Good evening, everybody. My name is Allison Rouse, and I'm the Director of Alumni Communities Engagement here at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. And it is my honor to bring to the stage the Philip H. Knight Professor and Dean of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and Morgridge Professor of Organizational Behavior, Sarah Soule.
Well, good evening, everybody. Glad that everybody is seated, and I want to invite you to please start in on your salads as I share some remarks. There's a nice program here tonight, and there's no reason we should let our good food wait. So please feel free to jump on in. Welcome, welcome to the Ernest C. Arbuckle Award Dinner. We have several people here with us tonight that I would like to give a few shout-outs to. First, we are so honored to have President John Levin and Dr. Amy Levin with us. John and Amy, thank you so much for coming. This evening is as much about the entire university as it is about the GSB, and your presence here of course reminds us of that. We're also very, very happy to have with us the members of the Arbuckle family: Susan, Steve, and Anton. Thank you so much for being here with us.
I would also like to welcome the members of the Stanford Board of Trustees, the GSB Advisory Council and Trust, the leadership team of the Business School Fund, and the board members of the GSB Alumni Association. You all provide the connective tissue of this community, and we're so grateful for your partnership, your counsel, and your care. Thank you for joining us. Now before I go on, I want to take a moment to acknowledge the passing of Steve Denning, the 2018 Arbuckle Award recipient. As many of you know, Steve served as Stanford's longest serving board chair, guiding the university with steadiness and with vision. He was a foundational force behind the Denning House and the Knight-Hennessy Scholars program, the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, Stanford HAI, and he co-chaired the Stanford Challenge. We remember Steve tonight with gratitude and affection.
Now let me tell you a little bit about this award and about the man whose name it carries. The Ernest C. Arbuckle Award is the highest honor that the Stanford Graduate School of Business bestows. It's presented annually to a leader who has achieved distinction in management and who has demonstrated a genuine, sustained commitment to addressing the changing needs of society. Tonight, as you know, Hamid Moghadam will become the 56th recipient of this award.
Ernie Arbuckle was the third dean of the GSB, serving from 1958 to 1968. During that decade, he elevated the school to a place of global standing. He recruited exceptional faculty, he overhauled the curriculum, and he built new facilities. And he did all of that while bridging two worlds that do not always speak to each other: the world of academic rigor and the world of business practice. But what people remember most about Ernie, it's not really the buildings, nor is it the rankings. They remember the person. Ernie Arbuckle, as many of you know, was a decorated World War II veteran, allegedly refusing morphine when he was injured so he could keep a clear mind and bring his men to safety. This anecdote shows something about Ernie: that he believed that people beside you are more important than the mission itself. Ernie Arbuckle once wrote that if the private enterprise system as we know it is to survive, we must instill in our students attitudes that accept integrity, rooted in the bedrock of principle, as more important than operational competence. I think Ernie meant that because he understood that excellence without integrity is hollow, and that both of these depend on the kind of community you build around them. And as you've heard me say before, excellence and community are still the core values of the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Now, before I go further, I wanna take a moment to recognize the people who have made this community possible. To our past Arbuckle Award recipients who are in attendance, would you either raise your hand or stand if you are able? We have John Morgridge, our 1996 honoree; Bob Joss, former Dean and our 2012 honoree; John Gunn, our 2013 honoree; Mark Wolfson, our 2022 honoree; and Jim Coulter, our 2025 honoree. Thank you all for being here with us. We also have tonight 60 fellowship and faculty donors who are here. And would you, if you would, please just rise to be appreciated? You are all the reason that 50% of our MBA students and 24% of our MSX students are able to be here and to be lucky enough to study at the Graduate School of Business. Finally, and then I'll try to shut up soon-ish, we have 41 fellowship students here tonight. Would you also please rise?
To all of you, the people in this room are your community, and they made it possible, of course, for you to study here. And one day, I hope that you'll be the ones making it possible for somebody else. Okay. Now, I get to say some words about the man that we're here to honor tonight. Hamid Moghadam earned his MBA from the Stanford GSB in 1980. Three years later, he co-founded AMB Property Corporation with Doug Abbey and colleagues, and John, who's here with us tonight too. Doug's a lecturer at the GSB, and he is going to lead our fireside chat later on with Hamid. Many of you know, of course, that Hamid led AMB through its IPO in 1997 and through its merger with Prologis in 2011. Under his leadership, Prologis became the global leader in logistics real estate and one of the top 100 companies in the S&P 500. In January of this year, Hamid transitioned from CEO to Executive Chairman.
Now, Hamid has received so many honors for his leadership over the years. I'll just mention a few of them. In 2006, he received the Ellis Island Medal of Honor. In 2013, he was recognized as the Ernst & Young National Entrepreneur of the Year, representing the United States. And the Harvard Business Review ranked him the 17th best performing CEO in the world. But Hamid's relationship with Stanford, I think, runs deeper than all of these awards and accolades and recognitions. He served on the Stanford University Board of Trustees, the GSB Advisory Council, the boards of Stanford Health Care and Freeman Spogli Institute, and he chaired the Stanford Management Company, overseeing the stewardship of our endowment. Hamid's also mentored countless students. He supported faculty and contributed to the intellectual life of the school, and I think that's exactly what alumni excellence looks like at Stanford and at the GSB. Alongside with Christina, he has invested in the intellectual life of the GSB in so many ways that will outlast us all. Together, they established the Moghadam Family Professorship, and they're the primary benefactors of the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Program in Iranian Studies at Stanford. And this is a program that supports interdisciplinary scholarship, courses, and public dialogue on Iran's history, culture, and place in the world. We're really happy tonight to have Abbas Milani, the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies. And Abbas, wherever you are, thank you for being here. Hamid, what you've built in business is extraordinary. What you have given to the university is lasting, and the way you have done both with integrity and purpose is exactly what Ernie Arbuckle would have recognized and admired. Please enjoy your dinner, and we'll be back with the rest of the program after we have a bite to eat.
So I've learned two things in dean school. Number one is get a red dress, and number two is learn how to interrupt people when they're right in the heart of a really great conversation. So there you go. And I'll be very brief right now, but I wanted to move to the heart of our evening's conversation, and I'm really glad to introduce somebody who's going to take us there. Jahan Moslehi is the CEO and co-founder of Bridge33 Capital, a commercial real estate investment firm. Before founding Bridge33, he spent nine years at Morgan Stanley working across offices in New York and London. He, of course, earned his MBA from Stanford GSB in the class of 2010. And what I have learned about Jahan recently and in our conversation tonight is that he brings an incredible curiosity and commitment to everything that he does. He's a member of YPO, and he serves on the board of Conservation X Labs. So Jahan's going to share just a few remarks, and then he'll welcome Hamid to the stage to also share a few remarks before a conversation, a fireside chat with Doug Abbey. So Jahan, the floor is yours.
Thank you so much, Dean Soule. It's so great to be here today, and it's such an honor for me to be introducing Hamid tonight. You know, it's funny, I've actually realized that I've had many, many years to think about what I would say here tonight, not because I ever thought that anybody would ever ask me to give this speech, but because when a mentor has had such a tremendous impact on your life, you end up carrying around a list of things that you have to say about them. And so tonight, I'm excited to share just a couple of those. But before I do, I should say a few things about what Hamid has built. In 1983, he co-founded AMB and built it into the global powerhouse in logistics real estate. 3% of the world's GDP flows through his buildings. 3%.
He is a visionary. I could keep going on about his resume, but his resume is not why I am standing up here tonight. So I'm gonna go back to my list. In 2001, I was three weeks into my first job at Morgan Stanley. I was 22 years old. And when I was 22, I looked like I was 12. I got invited to a Morgan Stanley client event, and I show up, and I don't know anyone, and I don't know anything, and I'm kind of awkwardly hanging out at the bar by myself. And a guy walks up, and he starts chatting with me. And that guy was Hamid. The next day, I go into work and my boss, very sarcastically I might add, asked me whether I networked last night at the MSREF event and if I met anyone. I pull out Hamid's business card and I show it to him and I say, "Yeah, I met this guy." And he says, "Oh, wow. He's a huge deal. You should email him." And I say, "Oh, I already have, and we've already gone back and forth five times." That gets me to the first thing on my list. For someone at his level, Hamid is uniquely accessible. He takes the phone call. He responds to the email. He talks to the kid at the bar who's obviously the most junior person in a room full of important people. Hamid, for 25 years, you have always written me back, and I can't tell you what that means to me.
You also inspired me to start my own real estate company with my partner Andy 14 years ago, and you and Doug decided to back me. Ever since then, your fingerprints have been all over everything that we have built. And that gets me to the second thing on the list: Hamid is the rare CEO who develops other CEOs. It's early 2021, we've emerged from COVID, and we're on the offense. We're one of the biggest buyers of shopping centers in the country. Hamid calls me out of the blue and says, "Jahan, your number one job as CEO of this company is to build the best relationship with the 30 tenants that matter, figure out what their pain point is, and solve it for them." I did what I always do when Hamid gives me advice: I listen. And it was a couple of years later that I realized what he had done. That wasn't just tactical advice. That was the Prologis playbook, one that he had spent 40 years writing, based on the premise that when the rest of the industry is obsessing over capital, you obsess over your customers. That's how Hamid develops other CEOs. Hamid shows up early, he stays in touch, and he gives you a piece of how he built one of the great American companies. That is genuinely rare. Most CEOs at his level go on to build a great company. A smaller number go on to build an industry. And a very, very small few go to build other people who then go on to build their own companies and their own industries. Hamid has done all three, and that is a legacy that compounds.
I want to close tonight with the following. I have spent 25 years watching Hamid in every type of room: the real estate world, Wall Street, the Stanford community, the Iranian American diaspora, and most importantly, in his own home with Tina and Cyrus. What I have come to understand is that he's the same man in each of those rooms. The Hamid you see in the boardroom is who shows up at the dinner table. The Hamid who's given so much to this university and to so many other causes is the same Hamid who talks to that kid 25 years ago at the bar. There is just one Hamid. And he is in every circle that I've seen him in, always the most respected man in the room. Hamid, congratulations and thank you.
Well, that was amazing, Jahan. I don't know who you were talking about, but I enjoyed every second of it. Jahan has been, as he talked about, a friend of the family for over 20 years and a business partner for about 15 years when he started this company. So he's played a few roles. But in the last couple of months, he's been playing some really different kinds of roles. He officiated our son's wedding, and my son and his wife are here tonight with us, and he did a great job. And now he's serving as the emcee for this event, I guess. So at this pace, I think I'm gonna put him on retainer because he's really good at doing this. He's even better at it than real estate, I think. No, but in all seriousness, Jahan, thank you. I really appreciate your friendship, your leadership here, and for being part of so many important moments in our lives, including Cyrus's wedding. And thank you, GSB, for the honor. It's especially meaningful knowing the people who have received this award before me, many of whom I consider among my friends and worked with them and really learned from them. I also wanna really acknowledge the Arbuckle family. I was a little bit later than Ernie's deanship, but he's legendary and his mark is always gonna be on this school as really the person that put this school on the map. So it's great to have you here, and I look forward to getting to know you better.
Really the way I ended up at Stanford started with a blizzard in 1978. Literally a blizzard. And this was one of the biggest storms that Boston had ever seen. In fact, if you Google the Blizzard of '78, you'll learn all about it. At the time, I was at MIT and the city had imposed a week-long curfew. You couldn't drive your car, and in those days, there was a $500 fine if you drove your car and they caught you. So I was sitting around at home stuck, cold, frustrated, and rethinking my long-term plans. Right in the middle of that, I got a call from Lori Lieberman. How many of you know Lori Lieberman? Okay, many of you who were admitted around that time. So Lori calls up and says, "I hear Boston is shut down. I wanted you to know that it's 75 degrees and sunny in Palo Alto, and you should come here." So not only was that a very effective recruiting strategy, but it really changed the course of my life. As I look back, that one call and that one storm was probably the biggest moment of change in direction of my life. Stanford is where I met my wife. Through Stanford is where I met my partners directly and indirectly in the business. Many of my closest relationships relate to this place. And in a very real sense, I didn't just get educated here—maybe I didn't get educated here—but it really shaped my life.
I graduated in 1980 in the middle of the Iranian Revolution and the first of a double recession that lasted through 1983. Interest rates were 22%, and I was trying to get a job in the real estate business. Not very smart. Like many people at that time, I didn't have a clear plan. The future I thought I was gonna have changed 100%. But what Stanford gave me wasn't a direction; it gave me a way of thinking, and maybe more importantly, a comfort with uncertainty. That turned out to matter because the most important decisions don't come with complete information. When I started working, I wasn't trying to build a global company. We were just trying to learn, do a good job, and take advantage of opportunities as they came along. Over time, the opportunities added up. If there's a pattern, it's probably this: things evolve. You adjust, you make mistakes, and you try to stay relevant. What looks like a long-term strategy in hindsight is often just a series of decisions made along the way, with many mistakes among those decisions. What I've come to appreciate over time is how much of any outcome depends on circumstances, timing, people, and access to opportunity. There are many people with similar abilities, greater abilities, who didn't get the same chances, and that's where a place like Stanford really matters. They create opportunity. They bring people together. They change trajectories, sometimes in ways that are hard to see at the time. I'm certainly a beneficiary of that.
To the students here, I won't try to give you much advice. The world you're entering is different, and I'm not sure I followed most advice myself anyway. But a couple of things seem to hold up over time: be open to change, take on things before you're completely ready, and pay attention to the people around you. In my case, that turned out to be the most valuable part of being here. And many of my classmates are actually here, and I'm really happy for their support. Let me end with a few more thank yous: to Stanford for playing such a central role in my life; to my family, my son, my new daughter-in-law, and especially my wife whom I was lucky enough to meet through Stanford; and to my colleagues and partners who did the real work, and especially to my founding partners, Doug Abbey and Bob Burke, who are both here. I now look forward to joining Doug in the discussion. When I think back, it's hard to believe that something as random as a snowstorm and a well-timed phone call could set all of this in motion. But that's often the way things work: small moments, the right people, and a place like this. Thank you.
So picking up on the timeline, Hamid, you're an MBA, too. You have two degrees from MIT and a Stanford MBA, and you need a job. And by the way, you were 23 years old, so you've accomplished a lot already. Walk us through how to go looking for a job.
Well, you know, I think I told you part of the story. I think I hold two records at Stanford Business School. One was being really young with a graduate degree here, which is good, and the other one is really embarrassing the school by having more rejections than interviews that I had, and that is true.
Two more. Well, we won't get into the numbers, but...
Two more than the number of interviews I had. So, you know, I'm sure it had something to do with me, it had something to do with the circumstances, it had something to do with the economy. But it was not a fun time, let me tell you that.
And tell us a little about—so you had all these rejections. He's not gonna tell you that there were 85 rejections, but there were 85 nos. And one of them was from Morgan Stanley. Tell us a little bit about Buzz.
Doug is leading the witness here. So I think the story he wants me to tell you is that we were having a closing dinner for our IPO at one of the wineries in Napa. And everybody was saying nice things about Hamid, and Doug, and Bob, and the IPO, and what a great company AMB is. And the lead banker was Morgan Stanley, so they were really going all the way. And at the end of that, I invited people to look under their placemat, and there was a copy of a rejection letter from the guy who ran the real estate department at Morgan Stanley. And I said, "Well, must have gotten a lot smarter over the years, because I wasn't so smart then."
I believe that you were going to paper a bathroom with all of your rejection letters, but Tina, you turned it down.
Yeah, she's the reason we don't have one of those.
So, looking back to the early days, can you maybe share some memories of when you, Bob, and I started the company?
Well, all I can tell you is that we had these amazing meetings Monday mornings, and Bob used to keep the list, and there were like... I mean, I think our revenues were like a million bucks. But he had 700 items on the list. I mean, we were working on the craziest, tiniest, most goofball things that you could ever imagine because we literally started the company with a $50,000 loan and never took outside financing. So we were paying our way—a concept that doesn't really exist anymore, I don't think—but we were regenerating cash flow as we were building this company and self-financing it. We had a lot of items, but very little business. And over time, I would tell you the thing that happened the most is that we got more and more focused on our core business, and we had fewer and fewer things to do, which is a lot easier than the opposite. So that's probably the most memorable thing.
You remember when we were selected to get what we called the D Project. It was a secret project, but we were asked to value the Spreckels Ranch in Salinas, and we had to become experts on growing lettuce in Salinas. So that was not exactly something you would learn in business school. So you're one of the few CEOs that's taken a company from a startup to an S&P Global 100. Real estate's a simple business—four walls and a roof, the industrial business is, that is. Yet, as you look at the history and the trajectory from 42 years ago, you've made so many decisions that have fundamentally changed who we do business with, how we're organized, and a constant evolution of looking around the corner. And as you used to say, "We have to avoid being roadkill." Because if you're not doing that... So give us a little bit of a hint as to the discipline and the thought process that led to all of these significant changes over the years.
Well, I have a couple of theories about business, and this is a dangerous place to talk about them because there's so many people who know more about business than I'll ever know. But one of them is the bicycle theory of business, which is that you gotta keep pedaling, otherwise you tip over. If there's not forward motion, there isn't enough excitement, there isn't enough opportunity for people and all that. And companies that rest on their laurels usually fail. And you can look at incumbents from decades and decades and decades, and they're never the same companies. So, I've always been impatient. I've always wanted to do more than we're doing, always pushing the envelope, and not always actually making the right decisions, but pretty quick in adjusting our path.
If there's one suggestion that I have for the business school, it's that it's all about making decisions: Alternative A in the case, Alternative B in the case, which do you do? And what are the numbers that support each? I've never seen numbers that don't support the decision that you wanna make, okay? The numbers are always good. So that's really, I don't think, it. I think the key for me, for us, to building this business was when the business is going really well, to become anxious and uncomfortable. So the better the business went, the more anxious we got and started looking for other opportunities. So that was the playbook for the first 10 or 20 years. But I would say of late it's been simpler, and that's been actually just opening up your ears and listening to what your customers want. They tell you; you don't have to be brilliant to hear that. And it's not so much about making decisions; it's just about listening and adjusting over time and keeping your customers happy. And it's easier said than done. In the real estate business, which is a very deal-driven business, it's never been about the customer. Nobody actually knows the name of their landlord or cares about the landlord. But when you get to a scaled business and you're serving the needs of a customer across 20 countries or something, then it really becomes the customer. Because no single deal, no matter how big it is, no matter how profitable it is, is going to move the needle on a giant company like this. But serving customers well, better than anybody else—
We used to call them tenants.
Yeah, we don't call them tenants anymore. Tenants implies a landlord-tenant, feudal kind of relationship, and I don't think you can really treat your customers—
So how did you evolve from thinking about real estate as collecting rent from these customers of yours for industrial space that's maybe 5 or 10% of their spend on logistics? And that's what real estate people do: you have a lease and you collect the rent. But how did that opportunity to grow that business beyond just collecting rent, how does that manifest itself?
Well, hopefully one way is collecting more rent from the same customer. And the trick to that is actually solving more of their problems other than their space problems. And what other relationship do you have that you're in touch with the customer, whether they like it or not—hopefully they like it—for five to 10 years? They're not going anywhere. And you have an opportunity to sell them products and services and other things that solve their needs, whether that's energy, whether that's sustainability services, whether whatever. So you have a captive audience, and there's so much more value to that customer and that revenue stream. And the real estate industry really ignored that because it was a very fragmented business. Nobody really—when I got out of business school, billion-dollar companies in real estate was unheard of. And so it was a very fragmented business, and you couldn't build a customer franchise because when you have two to three buildings, it's all about location and that building. It's not about the platform. But when you have 6,000 and you've got 11,000 customers, it's all about leveraging that platform to do other things for them. So it was an insight that we backed into, if you will.
So it was not all up into the right-hand corner. And for many of you leaders out there in 2008, it was pretty brutal being a leader of a company. And I know how loyal you were to the employees of AMB, PLD. You took such a great pride in building a great team. AMB's stock price was trading at 65, and it went down to the range of nine, and Prologis, our biggest competitor, was at 70 and went down to about two. Talk about a challenging period of time. Jahan wrote a case called Navigating Treacherous Waters, which was about the period that you went through that we now still teach at the GSB. But talk about the personal element of it. Remember there's a story of you and Cyrus playing golf and hearing about what was going on in Wall Street. There was a personal element of it, which I'd like you to hear a little bit, but I'd also like you to answer: how did you turn lemons into lemonade? What was it that you learned from that experience that I think helped you go from playing defense, which everybody was doing, to playing offense?
Yeah, two-part question. The personal piece of it: I look at Tim Arndt, who's our CFO now, and the two of us spent so much time together working on this thing and building models and figuring out what business we should be in. And I remember speaking to Jim about maybe we should buy the company back, remember? And the check was even too big for you, and you can write some pretty big checks. But the personal part was the hardest. We had to lay off about 20% of our staff. We'd never laid off anybody. Obviously you can't run a company without having to ask some people to leave because of performance and all that, but we'd never laid off a company because the business was shrinking. But we didn't do it in one step. We thought we planned for a normal recession, and we went 5%, and then it was deeper, and we went another 5%, and we went another 5%. That was a terrible mistake on my part. We should have done it all at once. It killed me. We were very generous to people with time and financial resources during that period of time, because that's really important. And interestingly, many, many of those employees that left are now the best friends of the firm. They really look at the then-AMB part as maybe one of the best parts of their career, and most of them have landed—all of them, I think—in good places.
It was very personally hard. I would get up at 2:00, 3:00 in the morning, and somebody said, "What keeps you up at night?" during that period, actually, 2011. And I said, "The Wall Street Journal." And they said, "What do you mean The Wall Street Journal keeps you up at night?" I said, "Well, the Wall Street Journal guy always threw the paper in our backyard at 3:00 in the morning, and for some reason I kept waking up at 3:00 in the morning. And I figured out it's not the stress; it's the guy throwing the paper in the backyard." Seriously, that part of it was extremely difficult and stressful. By the way, it wasn't just us. The entire REIT Real Estate Index went from 1,200 to 270—the entire industry—because people thought there wouldn't be another dime of financing. But the other big lesson was simplify the plan. Really simplify the plan, and get on offense as quickly as you can. So we did a controversial equity offering at that time, without getting into the details, which is a story of another case that you teach. But that allowed us to get on offense, and that allowed us to buy our biggest competitor and create the new Prologis. And out of the seeds of that very difficult period, we became a much stronger company. But clarity: communicating, communicating, communicating the priorities until you're sick of hearing yourself talk. You've got to strip it down to a very simple message that people can understand and rally around. And you can't look weak. You can't look like you don't know what you're doing because a lot of people depend on you. But I got to tell you, there were a lot of times I had no idea what I was doing or what we were doing. So that's the truth.
So in the class, we ask the case about what would Hamid do. You'll remember the numbers, but no one had done a secondary. Nobody had demonstrated that you could raise capital in this brutal market, and the only way that you could ever be in a position to play offense would be to raise some equity and have a war chest. So we asked the students—and you'll help me with the numbers here—was your first secondary was at what?
Was it north of 50, I think.
