HENRY KRAVIS

摘要

Henry Kravis got his first break in finance during college in the mid-'60s as a summer trainee at Goldman, Sachs & Co., working with the firm's research analyst who covered the insurance industry. "I was reading these long, excruciatingly boring insurance filings, but it taught me how to dig," says Kravis, 71, who went on to earn an MBA from Columbia University after graduating with a BA in economics from California's Claremont McKenna College. "I would recommend to any young person today to get into the research department, because you really learn to understand how companies operate and the levers where they make money." A half century later Kravis has pressed his fair share of levers, completing more than 250 private equity investments with a transaction value of $500 billion at KKR & Co., the New York-based firm he co-founded in 1976 with Jerome Kohlberg and George Roberts. That year the trio left Bear, Stearns & Co., where they had been partners doing bootstrap acquisitions of small, private companies, in part because they had grown tired of the firm's "eat what you kill" culture, Kravis says: "What was important to us then, and is important to George and me today, is to have a culture of inclusion, not exclusion, where everybody gets paid on how well the team does and how well the firm does, whether or not you work on a deal."