You can't have bank holding companies acting as hedge funds. You can't have them taking a million-dollar pension plan for Joe Schmo the bus driver and treat it with the same risk appetite that you treat George Soros' pocket money. It's fundamentally ...
I invested in many companies, and I'm happy this one worked. This is capitalism. You invest in stock, it goes up, it goes down. You know, if you don't like capitalism, you don't like making money with stock, move to Cuba or China.
It's very difficult for me to do fund raising for my own organization if I'm working for other companies because sponsors will say, 'Well, hey, man, if she's doing a ballet for Ballet Theatre, we'll give money to Ballet Theatre.'
The real damper on employee engagement is the soggy, cold blanket of centralized authority. In most companies, power cascades downwards from the CEO. Not only are employees disenfranchised from most policy decisions, they lack even the power to rebel...
If you look at the world's top 50 drugs being sold today, they are being marketed and sold by companies that did not invent them. I respect patents. I'll pay a royalty. But I shouldn't be denied the right to produce drugs for poor people at reasonabl...
I have my own dance and production companies, and acting is my creative outlet. It's what I'm passionate about. I've actually created a lifestyle where I could act for free. I could get a job to pay the bills and act on the weekends to make me smile.
I was an All-American in wrestling in high school, was National Champion in Chinese kickboxing in 1999 and have spent a lot of time around professional athletes, which includes my eight-plus years as CEO of a sports nutrition company.
When I meet with the founders of a new company, my advice is almost always, 'Do fewer things.' It's true of partnerships, marketing opportunities, anything that's taking up your time. The vast majority of things are distractions, and very few really ...
For most of the 20th century, we didn't just enjoy economic success in Michigan, we defined it. Our innovators and entrepreneurs created the world's most productive companies, and our unions made sure that productivity led to broad middle class prosp...
It's clear to me when you do private equity well, you're making companies more efficient and helping them grow and become more profitable. That success means our investors - such as public pension funds - benefit, which contributes to the economic we...
Through their own actions, customers can hold companies responsible to higher standards of social responsibility. Through collective action, they can leverage their dollars to combat the force of those investors who myopically pursue profits at the e...
If you allow for a purely capitalistic society, without any type of regulation at all, you will get one monopoly that will eat all of the smaller fish and own everything, and then you'll have zero capitalism, zero competition - it would just be one g...
I don't feel that this concept of disruptive technology is the solution for everybody. But I think it's very important for innovators to understand what we've learned about established companies' motivation to target obvious profitable markets - and ...
SpaceX is only 12 years old now. Between now and 2040, the company's lifespan will have tripled. If we have linear improvement in technology, as opposed to logarithmic, then we should have a significant base on Mars, perhaps with thousands or tens of...
Half of Google's revenue comes from selling text-based ads that are placed near search results and are related to the topic of the search. Another half of its revenues come from licensing its search technology to companies like Yahoo.
An awful lot of successful technology companies ended up being in a slightly different market than they started out in. Microsoft started with programming tools, but came out with an operating system. Oracle started doing contracts for the CIA. AOL s...
People offer me loads of stuff, and some of it I like, but I just can't do it because I can't write it all. So I might get in the position where I have some sort of company and just write maybe the first episode, but these are love projects, in a way...
I was on the improv team in high school, and after I graduated, I joined an improv company that had been established 10 years prior to me getting there. They did longform improv, and I fell in love with it. It's acting, character creation, collaborat...
A lot of people thought my career was over. If you're not releasing records, then something must be wrong. Either the record company doesn't like your music, or you've been dropped. It has to something negative. It's not like you wanted to take a bre...
Women are clearly the major consumers in far more than just female categories. It doesn't matter whether it is purchases of cars, cosmetics, or even products for men, female consumption power is the leading consumption power in the world. Any company...
Forcing companies to recruit away from the golf course might lead to the appointment of more women from NGOs and academia and medicine, all of whom are likely to understand such concepts as stewardship and sustainability much better than men picked f...
