Look, don't congratulate us when we buy a company, congratulate us when we sell it. Because any fool can overpay and buy a company, as long as money will last to buy it.
From Henry Kravis
Giving back is something that comes from the heart to me. It's not that I do it because it's the right thing: I do it because I want do it.
You only have one thing to sell in life, and that's yourself.
If you build that foundation, both the moral and the ethical foundation, as well as the business foundation, and the experience foundation, then the building won't crumble.
One, I love the creativity. I love the ability to create a capital structure that is appropriate for a company, no matter what field it happens to be in.
If you don't have integrity, you have nothing. You can't buy it. You can have all the money in the world, but if you are not a moral and ethical person, you really have nothing.
I thought at the time that I wanted to go into institutional sales, selling stocks and bonds to institutions. In those days, which was the 1960s, the institutional salesman was making about $100,000 a year. I thought that was just an enormous amount of money.
In the '70s and '80s, what private equity did is it changed corporate America. It started holding companies accountable, and for the first time managers started thinking like owners.
I was an economics major in college, and every summer after school, I would drive my car from California, from Claremont men's college at the time, to New York. And I worked on Wall Street.
It's one of the most important things at the end of the day, being able to say no to an investment.
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