Despite his constant travel and packed schedule, Blackstone’s Jon Gray tries to respond to every email before he goes to bed, even if it’s just to say he’ll look at it more carefully later.
He advised summer interns that adopting a similar habit will probably serve them well.
“Responsiveness is a habit that you can learn that wins you a lot of positive affirmation,” Gray, the firm’s president and chief operating officer, said Wednesday.
“If you respond to people in a timely way, it shows you value them,” he said.
Responsiveness was just one part of Gray’s broader playbook for building a career at Blackstone. Speaking to blazer-donning interns in the firm’s New York headquarters and on Zoom around the world, he said success comes from combining hard work, entrepreneurial thinking, and kindness.
“You’re giving huge effort, you’re willing to take a little risk as an entrepreneur, but you’re treating people in a nice way. To me, that’s a winning formula,” Gray told the room, as some jotted down his words in black notebooks.
Gray started at Blackstone when he was only a few years older than the majority of interns he was talking to. He joined as a 22-year-old college graduate, rose to prominence through the real estate investment group, and became president in 2018.
The firm’s stature and scope have ballooned since then. Blackstone now employs more than 5,000 people, manages $1.3 trillion in assets, and accepted fewer than 1% of interns this year. Blackstone had more than 170 interns last summer and declined to comment on this year’s class size.
When it comes to hustle, Gray advised interns to “work harder and care more,” because those he has seen achieve the most have tended to go the extra mile, whether that’s doing additional diligence or arriving a bit earlier.
Entrepreneurship can also take many forms, Gray said, like streamlining a report using AI. (Every intern, regardless of what group they’re working in, will see how important AI is “in almost every product where we’re deploying capital today.”)
For Gray, being nice doesn’t mean being any less ambitious or demanding, and it usually boosts business. So much of what Blackstone does — raising capital and executing investments, for example — is a “team sport,” he said.
Beyond advice for those at the very beginning of their careers, Gray shared the defining characteristic he looks for in potential leaders: an “eye of the tiger, will to win.”
“One quality above all else: it is that drive and hunger. There’s just this sense that they want it,” he said.
Gray added that the hunger could come from anywhere — maybe someone played competitive sports or is a first-generation citizen. Both Gray and CEO Steve Schwarzman, who spoke to interns on their first day, said that intellectual “flexibility” is also crucial, especially at Blackstone, which prides itself on an entrepreneurial spirit.
“Things happen in the real world. You’ve got to be able to figure it out,” Schwarzman told interns on June 1.
For all the changes in the world, Gray emphasized the importance of not chasing hot sectors and remaining squarely focused on Blackstone’s “north star” of delivering returns for customers. Gray, a dual English and economics major in college, said Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs has had a profound impact on his life philosophy precisely because it reinforced that belief. He remembered, when reading, that even though Jobs was a brilliant marketer, simply creating amazing products likely would have been enough to make him successful.
“We are an investment firm, and we must deliver for our customers,” Gray said. “Always focus on your core product. Don’t forget that.”
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