David Rubenstein: We took $5M and turned it into $500B

I raised $5 million from four investors in 1987. Today, Carlyle manages not $5 million, but $500 billion.

How old were you then when you started Carlyle?

Thirty-seven. I said, "Geez, if I don't do it now, I'll never do it."

Do you have any habits that you think would shock people?

I always view myself as being from a blue-collar family in Baltimore.

But even, like, in year ten, you weren't thinking like, "All right. I can breathe a little. This is gonna work. I think I'm safe."

No, because if you're an entrepreneur, you always think something bad's gonna happen.

Do you still feel that way?

Every day. Ninety-nine point nine percent of the companies that are started in the United States are not in business five years later. If you go back and look at anybody that built a company, they have self-confidence that is staggering. I met Jeff Bezos for the first time, and he said, "Well, I'll give you twenty percent of the company that I'm about to build." Later, after the company was going somewhere, I said, "We should have taken that deal." That was stupid. That stock's probably worth fourteen, uh, billion dollars now.

Can I ask you about seeing people get power?

Well...

[singing] I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. Uh. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road less traveled, never looking back.

I was looking at this photo. There's this photo here of, I think it's you and your parents.

Yes. It's with President Carter when, uh... You know, I was twenty-seven years old. I got a job as the deputy domestic policy advisor. I obviously wasn't qualified and wasn't experienced. But in our system, if you work in a campaign and you win, you might get a job in the White House. And so my parents, who were blue-collar workers, never graduated from high school, when I got a job at twenty-seven in the White House, you know, they couldn't believe it. Then I took them in to meet the president, which is what that picture shows, and they were, you know, in awe because they were what you would call Yellow Dog Democrats.

What's that?

It is an old expression. It means that I am a Democrat, and I would vote for a Democrat for a candidate, s- for a president or for any office, even if it was a yellow dog.

So they were just hardcore Dems.

Absolutely.

What do you do your first month when you're in office? Because getting any type of new job is a big deal, particularly one where it's, like, one of the most powerful things on Earth. What do you do your first month? Do you remember?

Carter had a lot of promises, and what I did is I worked on compiling what his promises were. See, there wasn't no internet then, and so Carter had wanted to know what he actually promised in the course of his two years' campaign. Well, you have to go dig it out, talks, interviews, questionnaires. What did he actually promise? And I got to sit in a lot of Carter's meetings because I would-- I knew his promises better than anybody, and so I would be able to object and say, "Mr. President, it's a good idea this person has, but it's a violation of a campaign promise." Every administration, the current administration, every administration has young people who are in their twenties