Corporate Leadership
Rohan Suri is Managing Director, Private Equity at KKR. He joined KKR in 2012 and has led or co-led ~$6 billion of investments in companies across sectors including technology, financial services, healthcare, industrial and consumer.
He currently serves on the Board of Directors of Infinx, Ness Digital Engineering, Vini Cosmetics, Incred Finance, Re Sustainability, Shriram General Insurance, and has also led or co-led investments in Jio Platforms, Reliance Retail, Alliance Tire Group (ATG), Max Healthcare, Max Financial Services, HDFC Ltd., Five Star Finance and SBI Life Insurance.
Prior to KKR he was with Bain & Company in their New Delhi and San Francisco offices. He holds an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, where he was an Industry Scholar, and a B.E. Honors from the Birla Institute of Technology & Science, from where he graduated as a Chancellor’s Gold Medalist. He is a recipient of the Global 30 under 30 award from the BITS Pilani Alumni Association (BITSAA).
What does this recognition from IIMA mean to you?
First of all, thank you for having me here., It’s great to be back on campus. This is an incredible honour. I’m grateful and thankful for the Institute for this honour. It’s deeply meaningful to me to receive this recognition. IIMA is an institute that I deeply respect. It’s a place where it all began for me. My professional journey started here, and I consider myself very fortunate that I’m part of this community, which values not just achievement but also integrity and personal growth. So it’s an incredible honour, and I see this as a responsibility to keep striving further, staying grounded, and contributing meaningfully in helping others on their journey. So I am very grateful to the Institute and the professors and the team.
Reflecting on your journey from IIMA to managing director at KKR. What have been the most defining moments in your career?
I would say I’ve been very fortunate being at KKR to have gotten a ringside view into the growth of private equity as an industry in India. When I joined KKR in 2012, the PE industry in India was very different back then. It was primarily minority investing that was happening at the time. If you look and one of my first investments when I joined KKR was we did a buyout where we bought 80% in a company. It was a much larger investment compared to what we were doing and what the industry was doing at the time. And it was basically the first buyout that happened in India. And while KKR as a firm had a lot of experience doing buyouts globally, that was the first one we were doing in India. So we were also trying to see how we can localise the buyout playbook in India. And I think when that investment happened, I didn’t realise, but that was the start of a trend of buyout activity picking up in India.
So if you just look at between 2010 to 2014 and you look at 2020 to 24 in these last 15 years, private equity deal activity in India has gone up five times, but buyout deal activity has gone up like eight times, and the size of buyout deals has also increased significantly. So the industry has shifted towards buyouts, and being at KKR, I’ve had this opportunity to observe that play out in front of me real time. And there are a lot of reasons why buyout activity has picked up in India, but being in the seat has really given me the opportunity to be involved in a lot of these investments and see this trend play out in India. So that’s been very satisfying and rewarding for me. The other thing, which I find very satisfying, and it’s a big reason why I love this job, is because I get an opportunity to partner with world class entrepreneurs and management teams and work with them as they build their business and seeing what it takes to build and scale a business in India successfully, working with them in problem solving and understanding and learning from how they think about problems has been such tremendous learning for me. So I think these have been some of the hallmarks of my journey in my career thus far, which has really kept me motivated and has been very satisfying for me.
So if you just look at between 2010 to 2014 and you look at 2020 to 24 in these last 15 years, private equity deal activity in India has gone up five times, but buyout deal activity has gone up like eight times, and the size of buyout deals has also increased significantly.
What about your own personal habits that have been inculcated with this kind of thinking? What are your habits that you spend time daily on, which help you in your professional life?
Look, there’s no substitute for hard work, but that’s a given. Those are table stakes. I think everyone recognises that. I think one thing that I have been very fortunate to have received the advice very early in my career from my seniors and my mentors is that you have to be a curious person to understand how something is happening. Why is that? Why is that thing working out much better than something else? So having that curiosity. Also, being in your comfort zone and not going out and meeting people is a big mistake a lot of people make. I would encourage people to spend as much time meeting people, building relationships, learning and understanding from them. Things like “what are you working on? What are you seeing in the market?” Because everyone has a different perspective, and you can only have that drive to go and meet people if you have that curiosity and if you are not just sitting behind your desk and working on just reading something which someone else has written. So having that curiosity and the drive and going out and meeting people is very important. The other thing I would say is to be humble. No one knows all the answers. So I would say those are pieces of advice that I was given early in my career, and I try and abide by them, and I would give to anyone else as well.
Also, being in your comfort zone and not going out and meeting people is a big mistake a lot of people make. I would encourage people to spend as much time meeting people, building relationships, learning and understanding from them.
What do you see as the most exciting trends in private equity in India?
So we spoke about buyoust. I think that is a trend which is here to stay. I think it’ll even accelerate, as a lot of businesses in India are family-owned businesses, and they go through a period of succession. Private equity firms, which have the expertise to do buyouts, can be very constructive partners in that type of setting. Today, Indian founders and entrepreneurs recognise that private equity represents not just capital but also value-added and operational expertise. So I think that is a trend which will continue. The other trend that has really played out, especially in the last four or five years, is how our capital markets have increased in depth. Domestic flows, retail flows, into our capital markets have seen a big positive move. I think what that does for private equity investors is give them the confidence that there is an avenue for us to exit our investments to the private markets, which in turn gives them greater conviction to do larger deals, and then almost like a virtuous cycle. So I think the increase in buyout activity and further deepening of our capital markets will be very positive for the private equity environment in India.
What is your advice to students who want to follow your path and make a career out of private equity?
Like I said, be curious, reach out to people who are in the industry, to understand and form your own view, whether this is something you enjoy doing or not. The other thing is, be open to unlearning topics outside your comfort zone. I think there’s value to being a sponge and absorbing as much as you can, because that helps you form your own mental map of what you like. It also helps you develop a better framework for making investment judgments. So the more you meet people, the more you push yourself to think internally. A lot of times, you’ll make mistakes, but if you’re doing a lot of that, you have more ribs under your belt. You will just become smarter as an investor. So I would encourage people to do that and just be out there if you’re interested in building a career in this space.
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/LBdV05J9Yrg?si=PpWKqxLGtf-aKJaG
