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On October 1, 1985, weeks after the Links Club accord that sprung Schwarzman from Shearson, Peterson and Schwarzman formally launched the Blackstone Group, with Peterson as chairman and Schwarzman as CEO. The name, Schwarzman’s invention, reflected their ethnic roots, combining the English equivalents of schwarz , German and Yiddish for black, and peter , Greek for stone. They opened an office on the thirty-fourth floor of the Seagram Building, the elegant Mies van der Rohe– and Philip Johnson–designed skyscraper on Park Avenue just north of Grand Central Station. Their quarters were conspicuously austere: just 3,067 square feet, which they outfitted with two desks and a used conference table. There was one other employee, Peterson’s secretary.
The funding was similarly frugal: $400,000, half from each partner, to pay Blackstone’s bills until cash started coming in. That was nothing to Peterson, who had pocketed more than $13 million in severance pay and from his cut of the money from Lehman’s sale to Shearson. Schwarzman, too, had made a bundle, $6.5 million, from the sale of his Lehman shares. But though the amount they staked to Blackstone was comparatively small, they were determined not to risk any more. They worried that if they ran through the money before Blackstone started to pay for itself, it would bode ill for their venture.
It was the same cautious approach to risking money that would become a hallmark of Blackstone’s investing style—and helps explain why Blackstone avoided the kind of brazen, outsized gambles that caused some high-flying rivals to run aground.
Schwarzman and Peterson had a breakfast ritual, convening at eight thirty nearly every morning in the cafeteria of the former Mayfair Hotel, on Sixty-fifth Street and Park Avenue, now the site of the celebrated restaurant Daniel. There they mapped out their plans for a hybrid business—part M&A boutique, part buyout shop.
They had no wish to emulate investment banks or brokerage firms, which need sturdy capital foundations to back the commitments they make to their clients and to tide them through when they lose money in the markets. “We didn’t want to have a lot of capital tied up in low-margin businesses,” Schwarzman says. “We wanted to be in businesses where we could either drive very high assets per employee or operate with very high margins.” Giving M&A advice was the ultimate high-margin work—enormous fees with very little overhead. Managing a buyout fund was appealing because a relatively small team could oversee a large amount of money and collect a commensurately large management fee along with a share of the profits on the investments.
They also hoped to tack on related businesses that made their money from fees. They weren’t sure yet what those would be, but they thought they could attract like-minded entrepreneurial types from other niches of the financial world who could benefit from a collaboration. They lacked the dollars to hire top talent, however, or to stake another business. Nor did they want to share the ownership of Blackstone. The memory of the feuding at Lehman was still all too fresh, and they wanted absolute control of their business.
The solution they ultimately hit on was to set up new business lines as joint ventures—“affiliates,” they called them—that would operate under Blackstone’s roof. To lure the right people, they would award generous stakes in the ventures. In time, that arrangement was the foundation for two of Blackstone’s most successful affiliated businesses, its real estate investment unit, built by John Schreiber, and the bond investment business that was later spun off as BlackRock, Inc., now one of the preeminent publicly traded investment managers in the world, which Laurence Fink, who started it, still leads.
Such was their long-term vision. But the first task was to land some M&A work to pay the rent. It would take time to raise a fund to invest in buyouts and years more before the new firm would garner any profits from its investments. In the meantime, Peterson and Schwarzman needed a source of near-term revenue.
Their M.O. on the M&A front was the same one they had employed at Lehman. The fifty-nine-year-old Peterson, with his entrée to executive suites around the country, would get Blackstone in the door and Schwarzman, then thirty-eight, would make the deals happen. Peterson and Schwarzman would cozy up to management to get “deal flow.”
With the financial world polarized by the wave of hostile takeover bids, Peterson and Schwarzman knew that they would have to choose sides. In 1985 the backlash against the raiders and Drexel had not reached its peak, but it was clear to them how they would ally themselves in the battles over corporate control. From day one, Blackstone pledged its loyalty to management. “Drexel was viewed by many in both the business and the financial establishment in a very unfavorable way, because they were like uninvited guests at many parties and they insisted on staying,” Schwarzman says. “We wanted to be consistent with what we were doing at Lehman, and we didn’t see how we could be counseling corporations one day and then turning around and attacking them the next. We wanted the corporate establishment to trust us.”
They soon discovered that it was one thing to pitch clients with the prestige of Lehman behind them. It was quite another to win business for a new firm no one had heard of.
For several months, they couldn’t scare up a single advisory assignment. By the time they landed their first, a project for Squibb Beech-Nut Corporation in early 1986, the $400,000 they’d started out with had dwindled to $213,000. The Squibb Beech-Nut job paid them $50,000. A pittance compared with the fees they’d commanded at Lehman, it was manna for the starving. Soon after that, Blackstone won two other assignments that paid modestly more, from Backer & Spielvogel, an advertising agency, and Armco Steel Corporation. “We were starting to earn back what we’d been losing,” says Schwarzman. “Those were the streams of revenue between us and oblivion.”
Starting in April 1986, Blackstone’s M&A work picked up markedly. Yet even as its income rose, the firm continued to bump up against a prejudice in the corporate world against independent M&A boutiques. Not even CSX, which had collected an extra $15 million for its newspaper subsidiary thanks to Schwarzman’s cunning years earlier, was entirely comfortable using Blackstone. CSX supplied Blackstone its first major M&A assignment, hiring it to help craft a takeover offer for Sea-Land Corporation, a shipping company that was seeking a friendly buyer after receiving a hostile bid from a corporate raider. However, when it came time to order a fairness opinion—a paid, written declaration that a deal is fair that carries great weight with investors—CSX’s chairman Hayes Watkins sought out a brand-name investment bank, Salomon Brothers, instead.
Disheartened that his client had looked elsewhere, Schwarzman asked Watkins why he wouldn’t accept Blackstone’s opinion when Schwarzman’s opinions had always sufficed when they were issued on Lehman’s letterhead. “I hadn’t thought of that,” Schwarzman remembers Watkins responding. Schwarzman then prevailed upon Watkins to commission fairness letters from both firms. Though Blackstone hadn’t managed to handle the deal solo, at least it won equal billing with the much more established Salomon.
At the same time as the two men were selling their services as M&A sages, they were also pounding the pavement, trying to drum up money for a buyout fund. By now the LBO business was no longer a backwater industry, and many others, including their former Lehman colleague Warren Hellman, were flocking to this hot corner of the investment world. The lure was easy to understand. KKR, the buyout front-runner, had just collected $235 million—four times what it had invested—selling Golden West, a Los Angeles TV broadcaster. Not long after, KKR pulled off its twenty-seventh buyout, capturing a much larger broadcaster, Storer Communications of Miami, for $2.4 billion, setting a new record.
But if winning M&A work had been harder than Peterson and Schwarzman had imagined, the fund-raising was downright demoralizing. The magic of their collaboration at Lehman, their accomplishments and renown as bankers, meant little now.
They’d set a most ambitious target for themselves: a $1 billion fund. KKR, the biggest operator at the time, was managing just under $2 billion. If Blackstone reached its goal, it would smash the record for a first-time fund and rank third, behind only KKR and Forstmann Little, in the amount of capital it had to invest. Schwarzman admits that the advertised figure was partly bravado, but it served a tactical purpose. Many potential investors had caps that barred them from providing more than, say, 10 percent of any one fund’s capital. By setting a lofty total figure, Schwarzman figured, investors might be persuaded to make larger pledges.
Moreover, a large fund would throw off a fortune in fees to Blackstone as its general partner. For investing the money it rounded up from insurance companies, pension funds, and other financial institutions and overseeing the investments, Blackstone would rake in management fees of 1.5 percent of the fund’s capital, or $15 million a year if the fund reached $1 billion. (The investors, who become limited partners in a partnership, don’t write a check for their full commitment at the outset; they merely promise to deliver their money whenever the general partner issues a demand, known as a capital call, when it needs money for a new investment. Even so, the general partner collects the full 1.5 percent from the limited partners every year no matter how much of the money has been put to work. When the funds themselves begin to wind down after five or six years, the management fee is substantially reduced.)
Richer yet was the potential bonanza Blackstone stood to make in “carried interest.” By the conventions of the business, private equity firms take 20 percent of any gains on the investments when they are sold. If Blackstone raised the hoped-for $1 billion and the fund averaged $250 million in profits a year (a 25 percent return) for five years running—a not impossible mark—Blackstone would be entitled to $50 million a year, or $250 million over five years.
On top of that, the companies Blackstone bought would reimburse Blackstone for the costs it ran up analyzing them before it invested and for its banking and legal fees. Its companies would also pay advisory fees to Blackstone for the privilege of being owned by it.
A more lucrative compensation scheme was hard to imagine. The fee structure ensured that if the fund was big enough, the financiers would become millionaires even if they never made a dime for their investors. The management fees alone guaranteed that with a large fund. If they made good investments and collected their 20 percent carried interest, they stood to make a lot more. While the individual partners at a successful midsized firm such as Gibbons, Green, van Amerongen might earn $2 million in a good year, the industry’s kingpins, Henry Kravis and George Roberts, overseeing multibillion-dollar funds, each took home upward of $25 million in 1985. This was several times more than what the CEOs of Wall Street’s most prestigious investment banks made at the time, and it dwarfed what Peterson had earned as CEO of Lehman.
Getting their hands on the money in the first place, though, proved to be a struggle for Peterson and Schwarzman. Though LBOs were generating a great deal of talk and curiosity, most pension managers viewed them as too risky. The few investors who had the stomach for LBO funds preferred to place money only with tried-and-true firms such as KKR, Forstmann Little, and Clayton Dubilier & Rice. Not even a Wall Street grandee like Pete Peterson could overcome that bias.
“ The problem was that a lot of pension fund managers had financial advisers, and the first question they asked us was, ‘What is your track record?’ ” Peterson says. “Well, we didn’t have one. They had to accept us on faith, nothing more. It was one of the toughest things I’ve ever been involved in.”
Shortly after they opened shop, they drew up a two-page promotional letter describing their business plan, which they mailed to hundreds of corporate executives and old Lehman clients. They then waited. And waited. And waited. “ Pete and I expected business to come flooding in. Of course, it didn’t,” Schwarzman says. “We got a few ‘Congratulations, nice letter’ responses. That was it.”
The pair’s fund-raising trips were often fruitless. They were treated cavalierly, sometimes boorishly. Schwarzman, who arranged the trips, dragged Peterson with him to pitch the Delta Airlines pension plan in Atlanta one brutally hot day. Their taxi driver got lost and left them to walk the last half mile to the office. Peterson, weighed down with a suitcase, a bulky briefcase, and a suit bag, was drenched in sweat when they arrived. They were greeted by two pension officials, who escorted them to a room in the basement of the building and offered to get them coffee—and then asked them to chip into the coffee fund. At the end of their long presentation, Peterson and Schwarzman asked for the managers’ reaction, only to learn Delta’s fund didn’t invest in LBO funds. “They said they had just wanted to meet us because we were well known,” Schwarzman says. “The walk back was even hotter than the walk there. I thought Pete was going to kill me.”
An excursion to Boston was equally galling. They flew there one Friday for a 4:00 P.M. meeting Schwarzman had lined up with officials at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s endowment. When they arrived at MIT, the receptionist informed them she had no record of the appointment, and there was no one remaining in the office on the eve of the weekend. The two partners left, muttering imprecations under their breath. Adding insult to injury, they emerged from the building to find themselves in a torrential downpour with no umbrellas. They retraced their steps in order to call a cab from the endowment office, but it was locked. They took up positions on opposite street corners, hoping to hail a taxi in the driving rain, but to no avail. Finally, Schwarzman, ever the bargainer, rapped on the window of a cab stopped at a red light and offered the passenger a deal: $20 to have the driver take him and Peterson to the airport. It was the only pitch they made that day that succeeded.
After months crisscrossing the country, their quest had yielded only a single, $25 million pledge from New York Life Insurance Company. Eighteen institutions they’d considered strong candidates to invest with Blackstone had rebuffed them. By the winter of 1986, a year into the fund-raising, they were “about out of tricks,” says Schwarzman.
There were few targets left, so they decided to take a long shot and approached Prudential Insurance. The Pru had close ties to KKR, so they weren’t optimistic. “It didn’t seem the highest probability they’d want to invest with a start-up,” Schwarzman says. But Peterson had done business with Prudential’s chief investment officer, Garnett Keith, and was a close friend of Keith’s old boss and mentor, Raymond Charles. He arranged a lunch at Prudential’s headquarters in Newark, New Jersey.
Keith knew his way around leveraged buyouts at least as well as Peterson and Schwarzman, having financed twenty-five to thirty of them by that point. Under Charles in the 1960s and 1970s, the insurer had become the biggest lender for “bootstrap” acquisitions of small, family-owned businesses in which the buyer borrowed most of the purchase price—the forerunners of buyouts. Keith himself had helped fund a number of KKR’s early deals, including the landmark Houdaille LBO, for which Prudential furnished nearly a third of the total capital.
Over lunch, Keith proved to be receptive. Between bites of a tuna sandwich, he trained his eyes on Peterson and said, “I’ve thought about this, Pete. We’ve worked together. I’m going to put $100 million in your fund, and we would like to be the lead investor.” Keith, it turned out, had come to believe that the Pru was too closely identified with KKR and was in fact eager to forge new relationships. Furthermore, Ray Charles “had a lot of respect for Pete, and that rubbed off on me,” Keith recounts.
At last, after more than a year of brush-offs, humiliations, and gnawing doubts about whether Blackstone would make it, Peterson and Schwarzman’s luck had turned for the better. They were stunned. “That luncheon was the biggest day of our Blackstone lives,” says Peterson.
As an anchor investor, Prudential drove a hard bargain, though. Back then, buyout shops laid claim to 20 percent of the investment profits from each individual company their fund bought. But that meant that if one very large investment in a fund was written off—say, an investment that consumed a third of the fund’s capital—investors might lose money even though other investments worked out. The manager, though, would still collect profits on the good investments. It was a kind of heads-I-win, tails-you-lose clause.
Prudential insisted that Blackstone not collect a dime of the profits until Prudential and other investors had earned a 9 percent compounded annual return on every dollar they’d pledged to the fund. This concept of a “hurdle rate”—a threshold profit that had to be achieved before the fund manager earns any profits—would eventually become a standard term in buyout partnership agreements. Prudential also insisted that Blackstone pay investors in the fund 25 percent of the net revenue Blackstone made from its M&A advisory work, even on deals not connected to the fund. At the time, Blackstone still was forking out much of that revenue to Shearson under Schwarzman’s severance agreement, which would end the following year.
In the end, these were small prices to pay for the credibility the Pru’s backing would give Blackstone. The Prudential name could open doors at top financial institutions in the United States and abroad, and Peterson and Schwarzman quickly parlayed Keith’s endorsement into further investments. It paid off particularly in Japan, where Prudential was a major player and where Peterson’s status as a former cabinet member carried weight. Peterson was scheduled to give a speech in April 1987 at a gathering of top American and Japanese politicians and business leaders in Tokyo, and he and Schwarzman took advantage of the trip to trawl for money.
There, with the help of First Boston and Bankers Trust, top U.S. banks with a presence in Tokyo that Blackstone had hired to help on the fund-raising, they lined up meetings with Japanese brokerage houses. Schwarzman knew that brokers like Nomura, Daiwa, and Nikko were hankering to do business on Wall Street, and he hoped Blackstone could leverage its Wall Street lineage into a capital commitment.
Schwarzman’s hunch turned out to be right. In Tokyo, an exploratory meeting with Yasuo Kanzaki, executive vice president of Nikko Securities, Japan’s third-largest broker, went well. Kanzaki signaled that Nikko was willing to discuss an investment and asked the two not to talk to any other Japanese brokers. Unbeknownst to Peterson and Schwarzman, First Boston had scheduled a meeting the next morning with one of Nikko’s big competitors, Nomura. The two Americans weren’t sure what to do. They feared insulting Nomura by canceling on short notice but didn’t want to renege on their word to Nikko.
Schwarzman and Peterson called Kanzaki from their car phone outside Nomura’s headquarters before the meeting and asked him how to resolve the awkward situation. Kanzaki responded by asking them how much money they wanted. Peterson cupped his hand over the phone while he and Schwarzman discussed how much to ask for. Finally they settled on $100 million. “No problem,” Kanzaki declared. “Done deal!” He then suggested they keep their appointment with Nomura so as not to breach Japanese business protocol.
Nikko got what it desired from Blackstone, a collaboration to help its tiny band of New York bankers get up to speed on Wall Street. For Blackstone the surprise investment was even more valuable than it first seemed, for Nikko was part of the Mitsubishi industrial group, one of four enormous Japanese business combines that are linked by cross-ownership, commercial synergies, and a shared mind-set. As Schwarzman and Peterson trooped to meetings with other parts of the Mitsubishi network, they were greeted warmly. Mitsubishi Trust, Tokio Marine & Fire, and other group firms ponied up for the new fund.
Peterson and Schwarzman hadn’t recognized how intimately linked the institutions were when they headed into these meetings. “ We’d congratulate ourselves on being such great presenters,” Schwarzman says. “I came to realize later we could have sent monkeys in to make those presentations. The fact was, they tended to trust the lead investor, Nikko.” Even a member of a rival industrial group, Mitsui Trust, pledged $25 million. He and Peterson headed home with an additional $175 million in hand.
Their hot streak continued upon their return. In June, Peterson bumped into an old friend, General Electric chairman and chief executive Jack Welch, at a birthday party for Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham. “Where the hell have you been?” Welch inquired. “I know you and Steve have started this business, and I haven’t heard from you.” Peterson answered, “Dear God, Jack, we’ve called and called on GE, and they said you’re not interested.” Said Welch, “You should have called me directly.” Peterson did so the next morning, picking up $35 million.
Even more momentous was the $100 million General Motors’ pension fund put up. GM, like GE, had brushed off Blackstone several times, but a First Boston banker tapped a church connection to get Blackstone access to GM, and the firm soon captured another $100 million pledge. The GM imprimatur brought Blackstone a raft of smaller commitments—$10 million to $25 million—from other pension funds.
Blackstone had now won anchor investments from three of the most important sources of investment capital at the time: the insurance industry, pension funds, and Japanese financial firms.
By early autumn 1987, the Blackstone buyout fund had reeled in a total of more than $600 million. That was well short of their $1 billion target, but Peterson and Schwarzman began to think they should lock that up while they could. It was a perilous time, though it was not yet clear just how perilous. By the second week of October, the stock markets were jittery. Inflation was headed up, fanning talk of an interest rate hike, which would slow the economy and put a damper on a business such as a buyout firm that relied on borrowed money.
“I was exceptionally nervous and putting pressure on everyone to close,” Schwarzman says. He worked the phones, and on Thursday, October 15, 1987, Blackstone wrapped up the fund at around $635 million, with some mop-up legal work on Friday.
The following Monday the U.S. stock markets nose-dived 23 percent. Black Monday, as it became known, was the biggest one-day drop since 1914, outstripping even the 1929 sell-off that ushered in the Great Depression. If Blackstone hadn’t tied up contractual loose ends before the crash, undoubtedly many investors would have backed out. Instead, Blackstone could boast of raising the largest first-time leveraged buyout fund up to that time.
No longer would Peterson and Schwarzman live off the unpredictable bounty of M&A fees. Blackstone now would collect 1.5 percent of the fund’s capital every year as a management fee for at least six years. This not only ensured Blackstone’s near-term survival, but it also meant that Blackstone, finally, could staff up and take on the trappings of a bona fide business.
After an exhausting, two-year struggle, Blackstone had arrived.
“We got in just under the wire,” Schwarzman says. “It was probably the luckiest moment” in Blackstone’s history.