Callouts & quotes from 10,384+ activist slides

""So goods transport was the main focus area for both pallet and smaller goods within Fetch's primary focus area. Fulfillment was an application they're building out, and we're still building that out fulfillment application out. And we're seeing early traction in that. It's a small business today. It's a small business today." — CEO Burns, JPMorgan Conf May 24, 2023. "To compete in the fast-paced, high-stakes world of e-commerce, modern distribution and fulfillment center operations are introducing increasing levels of automation. Too often these automated systems operate independently, performing very discrete tasks and processes. This collaboration with Fetch to have a turnkey solution with Momentum gives those in the e-commerce industry a competitive advantage that will optimize productivity, increase operational safety, and provide significant return on investment." — Honeywell Robotics CTO"

""I think it's early days to speculate on [the economics of Epic], the product isn't even built yet... in terms of pricing and all of those things it's just too early for us to really talk about but I do expect its going to be a very profitable business for us" — Hugh Johnston, Disney CFO, February 2024; "An effort to notify the leagues wasn't made until Tuesday before a planned announcement. Many learned of it when The Wall Street Journal broke the news...The leagues... are eager to be fully debriefed and ensure that this platform doesn't present new business risks or threats." — Wall Street Journal, February 2024; "[M]anagement by press release" — meaning that if I say something with great conviction to the outside world, it tends to resonate powerfully inside our company." — Robert A. Iger, CEO & Director, The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 Years as CEO of The Walt Disney Company"

""In a study recently published in Nature Climate Change, scientists found that 65% of the insect populations they examined could go extinct over the next century." — NASA, Nov 2022. "But, both the number and diversity of insects are declining around the globe due to habitat loss, pollution and climate change." — Univ of Florida Thompson Earth System Institute. "Rapid declines in insect populations could have significant impacts on the environment and human food security." — Davidson College & Catawba College, March 2023. "Our work reveals dramatic rates of decline that may lead to the extinction of 40% of the world's insect species over the next few decades." — Biological Conservation Journal, April 2019. "Overall, we found considerable variation in trends even among adjacent sites but an average decline of terrestrial insect abundance by ~9% per decade" — Meta-Analysis Science.org, April 2020."

""I think it's early days to speculate on [the economics of Epic], the product isn't even built yet... in terms of pricing and all of those things it's just too early for us to really talk about but I do expect its going to be a very profitable business for us" — Hugh Johnston, Disney CFO, February 2024; "An effort to notify the leagues wasn't made until Tuesday before a planned announcement. Many learned of it when The Wall Street Journal broke the news...The leagues... are eager to be fully debriefed and ensure that this platform doesn't present new business risks or threats." — Wall Street Journal, February 2024; "[M]anagement by press release" — meaning that if I say something with great conviction to the outside world, it tends to resonate powerfully inside our company." — Robert A. Iger, CEO & Director, The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 Years as CEO of The Walt Disney Company"

""We view CTB's asset quality to be of a higher risk than its peer group...CTB's credit card franchise is more narrowly linked to the Canadian Tire brand; supporting its Triangle Rewards loyalty program." — Moody's, June 11, 2019; "We believe CTB's class of credit card customer is higher risk than peers and during an economic stress, the bank will experience higher than-peer credit losses... This reflects its chosen market niche of focusing on customers who primarily use a credit card as a source of financing (revolving balances), rather than payment." — Moody's, June 11, 2019; "CTFS continues to expand its financial services business... While CTC has a long history of prudently managing risk with smaller, tightly focused financial services operation, continuous growth could lead to the possibility of evolving customer profiles, which may result in additional risk." — DBRS Report, April 8, 2019"

""So Michael, you're right in that milk production is falling, but the approach that we've taken is we have a strategy where we're going to tap into 3 sources for our milk moving forward... we still feel confident that we'll be able to achieve the numbers that we originally committed to, which is to get to a 3 billion to 3.1 billion liter of milk over a 3-year period." — Kai Beckmann, Q4 2019 Conf Call. "If you recall, when we first acquired the Australian platform, we were targeting after the sale of Koroit around 3.1 billion liters of milk. That new normal is 2.7 billion liters of milk... So the new normal for us from the historic number of 3.1 billion liters is 2.7 billion liters." — CEO, Q3 2020 Conf Call. "So if you recall, we had targets of about 2.7 billion - 2.8 billion liters of milk to be processed. We're probably somewhere around 2.2 billion liters of milk." — CEO, Q4 2022 Conf Call."

""Consider using return on invested capital ("ROIC") as a long- term performance metric instead of revenue or relative TSR." — Shareholder Request, FY19 Proxy; "We recognize that ROIC has a good correlation to share price in many industries, however we do not currently use ROIC as an internal performance measurement and we believe that, where possible, compensation metrics should match the day to day metrics used to run the business. We also note that return on investment metrics like ROIC are not common in the technology industry where it is critical to continuously reinvest for growth and to maintain leading edge products. We continue to believe that revenue growth is the most significant driver of our business performance and we pair revenue metrics with profitability metrics to ensure that management is focused not only on growth, but on profitable growth." — Management Response, FY19 Proxy"

""The CEO is a headwind to a turnaround. Firing him is the tailwind." — Top 10 Active Shareholder; "I would rate them as the worst-performing management team in the airlines." — Top 10 Active Shareholder; "They need a new look across the board and you are only going to get that with [a CEO] who is not from Southwest." — Top 10 Active Shareholder; "I have zero confidence this team can get this right and certainly not in the timeframe that is needed." — Top 10 Active Shareholder; "Having the current CEO drive the process for a new strategy is not a good idea." — Top 10 Active Shareholder; "You need a really different leader to right the ship." — Top 10 Active Shareholder; "I don’t think this is the right CEO to lead the company and I would view his removal positively." — Top 10 Active Shareholder; "So it is really [the CEO] has not done a good job running the company." — Top 10 Active Shareholder"

"“In 2002, The New York Times published an article about Matthew DiFrisco, an analyst who downgraded Darden's stock to ‘neutral’ from ‘outperform.’ Following the downgrade, Darden's investor relations officer Matthew Stroud canceled a marketing trip with DiFrisco's clients, telling him that he needed to have an ‘outperform’ rating to enjoy such a privilege.” — The New York Times. “Some investors are protesting that Darden's idea of ‘direct engagement’ amounts to returning the phone calls of analysts and investors who agree with its strategy while ignoring calls from dissenters. ‘They've got a history of only engaging with investors and analysts who are supportive of their views,’ said one Darden shareholder, who declined to give his name for fear of retribution from the company. ‘If the board is so convinced [a Red Lobster spinoff] is such a great idea, then put it to a vote.’” — New York Post"

""In 2002, The New York Times published an article about Matthew DiFrisco, an analyst who downgraded Darden's stock to 'neutral' from 'outperform.' Following the downgrade, Darden's investor relations officer Matthew Stroud canceled a marketing trip with DiFrisco's clients, telling him that he needed to have an 'outperform' rating to enjoy such a privilege." — The New York Times. "Some investors are protesting that Darden's idea of 'direct engagement' amounts to returning the phone calls of analysts and investors who agree with its strategy while ignoring calls from dissenters. 'They've got a history of only engaging with investors and analysts who are supportive of their views,' said one Darden shareholder, who declined to give his name for fear of retribution from the company. 'If the board is so convinced [a Red Lobster spinoff] is such a great idea, then put it to a vote.'" — New York Post"

"“We think that this business -- that parts of this business are very attractive from a growth basis. There's tremendous synergy with our existing business... We see areas of opportunity to further technology with our surfactants technology, our amines technology and with some of our other technologies that we have in house, we see opportunities to expand into the textile industry here and move further downstream.” — Peter Huntsman, President & CEO, February 2006; “When you think about our three differentiated businesses, we have good intermediate positions in MDI and we have formulation businesses that really bring it right down to the customer level... And we believe this Textile Effects business will give us that formulation approach that is close to customers, particularly in Asia, where we can move beyond the intermediates into the more formulation area.” — Kimo Esplin, CFO, February 2006"

""If you even talk to a guy, whether he expressed interest or not, you always created an opportunity for 5-10 vehicles [in Salesforce]. OEM? 50 - 100 vehicles... The numbers always looked good to the [XL] board, and they looked good to people like you... Me and the other salespeople always talked... I was always skeptical of that—if it’s not legitimate, why the hell are we putting it in?" — XL Former Employee B; "Once a quarter before board meetings, I would find that a bunch of my deals with larger [potential sales] numbers behind them would have been exaggerated substantially in their probability to close: from 25% up to 75%. For that brief week when the board was in town, my deals were at 75%, and I would have nothing to do with that. That was [manager name redacted]. A minimum of four times a year he would exaggerate my pipeline substantially to report to the board." — Former XL Employee A"

""And can you just comment on the spreads that you are making on your product these days, how you're pricing to customers, just given the price of feedstocks, the canola oil, going up?" — Jonathan Tanwanteng, CJS Securities. "Yes. Let me say 1 more thing in terms of kind of longer-term before I address that one specifically... canola oil is going up in price. About half of our current contracts have escalators in them that allow us to pass that on to the contracted customer. We put that language in every contract that we had that was multiyear. So in the 1-year contracts that we did, we didn't have that in there, but we had hedged... And we are also aggressively looking at alternatives, which we know there are a lot of alternatives, but obviously, we're looking for economical -- more economical alternatives, if you will. So that's an ongoing project." — Stephen Croskrey, CEO Danimer Scientific"

"This transaction is troubling from a governance perspective, brings significant additional risks around the balance sheet, integration and channel conflict, and highlights the challenges in FWRD's core business model. — Stephens. [The approximately 40% share price] decline puts significant execution pressure on the company just to recoup such losses, never mind demonstrating that the deal was a risk worth taking in the first place. But it is the questionable governance of the transaction that stands to place FWRD squarely in the sights of activists. — ISS. [W]e believe the rejection of FWRD shares in recent days is more about the board's tactics of exhausting the company's considerable dry powder to bet its future on an asset-light diversification and customer acquisition play, while not offering existing shareholders a voice or vote on the matter before the deal closes. — Susquehanna (SIG)."

""Penumbra has offered a similar kind of [bundling] arrangement [as Medtronic], but I told them that I am not interested because I have used their stent retriever and I don't think it is as good as the Solitaire [Medtronic]. And the discount that they are going to offer – truthfully, they could even offer it for me for free and this would not convince me to use it." — Neurosurgeon. "It is widely recognized that doctors hate Penumbra's stent retriever.... Penumbra is trying to get into stent retrievers and has fallen flat on their face. Penumbra has not gotten any traction with their stent retriever. The development of a stent retriever is not easy at all." — Neurovascular Products Sales Director. "Medtronic has the Solitaire - it's a great stent retriever. And you compare that to the Penumbra stent retriever, which is this 3D separator - in my opinion, it wasn't at as good." — Neurosurgeon."

""Given the similarities between Hess and CLR’s ND Bakken plays, as an order of magnitude we suggest this is a reasonable starting point for how the market should value Hess’ Bakken acreage…[this] should alone justify a $24 per share uplift from current levels." — Bank of America Merrill Lynch (Sept 20, 2012); "The key, in our mind, to improving relative performance will be demonstrating improved capital discipline through substantially lowered overall spending in 2013 and removing funding risk through additional tax efficient disposals." — Credit Suisse (October 1, 2012); "…The question is whether it needs to cut deeper and more aggressively than it has. An extreme version could involve it becoming a "pureplay" Bakken producer..." — Goldman Sachs (June 11, 2012); "Below is our wish list of the initiatives we believe Hess could take to enhance shareholder value." — Citigroup (July 20, 2012)"

""Could you sort of give us an overview of how that's going? I think there was a lot made of kind of Amazon moving to the capital region. How much competition are you seeing from kind of the tech industry?" — Analyst Barcap Conf Feb 2020; "Yes. Look, hiring's tough. Again, this is one of the areas that we view is the thing that keeps our CEO and CFO up at night... So them coming to DC maybe intensifies that competition a little bit, but the idea that we've never seen Amazon before, and we've never competed for talent until they announced HQ2 is just not true." — Former VP Booz Allen Response; "Early indication is that our fourth quarter productivity levels may remain closer to historical norms... This was critically important because the labor market, as we often appreciate, is very competitive. Pre-pandemic and in the midst of COVID, it has remained so." — CFO Comments Q3 2021 Jan 29, 2021"

"How much of the sales of that business are from consumables versus the kit itself? — Analyst Altobello, Waterpik Deal Call 7/7/2017. (CEO) That's a good one. I couldn't tell you the answer to it. (CFO) Yeah, we'll get back to you on that one Joe, it's a good question. — CEO and CFO. Two questions, one I was wondering if you could talk about maybe the online percentage of sales that you're seeing in Waterpik at this point and kind of the strategy that's there. — Analyst Gere, Waterpik Deal Call 7/7/2017. (CEO) As far as – I don't recall what the percentage is of e-commerce, and we'll have that for you on a later call, but you know, as Rick said, it's not insignificant, so it's meaningful to the total. (CFO) Yeah, off the top of my head, Jason, we said, you know Church & Dwight were around 3%, I think those guys are high single-digits, but we can clarify that on the next call. — CEO and CFO"

""Reps engaging in the practice of medicine has always been the concern. It’s very time consuming to schedule the patient with a doctor to reprogram them. The majority of the doctors don’t know how stimulators work or how to program them. The rep is in the operating room doing the programming. The doctors are not involved in the programming. They understand at a high level that they’re driving a current through the spine. From a technical standpoint to use the programmer or remote control, not so much." — Former Nevro executive #1; "They’re not health care providers in any way, shape, or form. Some of them are not educated in medicine or science at all, and they’re responsible for the care of patients. You can say that’s definitely not a great thing. If the patients knew what the credentials of some of the caregivers are they would probably be pretty concerned." — Former Nevro executive #2"

"It seems our products are so popular that we struggle to meet the demand. If people love Oatly and want more, we want to be better at getting it to them. And we’re off to a decent start: In 2019 we produced around 165 million liters of product, a whopping 93% increase compared to 2018. We’ve built two new production sites—one in Vlissingen in the Netherlands, and one in Millville, New Jersey in the US—both of which opened in 2019. Because the focus was on finalizing and starting up these sites, the increased production capacity initially had a negative impact on our overall environmental footprint. But we always think long-term, and the plan is to catch up and make things right again with various improvements at these locations. During 2020, we also plan to start building two additional production sites—another in the US and our first one in Asia (Singapore). — 2019 Sustainability Report"

"In January 2020, MSCI entered into a strategic relationship with Burgiss, a global provider of investment decision support tools for private capital. The Company acquired a 40% non-controlling interest for $190.8 million, including capitalized costs, which is accounted for as an equity method investment with the Company's share of Burgiss' earnings being recognized in "Other expense (income), net" in the Condensed Consolidated Statements of Income. The Company is applying a policy election to recognize its share of Burgiss' earnings on a three-month lag. Accordingly, the Company has not recognized any earnings or amortization related to its investment in Burgiss in the three months ended March 31, 2020. MSCI has also elected to apply the nature of the distribution approach to determine the classification of the distributions it receives from its equity method investees. — MSCI 2020 10-K"

"This pattern suggests that Phillips 66’s board is using these repeated proposals as a distraction tactic while failing to deliver tangible governance reform that shareholders seem to support. If the desire to declassify is genuine, one would think the board would accept the remedy that Elliott has proposed. — Professor Mark DesJardine, Dartmouth Tuck School of Business; Phillips objects to the Elliott proposal, weakly arguing that it “contravenes well-settled principles of Delaware corporate law and would be highly unlikely to withstand scrutiny in Delaware courts… The problem with this argument is that it ignores the simple fact that directors are free to resign their board positions at any time, and nothing in the Phillips charter or bylaws possible can be construed as preventing directors from voluntarily offering to resign..” — Professor Jonathan Macey, Yale Law School and Yale SOM"

""[Medtronic's] intermediate catheter - it is the aspiration catheter." — Neurosurgeon; "The FDA label matters more to less-sophisticated doctors, like radiologists. People like me do whatever I think is best." — Neurosurgeon; "They are a commodity product. We basically just decided in our [RFP] process - if you step back and think about what they're offering, they're just plastic tubes, right? How hard is it to make plastic tubes?" — Neurosurgeon; "Penumbra went around to and made a very big deal about physicians using Medtronic, Terumo and Stryker aspiration catheters that previously did not have the stroke label indication. They freaked out a lot of doctors. This annoyed the doctors a lot because [the Penumbra salesman] should not be telling the doctors how they should be treating their patients. This also swayed some doctors to use Penumbra." — Neurovascular Products Sales Director"

""it's all knife fights in phone booths... you're not really taking share any longer; you're just trading share amongst those three primary players." — Former Pure employee; "You can quote it from all three of those vendors, Dell, Pure, and NetApp and get a similar solution with a similar price. So, you're looking at Toyota, Honda, and Nissan, right? They're really close." — Field CTO at IT reseller/integrator; "[Pure was] beating up NetApp. I've heard this from my friends at NetApp. Then NetApp did something brilliant. They [licensed] their ONTAP code very attractively to Amazon and the other hyperscalers... They crushed it. That was something that Pure was lacking." — Former data storage architect at AWS; "The problem with Pure has always been unstructured data...especially compared to VAST which started from unstructured data..." — Data storage product manager at leading hyperscaler"

"The authors stated that these findings had several drawbacks. First, the findings were observational and retrospective. Second, the choice of ACM was decidedly not random and likely influenced by a number of patient, provider, and system factors. Third, inherent limitations exist in the use of claims data. Fourth, these researchers set the analytic start date using claims with CPT codes in part to facilitate the identification of device manufacturer with National Provider Identifier (NPI). Fifth, although a difference-in-difference analysis could identify relative differences in utilization and cost trajectories, which was the objective of this analysis, the healthcare resource utilization (HCRU) and cost outcomes were unadjusted. Sixth, this study was not designed to examine the mechanism (mediator or regulator) of outcomes. — Aetna Clinical Policy Bulletin on Cardiac Event Monitors"

""That's the bread and butter. I worked on 6 or 7 projects, maybe 10 if you count some of the ones I worked on briefly. In my time, I worked with various flavors of e. Coli, yeast, a weird organism that wasn't even domesticated." — Former strain engineer; "They took all of the money that they've raised, and they put it into the equipment to be able to do parallel processing of yeast cells. It's not always yeast, but yeast is their organism of choice." — Former Ginkgo executive; "Yeast is typically the organism of choice because it's well-understood, it's fairly easy to manipulate and work with, and you can do post-translational modifications. It's a very robust organism, and the entire industry, I would say, yeast is the organism of choice." — Former Ginkgo executive; "Zymergen are also using yeast. Yeast is an industry-standard, so that's just not a secret." — Former Ginkgo executive"

"Pain doctors don't make a lot of money implanting stimulators. They make more money trialing. You can make thousands of dollars trialing a procedure. In the past you used to be paid per electrode, so Boston Scientific created a 16 electrode lead and the government figured out what was happening and then they reimbursed by lead not electrode. You can make $5,000 to $8,000 for a trial and a couple of hundred to a couple of thousand for implantation. It's not very lucrative to implant. It's always been that way. — Former Nevro executive; I'd say the majority of stim is done in ASC's, in the pain world. If you own your own ASC you're more likely to push stim therapy and stim trials and implants on your patients. If you are a hospital employee, you're likely to not care as much and your utilization is going to be far less for a given hundred patients. — One of Nevro's highest volume KOL's"

""Part of the reason we struggle to underwrite Box’s story of accelerating growth and expanding margins is the fact that Box has discussed initiatives to accelerate growth in the past, but not delivered on it, and has had several different target models, consistently needing to walk them back" — RBC Capital Markets, July 2021; "Box managed modest growth acceleration for the quarter, existing only if we consider the company’s results on a sequential basis. In simpler terms, Box’s newly reported 10% growth in the first quarter of its fiscal 2022 was better than the 8% growth it earned during the fourth quarter of its fiscal 2021, but worse than the 13% growth it managed in its year-ago Q1. With Box, however, instead of judging it by normal rules, we’re hunting in its numbers each quarter for signs of promised acceleration. By that standard, Box met its own goals" — TechCrunch, May 2021"

"“I was hands-on on the ACTIS line, particularly the ACTIS A150. These were for mask inspection exclusively. There were three machines...I'd say there were definitely a lot of challenges with the tool, and the light source in and of itself was out of Lasertec's hand at the time with the A150. Ushio would do the light source replacements and maintenance. There were engineering differences to try to resolve some of the main problems that we experienced with Ushio - it was basically like a flickering candle when you were trying to utilize it like a laser. Having high repeatability became a big challenge. They needed someone on the back end, like someone in my position, to be able to call, worst case, if the light drifted out of focus or too far out that Intel engineers couldn't step in and resolve it themselves.” — Former Lasertec field service engineer who worked in the Intel mask shop"

""It's not just about cost, as you well know. And on the cost side, our people are very efficient." — John Hess, Chairman & CEO Hess, April 2012; "Not really familiar with what you are talking about [in response to question about Hess closing gap with other Bakken operators]. I will tell you that our data shows us as very competitive with other operators in North Dakota [Bakken]." — Gregory Hill, EVP Worldwide E&P Hess, April 2012; "Essentially [we are] always focusing on how we're working on the cost side of the margin equation... [the bakken is] our oil factory, [we]continue to work on our oil factory way of driving down costs." — Harold Hamm, Founder/Chairman/CEO Continental, October 2012; "The big focus is driving down costs." — Michael Lou, CFO Oasis Petroleum, November 2012; "Our focus right now is getting our well cost down." — Jim Brown, COO Whiting Petroleum, November 2012."

""It typically took over 12 months to make the decision on licensing, there were a lot of people involved. At other companies it would take half as long. Since it was a very long process, a number of times, especially small companies, would just move on." — Former Bristol-Myers Executive; "Starting a clinical program took too long. By the time it took to write a protocol and committing to do a program, a lot of things had changed, some things had gotten approved, and some programs became obsolete. I remember one program took five years for us to complete." — Former Bristol-Myers Executive; "We are moving in a speed now in R&D that frankly, we had never contemplated before... we've had about a 3 percentage point improvement. So what we paid 19% of sales for in 2014, we now pay 16% of sales for. And that's real progress for us." — Robert Bradway (Chairman & CEO of Amgen, January 2019)"

"“Hyperscale Cloud and Infrastructure Partners. We have formed global strategic go-to-market alliances with hyperscale cloud providers including Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. In addition, we have strategic alliances with leading hardware infrastructure providers to deliver our software optimized for their technology such as Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Intel.” — C3 10-K Annual Report. “The tight integration of the C3 Platform with HPE’s ProLiant family of servers, including the HPE ProLiant for Microsoft Azure Stack, unlocks tremendous value for organizations across the globe and in every vertical market – enabling AI, machine learning, and deep learning while addressing governance, compliance, and security needs,” said Phillip Cutrone, VP and GM of the WW OEM Business at HPE. — C3.ai Announces Strategic OEM Partnership with Hewlett Packard Enterprise, press release, Oct 16, 2018"

""I was on Saluda’s trial and it’s published so the data is all out there. It was very good, like really good. I’d never seen anything like it. And these were normal patients. Real patients, not cherry-picked." — KOL and previously a high volume Nevro implanter; "I guess we’re enthusiastically waiting for Saluda to come out and to see if that’s a game changer. Saluda overall looks very exciting and it makes sense." — KOL and Nevro speaker; "No one waveform is perfect for a patient. That’s what Saluda is trying to do. It’s very cool. It’s the best tonic device out there. It’s the best tonic data ever. Their data beats Nevro’s data. I hope Medtronic or someone buys them because it would give them a competitive advantage." — High volume implanter and Nevro user; "Saluda is really cool. The device has an opportunity to be very efficient. I’m optimistic about it." — High volume implanter"

"We continue to see some risk that Tesla could materially cut the price of its locally made (MIC) Model Y from 488k RMB ($73k) to something in the mid- to high-300k range ($56-58k). This could potentially hurt near-term sentiment and slow NIO’s order book momentum considering it would be a direct competitor to NIO’s EC6 and ES6. — Deutsche Bank. Recent estimates from securities firm Tianfeng Securities are pointing at something quite remarkable for Tesla’s ongoing ramp in China. As noted by the firm in a recently-released research report, Tesla’s strategy of passing its cost savings to customers could result in the Made-in-China Model Y starting at a very reasonable price of CN¥275,000 (about $41,000). — Tianfeng Securities. Another wave of price cuts for premium electric vehicles in China may be on the horizon, stirring up what could be an intense rivalry — Bloomberg Intelligence."

"We note that the “other adjustments” line item is a significant adjustment in your reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP Results, particularly for the year ended January 31, 2016 and 2015. Please tell us the nature of the items included within these “other adjustments” as well as your consideration for further breaking out these items in more detail in your reconciliations. Similar concerns apply to the Form 8-K filed September 7, 2016. — SEC; The “other adjustments” line item within our “Reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP Results” includes restructuring expenses, acquisition-related expenses (including integration costs)... we have chosen to present those adjustments as a single line item in our reconciliation tables. We believe that breaking out the individual items comprising the “other adjustments” line item could unnecessarily clutter the reconciliation tables — Verint Response"

""It was a maze. We were doing a disservice selling a 1,200 employee client Vantage when we would have done a better job selling Workforce Now... I'm not sure that the customer is at the center of the decision." — Former SVP Product Strategy; "Why are margins so low? Overhead. So many layers, so many inefficiencies with regards to the same people doing the same thing... each product or team has its own duplicative organization. There are still silo's." — Former Sr. Director of Business Transformation; "There were always turf wars at the seams. Imagine a 49 employee client moved into Majors and is now being sold Workforce Now. Who owns that client? Is this an SBS or a Majors upsell opportunity? Consider it – there’s separate sales leaders. Everything is segmented by size. The revenue is ‘owned’ by regional GMs with their own P&L. It’s a mess." — Former DVP, Business Transformation"

""The Company’s valuation policy considers the fact that privately negotiated securities increase in value over a long period of time, that the Company does not intend to trade the securities, and that no ready market exists." — Allied Capital Corporation 2001 Annual Report; "The concept of ‘current sale’ in ASR 118 is particularly troubling if applied to a BDC’s illiquid portfolio, because if such a portfolio were subject to a current sale test, the portfolio would need to carry a significant discount from the face value of its underlying securities." — Allied Capital White Paper; "The idea that we should be marking long-term, illiquid investments to some artificial or theoretical markets instead of telling shareholders what we really think we have made in gains or lost in principal seems theoretical at best and at least confusing." — Ms. Sweeney, Allied Capital conference call."

"And the strategy was land and expand, we discussed the fact that we have a very broad portfolio of better-breed solutions, and we also have a large customer base. We acquired KANA and we got their customer base. So we saw a great opportunity to land and expand within the customer base and as well as new customers. And it actually worked very well for us last year where we achieved double-digit organic growth as we were executing on this land-and-expand strategy last year....What became clear to us now after a couple of quarters of looking at the trends is that while our customers are very interested in working with vendors that have a broad portfolio and moving faster towards transformation, the approval cycle does take longer, and when they approach management, they need to go back and defend the proposal and go through a long explanation and so forth. — Dan Bodner, CEO, Verint"

"Effective April 2019, the Company adopted a formal “clawback” policy applicable to annual and long-term incentive awards made to the CEO, CFO and any other key member of executive management as identified by the Board or CEO. Under this policy, the Company may seek to recoup incentive compensation paid to covered employees to the extent that such compensation was granted, vested, or earned based on financial results that the Company is required to restate as a result of material noncompliance with any financial reporting requirement under federal securities laws. In March 2022, the Company expanded the policy to allow recoupment of incentive compensation paid in the event of gross negligence in performance or misconduct resulting in a violation of law or Company policy, where such acts resulted in significant financial or reputational harm to the Company. — 2022 Proxy Statement"

"“I think it's an interesting observation because one of the things—in my mind, a cell line development workflow really starts you're penning single cells, you're observing something about them, in many cases, division rate or growth rate, things like that. And then the idea is that you can take the cells off of the chip, put them in a plate, and then grow them up in a GMP-compliant type facility. It's been interesting because there's honestly a lot of problems with that. It's not really all that surprising to me that they kind of de-emphasized that pipeline because there are issues with contamination, there are issues with growth, and the cells don't necessarily behave off-chip the same way they do on-chip, and so what may be a great growth candidate on-chip may behave differently in so-called chip emissions and things like that.” — Leading academic institution/ex-BLI scientist"

""Since confirming the scale of the modernization impact on free cash flow from Egypt, the guidance provided... for the period 2022-24 is the first time management has laid out the implications of what it has described as 'the most attractive incremental investment opportunity in its portfolio'... this is the primary driver of a 50% increase in free cash flow capacity of the portfolio." — BofA Securities (22 February 2022); "[Apache's PSC modernization] is a win-win for both parties and will help to drive increases in investment and production to the benefit of Egyptians." — H.E. Tarek El Molla, Minister of Petroleum & Mineral Resources, Arab Republic of Egypt (May 2021); "The most important and material event in the Company's 15-year history in Egypt" "Field netbacks will improve by >100% over price range of Brent $40-$60" — TransGlobe Energy Corporate Presentation (April 2021)"

"“CapEx for the quarter was $22 million, mostly associated with our Factory of the Future investment...Projected CapEx for fiscal '22 is expected to be in the range of $90 million to $100 million, associated with increased investment in our Biopharma business.” — James Thorburn, Twist CFO; “...In terms of CapEx, we're projecting approximately $90 million to $100 million for CapEx. So that should help you frame the cash burn. So if you step back and look at that, it's approximately around about $260 million for the year... I mean, obviously, a good chunk of that is being invested in ramping up R&D for biopharma, reinvesting in the core business. We're investing about $40 million in Data Storage. And obviously, for overall CapEx, the bulk of the CapEx investment, approximately $75 million of the $100 million this year is for the Factory of the Future.” — James Thorburn, Twist CFO"

""These people prey on sick and generous folks, it’s inconceivable that a company in medical industry would be so unprofessional." — Customer (January 17, 2019); "This company is suppose to cater to the elderly to me they rip off the elderly." — Customer (August 13, 2018); "FRAUD by salesperson: Before buying a $2500 portable oxygen unit from Inogen I asked the sales rep if Medicare covered such equipment and he said no. This was blatantly deceptive... The rep confirmed that Medicare does pay for the units but Inogen is not an authorized provider in my area. The rep deliberately withheld that information from me to make the sale." — Customer (August 7, 2018); "I was intending to use my Medicare benefits to help with the purchase of the device... it is fairly easy to understand what's going on. It's what is referred to as the old "bait an switch"." — Customer (November 21, 2017)"

"“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. If you do not know the neuromodulation space and you’re listening to the Board tell you that Rami [prior CEO] screwed this up. You think, I’ve talked to Kasra Amirdelfan [implanter who is the #1 recipient of Nevro payments*] and David Caraway, their Chief Medical Officer, these guys are high on it. I can come in here and look like a rock star and just not be an [redacted] like Rami, and I can flip this thing in no time because I know the investment community because of my history. 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"

""The start-stop nature of NFL games means that the latency issues that arise from data providers offering a feed from television coverage don't come into play as they might do in other sports... The fact remains that most betting on a match, even in-play, is on the final result. Thus, the case in favor of new types of in-play bets is, as yet, only the stuff of start-up pitch decks." — BettingUSA.com (June 14, 2021); "I do believe the data is being over-valued, and the NFL is not familiar with the challenges of running a profitable sports betting business." — Matt Para, sports betting consultant (BettingUSA.com article); "What I can say to you, is that on a cash basis we anticipate the NFL to be breakeven in 2021, and cash generating thereafter. And indeed, on of course, the life of the contract we anticipated to be profitable." — Mark Locke, CEO (GENI earnings call Q1 2021)."

""On March 19, 2014 the company announced several changes to its bylaws which would ‘update the bylaws to address current market practices.’ However, some of the bylaw changes appear to go beyond modernization, and—in the context of an extant challenge from shareholders—call into question the board’s motivation....the nature of these particular changes, coupled with the last-minute cancelation of its formerly annual 2-day analyst conference in March, may suggest cause for concern to shareholders." — ISS; "[S]ome investors are protesting that Darden’s idea of ‘direct engagement’ amounts to returning the phone calls of analysts and investors who agree with its strategy while ignoring calls from dissenters. ‘They’ve got a history of only engaging with investors and analysts who are supportive of their views,’ said one Darden shareholder, who declined to give his" — New York Post"

"“Yes, exactly.” — Former SafeCharge Employee; “Absolutely. To be honest, how can you find out? If you take over a company, you only look at the people and the CVs and see they have experience. He found out in the late stage and that is why they are recruiting very strongly right now.” — Former SafeCharge Employee; “Yes. Its both a technology thing and to acquire the customers. It’s about the clients and to be honest, most DSPs in the U.S. don’t have the necessary experience in the gambling industry because it hasn’t been allowed.” — Former SafeCharge Employee; “Yes. I mean in this industry you have good and bad stuff so it would not surprise me. Yes. For example, you have some FX companies they are servicing. Interpol and the FBI are cleaning those companies up. For sure they have affiliations with them because they do quite a few FX companies.” — Former SafeCharge Employee"

""Yeah. Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my question. Can you help me out on what's the average FICO score of your buyers that are using financing on your site? And how has that trended as you've doubled since IPO, or actually call it massively more than doubled? Also, can you - it doesn't look like Ally is now taking all of your loans based on my calculations, are you selling to others now as well? And if so, who and what type of loans are you selling to other people than Ally?" — Nat Schindler, Bank of America; "Yeah. So first on the FICO question, I would say our FICO continues to look a lot like the broader used car market. So if you look at other leading retailers or just kind of used car sales in general, we've got a very similar FICO distribution to any of those retailers and that's been very stable across time, nothing to call out there." — Ernie Garcia III - CEO, Carvana"

""Our [buying] group has a committee looking to get a relationship with one of these as our own print farm." — Orthodontist, Platinum Align Tier; "There are over 100 aligner companies coming out of Asia. Two to three years from now, I don't see how Invisalign will see the same amount of cases that they had in the past." — Dentist, DSO; "The need for Invisalign is diminishing. Dental laboratories are going to have the software and printing capabilities to compete with Invisalign. The production costs will not be as cheap as Invisalign [per aligner], but the lab will not need the same margin as Align because they won't have to cover advertising costs. This is going to cause significant pricing pressure in the industry. Today, we have a few big competitors. As soon as labs get involved, there will be different pricing." — Former C-Level Executive, Major Dental Equipment Company"

""Whether it’s because TransMedics is too expensive or OrganOX is better, there is a desire for our transplant center to do more OrganOX...that is a risk for the market share for TransMedics...liver is why OrganOX is taking off." — CFO of one of the largest OPO’s (organ procurement organizations) in the country. "If you see the liver use start to go down, I can tell you, at least for here in the Bay Area, it will all be attributed right away to OrganOX. They can't produce the machines fast enough. We would have purchased three of them, but they can only give us one at the moment. So, then as soon as we deploy this program, we are in conversations with the perfusion group to bring in NRP. And if we want to provide NRP on 100% of our DCD donors, which is the bulk of the OCS liver machine use, is on those DCDs." — Executive at a leading West Coast OPO, longtime industry veteran"

"“Today, we believe that we have the best pipeline in our history.” — Dr. Bourla, October 30, 2018; “At the same time, we have likely the best pipeline we've ever had at the corporation.” — Dr. Bourla, January 3, 2019; “...what we believe is the best pipeline in our history with good breadth and strong innovation.” — Dr. Bourla, January 29, 2019; “...this company will be, from day 1 after the separation, a best-in-class revenue growth, long term, sustainable story with a relatively unlevered balance sheet at this company and the best pipeline we ever had.” — Dr. Bourla, January 14, 2020; “And if you take a big picture view, over the last decade, we have changed and refocused our approach to R&D. We have improved dramatically its productivity, and we have developed the best pipeline we ever had and one of the best, I believe, in the industry.” — Dr. Bourla, January 28, 2020."

"“There is nothing real we have seen on the table and investigated deeper and taken and analyzed on our side in specific detail. [We’re getting it] from QuantumScape’s side. The data, facts and figures are aggregated on a level which seems perfectly nice.” — VW employee; “When you have test results and each cell is behaving differently most of the time, of course there are people [at VW] saying, they tested 100 cells and two performed quite well, and those are the results we see, just to give you an example. With our current suppliers who are actually equipping our cars, we get live data. This is not where we are currently. It’s also that there’s a lot of marketing involved. As I mentioned before, we are quite dependent on what is being presented to us.” — VW employee; “I’ve gotten mixed opinions from our engineers. Everybody says it’s a long journey to goal…” — VW employee"

"Yeah, it is inappropriate, and they weren’t granted access, thankfully. But I think what they wanted to see was—because every time a new potential donor becomes available, someone at the OPO is entering that data into this computer system. You can see at any given time which donors are in the pipe, which ones are in the cue. And so, they probably, I would imagine they wanted to go and review their clinical information to see if they might be a good candidate for the device. I don’t know what they were going to do with that information, like try to persuade the OPO or try to persuade the surgeon at the transplant center that accepted it; I don’t know. ... I’m sure they have a code. Anyone could look and see who they have access to. It’s not something that’s transparent. Although, I suppose an OPO could give a vendor access through their own login. — Transplant administrator"

"Near the end of each quarter, beginning on or about December 2002~ Vitesse routinely shipped large amounts of inventory to Nu Horizons. As the close of each quarter approached, Tomasetta and Hovanec directed Vitesse employees to ship product to Nu Horizons in order to close the gap between Tomasetta's internally forecasted revenue target and Vitesse's actual quarterly revenue. During weekly revenue meetings, Tomasetta and Hovanec instructed members of the sales staff to maximize the amount of inventory Vitesse shipped to Nu Horizons. Tomasetta, Hovanec, Mody, Kaplan and others then discussed in smaller, closed-door meetings, specific product shipments to Nu Horizons that would be made in order to close the revenue gap identified by Tomasetta and Hovanec. The defendants sometimes referred to these quarterly shipments as quarterly stocking packages ("QSPs"). — SEC complaint"

""Thanks and good morning. In the write up, in the discussion of the foreign exchange headwinds and gross margin you also said you made select changes to your product mix. I am just wondering if you could elaborate are there certain categories that your emphasizing in certain categories, you are deemphasizing I am just wondering what that sentence really meant?" — Peter Sklar, BMO Capital Markets; "It's really an item by item discussion. Where the compelling value remains and we are able to take for example two pencils out of a pack and still be competitive to help with offsetting some of the headwinds, that's the way we handle it or in other cases if we replace the product with a new offering that's just as compelling but different at a lower cost potentially. That's another way Buyers can use that tool to help them with current challenges." — Michael Ross, CFO, Dollarama"

""Lastly, as a reminder, last week marked the one-year anniversary of our Fleet ownership. The acquisition continues to perform in line with our expectations, and our focus has fully shifted towards our long-term brand-building strategy." — Ron Lombardi, CEO; "If you look at Fleet this quarter, you mentioned consumption still pretty strong: mid-single-digits plus. Fleet sales were down 1% in this quarter. They are up 3% year to date." — Raymond James; "Yes, so from a sales perspective for Fleet, US sales continue to be strong. It's the international sales, where we primarily work through a distributor business. And we see sales variability with distributor businesses from quarter to quarter on a regular basis. So again, that's why we take you back to the mid- to high-single-digit consumption trends for Fleet overall, which we feel comfortable with." — Christine Sacco, CFO"

""Despite a reduced investment outlook, we remain concerned with the pace of SG&A spend to support growth of owned retail doors, which could still generate lower marginal returns than anticipated leaving earnings growth challenged longer-term. Total SG&A intensity is up 600bp over the last three years." — 1/30/15 Credit Suisse. "...it looks like if you take out that $7 million of cost savings you're talking about in 4Q, you're still looking at almost 10% SG&A growth in fourth quarter against the minus 5% top line." — Research Analyst, 2/2/17 Earnings Call. "Some of it is some additional marketing around our E-Commerce business. And another item is there are some increased incentive comp this year relative to year ago, and that's really related to -- incentive comp related to lower levels of management relative to a year ago." — Thomas George (CFO), 2/2/17 Earnings Call."

""Omnichannel commerce leader grows customer base by more than 20,000 customer locations worldwide, entrenches leadership position in Asia-Pacific." — Press Release, March 11, 2021. "Subsequent to the closing of the acquisition, Lightspeed will serve as the technology partner of choice for over 135,000 customer locations worldwide" — Press Release, March 11, 2021. "Lightspeed Payments had another record quarter and grew revenues both year-on-year and from the previous quarter. And we are now present in over a 140,000 customer locations when we include the recent acquisition of Vend." — Q4 2021 Conf Call, May 2021. "Looking at the building blocks of our business, everything starts with customer locations, which grew to approximately 119,000 at March 31, and is now over 140,000 on a pro forma basis, including our recent acquisition of Vend." — Q4 2021 Conf Call, May 2021."

"“Not robust enough to ensure good results”; troubleshooting was difficult... The system should have been a little bit more resilient and a little bit more flexible to accommodate for a suboptimal sample. At that point, troubleshooting was also fairly difficult.” — Former BLI scientist. “It always required a lot of support materials in terms of documentation... You couldn’t really run everything perfectly because there were just too many steps.” — Former BLI scientist. “They did, yes, they did occasionally because consider that in a workflow that can last up to five to six days or more, 500 hours of a target for consistent and reliable usage, that basically means five or six runs. That is something that can be reached. That limit can be reached fairly quickly. If 1 out of 6 or 7 runs doesn’t work, then it starts to be an issue for the customer.” — Former BLI scientist."

""The Abcellera system has the same possibility because it's based on a very similar concept to the Berkeley Lights system; it doesn't use optoelectrical positioning to move the cells around, but has a 3D based, gravity-based system to isolate single cells, but then you can also put them in chambers when you put them together with other cells so that you can do a functional assay. So, that part could be done with the Abcellera system. Some other aspects of the activation of a cell that is producing antibodies can also be monitored to a specific type of assay that is compatible with the 10X Genomics platform based on encapsulating it in droplets, not like single cells but a B cell and potential target cells together in the same droplet and then monitoring the behavior of the B cell and then staining. There are ways to obtain the same information." — Former BLI scientist"