2026 May Session: Eugene Kim w/ IMM PE
Private Equity: Insights from Eugene Kim
2026.07.04
Section 1: Career Path, Leadership & Organizational Experience
Q1: How did you transition from engineering and consulting into private equity?
Eugene Kim studied Computer Science at KAIST before deciding to transition into business and pursue a master’s degree in management. The decision was influenced by her sister’s experience at McKinsey and her own assessment of where her strengths and interests lay.
During graduate school, she interned in Credit Suisse’s Investment Banking Division and later joined BCG after completing a summer internship. After three years in consulting, she began looking for a career with more tangible outcomes and a better long-term fit. Her exposure to private equity through an MBK due diligence project introduced her to the industry, and she subsequently joined IMM PE, where she has remained for 17 years.
She attributes her longevity at IMM partly to her fit with the organization’s culture and partly to the fact that her responsibilities changed roughly every three years, continuously providing new challenges.
Q2: What did you learn from moving from investing into operating portfolio companies?
After approximately eight years in investment roles, Eugene was dispatched to the management team of Hollys when an attempted sale of the portfolio company failed and a leadership change became necessary. She later took management roles at portfolio companies including Able C&C and Hanssem.
She noted that sending internal investment professionals directly into portfolio-company management is relatively unusual in private equity, where hiring an external CEO is generally more common.
At Hanssem, she spent approximately a year and a half shifting the company’s strategy from comprehensive interior packages toward higher-margin kitchen products. Despite initial internal resistance, she drove organizational change by accumulating successful cases and persuading stakeholders with quantitative evidence.
Q3: What principles guide your leadership and decision-making?
Eugene views emotional reactions, such as shouting, as inefficient because they distract from the substance of a discussion. She believes effective leadership comes instead from decision-making authority, clear direction, and professional expertise.
She identified unclear or frequently reversed decisions as particularly difficult for employees. Her approach is to break problems into specific components and quantify their positive and negative impacts.
For reversible decisions, she favors acting quickly. For decisions that are difficult to reverse, she recommends involving more people and allowing sufficient discussion. Above all, she emphasized that the worst decision is making no decision at all.
Section 2: Private Equity Investment Philosophy & Value Creation
Q1: What do you consider most important when evaluating a private equity investment?
Two principles are particularly important: understanding the business and identifying value drivers that can actually be controlled.
Using Hollys as an example, Eugene simplified the business into drivers such as number of stores × sales per store, before further decomposing those variables into factors such as average transaction value.
She cautioned against building valuation models around variables that the company cannot directly control, such as simply assuming a certain market size and market share. The investment thesis should instead identify concrete drivers that management and the investor can influence.
Q2: Why is understanding a company before investing particularly important in a buyout?
Large-scale buyout transactions have a limited pool of potential buyers, making it difficult to justify an investment based only on the possibility of a favorable future exit.
According to Eugene, deeper knowledge of the company before the transaction improves both the investor’s ability to determine an appropriate valuation and its ability to execute post-merger integration (PMI) after the acquisition.
She also noted a broader challenge facing the PE industry: as fund sizes increase while suitable deal opportunities remain limited, firms are considering strategies such as focusing on mid-sized buyouts and diversifying across asset classes.
Q3: What capabilities become more important as you become a senior private equity investor?
Private equity is fundamentally a team-based business rather than an individual one. As professionals become more senior, the ability to persuade multiple stakeholders and build consensus becomes increasingly important.
Eugene also emphasized the importance of developing scarcity within an organization. This can come from becoming exceptionally strong in a particular function, such as valuation, or from accumulating distinctive experiences that others do not have.
Rather than spending excessive effort eliminating every weakness, she recommends bringing weaknesses above the minimum level required for professional effectiveness and then investing more time in developing differentiated strengths.
Section 3: Career Development, Diversity & Sustainable Growth
Q1: What strengths have been most important throughout your career?
Eugene identified two personal strengths: a willingness to take risks without excessive fear of change and an ability to quickly understand the strengths, weaknesses, and interpersonal relationships of people within an organization.
The latter, she explained, was not something she deliberately trained but rather a natural tendency. Combined with her willingness to take on different roles, these strengths allowed her to accumulate experiences across investment analysis and portfolio-company management.
Q2: How should women navigate being a minority in industries such as private equity?
Eugene observed that many challenges associated with being a female minority in private equity can arise from unfamiliarity and lack of understanding rather than deliberate discrimination. When she joined BCG in 2002, women represented less than 18% of consultants and there were no female partners, although she noted that the environment has changed significantly since then.
Her recommendations were to choose organizations with cultures that are open to diversity, identify personal differentiators beyond gender, and focus on areas within one’s control rather than becoming overly consumed by gender-related issues.
At IMM, she found an environment where individual differences were respected. She also noted that although she was initially assigned to the consumer sector partly because she was a woman, the experience ultimately became an advantage by helping her develop deeper industry expertise.
Q3: How do you use AI and continuous learning in your work?
Eugene currently uses Claude to identify additional areas for improvement and generate potential implications from financial analysis. Rather than relying on AI primarily for accuracy, she uses it as a tool for idea generation and identifying directions for further research.
Continuous learning is also part of her daily routine. She reads approximately 50 books per year and maintains a habit of waking at 5 a.m. and reading for 30 minutes. She recommends reading across genres, including novels and essays, rather than focusing exclusively on self-development books.
Q4: How do you build a sustainable long-term career?
Eugene maintains routines around early-morning exercise and reading while deliberately protecting time with her family. Although maintaining work-life balance can be particularly difficult at the junior level, she noted that professionals generally gain greater flexibility over their personal time as they become more senior.
She recommends developing an exercise habit from one’s twenties and emphasized that sustainable careers depend not only on professional achievement but also on maintaining a strong support system of family and friends and managing oneself effectively.
More broadly, she advises against becoming overly fixated on a single career objective. Instead, individuals should develop their own values and accumulate diverse experiences over time. For Eugene herself, intellectual stimulation and relationships with people from diverse backgrounds have been important sources of motivation throughout her career.
From Our Mentees 💬
Songhyun Rhee, Mentee
I learned soft leadership could be just as powerful as authoritative leadership. Being introverted could also be powerful when you focus on your own strengths.
Seeun Park, Mentee
Because the speaker had also thought deeply about her career path and had considered directions different from your undergraduate major, I found much of your advice very helpful. It was also a valuable opportunity to hear honest and realistic perspectives.
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