Henry Kravis Quotes

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

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.

Mergers and acquisitions, we are always looking for that.

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

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.

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

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

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'll say this: I can't think of one instance in my 20 years in venture capital in which I have wanted to sell a company before the entrepreneur.

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

You don't get a chance to buy a company like NBCUniversal unless it's not doing well.

Private equity firms aren't necessarily evil by definition. There are many stories of successful turnarounds fueled by private equity, often involving multiple floundering businesses that are rolled into a single entity, eliminating duplicative overhead.

Much of what is called investment is actually nothing more than mergers and acquisitions, and of course mergers and acquisitions are generally accompanied by downsizing.

I don't think it's a good idea to plan to sell a company.

VC firms are... responsible for the full life cycle of a company: they find it, help it grow, open up a Rolodex, and sell it.

I don't invest in companies where my mental model is that they need to get themselves acquired in the next few years - or ever.

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

In my world, historical revenue is the least interesting thing to consider in an acquisition strategy.

I never look at an acquisition really by size.

Yahoo would benefit from going private or becoming part of a larger corporation.

For some companies, going public makes the most sense. For others, remaining private is preferable.

I have never had a situation where an investee company would have a good value by having a banker. Investment bankers are there to please future clients. You are a temporary client; they are therefore not to get you the best valuation.

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

The historical evidence shows that shareholders usually greatly benefit from mergers.

I spent many hours slaving away, day and night, bleary eyed, on multi-million pound takeovers, mergers and acquisitions, and the rest. It could sound glamorous (especially when it involved overseas travel) but often it wasn't partly because, as a lawyer, you were not the one calling the shots.