Time & Perspective Quote by Henry Kravis

There’s a carefully engineered humility to Kravis’s memory: an economics major, a long cross-country drive, a summer job. It’s the bootstrap story in pinstripes, framed as personal grit rather than prearranged access. The details do a lot of work. “Economics major” signals seriousness and fluency in the language of markets; “every summer” implies disciplined repetition; “drive my car” adds tactile effort, a young man literally moving himself toward opportunity. Then the final clause lands like a credential: “I worked on Wall Street.”

The subtext is pedigree without saying pedigree. Claremont Men’s College (now Claremont McKenna) is an elite pipeline; “worked on Wall Street” in that era often meant a door opened by networks as much as by merit. Kravis doesn’t mention who introduced him, which bank hired him, or how rare that on-ramp really was. The omission isn’t accidental. It keeps the narrative clean: ambition plus stamina equals success. That’s a more palatable origin story for someone who helped define modern private equity, an industry frequently criticized for extracting value rather than creating it.

Context matters because Kravis’s generation of financiers built a cultural script: finance as the inevitable destination for the “smart” and “driven,” a meritocracy that just happens to reward those already close to the tracks. The quote is less a confession than a calibration. It reassures listeners that the empire started as a summer job, not as a system.