Would KKR establish heavy position in Cxr read kravis answer JK What’s the most surprising thing you’re doing as an investor?
HK: We did only private equity until 2004. We’d go see a company and by about the third sentence somebody on our team would ask, “Is your company for sale?” And the CEO would say, “We have no interest in selling.” And our team wouldn’t have much more to say after that.
Today KKR is in three broad buckets: private markets, public markets, and capital markets. Private equity is probably 40 percent of what we do, and the rest is these newer businesses, which are all growing very well.
We didn’t start off thinking we would be in the credit business, or real estate, or hedge funds. This is an evolution. We didn’t do any of this overnight. It took a long time. In the process we became much more of a solutions-provider that can invest up and down the capital structure as opposed to a pure private equity investor. So we never have a conversation that begins and ends with, “The company’s not for sale.” Now we start off with, “What do you need today that you’re not getting?”