Philip Hammarskjold

Philip Hammarskjold is Executive Chairman of Hellman & Friedman, one of the world's oldest and largest private equity firms, managing roughly $115 billion in assets as of year-end 2025. He serves as Chairman of the firm's Investment Committee and sits on its Compensation Committee. He joined H&F in 1992 and rose to run the firm, serving as Chief Executive Officer from 2009 to 2017 and then as Co-CEO in 2018 before transitioning to Executive Chairman.

The leadership transition was formalized in August 2018, when H&F moved away from a co-CEO structure: Patrick Healy became sole CEO while Hammarskjold stepped back from day-to-day operations into the Executive Chairman role, retaining chairmanship of the Investment Committee — the seat of ultimate deal authority at the firm.

Before joining H&F, Hammarskjold worked in the Merchant Banking Department of Morgan Stanley & Co. in New York and in the Corporate Advisory Department of Dominguez Barry Samuel Montagu in Sydney, Australia. He holds a bachelor's degree from Princeton University and an MBA from Harvard Business School, where he graduated as a Baker Scholar (top of his class).

Over his career he has served on the boards of numerous H&F portfolio companies. He is currently a director of Cordis, Caliber Collision, and Circana (the merged NPD/IRI market-research company), and was formerly a director of AlixPartners, Catalina Marketing, Change Healthcare (formerly Emdeon), Digitas, DoubleClick, GeoVera Insurance Group, Goodman Global, Grocery Outlet, Texas Genco, and Young & Rubicam.

• Strategy: H&F pursues "a single private equity strategy," building a concentrated portfolio of large-scale investments in industries the firm knows deeply, rather than spreading capital thinly across many small bets.
• Stage & structure: Large equity investments in scaled, high-quality, growing businesses — acting as both a controlling shareholder and an influential minority investor, using a variety of transaction and capital structures.
• Sectors: Software & technology, financial services, healthcare, consumer & retail, and other service-based businesses. H&F emphasizes companies whose most important assets are intangible — "the people, their business practices and intellectual capital, and their customer relationships."
• What makes them say yes: Durable, growing companies with strong management teams in developed markets (U.S. and Europe); alignment and long-term partnership over quick flips. Notably, H&F does not charge transaction or monitoring fees to portfolio companies.
• Scale: This is not seed or angel investing — H&F deploys multibillion-dollar funds (HFCP X: $24.4B; Fund XI: ~$22B) into companies that already have significant scale.