Jay Samit Quotes

If you're the CEO of a publicly traded company, you're worried about quarterly returns.

With a private company, you've got to get into who's investing and what's the balance sheet like. So going public is a positive thing from the perspective of the sales organization.

I have never run a public company. I spent my entire life working for a private company.

Every public company depends to some extent on the trust of its investors.

I met with several public company CEOs to learn about their experiences of going public and listened to as many earnings calls as I possibly could.

Being a public company is really terrible for most companies. I'd say Facebook and Google have done a pretty good job of standing up to the incredible quarterly pressure to hit numbers, but most companies - and I've observed a lot now - don't do a very good job of that.

Clearly as you move to being a public company, probably even more than growth, there is a huge value based on predictability.

Being a CEO still means sitting across the table from big institutional investors and showing your leadership and having them believe in you.

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.

I think most CEOs think their stock is undervalued, probably.

I have not been a believer of point guidance. It really limits your flexibility to do what you want. It leads to behavior that is not supportive of long-term shareholder value.

The ability to please your shareholders comes because of what you do for clients.

The stock market clearly values companies that can deliver disruptive innovation.

Too many companies are running their business into the ground, I would argue, by being myopically short-term focused on the shareholder.

One of my major objectives is to build a long-term enterprise, to build shareholder value over time.

By doing what they must do to keep their margins strong and their stock price healthy, every company paves the way for its own disruption.

You have to have in mind what you want when you go public. It's not just an end in and of itself. Suddenly, you have investors to satisfy. Investors who want - who demand - a return.

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.

I don't want to take a company public and not have it do extremely well and fail the public shareholder.

Business chief executive officers and their boards succumb to the pressures of the financial markets and their fears of takeovers and pour out their energies to produce quarterly earnings - at the expense of building their companies for the long term.

Going public for the sake of going public is not really an optimal thing. You're going public because as a company you believe it is the right thing to do and it will benefit the ability of the company to achieve its long-term objectives.

I don't think I'd enjoy running a public company. We haven't needed to go to the market to fund expansion.

I think every company has its own unique approach to creating shareholder value.

I wish we could be private with Tesla. It actually makes us less efficient to be a public company.

We have an obligation to provide a return for our shareholders.