John Kim

My first job after college as an IBM marketing rep taught me two important things about myself. Through that initial work, I first discovered and explored my love for sales and marketing. I also learned that success is achieved only when the customer believes that their needs are understood and met with care. As my mentor used to say, “Take good care of your relationships or someone else will.” After getting my MBA at Harvard, I went into private equity where I could integrate these capabilities into the core mission of the investment firms that I worked for. At the time, the investor relations role was still quite new and no one had written the playbook on how it should be done. Bridging those two worlds became a calling for me. Over the course of my career, that calling helped me to create authentic and meaningful connections with a broad range of investors while working for world-class investment firms such as JP Morgan, Court Square Capital, and most recently at Kelso & Co.