Eric Bischoff Quotes

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.

Over the next few years the boardrooms of America are going to light up with hot flashes.

Monday Night Football started in 1970, and when it started, it was something extremely special because sports had not been aired in prime time. So, it was a novelty, and a lot of people thought it wouldn't work, and, of course, it worked spectacularly well.

Going public is 18-month process, while an acquisition is a 6-month process. Going public means going under so much scrutiny, regulatory approval, auditing, magnified 10 times. Having the stomach to do that isn't necessarily in my DNA. My DNA is building a product and a service.

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

I don't think LVMH will want to significantly change the strategy of Loro Piana, and I don't think that they would have bought it otherwise.

M&A is always an opportunistic tool to grow a company.

I was vehemently against acquisitions. Now let's buy everything in sight. Well, that's a slight exaggeration. We are a little more strategic than that. But everything was on sale.

M&A negotiations feel really fun. This is one of the biggest killers of companies, is they entertain acquisition conversations.

I think our Acompli acquisition was an interesting one, which started with a partnership and looking at their mobile e-mail app on iOS and Android. And what I would like to highlight with that one is the speed that we actually turned that around and brought it out the door.

I think that Amazon made an incredible play with the Twitch purchase.

I was approached by a company in San Francisco called Fantex. I did my due diligence on it. I tried to outweigh the pros and cons. Then I just made a business decision.

We were lucky that when we were making the transition from children's to prime time a lot of other presenters our age shied away from that arena.

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.

Edelman maintains a very conservative balance sheet. We do small acquisitions. This helps me sleep well at night.

There I was - 20 years old, living in Ireland, and I'd never heard the word 'venture capitalist.' But I'd said that I wanted a job that involved a lot of negotiation, a lot of yelling at people on the phone, and for it to be high-risk, high-reward.

In pharma, we continuously look for acquisitions... if it makes strategic sense and if there is any value.

We understand that conglomerates have no future.

History suggests that big corporate maneuvers tend to coincide with changes in morning-TV fortunes, either because the new managers tinker with the product or fail to take it seriously.

I can't tell you the amount we plan to invest in new acquisitions because that will depend on the opportunities that become available to us.

Noise about carrier M&A will heat up dramatically in United States and India. The pent-up demand for action is there.

I've said all along that we're building Axovant as a lasting company for the long run, not to hand over that upside to a pharma company in the future.

When I got to Activision, it was like a carnival. They had a recycling container filled with cans and a sign over it that said 'Activision Takeover Defense Fund.' Activision was making games based on passion and gut instinct. We needed to develop games based on P&L statements and what was going to sell.

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.

Does Tiger Woods tee off at 8 A.M. when he's going to win a Masters? Does Floyd Mayweather fight the first fight of the night? No, he's the main event, right? So the 'Stros need to be playing on prime-time television.