Chapter 196 Big Shots

According to estimates, if the sale of NetArt shares goes smoothly, they can recover more than US$200 million from the 4.3 million NetArt shares.

For the remaining funds, Barron has also reached an agreement with Goldman Sachs Group, which can be solved by pledging his shares of Sinclair Group and part of Apple's shares.

During his time in Silicon Valley, in addition to completing the acquisition of Google shares, Barron also established the North American branch of Woaw with the help of Sequoia Capital.

The main job of the Woaw North American branch is to be responsible for the operation of the Woaw website in North America. To this end, they will also build a data center here - due to U.S. policy, the data of North American users must stay local, so this data The center is necessary to develop the North American market.

This is also a precautionary suggestion for Woaw from Sequoia Capital, which has extensive Internet experience. After all, when their scale develops to a certain level, even though Woaw is a British company and a "close ally" of the United States, it will still be unavoidable by relevant U.S. departments. s concern".

Just like companies like Google and Microsoft, they are also subject to various restrictions in Europe. It is the same reason.

At the same time, Woaw's North American branch will also establish a research and development center in Silicon Valley to conduct research on some new technologies for future Internet development.

…

"This is Mr. Larry Fink of BlackRock, one of the fastest-growing wealth management companies in the past two decades."

"Hello, Mr. Fink, nice to meet you."

Under the introduction of Paulson, the president of Goldman Sachs Group, Barron had a good chat with the founder and CEO of BlackRock Group.

BlackRock Group Barron's was well-known in its previous life. It was originally an independent company spun out of a fund management department of Blackstone. After more than thirty years of development by Larry Fink, by the time of his rebirth, he was already a manager. A top wealth management company with over US$10 trillion in assets.

However, at this time, we have not yet experienced the subprime mortgage crisis in 2008. Goldman Sachs Group's "invincible golden status" has not been broken, and BlackRock Group is far from developing to the scale it later did. Therefore, in front of Paulson, Larry Fink still showed enough respect.

It was the party hosted by Goldman Sachs Group that was able to invite so many "big shots" today. So far, Barron has seen such powerful people as the president of Bridgewater Associates, the president of Sands Corporation, and the second generation of the Amway family. big shot.

So far, the scale of cooperation between Barron's and Goldman Sachs has reached billions of dollars, making him a "big customer" that cannot be ignored by Goldman Sachs. Therefore, tonight, Paulson, the president of Goldman Sachs, specially took some time to accompany him. Looking at Barron, he introduced these people to him.

That is to say, Barron's recent large-scale purchases of stocks in Apple and Google have given him a little bit of visibility in front of these people. In the eyes of these people, his previous investments in the United States are nothing more. It's just a small fight.

Even so, the scale of assets currently managed by DS Capital is still not high in the eyes of those fund companies.

After all, the capital management scale of the Mars Fund had just exceeded 1 billion pounds at this time, and when BlackRock Group was first created, the capital management department spun off from Blackstone already had a capital scale of up to 1 billion US dollars...

"Hello, Mr. Blankfein, nice to see you here."

Lloyd Blankfein was a little surprised when Barron took the initiative to greet him. After all, at this time, he was just the head of the Fixed Income Commodity Department (FICC) of Goldman Sachs Group. It was also a great honor for him to be able to attend this gathering. Because FICC has achieved brilliant results in the past two years, it can be said that it has gradually become an important part of Goldman Sachs Group's revenue.

"Hello, Duke Cavendish, it's an honor to meet you. Your recent investments are very bold."

"You don't have to be so polite, Mr. Blankfein, just call me Barron. I've heard of you before, and they all say you are the most capable person in the Goldman Sachs Group."

Barron's praise was very helpful to Lloyd, but what he said was correct. Otherwise, Lloyd Blankfein would not have become the first and only Goldman Sachs after its listing at the beginning of this year. Employees who make it to the board of directors.

The reason why Barron deliberately got close to Lloyd was because he knew that Paulson, the current president of Goldman Sachs Group, was about to retire. Prior to this, Paulson had two recognized successors, but there was no such person as Lloyd. Lancoffin.

But because of the outstanding performance of the fixed income department he was responsible for - the revenue of this department headed by Lloyd increased from US$2.86 billion in 1999 to US$5.59 billion in 2003, becoming the pillar department of Goldman Sachs - it was finally In December of this year, after Paulson retired, Lloyd Blankfein took over as president and CEO of Goldman Sachs Group, becoming the most powerful person in the financial empire.

While Lloyd has not yet ascended to that position, Barron is also willing to get closer to him.

Not only did Barron have such thoughts, Lloyd also responded very proactively to Barron's kindness.

After all, as one of his competitors to "top" Goldman Sachs Group, John Thornton's main achievement was to successfully enter Goldman Sachs Group's business into the European and Asian markets.

In the European market of Goldman Sachs Group, the cooperation with Barron's in England is also a very important project.

So Lloyd naturally hopes to deepen his friendship with Barron, an important collaborator in Goldman Sachs Group's European business.

In addition to these, at this gathering, Barron also met some people who were very interested in his Mars fund, including Anderson, the boss of the Sands Group, and Steve Wynn of the Amway family. An Luo.

Although the scale of funds is vastly different compared to behemoths such as Blackstone, Bridgewater and even BlackRock, the returns of the Mars Fund in the past year have been very eye-catching - after all, the more large-scale funds, the more The harder it is to maintain a rate of return that is too high, those fixed-income funds have the largest total amount of funds, and the annual rate of return of these funds does not even exceed 10%!

But similarly, for Andersen and Steve, placing part of their funds in high-yield "small" funds such as Mars funds can also be regarded as part of their asset allocation.

Especially for the well-funded Andersen...

Of course, at this time, they were just getting to know each other for the first time, and they were far from finalizing their cooperation.

However, Barron did gain a lot from this gathering. At least he made many connections, which will be very useful for his future development here in the United States.