Sixth Street's Origins

David Stiepleman: Hey, Wax.

Alan Waxman: How are you doing, buddy?

David Stiepleman: Good to see you.

Alan Waxman: Long time no see.

David Stiepleman: What was the vision of the firm? Talk about that.

Alan Waxman: From the beginning?

David Stiepleman: Yeah, from the beginning. Project Austin, what was it?

Alan Waxman: Project Austin was a business plan that a number of the co-founding partners started working on in 2006, having studied all the other GPs in the world, what mistakes they had made, it was taking our experiences where it's super hierarchical, goes into one person, people aren't thought partners and they don't work together. It's not a team-oriented environment, there's a lot of fiefdoms and silos and we wanted to be the opposite of that.

David Stiepleman: It frees up that mind share to actually focus on productive things. But too, and you're alluding to this, it's way better for our capital providers, for our investors.

Alan Waxman: When you think about the original vision of Sixth Street, we wanted to be the first scaled multi-strategy private capital firm that actually operated as a team. To have a firm with a collection of people with shared values, good human beings, lots of different personalities, but all want to do business the right way. We wanted to be a firm with maximum flexibility. We didn't want to be a private equity firm, a private credit firm, a private real estate firm. We just wanted to be investors. I'm biased, but I think we have the most entrepreneurial culture that is looking for people to come up with good ideas, to be able to attack that white space. Obviously, there are different focuses, but ultimately, it has to be One Team.

David Stiepleman: We’ve got a great team. We're doing super interesting things. Where are we going?

Alan Waxman: The foundation, the bedrock is laid and so we've gone horizontal, and now we're ready to go vertical and do so in a Sixth Street way. Because of where the world is headed from a technology, engineering and AI perspective, we're very well positioned for that, which is going to enable us both in Core and on the investment side to be able to do better things more efficiently. It's an exciting time for the firm.