KKR

“Particularly if you're buying NVIDIA GPUs to a lesser extent TPUs, you can finance these. And there's a very sophisticated, you know. Yeah, it's a very low cost of capital to finance them today.”

“Like, let's say it's fifty billion dollars. For an Nvidia data center, you need a fifteen billion dollar equity check. Okay. You can finance the other thirty five billion.”

“Now that the Apollos and Blackstones and KKRs of the world you know, I think in a lot of cases the leveraged buyout is a very small part of what they do today, but I do think it's still like in the core culture.”

“The big turning point, I would say, was 1980 when KKR did a LBO for Hudai Industries, the first big public company that went, actually, was taken private.”

“There was no reason, really, that a KKR or a Forsman Little that were the big players back then should ever have existed. Your old firm Goldman should have beaten them.”

“Bring in traditional US capital, get some debt. Clear out the Chinese convertible debt. Give them their ownership. Off we go. Clean cap table. And so, we did that, I believe it was in the summer of 2018, and we had to build the first board that I'd ever been p…”

“So actually like the business from KKR investment to IPO ended up looking wildly different than an advertising business because we ended up with like 14, 15 different game studios across all categories of gaming that we ended up owning so that we can not only …”

“When we were private from 2011, when we started the business to 2018, when KKR invested and we got our first three person board, I didn't have a board.”

“One of the things we've never done, but has always been on the idealist is to actually just have an in-house bank.”

“I think it's probably a good time to be in the LBO business. I think it's probably a good time to be in the Toma Bravo Vista Blackstone KKR business. There will be homes for a lot of those companies, you know, who get themselves to a sustainable place and they…”

“The only reason you wouldn't end up at partnership is if you wanted to retain a hundred percent of the economics.”

“So KKR went from no one in private wealth to a team of 250 reps.”

“But I think it's tremendous that individual investors now get access to the likes of Blackstone and KKR and Aries and Apollo. These are tremendous firms. It's a great evolution for all individual investors.”

“Carlisle and KKR, where they own all the economics, they roughly trade market cap, 20% of AUM.”

“So they received a two hundred million or so capital injection from KKR, One of the biggest names in private equity as a backer, and then only a few months later, they filed chapter 11.”

“What's more likely is we over time as an industry work on daily pricing, all of the various different private markets.”

“There's no doubt in my mind in a decade from now, we will see very meaningful allocations within that DC market to private markets. Whether it's 10%, 15%, it's going to be really, really big.”

“Every now and then I'll hear someone even smart friends will say, oh, well, you know, KKR is going to make sure everyone's taken care of because they don't want the bad press. I'm like, what are you talking about? It's not like Wobegon. They are going to walk …”

“What makes venture unique as an asset class for us is that it has what I'll call a global topology. You know, you bring a company on to Carta because all the investors are minority holders. They bring a bunch of investors. They bring 20 investors. And then tho…”

“He's taken the Bloomberg dividends and pumped it into a family office that basically Carlisle and all these guys, you know, the Warburg Pincus, all the private equity guys like KKR, They go to him first, and he tosses in, like, five hundred million in each of …”

“I sometimes joke that the big AI companies should become LBO shops. And what they can do is they can partner with KKR or Blackstone and all they get is the data. KKR and Blackstone pride the capital, get all the returns. Fine. But all the data comes back to, y…”

“Some of those deals didn't wind up working out very well, and RJR proved to be a very mediocre deal for KER.”

“In Turkey, I think we lost around five hundred million. What we didn't see was rule of law was a bit of a flexible concept there.”

“And quite frankly, we have so much going on in Western Europe. We just don't take the risk. We stay close to what we can control.”

“To have discipline, even in those times, yes, you want to deploy when there is incredible opportunity, but you need to set yourself Limits, right? There's just limits of how much you invest in a year, how many different types of in the theme things you back, b…”

“We tried also Africa, Ethiopia, where we were the largest growers of tulips and roses that didn't work out for similar reasons.”

“Many people thought at KKR in Europe we were crazy when we leaned in and invested, I think a third, if not 40% of our current fund during COVID.”

“The only investment in 2009 we made was BMG.”

“So Europe for KKR is an eight billion dollar fund. It's the largest standalone investment fund in Europe.”

“In a fund of eight billion, typically you have around 15 investments, ok?”

“My space company in Bremen, which is OHP, we just did that investment. That's going to be a big winner given everything's going on.”

“It's a common misunderstanding that my industry is sleepy, boring, and just You know, aiming for those doubles over five years. If we do that, we don't do our job, really.”

“On average it's like, 400 to six hundred million.”

“In the last 1015 years, Three quarters of all the investments we have made are partnerships.”

“Always do, but it's more like 10, 15% of the fund. So you would, of eight billion, you would retain, let's say, a billion or so as a reserve, because we do not need as much capital for follow-on rounds, because this is, you know, in terms of the maturity of th…”

“We making those entrepreneurs that are in there or these CEOs or these families, we make them Owners again, right? Because many of them weren't originally the founders of these companies.”

“We are the largest owner of fertility clinics in Europe, ok?”

“I don't think that the DNA of KKR and of other later stage firms. It extends to what Insight does or what growth funds do. It will never extend to venture because it's a different skill set. It's a very different skill set.”

“The party that was celebrated in 21, 22, in terms of the velocity of fundraising and investing was absolutely artificial, inflated, and not sustainable.”

“Over the last 15 years, only 15% of our exits were actually IPOs.”

“We ourselves became owners of a five billion pool that had been valued at one and that became 10 and that's now 30. So we are actually the largest investor in our own things.”

“So basically we Apollo and others have now taken under our wings insurance companies that provide all this liquidity.”

“When I did the BMG deal, that was a one and a half billion deal for a 50% stake In that music company, you fast forward 10 years, and we had a ten billion deal to buy half of Axel Springer, which again was a fifty-fifty deal with the family.”

“The large majority is, is America. You have some pockets in Europe, like Holland and Norway that are very strong. The Middle East is incredibly innovative and takes a large chunk.”

“Torsten is, is the best, but in five years time, we look back and say, of course, Torsten couldn't have done it all by himself. There will be more, there will be others.”

“So we are absolutely rock solid you know, disciplined on this. You wouldn't, normally you don't do more than 10% of one fund. You know, I think in terms of underwriting, the absolute maximum is 15%, but it's in that range.”

“Yes, of course we need a European SEC. Yes, of course we need A bit more of one pan-European place where people can go public. It's extremely important.”

“One of our production companies produced it”

“I was the first institutional investor through the door. I just didn't have the fun to invest.”

“We literally at KKR had the chance to invest in Alibaba a long time ago, and that came on my desk, and I said no.”

“I think the industry is big. Everybody has its place. I have done venture myself to know that it's an entirely different you know, skill set, so I'm not worried about it.”

“We have six hundred seventy billion under management now. This number will go up massively, but what I want to see, I think historically the kind of individual retail type, broad based investor base is roughly 20%, maybe 30%. I want to see that to go to 50%.”

“Financial advisors now have a much broader value proposition that they are holding out to their investors. Sure, they're building portfolios, but they're also providing financial advice and planning, tax perspectives, sometimes they're a financial concierge, s…”

“Today, our focus is on the intermediary part of the market, so we don't engage directly with investors. There are a lot of really great companies that have built out direct To investor models. We want to participate in that by simply having our investment solu…”

“When I first got here about five years ago, we actually didn't have a marketing department.”

“Through whether it's an interval fund, a tender offer fund, a non-traded BDC, an operating company, there are now a number of new vehicles that asset managers can utilize, which really widen the aperture for investors to invest. And that includes not just qual…”

“All of our evergreen investment solutions have the same investments that you would find in our drawdown vehicles, and that's a really important differentiator.”

“Most alternative firms, their first in the waterfall is always just their institutional vehicle. We have created in our documentation that first in the waterfall to have an allocation to our wealth vehicles as well.”

“The reality is private markets are growing by leaps and bounds. And if you think about it, even in the equity space, More and more companies are staying private for much, much longer. So it's early, early days before we worry or get concerned about our ability…”

“If you look across KKR, roughly a third of all of the folks that are in distribution are focused on our wealth business”