Vincent Tan Quotes

When I first got into business, I made a lot of bad decisions.

Good decisions can have bad short-term outcomes but be great for the business long-term.

I spend 90 percent of my time saying no, and my accountant yells at me for it, but when I started in this business, I wanted my career to have legs.

Even though I'm a hype man myself, I like the practicality of it all. People who understand how to turn a profit. At the end of the day, this is still business so I'm looking for real practical knowledge of how to actually make money, not necessarily raise it.

One way to mitigate our risk is to invest in companies with understandable business models.

Great entrepreneurs are often great listeners and they can spot patterns and pick up on small details in customer stories.

When better business decisions are made, economists won't make them.

Your initial instincts about investments and people are usually correct. We do a lot of due diligence in this business and most of the time it comes out where we started.

You've got to know business before you go to show business.

If you don't understand the details of your business you are going to fail.

I have almost no interest in quarterly reports. Running a business or investing in a business based on quarterly earnings doesn't make any sense at all to me.

Never forget this simple truism: Forecasting is marketing, plain and simple.

I don't think you should ever start a business and move in a direction where you can't see it becoming a business.

Business, more than any other occupation, is a continual dealing with the future; it is a continual calculation, an instinctive exercise in foresight.

The Jews had, as a matter of fact, long been all along the most ingenious entrepreneurs. It was only our own future that we had never built upon a business basis.

This is a business. Be smart. Choose wisely.

The successful man is the one who finds out what is the matter with his business before his competitors do.

As a professional, you can afford to pick some stocks and be wrong about a few of them. To keep your job, you cannot take the risk of being seen to be wrong about the 'big picture' for very long.

I don't keep up on a lot of the business trends.

The mercantile business did not suit me.

Know the business; you need to know the business side of things.

I prefer to like the people I invest in, but it's not an absolute necessity, as long as they have a good mind and I know they'll do whatever it takes to be successful.

Know the business, learn the business, own something.

My mother really didn't know a heck of a lot about business. She was a very good mother, that made sure we ate right and we had our cod liver oil, but didn't know a heck of a lot about what I did.

Enterprises that depend on many rarely succeed.