Callouts & quotes from 37,061+ activist slides

""Can you talk about if the Company through this process discussed taking the Company private through a leveraged buyout and how you decided that this was the better alternative?" — Gary Lieberman, Analyst, Stanford Financial Group. "Yes, this is Bill Schoen speaking. We absolutely did, and we had several conversations with several people regarding that. And we came to the conclusion because of our extraordinary, outstanding balance sheet, that it would be a better approach -- the directors felt it would be a better approach to go ahead and give this cash dividend to our shareholders and then allow our shareholders to continue in the growth of our Company." — Bill Schoen, HMA Chairman. "In a bold move, Schoen fended off private-equity investors that have snapped up rival hospital companies, such as HCA last year, by using some of the same tactics." — Business Observer."

"Michael Gambardella: “Yes, good afternoon. Another question for Mr. Kleinfeld. Since you've been on the Board for almost 5 years now, you have had a say in some of the strategic issues of the company. But since you have taken the role of President, Chief Operating Officer [October 2007], you have gotten into a lot of the segments in a nitty gritty way. What, if you were the CEO of the company what would be the one thing that you would change in the way the company is run today to try to maximize value for the shareholder?” Klaus Kleinfeld: “Right. Michael, the good news is – I mean, we have a team here that's really working together as a very, very close team. And frankly, I mean, I would most likely not have come on board if that wouldn't have been the case. So I feel a good bit of responsibility of, what we are currently doing.” — Dr. Klaus Kleinfeld, April 7, 2008"

""Where direct printing does work is on flexible packaging where the package is first printed, then packed. For example, a Lay's potato chip bag. If consumer markets move more to flat flexible packaging, that's a disruptive technology for labels. The direct print and type of packaging combined that is a challenge." — Former Avery VP; "Many brands are moving out of rigid containers into pouches (also known as flexibles). From the recycling point of view they are not the best, but have taken a lot of market share. For example, a big part of the pet food market is now pouches. They can be easily opened and closed. Both shrink sleeves and pouches have been undermining the growth of the decorative label market." — 50 Year Pressure Sensitive Industry Label Expert; "Yes, I believe flexible packaging is growing in popularity." — Large Avery Customer In The Packaging Industry"

"The state investigation into the data breach revealed business associate agreements were not in place prior to sharing ePHI with three business associates: Infoaxis, BMedTech, and Igenomix, in violation of the HIPAA Rules. Diamond was also alleged to have violated the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act (CFA), HIPAA Security Rule, and HIPAA Privacy Rule by removing administrative and technological safeguards protecting PHI and ePHI, which allowed unauthorized individuals to gain access to its systems and ePHI for around five and a half months. The CFA violations included misrepresentation of HIPAA practices in its privacy and security policy, a failure to secure its network leading to a data breach, and unconscionable commercial practices. The settlement agreement lists failures to comply with twenty-nine provisions of the HIPAA Privacy and Security Rules. — HIPAA Journal"

""The other thing and Mike, I don't know if you want to comment on this, but with our SaaS-based products we're investing not only for future functionality but for scalability, so the computer hosting costs, which have been a relatively significant portion of the cost are coming down on a per unit basis fairly dramatically and we expect that to continue in the future." — Gary C. Butler, President and CEO; "That's correct. Typically 15% year-over-year reduction in hosting costs and the fact that they are SaaS-based, and our clients are always on the same version of a platform means that we don't have the expense of other software companies of maintaining different versions of the software." — Mike Capone, VP and Chief Information Officer; "I have to stop the bragging now or we're going to get too many margin improvement questions." — Gary C. Butler, President and CEO"

"It's like an imaginary...if I was to ship this to your lab, I would put this shell around it. But inside it's just skunkworks. It's just a bunch of wires, a bunch of stuff, very much handmade, very ineligible... I don't even know if that's real or if it's a mockup. I've been inside the lab. I'm just trying to think if that's really real. I think it's just an outer shell that they may have one of, but it's not really real. — Former executive; I don't know if you've been to a trapped ion lab before, but they're always just a big optics table, and there are a million pieces everywhere. I've seen the picture of the box. I think we actually just put a box around it [laughs], probably as a promo thing... That [the CEO's comments on a rack-sized box by 2023] to me, that seems totally absurd; just hearing it, it seems absurd to me. — Ex-employee, member of technical staff"

""I don't think like that's gone quite well because I saw like from France, Intuit has taken a step back. And the main reason is that a huge part of being able to do accounting well is the integration with the banks and the data providers...And if those mechanisms are not seamless, it's very hard for Intuit to do add value there." — Former VP at Intuit, Tegus, 1/22/24. "They have been trying to do international expansion desperately for many, many years, over a decade now, but they've just failed miserably...accounting as a product just does not travel well." — Former Strategy Employee at Intuit, Tegus, 2/19/23. "[International is] an area that QuickBooks has really struggled...you have to almost build a different product or at least you have a heavily modified version of product. And so expanding globally, it's tough." — Former Executive at Intuit, Tegus, 2/18/22."

"“We look at some of [these small cell deals] and we're looking at them and saying, boy, we either were getting some completely wrong or this is going to end up poorly for some folks.” — CEO Dan Caruso, August 2017; “A lot of the [small cell] deals that we've looked at don't – they're not justified by that first tenant...not all of the deals that we've looked at have been such where we were confident that there was a good investment, where whether it was the commercial terms of the first tenant and the lack of confidence we had and the durability of that, just based on the rights or whether it was just the fundamental economics that they were looking for, or it was our knowledge of the likelihood of getting a second, third or fourth tenant based on the competitive dynamics and who's already working with whom within that market.” — CFO Matt Steinfort, November 2017"

"“I am 70% Sofia [Terumo], probably 15% Medtronic React 71, and 15% Penumbra. It used to be that we were 100% Penumbra when they were the only thing out there... Sofia was way better than Penumbra's and so we pretty much switched. It took me a month or two to agree to that, but we switched... Their Jet7 catheter sucks and they know it.” — Neurosurgeon. “Penumbra used to always beat itself. Once something new came out, Penumbra would come out with something better. But now Medtronic has the React 71, and that is kicking ass. In our shop, we have shifted 40-50% of our business from the Penumbra Jet to Medtronic – and now it is backordered. Medtronic never expected it to be this successful. And Cerenovus [Johnson & Johnson] is coming out with some interesting stuff too in the next six months. I think they are going to be even bigger than the React 71.” — Neurosurgeon"

""If a pyramid sales scheme obtains illegal gains by fraudulent means or disrupts the economic and social order by requiring its participants to pay fees or purchase products or services under the guise of selling products, providing services or other business activities before accepting them as members and directly or indirectly inducing or coercing them to further recruit new members in return for remuneration or rewards based on the number of recruited members and according to a certain structure consisting of multiple levels, its organizers or leaders shall be liable for criminal liabilities provided that the scheme internally has at least 30 participants of pyramid sales activities and more than three levels of recruits." — Joint Policy Directive of the Supreme People's Court, the Supreme People's Procuratorate, and the Ministry of Public Security of the PRC"

""They are having a big problem there, they can't outsell their churn, and that was a problem a year and half ago and they can't provision right now to get things installed." — Former GTT Regional VP. "If you're coming up on a contract, they are holding a gun to the head of their customer... it's ostracizing their customers like crazy and as a result, they are losing revenue and they are losing trust with customers and it's a really big issue." — Former GTT Regional VP. "[The hardest part of this business] is, by far and away, sales. It's the ability to hire a sales force, train them, retain them, motivate them, keep them focused, promote them, give them a career path. It's an awful job, it's an outbound, tele-sales model, where you're making 100 cold calls per day to people that don't want to talk to you. And that's a really hard thing to do." — GTT Competitor."

"“Together, we can deliver unprecedented benefits to customers, combining the benefits of scale, trust and data.” — Sasan Goodarzi, Intuit CEO; “In terms of synergy, it's really what we were just describing earlier, really what you are now able to bring together with the two companies is the customers' entire financial identity where they can use their data to get access to the best personal loans that are right for them, the best credit cards that are right for them, the best by the way, insurance, it could be home insurance, auto insurance, renters insurance because when the customer doesn't have all their data in one place...” — Sasan Goodarzi, Intuit CEO; “Intuit enables us to strengthen this ability by allowing customers to add income data to that profile, enable members to see more offers through which they qualify.” — Ken Lin, Credit Karma Founder and CEO"

"“Due to the superiority of our workflows, Amgen has shut down legacy cell line development process and converted wholly to Berkeley Lights, and we're working through a similar process in antibody discovery. I think this is a great example of how we expand across our customers' organizations…” — BLI CEO, 1/12/21, JP Morgan conference; “They [Amgen] had a big problem there. And we solved that problem. Now Amgen, the -- all cell lines are coming out of Amgen are made on Berkeley Lights Beacon, right?” — CEO, 3/4/21, Cowen conference; “And case in point is that we worked on cell line development with Amgen early on. That was one of our early partners. And once they got a hold of our technology and saw how they could use it, they've dramatically -- they've switched wholesale over to Berkeley Lights to make cell lines at Amgen.” — BLI CEO, 3/24/21, KeyBanc conference"

"TaskUs has grown to an organization of over 270 professionals with offices in Los Angeles and Manila. Today, the vision is to create thousands of high quality, sustainable jobs across the world to support the most exciting companies of tomorrow. — Vimeo Video, 9 yrs ago; Bryce Maddock is the Founder and CEO of TaskUs, a leading provider of outsourced customer support and Big Data services. TaskUs is the secret weapon behind countless internet companies with the power of TaskUs fledgling startups are able to cut costs and scale rapidly, achieving a profitable and sustainable business model. Over the past three years, Maddock has grown TaskUs from a team of two founders working out of their garage to an international service provider with over 400 full time employees working at offices in Santa Monica and Manila, Philippines. — CEO Blog, Wayback Machine, Jan 2013"

"In addition, the Credit Agreement contains customary representations and warranties, financial and other covenants, and events of default, including but not limited to, limitations on earnout, milestone, or deferred purchase obligations, dividends on preferred stock and stock repurchases, cash investments, and acquisitions. The Company is required to maintain a minimum liquidity of at least $25 million and maintain specified amounts of consolidated revenues for the trailing twelve month period ending on the last day of each fiscal quarter. Minimum consolidated revenues shall equal either $1.0 billion for the immediately trailing twelve month period or $1.0 billion on a pro forma basis and for the fiscal quarters ending March 31, 2025 through December 31, 2025, and shall equal $1.1 billion for the fiscal quarters ending March 31, 2026 through December 31, 2026."

""Disney Chief Executive Officer Bob Iger has at least a cordial relationship with ValueAct CEO Mason Morfit, who is married to actress Jordana Brewster. Known for her role in the Fast & Furious films, Brewster has owned a home near Iger in the tony Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles. Iger and Morfit have gone on hikes together, according to the people, while Morfit and Brewster attended a screening of the Disney film Flamin' Hot in Los Angeles last summer." — Bloomberg, November 2023; "I have known Bob Iger since the time of our Fox investment (he was across the table during the Fox / Disney deal discussions in 2017). Over the years, I have used him as a sounding board for our investments in New York Times, Nintendo and a few others...I got excited when he returned to Disney a little over a year ago..." — Mason Morfit, ValueAct Co-CEO and CIO, January 2024"

""If they're tracking at 15-17% share right now, I think the question is, is there anything else that can significantly move the needle? And I don't know that there is with the landscape of the SCS market being what it is. The other big companies, especially Boston and Abbott, have spent enormous time and resources on very strong KOL and relationship development and have very, very strong marketing and sales organizations and that's going to be hard to crack." — Former Nevro executive; "I would not invest in Nevro today. The outlook is so unclear. I don't know that I see the long-term value. It's just a question of what's the long term business model for a company in the SCS space - the heavy ongoing cost associated with support and retention of physicians and patients... Once you factor all of that in, the profit margin is very slim." — Former Nevro executive"

""Your problem sometimes will sit in the queue for 30 minutes or one hour, depending on how busy their quantum computer is. So, 30 minutes to do the setup, and then submit the job and then you have to wait for the job to come back, and sometimes you have to wait until the next day for the job to come back." — Quantum computing expert; user of IonQ's machine; quantum computing faculty member. "The device that they used back then, it was a 5-qubit device, and I believe IonQ right now has an 11-qubit device... for every computational experiment that we ran, we needed to calibrate the gate from scratch, and it was a manual process. Now, this process has been fully automated, and I guess a fully automated process may not be doing as good of a job as the human was back in the day" — Leading quantum computing expert who has worked closely with IonQ and its founders."

"It’s just the toxic culture, this weird secrecy. Waleed’s sister is the product director for the lung division. What Amira says goes as far as lung cases go. The product director for liver - I want to say that his son is also in the company somewhere. Ahmed is his first name. — Former employee; The CEO, his sister, heads of other divisions, and then the technical officer were Egyptian. Some others by marriage; they may have some other relatives. They make decisions among themselves and we didn’t know what’s going on. — Former senior employee; Whenever someone’s sister is running the lung program - things like that. They just built out without knowing what they were doing. And if my team calls their 1-800 number, it was just like Larry, Mo, and Curly running things back there, trying to get a case done. — Transplant surgeon at a high-volume CA academic center"

"“Clearway puts all this money into construction—they want to maximize, they want to get their money out as much as possible, so they generate a financial model... You're incented heavily to maximize the apparent value in the future by sandbagging the numbers: You're not taking the risk around it, and you're selling it. So, when Hannon is buying into these projects, it's essentially stepping in the shoes of those original project owners. Now, what's strange about this is that if you're going to step into their shoes, you want to have a control position. So, think about Clearway, in this case, is managing this asset, Clearway is negotiating the contracts, Clearway is interfacing with the market, you're just financial passive investor, and you're going to have to take whatever happens... it's kind of weird.” — Interview with Former HASI Executive A, April 2022"

"“The UK, our oldest market in EMEA, continues its impressive performance. This quarter we experienced 92% growth in volume, and a 56% increase in average active sales leaders.” — Des Walsh (July 2013); “Net sales in the United Kingdom decreased $15.2 million, or 21.8%, for the year ended December 31, 2015... Following significant growth the United Kingdom market in 2013 and 2014, we have seen a decline in 2015. This decline is attributed to the impact of recent changes to the Marketing Plan, including the shift in focus to our longer-term sales leader qualification method to which Members continue to adapt. The underlying business metrics remain solid...” — 2015 Form 10-K; “Net sales [in the United Kingdom] decreased $9.9 million, or 18.1%, for the year ended December 31, 2016... We are taking steps to improve Member leadership engagement.” — 2016 Form 10-K"

"Gross profit. Gross profit increased $4.1 million, or 3.0%, to $142.0 million for the thirteen weeks ended July 1, 2023 from $137.8 million for the thirteen weeks ended June 25, 2022. As a percentage of net sales, gross profit was 37.0% and 37.7% for the thirteen weeks ended July 1, 2023 and June 25, 2022, respectively. Gross profit increased primarily due to higher sales. The decrease in gross profit rate of 70 basis points was driven primarily by 160 basis points of deleverage in buying, occupancy and distribution center costs partially offset by a 90 basis-point increase in merchandise margin rate. The increase in merchandise margin rate was driven by 80 basis points of product margin expansion resulting primarily from growth in exclusive brand penetration and a 10 basis-point tailwind from lower freight expense as a percentage of net sales. — Q1'24 10-Q"

""This week we're celebrating three years since we announced the acquisition of inContact which was pivotal point for NICE and represented a seismic shift in the customer engagement market. The acquisition and the ensuing delivery of CXone gave us the first and only true native cloud platform that seriously incorporates the marketing and routing, workforce optimization and analytics into a single platform for enterprises of all sizes. With all these assets combined together with substantial investment in R&D since the acquisition CXone has become the most complete platform in the market. ...It is clear that the execution of our strategy is working as reflected in our strong results, including in Q1, where we reported year-over-year double-digit growth in all key metrics. This included a 12% increase in revenues to $378 million." — NICE Q1 FY19 Earnings Call"

"“This week we're celebrating three years since we announced the acquisition of inContact which was pivotal point for NICE and represented a seismic shift in the customer engagement market. The acquisition and the ensuing delivery of CXone gave us the first and only true native cloud platform that seriously incorporates the marketing and routing, workforce optimization and analytics into a single platform for enterprises of all sizes. With all these assets combined together with substantial investment in R&D since the acquisition CXone has become the most complete platform in the market. ...It is clear that the execution of our strategy is working as reflected in our strong results, including in Q1, where we reported year-over-year double-digit growth in all key metrics. This included a 12% increase in revenues to $378 million.” — NICE Q1 FY19 Earnings Call"

""With the site's (admitted) connections to pharmaceutical and other companies, WebMD has become permeated with pseudomedicine and subtle misinformation. It's not only a waste of time, but it's also a disorder in and of itself — one that preys on the fear and vulnerability of its users to sell them half-truths and, eventually, pills." — Excerpts from "A Prescription for Fear", The New York Times Magazine, 2/4/11; "This puts [WebMD] in a conflict of interest... They are also trying to sell a drug." — James Yeh, physician-researcher; "While the site's content is produced by a team of doctors and medical writers, the article failed to mention any basic information about the drug's effectiveness... And some of the information was worryingly incomplete." — Excerpts from "The truth about WebMD, a hypochondriac's nightmare and Big Pharma's dream", Vox.com, 4/5/16"

"“I mean, they had very similar beginnings, Zymergen and Ginkgo. What was different about the two companies, really, and this maybe seems like I'm splitting hairs a little bit, but Zymergen was always focused on lower-risk science.” — Former Ginkgo director level employee; “Ginkgo has always been more of the let's not do strain improvement per se, but let's actually build novel products or start from scratch... Ginkgo was always a higher risk but more sexy projects. Zymergen was just kind of ho-hum.” — Former Ginkgo director level employee; “I think both companies were always looking jealously at each other or trying to one-up each other. But I don't think there's a large differentiation between the two companies per se besides that historical philosophy... they're more similar to each other than they are different.” — Former Ginkgo director level employee"

"Disney Chief Executive Officer Bob Iger has at least a cordial relationship with ValueAct CEO Mason Morfit, who is married to actress Jordana Brewster. Known for her role in the Fast & Furious films, Brewster has owned a home near Iger in the tony Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles. Iger and Morfit have gone on hikes together, according to the people, while Morfit and Brewster attended a screening of the Disney film Flamin' Hot in Los Angeles last summer. — Bloomberg, November 2023; I have known Bob Iger since the time of our Fox investment (he was across the table during the Fox / Disney deal discussions in 2017). Over the years, I have used him as a sounding board for our investments in New York Times, Nintendo and a few others...I got excited when he returned to Disney a little over a year ago... — Mason Morfit, ValueAct Co-CEO and CIO, January 2024"

"“So overall, like do you feel like the profitability from the Zimmer's perspective is like vastly different in terms of, it sounds like the business model is slightly different because there's kind of capital purchase upfront and then what are sort of the ongoing sort of revenue streams which are there?” — Tegus Question; “Yes, initially, it was a capital sale only, right? And just kind of walking back a little bit, what they realized quickly is that in order to adapt change and not have to deal with that six- to 18-month hospital capital budget process... I can place a unit in your surgery center at no cost to you other than just a commitment for growth on the implant side of things at a competitively priced implant... And then I can backtrack and pull it into the hospital based on that surgeon's commitment to using my implants.” — Former Zimmer Employee"

"“Thanks for the question. So on the safety side, as many of you, I'm sure know, monitoring for safety data in the post-marketing setting is quite different from clinical trial settings. So one typically relies on reports from caregivers or health care providers and the patients that you're treating are also often not as controlled and may have more comorbidities, et cetera. So we are pretty early in the launch. But that said, I can tell you that we have not seen anything in the post-marketing setting that is different from the clinical trial setting. So there are no new safety signals. And once again, just to reiterate, what we have seen with the discontinuation rates at this time are substantially lower than what we have seen in the clinical trials. And Jim, I'll let you take the revenue question.” — Soleno CEO Anish Bhatnagar, Aug 6, 2025 earnings call"

""While storage and sharing are the strong suits of Dropbox Business, the ability to view or edit files inline or from within Dropbox is quite limited." — PCMag, Nov 2019; "Dropbox does continue to struggle to attract true enterprise customers though, with very few reference customers who have gone all-in with the vendor." — Computerworld, June 2019; "No one uses Dropbox at the enterprise level these days." — IT Expert With 20 Years+ Experience; "I don't see much of Dropbox in our enterprise space, especially in industries where compliance matters are critical to the industry such as financial services." — Cloud Storage Salesman At A Leading Enterprise Storage Provider; "I service a lot more smaller/medium companies than enterprise. For the smaller sized companies I've done work for, almost all of them use Dropbox." — IT Expert With 20 Years+ Experience."

"“First and foremost, we're providing them with the tools to achieve significant impact with patients, which is incredibly empowering. We do this through a user-friendly EMR platform, mobile apps that allow for ease of access and predictive clinical education to support improved decision making.” — CEO Dudum on Q3 2022 Earnings Call; “These people are interfacing with beautiful technology to treat their patients and have that flexibility to do it as they are walking their dog right around their block.” — CEO Dudum on Q3 2021 Earnings Call; “And the way that it works is that we have very flexible contractor hours. So physicians can jump on the platform. Most of the time, it's on their iPhone or on their computer from home or they're going for a walk, right, with their dog and they're talking to patients.” — CEO Dudum at 11/11/21 Citi Healthcare Conference"

""That’s right. That’s right. You got it...this is supplier talk from Lasertec and also from Intel because they are spending a huge amount of money, too, and can’t look bad." — EUV lithography expert; "...the last one was a different light source; they are no Ushio sources...I know they have a different light source...I know they announced the Urashima light source...I've heard Isteq thrown around as the creator of the IP for that source." — Ushio field service engineer; "That was a bit over a year ago" — Semiconductor industry advisor; "Again, they are on a second-generation light source." — Semiconductor industry advisor; "Lasertec tries to keep us in the dark" — Ushio field engineer; "we can look...they can't really stop us from looking." — Ushio field engineer; "there's as much downtime on those machines as there is on ours..." — Ushio field engineer"

"“...The key to [profitable growth] will be [that] we will be able to live within our means and deliver, I think, very attractive financial returns on a going forward basis as I said.” — John Hess, July 2012; “Our Company has always been disciplined, always has had the goal of living within our means.” — John Hess, February 2009; “We want to live within our cash flow. We usually moderate the spending based upon what we expect the cash flow to be for the year.” — John Hess, February 2008; “Our finances, we want to live within our cash flow. If you look at our company’s past you’ll see that we’re pretty disciplined about that.” — John Hess, September 2006; “...We basically have a philosophy of managing the capital spend for the Corporation within the cash flows that the businesses throw off.” — John O’Connor, Fmr President Worldwide E&P Hess, January 2005"

"“Another issue is the complexity the DLC structure can add to M&A. In particular, scrip transactions; that's partly a function of the valuation gap between the two companies. Another challenge is that each jurisdiction has parameters about how much stock can be issued in each country.” — AFR, May 2024; “...[Rio] needs to build a dynamic growth acquisition partnership model to attract many agreed acquisitions to rapidly diversify their iron ore exposure... The current wave of acquisitions would shape the next quarter of a century... not a time for major mining companies to be idle.” — Janus Henderson Investors, May 2024; “...remaining on the sidelines of sector consolidation would leave [Rio] open to suffering the same fate as Barrick Gold, which has seen its traditional rival, Newmont Corporation, open up a significant valuation gap...” — AFR, May 2024"

"“...operating priority is simply execution...I use data to drive decisions, I set clear targets...I set the competitive benchmarks and I continuously raise the bar.” — May 2, 2013 Investor Day said by Ellen Kullman; “Relative to our five year, long-term rolling growth targets (7% rev growth, 12% earnings growth)..., we believe these goals are both appropriate and achievable. We fully endorse management’s plan to achieve them and are encouraged by progress against them.” — Letter to Trian from Alexander Cutler, DuPont’s Lead Director dated March 5, 2014; “Returning capital to shareholders has always been a priority at DuPont” — March 23, 2015 Letter from Alexander Cutler; “Trian...nominated...its own director candidates...to advance Trian’s high risk agenda to break up and add excessive debt to the Company” — March 23, 2015 Letter from Alexander Cutler."

"“Ginkgo was kind of allowed to do what they wanted to do for the first period of the company [Joyn] at least, and that was really something that Jason Kelly and the group really sort of had pushed for, especially in Motif, at Allonnia, and the subsequent ventures, Ginkgo really needs to control these entities because if they can't then—what they want is for these subsidiaries or for these joint ventures, these supposedly independent companies to be obligated to use Ginkgo services, and Ginkgo services are very expensive.” — Former director-level employee; “From a business perspective, they want all the revenue, and they want to control the entity, for sure... the whole Ferment Consortium, this $300 million slush fund to start child companies of Ginkgo, I would say for sure Ginkgo controls all of those almost certainly.” — Former director-level employee"

"We were in advanced discussions which we severed because they are not always honest actors. We don't use them, but we use all their competitors. They are all mostly the same but they are detrimental to our business. They don't differentiate. They're trying to become the general diagnostic police of content on the internet. It's noble but a big bite. If you're trying to do that you have to be flexible. We didn't find DV flexible. Workability between the classification companies are different. We believe DV misclassified us in a way that didn't even classify us according to the legal definition of what we do. They said it was hard for their team to create a new category or move us. But they said they needed to get enough big buyers to override their classification, then they might consider it. There's a growing consortium of parties rising up against DV."

"“There were too many secrets and there were too many things that were hidden by the company...it is a Japanese company, so even if you are one of the company’s employees, you will never get an answer from the company. Lasertec was not open about anything that could be a problem...the company was not willing to be open about any of these minor problems, let alone any major problems, with the EUV tool. Recently, there could be some utilization rate or more major issues. When I asked something or when I tried to raise something, I never received any answer, and all I was told was to wait...Lasertec USA does not even have the technical background, so they are just waiting. Nothing ever gets solved.” — Former Lasertec product engineer; 20 years in the industry and previously part of the EUV task force at one of the top 3 semiconductor companies in the world"

"“Yes. It failed” — Longtime ex-TSMC procurement executive who introduced Lasertec inspection tools into TSMC. “Both the LastertecX8 Ultra and X9 Ultra are the DUV light source, but they are inspecting the EUV mask. The main reason is for the throughput. And it is not necessary...” — Longtime ex-TSMC procurement executive who introduced Lasertec inspection tools into TSMC. “Yes. Because of the throughput. TSMC will not consider the A300 or A150 for production. They will only exist in the EPO mask house. The EPO—we call it the EP Organization in TSMC. TSMC has already purchased six sets of A150. So, they already bought six tools. Six A150 tools. But last year, they also purchased the first A300. And the first A300 because they changed the light source, Urashima.” — Longtime ex-TSMC procurement executive who introduced Lasertec inspection tools into TSMC."

"So probably the cleanest way to answer this is just to say we have the premium price offering out there. Generally, we are the most expensive tool, and that's a reflection of the quality and the capability that we have relative to competitors. And you can see the growth rate that we've been delivering, which is generally at or above the competitors that are aware of and publicly report the data. So it's not that we're losing market share. And you can see the retention rates that we've seen to this point, which have been remarkable. So we're not seeing a lot of clients at all cancel and move to competitors. — CFO, JPMorgan Conf. Nov 2022; "But we did outperform. So I think in terms of ESG, I don't think many dramatic differences, Index, similarly. So I don't think -- I think the competitive landscape is fairly stable." — COO, Barclays Conf. May 9, 2023"

""In our case, we have a very different approach in that we have a handheld system. We have a burying approach. Most importantly, I think also this doesn't require presurgery CT. And the start-up times in the OR are actually very, very short. So altogether, we believe we have a fully differentiated solution here." — Smith & Nephew, Q3 2021 Conf Call. "This quarter, we began commercialization of our VELYS robotic-assisted solution for total knee procedures in the U.S." — Johnson & Johnson, Q2 2021 Conf Call. "We're looking at a 2022 launch for the robotics system." — Globus Medical, Q4 2020, Feb 17, 2021. "I mean it's a lot of units out in the marketplace in a pretty challenged environment. We're remembering again that we started for the most part with our first unit place at March 2019. So the demand is strong." — Zimmer Biomet, JPM Conf, Jan 10, 2022."

""When I joined the business I think we had a 15% gross margin, but this just wasn't sustainable at that level of profit. And so the last round of label negotiations was about elevating the margins to a point where, I think, the business would self-sustain...So what was good for Spotify was good for the labels and that's why the margin increased. Now on a go-forward basis, is that going to happen again? No that's not going to happen again. It's not in their economic interest to allow it to happen again. So how is it that the margin improves? The only way the margin improves is, we provide them with some value-added services that don't exist today that makes their business more profitable as a consequence and we benefit as well for doing it right now." — Spotify CFO Barry McCarthy, February 26, 2019, Bloomberg Transcript, Morgan Stanley Media Conference"

""There's good demand as you heard....We are planning to be 96% occupied by the end of this year...we're actually 73% complete with our 2018 leasing" — Bobby Taubman, Chairman & CEO of Taubman Centers; "If I look at the A-rated centers, which make up nearly 80% of our sales volume, sales were up 1.6%...excluding apparel, sales in the A centers were up 4.4%" — Sandeep Mathrani, CEO of GGP; "Digital commerce is our friend, it is a breeding ground for new businesses and these will be the businesses that will fuel the excitement in our portfolio going forward" — Arthur Coppola, Chairman & CEO of Macerich; "There is a lot of that new business out there that is exciting for us because we are bringing in the up and coming retailers or food operators that know how to connect directly through the consumer" — David Simon, Chairman & CEO of Simon Property Group"

"“The Japanese guys, it is not easy to change their minds. We keep asking, you don't need to perform 100; you just perform 60 because I only needed the goal of 60. Okay, but I need to do it very fast. But the Japanese guys say, no, no, no. We care about the quality. We don't want to miss it. We don't want to miss any defects. But sometimes it's not necessary. And also come by another issue. The pellicle is also another issue. Some masks are with pellicle; some masks are without the pellicle. So, it's a kind of an endless negotiation. The negotiation is to try to convince Lasertec to improve the performance. The negotiation is to try to convince them to change their performance, the quality...You can decrease your quality but increase, improve your throughput.” — Longtime ex-TSMC procurement executive who introduced Lasertec inspection tools into TSMC"

""Being a part of LivePerson right now is like watching a plane crash in slow motion. The CEO is investing in the most random stuff like a health app to test for COVID despite no need for it anymore and a whole BANK? It's a chatbot company, we have no business being in those fields." — Anonymous Glassdoor Review (April 14, 2022); "Sometimes I have to just tell friends about how this company is run and the incredibly bizarre things that happen here to make sure I'm not going crazy." — Anonymous Glassdoor Review (August 11, 2021); "And then there is the CEO. Oh...man. Here's his deal...he is a very good salesman. Could sell bottled saltwater to native Hawaiians. Except the problem is, HE would have been the one who came up with the idea to actually bottle saltwater, which is a TERRIBLE business idea!" — Anonymous Glassdoor Review (September 27, 2021)"

"FBR, July 2013: “CLB is one of the most attractive secular growth stories as its core competency of improving reservoir recovery fits in the sweet spot of our technology thesis.”; RBC, April 2014: “The company continues to establish itself as one of the best secular growth stories in the oilfield service sector with a suite of technologies geared toward the exploration and development of offshore and onshore unconventional oil plays with out-sized leverage to deep water field development.”; Morgan Stanley, September 2013: “Given our expectation for long-term secular growth, we believe the appropriate valuation methodology for CLB is discounted cash flow analysis. This differs from most of the stocks in our coverage universe, which we value on multiples (typically P/E and EV/EBITDA) because they tend to exhibit cyclical rather than secular growth.”"

"“You can only beat on the spinal cord so long before a refractory response happens. Look at drugs – ones that effect the nervous system lead to tolerance... The pathological changes that may have occurred in patients with Nevro’s HF10 therapy are being studied.”; “I believe, and a lot of other doctors believe, that you can only pound on the spinal cord so much. You’re seeing a shift now, where other companies are pulsing the energy... as a potential way to mitigate the tolerance that occurs in the nervous system.”; “I’m saying it’s just too much energy and you have to back off. Either the cells are down-regulating and can’t hear the noise anymore, or there’s an inflammatory response to high frequency and you are get cell formation that’s impeding the electrical signal.” — Ex-Nevro consultant/speaker and one of the most prominent KOL’s in the space"

"“Oh, I just hate any—you know, I just like to go to my little prescription box, type it in, and submit. I hate having to fill out a separate form and all this other crap. You always have to, like with Wakix.” — Neurologist who is a sleep specialist and professor at leading institution; “I think the excitement for this is on the wane... quite disappointed by how the burden of prescribing has really interfered with our ability to get people on it.” — Physician and professor of neurology at a large academic center; “They drove that home, that it’s non-scheduled, and I think it was more of a mindset that it was a safe medication so therefore it didn’t have to be scheduled. But they just make it so complicated when they had their own pharmacy delivering it. Again, yeah, I think it hasn’t taken off.” — Neurologist in the UK who also practiced in the US."

""Yeah, we just can't go fast enough. So, we continue to build backlog, every quarter goes by we're confident that demand is more than there to get to where we want to be." — CEO Wilson, Q4 2020 Earnings Call; "I think we're solidly in the second quarter. And we also have really good pre-subscription demand for that product." — CEO Wilson, Q1 2021 Earnings Call; "In fact, in terms of our product launch, we've got pre-orders, we've got pre subscriptions, we go to market on six years subscriptions, but we've got pre-subscriptions for our Element AIM product that fill out our demand for 2021, and we're now well into filling out 2022." — CEO Wilson, Jefferies Conference June 2021; "So preorder trends, I think it's fair to say we have more preorders than we can manufacture at scale and deliver in the fourth quarter." — CEO Wilson, Q2 2021 Earnings Call"

"“Grossman doesn't have a strategy. This is what concerns me. This is why I don't own a penny of Nevro. Keith Grossman may have wanted to flip it in six months... I would bet that that's about the due diligence that Keith Grossman did, and he was sold hook, line, and sinker. Now he's going to have to roll up his sleeves and say, ‘What do I do with this thing?’” — Longtime C-level executive in the space; “Grossman has a history of working with Bess Weatherman of Warburg Pincus who’s on the board... They move some people in, move some people out, but at the end of the day, they really control cost. They don’t really add true value and that’s kind of how I see Grossman... I’m very underwhelmed... I don’t think there’s a long-term plan there... Nevro has boxed themselves into a corner and now they’ll die of a thousand cuts...” — Former Nevro executive"

""John Dowdy was a know it all... I looked at all his financial models and they were just really bad... He was a good accountant but not a good CFO." — Former Danimer Employee; "It was the same thing back then. It was all about name dropping. We were already working with Pepsi back then. We had big clients but they were small orders.... I am amazed the Company is worth so much money now and its still doing the same thing." — Former Danimer Employee; "PHA by itself does not satisfy the technical requirements of most applications where normal polymers are used right now... When you take gluten out of bread and use wheat flour or whatever doesn't have gluten and try to make bread, it just breaks and there is no elasticity. That is pretty much the same thing when you remove petrol from polymers. That’s the really hard part." — Former Danimer Employee"

""I think IDEXX is a brilliant company... I think we can out execute [them] going forward." — CEO Wilson at BAML conference in February 2021. "But I mean, honestly, it's hard to get out of IDEXX, and it's hard to steal an IDEXX customer. They just have done a really good job of locking customers in. They'll pay whatever money they need to keep a customer. They'll do a lot of things to keep this revenue going. So they're definitely not easy to break." — Former Sales and Ops Heska Employee. "IDEXX, which in my mind, has always been like the, for want of a better expression, like the white shoe player in the space, [with] the integration of all of the major elements and the ability to bundle them, the integration of the reference labs, of the in-office equipment and analyzers and the point-of-care rapid test." — Former Senior Vice President, Zoetis"

"“They can do strain engineering and DNA synthesis and sequencing at a very high level, high throughput quickly. You can run a lot of tests through their program very quickly. They can engineer a strain and test them with very high throughput. But how we are working with them now is as a kind of a glorified CRO.” — Senior employee at Joyn; “As far as the other people that one might go-to for this kind of work, you can think of that from different angles, but Zymergen is one of them. You can think about Amyris; you can almost think about Genomatica; they could do the same thing. There’s also a privately-owned company locally. And then there are other smaller ones that have expression platforms on different bugs, e. Coli bacteria, yeast, fungi. So, there are different levels of players; there are other people out there.” — Current Motif executive"

""The business in Europe, which is, let's say, the purest general Flexibles business that we have at scale, which is a $3 billion-plus business had good sales growth last year and picked up momentum in the second half. So if anything, that business you would say is winning in the market and that's the expectation and it's been the experience as well." — CEO Delia, FY 2018 Call, Aug 2018; "Simple answer to your first question, yes, volumes grew overall, both in North America and in Europe, which is really pleasing because those are our 2 engines in Flexibles, right? Those are 2 big businesses, neither of which are in dynamic growth markets, as you pointed out. So if we can get a little bit of growth through volume in those businesses, it's good to see. So absolute volume grew in both North America and Europe." — CEO Delia, H2 2020 Call, Feb 2020"

"“They are. In a real-life scenario, what ends up happening is when an organ is declined at the last minute like that, the OPO is really charged and held responsible with the utilization of the organ...but, they are very high pressure. I think they've got two things on their mind. One is that—I am confident that they're not doing that work because they want to rescue this organ. What they want is they want to get paid...they just want somebody to use it so that they get paid...so, they start making their calls...they're going down their own Rolodex of their paying customers. If my mom is listed at a transplant center down the road, she doesn't get a call. Patients are being skipped routinely and often. The calls are only going to the centers that are willing to pay for these machines.” — Executive at a West Coast OPO, longtime industry veteran"

"related to cost accounting. In the treatments with no relation to cost accounting, inventory was classified as finished goods inventories which is under the management of the Sales department, and raw materials or works in process which are under the management of Operations (p. 249) and thus, outside the scope of revaluation (p. 253). Furthermore, a part of the finished goods inventories did not devalue in conformity with the method of devaluing book value to the expected disposal value (p. 255). In the investigation report, it was said that for most of the inventory, losses were recognized for accounting purposes for the first time at the time of disposal (p. 245); to begin with, neither was there an accounting rule nor were there similar de — Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Accounting, Auditing, and Taxation (ICAAT 2016)"

""Our vision for the future is simple. We are building Hims & Hers into the new front door to healthcare, a new front door that will span dozens of medical specialties, welcoming customers of all demographics into a unified consumer platform that looks and feels and talks to them in a way that gives them confidence they're in the right hands." — CEO Dudum (Q2 2021 Earnings Call); "...we feel confident in our abilities to lead in innovating, visualizing and ultimately creating the future of healthcare." — CEO Dudum (Q3 2021 Earnings Call); "Our vision is a world where being treated through Hims & Hers is equivalent to accessing the collective minds of the top specialists across the nation to review each customer's needs, and provide timely recommendations made possible through the power of machine learning." — CEO Dudum (Q4 2022 Earnings Call)"

""I guess the Canadian volume trends were somewhat as expected with retail down and foodservice up. But can you just talk about your market share today versus, I guess, probably a year ago and also pre-pandemic, just to give us some sense of the progress and evolution there? ... And how about in foodservice, Carl?" — Analyst Petrie, CIBC. "From a fluid milk perspective, the share is basically has not moved. So we haven't lost ground. We haven't gained ground on that side of the business... From a cheese perspective, we have made some gains... From a foodservice perspective, once again, I'll say that meeting -- coming out of the -- I'll call the pandemic, our team did an exceptional job of supplying the market and along the way we have gained share in this space as well, and we continue to perform quite well." — Carl Colizza, COO North America"

"“Yeah, simply put, yes.” — Ex-Twist employee in manufacturing, now a research professor; “As far as I know, there’s nothing like a microchip involved. Other people use microchip-like things for the synthesis of DNA oligos.” — Current Twist customer, professor with a protein therapeutics lab at a major university; “The business is based on service. On that front, I think that they are just average. That’s my observation. I don’t think that they are anything special. The only thing unique is that at initiation they could synthesize a million different oligos at a much smaller scale...They have some sales pitch, but even I am not 100% sure that actually is a real advantage, even when promoting that it sounds good, but in reality, I don’t know whether it translates to a better product or better outcomes.” — Former Twist employee, director-level"

"PEREIRA also discovered that, prior to his coming on board, there was evidence that Counter-Defendants had engaged in criminal and/or unethical activities, including without limitation, securities fraud, tax evasion, insider trading, false or deficient reporting to government agencies, violation of disclosure requirements, failure to document various transactions on company books, failure to keep records of Board meetings and/or to document decisions by the Board, nepotism, engaging in conflict of interest transactions, presenting false information regarding Counter-Defendants' products to potential investors and shareholders, breach of fiduciary duty and self-dealing by Board members, dilution of stock and misappropriation of company assets. — MEREDIAN HOLDINGS v. PAUL PEREIRA (case number: 1:16-cv-00124-WLS) (Document 104; page 5-6,13-14)"