In 1984, Lehman Brothers, where I had worked for my career, had been sold to American Express. I actually was the person handling that transaction. I was 36 years old, or 35, I forget which. I had a non-competition agreement, and as part of my wanting to do that deal, I wanted to leave for a variety of reasons. I didn’t like what ethically had happened with the firm. I didn’t want to be with the people — not all the people, but the leadership people — so I worked out a situation where I joined the former chairman of the firm at Lehman, who had been pushed out, which necessitated the need for the sale. He and I had always worked very closely together. So all we were trying to do by forming Blackstone was sort of re-forming our own working relationship. We didn’t view it — and on this, I’m sure I was sort of colossally naive — as that big a step. I knew we had always been successful doing almost everything together, commercially, and I didn’t understand why we wouldn’t be. The fact that we had no phone, no office, no company, that small little companies like this were not successful in investment banking, in fact they didn’t exist at all — there was only one of them that existed, which was a small firm founded by a fellow named Jim Wolfenson. Jim’s currently the head of the World Bank, but even Jim had never done any larger mergers until that time. We just assumed that we would be accepted as the sort of equivalent of a Salomon Brothers or a Lehman Brothers or a Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley, and I guess that’s the height of ridiculous hubris. Because we were too silly to understand that people might be worried about that, we went ahead, and it worked out.