Billionaire KKR cofounders say 'emotional intelligence' should be a focus for young investors
At the Milken conference, billionaire KKR cofounders highlighted the importance of soft skills like relationship-building over just analytical prowess.
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- George Roberts and Henry Kravis, the billionaire cofounders of KKR, spoke Monday at the Milken conference.
- The pair said "softer skills" are important for young investors.
- "Go out and meet people," Roberts said.
When they started KKR nearly 50 years ago, George Roberts and Henry Kravis loved taking meetings, even if their ideas didn't land a majority of the time.
Now, the private equity billionaires don't see young people putting themselves out there as they once did, the pair said in a conversation at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles.
"Try to develop some emotional intelligence," Roberts said, when the pair were asked to give advice to young investors.
"Go out and meet people."
Younger investors, Roberts said, often have great analytical skills, but "it's really the softer skills I try to encourage young people to do."
"Nobody likes to be rejected, so nobody likes to pick up the phone and make a phone call anymore," Roberts said, joking that young people "break up over text."
Kravis said that when the pair started the firm in 1976 along with Jerome Kohlberg,"we just dove in" without any real agenda because the PE industry was still so new.
"What we learned over time is just go out and build relationships," Kravis said.
"You've got to be willing to take risks," Kravis added, saying some younger investors struggle to pull the trigger.
The firm's 1988 buyout of Nabisco was immortalized in the book "Barbarians at the Gate" by journalists Bryan Burrough and John Helyar— which lowered expectations of them and made it "easy to get over the bar," Roberts joked.
Kravis added that people who call them barbarians are ones who have never met the pair.
"That myth is out there, and I guess it'll always be there," Kravis said.
The $660 billion firm came from the pair's long-standing relationship; cousins Kravis and Roberts met when they were two and have been close ever since.
"We help each other and root for each other," Roberts said, when asked about how to maintain a partnership over decades.
"This relationship is so much more important than anything else."
