The Age of Intention: How Private Capital Can Build Trust and Resiliency

Sixth Street Co-President David Stiepleman gave the Keynote Address at the International Bar Association’s 22nd Annual International Conference on Private Funds on March 11, 2024, in London. The following is a transcript of his speech.

Good morning, everybody.

Thanks to Rebecca Silberstein at Debevoise, thanks to the Organizing Committee for inviting me, and to Ali Shea from Debevoise and Lucy Robinson from the IBA, for helping out.

It’s a great invitation to come to London in March because it’s so lovely.

But also, 22 years, it’s very impressive. This is an incredibly important room. All of you, folks representing GPs, representing LPs, capital allocators—this is an incredibly important room for global capital flows. We have really important things to talk about.

I’m David Stiepleman, a Co-Founding Partner and Co-President of Sixth Street. We are a global investment firm, $75 billion of AUM across our fund families. We were founded in 2009, about eight of us who used to run the Special Situations Group at Goldman Sachs, which was an on-balance sheet proprietary investment platform.

We are investors. We are operators and risk managers. We have fund complexes that do a number of different things and focus on different strategies—but what we try to do is have 15 to 25 rotating investment themes at any time that we’re deploying across Sixth Street. We’ll talk about a couple of our deals to make some points later, but you’ll see that we were the rescue financing for Chobani. We were the pre-IPO convert into Spotify. We make sports investments.

We’re looking for the best way to express our themes up and down the capital structure. We are doing senior secured loans on a more liquid basis. We’re making direct loans, originating direct loans in the middle market. And we’re doing everything down to middle-stage growth equity.

We’re agnostic as to the instrument, as to the region, as to the sector, as to the asset class. We’re looking for the best risk-adjusted returns for our LPs. We’re 600 people, 10 offices in various countries around the world, including Texas. That’s a joke, Texas is not a country. You guys are supposed to laugh at that.

We are, I think, indicative of trends over the last 15 years that I’m going to talk about, because I think we’re one of a small number of firms, maybe half a dozen in the world, of the scale that we have and that do multiple strategies, that did not grow up around or with a private equity fund. And so, I think it’s a bit of a new model, an alts firm only really appearing over the last 15 years.

We’re either really smart or crazy. We’re probably somewhere in between. We’re not the smartest, we’re not the craziest, but we’re in the middle. And the only way we can do all this stuff is with our mission statement—everybody at Sixth Street can tell you what it is. And what it really boils down to is that we’re one team and we have to trust each other, that we’re going to get things right together, and that we’re going to work across silos. Our capital partners, our LPs, have to have a trusting relationship with us, where we’re going to be transparent, and we’re going to do things the right way.

As a result, we can operate as one team, and they’ve given us a lot of leeway in terms of flexible and long-dated capital.

I sit in an interesting seat inside of a firm that, I think, has helped shape some of the trends that I want to talk about, and for sure has been a beneficiary of those trends over the last 15 years.

I’m seeing, and I think you’re all seeing, some interesting things and I want to try and bring them into focus and see what we might do about them. Because I think some of those trends are kind of concerning.

We’re going to talk about how far the private capital industry has come. I want to talk about where I think we’re going, and some of the worrying trends that we’re seeing. And then I think this room has a singular responsibility to get some things right, so we’ll talk about that.

How Far We’ve Come. I’m going to take you back to 1998. That’s Zidane and the guys winning the World Cup for France in 1998; the Good Friday Agreement bringing peace between England and Ireland; the Spice Girls. Not equating these things, sorry, but I thought I’d give you a little local color. And then “Titanic,” which is a movie I still haven’t seen.

And the reason I haven’t seen it, possibly, and maybe you all share this, is because at the time in 1998 I was finishing my first year as a Big Law associate. I was learning how to be a deal lawyer, so I didn’t really do much else.

One day, somebody came into my office, a senior partner, who was probably younger than I am now. And he said, “Hey, can I get your help on something? I want you to work on launching a hedge fund.” Okay.

He said the following words: “$2.5 billion, low-risk, market-neutral strategy, long equity to merger arbitrage, some commodities. They need help. Can you pull together some precedents? They want to know about liquidity and fees and other terms.”
I was a French major in college and at that point I regretted that, because I had no idea what that guy was talking about, but I said, “Sure.” That’s what you say when you’re finishing your first year at a law firm.

I worked on that as a sort of end-of-first-year associate for the next six to nine months. I was clueless. On my team was a first-year associate who had just started, who was even more clueless than I was. And we worked with the COO of that firm, who was a lovely, lovely smart guy, and who also had no idea about hedge funds. And we put it together, and it was fun.

I think that the fund, in some way, still exists, and I hope that they’ve amended their documents many times since then!
That should horrify you, because you’re all coming from—whether law firm practices or GPs or LPs—really sophisticated ways of thinking about funds. That kind of gives you a sense of sort of the amateur nature of what we were doing back then.
So how far have we come?

You know about the AUM growth, from nothing to about $13 trillion today— depending on who you ask. The number of funds has grown, though, and there’s more consolidation at the bigger end of the market. The industry is sitting on something like $3 trillion of dry powder, which is astonishing.

We’re also more diversified. Back in 2000, traditional private equity was about 85% of the capital. It’s more like low 60s to 70% now, depending on the year, with more non-private equity real estate and credit fund strategies growing massively.

Private credit—I come from that world in part—we’re about $2.5 trillion of capital, also kind of astonishing. Average fund size has grown. You would expect that after — when did 3(c)(7) get passed? In 1996? Sure, that made fund sizes grow, but really recently, large public asset managers are raising larger and larger vehicles. Between 2021 (somebody should keep me honest here) and last year, I think the average size of a fund went from about $300 million to about $550 million, which is kind of nuts just over the last couple of years.

Companies across the world have raised more money in private markets than in public markets every year since 2009. And even when some of my friends in the industry try to make us sound smaller so that regulators won’t notice us, they say things like, ‘we’re only $13 trillion compared to the total market cap of global equity markets, which is $101 trillion, we’re not that big.’ Still seems kind of big to me, I don’t know, $13 trillion out of $101 trillion: pretty big. So, we’re pretty big.

What drove this growth? Obviously your very good work. Thank you. If you’re lawyers or you’re my colleagues at GPs, and also capital providers in the LP community – you’re helping structure funds, helping partner with new ideas and getting great stuff done and choreographing fund raises.

But there are also some real macro tailwinds. Returns help. There’s a lot of debate as to whether or not net returns really did outperform the market. They seem to have outperformed the market. You can go have that debate later tonight. But I think that debate also misses the point of diversification.

One of my partners is a brilliant guy named Marty Chavez. He always says diversification is the only free lunch in finance—and it is. You need to be diversified in order to be able to sustain things that are going on in the markets and stay uncorrelated. So diversification helps.

Of course, low rates over 30 years, not so bad. And that helped because people are really looking for alpha. Money was coming out of your traditional sort of 60:40, equity-to-fixed income allocation. Public pension plans in particular are very sensitive to this. They have a big obligation to pay retirement to their beneficiaries, and so were really looking for alternative ways to invest.

Then of course, a regulatory tailwind. After the Great Financial Crisis, Dodd Frank and bank regulatory rules, pushing our activities out of the banks and away from the implied “taxpayer put.” So super-important tailwinds.

Also, the LP mindset changed. You should challenge me on this afterwards at coffee if you’re an LP. But I remember going to raise money in 2010. Our first strategy that we raised around was a private BDC that was going to go public, which is a very strange thing to start with, especially in 2010. And most people that we talked to had this private equity mindset. They were private equity investors, they were evaluating traditional commitment-style funds, they were looking for, “Are you saying 25% IRR and two and a half times your money, like, if we’re not talking about that, why are we here?”

And sometimes, every so often, there was a very weird person in the corner who understood credit. And if we were talking about downside protection or call protection, or we were talking about collateral packages or financial covenants, they were vibrating with excitement, but you didn’t often get that person.

But we kept making this argument—we and others—and in a low-rate environment, as we started to say: “‘Gee, you could make 15% returns and be at the top of a capital structure and take appropriate risks.’” That started to resonate, and you started to see LPs forming opportunistic baskets to invest in things besides just private equity. You’ve all seen this.

Then you start to get more expertise in the room, and either there were no more weirdos, or we were all weirdos, and we just didn’t notice, which was good.
Then look, I think the machine started to work. Expertise started to leave the banks and develop at the LPs. And firms like ours could exist and grow, and we’ve been awarded with some trust from our capital providers with very flexible, long-dated capital.

Then we can become theme developers, investors, as I described. And not incidentally, you can use long-dated private pools to incubate themes, and to capitalize them separately, only if it makes sense. That’s a good model. We really like that model, because it allows for patience, it allows for partnership, and it doesn’t make us go to market when it’s not in everyone’s interest to go to market.

Let me give you a quick example of a theme that I alluded to: sports, media and entertainment.

In 2020, as COVID started to happen – like four years ago this week, right? – we thought: “‘You know, this isn’t going to last forever,’” which was a little bit of a strangely hopeful thought to have. And we said: “It’s not going to last forever, people are going to really have a demand for live entertainment and being together at some point in the future.”

And we also thought: “‘Gee, if you think about how our kids watch sports, it’s very different from the way I watch sports, right? They can look at highlights on their phone, they can follow players on social media – it’s global, it’s incredible. That’s also lot of revenue opportunities for sports clubs and for their financiers.’”

And then, it’s a very fractured time, especially in the United States. But sports are one of the last places that we go and we wear the same jersey and we high five, and I don’t know your politics, and you don’t know my politics.

So, we then thought, how can we do this? I don’t necessarily want to own passive equity, common equity stakes in teams, those are very hard to get out of, and I don’t really have control, and I don’t really know what they’re going to do with the team.

We looked for other ways to express that theme. For example, financing media rights, buying a media rights stream from FC Barcelona, investing in the new Santiago Bernabéu Stadium, which is re-opening right now, for Real Madrid.

We can even be a startup investor and start a new women’s soccer team because we see the dislocation between values of men’s teams and women’s teams in the United States.

The point is this: we’re large, exactly how large depends on who you ask. If you add up all the Form PFs, it’s $11.5 trillion. If you ask Gary Gensler, we’re $17 trillion. He said that in November of 2021 when he was kind of setting up the new funds rules last year. He said we were $23 trillion in Congress because he was comparing us to the $25 trillion commercial banking sector. Anyway, we’re big.

We have every kind of institutional investor who we love and appreciate. We are invested in all kinds of asset types, all kinds of companies, at all kinds of stages of their development from startup to maturity and beyond. We’re in every industry. And we provide credit to the real economy.

So, hey, congratulations. Thanks. Like, great to be here. Really appreciate it. I’m just joking. We’re going to keep going.

I’m actually kind of worried about where we’re going, but you should pause for a minute and pat yourselves on the back.

Current Headwinds. Fundraising was down last year. The same Bain survey that Rebecca was talking about also talked about an imbalance of demand and supply. GPs when surveyed said they were going to raise $3 for every dollar of LP demand, so that’s interesting. I wonder how that will work out.

But there’s a lot to possibly explain that you all would know better than I would about how it’s going this year. I hear its sort of leveling out or getting a little better in terms of fundraising.

But it’s really not just a year-over-year concern. I think we have three large headwinds, which I’d like to touch on.

One large headwind is what I’m calling geopolitics and politics. The world is a much more fractured and volatile place. We got an initial taste of that as an industry when Russia invaded Ukraine. There were sanctions from various quote unquote Western countries. I think the investment fund management business was largely unaffected, though there were some exceptions to that. But if there were to be analogous issues elsewhere, where we raise more capital, where we invest more capital, are we ready for that? I think we need to be thinking real hard about that. I know some people are.

As I alluded to before, it’s increasingly shrill in the United States. Red states and blue states telling us to do very opposite things. I think that we’ve so far navigated that in particular because of our friends at the public pension plans who have tried to help us navigate that, but the walls feel like they’re closing in. That’s not going to be great if we don’t reverse that trend.

And then general deglobalization, the world dividing into democracies and autocracies, that is not good for the free flow of capital and for the free flow of talent, which we thrive on. So those are powerful headwinds.

When I’m talking about populism, there’s a lot of things when you look at polls that people agree on, but the one thing they definitely agree on is the increasing belief that the system is somehow rigged. And we don’t do ourselves any favors. I love my friends in private equity, but banging the carry tax drum all the time is not super-helpful from this perspective.

I’ll tell you a quick story. I was down in Washington, D.C., or I live in California, so “over” in Washington, D.C., in the middle of last year, sort of on the heels of Silicon Valley Bank. A couple of us in the industry were visiting regulators, policymakers and lawmakers over a couple of days. We were trying to talk to them about why maybe naming non-bank institutions, like funds, as systemically important may not be based on the correct premises.

As we were describing this to very senior, very intelligent, experienced people: “Hey, we don’t really have the same asset-liability mismatch that banks have, for example, we don’t take overnight deposits.” They were surprised. And they were surprised because there are armies of lobbyists from our friends in the banking industry who were there—you know, the seats were still warm from them—they were pointing the fingers at private equity funds and “shadow banks” and hedge funds. We’re an easy target because people want to think ill of us because of, I think, this sort of populist trend.

And then finally, you know, all of this feeds—and you’re going to talk about this over the course of the next couple of days—the regulatory headwind.

I teach a class on private equity and hedge funds. It’s a law school class and we’ve just wrapped up a couple of weeks talking about the U.S. Investment Advisers Act. We go through a series of enforcement actions. The SEC ringing up managers on operating partners, management fee calculations, failure to do offsets, accelerated monitoring fees, conflicts, all that stuff. We trace that over the last 15 years, the SEC has staffed up their Private Funds Unit and their Asset Management Unit. And we trace the tone of these enforcement actions, which started around 15 years ago as, “Hey, you didn’t really disclose that or you didn’t make use of the mechanism that you have in your fund documents like an LPAC to get approval for that.”

And now it has turned into, “I don’t care what’s in your documents, you should not have done that.” What I call kind of like the “natural law” overlay. It’s very clear. We talk about this in the class, all of this is ramped up into its apotheosis in the private funds proposals and then final rules, where I think the SEC is telling us a number of things.

One, they think we’re too big to be relatively unregulated. They think that we’re running public goods for private gain, whether it’s in healthcare or owning homes or owning utilities or quasi-utilities. They’re worried that companies that are too large to stay private are able to do so because of our capital. They think—and this is important for this room—they think the capital formation process is not really arm’s-length.

And they think that we’re behind too high of a wall in terms of our standard of care. They’ve made this very clear. I want to linger on this last one because this scarred me. I don’t know if it scarred you, but it scarred me as someone who’s sitting in an investment firm seat.

Remember, the SEC went for, though they didn’t get or they didn’t finally enact, a total bar on limiting liability or seeking indemnification for negligence. Thanks to the good work of a lot of you or some of you in this room, that got removed from the final rules, but that’s not the point.

Just pause over that for a second. People at the SEC, they’re very intelligent. They are serious people with serious jobs. They intended for indemnification and exculpation of investment advisors to be narrower than the rights afforded officers and directors of public companies and mutual funds.

I’m not telling you they’re wrong. I’m just telling you that’s a very notable thing.

The SEC has already told us that they think they can do this anyway and that’s why they were removing it.

So I think we have a real problem. I think we have a broken relationship with our main regulator, which obviously trickles out into the rest of the world. I hope you’ll forgive, if you’re not American, the American provincialism.

And I also, you know, at the risk of being controversial, if you think regime change at the end of the year in the United States is a silver lining for this because they’re going to get easier on us – don’t count on it. I think us being a punching bag as an industry is good politics.

So you’ve got those three things. Geopolitics and politics, populism, regulatory headwinds.

Institutional Capital Not Growing. All this is happening as our institutional capital base is changing. It’s not getting bigger. The sovereign wealth funds, some of them are here, the public pension plans in the United States, the ultra-high net worth families, the foundations – love you. We have great partnerships with you. You are the reason we exist. And I’m not being funny about that. That’s absolutely true.

But we know you and you know us. So it’s kind of saturated. There are not a lot of new pools of capital coming online. And it might be getting a little bit smaller. There are worries about whether public pension plans, for example, will be able to satisfy their pension obligations as beneficiaries are retiring, they get older, they live longer, and then I’m sorry to say they die.

And back to geopolitics and state politics, the total addressable market, what our VC friends call the “TAM”, it’s getting segmented, right? Red states and blue states. It may not be available to all of us.

Looking for new capital—retail. So, what are we doing? Well, we’re doing the rational thing. We’re looking for alternative capital sources. We all know the long-term secular trends in the GP world. We’re out there looking for ways to more easily access retail money and to use insurance company balance sheets as liabilities. You know all this. There’s a headline every day. It’s why you’re working on all these retail products.

And let’s talk quickly: what do I mean by retail products? There’s been an evolution. There are the feeder funds at the wirehouse banks; we’ve been doing that for a long time. That’s nothing new. There are interval funds and tender offer funds that are stretching the 40 Act container to make it work and to get a little bit further down the retail curve. We’re trying to figure out how to get more un-intermediated access to retail.

There are articles every day. There was one in the FT this morning about how people are staffing up on their fundraising teams for people who cover these pools and who cover intermediaries like RIAs and financial advisors. If you go to any one of the large public asset managers’ websites—with no offense; you can go to ours too—you get gauzy, nice videos from the head of the firm sort of making them palatable as a household name so that financial advisors don’t look stupid for recommending investing in us. Right? It’s sort of like nobody gets fired for hiring IBM or whatever it was.

So what are we doing? This is the point: we’re larger and more visible than ever. On the asset side, we’re touching consumers and patients and tenants. It puts a target on our back, and our regulators are saying we probably should not exist in the same relatively unregulated form as we have existed.

Our historical response to that has been, we shouldn’t be regulated as mutual funds and having to register our securities because we only solicit and manage capital from large, sophisticated institutions. But we’re moving away from that. And the commercial reasons make a lot of sense, which I just described.

But common sense also tells you that if the trade was that if we stay with big investors and you leave us alone, but we kind of retrade on our side of the trade, then something’s got to give and we’re exposed.

The main point of my coming here is to ask you: you are the brain of the industry. Are we doing that on purpose? Is this deliberate? Is there a plan?

By the way, it could be totally rational. Maybe this is the high watermark of scrutiny, the courts beat back the new rules, they leave us alone. Maybe your theory is that the big firms survive, the $500 billion and above, and everybody else has to consolidate and do tie-ups. Maybe this is just the natural evolution. Like you know what? We had a good run. Twenty-two years, great conference, the whole thing. We register our funds now, we become commoditized. Maybe we have capital requirements like banks? I don’t really know what that means. Maybe we push back on material stuff, we continue to lobby so that we can charge performance-based fees which we wouldn’t be able to do under the existing regulatory regime.

But I’m a little worried that we built this incredible industry. We’ve done a lot of work. I think private capital probably should exist in some way, shape or form, and we’re just kind of doing the next thing or not thinking about it.

Five things this room should be doing. And so, if we want to be awake and intentional, we should probably talk about it. What can we be doing?

I have five things.

Number one. We should write our histories. What I mean by that is that everything you read about our industry is super-negative or super-positive. It’s advocacy. When you talk to financial reporters, you talk to policymakers—there’s nothing digestible. There’s nothing accurate that can be used as the basis of making judgments. That’s an overstatement. There’s some really good stuff. Where’s Stephanie Breslow? Your casebook is very good. I like your casebook. But, and I think there are probably a lot of frustrated academics and journalists in the room, right? This is your shot.

I would love to read about the time before there was a channel for private capital formation, when it was just the Rockefellers and the Morgans who could form private capital and invest. What did that look like? Was that a good thing? There’s a lot of scholarship, obviously, on the ’33 Act and why we draw the distinction between sophisticated capital and unsophisticated capital. But has it been looked at through the lens of now $13 trillion or $27 trillion or however much private capital is out there? I would like to read that.

What about fund terms? Like, how we set terms and how we choreograph the fundraise? In this room is a lot of wisdom and a lot of lore about why that provision is that way. Why do we draft the LPAC provision that way? Or why does the waterfall read the way it reads? And, like, actually, go through it and think about why things are the way that they are, and why we do the fundraise the way we do the fundraise. I think that will actually surface the things that we actually care about and things that we don’t care about. And I think that will be important.

Collect your stories, collect your lore, teach it in law schools. It will be a healthy demystification of what we do. We can push back credibly on stories that are being told about us and open us up to other ways of doing things. And think about it, in five years if you start this tomorrow, we’ll have a library of some good stuff, some not good stuff, but it will be something useful that people can look at and it will kind of fill a vacuum of not great stuff that’s out there.

Number two. We’ve got to convene real GP and LP dialogues. I know that there are some LPs here and some LP-side counsel. But this is largely a GP room.

We probably should use this for that. And I know there’s a GP-LP panel, which I think should be very interesting. But this isn’t the criminal bar. It’s not the bankruptcy bar. We’re in business. We’re trying to do a mutually beneficial business together. We should be talking about things and disagreeing about what we disagree about, but talking about things that would take a temperature down.

For example, on LPA terms: What LPA terms can we talk about that we argue about every single time that we actually could probably make some progress on? My only point is, it’s not a zero-sum scarcity game. We need to be more transparent and able to self-regulate. It’ll be better for all of us, GPs and LPs. By the way, I’m going to say “football” because I’m in London. Did you notice the Real Madrid and Barcelona logos? We can partner with the ancestral enemies of Spanish football. You can talk to LPs.

Number three. I call this “real retail” protections. I said before, you can’t walk away from our side of the trade and then complain that we aren’t being left alone. I’m going to say it: I think private REITs, and interval funds, and tender funds—I’m not the world’s leading expert on it—but I think it’s like liquidity doesn’t really mean liquidity. And I think at some point that’s going to run out, in terms of it being acceptable or something that has a lot of life in it.

Whether you agree with that or not, let’s be ready. Let’s be ready to anticipate that people are going to say, why do you think you get to raise money in retail? I think they’re saying it already. And it’s certainly a big theme of the SEC’s commentary on the private funds rules. This is the room that can think creatively about this, what a middle ground would look like.

I have some ideas; they’re probably dumb. But maybe we should be thinking about the fiduciary responsibility of the tour guides, the RIAs, the FAs, the brokers, and be a force for harmonizing those different standards. Maybe we’re supposed to borrow an idea from registered security offerings and have underwriter’s counsel who writes opinions and who does due diligence. Maybe we’re supposed to fund an SIPC or a similar investor protection fund for retail clients.

Maybe we’re supposed to take the SEC seriously and focus on companies staying private for longer. And go back to the history, go back to the early ’60s when they were very concerned about the over-the-counter market. It was a similar kind of concern where companies were staying private or they were staying in the OTC market in kind of the shadows and not doing full registration. What do they do then? Maybe there’s some lessons to be learned there. Look, you’ll have much better ideas than I do, but something’s got to give. I think you all can create the landing pad.

Number four. I call “officers of the court.” Maybe this is a little vague, but I’ll just tell you a quick story [about] when I was at another firm and I was the client and we were looking at trying to figure out how to let private equity funds own bank holding companies in the United States:

We went down to the Federal Reserve and our lawyer was well-known, sort of the dean of the bank regulatory lawyers. He was terrific. And he was terrific because he knew all the rules and stuff. But when he walked into the Fed, everybody knew him. He was able to get the meeting with the person who was really the right person to get the meeting with. And he represented us, but it was also very clear that he represented the system. He represented sort of good practice in the bank regulatory space. And if he was going to say something or recommend something or talk about us, it was automatically credible. And that was super-helpful and important and also meant that he wasn’t going to go too far in pushing for things that we might want to do.

You’ve got to develop those relationships. In a non-transactional way, in a way that where you don’t necessarily have anything in particular to talk about. Go build those relationships. Go talk about what’s good for the system.

We need transparent, commercial, collaborative relationships with our regulators. If we don’t have that, it’s not going to end well.

Finally, number five. Please invest in technology. If you spend time now, and I think a lot of you are, at least at the larger firms, spend time now, cleaning up your documents, curating your large language models. If you don’t know what that means, I’m not sure I know much about it either, but you should really understand what that means. Imagine if generative AI could produce a balanced form document from the get-go that was trusted and that shut off the mistrust-producing machine that negotiations have become. Imagine that that document could then feed through to your reporting teams and operationalize the fund documents immediately. That could reliably confirm compliance with the fund documents. That could harmonize valuation of illiquid esoteric investments across multiple managers. It would build trust and we really need trust; it’s really a scarce commodity right now.

Conclusion. Look, it’ll be hard to kill our industry. I imagine this conference will get to at least 25 years, but let’s not resign ourselves to driving into a wall and seeing what survives. We should be trying for healthy GP-LP relationships, we should be trying for healthy industry-regulator relationships, where we’re actually serving a purpose and doing well by everyone. That’s my challenge to you.

I hope some of these observations are useful, that they resonate. If they do, you’ve got a great line-up of panels and workshops on retail, on generative AI, on the battle of the jurisdictions (sounds very scary), on GP-LP relations, that’s great. These are great forums for getting going on saving our industry.

And seriously this time, thank you very much. I appreciate it.

Disclaimer: The content presented here is for general, informational purposes only and is not intended to be, and must not be, taken as a basis for an investment decision. Information discussed within this keynote address were presented by David Stiepleman at the International Bar Association’s 22nd Annual International Conference on Private Investment Funds in London on March 11, 2024. Opinions expressed are current opinions as of the date of this conference. For additional information, please refer to the following disclaimers: https://sixthstreet.com/terms-of-use/