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Stanford Graduate School of BusinessBlackstone's Stephen Schwarzman on Hiring Phenomenal People
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At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Schwarzman on building Blackstone: strategy, thick skin, and elite hiring
- Stephen Schwarzman describes founding Blackstone as an exercise in defining a distinctive strategy before acting, including early plans spanning M&A, private equity, and building businesses that create intellectual capital.
- He portrays early entrepreneurship as a high-rejection, high-stress period where success depends on thick skin, adaptability, and sustained force of will despite frequent dismissals and dishonesty from potential backers.
- He argues that being a CEO requires different, learned skills than being a founder, including careful communication, reinforcing values, balancing control with autonomy, and managing people with dignity even when it slows execution.
- He explains that a strong culture comes from structured processes—such as mandatory risk-focused debate in investment decisions—and from hiring people who are capable, emotionally stable, honest, and aligned with the firm’s values.
- He says his personal motivation has consistently centered on learning, creating, and operating on consequential frontiers, and he identifies excellence and making a vision real as what matters most to him.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasStart by figuring out your strategy and distinctiveness before you launch.
He describes spending hours thinking through what they wanted to be, why anyone would need them, and what distinctive value they could offer, especially when they didn’t yet have a firm or track record.
Use clear criteria for new ventures: great opportunity, a “10 out of 10” leader, and intellectual-capital creation.
He emphasizes setting up new initiatives only when there’s an outstanding opportunity, a top-tier person to run it, and a way for that effort to build knowledge that strengthens the rest of the organization.
Entrepreneurship requires an unusually thick skin and sustained “force of will.”
He recounts sending out hundreds of fund offering circulars and receiving repeated rejections, arguing that persistence and adaptability under rejection are central to entrepreneurial survival.
The CEO job is trained behavior: communicate carefully and manage people with dignity, not like “deal parts.”
He says CEOs must recognize how heavily their words are weighted, use praise carefully but generously when deserved, and slow down to preserve dignity while still achieving objectives—sometimes taking much longer to implement changes to avoid damaging the institution.
Institutionalize dissent by making critique mandatory and explicitly non-personal.
After a painful early investment loss, he describes building a process where everyone must voice negatives and risks, creating a culture where critique is expected and not treated as a personal attack.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesI’ve found that, that the most important thing about a new business is, is figuring out what you’re doing before you’re doing it. In other words, why does anybody need you?
— Stephen Schwarzman
If you attract tens, they always make it rain if you need rain.
— Stephen Schwarzman
How many times can you be told you’re a loser? The answer, apparently, is almost infinite.
— Stephen Schwarzman
You never sleep because of the fear of failure. And if you don’t have that fear, you’ll stay asleep, you will fail.
— Stephen Schwarzman
What matters, uh, to, to me most is excellence, uh, and delivering sort of a vision into reality.
— Stephen Schwarzman
SPEAKERS
Stephen Schwarzman
guestCo-founder and CEO of Blackstone; founder of the Schwarzman Scholars program.
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
