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Henry Kravis

Co-Founder & Executive Co-Chairman, Kkr

Search every verified Henry Kravis interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. In a recent appearance, Henry Kravis discussed the founding of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR) in 1976, describing how he, his cousin George Roberts, and Jerome Kohlberg left Bear Stearns to establish a firm with a collaborative culture, in contrast to the "eat what you kill" environment they had left. He recounted that the founders initially struggled to raise a $25 million fund and instead sought individual commitments of $50,000 each, with the founders personally contributing $10,000 (Kravis and Roberts) and $100,000 (Kohlberg). Kravis noted that the State of Oregon Public Employee Retirement System became an early investor in 1979 with a $5 million commitment and remains an investor today. Kravis also reflected on a repeated professional mistake, stating that he and his partners were at times "too slow in changing out some CEOs of companies that we had." He said they kept thinking a leader would improve, but observed that "what you see up front is pretty much what you're going to see in the end," adding that waiting represented a "lost opportunity." He indicated that KKR now moves more quickly on such decisions than in the past.

Recent appearances

Notable quotes

“So what we chose to do, pretty much as far as KKR is concerned, we do invest in some AI companies, but I could not tell you which AI company is going to work or not... But as far as KKR is concerned, we chose to more go to the picks and shovels side of the equation. And we've invested in, or we basically own five platforms that own data centers. We have interest in over 200 data centers around the world. And that's M”

“We didn't want a my, we wanted a we. And we wanted it set up in such a way that whether you brought a deal into the firm or not, whether you worked on a deal or not, you were going to get to participate in the carried interest and the fee income, which was all we had at that time to offer.”

“When everything looks the worst, that's the time, in our view, to lean in. And that's what we have done, continually. And you have to have the courage of your convictions and you got to see it through.”

“We've made our best investments and had the best returns at the time when everybody's looking at their shoes and saying, woe, poor me, world's coming to an end. I promise the world doesn't come to an end, number one. And you've got to have the strength and the ability to go against the tide.”

“There's 44 trillion in the hands of individuals in savings. A trillion. 44 trillion. There's 10 trillion in that the hands of people with 401(k)s. And let's assume that we're only able to capture 5% of the 10 trillion dollars today. You can do the math. That's $2 trillion that triple what we have.”

“We're saying to people, 'Don't panic.' You know, you have to look at what industry, who's getting hurt? Right. Well, retail's getting hurt a lot. Auto industry is getting hurt a lot. And we have, in our portfolio, we've got uh over 90% of our companies have no exposure or very limited exposure uh to uh to tariffs.”

Other executives at Kkr

  • Henry Mcvey, Partner & Head of Global Macro, Balance Sheet and Risk, Chief Information Officer of KKR Balance Sheet

The summary and quote tags on this profile are produced with AI assistance from verified, first-person interview transcripts, then checked by our team to confirm the speaker's identity and the accuracy of every quote. See how we verify →