John Quelch Quotes

Doing ventures is great - I'm talking economics now - if you've got a rising market. It's wonderful. If I hadn't got HKT, I would have been just as happy. Because there's a price for everything. And to overpay for something is awful.

Once you have a product that you are happy with, you the need to centralize things to continue growth.

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.

There are companies with management and companies with money. You can always find money. Management is the key to success in any business.

You have to spend a lot of money to build strong sides.

If you get the product and technology right, then the rest usually falls into place.

We're not really in the business to sell ourselves. We want to sell what we work on.

Every time we bring someone in we ensure that they are a strategic thinker, but even more important that they understand that if the products aren't successful and the products don't sell that there won't be anything to strategize about.

I think it's natural for any manager to want to grow his business. The question is at what rate, and in what direction, and in what format?

True economy means the wisest expenditure of what we have, everything considered, looking at it from the broadest standpoint. It is not a good thing to save a nickel at the expenditure of twenty-five cents' worth of time.

Businesses must invest in products and people in order to create new wealth.

The real challenge in this line of work is being able to weed the productive ones from the chaff, to decide which you're going to spend the next six to nine months turning into something that people will pay for.

You're either making money or you're not. If you're not making money get out of the business.

Roughly speaking, when you are dealing with business firms operating in a competitive system, you can assume that they're going to act rationally. Why? Because someone in a firm who buys things at $10 and sells them for $8.00 isn't going to last very long in that firm.

Business is Business.

Without sufficient funds, nothing could be efficiently done.

Free enterprise picks investments successfully by running millions of experiments, and the survival of a product depends on its producing more value per dollar of cost than other products do. Competition ruthlessly prunes products that fail to meet this threshold. The public sector works in the opposite way; it undertakes large investment with virtually no competition.

The challenge of any business owner is not only to keep the saw sharp, but also to know if you even have a need for such a tool.

It is one thing to seek out new ways to grow your company and new potential streams of income from new services or products, but it is quite another to take on responsibilities that are far from your primary job as Entrepreneur.

Confidence, capital, and new markets fuel entrepreneurship and job-generating expansion of existing businesses.

We are going to continue to run a business, and we are going to continue to meet the supply and demand that's out there.

My job is to make sure that as our customers' priorities change, as the environment changes, we shift that portfolio of products to meet them.

A subset of CEOs is that of entrepreneurs. And the classical definition of an entrepreneur is an individual who pursues opportunity without regard to the resources currently controlled. That sounds like a very different person than one might expect an analytical investment manager to be.

Fundraising is a long and distracting process, and by the end of it, all you want to do is go back to building the product that you're working on.

Deep learning is a very capital-intensive area, and it's rare to find a company with both the necessary resources and a company structure where things can get done without having to pass through too many channels and committee meetings.