Matthew Stopnik
RBC Capital Markets, LLC
Good afternoon, everyone. The — thank you, Mike. Thank you, everyone for joining us. Hopefully, everyone is wide awake after that light lunch.
Michael Arougheti
Co-Founder, CEO & Director
I think it must be good. We’re all eating steak for lunch.
Matthew Stopnik
RBC Capital Markets, LLC
I’m not sure how much we need an introduction for you, particularly in this room. So I’m going to keep this brief. Under Mike’s leadership, Ares has become one of the defining platforms in the private market, spanning credit, private, private credit, real assets, infrastructure, secondaries, insurance capital, sports and increasingly, the individual investor channel.
While the growth and scale of Ares is impressive, I think it’s the intentionality and the architecture of what you’ve built that really makes Ares unique. It’s not just a bigger version of the traditional asset manager model, it’s essentially a different operating system. And for this discussion, that’s what I want to focus on, more about the shape of Ares rather than the scale, and what enables it to operate differently from many of your peers.
And on a personal note, Mike’s been a close friend of mine for 40 years. We were high school classmates, Clarkstown High School North in New City, New York.
Matthew Stopnik
RBC Capital Markets, LLC
Go Rams. So it’s particularly nice to be up here, share the stage with you.
Michael Arougheti
Co-Founder, CEO & Director
We were actually analysts together too at Kidder.
