Anthony Noto Quotes

In the finance world, we used to spend all of our time looking backwards, reporting on what happened. Can I book it? What are the numbers? Now it's about looking into the future. It's about planning and integration. The role of finance is now that of a partner in the business.

Business reporting is not dealing with objects, it is dealing with relationships between objects.

My business is the analytical framework.

I come from Wall Street, and you'll never see me do a PowerPoint because I'm all about Excel spreadsheets. If it's not in the numbers, I don't care how strategic it is; it doesn't play out.

If you don't have a VP Finance on your team reporting to you, do yourself, your team, and your investors a favor and go hire one right now.

There is nothing wrong with good accounting, except that it does not necessarily lead to good science.

If I had learned more about business ahead of time, I would have been shaped into believing that it was only about finances and quality management.

Business is all about risk taking and managing uncertainties and turbulence.

Risk models are a substitute for historical knowledge, because they tend to work with just three years' worth of data. But three years is not a long time in financial history.

I have almost no interest in quarterly reports. Running a business or investing in a business based on quarterly earnings doesn't make any sense at all to me.

Start small; get to know the landscape. We take risks but not major risks. We always started with small capital - €4m in Holland, $10m in Russia - and as we get to know the landscape of a country, we think about other businesses.

Good household decision-making often relies on thinking about your household like a firm.

We try to create a situation where we're the casino. It's like how an actuary would set insurance rates. Predictability, predictability, predictability. What's the path to least risk? What's the greater chance of getting some return on this asset?

You just can't get too focused on worrying about what's going to happen in the next quarter. You have to worry about where the business is headed long-term.

When you're talking about capital and financial things, which I certainly pay a lot of attention to, I base those decisions on one question that I typically ask myself, which is 'Does it help us to build a better company?'

I had some of the students in my finance class actually do some empirical work on capital structures, to see if we could find any obvious patterns in the data, but we couldn't see any.

In business, you try to minimise risk.

I consider a merchant someone who has a certain intuition and instinct, and - very important - knows how to run a business, knows the numbers.

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

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.

I've always focused on technology and growth and don't have the core competency to do liability management - I'm a mechanical engineer.

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

The Pentagon should use data to guide financial decision-making.

When I started out as an equity analyst, we had no securitization data. We relied on company data.

I have long believed the corporate world is plagued by poor capital allocation decisions.