Long before BlackRock became the world's largest asset manager, its founders were building the tools they needed to understand risk in their own portfolios, often starting from something as modest as a spreadsheet. As the firm grew, that technology proved powerful enough to analyze even the most complicated mortgage portfolios quickly, and clients began to notice. Many had never had that degree of transparency into what they owned. Rob Goldstein, one of BlackRock's founding partners and the longtime leader of BlackRock Solutions, was there as that internal toolkit became a business of its own. In this episode of War Stories over Board Games, he tells Institutional Investor's Julie Segal how a homegrown system for seeing inside securities and portfolios grew into BlackRock Solutions, and changed what investors expected to know about their own holdings.