Antony Ressler0:08
Thanks Craig. I'm Tony Ressler, I'm Chairman of Ares Management. Delighted to be here. Thank you all for being here. I guess my job is a fairly easy one. I'm supposed to describe the past 10 years of Ares Management in the next 5 or 10 minutes.
And I think the best way to start is to make quite clear: no, I did not expect that Ares Management would grow in market value 10 times over the past 10 years. No, I did not think Ares Management would grow its fee 10 times in the past 10 years. And no, I did not think Ares Management would grow its assets under management five or six times over the past 10 years.
What I did know when we went public is that we were a very good company and had the ability to become a great company. We weren't sure, but we had enormous confidence when we went public that we could do something special.
It's tough, I would say, tough to know what was most responsible for the past 10 years and for that somewhat extraordinary performance. I think one might say it was the collaborative culture or the power of the platform that you hear about so often.
It certainly could have been the commitment we had to building really an extraordinary origination platform. I think it could also have been the fact that we were utterly committed to credit and understanding credit.
I think some of us might argue 20 years ago when Kip and Mitch and Smitty and Mike came to this firm to launch a US direct lending business. My personal favorite was six years ago when we replaced the then CEO with the current CEO, Mike Arougheti.
I would say all of the above had a meaningful contribution. And as far as I'm concerned, we're just getting started.
You know, we get asked all the time, you know, what was that secret sauce? We try to answer this, but to me, assets follow performance. And we've had really good, consistent performance over an extended period of time.
We've stayed disciplined to what we do well. That to me, for an investment firm that's focused on a massive market with extraordinary opportunities, stick to what you do well. Assets follow performance. And if performance is solid, impressive, and long-term, good things will happen.
I must also say, in this picture, bringing my son, I still can't figure out why I brought my son. I think he just graduated college, but most importantly, I don't think anyone else in our senior management team had a college-age child at that time. So it seems like I was the only one, but I don't know if that's core to today's presentation.
I get asked, and I think we have a fairly interesting discussion of what the next 10 years looks like. And for me, it's really pretty straightforward. The private markets will grow faster than traditional markets.
Corporate, asset-backed, real estate, infrastructure, all will grow as asset classes in the private markets. The United States, North America, Europe, Asia, all will grow larger in their private markets activities.
And we see the bigger guys getting bigger. We see average deal size continuing to grow. So the simple and to me obvious perspective is we could not be in a better place.
Our next year, our next 10 years would appear to be actually far more exciting even than our last 10 years. And as far as I'm concerned, all of us have so much more to offer at this moment in time.
We have so much more expertise. We have so much more credit and lessons learned over the past 10 years as a public company. And I think, as you're about to see, we have such depth in our management team that we could not be better positioned for this next 10-year run.
And now, I guess I get to introduce my favorite Chief Executive Officer, Mike Arougheti.
