KKR’s Pete Stavros - a culture of ownership - live from AGM’s RIA Field Trip

Welcome back to the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast.

Today’s podcast unpacks the importance of ownership and equity, and how the world’s largest private equity firm (source: PEI 300) has helped create a culture of ownership within its portfolio companies and more broadly across the industry.

With the backdrop of KKR’s studio in New York and the firm fresh off the heels of celebrating its 50th Anniversary, we sat down with KKR’s Co-Head of Global Private Equity Pete Stavros for a live conversation during AGM’s RIA Field Trip to discuss how culture can be a competitive advantage and how it defines much of what KKR does both internally and with its portfolio companies.

Pete has not only been a leading private equity investor at one of the industry’s largest firms, but he’s also been a pioneer in one of the industry’s most important initiatives: enabling employees of private equity-backed companies to share in ownership of the companies where they work.

The firm’s Broad-Based Employee Ownership has delivered on its promise in many ways, with KKR’s recent 14x (and $4.75B) exit on CoolIT providing all 650 CoolIT employees with cash payouts that ranged from approximately one year to more than eight years of annual pay, which, as Pete noted in our conversation, was “life-changing for many employees.”

Pete and I had a fascinating conversation about the culture of ownership at KKR, the evolution of the firm’s private equity platform, why it’s so important to make employees owners, and how it’s created a ripple effect in the industry. We covered:

KKR’s “we not I” culture.Why the most important trend in private equity going forward will be a shift from “balance sheet and income statement arbitrage to total cultural transformation.”Why and how culture is an advantage — and how KKR sustains its competitive advantage.The power of a scaled platform and why the division of labor is important as firms grow.What Pete means by “persistence in process.”How can companies encourage people to act like owners, and why is it so important for employee retention and productivity?How can sharing equity ownership be used as a tool to change culture?The impact the private equity industry can have through its ability to cascade change.Bio

Pete Stavros (NewYork) joined KKR in 2005 and is Co-Head of Global Private Equity. This includes oversight of assets across Europe, Asia and the Americas and traditional large and mid-cap private equity, core and growth equity. Prior to this role, Pete s