CEO

“CEOs, managing partners, leaders in professional service firms, we've tracked them, they spend most of their time with people that are like them, with the stars.”

“So essentially the CEOs that had higher levels of risk taking in their private lives, we saw the same attributes in the firm. So everything from higher leverage, Higher prevalence of M&A activity, higher equity return volatility. It was almost like everything …”

“Really talking to CFOs on the ground and CEOs on the ground is really where you understand where the pressure points are in a system, and it actually helps you allocate capital better.”

“Turns out that going to business school empirically does not mean that your stock price does better. Turns out working at an investment bank or top tier consulting firm has no impact on the stock price of the company that you run. Turns out that your track rec…”

“PWC had a report out, I don't know, maybe it was six months ago and said that a third of all the CEOs that had been laid off in a prior year, it was due to ethical lapses.”

“For me or Providence Equity, I always say, if you go into a board meeting, and you know more than the CEO, or you think you know more than the CEO, you got the wrong CEO.”

“If I want to know maybe about auto technology, obviously she's the one to talk to, but she's long. That's the only way. And that creates a bias because if you own a company, if you manage a company, you think it's going to do well.”

“There's founders and there's CEOs. In rare occasions, the founder can be the CEO. And obviously when that works, I think it works most beautifully.”

“Eight out of the 10 CEOs of the companies in which we invest in today were educated in either Europe or the US.”

“That's the way that most CEOs misinterpret what they're standing up in front of a company to do. They think that they're there to project power and that they are there to sometimes bamboozle an audience.”

“One of the things that Steve did, and there's really not many other people that do this, is call out CEOs. And he did it one after the other, and he was not afraid to do it.”

“Building a relationship, coffees, dinners, lunches, whatever, with the CEO, with the management team, because what you're doing is you're building trust and respect, and you're building this goodwill bank such that when tough times happen, you have the agency …”

“They don't like to sit there and talk about the next quarter. They couldn't give it to us. They're not interested in it. They think it's a waste of the time. They think you are a boring guy. They want to talk about corporate culture. They want to talk about wh…”

“I think you're going to find many of the people that were the head human resource manager eventually goes to become CEOs.”

“This is narrative creation. This is what makes for a successful CEO today, Ted, is the ability to create and sell a story.”

“But what we learned was most CEOs are knocking around these conferences without a plan. No one's really thought about how do we get the value.”

“The role of the CEO is to set the culture, make the big sale, solve the big problem.”

“And we had a rule at Bessemer. If the company called you back, it really sucked. It was the CEO you call every two days for a month. That's the CEO you want to get on the phone.”

“We always found it extremely useful to talk to the CEOs and the entrepreneurs of the portfolio companies of the venture firms”

“The one, ironically, that sits at the top is that it's really lonely at the top. Oftentimes, an individual or a partnership team, they have things in their head that they're thinking about that they can't share with anybody else. And they've exhausted all the …”

“You can't take the majority owner of a company and say, you're a zero. I have all the value at the hold co. Have a nice day. Are you going to manage the business? Are you going to show up at every board meeting? You just told the CEO and his team or her team t…”

“The vast majority of the time, if you talk to a CEO and she can tell you what the career aspirations of her five or six direct reports are, the likelihood that she's a really good manager of those people is quite high.”