Kamil Salame

Kamil Salame is a retired Partner, CVC Capital Partners, where he oversaw the North American investment activities of CVC Strategic Opportunities, the firm’s long-term capital fund, from 2020 to 2022.

From 2009 to 2020, he also served as a Partner and CVC’s Global Co-Head of Financial Services and U.S. Head of Financial Services investing. Kamil was a core part of the senior team that built CVC U.S. over the last decade. Among other roles, he served as Co-Chair of the U.S. Advisory Board and Co-Chaired the CVC U.S. weekly private equity new business meeting. Kamil has served on the boards of more than 20 public and private companies globally.

Prior to joining CVC, he was a Partner and Member of the Management Committee at DLJ Merchant Banking, the private equity business of Credit Suisse, where he served in various capacities for over 14 years. Kamil also served as a Principal of DLJ Real Estate Capital Partners and as a member of DLJ’s High Yield Group. 

Kamil received 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 University School of Law, 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.”