Dry Powder: The Private Equity Podcast

The Hard Truth about Operational Excellence with KKR’s Pete Stavros

The global co-head of private equity and partner at KKR reveals the rigorous, long-term discipline required to drive real operational improvements.

  • First published on 6월 23, 2026

Podcast

The Hard Truth about Operational Excellence with KKR’s Pete Stavros
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If you ask Pete Stavros, global co-head of private equity and partner at KKR, how he’s navigating today’s markets, he’ll come right back to the industry’s fundamentals: sourcing proprietary deals and driving real operational improvements. It may sound like what you’d hear from any number of fund managers until he details the mechanics and rigor of KKR’s approach.

You can listen to this episode of Dry Powder and catch future episodes by subscribing on Apple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotify, or wherever you may listen.

“Senior folks on our team, they couldn’t run a factory, but they’d come close,” Pete says. “And we still do some of this: Our younger people would have to leave and go work at one of our companies for a year or two if they wanted to get promoted.”

Today on Dry Powder, Pete explains how KKR built one of the most operationally intensive teams in the industry and why he believes this approach is the most repeatable way to generate alpha at scale, regardless of macro conditions.

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