Morning Coffee: KKR private equity partner advocates 10-hour days after years of 24/7 exhaustion. Goldman Sachs likes its new M&A hire from JPMorgan
Philipp Freise, co-head of European private equity and partner at KKR, has done his time in the industry and worked his share of long hours.
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When Freise, a graduate of Germany's WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management, joined KKR in 2001, the firm had fewer than 100 employees in London, and they were expected to work hard. “I don’t think we left KKR before midnight for the first 10 years,” Freise reminisced to Financial News. “We all had to work 24/7. Those were the old days of private equity. It was just about surviving.”
Times have changed. Just as rival firm Apollo has beensoftening its culture, so has KKR. Freise and Mattia Caprioli, KKR’s other co-head of European private equity, say there's no longer an emphasis on face time. — People at KKR's London office aren't expected to be in at 8am and to leave at midnight, as when the two partners were themselves young. «Having everybody in the office until midnight in August means you have a cultural problem,” Caprioli declares.
It's an edict that's come from the very top.Joseph Bae and Scott Nuttall, KKR's co-chief executives sent employees an email last week urging everyone there to work a bit less in August. Freise says people need time to recover. „This is a creative job,“ he tells FN. „If people are exhausted, they can’t be creative. Bursts of intensity need to be followed by recovery.”
Freise is embodying this ethos. As the father of four children, he says he's careful about his working hours: “I have four kids and during the week I don’t work from 6.30pm to 8.30am. Everybody here knows that. That’s created a culture.” KKR wants its employees to have families, Freise adds: there are no meetings at 8am so that
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