N. Robert Hammer Quotes

I come from the operations side of the business, and I buy companies to operate them, not to flip them.

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.

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

As a CEO, I had significant exposure to private equity, enough that I had in no way bought into the media's caricature: rapacious privateers who destroy companies.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Look, don't congratulate us when we buy a company, congratulate us when we sell it. Because any fool can overpay and buy a company, as long as money will last to buy it.

The deal machinations many companies put themselves through, while certainly a bonanza for investment bankers, can confound the typical investor.

When I was a CEO, I thought I understood private equity. I didn't. And what I've learned since my retirement, and since becoming directly involved in the world of private equity, points the way to a new career path for thousands of talented senior executives - and a new engine for value creation.

VCs like acquisitions as much as IPOs because the acquiring companies often can rationalize paying large multiples over the current valuation of the startup.

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.

In the 1980s, corporate raiders began mounting unfriendly takeovers of companies that could deliver higher returns to their shareholders - if they abandoned their other stakeholders.

This is a bit like big-game hunting. You look for companies of a certain size that deserve to be public.

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.

When I started in the business in 1999 and 2000, we had companies that were going public in two, three or four years.

A successful economic development strategy must focus on improving the skills of the area's workforce, reducing the cost of doing business and making available the resources business needs to compete and thrive in today's global economy.

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

The activists play the balance sheet by selling a division to buy back stock and leveraging the balance sheet and buying back more stock.