- Blackstone encourages junior staff to speak at deal meetings, fostering open dialogue.
- It can be “scary,” said Jon Gray, the firm’s president, on a recent podcast.
- A former intern told BI last year that a senior leader said to him “rank doesn’t matter here.”
Blackstone’s president said that senior executives often ask the most junior people in the room to speak at the private equity firm’s deal meetings.
“We’ll go around in many of these committees and ask the most junior people in the room, ‘hey what do you think?’ We want them to articulate why they have conviction,” Jon Gray said on a recent podcast hosted by Norges Bank Investment Management. Norway’s sovereign wealth fund has invested hundreds of millions of dollars with Blackstone.
The 54-year-old, who started his career at the firm, said that it can be “scary” for a young person, and that the committee is “not the most patient group of people.”
Gray added that meetings get into questions immediately, with people “drilling” the presenters about the companies in question.
“What we try to do is make sure a lot of please and thank you’s and be appreciative to the group, but there’s really sort of a truth-telling exercise,” Gray said.
Blackstone is the world’s largest alternative asset manager, with more than $1 trillion in assets under management. The firm has 12,700 real estate assets and 240 portfolio companies as of June, according to the company’s website.
Last year, an associate who interned twice at the firm told Business Insider that juniors were encouraged to make their presence known.
“Senior leaders were constantly coming out to the bullpen and asking the most junior person on the team what they thought about the deals that we were currently in process with, what they thought about up-and-coming trends,” said Marshall Plumlee, who was a US Army infantry officer before his Harvard MBA. He’s now working at Blackstone full time.
Plumlee said that one senior leader explained it to him this way: “Rank doesn’t matter here; your thoughts are just as valuable as the next guy.”
Blackstone had 4,735 employees as of December 2023.
Talent development initiatives
The private equity firm has made other commitments to developing talent, too.
In 2020, it launched Career Pathways, a program to help portfolio companies solve talent problems by creating internal trainings. Last year, it started a data program to find and train people to fill specialized technical positions. In September, the company said the portfolio companies that took part in the program have hired over 10,500 people from underrepresented groups.
“We put it inside of our portfolio operations side of the business,” Gray said at the time. “It’s not a charitable effort. It’s designed to drive talent to companies.”‘
The executive is also known for being in charge of the iconic Blackstone holiday videos, which started in 2018 when the firm had grown too large to host company-wide Christmas parties. Business Insider previously reported that Gray is usually the first person to come up with the idea for the holiday video — a comical sketch sometimes filmed in the style of the television show “The Office” or with other pop-culture bents.
