Blackstone may manage more than $1.3 trillion in assets, but president Jon Gray doesn’t want the firm’s newest class of Gen Z analysts thinking like stereotypical employees at a Wall Street giant. To succeed, he says, they should approach their jobs like they’re working at a startup.
“Think about wherever you’re working, whatever capacity in our firm or elsewhere, how you can be an agent of change, how you can make things better, how you can serve clients in a better way,” Gray said in a recent address to Blackstone’s newest class of analysts, adding they should focus on “this idea of being entrepreneurial.”
Gray has spent 34 years at Blackstone and has seen that philosophy play out firsthand. He credits the firm’s rise to becoming the world’s largest alternative asset manager to preserving the culture it had as a small business when it was founded by Peter Peterson and Stephen Schwarzman in 1985.
“We’re as nimble and entrepreneurial when there’s something new that emerges,” Gray said. “And yet we can continue to do it at a larger and larger scale.”
“The beating heart of the place, that feels the same. Drive, desire to be successful, operate with integrity, be excellent in what we do,” he added.
AI is shrinking Gen Z’s entry-level jobs—but making entrepreneurship an easier alternative
Landing a summer analyst position at Blackstone has become increasingly competitive. The firm’s acceptance rate for its 2026 analyst class was less than 0.1%, a Blackstone spokesperson told Fortune, down from 0.4% in 2021.
That’s also a reflection of the broader job market, where young professionals are competing for fewer entry-level roles. A recent Graduate Management Admission Council survey of more than 600 recruiters found that one-third of employers are replacing some entry-level roles with AI, particularly in technology and manufacturing. More than half of the recruiters surveyed hire for Fortune 100 or Fortune 500 companies.
At the same time, AI is making it easier than ever to build something from scratch. A business plan, website, marketing copy, software prototype, and even customer outreach can now be generated in minutes—drastically lowering the cost and expertise once required to launch a company.
Many workers have already taken notice: 33% of U.S. adults plan to start a business or side hustle next year, a 94% year-over-year increase, according to Intuit’s Entrepreneurship in 2026 report. Gen Z shows the strongest entrepreneurial ambitions, with 43% considering starting a business in 2026.
That shift is also showing up among some of the country’s most ambitious graduates. At Harvard Business School, 17% of the class of 2025 reported plans to forgo seeking a traditional job in favor of launching their own businesses—more than double the 8% who said the same in 2021.
“My generation don’t want to go work a consulting or banking job. They don’t even want to be an astronaut anymore,” Steven Schwartz, the Gen Z founder and CEO of the creator-commerce platform Whop, previously told Fortune.
“They want to make content online, they want to find customers online…Being educated with more information about what people can do, why would they want to do something that isn’t the most elite experience and the most fun for them?”
Jeff Bezos says aspiring entrepreneurs should learn from corporate America first
Gray’s advice doesn’t necessarily conflict with Gen Z’s entrepreneurial ambitions. Instead, it suggests that young professionals who land jobs at established companies can use the experience as training grounds before eventually building something of their own, if they so choose.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has offered similar advice, encouraging aspiring entrepreneurs to spend time learning inside world-class organizations before venturing out on their own.
“I always advise to young people: Go work at a best-practices company somewhere where you can learn a lot of basic fundamental things [like] how to hire really well, how to interview, etc.,” Bezos said at Italian Tech Week last year.
“There’s a lot of stuff you would learn in a great company that will help you, and then there’s still lots of time to start a company after you have absorbed it.”
His advice also reflects the reality of entrepreneurship. Nearly 50% of all companies fail within five years of founding, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
