Business Week's Cover Story is "Thinking Man's Banker," Tim Collins '78

December 2, 2001

December 2, 2001, Greencastle, Ind. - Timothy C. Collins, founder and chief executive of Ripplewood Holdings LLC and a 1978 graduate of DePauw University, is on the cover of the December 10, 2001 Asian edition of Business Week, which includes (in all of its editions) an article on Collins entitled "Gaijin at the Gate." The magazine says that Collins, who heads a private equity fund, "is betting almost $2.5 billion of his investors' money that (his) nonstop networking (with Japanese leaders) will pay off in an improbable success story... He is committed to the idea that Japan is the ultimate restructuring play, a collection of undervalued assets that the specialists Ripplewood employs can turn around with elbow grease, some well-applied capital, and Western management knowhow."

Collins is quoted as saying, "Japan has one of the most productive industrial infrastructures going. It has the best engineers in the world, the best products, the best processes."

Later, Business Week's Brian Bremner and Julia Lichtblau write, "Given Collins' reputation as the consummate dealmaker, it's ironic that he almost checked out of the investment game in the late 1980s, when he was working at Lazard Frères in New York. A philosophy major in college who maintains a keen interest in the spiritual side of things, Collins wondered if he shouldn't be doing more with his life. In 1988, he spent a month laboring at a refugee camp in Sudan, all the while sorting through his priorities. In the end, Collins sought the advice of a mentor, Texas financier Richard Rainwater, who made millions for Bass Brothers Enterprises Inc. and, later, for George W. Bush. Collins recalls Rainwater telling him: 'God didn't make you a poet, or an opera singer, or a six-foot-eleven center. But you are pretty good at doing this.'"

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