into perpetuity. You know, it's a different business. It's a cash cow business, deserves a different multiple. And that's what I think the markets are wrestling with in the public sphere, which has its own cascading effects into the private sphere.”
2026-06-23 · Invest Like the Best · Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A time in my career, and I can't really go back through history and identify something similar where it's not really the macro conditions per se, although you can maybe call this macro, that are driving potential repricing of equities and long duration credit and volatility, all because it's just uncertain as to how this technology will evolve and change the fabric of the economy. We've had things that change the fabric of the economy, but it would be slow burn. It would not be something that you need to think about today. Things like Salesforce, this is a company that is embedded in the vast majority of large companies in the United States and globally. The first question was, are people just going to vibe code their own CRM? No, of course not. I sit in a large enterprise. That's absurd. That's not the question. The question is, is the company that trillion dollar company I mentioned before that isn't even around today, that's still an idea somewhere?”
2026-06-23 · Invest Like the Best · Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Also, have potentially structurally higher volatility. You combine that with some of the tactical stuff like perhaps the SEC will not require quarterly earnings. And so you can make an argument that volatility is just going to be structurally higher going forward. The other part of that is everything I've talked about for now is through the equity lens. In the credit space, same concepts applied. Am I worried about four-year paper in most of the software names? Probably not. I mean, they're contracted out. This is not a four-year issue. That paper should be money good. Would I be worried about holding 30-year credit on Salesforce or Oracle or any of these things? I just think that it's a much, much riskier proposition. And so it would feel like that should drive steepness in credit curves if that's a structural shift that takes place. That will change capital market behavior. I go back to the fact that I have not experienced a framework.”
2026-06-23 · Invest Like the Best · Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, lower across the board. I don't think I've experienced a question like that in my career where you question multiples based on macroeconomic variables like, oh, inflation's higher, rates are higher, therefore multiples should come down or some version of this is very different. You're literally saying the future is so unpredictable that how could I possibly place some higher multiple on something. So that is a really fascinating question because it comes against the backdrop of possibly very favorable macro, which historically would have just had higher multiples. It can come against the backdrop of an expanding economy. Another way to put it is you will likely have trillion dollar companies in 2030 that currently don't exist. And you probably have trillion dollar companies or many hundred billion dollar companies that will not exist. And we're starting to see that. We're starting to see, therefore, more volatility. So that's the next extension of that is there's multiple question.”
2026-06-23 · Invest Like the Best · Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the newer ones that is really interesting is this notion of how do you think about valuations across not just software. Software, I think, has been the most talked about one. How do you think about valuation of businesses in a world where the future is increasingly invisible? It was perhaps always invisible, but you could get comfortable that certain things had a lot more staying power through thick and thin than not. And whenever you have that dynamic, you could put a higher multiple on things. And that's how you rationalize paying a price for an asset. I think today you kind of got to ask, well, do I really, really know which businesses will thrive 10 years from now or 15 years from now? I think that's really difficult. And that could be everything from yes, software, but maybe perhaps even Home Depot or John Deere, things that are not obvious in the AI crossfire. So that leads you to a question of should multiples be”
2026-06-23 · Invest Like the Best · Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Creativity is such an incredibly important part. The ability to take an obscure or well-organized set of data and find insights that are not easily observed from it, that's the art of investing. And now you can iterate on that in such powerful ways. I find myself using AI every single day more and more so. And frankly, it raises other questions for me. The more I spend of my day with AI, I'm actually not spending it with my colleagues. I begin to worry about that now. How much are you taking from those messy relationships that are human relationships and messy ways of getting information into the super interesting, smart, and efficient way of interacting with artificial intelligence? I don't know how that part is going to play out because it almost is, if you take it again to the max, it's isolating.”
2026-06-23 · Invest Like the Best · Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Generalities and it will drive everything to kind of an average, right? That's what these models are. So in order to get the best out of them, you need to engage with your knowledge, your experience, your ideas and creativity. It is amazing what you get back. And so I think in the investing sphere,”
2026-06-23 · Invest Like the Best · Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's super different about this technology than other versions of how this came about is it requires people to engage with it, get into a relationship with it, have agency. It's not a software package that the technology department is going to install on your desktop and then you're going to put your workflow through. That's not what it is. It's an absolute superpower that's given to you to get the thoughts out of your brain and have the superhuman assistant that is able to rationalize your thoughts, present them in a coherent way, interact with you. By the way, it makes you sharper if you go back and forth and jostle with it and really become an editor as opposed to just taking that first output that it gives you and saying, oh, good enough, because that's where slop tends to live. If you just ask for something and you get it back, it will give you.”
2026-06-23 · Invest Like the Best · Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To impossible. You may get the right issues, but you don't know how they interact with each other. You don't know what people do within the system to adjust and mitigate all the different roadblocks that come up. I do think we're living through a moment. I do think it's a reset in the way PAX Americana governed, but I don't think it's a reset away from American power in the world, at least on a relative basis. The world continues to need America.”
2026-06-23 · Invest Like the Best · Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whether that's the ability to innovate, whether that is the energy abundance that we ultimately have, all those things continue to conspire for American exceptionalism. But we've also gotten quite accustomed to a world where just-in-time inventory is worth thing and now that's challenged. The ability to identify the cheapest pockets of labor or competitive advantages like the economics book would say, that's going to potentially have structural impediments, which has implications on inflation, on rates. How does all that balance with what I perceive as an incredibly deflationary impulse from technology? I'm not sure. I think we are reasonably good at identifying by we, I mean, not LMI, but we, as people who like to think about these things, at identifying the variables that drive economic outcomes, but I think we're terrible at is assigning weights to them. That's why forecasting is next.”
2026-06-23 · Invest Like the Best · Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or is it just continuous progress? And then I think about the geopolitics today, and they do feel like we are certainly breaking the order that had governed economic flow, security architecture across the globe that has been in place more or less since World War II. You can make the argument that along the way we had some really major shifts like the Berlin Wall falling, but it's been a period where certain norms in international relations and certain alliances held through all that. And it does feel like that's changing. That in itself, I don't think affects investing, if you're focused in the US so much. What does clearly matter is that the economic architecture is changing. It's changing from an energy perspective. It's changing from a supply chain perspective and there are real investing opportunities and risks that evolve from that. I continue to think that the US endowed with inherent advantages.”
2026-06-23 · Invest Like the Best · Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“completely upend society and human life as I know it. I told myself, odds are very small. It's very unlikely that that's going to be the case. And then I remind myself there were many pandemics before that would wipe out large parts of humanity, yet humanity goes on. It is true that if you're living in that period of time, your experience is actually quite different than the lens of history many years later. But I also find myself having those thoughts over and over again. I have those thoughts when it comes to the unbelievable moment in tech progress that we're living through. And that feels really real and very, very different in a way that you can imagine society 10, 15 years from now that will look nothing like what it looks like today. But that was also probably true during the Industrial Revolution for the people that looked back 15 years after the steam engine became mainstream, society looked nothing like it did 15 years before. Is it really that different?”
2026-06-23 · Invest Like the Best · Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love history. We talked about this before. And so I'm particularly tempted to engage in these things. A couple of things I try to remind myself of. Whatever it is that you are living through, we are living through, it feels particularly acute to us. It always feels like the sharpest moment probably isn't. If you go back and take people in our parts of life, they experience things then and they thought it was the most acute thing. I also think about the fact that in my career I've now been through what I would say is more than enough of various crises. Some of them feeling like, could this really be that I'm alive during this period? I distinctly remember walking after a long day on Zoom in March or maybe April of 2020. It was a rainy day, 10, 11 hour marathon on Zoom, needed to walk outside. And I'm walking around and thinking, is it really possible that my life happened to coincide with this moment in humanity where a pandemic was going to”
2026-06-23 · Invest Like the Best · Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quick, can you take certain risks that others just don't even think about? The game's different across different types of exposures.”
2026-06-23 · Invest Like the Best · Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's exactly right. I think we want to be one of those institutions, but I would say we want to be even more bold than that because there's a notion of a name being on the capital roster that allows others to come in. That's an asset you have as that type of LP, but we want to be much more than that. We want to sustain that, maintain that, but we also want to be known for our creativity to structure solutions, for our creativity and willingness to take risks that some of those institutions with that halo of a brand just don't do not set up to do. That's not meant to be a negative. In certain cases, that's all that you need. In the case of, let's say, the venture ecosystem, which you're so familiar with, we're not going to try to replicate that outside of our organization. That's where you're competing truly with other capital to get on the capital roster. In other places, that's just not the game. The game is, are you creative?”
2026-06-23 · Invest Like the Best · Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But our reputation continues to build on the way we show up. Any single one of our people that goes out into the world can do tremendous damage or bring tremendous benefit in the way they engage. Because as you know, if you do great things with 10 business partners, the next 10 things are going to be easier because at least a few of those are going to come from that network. And we find ourselves well beyond that. We are a hub of incredibly interesting relationships. And we've tried to make sure that we approach that with all the care and diligence and thoughtfulness. What I mentioned before, if I can identify a way we can be helpful to two of our partners or three of our partners and not be involved, we're always going to do that. We're always going to think that way because we feel that these are valuable business relationships, friendships. We're rooting for all our business partners.”
2026-06-23 · Invest Like the Best · Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You've used this term branded capital. But what is branded capital? Branded capital could mean literally for one reason or another, you're viewed as someone that AGP should engage with. And that could mean many things. If you're a mega fund and you're coming to raise through your fundraising cycle, branded capital could be a large state pension, which will always write the big check. That's not what we do. That's not what we are. And so that's not our brand. Our brand is to come and help you build a business. Our brand is to be quick in the way we ingest information ultimately come back with how we want to or don't want to participate so that we don't waste your time. We operate much more like a GP in that way. And frankly, look to hire people that come from GPs or operators rather than just a traditional LP background. Of course, we compete in a variety of spaces.”
2026-06-23 · Invest Like the Best · Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where we would never seek to reproduce that kind of insight and that kind of capability is an example of do we have diversification in our portfolio? Are we benefiting in the moment from that exposure to energy? Absolutely. Would we have gotten the same level of exposure and benefit from our previous way of expressing that? No. That is really, really important. Having that diversity of different businesses and different exposures, but keep coming back to how do you acquire that exposure, that difference can mean the difference between it actually being effective versus not.”
2026-06-23 · Invest Like the Best · Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the way we were getting it was not serving us well, both because of our capabilities. We just didn't have the capabilities to be operators of some of these energy businesses. The second part was they were quite narrow. The second you're focused on an operating business, that can be swamped against a backdrop of macro that says, okay, well, energy prices are up. Why is this thing not providing me with what I thought it would? Instead, today, I mentioned one of the verticals we have is energy and infrastructure, which is both a credit and equity business where we, in many cases, choose to own certain assets or have ownership in certain assets, but not operate them, provide capital across the capital stack and provide solutions, which allow us sometimes to do things like provide credit, but have upside exposure via warrants or things like that, certainly back partners where appropriate in parts of the industry that are quite technical.”
2026-06-23 · Invest Like the Best · Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it has evolved through time. We've created much more of those options. Historically, depending on how far you want to go, the primary way would have been to back a GP. That's a pretty narrow path, perfectly good one. But I'd say we've been very, very focused on that same thing I described before. We want to have as many ways we can engage and help our business partners asking the first question is what's the exposure? How do we best get that exposure? The mix today is dramatically different than it would have been five years ago. That's both expressed in the types of exposure. So for example, we used to have a meaningful amount of exposure in natural resources. We have much less today. One could have looked at that and said, well, natural resources is a way to get exposure to energy, let's say, or perhaps inflation hedge if you wanted to put that lens on.”
2026-06-23 · Invest Like the Best · Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if we're clear about what is it that they're trying to accomplish, because if you can't communicate a brilliant vision, it stays in your head and unfortunately doesn't get realized. Lots of different things that go into it, but passion for your craft is a really important component.”
2026-06-23 · Invest Like the Best · Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To iterate because it's what you do, and that leads to better results. It's no different in my mind than the silly act of trying to create a better croissant. It exists in current form. It's great. But you can make it better. We do that culturally at LMI. We try to make things better, whether it's our internal process, whether it's the way we engage the world, whether it's the way we are willing to experiment with technology and move fast. All that is part of our culture. In terms of the investing activity or this notion, would we back at certain type of investor, we look for traits of entrepreneurs, of people who are eager to make the world better through the lens of whatever it is that they're doing. The best investors are obsessed with their craft, not because they're financially driven. I think we looked for that in our partners. We look for people who are incredibly passionate and good at what they do, are able to communicate it and make it come across.”
2026-06-23 · Invest Like the Best · Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Related to this notion of risk taking, not assuming and not taking anything for granted, not being entitled to anything. This is a fundamental trait that immigrants share. When you come with nothing, just looking for a life, you don't think of yourself as entitled to anything. And I think that carries no matter how your life in the United States ultimately evolves. You know you're not entitled to anything. No one owes you anything. And that permeates the spirit of the way I go through my life. Now, we talked about entrepreneurship, a culture of why do this at all? Well, why not? Why wouldn't you want to make something better? And I think we've tried to have that culture at LMI where we don't say this is good enough. That's not a good way to live. If you're passionate about your work and you're really interested in what you do and you care about your craft, you're going to continue.”
2026-06-23 · Invest Like the Best · Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the opposite of what you would experience in a place like the Soviet Union, but I would argue in many other societies as well. Like everything else take into its excessive corner, you would probably find all sorts of issues with individualism as the way to construct a society. And we wrestle with those in the U.S. But what it does do is it frees a person to pursue their talents, pursue their interests, pursue a network of friends they want to be associated with in a way that's just impossible elsewhere.”
2026-06-23 · Invest Like the Best · Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“bullying all those things were part of the social fabric so when you're born into that you are consumed by this notion of this is my reality how do i navigate it and survive never mind iterating on innovation i'm just trying to survive my experiences at the same time that was a reasonably happy kid because when you accept those things as part of your life you don't dwell of them you don't think of yourself as a victim you just accept them as they are and you form the rest of your life around them as constants. I have both kid happy memories as well as some of those stark moments of grayness, of just a society that has no spirit, a society that has no real art. And that's not a statement on the people. That's a statement on the way society is constructed and suppresses those otherwise natural human, I think, traits. When you come to the US, you experience literally the inverse of that, this notion of individual.”
2026-06-23 · Invest Like the Best · Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The highest level, you're not given permission to dream. You're born to survive. You're born with an attitude and a notion of I need to navigate these ways of life so that I can survive. I don't think it's worth getting into all the other components. Like I said, I experienced really difficult persecution being Jewish in the Soviet Union. That looked like being called out in school. I was a nine-year-old kid and I still have memories of that. My parents experienced that in much more stark ways where as a Jew you were not allowed to pursue certain professions or there would be hard quotas on how many people would be allowed to be in those professions. You would be assigned where you live. There'd be university quotas and so on and so on. I didn't experience obviously those things, but I experienced a society where that was normal. Jews were persecuted. Many other types of groups were persecuted. The point is that was normal behavior. It was overt, explicit, personal.”
2026-06-23 · Invest Like the Best · Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The exact opposite view if you want to reinvent the croissant, which exists in thousand different ways right around Union Square, you can do that. And if you can figure out a way to make it special to you and to your customer, there will be a market for that. And what is the act of that? That is human creativity. That is humans iterating and perfecting and continuing to apply themselves and to express themselves on something that doesn't need necessarily a different way of consuming calories, but it's beautiful. It's what drives, I think, people in general in the United States is to constantly make little tweaks that make things better. And we all benefit from those.”
2026-06-23 · Invest Like the Best · Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your family's history, your ethnicity, your religion, your government's oppressive system, an inability to move up the socioeconomic ladder because of the way the economy is set up. All those things and versions of or combinations of are present just about everywhere. But in the US, you have an opportunity. One of the ways I described the fascinating thing about America is, believe it or not, through the lens of a croissant. I remember as a kid in the Soviet Union, about six years old or so, my mom would send me to go get bread. And the way you get bread is there's a bread store and there is one, maybe two types of bread. And there'll be lines outside of it and you get the bread. Never went hungry, so don't want to create those impressions. But the view was very simple. Bread is bread. Why would you need more bread? You get your loaf and you go have your calories. In the US, we take...”
2026-06-23 · Invest Like the Best · Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What is true in the US always has been true, still true today, despite all the many ways you could criticize America is that the level of agency you have as a citizen of the US or as a resident of the US is unparalleled to anywhere else in the world. That's because it is a vast country with vast amount of regional differences, cultural differences along the way. We have done an incredible job of ultimately integrating people into our society. And if you have talents, if you have motivation, there's an infinite amount of way you can both define what success is, define how you will contribute, and ultimately live a life where you have the option to thrive. Not everyone thrives, but you have the option to. And that option is not available to the vast majority of humanity because you'll be burdened by”
2026-06-23 · Invest Like the Best · Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I do love America, and we're going to celebrate America's 250th birthday this summer. When you're born outside the United States, you are exposed to a way of life that is very difficult to actually understand for those that are fortunate enough to be born in the United States. You take certain things for granted. You assume they are like gravity because they just exist, but they're not. I was born in Moldova. a former Republic of the Soviet Union currently an independent country right outside of Ukraine. I was very, very fortunate that my parents decided to uproot their life in 1990 and make the journey to the United States. Now, to be clear, this wasn't a difficult decision. This was something that people could only dream of. We were very fortunate for a number of different reasons to take the path that we did, which was a direct path to the United States.”
2026-06-23 · Invest Like the Best · Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. We are incredibly diversified in our insurance businesses. You're spot on in the way you've just described what Ajit said, but we think about the similarity between not all our insurance lines, but particularly the more esoteric ones or really in the commercial and specialty space, as very similar in spirit to the practice of what investing is, which you're deploying capital into uncertainty to achieve a return. That's true across both. The risks tend to be not six months on one year risks. They tend to be multi-year risks. The same disciplines and the same conceptual framework applies. How do you manage your reserves? How do you manage your liquidity? These concepts go back and forth between the balance sheet. Let's be clear, these businesses operate in their own spheres and ecosystem, not a lot of operational synergy, but definitely strategic synergy.”
2026-06-23 · Invest Like the Best · Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Correct At the most extreme, you could think of Berkshire as being that. People think about Berkshire's insurance operations the most visible, obviously, is Geico, the original, but they are the insurer of last resort very, very often. The reason they can do that is because they've got this incredible balance sheet. Berkshire is in a universe of its own, particularly in the way shareholders have regarded Berkshire not asking for capital back. But that's an extreme example of what you can do when you have a balance sheet like that.”
2026-06-23 · Invest Like the Best · Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Product breath, future risks that currently may not be visible to you, but are going to evolve, we can be your partner in Retreat.”
2026-06-23 · Invest Like the Best · Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The other component I mentioned that our insurance businesses are incredibly diverse. So if you think about other large insurers, take a progressive, incredibly successful company, lots to admire. But they're very focused on a particular vertical motor in the US. They're incredible at it. Those risks require a certain types of balance sheet. They're not particularly long-tailed. If you think about our mix, we have risks that can come back from 20, 30 years ago and be very fat-tailed. It is really, really important to differentiate the balance sheet that company like Progressive needs versus a company like Liberty Mutual. Our tails are fatter, our balance sheet requirements are very different. That goes back to what we describe as a flywheel. If we do well for our policyholders in terms of underwriting, efficiently creating various products that tailor and suit their risks, and then invest our capital well, we can.”
2026-06-23 · Invest Like the Best · Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source