Ehud Barak Quotes

I think one of the key differentiators I bring to the table as a venture capitalist is a solid understanding of the public markets and how they operate.

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

As I became a venture capitalist, it's almost like I went to the dark side for a while.

I'm a very practical, pragmatic capitalist. I was trained at Goldman Sachs. I went to Harvard Business School. I was as hard-nosed a capitalist as you get. I specialized in media, in investing in media companies, and it's a very, very tough environment.

My most difficult class at Harvard Business School would have to be finance.

I wanted to be a venture capitalist and join Sequoia Capital. They've financed and helped built some really special and enormously successful companies, including Google, Yahoo, Paypal, YouTube, Cisco, Oracle, Apple, and also Zappos.

I wanted a CFO with public company experience; I needed an HR department, new office space, and a board which could help me grow the business. Insight, the private equity firm I chose, helped me with all that.

Private equity has been the purview of super wealthy individuals and institutions.

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

In India, the investment banking industry is a little different. Overseas, the structures are very complicated, but not in India.

As part of our research, we monitor just about every announced deal globally that is in excess of a billion dollars.

Goldman Sachs saying they might be interested in such an investment. I'm familiar with the company. I've known the management, the current management, Jack Welch before Jeff Immelt. I've known him for decades.

Investment banking is not a business; it is a personal service where bankers work hand in hand with their clients. And it is a service that must not simply be about making bigger and bigger deals that reap rewards for only a small group of executives.

There is no country in the world where it's as easy to find venture capital in the stock market as the United States.

I've been a customer of the top venture capital firms, so I know exactly what they do and don't do.

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.

In order to access private capital, you have to provide competitive return on investment. In order to give competitive returns to investors, you've got to operate on a profitable basis and be thinking of yourself as a business.

We don't think of ourselves as a regional investment bank. We think of ourselves as merchant bankers with clients all over the country.

Who is Antonio Weiss? He's the head of global investment banking for the financial giant Lazard.

[Corporate] takeovers are for the public good, but that's not why I do it. I do it to make money.

Blackstone is a major client of many of the largest banks around the world.

Goldman in the '80s was like a priesthood, a monastic experience where you worked all the time but were incredibly dedicated to client services, to building and growing companies.

Goldman Sachs isn't the firm it once was when I worked for it, but it's still one of the building blocks of our capitalist society.

If you're just interested in the prestige of banking, that's not what's going to sustain you. You have to be interested in what we do: managing and originating capital, helping issuers and investors come together is great, bringing these companies to life.

If you look at Citadel today, that's really - the founding principle of the firm is a real pursuit of talent, a pursuit of people who have a passion for finance, and a pursuit of individuals who make good decisions day in and day out.