Henry Kravis

If we can just take a few companies, and use those as models, as examples, to show the rest of corporate America how they can become more competitive, that's what I'd like to do and that's what I hope to do.

It used to be that you would go in to see a CEO, and you would ask them, 'Is your company for sale?' and if they said 'No, we have no interest in selling,' that was sort of the end of the conversation.

Look, don't congratulate us when we buy a company, congratulate us when we sell it. Because any fool can overpay and buy a company, as long as money will last to buy it.

But once you buy a company, you are married. You are married to that company.

In the '70s and '80s, what private equity did is it changed corporate America. It started holding companies accountable, and for the first time managers started thinking like owners.

I have, in my partner George Roberts, a person who is the most wonderful man in the world to me. He's like a brother to me. Creating with him, being side by side with him, in whatever we try to do, is a real pleasure to me.

Quite frankly, the financial community has to improve its image. The financial community has to be much more transparent than it is.

I thought at the time that I wanted to go into institutional sales, selling stocks and bonds to institutions. In those days, which was the 1960s, the institutional salesman was making about $100,000 a year. I thought that was just an enormous amount of money.

I was an economics major in college, and every summer after school, I would drive my car from California, from Claremont men's college at the time, to New York. And I worked on Wall Street.