Joe Bae had already moved into his dorm room. Harvard Business School was about to begin. He had spent two years at Goldman Sachs, had a place at the school, and had reached the point in a young financier’s life when the next step appeared reassuringly settled. Then a recruiter called. KKR wanted to hire two analysts in New York. Would he come down and meet them?
He drove to Manhattan, interviewed with the partners, and boarded a plane that evening to meet George Roberts and the team in California. Within roughly a day and a half, the carefully arranged next chapter had acquired a competitor. Bae chose KKR. Harvard could wait. As career decisions go, it was an unusually brisk way to make an expensive dorm room redundant.
That was 1996. In October 2021, Bae and Scott Nuttall, the other New York analyst hired that year, became the firm’s co-chief executive officers. They succeeded Henry Kravis and Roberts, who stayed as executive co-chairmen. The journey between those dates ran through Hong Kong, a Korean brewery, and the slow work of persuading people that an unfamiliar institution might be a useful partner.
The pianist who heard his limits
Long before he was choosing investments, Bae was spending hours at a piano. Born in South Korea, he came to the United States as a small child and grew up on Long Island. In his account of public school, he was one of just two Asian students. Fitting in required work; racial slurs and playground bullying were part of the experience he later described.
Music provided a different kind of education. His father, a chemist, would come home from work and drive him more than an hour to piano lessons. He recorded the instruction and played it again on the return journey. Many children are told to pay attention. Bae got the replay.
He took the instrument seriously enough to consider a professional future. By the end of high school, he had decided against it. That admission matters in a career usually described through promotions and transactions. He has spoken about music teaching him discipline and humility, including the ability to recognize when someone else has greater skill. Practice could take him a long way; it could also reveal where the road ended.
He graduated from Harvard College in 1994, magna cum laude, and entered Goldman’s principal investment business. His later move to KKR exchanged a formal course of study for proximity to people already doing the work. There is a continuity between the two decisions: taking an ambition seriously enough to reconsider its shape.
“You haven't even managed your children yet.”
Henry Kravis, recalling his joke when Bae volunteered to lead KKR’s Asia expansion
A familiar name, an unfamiliar continent
In 2005, Bae traveled across Asia with Kravis and Kravis’s wife, Marie-Josée. Over three weeks, their itinerary included Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Shanghai, Beijing, and Singapore. They met more than 60 banking and corporate executives. Other American investment firms had struggled to establish themselves in the region. KKR went ahead.
Bae volunteered to lead the effort. He was barely into his thirties and had little management experience. Kravis’s joke about managing children caught the scale of the assignment: a capable investor was about to become a builder of offices, teams, and relationships across countries with different commercial customs. He moved to Hong Kong in late 2005.
The choice of people was central. KKR recruited investors with local knowledge and connections rather than assuming that familiarity with American dealmaking would travel intact. Hong Kong was followed by offices in Tokyo, Beijing, and Sydney. A firm’s name can get a meeting. It cannot supply every piece of understanding needed once everyone sits down.
Kravis remembered an energetic Bae trying to attend meetings across the region and needing encouragement to delegate. There is something recognizable in that detail: the person sent to build a business discovering that being present everywhere is a poor substitute for having colleagues who can act without him.
The Asia assignment widened his responsibilities beyond evaluating a transaction. The Korea Society’s account of his career lists investments spanning businesses such as Intelligence, BIS Cleanaway, Alliance Tire Group, and Oriental Brewery. These were different companies in different markets, requiring teams able to understand the particulars rather than a single continental theory.
The brewery with a return ticket
Oriental Brewery made the approach tangible. In 2009, AB InBev needed to reduce debt following its combination of InBev and Anheuser-Busch. Its South Korean brewery was available. KKR acquired the business in a deal valued at $1.8 billion; Affinity Equity Partners became its investment partner.
The transaction included an unusual accommodation. AB InBev could buy the brewery back within five years. The seller could raise money while preserving a route to ownership later. KKR and its partner could work on a business with an identified potential buyer. The agreement made room for both sides’ intentions.
Bae led the team, with investment in facilities and sales operations among the changes during ownership. The Cass brand grew, and Oriental Brewery moved into first place in South Korea. In 2014, AB InBev bought it back for $5.8 billion. The bottle had made a round trip; the business underneath had changed.
For a profile of Bae, the interesting feature is the arrangement as much as the price. It involved financing, management, a consumer brand, and the seller’s continuing attachment to the asset. A spreadsheet could record the result. Getting there required an agreement people were prepared to make.
Two desks, then two chief executives
Bae’s eventual partnership with Nuttall had a long apprenticeship. Both arrived at KKR in 1996. In July 2017, they became co-presidents and co-chief operating officers. Four years later, they took the top jobs together. The firm had time to see the pairing at work before changing the names on the chief executive line.
Their backgrounds at the firm were complementary. Bae built the Asia business and took on responsibilities across private markets. Nuttall’s work included capital markets, fundraising, credit, and insurance. A broad institution could draw on two careers that had developed inside it along different routes.
The personal relationship also extended beyond the office. Their families have vacationed together, and their children are friends. Those details give substance to a corporate word that can otherwise become rather weightless: trust. Here it includes people who have spent decades observing one another when a meeting has ended.
Shared leadership still carries an obvious test. A partnership must make decisions, accept responsibility, and keep working when its members disagree. The relevant fact in Bae’s story is the time invested before the appointment. By 2021, he and Nuttall had a quarter-century of shared institutional memory. The succession formalized a relationship that already existed.
The history missing from the dinner table
Bae’s public work eventually returned him to questions that had followed him from Long Island. What makes someone feel they belong? What happens when the familiar story of a successful minority obscures the needs of people who have fewer resources?
He helped found The Asian American Foundation in 2021. Its founding board committed $125 million over five years to support Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. The wider AAPI Giving Challenge sought commitments from businesses and philanthropists to community causes, rather than requiring every dollar to pass through the foundation itself.
The distinction was practical. A national organization could convene donors and help existing groups get resources. It could also work on education and representation, areas where a change in public understanding takes longer than a fundraising announcement.
At home, Bae found a smaller version of that task. Talking with his four children, he realized how little they knew about episodes such as the Chinese Exclusion Act and Japanese American wartime incarceration. Family meals became occasions to discuss that history. For a parent whose childhood involved trying to fit in, explaining what had been left out became a different responsibility.
“I joined TAAF to help amplify the voice of the AAPI community”
Joe Bae, on his reason for joining the foundation
His wife, novelist Janice Y. K. Lee, is a Harvard classmate. Together, they helped lead a 2021 philanthropic effort to expand Asian American studies at Harvard. In 2024, they gave $20 million for arts and humanities leadership and undergraduate financial aid. Their earlier support included a creative writing lectureship established in 2015. The interests are specific: history, writing, and the possibility of getting an education.
Back at Harvard, with a different assignment
On July 1, 2024, Bae joined the Harvard Corporation, the university’s governing board with responsibility for its academic, financial, and physical resources. The student who had left business school before classes began returned in a role concerned with the institution’s future. His cultural governance experience included Lincoln Center, where Harvard described him as vice chair, and earlier service connected with the Hong Kong Ballet.
His working life continues to expand beyond the buyouts of his early career. KKR completed its acquisition of Arctos in May 2026, adding businesses involving sports franchise investments and capital solutions for asset managers. In August, Bae and Nuttall backed a partnership with NVIDIA around financing computing infrastructure. These are new settings for an old occupational question: how do capital, expertise, and people fit together?
That same month, as co-chair of TAAF’s board alongside Peng Zhao, Bae helped announce a search for a successor to chief executive Norman Chen, who planned to move to vice chair at the end of 2026. Building an institution includes arranging for someone else to carry it forward. Bae has now stood on both sides of that process.
He once practiced the piano for hours and decided his future belonged elsewhere. He arrived at business school and then left for a job. He moved to Hong Kong to establish a business that required other people’s local knowledge. Across those choices, education keeps appearing in unexpected places: a rehearsal, an interview, a new market, a conversation with his children. The dorm room was only the first classroom he could afford to leave.