Summary

Waxman’s entire method reduces to one skill: unitizing risk and return across every asset class, sector, geography, and duration — the framework is business/sector quality, capital-structure attachment point, and documents — so a consumer-goods buyout at 20% with 70% leverage can be compared against a hyperscale data center with a 15-year take-or-pay contract, or the same 15% structured-equity deal in Australia versus Ukraine. “Everyone thinks their baby’s the prettiest” — single-strategy investors can’t make that comparison, and it’s why Sixth Street runs capital from 10-12% up to 20-25%/2-3x under one roof.
Every good theme has a shelf life of 12 to 36 months: “there’s a lot of smart people out there,” so a good theme becomes less good, then okay, then bad, “then people overcorrect, they start putting leverage on it, and then you have a correction.” Sixth Street sees 450-500 deals a month, runs 15-25 themes at a time, and most of the 2025 list didn’t exist in 2022 — the firm is built to migrate rather than ride a theme down.
His implicit macro warning: investors are back in behavioral tunnels — direct lending flooded with new money, nominal returns manufactured through leverage, LPs still bucketed by asset class asking for “20% returns” without asking how much leverage produces them. The 2001-02 fiber bust and the 06-07 signs “were all right in front of you,” and the siloed-vision pattern is “what we’re going to be talking about sometime here in the next two to three years.”
Two overlooked risks he names for mid-2025: the AI labor transition — productivity gains are coming, job losses with them, and “it should be code red people talking about it and that’s not happened” — and the wealth channel, where private-alt allocations of 3-5% versus 40% for pensions should rise but must be structured responsibly: “just because you can raise it in the wealth channel doesn’t mean you should.”
The structural edge is TAL, a ~$30B “synthetic Goldman Sachs balance sheet” sitting across ten deliberately modest platform funds — the growth fund stays at $3-4B instead of $8B, yet the firm can still “consistently write billion dollar plus checks across asset classes.” That architecture came from case-studying every faded GP brand: the killer was raising ever-larger funds past the opportunity set.
The track record is built on restraint: SSG paused in 2006-07 and was, he thinks, the only principal group (maybe one other) that didn’t lose money in 2008 on a lot of capital — without which Sixth Street’s first fund never gets raised. “Sometimes the best thing you can do as an investor is not invest”; in 2017 they passed on 15-20% deals because the risk was too far out on the spectrum.
Culture is presented as the business model, not decoration: multi-strategy investing dies with fiefdoms, so Sixth Street hires people who are “over themselves” (borrowed from the Spurs), trains them to “face the tiger” when deals go wrong — a fraud recovery that returned 50 cents on the dollar “when we should have gotten two cents” — and has never lost a partner.

Deep dive

1. SSG: the Goldman desk that could do anything — except lose money

Waxman’s path in was pure accident: an international-relations major at Penn, 35 interviews and no offer, working the mail room at bond manager likely Fischer, Francis, Trees & Watts, he met a Goldman principal investor on a plane home from Texas — “reading research reports a thousand miles per hour, processing speeds I’d never even seen” — peppered him with questions, and got an interview. The lesson he still draws: curiosity builds relationships, and relationships create opportunities.
The Special Situations Group ran the firm’s own balance sheet — $25 billion at peak — with a mandate he summarizes as: any theme, any asset class, any geography, any duration, return profiles from 10% to 30%, “literally we could do anything but we couldn’t lose money.” A small team generated a substantial share of Goldman net income for 10-plus years; the Wall Street Journal’s “Navy Seals” label created the halo.
The formative scar was 2001-02: Goldman had ten disparate principal-investing fiefdoms that never spoke. Waxman’s US corporate group was negative on the fiber overbuild (likely XO Communications, Williams); another group one floor apart was all-in on fiber and lost heavily. The firm merged everything under one umbrella — the origin of the cross-silo periphery Sixth Street is built on. He credits likely David Viniar, “probably the best CFO, in my opinion, ever on Wall Street.”

2. Unitizing risk: business quality, attachment point, documents

Return units are easy — “it’s arithmetic.” “Risk units are a lot harder.” The refined 25-year framework runs three questions across every deal: what’s the quality of the business and sector, where do you sit in the capital structure (attachment points), and what do the documents say.
The worked examples carry the idea: a private equity buyout of a consumer-goods company at a 20% return with 70% leverage versus a hyperscale data center with a 15-year take-or-pay contract from an investment-grade counterparty — the latter properly commands a lower return. The identical 15% structured-equity deal in Australia versus Ukraine demands different pricing. A minority stake where “the control party can literally do whatever they want — dilute you, put a bunch of debt ahead of you” is a different set of risk units than one with real protections.
The cultural corollary: specialists can’t do this. “If you’re just a healthcare investor, you think your baby’s the prettiest… if you’re just in Europe, you think Europe’s only good.” Sixth Street calls the antidote “playing tennis” — comparing a healthcare senior secured loan to buying a healthcare company to European real estate to Asian infrastructure, in real time, against the macro backdrop.

3. Themes decay on a 12-to-36-month clock — the firm is built to migrate

The mechanics: 450-500 deals flow into Sixth Street every month, 50-60 themes bubble across ten investment platforms, and 15-25 are live at any time — a theme must be actionable, not merely good. Compare 2025’s list to 2022’s and “most of them are different themes,” which is why “we have to be a firm of entrepreneurs.”
The decay function is his signature market model: any good theme attracts smart money, “then it’s a less good theme, then it becomes an okay theme, then it becomes a bad theme, and then people overcorrect, they start putting leverage on it, and then you have a correction.” The Goldman-era track record came from migrating before that last phase, never getting caught in it.
Theme sourcing is deliberately everywhere: 16 sector franchises doing primary research on their ecosystems, long-standing CEO relationships calling in observations, noticing a supplier more interesting than the company under diligence, or three similar deals arriving at once. The showcase is AirTrunk — “started literally with a white sheet of paper” in 2017, data centers before the crowd, recently bought by Blackstone for what he cites as ~$16 billion. The current power-constraint theme emerged the same way: power, data-center, and real estate teams circulating signals under one umbrella.

4. What people get wrong about risk: tunnels, leverage, and LP buckets

Asked what would surprise people about risk assessment, his answer is behavioral, not technical: humans “get into behavioral patterns and they look at the past and they just keep going.” Direct lending has oscillated between great and less-good entirely on capital flows — and “somewhat recently, you see a whole bunch of new money coming in.” The evidence is never hidden: in 06-07 “there were over 100% loan-to-value loans to houses… it’s all right in front of you.” His quiet forward call: this siloed tunnel vision is “what we’re going to be talking about sometime here in the next two to three years.”
A barbed aside on COVID worth keeping: the Fed bailout “made some people that shouldn’t have looked smart look smart. But that’s a whole other thing.”
The LP world compounds the problem because it’s structurally siloed — private equity bucket, fixed income bucket, private credit bucket. Early Sixth Street fundraising meetings went: “We need 20% returns.” “Okay, how much leverage are you taking to get 20%? It didn’t matter.” Nominal returns are just underlying risk plus leverage; “people can make returns whatever they want through leverage.” His prediction, hedged as stated: “at some point I think the AI is going to figure out how to quantify units of risk for private capital. That’ll happen someday. That has not happened.”

5. Two named risks for mid-2025: the AI transition and the wealth channel

He disclaims AI expertise — his partners Marty Chavez (Google board) and Adam Korn, ex-Goldman engineering, are the experts — but his worry is the transition: once productivity gains arrive, so do job losses, and not enough people are talking about how to “remobilize capital” into the real economy. The US-China race and hyperscaler competition absorb all attention; “to me it should be code red people talking about it and that’s not happened.” He’s been discussing it with Jeff Weiner, former LinkedIn CEO, and notes Anthropic’s CEO “actually came out and said something publicly” — a first.
On the wealth channel: wealth-channel investors sit at 3-5% private alternatives versus ~40% for pensions and ~50% for endowments, so allocations should rise — but the transition, structures, and liquidity have to be responsible to those investors. The governing principle from Jamie Gates, “the godfather of Sixth Street”: “just because you can raise capital doesn’t mean you should” — advice he’d “espouse to all of our people in our industry.”
The host’s observation that pure public-equity investors are “kind of a dying breed” draws out the irony: fewer public companies, more privates — Patrick cited a statistic that about 93% of companies north of $100 million in revenue are private — and yet ETFs and trading wrappers are being built on private assets. “It’s a little bit circular… these are real dynamics” that anyone allocating capital “needs to take real note of.” And larger LPs, he says, are already starting to compete for access to the best GPs the way GPs compete for companies.

6. Sixth Street’s founding: Project Austin and the five-year compass

What he’s proudest of from SSG is what they didn’t do: pausing in 2006-07 as things got “irrationally exuberant.” “We didn’t know what was going to happen in the GFC,” but relative risk-unit comparison showed things “getting out of whack.” SSG was, he thinks, the only principal group — “maybe there’s one other” — that didn’t lose money in 2008 on a lot of capital. His counterfactual is blunt: had they blown up like “so many people in seats like mine,” Sixth Street’s first fund never gets raised.
He told likely David Viniar in March 2008 he wanted to rebuild the model entrepreneurially, but stayed through the year — “there’s no way I was going to leave those guys at that time” — then wrote Project Austin: values, culture, investment philosophy, and a five-year strategic plan, after case-studying every GP, including big brands that “faltered away.” The recurring failure mode: raising larger and larger funds regardless of the opportunity set. TPG was structured as “a firm within a firm” — minority stake, Sixth Street never ceding control of investments or hiring.
The firm is now on its fourth five-year plan (the 2030 plan): an 18-month, 200-page process — 80 ideas narrowed to ~40 subplanks under five strategic planks — then broken into one-year increments where every employee writes a personal business plan. The design constraint: “we want the summation of all those personal business plans to equal the five-year strategic plan” — everyone “climbing up the mountain together.”

7. Culture as operating system: over yourself, and face the tiger

The values stack: the “one life” principle (“you have one life — do you want to be average or great?”), relentless curiosity, and one team. The filter came from the San Antonio Spurs — Waxman grew up an Austin fan, and RC Buford and Gregg Popovich handed him the phrase: “are you over yourself yet?” — “the ultimate expression of can someone be a good teammate.” It’s load-bearing, not decorative: “the enemy of a multi-strategy investing business is fiefdoms and silos” — hoard information and the whole unitization model breaks.
“Face the tiger” comes from his black-belt father, and a five-foot tiger sculpture stares down all three elevators at the office. The thesis: “it’s easy to have a culture when things are going well, but cultures are defined when things go wrong” — most people run, point fingers, or freeze; “at Sixth Street, we’re like, ‘Good, let’s go.’”
The specimen story: a structured-equity investment in a European plastic-bottle company, the only fraud in firm history (“knock on wood”). Five partners convened at PJ Clarke’s — “holy what, what is going on here” — divided the work on the spot, pulled in a 12-person cross-firm team, and recovered 50 cents on the dollar “when we should have gotten two cents.”
The retention datapoint: “we’ve never lost a partner” — though he allows the criticism that “maybe we should have lost some.” His frame: monetary pay is one currency, but there’s “who you work with compensation, culture compensation, are-you-getting-developed compensation, white space compensation.” His two standing tests: the annual Austin offsite a-hole check (“so far we’re undefeated, we’re like 16 and 0”) and whether, at 80, he’d introduce the people in a random investment committee to his grandkids.

8. Spotify and Airbnb: what a whiteboard deal actually looks like

Spotify, 2016: the market had “a cloud over the company” — perceived competitive threat from Amazon and Apple — it was still burning cash and refused to raise common equity below the last round. Barry McCarthy whiteboarded principles; the answer was a $1 billion convertible with a cap around $25 billion, a current-yield component, designed as a pre-IPO bridge. It “went way through the cap.” On likely Daniel Ek: “it takes one second to figure out that guy is generational” — and the whole management team told the same story, which he flags as rare.
Airbnb, 2020: “we were one of the few firms in the world playing offense at the beginning of COVID, and the reason we were playing offense is because we had a good defense” — the 06-07 pattern had reappeared in 2018-19 and they’d protected the portfolio. Sixty people worked weekends rebuilding all 15-25 themes; one was “best business models most impacted by COVID.” With no pre-existing likely Brian Chesky relationship, they cold-called board members and bankers, and with Silver Lake wrote a $1 billion loan with warrants — they wanted it done in seven days, teams in Asia, the US, and Europe literally handing off the work.
The risk-unit anatomy of that deal: fundamentals and team, yes, but the decisive analysis was liquidity — the financing gave Airbnb up to four-to-five years of runway, “not in the spreadsheet judgment.” And the generalization: investors price explicit risks but ignore implicit risks — “one of them in the case of Airbnb was we’re assuming away that there will be a cure. We can’t all be locked in our houses forever.”
On simplification: “we like complex things,” but “ultimately investments come down to three or four or five things and we know those things inside out.” The discipline extends to passing — in 2017 they walked from 15-20% deals as too far out on the risk spectrum, and some of the deals others kept doing worked out well — until COVID.

9. TAL: the synthetic Goldman balance sheet on top of ten modest funds

TAL exists to solve the fund-size trap identified in Project Austin. Each of the ten platforms keeps its fund matched to its opportunity — the growth business “would probably raise an $8 billion fund” without TAL; instead it stays at $3-4 billion — while the ~$30 billion vehicle over the top, “the synthetic Goldman Sachs balance sheet which could do anything,” speaks to the largest deals: “we’re one of the few handful of firms in the world that can consistently write billion dollar plus checks across asset classes.”
TAL is unconstrained across asset class (real estate, infrastructure, private credit, growth, mostly private with public capacity) and duration — from two-to-three-year deals to the Real Madrid and FC Barcelona strategic partnerships that “extend further than 10 years.” His framing of why it matters: what you get from an investor reflects their capital base, and “you never know at that particular time where the best opportunity is going to be.”
The sports thesis dates the entry precisely: COVID took franchise revenues “to zero,” and for the first time ever the top clubs reached out to institutional partners. The bet is local brands going global via technology — “you can be a Dallas Cowboys fan in Australia or a Real Madrid fan in China and watch.” The roster now spans the Cowboys, Yankees, San Francisco Giants, Real Madrid, and Barcelona.
The Bernabéu deal shows the whiteboard method end-to-end: Madrid didn’t want debt, so Sixth Street built an equity joint venture around the stadium’s premium perimeter — VIP suites, premium food and beverage, the museum, premium tickets — with portfolio company Legends uplifting the offering (“we underwrote that and put our money where our mouth was”). Pricing is iterative: “here’s option A, B, C… they say we like a combination of A and B… we come back with a hybrid.” The boundary condition: “we feel like we can price anything that’s not binary — stroke-of-the-pen risk” excepted. Same toolkit produced the $20 billion asset-origination joint venture with Max Levchin’s Affirm. Barcelona’s version: financing to keep the roster together — “you can see how they’ve done since.”

10. Steven Plus, yellow notepads, and the future self

The origin of everything: assigned early at Goldman to evaluate a $400 million loan portfolio from failing Dallas bank Amresco — RTV Ventures loans to radio and TV stations with asset value but no cash flow, structured as first-lien loans at 15% coupons plus warrants for 10-30% of the company, lending the first $50 million against $200 million of “stick value” — the first 25% of the value in a first lien, which “kind of broke my brain.” Steven Plus, the slow-talking Texan who ran it (now Sixth Street’s chief risk officer), answered Waxman’s ten daily yellow-notepad questions for two years and “taught me finance, taught me investing, taught me about risk units, taught me everything.”
The compounding payoff: at 23-24 Waxman wrote (with Plus’s help) a business plan to apply the model to good middle-market businesses banks wouldn’t touch — at lower rates but a far bigger TAM — “direct lending didn’t exist; it wasn’t a word” — presented it to likely Hank Paulson, likely Lloyd Blankfein, and likely David Viniar, and Goldman entered the middle market. Per his partner Julian Salisbury, that business is now over $50 billion. His answer to the kindest-thing question: Steven Plus taking the time — “I wouldn’t be where I am today without him.” Today, anyone at Sixth Street needing development gets sent to work with Plus.
His development doctrine, riffing on Ravi Gupta’s “demanding and supportive”: “it starts with caring — you have to authentically care for that person.” The mechanism is the personal business plan: three-to-five things to improve, “knock down 70%,” roll the rest forward, repeat for 20 years — “shoot high, because if you’re doing 100% of your plan you’re probably not aiming high enough.” The motivation was always the “future self”: build the toolkit before spouse and kids exist so that “your future self will thank you because you get to spend more time with your kids and go to all their sports games — like I do today.”
His own week now: on every major investment committee but nearly silent — “everything that I would have said has already been asked, and in a lot of cases asked better” — stepping in on one or two deals a year (Airbnb, Real Madrid). Otherwise: five strategic “big boulders,” maniacal culture enforcement (“if I see someone hoarding a relationship or not calling people back, I’ll pull them aside — that’s not how we do it here”), and 20-30 conversations a day averaging two or three minutes. “If I’m 10,000 feet deep every day, I’m not doing my job.”

谢晨 on Robotics’ Data Drought, Synthetic Data and Meta’s Scale Deal How High Can It Go?