Jeff MacNelly Quotes

One of many strengths that I often see in successful women on Wall Street is a responsible balance between risk taking and risk mitigation - the ability to assess situations smartly and make the right medium-to-long-term decisions without being lured into reckless, short-term profit-taking.

Investing is a business where you can look very silly for a long period of time before you are proven right.

My own view is that every company requires a long-term view.

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 consider each business investment based on concept and revenue.

I think to some degree one of the strengths of the high tech industry is that people are actually willing to tell you things. When I went to Novell, I didn't know how to be a CEO, so I went in and I called all sorts of CEOs I knew. I called in a favor. I wanted to come by and listen to them tell me what it's like to be a CEO.

Producers are not gamblers. They want a good return on their investment.

On balance, after weighing the arguments, I believe that the time has come for Australia to create a new sovereign wealth fund.

I invested. I wanted to cushion the future. I'm a financial success!

I ended up buying a restaurant. Already we had invested in a gas station and a metal products plant.

I've been called Mr. Patient Money because I have the patience to work through challenging circumstances.

I decided that the stock market was not an option for IKEA. I knew that only a long-term perspective could secure our growth plans, and I didn't want IKEA to become dependent on financial institutions.

I was stupid in a business way. I should have been greedier.

If my businesses or my investments are not profitable, then I don't eat. And I like to eat.

We can't just live as rentiers off the oil fund.

The person who I admire most in business is Warren Buffett. He is a long-term investor and has brilliant ideas, and he sticks to them.

With poker, you have a resolution of the hand within a couple of minutes. Whereas, even if the thought process in investing is very much the same, you're looking at an outcome that could be 2, 3, 4, 5 years from when you make the original decision. And the mindset related to that is very different.

What I like to say when you get into something that feels like a bubble or, at least, feels irrational is that you still want to build a company that has a strong discipline, business-building culture.

I never heard of anyone saying they want to deploy their capital wisely and go buy a sports franchise. What you want to do is just not lose money. You see, I don't have to work anymore. I tell people I don't have a real job. On the other hand, I learned long ago that you can't go broke if you turn a profit.

When we raised the first Foundry Group fund in 2007, we took over 100 first meetings. We told our story several hundred times. As part of it was a slide called 'Strategy.' I still repeat the elements of that slide regularly, a decade later, as our core strategy has not changed.

If you're making all your money simply betting on interest rates, that's not a business. Flow is a business. On the outside, they look the same for a while. But when you dig into them, no, they weren't exactly the same.

We think the ownership culture is very important, so we like to invest in businesses whose leaders are also owners.

Far too many of my peers were taken in by the jet-setting rock star lifestyle and didn't realise the money might not last forever - but I have always had an eye on the future and invest in a syndicate to share risk.

I succeeded at venture capital because, for years, I rarely thought about or spent time on anything else. Anything less than that unmitigated full commitment leaves me feeling frustrated and ineffective.

Keep your debt low, and ask, Can your operational expertise make an impact? Then you're taking away a lot of the risk.