Private Equity Quotes

In the 1930s, there was a stretch where you could borrow more against the real estate than you could sell it for. I think that's what's going on in today's private-equity world.

We welcome the interest from PE firms, as we see it as a sign of our progress, and my position is that we should always open the doors to those who want to bring capital to our industry.

State funds, private equity, venture capital, and institutional lending all have their role in the lifecycle of a high tech startup, but angel capital is crucial for first-time entrepreneurs. Angel investors provide more than just cash; they bring years of expertise as both founders of businesses and as seasoned investors.

Congress has all sorts of rules, hedge fund managers, private equity managers, executives, movie stars, fall into that allow them to escape or defer into the future not paying their taxes. And if you can defer your tax into the future, it's the best deal in the world, because you don't just get to eat your cake and have it too. You get to eat your cake and have a bigger cake.

Pension funds, endowments, and private investors trust Mitt Romney's former company Bain Capital enough to hand it billions of dollars in assets.

I've nothing against Goldman Sachs. But Goldman Sachs isn't an investment bank. Goldman Sachs is a hedge fund. It's bigger than any hedge fund. It's more leveraged, to the power of three or five, than any hedge fund.

I have been in Wall Street all of my life. I love it. It has been good to me. I know many wonderful, decent, honorable, ethical, hard-working people that were in Wall Street with me.

Private equity is a science project for many, many years, and when you have a science project, it leaves the human beings as a secondary fact.

Private equity firms aren't necessarily evil by definition. There are many stories of successful turnarounds fueled by private equity, often involving multiple floundering businesses that are rolled into a single entity, eliminating duplicative overhead.

I started a private equity fund and we invest in energy, mining, agriculture kind of things in Africa.

Unbeknownst to most American investors, significant portions of their public pension, mutual fund, life insurance and private portfolios are comprised of stocks of privately held companies that partner with state sponsors of terror.

As a serial entrepreneur, angel investor and public company CEO, nothing irks me more than when a startup founder talks about wanting to cash in with an initial public offering.

I have either run private equity funded companies or been a partner in a private equity fund since 1982. I've had a front row view of the vital role private equity continues to play in building and keeping American businesses competitive in the global economy.

We've always been modestly leveraged, and we've never believed in a great deal of leverage on either our private equity business or on our investment banking business. And I think it really goes back to my uncle and dad growing up in the Depression and just seeing what happened to people who were overly levered.

When I was in the leverage buy-out business we bought Weetabix and we leveraged it up to make our return. You could say that anyone who was eating Weetabix was paying for our purchase of Weetabix. It was just business. It is the same for Liverpool.

Little startups are ridiculously overfunded.

Venture-backed startups with billion dollar market caps are called 'unicorns' because they are supposed to be rare mythical creatures that few entrepreneurs will ever ride.

Some of my best friends are Venture Capitalists, but let's face it, a hamster with Alzheimer's could make those kind of numbers. It's great work if you can get it.

You look at what happened with Chrysler, it went through that bankruptcy, and it's re-emerged in a much different fashion, privately held in some of those things, and it's really putting out a great product.

Small- and medium-sized businesses need access to a diverse range of finance options, including non-bank lending. These new forms of finance are still small in scale today but they should, over time, bring additional choice and greater competition to the lending market.

There is no correlation between a weak IPO market and an impact on early-stage VCs.

A bubble in early-stage funding means maybe there's $300 million at work when maybe there should be $150, as opposed to a bubble in late-stage funding which means there's $20 billion at work when there should be $3.

I'm a very practical, pragmatic capitalist. I was trained at Goldman Sachs. I went to Harvard Business School. I was as hard-nosed a capitalist as you get. I specialized in media, in investing in media companies, and it's a very, very tough environment.

I see myself as a private-equity investor that helps rebuild companies. Restructuring is a cottage industry in that there aren't that many serious practitioners.

We have the Nasdaq private market. But we also want to make sure that every investor has an opportunity to ultimately join in growth and the success of these great companies that we have that have been formed in the United States.