How Perry Golkin Built Public Pension Capital Into a $2.17 Billion Raiser

Plenty of private equity firms are founded by executives who leave a mega-fund to strike out on their own. Fewer of them are built by someone who spent a quarter century inside that mega-fund learning, specifically, how institutional money gets raised and kept, and then built a firm named after exactly the LP base that expertise was meant to serve.

Perry Golkin is co-founder and CEO of Public Pension Capital, the middle-market private equity firm whose flagship vehicle, Public Pension Capital LLC, filed $2.173 billion on September 24. Golkin spent 25 years at KKR, from 1986 to 2011, rising to general partner and sitting on the firm's Operating Committee, chairing its Portfolio Management Committee for five years, serving as KKR's New York Administrative Partner, and leading the group responsible for KKR's investor relations and fundraising before he departed to found PPC in 2011. That is not a resume built around picking deals alone, it is a resume built specifically around convincing large, conservative pools of institutional capital, the pensions, endowments, insurers and foundations PPC now serves directly, to commit and stay committed across market cycles.

What This $2.17 Billion Raise Represents for PPC's Platform

The size of this single filing matters more than it might first appear. Public Pension Capital manages approximately $2.3 billion in committed capital across its platform, which means this one vehicle's $2.173 billion represents nearly the entirety of the firm's institutional capital base in a single line item, not one fund among many comparably sized ones. For a firm 15 years into its life, that concentration says PPC has scaled to a single, dominant flagship strategy that its LP base has consolidated behind, rather than spreading commitments thin across a wide family of smaller, less proven vehicles.

PPC's actual investment strategy sits in middle-market service businesses generating roughly $5 million to $30 million in EBITDA, organized around three verticals: Industrial Services, Business and Financial Services, and Healthcare Services. Past portfolio investments have included Edustaff, a staffing services company, Life Science Outsourcing, a medical device contract manufacturer, and Aduro Advisors, a fund administration services firm, giving a concrete sense of the kind of established, cash-generating operating businesses PPC actually buys into rather than a generic private equity label. Golkin's continued academic presence, teaching at Wharton's Executive Education program and holding a faculty appointment at Penn Carey Law, also keeps him embedded in the same institutional and academic networks that feed PPC's LP relationships, an unusual but deliberate extension of the investor relations discipline he built at KKR.

Why the KKR Pedigree Still Matters 15 Years Later

A founder's departure from a mega-fund to start something smaller is often framed as a step down in scale. Golkin's trajectory reads more like a deliberate specialization: KKR's platform is built for the largest buyouts in the market, while PPC applies the same institutional discipline, the same rigor around partnership, value creation and operational improvement that Golkin helped codify at KKR's Portfolio Management Committee, to a segment of the market too small for KKR's own mega-funds to touch efficiently. That gap, well-run middle-market service businesses with real cash flow but not the scale for a bulge-bracket buyout shop, is exactly where a KKR-trained team with genuine fundraising credibility can build a durable, differentiated platform, and a $2.17 billion raise 15 years in is evidence that the LP base has bought into that thesis at scale.

Golkin did not build PPC alone. His co-founder, Mike Tokarz, is also a former KKR partner, and the wider PPC Enterprises team carries more than 275 years of combined private equity experience across its senior ranks, a density of institutional-buyout pedigree that is unusual for a firm operating at PPC's middle-market scale. That combination, deep mega-fund training applied deliberately to a smaller deal size, is part of what has let PPC pitch pensions and endowments a message that is easy to understand even for allocators who have never written a middle-market check before: the same discipline that built KKR's track record, sized to businesses institutional buyout funds routinely pass over.

What This Means for Founders

Public Pension Capital is not a venture investor and does not write early-stage checks, so this is not a fund to approach with a pre-revenue pitch deck. But for a founder or owner-operator running an established, profitable services business in industrial services, business and financial services, or healthcare services, generating somewhere in the $5 million to $30 million EBITDA range, this is exactly the kind of buyer or growth partner worth knowing exists. A founder at that stage weighing a full sale, a partial recapitalization, or a growth partnership to fund expansion should understand that PPC's whole model is built around adding value to businesses already at that scale through industry relationships, customer introductions and operational improvement, not around swinging for a venture-style outcome. Knowing a buyer like PPC exists, and understanding the specific EBITDA band and verticals it targets, is useful well before a founder is actually ready to have that conversation.

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