Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman said his firm's rough early days taught him why every entrepreneur should be prepared to be in 'psychological pain in a way you haven't before'

He and Pete Peterson, former US secretary of commerce and Lehman Brothers CEO, founded Blackstone in 1985 as a private equity firm. Today, it manages $500 billion in a variety of investments.

When they set out to build the firm, they were Wall Street power players who had fallen out of the circle of power, and they struggled to find clients. Schwarzman said that all entrepreneurs must be prepared for emotional pain and failure, and that they have to devote themselves fully to a unique project in order to make it worthwhile.So when you, when you did leave Lehman, you and a former CEO of Lehman, Pete Peterson, you decided that you were going to create your own firm, which, that's Blackstone. And when you were starting off, you didn't have any clients, you say you were waiting for the phone to ring. No one was calling.

So I went back into his office, Pete's office, and I said, Pete,"What do we do?" And he said,"Well, let's wait two weeks and call them all again. We'll get lucky." This goes down as great strategy, right? And we actually got someone to hire us.

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