Meet the 2 executives promoted to lead Apollo's $77 billion private equity business, as PE firms hand power to a younger generation of leaders

Apollo; Ruobing Su/Business Insider

David Sambur (left) and Matt Nord will lead Apollo's private equity business.

• David Sambur and Matt Nord have been quietly settling into their new roles as co-heads of Apollo Global Management's $77 billion private equity business.
• The pair are not household names in finance but have built a reputation for themselves as perhaps the most "Apolloesque" dealmakers at Leon Black's shop, working on deals spanning from healthcare to sports. 
• Business Insider spoke with a handful of their colleagues, including their boss, and reviewed a number of their deals, to offer a clearer picture of who will lead one of Apollo's most important business lines. 

David Sambur doesn't have a LinkedIn profile, or any social media presence for that matter.

Most of his public comments appear in canned press releases, like when his massive firm, Apollo Global Management agreed to acquire Shutterfly, the US digital imaging company in June. 

Sambur, who is stepping into a leadership role at Apollo, will struggle to stay out of the limelight much longer. 

He's now taking the reins of Apollo's $77 billion private equity unit, alongside his colleague Matt Nord. The two have worked together for the past 15 years, ever since they joined Apollo as investment bankers from Salomon Smith Barney.

Nord, 40, and Sambur, 39, are not household names in finance. But they have gradually built a reputation as some of the most "Apolloesque" dealmakers within the firm, known for their contrarian investing style, making bold bets that other PE firms wouldn't make and then executing those deals successfully. 

In their new roles, they oversee the second-largest of three business divisions at Apollo, which also has a more than $200 billion credit investing unit, as well as a $34 billion "real assets" unit, encompassing investing in physical assets like real estate, land and equipment. 

Private equity's unpleasant press

In interviews with Business Insider, Sambur and Nord said they will now take a more hands-on approach to communicating the firm's PE deals and investment strategy, at a time when private equity's role in the economy has come under scrutiny in the 2020 presidential race and candidates like Elizabeth Warren are calling for more transparency and accountability from the industry. 

Warren, who is now neck-and-neck with Joe Biden as the leading Democratic presidential candidate, has villainized PE executives as part of her campaign, saying they take over companies, load them with debt, strip assets, and then walk away - rich from huge management fees - when they go bankrupt. She has proposed legislation that would bring a 100 percent tax on fees earned by private equity firms and create laws to protect workers' financial interests in the event of bankruptcies. 

Last Friday, Warren tweeted about the shut down of Splinter News, a private equity owned news outlet, saying "Private equity firms are sucking the value out of our companies, and wiping out newspapers and digital news outlets."

Apollo's stock, which had been up 2.3% for the day, then saw its gains erased instantly.

Apollo did not own Splinter News, but the tweet linked to a 2018 article that was critical of the private equity industry. More recent critical articles have surfaced as well, including recent news reports of a newly-released academic study looking at private equity buyouts between 1980 and 2013, finding that PE ownership of companies led to fewer jobs there.  

Meanwhile, Apollo itself has had its own share of unwelcome press coverage.

In recent months, the firm's founder, Leon Black, has been faced with questions by reporters, investors and an analyst on an earnings call, about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, the late financier who was charged with underage sex trafficking until he died by suicide in a New York jail. (Epstein once ran Black's charitable organization, though Black has not been linked to any wrongdoing.)

People close to the Apollo leadership change say the Epstein news has not played a factor in the timing of the appointments, with one person stressing that Black's former friendship with Epstein is a personal matter, without consequence to Apollo the institution. 

Rather, the appointments reflect a pivotal time in the private equity industry, when prolific founders of some of the best-known PE shops, such as KKR, The Carlyle Group and TPG, are ceding power to a younger generation of leaders to take their firms forward into the future. 

Business Insider spoke with a handful of Nord and Sambur's colleagues, including their boss, and researched their deals to offer a clearer picture of who will now influence the direction of one of the world's most powerful money managers.

Two 'Apolloesque' dealmakers

By all accounts, Nord and Sambur's ascension within Apollo has been a long time coming, with senior management handing off responsibilities more than two years ago, when they started working more closely with then-PE head Scott Kleinman.

Nord and Sambur will continue reporting to Kleinman in his new role as co-president of Apollo's entire business, including areas in which it has expanded such as real estate and credit. 

"I had the job for nine years," Kleinman told Business Insider. "It was time to bring in some fresh perspective and showcase the talent we have in the organization." 

Kleinman said that Nord and Sambur were clear standouts for the roles, in part because of their dealmaking instincts, as illustrated in a handful of recent buyouts - deals, he said, that followed a pattern of buying companies others weren't interested in and then jamming to improve their balance sheets. 

Nord, for one, has been busy managing a healthcare company. 

Last July, Nord was behind Apollo's $5.6 billion acquisition of Tennessee-based hospital operator LifePoint Health.

The deal, which came after stop-and-go sale negotiations over price, gave LifePoint a whole new chain of hospitals throughout rural areas in the United States as Apollo merged the company with another one of its health businesses, RCCH HealthCare Partners. 

Personality-wise, Nord has been described as pleasant to work with, a "sweet guy" one colleague said, who makes executives feel comfortable in their skin rather than hammering them with Shark Tank style questions. His tone is almost professorial.

Sambur, on the other hand, is known for his stomach to stick with an investment despite unexpected business challenges. 

That's at least how the CEO of golf club company, ClubCorp, knows him.

"When things don't work out the way you hope and you watch someone consistently take the high road, it's a real compliment to the human being and the executive," said David Pillsbury, who joined ClubCorp as its CEO in 2018. Pillsbury didn't get into specifics, but said that he's seen Sambur make business decisions based on "what's right and fair" rather than what may be written in a contract. 

As soon as Pillsbury joined ClubCorp, he met with Sambur at his New York City headquarters and the private equity executive encouraged him to expand the company from a simple golf club into areas like entertainment and fitness. 

As part of this vision, ClubCorp launched an app that allowed members to order food and make tee-time reservations. It also bought a controlling stake in a golf entertainment company called BigShots Golf, which produces private and family friendly events where both golfers and non-golfers can play simulated golf games on electric screens, in both indoor and outdoor venues. 

Irina Novoselsky, CEO of CareerBuilder, said Sambur has a "high sense of urgency" and helped modernize the company with artificial intelligence. And Shutterfly CEO, Ryan O'Hara, said Sambur can clinch unlikely deals. He saw this when Sambur helped combine Shutterfly and Snapfish, an online photo storage and printing services company. 

O'Hara said that Shutterfly had previously sought to partner with Snapfish but "never found a way to make it happen." But with Sambur's persistence, and negotiating the deal without Shutterfly directly involved, he was able to make it work. "He navigated some unique dynamics to do that," said O'Hara. 

Other growing companies that have Sambur's fingerprints on them include online employment company CareerBuilder, which Apollo bought in 2017; Rackspace, a Texas-based cloud computing company that Apollo in 2016; and Outerwall, the owner of Redbox video kiosks, which Apollo bought in 2014. 

No special traditions, just work

Nord and Sambur officially learned of their appointments a couple weeks before Apollo's announcement, when they met with senior firm members, though it had been in the works for about a year.

Both were already involved in deciding annual compensation. In the near term, the promotions meant some additional administrative duties: meetings with HR about internal audits and managing the private equity unit's budget. 

There wasn't even really a formal vote on the appointments, people familiar with the matter said. Rather, it was more of a consensual understanding among firm management, stemming from their work on deals. 

Both Sambur and Nord said were no special traditions to welcome them to their posts. 

"Just work," said Nord.

"Not a lot of time for self-congratulatory stuff."