Igor Rozenblit, Managing Partner, Iron Road Partners

It’s Not Magic is a podcast from Sixth Street that brings to light insights and perspectives from founders and industry leaders on business building in plain English. Hosted by Sixth Street’s Co-Founder, Co-COO and Co-President, David Stiepleman, It’s Not Magic asks guests what they do and how they do it – because building a business is a lot of things, but… It’s Not Magic.

On this episode, our host David Stiepleman sits down with Igor Rozenblits, Managing Partner at Iron Road Partners and Former Co-Head of the SEC’s Private Funds Unit. Listen to the full episode here [LINK].

DAVID STIEPLEMAN: Hello and welcome to It’s Not Magic, a podcast from Sixth Street about business building that strips away the pretense and gets right to the useful stuff. I'm your host, David Stiepleman. We use this show to talk to founders and industry leaders and get them to explain in plain English what they set out to do, and specifically, how they do it. In this episode, we're speaking with an entrepreneur who spent over a decade as one of the most visible and innovative financial regulators before coming back to industry and building his own professional services business.

IGOR ROZENBLIT: It's much more difficult being on this side, certainly from that perspective than being a regulator. I think as a regulator, you might say, “well, then don't do A or B,” but of course that's often not possible and have a business at the same time as well.

DAVID STIEPLEMAN: That's Igor Rozenblit, the Founder and Managing Partner of Iron Road Partners. Iron Road is a specialist advisory business focused on the private funds industry. Prior to founding Iron Road, Igor spent over a decade in a storied career at the SEC. He began his government service right after the financial crisis. The insane stat for this episode: from 2010 to 2020, and that roughly corresponds with Igor’s time at the SEC, private funds experienced unbelievable growth with gross assets under management hitting over $17 trillion by the end of the decade.

More than the numbers, private funds have grown in influence, holding massive amounts of public pension retirement savings and investing in every conceivable asset class. Igor saw this and co-founded the SEC's Private Funds Unit, which has become an elite and respected regulator of private equity, hedge funds and everything in between. In this conversation, we'll talk about how Igor built the PFU from the ground up and how he then chose the entrepreneurial path in the private sector. We'll get into what's been the same and what's been different about those experiences and how setting the tone matters when getting something off the ground. And of course, we'll hit on the private fund proposals from the SEC that have the potential to radically change the industry.

Igor Rozenblit, thank you so much for joining us. We'll talk a bit about the new rules that are being proposed by the SEC, but I’ve got to ask you, as someone who's described as at the center of the SEC's, you know, scrutiny and knowledge of private equity and private funds, are you kicking yourself that you left? I mean, there all these new rules that came out, they must be sitting on top of all that work that you and your team did at the Private Funds Unit. It's kind of a bit of a culmination. How are you thinking about that?

IGOR ROZENBLIT: David, thanks for having me, and no I'm definitely not kicking myself that I left. I think this might have been, we'll see, but this might have been the best decision, at least the best career decision, I might have made thus far. I think that I spent 11 great years at the Commission and I feel like I accomplished a lot, the Private Funds Unit accomplished a lot and it was time to try something else. So I'm definitely not kicking myself.

DAVID STIEPLEMAN: Okay, well, we'll talk about that. Let’s go back 11 years, or 12 years I guess, when you joined the staff at the Commission. Your background was as an investor. You did PE deals in healthcare, you were investing in private equity managers, how did you get into a regulatory role?

IGOR ROZENBLIT: As many great things in life, this was complete happenstance. I was working for a French bank at the time, managing their North American private equity fund, the fund’s portfolio. The global financial crisis hit, the bank decided to close up shop in the United States, and I was out looking for a job. And I did not know anything about the SEC, but at the time it was actually the only job I could find. And a funny story about that – the time between me applying for this position and when the SEC actually called me, I had completely forgotten that I applied. And so when the SEC called me my cell phone and said, it was the SEC calling my stomach dropped because, you know, things weren't going great at that time to begin with. And now the SEC’s calling me on my cell phone, so this can't be good. But it turned out to be the best thing that's ever happened to me in my career.

DAVID STIEPLEMAN: That's incredible. You're there for a couple years, you're in enforcement, and it's your idea, I think, to build the private funds unit in 2012, 2013, is that right? And how did you think about that? How did that come about?

IGOR ROZENBLIT: I don't think I could take one hundred percent credit for the Private Funds Unit. I was working in enforcement in a specialized unit called the Asset Management Unit. And one thing I noticed is that it actually worked really well, the idea that you can build pattern recognition in enforcement attorneys. I mean, that really worked, but the exam division had nothing like it. So in fact, the Private Funds Unit was kind of a copy of the Asset Management Unit in the division of exams.

DAVID STIEPLEMAN: So, it's a new business build inside of the SEC in 2013, how did you approach it?

IGOR ROZENBLIT: It was a long process trying to pitch it, and it was as much a sausage making process as you can imagine inside of bureaucracy. It started with us doing examinations while I was still in the division of enforcement and recognizing that there was really a lot to do in the private markets from an exam and regulatory perspective, and that the private markets were only growing and only getting more complicated. So, really the only way to properly do examinations in the private markets was to have a specialized unit focusing on those things. And that was the pitch. And in the end, there were reasons to do it and reasons not to do it, but ultimately the reasons to do it won out. And the unit was formed in 2016.

DAVID STIEPLEMAN: So our listeners in part are business builders and creating something out of nothing. Did you borrow from that kind of, you know, discipline or thinking? Did you have a business plan? Did you think about how you were going to brand yourselves internally and externally? Break it down for us, like what did you actually do?

IGOR ROZENBLIT: Well, just to take a step back, the idea that you should specialize in kind of one thing, and you should have a thematic approach to what you're doing, that's a very private equity like idea. And that's an idea that I was really used to, coming out of the private equity business. And that's exactly how we pitched the Private Funds Unit. The idea was that we would do a couple of things in a unit that we could not do in the general population. The first is build pattern recognition. The second is have a thematic approach to our examination. So, we would pick a theme, two or three every year. These are risks that we saw in the marketplace from a regulatory perspective. We would build a top-down examinations approach to those risks, and we would execute that kind of approach, and definitely were very cognizant of the idea that there needed to be some brand building, and there needed to be a business plan, and it needed to work on the outside of the agency and on the inside of the agency.

On the outside of the agency, the business plan was that you should really clean up your act because if something is going wrong and the Private Fund examines you, we will find it. And that was the brand on the outside. On the inside of the agency, I think we were very much team players and we supported as many examinations as we executed ourselves. And one thing to remember, actually, when I joined in 2010, everyone was still reeling from Madoff. And the fundamental issue with Madoff was that there was just not enough expertise to find the fact that this was a Ponzi scheme. And so the idea that you should invest in a unit that will prevent that from happening again, that's something I think that really resonated inside the agency.

DAVID STIEPLEMAN: How did you recruit internally? Like, what was your pitch to people? Were they lining up to do this, or were people skeptical? A little of both?

IGOR ROZENBLIT: I think in the beginning, people were lining up. It was not difficult to recruit people for this. I think everyone wants to do interesting exams. Everyone wants to have a huge impact. And at that time, we were having a huge impact in private equity. Remember in 2014, 15, 16 is where a lot of the big impactful private equity cases were being filed. And so they were lining up the door and we were able to recruit pretty effectively.

DAVID STIEPLEMAN: Igor when you were getting the PFU started, and then you kind of grew it into a successful unit, how did you yourself stay abreast of sort of the complicated, specific micro issues that managers face, but also were able to keep a top-down view, see the field, so you could drive the unit and run the business, so to speak? How do you strike that balance?

IGOR ROZENBLIT: Well, I think one thing that I was able to do well, because I had kind of a cross-functional experience in my career, is I was able to identify issues in the industry and then translate those issues to a story about how those might violate the federal securities laws. And so I think that's the one thing we did really well. In terms of how we keep abreast on the issues, there's really a couple of ways.

One is at the SEC, we actually had, and the SEC continues to have, a very, very close relationship with investors. And investors wouldn’t come in and talk about the managers they invested in. They would never do that. But they would talk about the issues. “We're seeing X, and we don't like it.” And because we were surrounded by, you know, the federal securities laws and we understood them well, and we understood investors, we could ask the right questions to figure out whether this is something that the investor didn't like, or whether this is something that could be potentially illegal and something that we could put into our toolbox and explore examining or investigating in the future. And so that's kind of how we executed that. It was a little bit more dynamic than rigorously planned out.

DAVID STIEPLEMAN: My sense of the culture of the SEC, any time I've dealt with the staff, is that these are really smart people, dedicated public servants, who take the job – protecting our capital markets and having orderly capital formation, protecting investors – they take that job very seriously. They should, it's an incredible national asset for us that we have transparent functioning capital markets. So I imagine you had a pretty motivated, high quality pool of employees, but were you trying to set a culture that was distinct or supplemental in any way to the rest of the staff in the PFU?

IGOR ROZENBLIT: That's a great question, because I think culture was a big challenge. The SEC has a culture, and it didn't really make a ton of sense to develop something that was completely different. However, at least my perspective was that we did need to view ourselves as somewhat different. We did need to view ourselves as thought leaders, and we did need to take that thought leadership and translate it to kind of actionable steps that we would take first. And then if those actionable steps worked, we would be able to teach others how to do it. And in that way, our small group could have a massive impact on the securities industry, just by starting small. And that was what I told the folks all the time, the team.

DAVID STIEPLEMAN: Talk about the external messaging. You said, you know, one of the things you wanted to get out there to managers was, “Hey, clean up your act, because you know, we're going to figure it out.” Aside from saying that at conferences, what else did you do? I mean, the presence exam, I think was one of the tools that you guys used. Maybe you can explain that, and were there other things that you used to kind of get people's attention?

IGOR ROZENBLIT: Well, the presence exams were just a set of exams done in 2012, 2013, that were high level, just to let the private equity industry know that the SEC was on the beat. But really the external messaging was encapsulated in two ways or was executed in two ways. The first is we would just do deeper exams, and because the private markets and the private fund industry is really not that big, word gets out about that pretty quickly. And the second is, when we would go speak at conferences, we would be mindful not to speak in generalities but to speak in great specificity about relevant issues. And in that way, I think there was a good signal to the industry that, “Hey, these guys really know what they're talking about.”

DAVID STIEPLEMAN: How did you keep people motivated? Did you have tension issues? I think people stay there for a while and actually like their jobs.

IGOR ROZENBLIT: Well we tried to keep people motivated by giving them interesting exams to do, by showing them how to do them in an impactful way and making them feel like they're having a difference in the federal security markets, and they were. And I have to tell you David, one of the challenges, and I still talk to my colleagues back in the PFU, one of the huge challenges when you're on the inside is measuring or really appreciating what kind of influence you are having on the entire industry. And I can guarantee you that the Private Funds Unit does not know the level of the influence that they're having. And that's one thing that I tell them, like, “I was at this conference and people were talking about you, you are having a huge influence.” And it's just hard to know.

DAVID STIEPLEMAN: I agree with you. I think the influence has been, like I said, demonstrable over the last, you know, 12 years. It’s a very different relationship and it's rigorous and I think your message is exactly right. So, Iron Road Partners. First of all, why the name?

IGOR ROZENBLIT: The name? Iron Road Partners is named after this mountain climbing technology called the via ferrata, which is basically mountain climbing for novices. It's a steel cable stretched along a mountain path. You clip in, you have your mountain climbing experience. There's nothing you could do to hurt yourself. You can't unclip. The steel cable will catch you if you fall. And just like the steel cable will catch you if you fall if you're mountain climbing, we will catch you if you fall from a regulatory perspective.

DAVID STIEPLEMAN: So you are the via ferrata for those of us trying to get over the mountain pass into…

IGOR ROZENBLIT: Right.

DAVID STIEPLEMAN: At this point, you've seen hundreds of asset managers as an investor, as a regulator. And my question isn't so much like about those managers, but what lessons did you take from seeing all of these businesses run in running your own business?

IGOR ROZENBLIT: One thing I learned is that you can't focus on too many things. You really have to keep it simple. But if you focus on the right one or two things, you can really make great things happen, if you really focus on them and if you live those one or two things. And I think as an investor, when you go around asking managers, well, what are you good at? They're not going to give you 20 things that they're good at. They're going to say, we're the manager that does X. And so we wanted to be the regulatory consulting firm that does X. And we wanted to internally focus on just one or two things.

DAVID STIEPLEMAN: What are they?

IGOR ROZENBLIT: Well, I think if you're a professional services firm, at the end of the day when everything is stripped down, you only really have two things. And the two things are your culture and your brand. And those are the two things we're going focus on internally like a laser. Everything else will fall into plan, hopefully, but we're going to be focused on building a culture that we think is unique in this industry and a brand that is recognized as innovative and high value add.

DAVID STIEPLEMAN: What are the deliberate things, Igor, that you do to reinforce your culture?

IGOR ROZENBLIT: A number of things. One is we really never let our staff get away with superficial analyses. They always need to be thinking about the second order impact of the things that they are actually doing. Another thing is, it's very tempting to have a recommendation that tells you to do more analysis and that kind of recommendation is not actionable. So we push our staff to have actionable recommendations, and that really forces people to think about whether or not they've analyzed the problem correctly. And one of the holes we fill is that we are not solely focused on the federal securities laws. Just like the Private Funds Unit, first we want to understand your business and then we can figure out whether or not you need to do regulatory thing A or B. And so we also tell our staff that they really need to understand what the business is and how it operates before they make any sort of judgment.

DAVID STIEPLEMAN: One of the things that I know you did at the PFU and obviously you're got to now is, is training people. And that's got to be so important in a personal services business. You've gotta leverage yourself, right? You've got your brand, you're translating that brand into Iron Road Partners, you can't do everything, you can't be everywhere. You need people who are out there giving you leverage and doing what you would've done if you were in the room. How do you do that? That seems to be the crux of the challenge of personal services business.

IGOR ROZENBLIT: Yeah, and it's funny because for our analysts, we actually make them take Wall Street analyst classes. We don't actually train them on the securities laws first. We train them on building a financial model, analyzing the financial model, and understanding how a firm like yours does what it does.

DAVID STIEPLEMAN: As you were starting and running the PFU, co-starting and running it, or as you're getting Iron Road Partners sort of up and running – well, you're more than up and running, you're already a big presence in the market it seems like – do you have a mentor that you think about, like someone who back from your either early days as an invest ent professional, who you think, “What would that person be doing? What would they be thinking?” who really impressed you?

IGOR ROZENBLIT: Yeah, well, I have a couple of people I speak to frequently about the business. I've got one friend who in 2002, we were sitting around in Starbucks talking about starting a consulting firm and leaving the jobs where we were working at the time, and I didn't do it and he did. And ultimately he built this business to a very large business and sold it to a huge multinational corporation. And other than the pain I have to endure every time I call him and reminding me of that, he's done this before from a professional services standpoint. And he gives me some really good advice and perspective that I certainly do not have coming out of the government.

DAVID STIEPLEMAN: What's a key nugget that he's given you, that you just were like, “Wow, that's wisdom”?

IGOR ROZENBLIT: One of the things that he said, which we all think about – maybe there's this bias of thinking other people are like us – but one thing he told me is that my employees, for the most part, are not interested in being entrepreneurs. They're more interested in being employees. And what I need to do is provide them the kind of structure and the kind of guidance and training that an employer would give an employee. And that's very different from the way I think. If I was an employee, I would prefer someone say, “Here’s the goal, and call me in a month and go achieve that goal.” And that is not how most people work. In our recruiting, actually, it's difficult to find someone who wants to work at a startup. It just is. And I think that's something he opened my eyes to, that I think it would've taken me a long time to come to that same conclusion.

DAVID STIEPLEMAN: That's a super great insight. I think people think that they want to be entrepreneurs and some of them love it. And some of them – I'm the same way as the way you described yourself – are like “Give me something,” or “Let's figure it out and I'll come back to you and let you know how we figured it out, or let you know if I've hit an obstacle or if I need your wisdom” kind of thing. That's how I thought about myself as a younger person. But yeah, not everybody likes that or is comfortable with that and wants to be sort of given more guidance. I think it's a super good insight.

IGOR ROZENBLIT: Yeah, I thought it was great. And not only that, I think like 95% of people are not like that. That's my sense.

DAVID STIEPLEMAN: I wonder if 95% of people think they should be like that, but they're not like that. Yeah that’s interesting, I wonder.

IGOR ROZENBLIT: I think you're right. There are a lot of people who think of themselves as entrepreneurs, me being one, that when faced with the reality decide that maybe that's not what they want to do after all. So I agree with you on that too.

DAVID STIEPLEMAN: Anyone else on your list? I interrupted you because I'm sure you have other people that you talk to in your kitchen cabinet.

IGOR ROZENBLIT: Yeah, there's another person I talk to, a very senior private equity person, a business builder, who's given me some great advice on branding and working with the press. And when I left the Commission, I thought that, you know what? I'm going to like, work in the shadows for a month or two, and I'm going to slowly build this thing up. And then I'm going to have an announcement that says, oh, Igor launched this new business. And one thing he told me, of course this is 24 hours after I left, he told me I had 48 hours to put out a press release and then no one's going to care. And I said, there's nothing built. How am I going to put out a press release? He said, you’ve got to put it out. And he was right.

DAVID STIEPLEMAN: Oh, that's interesting. As you're putting it together, there's always this tension between, I’ve got to build the infrastructure, gold plate this, make sure this works, controls, all that kind of stuff, but you actually have to start doing the business cause otherwise you can't pay for all that stuff. Has that changed your view, ticked up your sympathy level, your empathy level for fund managers?

IGOR ROZENBLIT: It's definitely changed. And I think being here on the other side where I can speak more honestly with the fund managers, I can kind of understand some of the intractable problems that they're facing because the federal securities won't let them do A, but they also won't let them do B. And you're kind of stuck in a situation where you're trying to figure out where you're going to take the risk and where you're going to mitigate the risk. And it's much more difficult being on this side, certainly from that perspective, than being a regulator. I think as a regulator, you might say, well, then don't do A or B, but of course that's often not possible and have a business at the same time as well.

DAVID STIEPLEMAN: Yeah. I’ve got to ask you about the private funds rules a little bit. I'm more interested in, or at least interested today, in the process. Chair Gensler, very smart guy, you know, knows these markets, staff very smart, knows this stuff. This seems to have been a lot of material put together very quickly, proposing a very radical change to how private funds conduct themselves and the relationship with its federal regulator. Like what's going on? Like how does this play out?

IGOR ROZENBLIT: I think about the funds rule really in three parts. There is a part that I think was viewed as sorely needed, and I think a lot of that boils down to transparency reporting. But for this rule, that's only really a part of the rule. Another really big part of the rule I see coming directly from the exam program. These are all the things that we wish we had when we were examiners examining fund managers. And that includes private fund audits, written annual reviews, immediate notification of GP-led restructuring occurring. So things like that. And then there are prohibitions that might have been generated from exams, might have been generated from investor asks of the Commission. So these are things like the changes in the gross negligence and negligence standard, prohibition around reducing clawback for tax. So things like that. So this is very much a kitchen sink rule proposal. What the actual rule will look like is unclear. There will be some sort of negotiation that happens among the divisions and perhaps some of the Commissioners, even though they're not allowed to actually negotiate directly. And some sort of watered down version of that rule will become the law of the land. And then there'll be a legal challenge and we'll see how that unfolds.
DAVID STIEPLEMAN: It's a very interesting time. Do you agree with that assessment? I think you do, that it's proposing a pretty dramatic reordering of how to think about this regulatory regime? Or is that an overstatement and just alarmism by the industry?

IGOR ROZENBLIT: I don't think that's an overstatement. I think it will change the role of compliance inside every investment management organization. For sure.

DAVID STIEPLEMAN: So your investor advisory council, which I think is a really smart – I don't know if it's an innovation relative to your peers – but it's a very, very good idea. How do you use them?

IGOR ROZENBLIT: Well, one of the things I learned at the SEC as we talked about earlier is that a lot of the issues that become real big, serious enforcement issues come from the investor community. They come from the investor community, they go to the SEC, so that's the primary idea behind the investor advisory council. We want to know what the practices are that are really upsetting investors. We will use the same kind of approach we use in the Private Funds Unit to view those and to identify whether or not those are serious regulatory risks. And to the extent that they're serious regulatory risks, we're going to go to our clients and tell them, you know, you’ve got to address this because I think the SEC’s going to find out about this soon enough.

DAVID STIEPLEMAN: I want to go back to sort of your pattern recognition ability, and you must have had experiences whether at the PFU or now as a service provider to firms like ours, and you walk in the door, you get on the phone or get on the zoom or whatever. And, you know, immediately this is a well-run place. This is not a well-run place. Do you have it calibrated now to that level of ability to predict it and are you right?

IGOR ROZENBLIT: It's a really tough question to answer David, because I definitely have an impression of whether or not a place is well run or not right off the bat, but I don't think I'm right all the time. I think that idea kind of underpins our philosophy at Iron Road Partners and really in the PFU, which is that you can't make snap judgments until you really understand what you're looking at and you really peel the onion. And we don't want to make snap judgments at Iron Road Partners, and we didn't want to make them in the PFU as well. One thing that I thought was interesting, and I don't know if it's worth talking about on this podcast, but I think about it all the time, is the idea of what I thought was going to happen when I started this business and what actually happened mainly from a mental health perspective to completely different things. I don't know if that was your experience, but there’s just—

DAVID STIEPLEMAN: What do you mean? Tell us what you mean?

IGOR ROZENBLIT: Well, I was a pretty confident guy managing the Private Funds Unit, things worked pretty well. And, here on this side, I really had to get comfortable with the idea that I was going to make a lot of mistakes and I have made a lot of mistakes. And I was going to have to deal with the idea that anytime there is a failure of any kind, I tend to beat myself up about it. And I think that a lot of people do as well. And that has to be dealt with also, and to your point, David, this business is all consuming. And I, I found that to be, or I find that now, to be a huge challenge. And it's really not something that I foresaw when I made the decision to do this. And I suspect I'm not the only one.

DAVID STIEPLEMAN: No, you're not. I was going to say, I appreciate you opening up about that. I've had the same experience where in my prior lives, I felt like, you know, I was on top of stuff, I was a subject matter expert in what I did. And getting comfortable with not knowing the answer, of making mistakes, of not assuming that everyone is, you know, laughing at me behind my back because I'm making mistakes, and having just to, you know, deal with 'em and move on, and I'm the guy in the seat and that's okay, it’s hard. But you said you you're learning to deal with it nine months, 10 months I – how are you doing that? What's the approach?

IGOR ROZENBLIT: Well, I've tried a lot of different things. I've taken up meditation—

DAVID STIEPLEMAN: Me too.
IGOR ROZENBLIT: Which [meditation] I found was effective because it really taught me to think about what I'm doing now, as opposed to what I'm going to be doing two weeks from now, which of course has infinite possibilities as in impossible to predict. So I found that to be effective. I also found that I really kind of love what I do and no matter, like, if there's an anxious moment, if I'm with a client and I really dive into the work, I think that is really helpful for me as well. But I wonder if this is kind of a permanent state .

DAVID STIEPLEMAN: I think it is. I talk about it with, with my partners, not infrequently, there is no stasis in running a business and there's always something coming at you. And that's what you’ve got to just get comfortable with and realize that, you know, no one's perfect and you’ve got to try and get it right, and all you can do is do your best and be transparent and make decisions in good faith and explain your decisions to people. And I think, you know, you’ve just got to have the confidence that people will respect it. But I think it's hard, and I appreciate you being open about it. It is hard.

This is my last question. When you're starting a new business, it can become all consuming. How are you pacing yourself, or are you failing?

IGOR ROZENBLIT: I'm failing. If you have any , if you have any evidence by the fact that I'm doing this from vacation, but if you have any idea on how I can pace myself better, let me know. It is all consuming a hundred percent. I'm actually happy to hear you say that. I'm happy to know that I'm not the only one that works all the time, 24/7.

DAVID STIEPLEMAN: Yeah. But I want to let you get back to your vacation and will only say thanks. It's great. Thank you for your service to the markets and to the country. That sounds hokey, but it's true. And thank you so much for taking the time and and for your ongoing work in the industry, because it's really important. So I really appreciate your time.

IGOR ROZENBLIT: Great. Thank you.

DAVID STIEPLEMAN: That was Igor Rozenblit. He joined us for an interview on April 20th, 2022. We appreciated him taking the time to share his story and open up about the weightiness of building something new and the responsibility that entails. Here's what I think we learned from him. First, pattern recognition and a focus on themes can be very, very helpful when starting something new. Two, cross-functional expertise and having a generalist mindset means you can step back and see the field. Three, culture always takes work, and while you think that motivating people in the private and public sectors was different, everyone wants to do something interesting and they want to feel like their work makes a difference.

Thank you again to Igor for his time, especially for his years of public service, and for his candor. It continues to be a dynamic time in the private funds business, especially as we record this at the end of April, when the industry has digested and commented on the SEC's proposed rules on private funds. More to come there.

The views expressed in this podcast are not necessarily those of Sixth Street and Sixth Street is not providing any financial, economic, legal accounting or tax advice or recommendations in this podcast. In addition, the receipt of, or listening to this podcast is not to be taken as constituting the giving of investment advice by Sixth Street. Please see additional disclosures on our website for more details.

DAVID STIEPLEMAN: You've been listening to It’s Not Magic, a Sixth Street podcast. You can sign up to receive an email when a new episode drops at sixthstreet.com or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoy today's show, please share it and follow @SixthStreetNews for more on the show and our firm. Thanks to Sixth Street's production team, Patrick Clifford and Kate Hanick for putting this together with sound engineering by Steven Cologne. Our theme song is It's Not Magic, an original song from Patrick Dyer Wolf. Once again, I'm David Stiepleman. Thanks for listening.