Tobias Lutke Quotes

Mergers and acquisitions, we are always looking for that.

You're doing a major merger, you got to hope you didn't get it wrong. That's the view of any CEO.

When a change in how some element of one's business is conducted becomes an order of magnitude larger than what that business is accustomed to, then all bets are off.

Success in M&As comes with executing with vigour along with the obvious right choices that you got to make.

During the time of Webex growing from $0 to greater than $700M, the company was sold to Cisco. The Webex team lost the passion and drive to further grow the business because many Webex veterans left and Cisco's integration with Webex was not successful.

We need to stop defining Boeing's future based on a single program or two programs, and we have been doing that with the fighter story. It doesn't mean it was wrong or right; I just don't think it represents the great diversity of the Boeing Defense portfolio.

I think everybody at IBM knows the early 1990s disaster, and it's in our fabric that you cannot miss the ship.

We continue to look at accretive and synergistic acquisitions both in the domestic as well as international markets. Our emphasis, thus, will be on strategic acquisitions, and we will not be doing it just for the sake of making our name bigger.

In any business, you have to evolve.

I've been through a couple of mergers - they're not that fun. And it's easy to lose your focus on this grandiose mission you established for yourself as an independent company.

Founders go wrong when they start to believe their business plan will materialize as written. I advise entrepreneurs to burn their business plan - it's simply too dangerous to the health of your business.

Lot of companies are looking for advisory work on business strategy, restructuring work.

The company-as-a-machine model fits how people think about and operate conventional companies. And, of course, it fits how people think about changing conventional companies: You have a broken company, and you need to change it, to fix it.

Any dope with a checkbook can buy a company. It's what you do afterward that matters.

You have to make a decision whether it's a new product or you integrate it with an existing product. It takes time to work these things out.

Multiple mergers can be challenging because people come from different backgrounds.

If guys try to make a bigger company for the sake of size, they don't create value in most cases.

Wal-Mart does not do big mergers, though it will buy much smaller competitors in so-called 'tuck-in acquisitions.'

I've always advocated using the break between product cycles as an opportunity to reflect and to look ahead, and that applies to me, too.

I think there are certain business matters which we must now conduct differently than we used to.

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

I don't know that I can give a definitive answer to that, I can only say that if we create the right climate those who are producing those products will have the opportunity to move into a higher value product if changes are needed if we get this right.

When we bought it, Spiegel was in a difficult situation; it made a loss at that time. We invested in it and then it turned around, and then we bought Eddie Bauer and Newport News.

If you go through some big corporate change, it's just not going to be the same. If we sold to Yahoo, they would have done something different; if you want to continue your vision of the company, then don't sell because there's inevitably going to be some change.

We get talent and scale from mergers.