Stephen Schwarzman grew up in a middle-class family in suburban Philadelphia. His father ran a dry goods store. By the time Schwarzman wrote this book, he had built Blackstone into the largest alternative asset management firm in the world, with hundreds of billions of dollars under management. The memoir traces the distance between those two points.
Schwarzman worked at Lehman Brothers in the 1970s and 1980s, rising to managing director before leaving with his partner Pete Peterson to start Blackstone in 1985. They began with $400,000 and a secretary. The early years were spent pitching deals that nobody wanted to fund and living on the edge of failure. Schwarzman describes the specific deals that established Blackstone: the buyouts, the real estate acquisitions, and the fundraising trips that involved being rejected dozens of times before finding investors willing to commit.
The book is organized around lessons. Do not lose money. Every deal has to work on its own terms, not just in the context of a portfolio. The best way to learn is to put yourself in situations where the consequences of failure are real. Hire people who are tens, not sevens, because tens attract other tens and sevens attract fives. Be willing to call anyone, no matter how senior, if you have a genuine reason to talk. The lessons are presented with specific examples from Schwarzman’s career, which gives them more weight than abstract principles would carry.
Schwarzman does not pretend to be modest. He describes his philanthropy, including a $350 million gift to MIT and a $150 million gift to Yale, with the same matter-of-fact tone he uses for everything else. He describes dinners with heads of state and conversations with presidents. The book assumes that operating at this level is interesting, and it is, even if the protagonist’s self-regard can be wearing.
The strongest chapters cover Blackstone’s evolution from a small advisory firm to a diversified financial giant. Schwarzman describes how the firm expanded into private equity, real estate, hedge fund solutions, and credit, each expansion driven by a specific opportunity and managed through a specific process. The IPO in 2007, which valued Blackstone at $33 billion and made Schwarzman a billionaire many times over, gets detailed treatment.
What It Takes was a New York Times bestseller. It is most useful as a window into how decisions are made at the highest levels of finance and as a collection of operating principles from someone who has been tested at scale.
