company valuation Quotes

Our goal is to make General Motors the most valuable automotive company. Clearly, that is having sustainable profitability and driving great returns for our shareholders.

Can anyone create an enduring business on the Web, where it's easy to build new companies, and when survival depends on the whims of fickle users? The big lesson of 'Digg' may be simply this: if someone offers you a ridiculous amount of money for a company that wasn't that hard to build, don't think twice. Take the money and run.

Look, don't congratulate us when we buy a company, congratulate us when we sell it. Because any fool can overpay and buy a company, as long as money will last to buy it.

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

Great investment opportunities come around when excellent companies are surrounded by unusual circumstances that cause the stock to be misappraised.

The stock prices of networking equipment companies like Cisco Systems and Nortel Networks sometimes seem as if they are priced for perpetual success.

Of all the big Internet companies, Yahoo is the most highly valued on a price-earnings and price-sales basis.

We actually created Twitter and Odeo at the same time. When we realized we didn't really want to be running Odeo anymore we looked around for anyone who wanted to buy Odeo, but not acquire us as a technology. But people aren't as interested in that.

Every time a twenty-something CEO turns down a multibillion-dollar offer for a company that has little or no revenues, it hits a raw nerve in me. Unlike most professionals, I am not shocked by the seemingly bizarre behavior of those founders who pursue their vision beyond all rational thought or monetary reward.

If you can buy the best companies, over time the pricing takes care of itself.

The basic story remains simple and never-ending. Stocks aren't lottery tickets. There's a company attached to every share.

The value of a company is the sum of the problems you solve.

Zuckerberg rejected $2 billion for Facebook and has successfully created a company worth nearly $200 billion.

If you told Exxon or Lukoil that, in order to avoid wrecking the climate, they couldn't pump out their reserves, the value of their companies would plummet.

I think there's an awful lot of twaddle and bullshit on EVA. The whole game is to turn retained earnings into more earnings. EVA has ideas about cost of capital that make no sense. Of course, if a company generates high returns on capital and can maintain this over time, it will do well. But the mental system as a whole does not work.

You should think about for the next 10 years, you're going to be giving out 3-5% of the company every year.

When buying shares, ask yourself, would you buy the whole company?

I had Dell for four and a half years, and its sales are still phenomenal, but their operating margins started to contract, so I sold it in early 1999. There's nothing wrong with Dell! It's a fine company. It's just the business risk they took.

Facebook has revealed their estimated net worth - $96 billion. That's almost as much money as businesses lose every year from their employees wasting time looking at Facebook.

Keep salaries low and equity high. Keep the organization as flat as you can.

When we do an investment, we always ask, 'Can we affect the outcome? When buying a company, can we have an impact?' That's a different style of investing than a passive investor in the stock market. To me, that's how you're taking the risk out of it. You know what your capability is and how you can enhance value.

When companies are private, founders can share more about their future dreams with investors; report less; and the shares are illiquid, constraining short-term changes in valuation.

A vote of confidence from Cisco Systems can be very important to fledging technology companies, especially if they have initial public offerings on the horizon.

Economic theory dictates that the value of a company is basically the present value of its future profits. To estimate Facebook's value through its future profits, we need to have a view on its user growth and how this will evolve in the next 10 to 50 years.

When you have built a $3 billion company out of a broom closet, I think you are entitled to a nice house.