ValueAct Capital

“We got her to sell the only share she'd ever sold in our company, sixty million dollars to us, because we told her how scary it was to see all these scandals.”

“There's only three ways to win equity investing. One is you have better information or faster information and computer programs and fiber optic cables that you tunnel through railway Lines and stuff, and we don't do that. The second way is you understand the w…”

“I looked back at the Microsoft proxy this year, and I was really pleased to see that the basic architecture of what we designed over a decade ago is still in place.”

“There have been 27 cases where we've been involved in CEO succession.”

“That analysis of let's just ignore what you see in the 10 K. Let's just build up zero base. What does this business cost structure look like? That is by far, I think the most important exercise that we do early in our due diligence process.”

“A little esoteric, but it relates to a few years later, we built a big position in Roblox because we understood the direction of travel of the video game industry was to massive multiplayer user generated communications and social dynamics into it.”

“In our entire history, we've only had two proxy contests, over 125 investments, 55 board seats, only two proxy contests.”

“The second one was in Japan. It was the largest ever proxy contest in Japan, a company called Seven and I Holdings.”

“Usually when we're investing in a company, there are a lot of people inside the company who see the exact same opportunity that we see. It's almost never the case that we have some idea that nobody in the company has ever thought of.”

“With Enron, when you got to what was commonly considered the smart money, people either weren't invested in Enron, or they were short. And it was largely long-only funds and index funds, and what we think of in terrible terms, but the dumb money that was inves…”