Management Team

“Private investors are often selling to management teams. And at some level that can mean telling management teams what they need to hear, because you want to be able to keep participating in the rounds.”

“If I'm asking a management team questions, there is this heaviness that exists. You try and break through, but just naturally exists where the management team, okay, here come the private equity folks. The private equity folks walk in like, okay, here's the ma…”

“One of the things that we've done is leaned in and enhanced the management teams of the businesses that we've owned to give them the resources to do some of these things, because it's unrealistic to assume that someone's going to do their day job and all of th…”

“A board of directors that had perverse incentives, a management team that had perverse incentives.”

“You can tell what stage of a company and what type of management they have. By the quality, by the theme, just by the look of the deck. And it sounds shallow and maybe a lot of investors won't admit it, but I make a definite judgment call on that.”

“It's not the founder, per se. I want to see the level of the commitment between the management team to each other, because you can win from time to time with one star player, i.e. The founder, or a key IT person, or what have you. But generally speaking, for a…”

“Every time you open your mouth to report your quarter, your stocks up or down 20%. What that tells me is, You are not doing a good job communicating your business. You don't have good visibility around your business because you are surprising the market every …”

“I actually think once you even have two million in revenue, all that matters is the management team. Nothing else matters. You think competition matters, but a great head of engineering and product will outpace the competition, right? A great growth marketer w…”

“The number is 80% of the management team will turn over in a turnaround.”

“My terminology from experience is there are VCs that are seagulls, And here's my definition. They fly into a room, or fly into a meeting, fly into a location, they basically take a shit, and they fly away. They talk a lot, they give work to do for other people…”

“I try and really listen closely to the management teams, you know, cause, cause they are so much closer to the action. And, you know, if you're talking about, should you sell a private company or not? Their recommendations need to be really discerned and close…”

“I want to spend an hour, hour and a half with each one of the management team members And I just want to have an honest conversation with them. Just a very basic, candid discussion of, so if this was your money, would you do this deal? Am I doing something int…”

“I have one of my MBA is recalculate everything. And I'm like, this is a symptom of a very serious problem, right? We don't trust the management team to present the correct numbers. We don't correct them to do the trust them to do the right formulas.”

“And that feeling is a complicated result of charm, beauty, eloquence, all these factors that don't really, in the end, correlate very well to are they a great business person or not.”

“I put things in three basic buckets. Low percentage of the time management that is so stellar. That you think they can take a very marginal product, right? They can sell ice to an Eskimo, and there's drugs like that. And they can find a way to get it across th…”

“If a decision is easy, it's probably a half measure. If it's hard, if it's really damn hard, if it's controversial, you're probably doing enough of it.”

“In my experience in sitting on boards, and I'm sad on many, no matter how hard you tried, you never really know what's going, my experience has been, you never really know what's going on inside of a company, so board members are entirely dependent on On the m…”

“Probably the biggest mistake that I've made in my career is underappreciating how important a good management team is, because if you have a great molecule and it meets a bad management team, you can destroy a tremendous amount of value just by making bad deci…”

“We have a lot of management teams actually calling us for inbound requests on what can I do to improve my profile and what should I be focusing on?”

“In accounting, we teach people that you should ignore fixed and sunk costs and only look at the marginal cost and marginal revenue Associated with the proposal that you're making a decision about. And that idea that you should ignore sunk costs, and just look …”

“You need a really strong management team if you're gonna do things like that. You have to be really careful if the management team isn't strong enough to handle, you know, because they have even more context.”

“Board meetings are rated most highly when people are energized and when the management team takes away a couple of good, useful ideas. So I think in a three hour board meeting, five ideas that the manager team writes down and tries to figure out what to deal w…”

“We almost always try to work through the management team directly, or if we are interacting with VCs, we are typically trying to do so with the consent of management.”