YouSaid · the spoken record

Jean Eric Salata

lines on the record: 67
first: 2026-06-12
most recent: 2026-06-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“This so called eighth wonder of the world, which is the power of compounding. I wish I'd appreciated that a bit more after 30 years of investing, let something ride for 30 years. Generally, if it's a decent business, it'll be worth a lot of money.”
2026-06-12 · Masters in Business · Riding Global Tailwinds with EQT's Jean Eric Salata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things I would say one is you need to be AI native these days, which is not the case obviously when I was starting out. And secondly, perseverance. Don't give up. Stay in the game because things come and go. You get knocked down, get back up, you stay in the game. And new opportunities arise.”
2026-06-12 · Masters in Business · Riding Global Tailwinds with EQT's Jean Eric Salata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I read a great book called Why the West Rules for Now, which is a sweeping history of why the Industrial Revolution happened in the West and not in Asia and the East. But it talks about how going forward that could change. And if anybody's interested in history, I highly recommend that book.”
2026-06-12 · Masters in Business · Riding Global Tailwinds with EQT's Jean Eric Salata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was very lucky I had a third grade teacher that kind of took an interest in me and kept me after school to help me work on independent projects and was like an outlet for my creativity that I felt was frustrated in class. Really amazing teacher.”
2026-06-12 · Masters in Business · Riding Global Tailwinds with EQT's Jean Eric Salata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you invest in a stock, you're buying a secondary position. If you buy Apple's stock today, you're buying it from someone who's selling it to you. You're buying it secondary, you're not buying the IPO of Apple. That was a primary. That happened 25 years ago. Same things happen in private equity is that all the companies that are private in order to buy them, you had to buy them as a primary through a fund that bought the company as a private deal. Well, now we have $3.8 trillion of private companies out there that are unrealized that everybody's complaining about. That actually is the foundation of a secondary market now in private companies, private assets that you and I and others can start to participate in through the secondary market. You don't need to find a new deal to buy. You can buy an existing business that's privately owned. If you like it, if it's”
2026-06-12 · Masters in Business · Riding Global Tailwinds with EQT's Jean Eric Salata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think one of the really interesting developments is what's happening in the convergence between both public and private markets, so companies staying private longer. The sort of blurring of the lines there, how you get exposure if you're an investor to the best businesses in the world. Do you wait till they become public or do you do it before they become public? You know, historically, it was a very small minority of institutional investors really that got exposure to private markets. Individual investors almost had zero. That's changed a lot in the last few years, but it's going to change, I think, even more as we move into the coming years and people start to participate more, the democratization of our asset class that people talk about, I think, is a big trend. Related to that is the kind of blurring of the lines between or convergence between the secondary market and the primary market of private equity. You know, those used to be viewed as completely different things. You invest in a private equity fund. If you can't get your money back after seven or eight years, you find someone to buy those interests from you and that's a secondary market. That has changed. If you think about the public markets,”
2026-06-12 · Masters in Business · Riding Global Tailwinds with EQT's Jean Eric Salata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, the same CEO, for example, that we work with before, we can work with that same individual again because the model now has been tried and tested and been around for a couple of decades. So you're developing much deeper bench of talent in private equity in Asia than you've had in the past. And that's been, I think, a key driver of returns. The culmination of governance through the buyout strategy plus the talent pool that's available now.”
2026-06-12 · Masters in Business · Riding Global Tailwinds with EQT's Jean Eric Salata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From different industrial sectors and different sectors that we invest in. And we tap into those to come and become what we call our non-executive chairs or independent non-executive chairman. So we have a chairman that we bring in from industry. We usually have a CEO, either existing CEO or new CEO. And then we have our deal partner. And that combination of those three people is the governance structure for our investments that drive the active ownership model for our business. We also are seeing a bigger pool of domestic talent now that we're able to develop within say Japan, within India through multiple private equity-backed investments that we've made where”
2026-06-12 · Masters in Business · Riding Global Tailwinds with EQT's Jean Eric Salata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is, and I think one of the things that we've learned over the years is the importance of being able to be what we call an active owner in the businesses that we buy, which has really meant that we've really migrated primarily to a controlled buyout strategy other than our early stage tech strategies. But in our main strategies, we're a buyout investor, which means we have control. And I think having control enables you to really affect change in the business and collapses this sort of agency problem that you see between ownership and management and many other markets around the world. And Asia is no exception, we're starting to collapse that and see that collapse in Asia through the ownership model that the governance model really, the private equity brings when they invest. When we invest as an industry. And as a result, as we've scaled our business over time, you're starting to be able to really develop pools of talent. So for example, we have 700,000, 800, what we call industrial advisors across globally across EQT.”
2026-06-12 · Masters in Business · Riding Global Tailwinds with EQT's Jean Eric Salata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the growing middle class as you're now seeing a huge increase now, and it's the largest population in the world, 1.4 billion people. It's also the youngest population in the world. So the demographics are very favorable. And one of the big early beneficiaries that we're starting to see on the ground in India is the healthcare sector, housing and healthcare. The first thing that people do when they start to save and generate a good income, they buy a home. And then they want to make sure their family is well looked after their parents and their children well looked after from a healthcare standpoint. So we're seeing strong demand for housing, housing finance, and for healthcare, which is some of the areas that we're investing in in India.”
2026-06-12 · Masters in Business · Riding Global Tailwinds with EQT's Jean Eric Salata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I like India a lot. We're very bullish on India. It's been the biggest market for us over the last five years of where we've invested. Historically, the story has been a lot about technology investments in the tech services industry primarily, which has been a beneficiary of global investment in technology and the tech stack and the migration to the cloud. That has hit a little bit of a disruption now with what's going on with AI, but they're quickly adapting to it and using AI tools to actually make enterprises more competitive and to help diffuse AI into the enterprise using the skills that they have millions of computer technology programmers and labor available to help drive AI adoption, which is one of the things that India is very competitive in. But the bigger story in India, I think, for the next five years is more about the consumer and the growth in the middle class. And one of the big beneficiaries”
2026-06-12 · Masters in Business · Riding Global Tailwinds with EQT's Jean Eric Salata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would agree with that. I think that the energy security is top of mind. Certainly China has moved very much in this direction.”
2026-06-12 · Masters in Business · Riding Global Tailwinds with EQT's Jean Eric Salata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's just a large investment opportunity that ultimately with energy transition, with climate related concerns, the real catalyst here is ultimately going to be having to be the market forces that drive this forward. It has to be that it's more cost competitive. It's more cost effective to do things using electricity and the grid than it is using fossil fuels. Otherwise, if it's not more cost effective, the market forces aren't really at play and you're relying on policy or you're relying on philanthropy. It's just harder to see these things scale. But we're getting to this tipping point where the cost curves are coming down, the security concerns are becoming real. And when that happens, then with scale, with volumes, whether it's EV batteries, whether it's solar panels, you're starting to see the big uptake and the movement in that direction.”
2026-06-12 · Masters in Business · Riding Global Tailwinds with EQT's Jean Eric Salata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we see a lot of opportunities across both Europe and Asia in the energy transition. It's, you know, with what's going on now in the Middle East as well is kind of driving home the point that energy security is going to be even more critical in the future. There is a tremendous technological push of innovation coming out of China in terms of supply chain for batteries, for solar. Even areas like hydrogen, you're starting to see a lot of very interesting scaled up innovation there. We have a big infrastructure business in Asia that invests in the energy transition. We invest in battery storage, for example. We have a big business in Australia now. Australia is big in this area. We expect to see more opportunities there. Singapore has been a leader actually in funding the energy transition throughout Southeast Asia. Very forward thinking, I would say, in that regard.”
2026-06-12 · Masters in Business · Riding Global Tailwinds with EQT's Jean Eric Salata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Either changing the management or enhancing the strategy of the business in order to close the gap between the operating performance of the business and the full potential of the business. That's kind of the traditional playbook of private equity. It's gotten harder to do in parts of the market that have become more efficient. Globally, you have a lot of shareholder activism already. So most public companies are already doing what they should be doing. But in Japan, they're a little bit still further behind. And now you see a big push by the Japanese authorities and political leadership to drive efficiency in their economy and to drive corporate governance reforms, which is trying to close this gap between full potential and performance. And as a result, there are a lot more assets being sold, either corporate divestitures, take privates, or generational change happening with founder-led businesses where you're buying business and you really see the opportunity to simplify and improve execution. It's really about that. It's about sort of”
2026-06-12 · Masters in Business · Riding Global Tailwinds with EQT's Jean Eric Salata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you got a healthy growth, tremendous CapEx spend. It's a little bit of the picks and shovels approach to you have this tremendous boom in AI that's feeding through. There's knock-on effects into the supply chain. And Asia's pretty well positioned to participate in that. You look at markets like Korea. You look at markets like Japan. Those are probably two of the biggest beneficiaries. certain parts of Southeast Asia as well. So we're excited about that. I think the second big opportunity we touched on it earlier as well is just the Japanese bio market. And the level of reform that you're seeing there driving increased deal flow, driving really what I call the excess returns opportunities that private equity really is good at and should be focusing on. The days of buying undermanaged assets”
2026-06-12 · Masters in Business · Riding Global Tailwinds with EQT's Jean Eric Salata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think in Asia, as we were touching on a little earlier, there's a couple of big themes that we're excited about. One is this sort of CapEx super cycle, which is feeding through the Asian supply chain. When you're talking about building data centers or semiconductor memory chips and so on, there's a whole supply chain that feeds into that, whether it's the cooling, whether it's the grid, whether it's the capital equipment that's used to manufacture, the testing equipment, the services around that. So there's a whole supply chain that's seeing elevated activity and growth. I think the number is something like an incremental five trillion dollars of CapEx being spent in Asia within the industrial supply chain between now and over the next five years. It's growing at about 15% a year.”
2026-06-12 · Masters in Business · Riding Global Tailwinds with EQT's Jean Eric Salata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. Our biggest exit last year globally as a group was a company called Galderma, which is a European Tying all your liquidity proceeds to a single strategy or a single market, but you have exposure to multiple markets and you're getting cash back from different strategies to give you that cash that you need at a time when you're lacking distributions from other parts of your portfolio.”
2026-06-12 · Masters in Business · Riding Global Tailwinds with EQT's Jean Eric Salata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Meaning that we're able to take our companies public or sell down through the public markets as an avenue of getting liquidity versus just trying to sell to other buyout funds or sell to strategic buyers, those deals have been a bit slower. And even the IPO markets have been challenging. But we were within a challenging IPO market, we had the highest level of activity of all other market participants.”
2026-06-12 · Masters in Business · Riding Global Tailwinds with EQT's Jean Eric Salata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's actually about 30% of the NAV of the strategies that covers. And if you look at active funds, and if you look at the liquidity profile there, it even included a significant amount of tapping into the equity capital markets, the public markets. So we were actually the number one ECM firm last year. We had $15 billion of equity capital markets activity ranked number one by far actually relative to all the other private equity firms out there. On the back of just having some really interesting assets that the market was open for.”
2026-06-12 · Masters in Business · Riding Global Tailwinds with EQT's Jean Eric Salata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's all allocated across equally. So there's no cherry picking, there's no sort of different strategies for the wealth vehicle as there is for the institutional vehicle. It's a single vehicle. And then I think the other key aspect of our investment program, which is sort of where we've landed, where we've landed in terms of our fundraising last year, for example, we've just announced our closing of our Asia Fund, which is a $15 billion fund. It's the largest fund ever raised in Asia, $15.6 billion. The reason we've been able to achieve this is because of our exits and liquidity profile of our investment program. It's been a tough environment for exit and liquidity. It's one of the challenges that you read a lot about in our industry. We actually had a record year for exits last year at EQT.”
2026-06-12 · Masters in Business · Riding Global Tailwinds with EQT's Jean Eric Salata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're starting to see institutional investors also use this, not just the private clients use this because they are able to dial up and dial down their exposure instantly. So if you want to have a certain percent of your portfolio in private markets rather than waiting for the capital to be called over the next two, three years, you could just put it to work immediately into the asset class through these evergreen structures, which are fully invested on an NAV basis immediately. So that's one of the interesting aspects of that. The other interesting aspect of our evergreen structures or open-ended structures is unlike some of the other products out there which have designated investment strategies or investment teams for those open-ended structures, our open-ended structure is essentially a like for like alongside everything we do. You get exactly the same exposure to the exactly the same deals and the same pricing and the same everything that we provide to our sovereign wealth function clients that we provide to our institutional clients.”
2026-06-12 · Masters in Business · Riding Global Tailwinds with EQT's Jean Eric Salata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A couple of advantages of the evergreen or open ended structures. Number one, they do invest across everything. So you don't have to choose which funds you want to invest in. You get a broad exposure. Number two, they invest 100% of your money immediately into the asset class.”
2026-06-12 · Masters in Business · Riding Global Tailwinds with EQT's Jean Eric Salata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we have 30 different strategies. I think we have both. We have the drawdown funds, which are the main institutional vehicles for committing traditionally as you would to a fund and invest in buyouts or in growth capital or in life sciences or in real estate. But increasingly, and this is the highest growth part of our business for the industry as a whole, we have the open-ended structures. Some people call them evergreens. We don't call them semi-liquids because they're not liquid. They're not even semi-liquid, but they are open-ended. And what open-ended means is that you can subscribe to them every month, and you can redeem every quarter subject to the underlying liquidity availability in the quarter. And what we're starting to see is”
2026-06-12 · Masters in Business · Riding Global Tailwinds with EQT's Jean Eric Salata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have 30 different strategies at EQT across four different areas, private equity, infrastructure, real estate, and secondaries. Secondaries is our newest area that we've just announced that we've acquired, call our capital. It hasn't closed yet, but we're in the process of bringing that on board”
2026-06-12 · Masters in Business · Riding Global Tailwinds with EQT's Jean Eric Salata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Leading in many ways when it comes to AI. One of the things to keep an eye on, by the way, is the cost of compute differential between the US and China. There is a big difference there in how compute is generated and ultimately the cost of that compute per token to the users, which is going to become more of a focus, I think, going forward than it has been up until now, where it's kind of been viewed as a must-have, almost free available to all employees, they will be more focused on ROI. And I think this is where people are going to start looking at the competitive position of cost of compute in different markets versus what's happening in the US.”
2026-06-12 · Masters in Business · Riding Global Tailwinds with EQT's Jean Eric Salata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Battery storage. Having access to that sort of know-how ultimately is going to be important for everyone. How you do that in a way that protects your national interests is a topic of the day for policymakers globally in the US and Europe. And I think people are looking at that differently than they used to in terms of how much they're willing to outsource versus how much they want to do themselves. I mean, this Scale Up Europe Fund that I just mentioned is also a policy response to wanting to create homegrown innovation and scale homegrown innovation, which makes sense the way the US wants to do that and the way that China wants to do that. I think that the Chinese economy, it's truly impressive what's happening there in terms of innovation, the way the economy is growing and the amount of R&D, if you look at the patents being filed, the level of innovation, how the innovation is being commercialized. But at the same time, there's some very exciting things happening in Europe and in the United States. Obviously, the US is all”
2026-06-12 · Masters in Business · Riding Global Tailwinds with EQT's Jean Eric Salata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Medicine. You know, if you look at the biopharma, the biotech industry, there's a lot going on right now between China and the US. A lot of the early stage trials that are being done, many of those are getting acquired by US pharmaceutical companies and then being rolled out for the benefit of humanity all over the world. And these are areas where there's scope, I think, for cooperation. And I think everyone can benefit from that. There are areas that are much more sensitive when it comes to technology and chips and semiconductors. But even there, I would say that it's important for all investors, for all business investors, for governments, for policymakers to at least understand what's happening in China. Because I think it's relevant. It has an impact on global outlook. You look at EVs, you look at the solar industry, you look at what's happening in”
2026-06-12 · Masters in Business · Riding Global Tailwinds with EQT's Jean Eric Salata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The world is geopolitically becoming more polarized and maybe creating more silos in certain strategic areas like technology and defense as the winds have shifted. That's just the reality of the world that we're living in. Having said that, I do think that there's still this underlying ecosystem of interdependence. And a desire, I think, to work together, I hope, in areas like”
2026-06-12 · Masters in Business · Riding Global Tailwinds with EQT's Jean Eric Salata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who would have guessed? You know, three is up 60% last year, and Hong Kong was up, Japan was up in the 30s, and you had even Europe stock markets did better than the US last year. So the idea that having all your pension, all your retirement money in one market, it's worked pretty well for the time being. But the idea of the correlation and concentration and markets don't always go up. They go down as well. I think the old diversification strategies do play a role in long-term asset allocation and that's where EQT, I think, has something to do.”
2026-06-12 · Masters in Business · Riding Global Tailwinds with EQT's Jean Eric Salata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sorry, maybe just one last point on that, which is that you started the question off by the outperformers in the market. So what ended up happening last year, as you pointed out, is that the stock markets, if you look at listed markets as a proxy, the S&P 500 did pretty well. It was up sort of 18% or so. 17%.”
2026-06-12 · Masters in Business · Riding Global Tailwinds with EQT's Jean Eric Salata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Percent year to date, the total number of activist shareholder campaigns has doubled in the last few years 50 to over 100 a year on the back of some of these reforms. So you're seeing a whole new market kind of developing there for Japanese buyouts, which is very uncorrelated and very complementary to the traditional buyout opportunities that exist in the United States. And then together with the AI infrastructure opportunity, which is more global, there's just a lot happening in our ecosystem, which we see as being very additive, very complementary to just the traditional bread and butter of U.S. exposure to private equity or U.S. infrastructure.”
2026-06-12 · Masters in Business · Riding Global Tailwinds with EQT's Jean Eric Salata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're also investing in the digital infrastructure to connect it all, the digital connectivity of all of this. And so if you tie that all together, our infrastructure business is really riding some of these global tailwinds, not just in the US, but really doing this globally. Then in addition to that, I'd say the other thing that's pretty interesting, if you take a sort of non-US lens at the world is what's happening in Japan. And there, the Japanese buyout market is really on a tear. It's being driven primarily by some corporate reforms around shareholder reforms and activist shareholder increasing activism, shareholder activism, which is supported actually by the Japanese government to improve corporate governance, essentially. That's creating opportunities to really focus on shareholder value and to result in a lot more deal flow. The number of transactions that we've seen have, it's this year alone, it's up 60%.”
2026-06-12 · Masters in Business · Riding Global Tailwinds with EQT's Jean Eric Salata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We also have about $100 billion of investment into energy. So the whole energy grid, power generation and grid and storage, this is a really important part of the comprehensive solution that you need to drive AI compute. So we've got the energy, we've got the compute.”
2026-06-12 · Masters in Business · Riding Global Tailwinds with EQT's Jean Eric Salata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So these are sort of broadening that exposure across the regions is where we see opportunity. If I look at the world today, the AI infrastructure opportunity globally is probably the single biggest, most interesting investment opportunity. For us, it means investing in a couple of key areas. One is in the compute or data center space. We have one of the largest data center businesses in the world called Edge Connects. It's active both in the US, but also in Europe and now increasingly in Asia. We have a joint venture in India, for example, with the Adani Group in EdgeConnects. And that data center business has over 90 data centers. It's increased in value. We've owned it now for six, seven years. I think it's increased by 20x in terms of the total installed capacity of the business. We have, in addition to that, we take kind of an end-to-end solutions approach. So we have the compute.”
2026-06-12 · Masters in Business · Riding Global Tailwinds with EQT's Jean Eric Salata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Meaning explain what that means. Meaning sort of the investing back into more of the industrial base of, say, the United States or Europe away from just outsourcing all of that. And so this reindustrialization, the AI CapEx infrastructure plus the whole power energy transition that's going on with electrification, this is resulting in much more capital intensive investment than we've ever seen before. I mean, the sort of numbers that people are throwing around are just unprecedented. Within our lifetimes, we've never, it's historical. The levels of investment that we're seeing. And that has knock-on effects. The knock-on effects are throughout the whole supply chain. A lot of the supply chain actually feeds back into Europe. It feeds back into Asia, certainly. And so this kind of global supply chain of capital expenditures is creating new investment opportunities and demand for capital that we have never seen before.”
2026-06-12 · Masters in Business · Riding Global Tailwinds with EQT's Jean Eric Salata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I think what we're starting to see globally right now is this. Capital CapEx super cycle that is playing out with AI infrastructure, but not just AI infrastructure. It also feeds into the reindustrialization focus on CapEx for reindustrialization.”
2026-06-12 · Masters in Business · Riding Global Tailwinds with EQT's Jean Eric Salata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, we just announced yesterday. I don't know when this is airing, but we just announced yesterday that we've been awarded the Scale Up Europe Fund mandate by the European Commission, which is a huge deal. They decided to award EQT the management of what's going to be a $5 billion fund that will invest in early stage technology ventures across Europe to help them to scale up. So kind of series B onwards in areas like quantum computing, AI, life sciences, AI infrastructure, industrial...”
2026-06-12 · Masters in Business · Riding Global Tailwinds with EQT's Jean Eric Salata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think diversification is becoming more and more top of mind for global investors, particularly when we talk to our institutional investors, even in the private wealth channels, you're starting to get a sense that people feel overly concentrated, over-extended maybe in US assets. Not to say that U.S. assets are not attractive or that they don't have great prospects, which they do. But having 85, 90% of your assets tied into a market that's already highly concentrated is becoming a little bit uneasy for people. So what we're sensing it with our clients is a desire to get exposure to more global markets. And what I keep, we're strong is we have two-thirds of our businesses outside of the US. We're very strong in Europe. We're very strong in Asia. Within those markets, we are also exposed to some of the best sectors. We have a very thematic approach. We invest in healthcare. We invest in technology.”
2026-06-12 · Masters in Business · Riding Global Tailwinds with EQT's Jean Eric Salata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About creating a business that's going to last. So that sort of mindset, I think, really appealed to me and felt like the kind of place that was a good home for the company that we had built as a partnership prior to that.”
2026-06-12 · Masters in Business · Riding Global Tailwinds with EQT's Jean Eric Salata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To sense is the sort of people that end up coming to EQT staying at EQT. It's not the typical deal maker kind of Wall Street type of dealmaker that you get in some of our parts of our industry. And I think that really appealed to the kind of makeup of our firm at the time having that really informal interaction with people, that's a little bit of a Nordic trait, I would say, that this lack of hierarchy. You take a look at Connie, he's the founder of the firm, he's really opened up the ownership of the firm early to all the partners of the firm. The fact that he was even open to combining with my old business and in a sense diluting even further on a fairly large transaction, as you mentioned, that speaks to this kind of expansive view of we're trying to build an institution here. It's not about any one individual. It's not about sort of creating a legacy of any one individual.”
2026-06-12 · Masters in Business · Riding Global Tailwinds with EQT's Jean Eric Salata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The senior team, but then ultimately the culture throughout. And I felt very comfortable with it, and we did spent some time together meeting with the team members, meeting with each other, and we ended up feeling like this was going to be a great fit. Still taking a chance and bringing the business together. But having done it now, having been together now for nearly four years, I can tell you it's been a huge success. And it really boils down to the fact that the people, the cultural fit was very strong. Maybe the good time to talk about the values also of EQT, which are similar to the values we had at Bearing Private Equity at the time. You know, there's some key values at EQT has. Number one, it's high performing, which is something that I think most people in industry are going to focus on. But beyond that, it's also we focus a lot on transparency. We focus on being informal. We focus on being entrepreneurial. And we have another fifth value, which is respectful. And if you take all those as a package,”
2026-06-12 · Masters in Business · Riding Global Tailwinds with EQT's Jean Eric Salata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Firms. The European firms already are thinking in terms of well, every country's different. You've got the Nordics are different than Germany, which is different than France, which is different than Southern Europe. And so when they come to Asia, they have, I think, a heightened sense of appreciation for the cultural differences within Asia. And I think that to me was really important, that they understand that within Asia, Japan is very different from India and India is very different from China. And so I felt almost like there was a kindred spirit there in understanding that each country, each region, the cultures really matter. Then I would say that if you look at the histories of the firm, we're both about 30 years old at the time. We both had our ups and downs. We both kind of built the business from a founder of Connie and myself. And, you know, I think there was a lot of common history, shared history there. And ultimately at boiled down to the, I'd say the chemistry of”
2026-06-12 · Masters in Business · Riding Global Tailwinds with EQT's Jean Eric Salata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think initially you could imagine that would be the case, but as it turns out, I think a few things here. First of all, EQT started off as a Swedish firm, but it really, by the time we met, had already become a much more global business. So first Swedish, then European, expanding into Europe and then expanding into the US had some presence in Asia, not much. Secondly, EQT is backed by the Wallenberg family. The Wallenburg family is a sixth generation family from Sweden that has a history of really doing business globally. Investors in Ericsson, Electrolux, Saab, many of the big Swedish companies, AstraZeneca are backed by the Wallenberg family. And so they have a very global mindset, I would say, in the way they think about doing business globally and culturally. Then I think the other aspect here is there's a difference, I think, between a European firm like EQT and say American.”
2026-06-12 · Masters in Business · Riding Global Tailwinds with EQT's Jean Eric Salata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Got there and we find our strategy over the years, and we've created something that's actually quite hard to replicate, which is this regional platform delivering consistent outcomes with a great team of consistent people that have been with us a long time and that have a similar approach to underwriting and ultimately great performance. And so all that going from 25 million where we ended up by the time we did the deal with EQT, we had 25 billion under management over the spans of what was 25 years of building the business.”
2026-06-12 · Masters in Business · Riding Global Tailwinds with EQT's Jean Eric Salata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Somewhat similar, so we were able to bring the two cultures together, and the cultural fit ended up being what made that merger so successful. But going back to building the Asia business, building the team on the ground, building the common culture. And then it was sort of how do we institutionalize this instead of just doing deals here, doing deals there, how do we create a unified, systematic approach. And this is where my main day sort of came in of thinking, let's come up with some constructs about how we think about capital allocation, how we think about diversification, how do we think about macro, how do we think about sector trends, how do we think about our investment committee process, how do we drive due diligence, systematic due diligence in every market so we have quality control in each market. It's not just random dealmakers doing things the way that they want to do them on the ground. And so pulling all that together, which it took a lot of time. I'm making it, I'm shortening it here, but there was a lot of ups and downs or a lot of mistakes, a lot of setbacks. But eventually we...”
2026-06-12 · Masters in Business · Riding Global Tailwinds with EQT's Jean Eric Salata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where you have local teams in each market In 2005, we opened up an office in Japan. We had a great team in Japan of great people there. As we're building the team, A, you needed to have people from those markets that understood those markets. But the next question is, how do you stitch it all together? How do you create that common thread? And that comes down to culture and building a culture of like-minded people. And so I started to really also gain a huge appreciation for the importance of culture in a business. And that's something, by the way, that EQT has, I think, really excelled in globally. And one of the reasons I was ultimately attracted to EQT and combining our business with EQT four or five years ago was that Connie Johnson, the founder of EQT, early on with the Wallenbergs backing, realized that culture ultimately drives performance in an investment organization like ours. So built an organization with tremendous culture and our culture was actually”
2026-06-12 · Masters in Business · Riding Global Tailwinds with EQT's Jean Eric Salata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Investment program. People looked at me and said, What do you know about investing in Japan? What do you know about India? You're not even from Asia. And so I early on appreciated, and this has been an important lesson in my career, is that actually being a good investor is very important for what we do in our industry. But if you want to build a company, which was always my ambition, if you want to build a business out of it, you need to actually build a team, not just be a good investor. Being a good investor is kind of prerequisite to be in our industry, but beyond that, it's really about building a team. And so I was lucky enough to meet and to bring on board some great partners early on, very diverse backgrounds. So, you know, we have people even to this day. And in those days from each of these markets, we had great partners from China, from Taiwan on our team that we hired early on. We had a very good team in India on the ground in Mumbai. We call it now local with local.”
2026-06-12 · Masters in Business · Riding Global Tailwinds with EQT's Jean Eric Salata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're absolutely right about that. And that actually is the key, I think, to what we've been able to achieve over three decades, was that overcoming those barriers. Because ultimately people think of Asia. They call it Asia, but it's really a very, first of all, geographic, it's a huge, huge expanse of Tokyo to Sydney, it's like a 12-hour flight. And from even from Hong Kong all the way to India, it's still a pretty long distance. And culturally, you're talking about a very significant difference in the local culture, the language, the ways of doing business. So what we did initially was, you know, and we were actually criticized for this in the early days because in those days, people just did single country funds for that very reason. You had a China fund, you had sort of a Japan fund, a Korea fund. And what we set out to do was to say, okay, we're going to create a regional.”
2026-06-12 · Masters in Business · Riding Global Tailwinds with EQT's Jean Eric Salata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I said, that's good enough for me. I said, I'll take that. That sounds good. So we started with 25 and we did five deals of $5 million each. And it turned out that because of the cycle where we were, we were lucky to be able to buy in at good prices. And we bought some interesting businesses.”
2026-06-12 · Masters in Business · Riding Global Tailwinds with EQT's Jean Eric Salata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source