PE veteran leaps from middle-market firm to become KKR MD

Sixteen-year private equity veteran Nancy Ford joined $140bn PE giant KKR’s San Francisco office last month as a managing director.

KKR has been expanding globally, hiring in Europe and Asia, including opening new offices in China, and in the U.S. has been making replacement hires and growing headcount at its New York headquarters, Houston, San Francisco and Menlo Park, California.

Before her recent move to KKR, Ford worked at FFL Partners, a PE firm that invests between $50m and $300m in middle-market companies and raised $2bn fund in 2015. She worked her way up to managing director over the course of 14 years at the firm, which she joined after getting her MBA at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business.

Prior to that, Ford worked for two years at Thomas H. Lee Partners, a Boston-based PE firm that has raised more than $22bn and invested in 140-plus portfolio companies with an aggregate value of over $150bn.

Ford started her career at Goldman Sachs, which she joined as an investment banking analyst after graduating with a BS in economics from Duke University.

KKR, sometimes referred to as “the Goldman Sachs of private equity,” has been hiring a lot of junior bankers from Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan. It finished second on the eFinancialCareers Ideal Employer list of firms that PE professionals want to work for.

Last month, KKR appointed Joseph Bae and Scott Nuttall as co-presidents and co-chief operating officers, putting them in position to take over leadership of the firm when Henry Kravis and George Roberts step down. In response, various people resigned, potentially opening up some opportunities.

Photo credit: Tom Merton/GettyImages