Good morning.
KKR became famous in the 1980s as the leveraged buy-out pioneer that acquired RJR Nabisco—a nail-biting drama chronicled in the book Barbarians at the Gate. Today it’s the world’s third-largest alternative asset manager that, as my Fortune colleague Shawn Tully notes, “boasts the industry’s hottest stock and biggest ambitions.” Tully spoke with co-CEOs Joe Bae and Scott Nuttall about their strategy to move beyond a traditional capital-light, fee-based business to a buy-and-hold model more akin to Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. Shawn’s new story, published today, details how they plan to reach $1 trillion in assets by 2030 and become a much more profitable company along the way.
At their heart, most successful investment firms try to foster what Nuttall calls an “apprenticeship culture” in which leaders teach and test and create a state of constant learning. Bridgewater’s founder Ray Dalio called it “radical transparency;” Berkshire Hathaway’s Charlie Munger talked about being a “learning machine.”
