Ronnie Screwvala Quotes

Any successful company in the valley gets acquisition offers and has to decide whether or not to take them.

Venture capital is about capturing the value between the startup phase and the public company phase.

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

I've had two IPOs: with Etsy in 2015 and Cloudera in 2016. There have also been a ton of trade sales in my portfolio.

I delivered lectures, and I was also a consultant for international companies in finance, both private equity and big venture capital funds.

It used to be that you would go in to see a CEO, and you would ask them, 'Is your company for sale?' and if they said 'No, we have no interest in selling,' that was sort of the end of the conversation.

If I'm on the board of any company where there's an offer that comes in, I want to negotiate.

The best thing is to go public only when you're absolutely sure that's the right move for the company. And in order to make sure that is the case, you need to have as much control over the company as possible, which means not giving up control early on.

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.

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.

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.

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

I went public in 2002 in America, and do you know what Wall Street valued my concession in Macau at? Zero.

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.

The question for Dropbox is whether, when they run out of private sources for funding, they will be able to maintain that valuation when they go to public sources for funding and their valuation is set on the public markets.

I buy companies I want to own. I buy companies that make a lot of money, that don't have a lot of debt, and that I can understand.

Even if you're a relatively small player in search, that can still mean a company that's worth several billion dollars.

Even if a company is taken private, at some stage people want to make it public.

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

As I have seen with a lot of companies I have covered, acquisition interest can be a heady experience, and not always in a good way.

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.

Raise as little as you can to get you to something that you can show - plus maybe a quarter or two so you have a little bit of cushion - and then raise some more money. Raise as little - not as much - as you can because that's the most expensive equity you're going to sell.

With a private company, you've got to get into who's investing and what's the balance sheet like. So going public is a positive thing from the perspective of the sales organization.

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.

We listen to the entrepreneur. We try to have a fine tuning fork to understand what they are saying and whether that makes sense and know it when we see it. We don't try to do too much predicting.