As a public company CEO, I had done 112 earnings calls, and that's a record in the S&P 100.
Buffett is the guy that's been longer CEO than me. In the S&P 100, the thing that really got us and has really defined the company to this day is this concept of enduring excellence.
What is a personal habit that you believe had the greatest impact in your success professionally?
Being super responsive to people. I respond to people right away. And that really surprises people that a CEO is so accessible. They feel like I'm always there with them.
Today's guest is one of the most influential business leaders shaping the global economy. Hamid Moghadam. Hamid is the co-founder and now executive chairman of Prologis, a longtime CEO of course of the world's largest logistics real estate company for over four decades. He served as the CEO, the chief executive officer, leading the company through extraordinary growth that, to put it lightly, multiple market cycles and the transformation of global supply chains. Before CEO of Prologis, was the co-founder and CEO of AMB, which through merger became what is known as Prologis. Prologis owns and operates and develops the industrial infrastructure that powers modern commerce: the warehouses, distribution centers, and logistic hubs behind nearly everything we buy, ship, and consume. Today, the company spans nearly 1.3 billion square feet across 20 countries with a footprint so significant. This was wild. I had to look into this. I had with my research team, I was like, is this real? Is the portfolio, the footprint, it roughly 3% of global GDP flows through Prologis facilities each year. Is that, that's a real thing?
That's incredible. I mean, the scale, right? And Prologis was for the longest time the largest market cap for us real estate nerds, the market cap rate, for decades and currently sits at number two with a market cap roughly around, depending on the day, $120 billion. So under Hamid's leadership, Prologis has become a critical player at the intersections of logistics, technology, and energy, supporting the rapid growth of AI data centers and next-generation infrastructure, keeping the company ahead of what's next in a rapidly evolving global economy. But Hamid's story didn't begin in boardrooms or on Wall Street. He was born in Iran, immigrated to the United States as a teenager, and built his life and career from the ground up in a new country, developing the discipline and long-term mindset that would later define his leadership. One of the things, you know, we'll touch on, but really with the transition from CEO to executive chairman, how your day-to-day has shifted. But right now, focusing on strategy, mentorship, and long-term vision, offering a rare opportunity to reflect on leadership, patience, and really building something that truly lasts. Before we dive in, don't forget to like, share, and subscribe to the Matthews Mentality podcast. Hamid, welcome. We're sitting in your beautiful office here in Las Vegas, Nevada. How did you end up in Vegas?
Well, it's close to California, but it's not California. And I thought it was a good idea to create some separation, physical separation, and not be going to the same office that I was going to for many, many years. And Dan Letter, who's our new CEO, is the real CEO, and I'm no longer the CEO. So, it's better to communicate that by not being there all the time.
Sure. And the headquarters are in San Francisco, right?
They continue to be in San Francisco.
So, I wrote down one of my first questions. I said it's January 27th. It's been about 4 weeks since you became executive chairman. So, what is a day in the life, I always ask like what does a day in the life look like? But I'm going to tack on something. What does a day in the life look like today? And how has that changed from four weeks ago?
Well, I'm spending about a day or two a week on Prologis and really I'm there to do what Dan wants me to do. I take my cues from him and you know I think that level of engagement will fluctuate up and down, you know, depending on the need. There may be weeks that go on and that I don't do anything on Prologis and there may be weeks that I'm 100% devoted to Prologis but we're feeling our way. It's too early to tell where it's going to settle down, but it's working out pretty well so far.
So, let's start by give us an overview of the Prologis portfolio. And if you could like explain to, we have a very large non-real estate professional demographic on this show. And so, I think most non-real estate professionals, they could tell you even not being in real estate, what does an office building do? People work there. What apartment? People live there. Retail, people shop there. But I think a lot of non-real estate professionals they would struggle to tell you what happens in industrial buildings like they make things maybe. Explain, you know, give us an overview of the portfolio and if you could, you know, to the layman explain, you know, on average what happens inside these industrial buildings Prologis owns.
Yeah, good question. The vast majority of the buildings are used for distribution. So when things are made in one place and consumed in another place, they need to make obviously their way through the supply chain and because perfection is not possible. I mean if you think about it, if you could perfectly predict demand and supply, you wouldn't need any warehouse space because basically goods would go from being manufactured straight to where they're being consumed. But of course that can't happen because you got these practical things like ships and boats and planes and all kinds of things in between. So you have inventory building up. You have the function of actually redistributing happening because imagine you have a factory and the factory is producing these cups and these cups are all coming into one place but they're distributed to a bunch of different stores together with this bottle and that computer and all that. So they come in on containers that are full of these cups, but then they need to get split up and mixed up with a bunch of other stuff that go to retail or e-commerce or whatever. And that function happens in a warehouse. And it's really a redistribution function that happens in the warehouse. That's probably the biggest use. And that's changed a bit because of e-commerce, and we can get into that. But there's some manufacturing that takes place in some of these buildings. For example, we have a bunch of buildings in the border cities in Mexico, just south of the US border, and those look like any other distribution building, but the vast majority of the activity taking place in those buildings is manufacturing. So, it's a very flexible shell in which you can do a number of things all the way from manufacturing to distribution, but the vast majority is actually distribution.
What do they call those? Maquiladoras. I'm trying to think.
They used to, that was before NAFTA.
Ooh, see I remember that from a business class at USC. I actually did learn something.
Yeah, I was going to say I don't know if they're called that anymore. I guess they're not. All right. I want to go back in time. Let's talk about how you got here. It starts with you're born in Tehran.
You can date yourself if you want. What year? But, you immigrated to the US when you were 16.
So, I was born in Iran in 1956. I'm 69 years old.
Was that three years after the coup?
Yeah, but the coup wasn't really that big a deal as you hear about these days. I wasn't around to experience it directly, but actually the Shah and that regime had been in place for a number of years. There was a little blip during the coup and then he came back. So it wasn't, I mean it was an important historic event.
Became an issue 26 years later.
And now it's becoming an issue again.
Again. I actually, and I was going to say maybe I'll talk offline about this. Hopefully one day we could have a nice dinner with Jan. That's how we met. Jan must love you. If you have shopping centers, sell it to him. Bridge 33. But yeah, I was going to say, hey, one day we could have dinner in Tehran, just not today.
Well, that would be great. What age did you come to America?
So I actually went to Europe to finish high school at the age of 13 and was boarding school. And that was actually a pretty typical pattern. You know, there were a lot of Iranian students in the West, Europe, and the US. In fact, I think the numbers were there were 55,000 Iranian students in the US in 1978. It was the largest foreign student population here. By the way, there were about 60,000 Americans living in Iran at that time. The third TV station was AFRTS, American Forces Radio and TV station. So, it was a very western economy. It was growing at teens a year. It was on steroids.
What was it like to grow up in Iran back then?
I would say very little difference from growing up here. It was a very connected western economy.
Educated is my understanding.
Educated at the very top society there. Actually, the problem was that if you lived in Northern Tehran, it was just like living anywhere in the US, probably West LA was most similar to it, which is why a lot of people from Northern Tehran ended up in LA. But there were parts of the country that were not quite as educated. They were behind and all that. And that disparity actually drove a lot of the issues that came about. But the country was industrializing very quickly and it was not at all unusual for young people from Iran to go to college in the US or the UK, go back and get involved in the growth of the economy which was tremendous. I mean the biggest opportunities in the world were there. Just think about a smaller China but a higher growth rate than China in those days.
Yeah. Even in the days of China. So, I started in real estate in West LA and a very large Persian community, Iranian community, a lot of Persian Jewish community. But then as you know, as my business has expanded beyond Southern California, there's just so many and I don't know if it's something about real estate. I was actually going to ask you this question. What is about real estate that seems to draw people who were born in Iran? Because Amir Korangi is CEO of The Real Deal, you know, he was born in Iran. Obviously, Jan and so many that I've met, they come here and they're so successful and it's so fascinating. I know I'm generalizing, but they just, you know, whatever it is about that place or that culture, when you bring that to the States and really hear opportunity exists that they just do so well.
Well, it's a very entrepreneurial culture and if you look at it, there are two places in the Middle East where a lot of entrepreneurs come out of. One is Iran and the other is Lebanon. So, there are a lot of Lebanese entrepreneurs that you see around the world and you see them in Latin America, you see them in Asia, you see them all over the world. They're traders. And if you look at the geography, Iran is like a bridge between Asia and Europe. So there's been always a population of traders and sure it's kind of in the blood and real estate is the ultimate negotiating game. Right. So the ultimate tangible asset. Exactly. So these days I think you have a lot of people in real estate but increasingly you have a lot of people in technology as well. And I think, you know, it's interesting because other than Tehran, I think the other place from a historical perspective, it's like, man, you should have seen it in the 50s and 60s was Beirut, you know, in Lebanon. And it was like a western country and it was very prosperous. And then I think, if I'm not mistaken, it was maybe Hezbollah came in and that changed.
Late 70s is when it changed. Yeah, Beirut was called the Paris of the Middle East.
Yeah, that's what it was. And then obviously Tehran. So you first did boarding school in Europe and then is that how you ended up getting into, one of the notes I had was you got admitted to MIT at 16.
Actually I started in MIT when I was 16. Yeah. And for a short time, my birthday is in August so technically I was 16 about to turn 17. Yeah and I was there for about four and a half years. I stayed and got a master's and was just about to get on a plane and go back to Iran and get involved in what was the family business and I can explain more about that. And I remember vividly a conversation with my mom about my return and that was right around the time that the first shots were being fired in the streets.
It was right at the beginning of 78. It was just the beginning of what became the revolution. And she basically said, 'Look, figure out something to do with yourself for two years until we figure out if this place is going to settle down or what's going to happen.' So based on that alone, I applied to business school and a couple of business schools and decided to go to Stanford and really it was a temporary decision. I mean, it was just a way of spending two years waiting for things to change.
Not a bad place to spend it.
Not a bad place to spend. But of course, you know, as soon as I got there, the place blew up and became a very different trajectory.
Yeah. What was the family business?
So, my dad started in construction.
Oh, I thought you were going to say textiles, you know. [laughter] No, no. Actually, there is every Persian guy I know in LA has a rug store and I figured, you know, might be a problem.
It wasn't in rugs. But it's interesting because there's another family with our last name that were the biggest textile producers in the country and everybody kind of confused the two families. No, but my dad started in construction and development and then had a small business in addition to that in offshore drilling for oil and platforms and then ultimately started a bank called the Industrial Development Bank of Iran which ended up being the largest business bank before the revolution.
Part of why I was asking that I was interested coming into this conversation to kind of see what was the tie-in that got you into commercial real estate.
So that's an easy one. I mean, I used to go around with my dad to various construction sites on the weekends because that's when the traffic allowed you to get around and see a couple of things. You know, nobody's driving around. Tehran traffic was horrible in the 70s. Continues to be that way. So, I love spending time with my dad and I love the smell of concrete and construction sites and I never considered a career other than real estate and ultimately ended up doing what I wanted to.
What if anything went through you kind of psychologically, you know, you have this family business back in Iran and again before the revolution, prosperous country. I don't know if you had given thought like, 'Oh, I'm gonna take this over and this is my destiny.' And then you in some way get a call from your mom saying, you know, that may not be available for you. I don't know if it was as draconian as saying you had to start over in a foreign country, but was there any kind of mourning process for saying gosh, like I thought I had this whole setup and then now I have to start from scratch in America.
Absolutely. I mean, I'll tell you another part of the story which is important. My dad actually passed away in 1973. So, six years before the revolution. And right before he passed away the summer between my high school graduation and starting at MIT. So, there was tremendous pressure actually to get back quickly. That's why I was such a, I was the only boy. And actually I had two older sisters who were somewhat involved in the business but not as much as I would have been in those days because of the way the place was structured. So there was tremendous pressure to go back. I mean and I felt a responsibility to go back and get involved and you know when the revolution happened your whole mental picture changes. It was a wealthy family, was an educated family and here I was, you know, 6,000 miles away with no resources. I mean, they nationalized all those businesses and took them away. So, literally, I ended up here, I think, with $8,000 in a bank account and a lot of tuition to pay because I was just in the first year of business school. So, it was a very big transformation. Now, you know, nobody's going to cry for me because I already had my education and it was by and large paid for and that's better position than 90% of the people. But when your expectations are that you're going to go back and run this big business and be a big deal and all that, it takes a little bit of an adjustment.
Yeah. You know, I always say the hardest thing someone's ever gone through is the hardest thing they've ever gone through. And to them, you know, they don't have the perspective of something, you know, from an outsider's perspective, you say, 'Oh, that's not that much. This is much worse if you have to go through it.' But I'm sure that that had to take a psychological toll.
Yeah. One of the drivers of unhappiness is mismanagement of expectations.
And it was particularly difficult in addition to that. So I would say early in my life, pretty early in my life in my teens went through two pretty traumatic experiences. One my father passing away which was important, very important and then the Iranian revolution. But there was a third thing that happened right after that which is I was class of 1980 from business school and you're too young to remember this but in 1980 interest rates, the prime rate was 22%.
I was going to say 22, 23.
Yeah, inflation was 14%. The 10-year bond was 14.5%. And the real estate business was absolutely in the tank. And I wanted to be in the real estate business. And my first interview was in November of 1979. Guess what happened in November of 1979. They grabbed the American hostages in Iran. And I have a name that doesn't sound exactly like, you know, Jones or Smith or anything like that. So I was stuck in a situation where I was interviewing for all these jobs and getting rejection after rejection after quite the resume. So yeah, I have a feeling it wasn't really me, but it was just a combination of a bad economy and rightfully people were just really upset about what was going on in Iran. And really most people didn't know about the differences between those of us who were here and those of us who were, you know, promoting the revolution and all that kind of stuff. So it was a pretty depressing period I would say.
But somebody gave you a shot, right? What was your first job?
So there was a gentleman by the name of John McMahon. He was the adjunct professor at Stanford Business School who taught the only real estate class that was offered there. And he obviously knew me from class and knew I wasn't a terrorist. So, he actually offered me a job and I went to work at what was then called John McMahon Associates. And that's where I met my eventual partner, Doug Abbey. And I worked there for a couple of years from 1981 to 83. And we started what became AMB.
So, that was pretty quick. Couple years of experience. And did you always know you wanted to be what I'll call an entrepreneur, a founder, that you wanted to own your own business?
Yes. But I had no idea and no clue about what that meant. But none of us do. Ignorance is bliss. Right. Exactly. So actually when I was interviewing John for this job, I told him, John, I will work my tail off for you. But I'm an entrepreneur and at the end of the day this is going to be a stepping stone to an entrepreneurial career. I didn't know how quickly it would happen or how it would happen and he, I remember when we left he actually reminded me of that conversation and we had a really great departure or separation and we remained friends. He just recently passed away and I still spend time with his son and it was a very important step in my career. Without John McMahon none of this would have happened.
But you started your business, was it called AMB right away?
No, it was actually, we had a better name, it was called Abbey, Moghadam and Company because it was only Abbey and Moghadam. Yeah. The third partner was the managing partner of a large law firm in San Francisco, actually San Francisco headquartered, but all over the country and the world called Morrison & Foerster. And they were about to occupy a major downtown office building and to get an equity interest in it. So when we left and started our company, we didn't have any money. So we were basically providing consulting services to whoever would hire us. So Bob's firm hired us to advise them on how to structure an equity interest in this new office building that was being built in downtown San Francisco and how to monetize their old lease which was way below market in their existing building.
Through like a sublease or something.
Well actually to assign the entire leasehold to the developer of the new building.
Okay. So the developer of the new building ended up getting some pre-leasing, major pre-leasing in their new building.
But took over the obligation of the old building and that allowed Morrison & Foerster to make the move.
To make a move and pay in effect for the condo part of the building which was their own little block of office space.
Anyway, pretty complicated interesting transaction but that's how Bob and I got to know each other because he was the client. I was the person working 24/7 with him for a period of six or nine months. And Bob at the time was in his early 40s. I was in my mid-20s and Doug Abbey was in his early 30s. So he had been a real estate lawyer before and he was a real estate lawyer. He just became managing partner of the law firm. And he was ready to do something different than law. And we were lucky to catch him at the right spot. He liked us and we enjoyed working together. And we sort of had a bunch of casual conversations and he decided that he would join these two crazy people that had no really business to speak of. I mean, we had started the company with a $50,000 line of credit from Crocker Bank. Never used it, by the way, because we were cash positive from day one. Very different than startups these days. We never took external capital in our business and sort of started this consulting business with a couple of assignments that grew into a bigger and bigger business and eventually morphed into a workout business. So people were then hiring us to help them work out portfolios that were distressed and we built our reputation really in that business between 1983 and call it 1988, 89 and that's when we decided to sponsor our first fund on the ownership side.
So that was the first major transformation, one of many, one of five or six which was going from an advisor to an investment manager and a fund sponsor. So that happened in 1988 to 89.
And so, and that was right coming out of the S&L or maybe right in the middle of the S&L crisis, right?
It was actually right before the S&L crisis.
89 or 87. I maybe they changed the tax laws in 87 and.
Tax laws changed in '86. What they did is they disallowed passive losses from being deducted. Real estate by and large was financed. The equity came from tax syndications. I mean large companies, Consolidated Capital, JMB, actually JMB originally was a syndicator, Valor, I mean companies you never hear about anymore, but a lot of great talent came out of those companies. But real estate was tax financed and in '86 that went away.
And then the S&Ls which were the major source of debt financing went away in '88, '89. So real estate really fell on hard times. We had been doing mostly office building workouts and all that during the period between 83 and 88, 89 mostly in the Sunbelt because Texas went crazy because of the oil boom in the aftermath of actually the Iranian revolution the price of oil went from 12, 13 to like 70.
And Texas was boom town and everybody overbuilt office buildings in Texas.
Yeah. So we ended up building our reputation on the basis of that. It's ironic by working out some of these things and we got that reputation based on that we decided to do a fund but stay away from office buildings. So our first fund was called the AMB Western Properties Fund. It was focused on seven western states and it was focused on industrial and neighborhood shopping centers which is by the way a little fact that most people don't know about and it was two-thirds industrial one-third neighborhood retail. So we set out to raise $100 million and the first year we raised 10. It took us a year to raise the first 10 million. It was just like a disaster.
Second year we kind of, sales is tough. I tell people all the time, man, sales is tough.
It is really tough. And particularly if you're trying to do a new fund and you have no track record and all that. So, and the sales cycles are long. You go through pension funds and they want to make sure, you know, they talk to a bunch of people who come around once, they talk to fewer people that come around twice, and by the time you come around the third time, maybe you're real, and they start paying attention to you. Anyway, we raised 10 million.
Second year we raised 65. We declared victory at 75. We closed down the fund and started investing 50% leverage. So it was about $150 million.
Which in today's dollars is.
Probably a half a billion.
I was going to say it's a pretty good size for a fund. Yeah. 300, 400 million. It wasn't bad. It was respectable.
So we started investing these things and lo and behold the place blew up because of the S&L crisis. And all of a sudden, here's this little company nobody's ever heard of in San Francisco putting up 10% returns with one or two percent growth when everything is like declining 20% in terms of values.
Why do you think your assets, I mean two-thirds industrial, one-third retail? Why do you think yours were able to perform? Were you just buying better than everyone? Was it your execution of like a value-add strategy?
People were enamored with trophy office buildings and regional shopping centers. Regional shopping centers were five and a half, six cap rates in those days.
Okay. Now, mind you, this is an interest rate environment. It had moderated by then, but it was still sevens, eights, nines.
Yeah, it was nines and tens.
Nines and tens. Okay. So, we were buying industrial at about nine and a half, 10 cap rates with some growth built into it. So, we were generating low to mid-teen returns. Nothing spectacular, but everybody else was losing their shirts.
Yeah. When compared to the rest of the market, you know, it's an, it makes you guys look really good.
Exactly. Made us look a lot smarter than we were. I mean, it was just smart enough.
Because nobody else was really focused on the asset class and it was an important asset class and the unit investment sizes were small enough that you could actually buy a few of them in a $150 million fund. Obviously, you couldn't go buy a $100 million office building in a $150 million total fund. So anyway, these things performed really well and in '91, '92 after we got done investing this, we went out to raise 200 million for our second fund which was called the AMB Current Income Fund. It was actually the first private REIT that was structured. It was a fund structured as a private REIT and I think we raised 400 in like six or seven months.
So the market was ready for it.
And our track record really spoke for itself.
The market was ready for that. So we came out of that cycle with a good war chest.
And we started buying more and more industrial buildings in LA and I mean we were looking around. We were buying industrial in LA at 70 bucks a foot and really struggling. We were really paying 70 bucks a foot for this stuff and are we ever going to make any money out of this and you know the rest of the story. So anyway, we continued that strategy and in the meantime as we were investing this second fund, we were winning a bunch of separate account business. So we won some CalPERS business, some CalSTRS business, some Southern Company pension fund, separate account businesses, Ameritech, lots of pension funds formed separate accounts with us in parallel to the funds. And so we over the.
When you say separate accounts, you mean from an advisory like a consulting or a separate investment vehicle?
I mean they gave us discretionary funds to invest, but it was a single investor fund as opposed to a multi-investor fund. So between those single investor funds and our co-mingled funds and then we formed more co-mingled funds. I'll take you to sort of the mid-90s, 96, 97. We had built up a business that had almost $5 billion of assets under management. We were on fire. We were winning pretty much every mandate that we went after. And just to help you place this in your mind, the big competitors in those days were REEF, you remember REEF which was later acquired by Deutsche Bank.
Was called Rosenberg Real Estate Equity Fund. Yeah. And TCW, Trust Company of the West. I mean, these are companies that don't exist certainly in the big but they were big.
And the Heitman and firms like that. So those were the big players. We were coming along and we were becoming a pretty significant player and we looked around us and realized that there was this new vehicle format coming about called the REIT. Now REITs had been in existence since the 60s but they were basically backwater departments of commercial banks. It was just another way of investing equity in real estate and banks were the sponsors because it was a way of in effect capitalizing their developers and providing equity in addition to that but it was a backwater industry. I don't know what the total AUM of the industry was but it was.
In the hundreds of millions maybe in a good day. But REITs were beginning to get traction because that was the capital structure that was helping companies come out of the S&L crisis and recapitalize their portfolios and the expression was go public, go broke, or go public. So a lot of real estate companies like Simon I think went public in 1993 in the beginning of this wave. We were a little bit later than that. We were in '96 we started planning for this but we said well why don't we do this a different way than other people why don't we go to our LPs and we'll value their portfolio and we'll value our GP and we had a couple people that wanted to buy the GP so it was pretty clear in those financial services companies were buying GPs of real estate fund management companies so it was pretty easy to establish value. So we valued our business through these offers. Then we had values of what the funds were and what the separate account single investor funds were worth and we took all of these and put them together and as one giant private company for about a nanosecond literally a nanosecond and that company went public in November of '97.
So and nobody had done a transaction like that before. Now after we did it, actually Equity Office was formed that way which became the largest office company. This is a couple of weeks before Boston Properties went public.
And Kite, you may remember Kite became, did an industrial. So a bunch of companies followed the playbook and it's interesting actually a lot of private equity firms now essentially use the same playbook.
So a lot of founders, you know, they start a company and there's this vision, there's this dream that hey one day I'll have this liquidity event, public, private. Yours certainly, you know, from what I could tell your first big one, going public, you said November '97.
What was that feeling like? Was it as satisfying or fulfilling as maybe you had built in your head?
Okay, it was a tough slog. I mean, by that time, we'd already been in business 14 years. We had bootstrapped this thing up from a two-man operation, which you know.
Which for the audience generally, and I bootstrap my own company. And so, if you're not going to raise outside capital, it's like, where's the capital for growth? It's from cash flow. And so, you're always reinvesting back in the business. And so.
And one little thing going wrong can kill you. Yeah. Because the margin for error is not there at all. So yeah it was somewhat of a relief because it changed the equation from the first equation is can we survive? By the time we got into the fund management business we kind of knew we were going to survive but then the question was can we become relevant. And I never felt we could be relevant if we were just advising other people and other people's money. Having our own balance sheet really was a true test of do we know what we're doing and can we make good decisions and that excited me. It was not a liquidity event. We, I never took a dime off the table as a result of that. It was just a way of building permanent capital into your business.
And at that time I would say I should do the math. Bob is 14 years older than I am. So he was in his mid-50s. He wanted to slow down a bit. Doug was a couple of years after that. He was in his late 40s, early 50s by the time. So those guys slowly decided to retire.
But it was a great mechanism because it separated the idea of owning the company from working there.
So they could sell their shares. I mean there's probably some sort of for founders and keymen there's probably some sort of what do you call it?
Yeah. Lockups. Six months. Yeah. I've heard of longer.
It used to be that was the norm, but these guys didn't, they thought it was an attractive proposition to have that liquidity, but they actually didn't sell their shares. I mean, I don't know how much of it they own now, but they may have sold some to give to charity and all that, but it's not like they hit the exits. They just wanted to know that they had a valuable currency.
And that gave security and knowing that you're going to be in business and you have something of value that is liquid. But so those guys slowly stepped aside. We built a new management team that came in post-IPO. By that time the partnership had expanded to 10 people. The three of us owned the majority of the firm but we had seven other partners that had worked with us that came along. We had financed their purchase of the shares. So we were really on management structure 3.0 when we went public because the 1.0 was the founders, the 2.0 was the expanded partnership. 3.0 was really the first public company management team that we had.
And we'll get to 4.0 or you know the merger of equals as it was called. But.
That's 6.0. Oh jeez. All right. A lot of iterations here. But I want to, you know, go back and, you know, it's always a fun topic for us to discuss on the podcast is work-life balance, right? You know the 14 years of you being a founder and scaling. Talk to me about work-life balance there.
I don't know what that means, honestly. [laughter] I mean, I'm not proud of this, by the way. I am not proud of this. But on our honeymoon, my wife and I were at the Monaco. And in those days, there were no cell phones or email or anything. I was on the phone in the room the entire time. It's, I'm not proud of this at all. So, but that's what you had to do because we were working on a deal that kind of was life and death. I got married in '86. This is still the early days. Everything matters. And so no, there wasn't work-life balance for 10 years. I look, the first 10 years were pretty hard.
