Ron Williams Quotes

If private-equity firms are as good at remaking companies as they claim, they don't need tax loopholes to make money.

We really wake up every day trying to build businesses. That is the goal of private equity. It's a misnomer out there that private equity profits by shrinking companies. In fact, it's just the opposite. Private equity creates value by growing great companies.

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.

Big banks have long had private equity divisions that put up capital for deals too complex or risky for individual shareholders to finance.

People used to think that private equity was basically just a compensation scheme, but it is much more about making companies more efficient.

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.

Wall Street is always too biased toward short-term profitability and biased against long-term growth.

I've probably done more venture capital deals and expansion financings than I have done private equity deals. But both are the same. Private equity companies have also built jobs.

In the '70s and '80s, what private equity did is it changed corporate America. It started holding companies accountable, and for the first time managers started thinking like owners.

If you're running a business for the long term, the last thing you should be doing is borrowing money to buy back stock.

I think this is also a great time to invest in private equity, helping companies grow from the ground up.

How do you make money? Spinoffs, split-ups, liquidations, mergers and acquisitions.

STG is a combination of a holding company and a private equity model.

When you are buying companies, everyone in the company feels very good. Their chests are puffed out. At Blackstone, I used to tell people that there is nothing more fun than buying a company with somebody else's money. The business is growing, which creates more opportunity for your employees.

Private-equity and hedge-fund guys typically come into a situation of mediocrity, where rapid change may result in a profit.

When investors, particularly investment bankers, talk about splitting up companies, there's a lot of discussion about multiple expansion, and the reality is multiple expansion is an outcome, not a strategy.

There is a difference between being a venture capitalist and a vulture capitalist

I have long believed the corporate world is plagued by poor capital allocation decisions.

Carl Icahn, corporate raider by trade, is creative, a scrambler, and certainly not to be underestimated.

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.

Investments - particularly those that involve the change of control of a company - only work when they work well for all parties involved.

I learned about M&A and how to value assets and work with investment bankers.

The vast business interests of the country will be safe in your hands.

Well private money can take risks in a way that government money often isn't willing to.

I've actually taken companies public, I've actually busted companies, I've actually gone broke.