The 80-year journey of an industrialist

With my cousin George Roberts as a close companion

This story is about my 80-year journey, most of which I have shared with my cousin, George Roberts. In addition to being family, he is my best friend and longtime business partner. My life would not be the same without George. My personal history is really "our" history.

With the exception of some personal matters, in many instances in the following installments, you can replace "I" with "we" because we have done most everything together. And a lot of the story we will tell here is about building an institution together because we hope that this work has contributed in a small way to how business is conducted today and the options companies have when looking for partners to help them achieve their goals.

In 1976, along with Jerome "Jerry" Kohlberg, an experienced financier in the buyout business, we founded the investment firm KKR in the United States. KKR stands for Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. Jerry, who is deceased, left the company in 1987, but we have kept the original name.

George and I have made all decisions together until we gradually handed over the reins to the next generation. Though George is based on the West Coast, in Menlo Park, California, and I am on the East Coast, in New York, we talk regularly about anything and everything.

We believe in the power of capitalism, a system in which the free flow of capital brings prosperity to companies and people alike. We also believe business can be a force for good and that investing in companies can play a role in addressing some of the world's most pressing challenges.

KKR was the pioneer of the buyout fund industry, today often referred to as private equity, or "alternative" investments. What was novel in the 1970s and 1980s in the U.S. has become a feature of modern business.

When we are making investments, we are investing in companies and their employees. The capital for these investments comes from public pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, foundations, family offices and, increasingly, from individuals.

We also personally invest in everything we do and we invest from the firm's balance sheet so that we are very well aligned with those who have entrusted us with their capital. We wouldn't ask anyone to invest in something we didn't put our own money into. This is part of our core philosophy around sharing ownership and acting like owners. Almost everyone who works at KKR is a shareholder in the company.

We have made many investments in our history. Not all have succeeded. As entrepreneurs willing to take some risk, we have made many mistakes. But when we are successful, we leave the company better than we found it. We like to say we look for good companies that we can help make great companies -- with capital, support and resources. Today in our private equity business, we are also supporting all of our newer companies in creating ownership cultures by introducing broad-based equity ownership programs so the employees can share in the outcome of the investment.

At one point, we were even labeled "barbarians" based on a book about one of the 750 private equity transactions we have undertaken. In spite of the term, our business has grown dramatically over the years. Today we don't just do buyouts. We are providing capital for infrastructure, real estate, credit and, more recently, supporting insurance investments.

The Kravis and Roberts families were very close, and in particular George and I have remained close our entire lives. George was born in 1943 and I was born in 1944, just four months apart. We met on a family trip to Marblehead, Massachusetts when we were 2 years old.

I'm often asked if George and I disagree a lot. I peg our last real fight to an incident that happened when we were 7 years old. George was visiting me at my home in Tulsa, Oklahoma, from Houston, Texas, for Christmas. I had just received a new bicycle, and George wanted to be the first to ride it. I wanted to be the first one to ride it and was not keen to share my new toy. Our housekeeper chased me into the house where I ran into a wall and ended up needing 26 stitches on my head.

That's the last major disagreement we have had. Any subsequent disagreements that George and I had we've always been able to work them out face-to-face. We have an understanding that if one of us doesn't agree, we are not going to do it. It was together, or not at all.

George encouraged me to attend the same college he attended, Claremont McKenna. We spent a lot of time together in college and even went on a double date where he met the woman who later became his wife, Leanne Bovet. I tagged along with a female friend. We discussed the meaning of the price-earnings ratio during long car drives cross country to New York City to spend our summers working on Wall Street. George had a summer internship at Bear Stearns and I interned at Goldman Sachs.

We went to different graduate schools -- I went to Columbia Business School to get my MBA and George received his law degree at the University of California, Hastings School of Law. We stayed in touch, saw each other over summers and holidays and compared notes.

We spent both joyous and sad times together. When I lost my son Harrison in a car accident when he was just 19, and when George lost Leanne to illness, we supported each other. I love George and trust him 1,000%.

This January, I turned 80. George reached the same milestone a few months prior. In 2021, George and I handed over our CEO roles. I intend to share some of the learnings we have accumulated over half a century since our company's founding, including the importance of having a culture of collaboration, maintaining an entrepreneurial spirit, and the belief that companies and their leaders must evolve to survive.

I love Japan. I have visited the country every year since 1978, traveling around Tokyo and the countryside. I witnessed the 1980s when Japan was poised to own the world and the 2000s when it refused to change despite clear signs of decline.

Now, Japan is full of opportunities. Today's Japan reminds me of the United States in the 1980s when companies transformed and shifted to growth. I am honored to have been asked to share my story. I hope our journey, marked by highs and lows, service and setbacks, can offer some insights, or at the very least be entertaining for readers.