Tony James has spent over four decades seeing what was coming next and acting on it long before anyone else.
He built DLJ from a mid-sized brokerage into one of the most influential platforms on Wall Street by creating the leveraged buyout and private capital businesses that became the model the rest of the industry eventually adopted. He joined Blackstone as COO and constructed an entirely new set of investment businesses, helping transform the private equity firm into the world’s largest alternative asset manager. At Costco, he has spent four decades helping build and safeguard a company around a single principle — always do what is right for members, and the shareholders will take care of themselves.
Every one of those calls looked unconventional at the time. None of them do now.
In this episode of Grey Matter, Tony James sits down with Consello Founder, Chairman and CEO Declan Kelly to discuss the instincts behind those moments, the decisions that defined it, and what a career built at that scale ultimately teaches about judgment, patience, and knowing what to do next.
In this conversation, Tony discusses:
- Why he turned down Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley out of school and how he built DLJ’s leveraged buyout business
- The culture he built at DLJ and later rehabilitated at Blackstone, and why teams that root for each other without incentives beat individual talent every time
- Spending a billion dollars on a distressed credit team in the middle of a market collapse, and why it was one of the hardest and most consequential bets he made at Blackstone
- Why he turned down a senior role in government after an honest assessment of where he could be most effective
- What four decades at Costco taught him about the power of doing one thing extraordinarily well and refusing to get distracted by anything else
