ACTIVISM

Activists succeed because most companies are not run optimally. Management has too much job security, and boards are too friendly with management.

We want companies that have good businesses but are run by people who are not maximizing shareholder value. Those are our targets.

Activism only works when the underlying business is worth something. We are not turnaround investors. We are improvement investors.

Dell was the hardest investment of my career. We fought the buyout, we believed in the value, and we were right on the math but wrong on the outcome. Sometimes the market doesn't care about your math.

Use your platform for more than personal wealth. Athletes have a responsibility to drive change.

I wrote an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg suggesting he cut 20% of employees. Three weeks later, he laid off 11,000 people. The stock tripled.

The fossil fuel industry is the most powerful industry in the world and it’s destroying the planet. Somebody has to fight them.

Money in politics is corrosive, but walking away from the fight doesn’t make it better. You have to engage.

If the board won't create value for shareholders, someone else will.

Management doesn't like me because I hold them accountable. That's fine. That's my job.

We're simultaneously respected and feared inside companies.

We make investments in companies that aren't performing all that well. The biggest impact we're having is we're lighting a fire under a management team to do more faster than they would have otherwise done.

If the CEO welcomes us in and wants to have this open dialogue about high-level strategy and what can happen with the business and what can be done better, it's usually going to go in one direction. If instead you have a CEO that's putting up the walls, it might go a different direction.

We believe there is a clear opportunity for Synopsys's financial performance to more fully reflect the value it delivers.

We look forward to working constructively with Salesforce to realize the value befitting a company of its stature.

If transactional ideas can be imagined outside-in, transformational ideas can only be done from the inside, with deep engagement and only if you've built trusting relationships.

It's not corporate raiders taking over a business, it's not activists going in to kick out a bad CEO, it's a public market investor lending a skill set of acting like a business owner when they buy stocks to make them more valuable.

We should go after good companies with good boards and good managements because we'll have a better chance of getting them to buy into our ideas and then get it done.

Activism is like most other professions, except perhaps reality TV, in that you can make it ethical.

What we do is we try to bring out the full value of a company.

We have consistently sought to reach a constructive resolution with US Foods, but the Board's unwillingness to engage with us and make serious counteroffers have led us to this point.

Our numerous offers reflect our attempt to be open-minded, adapt to a dynamic situation and potentially reach a settlement that works for all parties.

When we arrive, nobody ever wants us there, but once we've been there for 90 days, nobody wants us to leave.

We are different from other activists in that we tend to spend a lot of time with compensation committees trying to get pay aligned very early on in our process.