Sergio Ermotti Quotes

I consider each business investment based on concept and revenue.

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

Profit is the most global aspect of a business, and it is cross-functional.

I found an approach to investing that made enormous sense to me: rigorously analyzing a company's fundamentals, understanding exactly how it makes money, developing a view on the business's future prospects, and deciding if it's a good business.

Many businesses fail because the owner wasn't willing to invest and wasn't educated on the difference between spending money frivolously and investing money into the business for growth, and the risks and rewards of that cash infusion.

I'd stay away from investments in a variety of sectors that are capital intensive. Anyone who says we need $100 million before we know if what we're doing makes sense and the customers want it - that's not going to work.

I learned that you shouldn't take your most esoteric concept and fit it into the largest space with the highest fixed costs. It puts too much pressure on the restaurant to hit grand slams every day when there just aren't enough people who want to watch that sport.

I have a business to run and stockholders to think about.

One, I love the creativity. I love the ability to create a capital structure that is appropriate for a company, no matter what field it happens to be in.

I had some of the students in my finance class actually do some empirical work on capital structures, to see if we could find any obvious patterns in the data, but we couldn't see any.

The key, I think, from a business point of view, is to learn how to be efficient in making a record that's not too expensive, so that you're not going crazy spending tons of money making a product that might not ever return that money.

The tools used by economists to analyze business firms are too abstract and speculative to offer any guidance to entrepreneurs and managers in their constant struggle to bring novel products to consumers at low cost.

The swamp is a business model. It's a successful business model.

If you go back to the late '50s, there really was nothing called "academic finance." Well, there was something being taught in business schools as finance, but it really had no strong research underpinnings.

In the finance world, we used to spend all of our time looking backwards, reporting on what happened. Can I book it? What are the numbers? Now it's about looking into the future. It's about planning and integration. The role of finance is now that of a partner in the business.

The Pentagon should use data to guide financial decision-making.

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

Professional services industries like finance, consulting, and legal services are, by definition, meta-industries. That is, they serve to help large companies raise money, buy and sell each other, reorganize, implement new systems, conduct complex transactions, and so forth.

The best investments are the easiest ones to approve.

I view investors as our partners and stakeholders in the company. They are trying to build financial models. What I try to focus on is helping them understand how we think.

The essence of a good investment manager is one who studies a given business and extrapolates the future cash flows that the business is likely to generate over the next several years. Based on the cash flow and asset assessment, they can then arrive at their expected rate of return if they bought a fraction of that business at a given price.

When we do acquisitions, we decide what we want. We decide what fills a hole. And if the price is too high, our alternative is the $5 billion we spend on R&D every year. We're not well-known for overpaying, because at Oracle we always have an alternative.

You can't look at the problem and say, 'I want them to do more, better, faster miracles - and not invest in research, not invest in development, and have those miracles delivered to me free.' It's unrealistic.

I don't think it ever occurred to me that I wouldn't be an entrepreneur. My dad became a real estate developer, and that work is usually project-based. You attract investors for a project with a certain life cycle, and then you move on to the next thing. It's almost like being a serial entrepreneur, so I had that as an example.

Capital structure isn't an eyeshade economic thing: It's about your ability to protect your workforce and your service levels.