So David Bonderman, it's amazing to read about his impact on the broader investment world. He is one of the best known names, one of the icons. You knew him better than anybody in this business. What specifically did he bring to this business that was unique to him?
David really is a legend in the industry, but he's a legend for several reasons. I think there's three particular things. First of all, he pioneered a type of investing. Secondly, he built a firm that had a distinctive place in the industry. And third, he had a really interesting personal style that I think helped evolve the style of this industry.
So what did he do? How did that work in practice? What was he doing as a dealmaker that really set him apart?
David did deal making as problem solving. If you think about some of his signature deals, they were deals that everyone saw but no one else was willing to take on. It wasn't that he was taking on more risk, it was that he saw something different. Take the Continental Airlines deal, a legendary deal in the industry. The most hated company in America, the biggest bankruptcy in US history, had sat there for two years. Dave and I put together a deal that carved out a new Continental and took it from worst to first in seven years. Warren Buffett said that airlines were financial sinkholes. David over and over made successful investments in airlines when others saw the S&L crisis, David saw the S&L opportunity. We created the good bank, bad bank structure for American Savings when working with Bass, and then we exported that structure around the world to do bank rescues in China, in Korea. Again, deals that no one else did, and that problem solving approach really appeared at a moment that the industry was mostly about changing capital structures, not companies.
All right, so you said something to me before we came on air which I found fascinating, which is that David was a polymath investor. The Bloomberg audience is pretty smart, but you need to break down what that actually means in practice.
Polymath is from the Greek, and it's basically a person who has broad and diverse interests but uses that knowledge and interest to solve problems. David really didn't come to investing until his 40s. Think about that. He had several careers before. He was a litigator, he argued in front of the Supreme Court, he taught law at Yale, he studied Islamic law in Tunis. This was a person that never took a finance class, didn't know accounting, and yet he brought that broad experience and problem solving expertise to the problems of investing. His ability to use different experiences he had to solve problems, I think, really created his style. It's a poly style. It was not one thing, it was a unique ability to see opportunity and frankly solve problems well. It translated into him being, I have to say, one of the most eclectic, maybe eccentric, sort of figures in an industry that didn't always, certainly the broader Wall Street doesn't always sort of embrace change.
So how was he received in this broader Wall Street world, in your estimation?
David was many things, but he was never boring. We used to laugh that David often brought like a rock and roll backbeat into rooms that were used to classical music. It was a very different style. He was known for his ridiculous socks, I mean they were just ridiculous. When others were drinking fine wine, he was drinking Diet Coke. He flew a thousand hours a year to meetings anywhere. It was a very personal thing for him. His style was informal, it was direct, he couldn't stand obfuscation. That style was a sort of a different wind in the industry at the time, and it opened up the opportunity for different types of styles to really flourish. It's an industry that had incredible talent among its founding brethren, but David brought a little bit of a different attitude and frankly a lot of fun into a very serious business.
So how do you build a firm around that? You can be sort of an iconic class as a single person, maybe as a small firm. You guys started out as three people in '92, '93, but now thousands of employees, quarter trillion dollars in assets. How does that grow into something this big?
I've been doing this a long time. Culture and curiosity. In some ways, what we described you and I about David became how you would describe TPG. At a time that the industry was very much about finance, was very much focused in New York, we came out of a family office in Texas, we set up on the West Coast. I used to say, and you do sports a lot Jason, that we were playing the same game but differently. We were the West Coast offense of private equity. To do that, you have to get a culture of curiosity and problem solving. At the first fundraise we did for TPG, our tagline was contrarianism, complexity, and change. At a time the industry was more focused on franchise businesses and finance, contrarianism, complexity, and change. I think those lines of problem solving and a different approach really were what David brought to the business in the early days.
