Gerry Schwartz Quotes

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

I have been in Wall Street all of my life. I love it. It has been good to me. I know many wonderful, decent, honorable, ethical, hard-working people that were in Wall Street with me.

One of the things that's great about the financial industry is, it's really financially rewarding.

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

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

The mutual fund industry provided the money for Intel and Motorola and Hewlett-Packard to crush the competitors.

It is usually people in the money business, finance, and international trade that are really rich.

I meet young people all the time who say something like, 'I want to work in venture capital.' And I can see why. Who wouldn't want to be smart, well-paid, dispense large sums of money, and tell people what to do?

I think Wall Street is very important, especially to tech companies. Wall Street will get in their rhythm and go fund tech companies, and tech companies will go create jobs and employ a lot of people, so there's that aspect of Wall Street.

You go public because you want access to capital in the form of debt and equity.

My best decision was to choose to go to Wall Street over law. I learned a lot and focused on the expanding software industry at a time when the independent software industry was just beginning.

Whatever the potential pitfalls, banks are increasingly enthusiastic about venture capital, particularly in new companies with strong prospects in fields like health care and technology.

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

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.

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.

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

In a capitalist society, persons who create capital, like Michael Eisner, are given the staggering rewards.

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.

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

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

Most of the money I make now comes from investments from CrunchFund. And the vast majority of that is what's called carried interest.

But Wall Street people are in fact very smart; they're funny, they're not company men who work their way up the chain.

I am not in Wall Street for my health.

Well private money can take risks in a way that government money often isn't willing to.

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