Riding Global Tailwinds with EQT's Jean Eric Salata

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News.

**Barry Ritholtz** (0:07)
I'm Barry Ritholtz, you're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My extra special guest today is Jean Eric Salata. He is chair of the EQT group, the largest alternative manager outside of the US. They manage over $316 billion. Previously, he helped set up the Bearings Private Equity Asia group and built it into one of Asia's premier private equity platforms. With no further ado.
Jean Eric Salata, welcome to Bloomberg.

**Jean Eric Salata** (0:52)
Thank you, Barry, it's great to be here.

**Barry Ritholtz** (0:54)
It's great to have you. I've been looking forward to this conversation for a while. Before we get to EQT, you have a really interesting background, and I wanna dive into that a little bit.
You grow up in Chile, you go to the Wharton School at University of Penn to get a bachelor's in finance and economics. Was investing always the career plan?

**Jean Eric Salata** (1:20)
Well, yes, investing was always the career plan. That's not how I ended up in Asia, but the idea in going to Wharton and becoming an investor was something I always wanted to do since I was a young boy. I remember reading a lot of biographies when I was a kid of business people and being very intrigued by that. I remember having my first paper delivery route when I was like 10 or 11 years old and really enjoying the idea of making money, and then actually started investing that money as a young kid in the stock market as well and kind of understanding how that worked. And then when I ended up at Wharton undergraduate and studying finance and management, I got very intrigued with global business outside the US.
I come from an international background. My family, we grew up in South America. My grandparents actually came from Eastern Europe and were sort of refugees that ended up in South America. So generation to generation, we've been moving around quite a bit. I always felt like I had quite a different perspective on life and the world than a lot of the people I was at school with. And so I was interested in pursuing that.
And by as luck would have it or fate would have it, I ended up meeting my girlfriend at the time, who's not my wife, who's from Hong Kong. And I ended up moving there right after I graduated, a year after I graduated from college, and ended up really building my career in Asia as a result of that.

**Barry Ritholtz** (2:41)
And that was Hong Kong before the handover.
So, Chile, Hong Kong, you started being as a consultant, end up everywhere from Sydney to Boston and then back to Hong Kong. Tell us a little bit about that global experience. How has that changed how you look at the world of investing?

**Jean Eric Salata** (3:00)
Yeah, I sort of have always felt a little bit like an outsider in the way I look at things. I never felt like I was exactly part of the community or the sort of the consensus view of things. I was always thinking about things a little bit more differently, I guess, given the background. I was always comparing things. When I was growing up in the US, I was always comparing things in the US to the way things were in Chile and saying, oh, this is different or that's different. Then when I moved to Hong Kong, I had the same perspective. I was thinking, wow, there's a lot that I see happening. All my friends working on Wall Street or in private equity firms in the late 80s, early 90s, that's not yet happening here in Hong Kong. There felt like there was a gap. It felt like there was a gap there. And that always intrigued me and got me motivated and interested in thinking about starting something new that would sort of try to take advantage of it or take advantage of that opportunity created by that gap of what's eventually maybe coming to Asia that's already happening in the US.
And that's sort of what led me to eventually leave consulting, get into private equity in the early 90s, which was really very early in Asian context in the private equity industry.
And from there, sort of to start building the business.

**Barry Ritholtz** (4:14)
So you leave Bain, was the next stop AIG Global Investment? Did you help set up their PE arm or was that already up and running?

**Jean Eric Salata** (4:23)
No, that was, AIG was essentially an insurance business. AIG, some of your listeners might recall Hank Greenberg, who's a legend, really kind of started, he actually didn't start that business, but was the founder that grew the business beyond the founder, CV Star's initial starting of the business in Shanghai of all places.