Exchanges ‘Culture is Everything’: Sixth Street’s Alan Waxman on Flexibility and Alpha
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Oct 24, 2025 
Alan Waxman, Co-founder and CEO of Sixth Street, dives into the significance of firm culture and flexibility in investment strategies. He discusses the innovative Tau strategy, which optimizes risk-reward across multiple platforms. Waxman shares key lessons from the financial crisis and underscores the importance of collaboration and open communication in teams. He identifies exciting opportunities in real estate, AI, and sports investments, emphasizing that a strong culture is essential for driving success in multi-strategy investing.
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Escalate Risk Early
- Elevate and escalate potential risks early rather than waiting for confirmation.
- Encourage junior staff to surface bad news quickly because it travels faster than good news.
Telecom Bust Shaped Sixth Street
- Waxman recounted the telecom bust and how siloed principal investing groups at Goldman suffered unevenly.
- That experience motivated creating a unified multi-strategy team to share ideas and compare relative risk-reward.
Use Cross‑Platform Capital Allocation
- Build a cross-platform vehicle to migrate capital to the best risk-reward across strategies and vintages.
- Avoid raising ever-larger blind pools; match fund size to opportunity and use flexible capital overlays like Tau.
