Kamil Salame

Kamil Salame has served as Chief Executive Officer of Cranemere since January 2024. In addition to his role as CEO, he is a member of Cranemere’s Board of Directors, Chairman of the Operating Review Committee, Chairman of the Board of NorthStar Anesthesia, and a member of the Board of Velocity Vehicle Group.

Prior to Cranemere, Kamil was a Partner at CVC Capital Partners, where he led the North American investment activities for CVC Strategic Opportunities, the firm’s long-term investment platform. He also served as Global Co-Head of Financial Services and Head of U.S. Financial Services investing. At CVC, he played an integral role in the growth of CVC’s U.S. franchise over more than a decade, where he co-chaired both the U.S. Advisory Board and the firm’s weekly U.S. private equity meeting.

Earlier, Kamil was a Partner and member of the Management Committee at DLJ Merchant Banking, where he spent 14 years in various investment and leadership roles. He also held senior positions at DLJ Real Estate Capital Partners and was part of the DLJ High Yield Group.

Over the course of his career, Kamil has served on the boards of more than 25 public and private companies, in eight countries, across several industries.

Kamil holds a B.S. from Georgetown University, an M.B.A. from Columbia Business School—where he was an Editor and Fellow of the Columbia Journal of World Business—and a J.D. from Columbia Law School, where he was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar. He is admitted to practice law in New York, Connecticut, and Washington, D.C.

The historical figure I most admire most is Abraham Lincoln. All of us know of his great accomplishments. Some of us have read the litany of failures he endured along the way. A reading of his letters debunks the revisionist cynicism. As with King, Ghandi or Mandela in the following century, it was his moral clarity that changed the world.

The causes I care about and support are those which enable people to help themselves. For more than a dozen years, I have been a director of a non-profit which is focused on job skills, sustainable industry and women’s economic empowerment in a developing economy. Seeing what people have been able to achieve in difficult circumstances, with even a small amount of help, has been truly inspiring. As an often quoted proverb states, “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.”

The most important advice I give to others is advice I received while a student in business school, inspired by Bryan Dyson’s famous speech: “We are all choosing lives where we will be forced to juggle. The trick to success over the long-term is learning which balls are made of crystal and which ones are made of rubber, recognizing that we will all drop balls from time to time, and choosing to drop the right ones.”