The 1992 book Merchants of Debt, a critical history of the private equity firm KKR, recounts the moment in the early 1980s when a firm executive came across VisiCalc, the spreadsheet software that would upend both KKR and Wall Street.
“KKR couldn’t rapidly stalk several companies at once, because its financial blueprints required weeks of calculations by hand,” George Anders wrote of the old way of doing business. But with the arrival of VisiCalc “all of a sudden, giant companies’ finances could be picked apart in an afternoon”.
After VisiCalc came Lotus 1-2-3 and later Microsoft Excel. For investors like Martin Brand, who today runs Blackstone’s US leveraged buyout group, it is now possible to get a deal analysis done while still on the phone to the investment banker making the sales pitch.