Callouts & quotes from 108+ activist slides

""Despite Juniper's strong fundamental performance this year that has driven the Street's EPS estimates higher versus a year ago, Juniper's stock (up 10% YTD) has underperformed relative to the S&P 500 Index (up 26%) in 2013. As such, we discussed the opportunity for an accelerated stock repurchase program with Juniper. ... We believe a $3 billion stock repurchase program could be 15-20% accretive to EPS" — Cantor Fitzgerald (12/11/13); "With respect to uses of cash, is there an argument for giving a committed level of cash return to shareholders out of free cash flow, given the healthy cash balance you have, given that it feels like cash flow, as a trend, should be rising going forward?" — Credit Suisse, CS Tech Conference (12/4/13); "Over the past three years, free cash flow generation at Juniper has averaged over $550 million per year. Further, the company has a relatively strong balance sheet with $2.8 billion of net cash at the end of the June quarter or 26% of the current market cap. ... we believe Juniper could and should institute a more formal capital return strategy" — Credit Suisse (9/18/13); "We believe there is scope for increased cash distribution" — Credit Suisse (9/18/13); "Healthy cash flow, no dividend. A quarterly dividend of $0.08/share would be very reasonable (potential yield 1.6%), but nothing's planned as yet" — RBC (8/12/13); "Juniper is a member of a club that most investors would like to see it resign from: Out of the 35 largest Hardware & Equip companies globally, JNPR is one of only four that is not expected to pay a dividend over the NTM. We believe it is time for JNPR to quit this club. ... we think a dividend would be viewed as a much-needed sign of mgmt's longer-term confidence. ... The knock-on positive effect of paying a dividend is bringing a whole new class of shareholders into the ownership base" — Citi (6/7/13); "We think it is time that Juniper quits the non-dividend payers and joins the overwhelming majority of global peers that directly return cash to shareholders" — Citi (6/7/13); "Risks to our Sell rating include a stronger carrier spending environment, improved competitive positioning, or a more aggressive capital allocation strategy, including the introduction of a dividend or a large buyback" — Goldman Sachs (4/24/13); "What would make us more positive? More aggressive capital allocation and/or activist shareholder involvement. Juniper's strong balance sheet ... and cash flow generation (estimated 7% FCF yield in CY13) make it a strong candidate for a significant buy-back or initiation of a dividend" — Goldman Sachs (3/19/13); "Juniper's share repurchases are typically used to offset stock option dilution resulting from the company's employee stock plans rather than being opportunistic buybacks based on price" — Goldman Sachs (6/13/12)"

""And so I joined Danaher. And with the team there, we evolved the Danaher Business System to be far beyond factories. So over the last 14 years in Danaher -- and I'm sure you've seen that in investor presentations how much we, at the time, they know, talk about what we did on sales, on marketing, on service, on how to accelerate innovation and so on. All of those things are 100% applicable at Johnson Controls." — JCI Wolfe Conference 5/25/2025; "On the services side, it's all about ensuring that the value of delivering and the way we deliver that value, that strong customer relationship translates into strong project to service conversion, and we're quite pleased on what we're seeing there as well as our software solutions to where now you're able to decouple ourselves from the natural investment cycles, investment cycles are either building a new building or they have a refurbishment plan coming up." — HON Wolfe Conference 5/20/2025; "We built a very strong service organization with dedicated and centralized playbooks that help serve our customers with life cycle management solutions." — CARR Carrier's Analyst Day 5/19/2025; "And some of our customers want an OEM that stand behind the system and service the assets over its life, and hopefully, is there for the replacement down the line." — JCI BofA Conference 5/14/2025; "Finally, our technological capabilities and our product domains are impressive. Our capabilities are evidenced by our many industry firsts and nearly 8,000 patents with more coming. Johnson Controls has come a long way over the last several years. But as I said, there's still great potential to unlock in this iconic technology-based and service-enabled company." — JCI Q2'25 Earnings Call 5/07/2025; "Yes. I mean I think the service business, obviously -- these are very sophisticated systems. So think of it as, the more sophisticated the system, the more aptitude there is for the OEM to do the service work, I'd start with that." — TT J.P. Morgan Conference 3/11/2025; "So that's the strength of the equipment markets. It brings the service tail and that service tail doesn't really start in those first 2 or 3 years post installation, right? There's warranty periods, and we get through that warranty period and then the newer product probably needs a little bit less service, but you start growing that over time. The service dollars really bring that 8x to 10x the value of services versus the original equipment. That really starts kicking in a few years after installation." — TT Barclays Conference 2/19/2025"

""The large variability in capex versus original guidance (just set six months ago) demonstrates some lack of capital discipline within the company." — Citigroup (July 25, 2012); "On the upstream side, we question whether the company has the bandwidth to operate in over 20 countries... We do not believe a company of Hess's size will get credit in the market for a shotgun approach to investing across the world." — Citigroup (July 20, 2012); "The key issue for HES in our mind is capital intensity and the inability of management in recent years to live within the limits of its cash flows. Furthermore, given the lack of growth in oil and gas production over the last 5 years, there is a case to be made that the company should return more cash back to shareholders instead of attempting to grow at all." — Citigroup (July 20, 2012); "We are skeptical that Hess's current global growth strategy will yield superior returns or growth, as its organization appears to be spread thin and we think it is unlikely that Hess can have a competitive advantage in all the areas it is pursuing." — Goldman Sachs (June 11, 2012); "We believe Hess should consider further reducing its exploration program beyond what has already been announced. It is not clear to us given the levels of exploration spending versus cash flows that a mid-sized oil company can successfully pursue a global exploration strategy as Hess has attempted... The company's high-risk/high-potential exploration and acreage strategy since 2009 is thus far not yielding favorable results." — Goldman Sachs (June 11, 2012); "The 7% pullback in the stock was severe, and in our view, is indicative of a loss of investor confidence in HES's execution capabilities, following a string of production misses and a lack of notable exploration success, in addition to a growing deficit between capex and cash flow. Entering 1Q'12, HES had missed its production guidance for four of the preceding 5 quarters, meaning execution was at a premium." — Simmons (April 26, 2012); "Although we think the company's underlying asset value is worth significantly higher than our near-term price target, we now believe the shares will likely continue to struggle throughout this year and will trade substantially below our estimate of its fair asset value due to the lack of visible catalysts as well increased investor skepticism over management's execution record..." — Barclays (April 26, 2012)"

""We've seen [auto] revenue off of a substantial base doubled in each of the last two years. And we expect to grow, while not at that faster rate, well over 50% for several years to come" — CFO Stifel Conf June 2016; "Yes, for the automotive in MPS, as you know, we entered the market about 4 or 5 years ago, and 4 or 5 years ago, our revenue almost 0. And even 2, 3 years ago very teeny, teeny, tiny. And it takes a long time to get the revenue. And so design cycle is about 3 to 4 years. And we are total TAM in automotive, it's about $6 billion, probably a little -- now they're more than that. And so what is our percentage? It's less than 1%. So it's a total greenfield for us to grow" — CEO Hsing April 2017; "Yes, it is fair that the growth rate it will not change much. Okay, but don't quote me exactly what's the rate. It would be very similar to this year. Which applications or which segments, I think in the next couple of years we're going to expand lot more segments. Now the lighting, infotainments and the safeties, and we will have a lot more safety products come out. And as Bernie said in his script, we have an ADAS and also the battery management as well as the connectivities. And those areas have a very little revenue or some of the items have no revenue, only sampling. And we expect to have a very high percentage growth in -- a very dollar amount growth in 2019, '20 and '21" — CEO Hsing Commenting on Auto Feb 2018; "The other thing I want to also point out is we're growing so fast, okay? 55% year-on-year growth last year. Take a look at the total semiconductor market in auto. It's about 13%, right? 4x growth versus the market. And you can see the TAM that we're going after, $7 billion. ...Really, we're at this moment where the opportunity is incredible. MPS happens to be at the right place at the right time. We've learned from the last 5 years of innovation of selling. We understand the customers. We have the great products. We see the growth really continuing over the next 5, 6 years, easily, 40% to 50% CAGR" — Allan Chan MPWR Auto Marketing June 2018"

""There were a couple of other problems with Nevro besides loss of efficacy. One, the size of battery. When you put in a huge generator like Nevro’s original device, you can’t hide it well. The other is charging it every day. It’s a burden and now you see Abbott going huge into non-rechargeable devices. Their device lasts 5-7 years. When I switch people out of Nevro or whatever into an Abbott they’re like, 'I don’t have to charge it? Are you kidding me, why didn’t we do this in the first place?' Patients don’t understand the burden of charging every day until they actually have to charge it every day. Initially people don’t mind, but after 6 months it becomes a problem." — KOL and former high volume Nevro implanter and consultant; "The problem with a 10kHz device is that battery is going to be gone in a day. You have to recharge it like your iPhone. You don’t need to do that. You can have 1kHz, and you have the same outcome. That’s been shown." — KOL and high volume implanter; "The average duration between recharges is one of the biggest detriments for high frequency. Patients are charging daily. For the older folks who struggle with technology, it’s a significant detriment. I won’t implant Nevro in folks over 60. It’s a big turn off for me and my patients." — KOL and high volume implanter; "I haven’t seen any better efficacy with 10kHz versus other frequencies. I would also say that one of the downsides of Nevro is that because of the high energy requirements, patients need to recharge very frequently and there are patient populations who may not be compliant and there’s data on that, patients don’t charge them, that the devices don’t last as long and that the patients just don’t use the device as much." — High volume implanter; "Nevro has to be charged every couple of days or every day versus others every 1 or 2 weeks." — High volume implanter"

""And maybe a follow-up on Libre. This is a product that's been wildly successful. You're now over $100 million run rate in the U.S., over $1 billion globally, and you really have one major competitor here that's -- let's call it at the upper end of the technology scale. And Abbott, I view as the low-cost, easy-to-access, very easy-to-use product in continuous glucose monitoring. So, as we think about the evolution of Libre over the next few years, how do you think about Libre staying at the lower end of the cost and ease-of-use curve versus moving up and trying to compete with your main competitor there? Thanks." — Robbie Marcus, Analyst, J.P. Morgan; "Well, I'll tell you, interestingly enough, I don't actually look at it the way you just described. I think Libre is a pretty different product. It's got tremendous capability, but given that value point that we have it priced at, it is accessible to patients all over the world.... And in our case, we have a much lower cost and far greater automated manufacturing capability to not only allow that cost, but to allow for mass production. So I'd say, at this point, we're making healthy profits on this product. We have no intention of changing the value proposition at all. And your question sort of suggests that we would raise price in order to be competitive, I'd say, you want to be asking the other side, what they're going to do to make themselves a value proposition, because this product is incredibly good value proposition, which is why it's got such high demand." — Miles White, CEO, Abbott Laboratories"

"Question, Justin Post: "I know one of the initiatives of the Company is to move up to team sales. Just wondering how you are thinking about enterprise sales force and whether you might accelerate hiring there. And then on the CapEx versus the capital leases, maybe talk about why you choose to use capital leases, what are the advantages to the Company and how you think about the cash flow around those? Thank you." Answer, CFO Ajay Vashee: "This is Ajay. I'll jump in on the question on capital leases and thank you for the question. So the high level update there is that in the last quarter we added $25.5 million to our capital lease lines, and we made close to $30 million in payments against our capital lease obligations. And as a result, our ending capital lease balance was $170 million in Q1, and that was down about $4.3 million from Q4. And at a high level, while there may be some variances within a given quarter and between quarters, we expect to generally maintain our outstanding capital lease balance over the long-term, as capital lease repayments will roughly offset capital lease additions. And to your question on how we choose to buy equipment versus leverage a capital lease, we receive favorable financing terms on our capital leases. And we believe that for a portion of our infrastructure hardware, that they better match our capital investments with our cash inflows, and so that's why we leverage them. And we of course continue to evaluate our capital allocation strategy on an ongoing basis." — Q1 2018 Dropbox Call"

""They try to call Omnia a high-frequency tonic [low frequency stimulation] which is bullshit. It's the same thing. They try to claim that they have burst which is also like a high-frequency burst. Bullshit. There's no data. They never did a study. Omnia is what everyone else's device can already do, just packaged in a little Nevro box. If a doctor already left Nevro because their device sucks, there's nothing Omnia does that's brand new or innovative that you can't do with whatever company you already use." — KOL and former high volume Nevro implanter; "I haven't implanted the Omnia. It's an incremental benefit. It will be better than Senza. I don't think it'll be a game changer. It won't bump my Nevro share any more. Every stim company comes up with a new device every couple of years. It's an incremental, evolutionary advancement. Not revolutionary." — High volume implanter; "The impact of Omnia is incremental. I think it's incremental for the Nevro users that were concerned about Nevro's limitations and therefore gave some cases to other companies. I don't know how much it gains new doctors. By now you've either used Nevro or you haven't. They're not really converting people from other companies all of a sudden because of the Omnia. They've almost exclusively converted over the previous Senza and Senza 2 users to Omnia but at the same time, I don't think it's a as big of a leap as the first time around with HF10 versus paraesthesia-based stim." — KOL and high volume Nevro implanter and consultant"

""This was certainly hallway conversations at ATC. The discussion that people had in the hallways was, first of all, we’re glad there’s going to be competition, so TransMedics can’t be the only game in town. Almost everybody was saying that. Again, I’ll leave it to you whether this would devastate their earnings reports or not…this is not going to stay exclusive much longer." — Cardiothoracic transplant surgeon, director of a leading academic transplant center; "If there is not much of an advantage of having this incredibly expensive setup versus a $30k different technology, then I think they’re going to have a very hard time selling it." — Transplant hepatologist and director of the liver program at a Midwest academic center; "There’s going to be a point where the cost is going to go down. Right now, TransMedics doesn’t have big competition. The only competition is called OrganOX. That is the same type of machine perfusion. There are other new companies that are going through the FDA to get approved. Those are different types of pump like hyperthermic machine perfusion. So, I can guarantee you that these companies, they are going to get approved by the FDA. I think that in the next year or two years at the most, you are going to have other competitors with TransMedics. Because of the cost, people are going to start shifting gears, and they’re going to be changing to a different pump because it’s not sustainable for a transplant center..." — Transplant surgeon in a leadership role at Vanderbilt"

""The large variability in capex versus original guidance (just set six months ago) demonstrates some lack of capital discipline within the company." — Citigroup (July 25, 2012); "Our view is that exploration spending should at least come down by 50%." — Citigroup (July 20, 2012); "The key issue for HES in our mind is capital intensity and the inability of management in recent years to live within the limits of its cash flows." — Citigroup (July 20, 2012); "Our valuation includes a ~$6 per share penalty for uneconomic exploration activity." — Citigroup (November 2, 2012); "We then discount that number [Hess value] by 20% to account for Hess's high exploration spending." — Deutsche Bank (November 6, 2012); "To summarize, the key growth assets underperform, expectations are lowered, and a key investor fear – Hess's propensity to outspend cash flow – is stoked by an early upward revision to the 2012 budget." — Deutsche Bank (April 25, 2012); "We believe Hess should consider further reducing its exploration program beyond what has already been announced." — Deutsche Bank (November 6, 2012); "A significant reduction in its global exploration program we also think is needed, as we do not believe Hess has a competitive advantage in all the areas it is currently exploring." — Goldman Sachs (June 11, 2012); "The company's high-risk/high-potential exploration and acreage strategy since 2009 is thus far not yielding favorable results." — Goldman Sachs (June 11, 2012)"

"Each new corridor, use case and service increases our TAM, differentiates us from the competition, and creates new revenue streams, driving even more growth. — CEO on TAM, Q4'24, Feb 19, 2025; So I think you're seeing that increased mix which is exciting from -- for a whole host of reasons, but most importantly, kind of sustainable long-term growth because the 900 corridors we launched last quarter, they are not going to materially contribute to revenue this quarter, next quarter. They're going to contribute to revenue in the years to come. — CEO, Q2'2022, Aug 3, 2022; So quite honestly, the top 20% of corridors, we as marketers would know and have a gut sense like, oh, yes, U.S. to India versus U.K. to India versus U.S. to Philippines, we just had this gut sense of their value, what was different in the marketing, all of that. But the other 80%, we put into this bucket called long-tail corridors, and they got essentially the same sort of marketing with obviously replacements...But a lot of those corridors were added kind of in large groups and they say, well, this is an additional corridor to continue to expand, but we don't know that it's going to be a massive corridor. So it sort of grow into our default bucket. And it would be marketed too, but it would be marketed with the same formula of all of our other long-tail corridors. — Former Remitly Channel Executive, Tegus Interview, June 14, 2024"

"So all those things, we feel, will function to get us in that intermediate term back to those double-digit margins. — Richard Kramer, CEO of Goodyear, Nov 14 2017; When we are able to recover the margin we've lost from a price versus raw material perspective, that is going to mean a return to something like we saw during that 2014 to 2016 period. And we're confident that we can get back to those levels and work to go beyond. — Darren Wells, Former Goodyear EVP / CFO, Jan 16 2019; I think the question for us and the drive is to think about what it takes to get ourselves back to double-digit margins. And we see a lot of opportunity, as we combine Goodyear and Cooper to take cost out... there are some near-term opportunities that are very big. — Darren Wells, Former Goodyear EVP / CFO, Jun 16 2021; We think it is very realistic intermediate term to get to that double-digit type margin again... the electric vehicle tires are going to be the next seed that helps us continue in that direction... — Darren Wells, Former Goodyear EVP / CFO, Feb 14 2022; ...that will put us in a really good spot to get to that 8% in, call it, the near term... And with 10%, it's a realistic possibility in more the intermediate term, call that 3 to 5 years. — Darren Wells, Former Goodyear EVP / CFO, Aug 5 2022"

""We're really going to try to grow our market. 75% of our market is comprehensive.... That really mostly addresses that 12 million TAM that we talked about, but 25% of our portfolio is non-comprehensive. That's growing very fast, in part because it's going after these 300 million consumers." — John Morici, CFO, Align Technology. "Yes. And over the last year or two, one thing we've worried about/thought about with your business is, SmileDirect does create demand.... They just want to do it online.... But one thing we've worried about is that 40-year-old parent goes into the office and the doctor says, 'Oh yes, I can do that, $6,000, write me a check and we're done,' versus $1,895 or whatever SmileDirect is. So are you seeing your doctors understand that they need to reprice, reset their pricing policies or how they charge patients?" — Jeffrey Johnson, Analyst, Robert W. Baird. "Yes. Many doctors are realizing that those patients or potential patients are coming in and price shopping. They have an idea that maybe it should cost them $2,000, you're right for if it's an easier movement, don't need a lot of aligners to be able to move their teeth in the right way, maybe they shouldn't be charging $5,000 or $6,000." — John Morici, CFO, Align Technology."

"“Sintering is the biggest reason why it’s hard to get from one size to another one. A smaller size is easier to get it uniform, flat, and precise. The chemical uniformity across the entire thing is much simpler. But as you go bigger in size, especially if you’re going from something that’s a square to a rectangle, different shapes, you can imagine that there are different types of interactions, stresses focusing on each of the corners, and things like that. It makes it more difficult to accomplish something as you’re trying to scale up.” — Former employee; “It is a ceramic electrolyte. It's easy to make well as a bulk powder. But when you put it into a film, the form factor for a battery, things become harder. You're balancing thickness versus number of defects; the defects are the ones with the dendrites....They were having problems at the coin cell level...it is a very difficult problem because they're taking ceramic and grinding it down to little particles. They're casting this formulation into a thin freestanding film, and making this freestanding film, and you have to have zero defects for that. One way to combat a defect is to make it thicker, but making it thicker has its consequences, so there's a fine balance” — Another former employee"

""Oil and gas was an important segment for all of us, not just hard-core center of oil and gas but the collateral, the related businesses to it, and everybody knows that story." — G&K Baird Conf June 2016; "We continue to see significant wearer losses with oil and gas and other mining customers, and there is clearly some spillover into related markets." — G&K Q3 2016 Earnings Call April 2016; "What I was referring to was our customers in the oil, gas, mining areas that generally, when you see the prices of the gas at the pump come down in the past, when we've seen those prices really come down, it kind of hurts that business here in the U.S. And so -- we saw some benefit in that price at the pump, as we said, 25 basis points in rental. But we also saw a little bit of softening in the business side of it from a customer perspective. And so that's what we're keeping our eyes on." — Cintas Q1 2020 Earnings Call Sept 24, 2019; "One area of caution with respect to growth relates to ware accounts within our existing customers. Additions versus reductions as we commonly refer to it, which slid some in our fourth quarter, partially due to some weakening in the oil and gas sector." — Unifirst Q4 2019 Earnings Call Oct 23, 2019"

"TSMC will play hard...KLA will win the P2 and P3 [inspection]...that's for the mask shop. — Ex-KLA executive. they will struggle...extremely hard to compete with KLA...I don't think Lasertec can pull it out in EUV [versus KLA] — KLA source. people would love to buy from KLA...there is no question about that...even if [their tool] were crap, then the customer would love to have a second supplier...they will get the orders, that's for sure. — KLA source. I'm talking about customers coming to KLA and "begging us to expedite": "I'm talking about customers coming to KLA...saying, guys, we need you to develop this tool...P2 can only be done by a clean tool...they were really begging us to expedite." — KLA source. has a lot of issues...doesn't work well...that's why customers want KLA to make a reliable tool. — Ex-director of engineering. everything could turn around in a second if KLA comes out with a superior tool...they're out of business, basically. — Longtime semiconductor executive in Japan. they were picked up by mass media newspapers and TV...that's why they became popular...average people walking on the street have no idea what EUV is. — Longtime semiconductor executive in Japan."

""Just wanted to ask about the new product revenue numbers that you gave.... Within those cards you have a sense of how much of that is sort of incremental revenue versus how much of that is just cannibalizing or replacing existing product sales?" — Michael Matson – Needham & Company; "The biggest piece that probably falls into the gray area is Centrella... If I look at the rest of the product growth from where we are today going forward, most of it is nonreplacement new product growth. So of the ones on that slide that was in the LRP deck, Centrella is probably the only one that materially falls into the cannibalization bucket, if that helps." — John Greisch – President & CEO, Hill-Rom; "And I think John also mentioned in his opening comments, the new product momentum has been -- we're very pleased with that. $300 million this year. We exceeded our goal. If you recall, our original goal was about $200 million. So great performance in 2018, and now we're expecting $400 million in 2019. So not all of that is incremental. As you know, we're cannibalizing some of our products, but about half of it will be incremental." — Mary Kay Ladone – VP of Investor Relations, Hill-Rom"

"“We are going to wait...we are going to wait...we have not met with their medical science liaison”; “as pediatric endocrinologists, we are familiar with the short-acting form of diazoxide...we have used that for quite some time...with congenital hyperinsulinism.... side effects that have been a concern...it mostly may present as a lymphedema versus congestive heart failure”; “hyperglycemia...we know that diazoxide causes it.”; “I’m not sure if they have field people...and help and explain...we are not going to reach out to our patient population”; “only one family came forward...not a big push...pretty quiet...some people were quite surprised within our division...it came actually as a surprise that this drug is in a trial...prior to FDA approval, there was not much noise about it.”; “how is that going to pan out if we get denial after denial after denial...so it doesn't consume too much of our time...if the internal medicine specialist says, sorry, it's too expensive of a drug, and I don't see really a benefit for that. I don't know...”; “it's a little bit unclear to us what's happening here”; “I don't know whom they are targeting and how....” — PWS endocrinologist #8"

"they made a multitude of offers to try to get us to basically purchase more equipment. — Marvell executive; other concessions were made like extended warranty service...at no additional cost...even guaranteeing service time like 60-70%...if not then we could take some kind of reimbursement...for the lost time of use — Marvell executive; they would actually swap out the A150 that we have with an A300 at a discounted price...because they wanted to try to get early purchase volume. — Marvell executive; we haven't seen real proof of concept and enough case studies to actually show the real-world application of it versus the A150. — Marvell executive; I can tell you right off the bat...they haven't taken any impairments against their balance sheet, so they're probably over-valuing their inventory far greater than it's actually worth...a lot of these companies are sitting on so much inventory.... — Marvell executive; is a common thing, unfortunately, that I've seen across multiple companies in the space...to manipulate earnings: they defer out...that impairment...because they don't want to record a hit on their gross margin. — Marvell executive"

"“If you're charging and discharging fast, the general knowledge is that you're going to degrade faster. The fact that there's no charge rate versus the cycling data at that particular charge rate - so they can say this is how fast it charges, and then they're showing cycling data from a cell that's at a slower charge rate. You have to connect those two. It's easy to stick those in separate slides.” — Former employee; “On slide 17, you get that fast-charging graph there, and they're showing less than a 15-minute charge, and that's good, but what's not clear at all in this is you can do that one time. The thing is, you can probably just go in the lab and put together current, any old lithium-ion configuration and force it to charge that fast, and it would not fail immediately. It's like, yeah; you can do this once, can you do it every time you charge a vehicle during its 200,000 life? I don't know the answer based on this data. If they had it, it would be here.... How many times can you do that before something bad happens? If it's thousands of times, fantastic. But is it really just like a couple of times?” — Solid-state expert"

"“What assisted Nevro with the Kapural study was interaction bias. It’s all about how the study was designed and how the study team interacted with patients in the Boston Scientific arm versus the Nevro arm... They compared Nevro to CMM [conservative medical management], and CMM is a very low bar.” — Former executive; “I have concerns and issues with how Nevro manages data especially around clinical research. If a study didn’t produce results congruent with their high frequency trial, they wouldn’t publish it. I feel that’s highly unethical.” — Former executive; “Another factor is how Nevro managed patients post-implant is create their own placebo effect... My concern is that they do this during clinical trials.” — Former executive; “The RCT patients were so closely followed up, so closely managed and optimized with full time field clinical engineers dedicated to them, that then going to a general population and not having that same support infrastructure, yeah, of course you’re going to see some fall off [in efficacy versus the pivotal trial].” — Former Nevro executive"

""So the benefits to this are immense. We can generate the same throughput at one-third of the operating expense with much more flexibility and we expect through time that we will be able to reduce the cost per gram of our proteins by some 60% or more and that enables us to achieve hundreds of millions of dollars of savings versus conventional technology." — Bob Bradway, Chairman & CEO, October 2014; "In the G&A area, we're setting up a series of shared service activities for non-core areas and we've created what we call a Global Business Services group, which is serving then as a centralized point to serve the Company." — David Meline, Amgen EVP and CFO, November 2014; "Things like rationalizing our process development organizations between manufacturing and research and development. That is a significant decision that we've made, a decisive decision that we've made that we think favors cycle time improvement and also favors reducing the capital that we have to invest in new molecules." — Bob Bradway, Chairman & CEO, October 2014"

""We have recently started to see relief with declines in the cost of oil-related products, but those decreases are just now starting to make their way into our finished goods?" — WD-40 CFO, Q1 Jan 2009. "If oil stays down and we get the conversion, given that and the savings that we anticipate from the improved manufacturing process from the capital equipment we have invested on our package lines to improve line speed from smart straw, all of those things aligned, we should see some sort of at least stabilization and improvement in our gross margin, particularly in the second quarter." — WD-40 CEO, Q1 Jan 2009. "We also began to see some relief from lower oil costs versus the first quarter although our oil costs in the second quarter were higher than they were in the same period last fiscal year." — WD-40 CEO, Q2 April 2009. "The cost of oil based materials in our Q3 cost of goods reflected the lower pricing of Q2 and positively impacted our gross margin by two percentage points" — WD-40 CFO, Q3 July 2009."

""One thing that concerns me is the huge amount of Nevro's valuation associated with PDN. It seem like half the valuation is linked to their PDN study. That study shows amazing results, but if you look at their control it's always CMM [conservative medical management] so these studies are always a layup." — Former Nevro executive; "And then the study also doesn't compare a Lamborghini to a Ferrari. They compared a stimulator to not another stimulator, but against just medication management. It is the dumbest study design. It's greaseball. And as doctors we just shake our heads and say, "Why doesn't Nevro just come out with a normal study?" — KOL and speaker; "What assisted Nevro with the Kapural study was interaction bias. It's all about how the study was designed and how the study team interacted with patients in the Boston Scientific arm versus the Nevro arm... They compared Nevro to CMM [conservative medical management], and CMM is a very low bar." — Former Nevro executive"

"Analyst: “It’s supposedly when Microsoft did their ChatGPT, supposedly a lot of the annotation was done in Kenya for $3.00 an hour. I mean is there a difference in the kind of annotation you guys do versus that kind of annotation?” Jack Abuhoff: “Yes, there is. There’s a great deal of difference. Some of the early models that have been built kind of go very broad but very narrow. There’s not a great deal of annotation that’s required. Much of what we do is the complex stuff. It’s going deep into subject matter domains, it’s going deep into use cases.” — 1Q23 Earnings Call. Former Employee: “No...that’s the thing I don’t get and that’s why I say they’re spinning. They’re making more out of it than it is...I am sure that [AI] has a role in their company but I think they’re billing themselves as very much an AI company. When [at the] end of the day, 10 years ago they had 5,000 people banging away at keyboards and they still have 5,000 people banging away at keyboards [now].”"

""We have always struggled with US onshore asset as in our view they do not fit in BHP's strategy of building large scale low cost tier 1 assets and are arguably worth more to someone else." — Citigroup; "Has the time come to take the BHP devolution further than just S32? In the last 6 months S32 has outperformed its parent by >30%." — Credit Suisse; "BHP's US Onshore assets promised so much but have delivered so little" — Deutsche Bank; "Since 2005, BHP has spent $7.9b on petroleum exploration, of which $4.9b has been expensed. However, since BHP's last prolific find with Shenzi in 2002, the Petroleum exploration team has been unsuccessful in achieving their goal of a tier 1, large scale, oil find." — Bank of America; "On strategy, we think there is no real benefit from portfolio diversification per se and unless we see a dramatic outperformance of oil versus iron ore (clearly not the case at present) we see no reason for BHP to trade ahead of Rio Tinto." — Bernstein."

"“Dendrites are a real problem, and that’s basically where we were at when I left - trying to solve dendrites. It’s a showstopper.” — Former employee #1; “A lithium-lithium symmetric cell is not a real battery cell...I don’t believe that they have solved dendrite formation in a real battery. A single layer is nothing.” — Former employee #2; “You’re balancing thickness versus number of defects; the defects are the ones with the dendrites.... They were having problems at the coin cell level...it is a very difficult problem.” — Former employee #3; “I don’t know that they’ve completely nailed this. I wouldn’t say that they’ve completely nailed this because there are definitely some issues with what they’ve put out.” — Former employee #4; “[The CEO’s dendrites claim] is a bunch of bullshit ...That’s definitely bullshit...it’s not going to be representative of what you will see in an actual cell...this is just not going to hold good at all.” — Former employee #5"

""Yeah, RUN also has the advantage of being on newer technology which scales more cheaply in terms of incremental margins." — Gary C. Butler, President and CEO; "So the number around that the difference between sales last year and this year is about 20 percentage points of additional new business coming in using our web entry systems versus Teledata which is our phone-in system." — Carlos A. Rodriguez, President, Small Business; "Really it's kind of the best of both worlds because the client gets better accuracy because you have real time payroll with real time validation of data, so you have fewer errors, fewer reruns and it takes down our labor component to both, it take the payroll and service the payroll and we think we're going to get a longer life client out of that because the overall quality and number of reruns and all those kinds of issues should be significantly down over time." — Gary C. Butler, President and CEO"

""If we have too many people, let's right-size fast; let's get it done by the end of the third quarter.' I explained that what I meant by right-size is straightforward: 'We have to benchmark our costs versus our competitors and then achieve best-in-class status'. I also remarked that we had to stop saying that IBM didn't lay off people" — Lou Gerstner, CEO of IBM (1993 – 2002). "I've had a lot of experience turning around troubled companies, and one of the first things I learned was that whatever hard or painful things you have to do, do them quickly and make sure everyone knows what you are doing and why. Whether dwelling on a problem, hiding a problem or dribbling out partial solutions to a problem while you wait for a high tide to raise your boat - dithering and delay almost always compound a negative situation. I believe in getting the problem behind me quickly and moving on" — Lou Gerstner, CEO of IBM (1993 – 2002)."

"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"

""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"

"There are three key takeaways for the right-hand side of this slide. For each cohort, the take rate remains almost unchanged versus 2020. Different cohorts have different pricing points depending on the business mix. And we continue to see that there are multiple factors that make our merchants want to do business with us, and pricing is just one of them. The drop in our average take rate from 5% in 2020 to 4% in 2021 is mainly explained by changes in the underlying business mix. The cohorts that grew the most in 2021 were the 2018 and 2020 vintages. And these cohorts came with a lower take rate, mainly driven by the business mix of higher payouts and local to local payment flows. Third, it is worthwhile to highlight that the 2021 cohort of merchants posted a higher take rate than our overall take rate in 2021. — Sumita Pandit, DLO COO"

""It is time for shareholders' voices to be heard, for accountability to be introduced in the Taubman Centers boardroom, and for a clear message to be sent to the Taubman family that shareholders will no longer tolerate abysmal corporate governance, misguided operations, lavish developments and inferior total returns," said Land and Buildings Founder and Chief Investment Officer, Jonathan Litt. "Taubman continues to deliver suboptimal value for shareholders with 57% stock underperformance versus Class A Mall Peers over the last five years. We believe our two independent and highly-qualified director nominees, Charles Elson and myself, will bring the fresh perspectives and objectivity that we believe is currently lacking on the Board and can help reverse this trend of value destruction." — Jonathan Litt, Land and Buildings"

""And when we dug through some of that, our average customer income now, we estimate is between $100,000 and $125,000 versus the U.S. median in the $60,000 range. We age up. We're probably 35 to 64 years old. They've lived in that house for 11 to 15 years" — Fmr. CFO (Now President) Lang, Q1 2020 Conf Call, May 1, 2020. "Our median household income is $96,000. Now you've heard us talked in our earnings release that we have -- we're using ranges. So our highest penetrating range was $100,000 to $125,000. We've hired a new external company to help us better understand our customer. They've given us a lot more insight and a lot more precise data. So we're now switching to use median household income, and that's $96,000, and that will be the benchmark going forward." — Fmr. President Lisa Laube, Investor Day, March 16, 2022."

""On May 22, 2013, Starboard entered into a Settlement Agreement with Tessera Technologies, Inc. pursuant to which the six Starboard nominees, which included only one Starboard employee, would constitute a majority of the 10 person Board. One of the incumbent directors who remained on the Board was Rick Hill. Hill was Chairman of Tessera and by far the most vocal opponent of Starboard’s involvement in Tessera. After being on the Tessera Board with Starboard for six months, Hill did a complete one-eighty and even agreed to be a member of Starboard’s dissident slate at TriQuint Semiconductor. Since the Starboard slate went on the Board, the Company’s stock has appreciated by 43.15% versus 16.22% for the S&P500." — The Activist Report's “The Independent Majority” article, August 2014"

""On May 22, 2013, Starboard entered into a Settlement Agreement with Tessera Technologies, Inc. pursuant to which the six Starboard nominees, which included only one Starboard employee, would constitute a majority of the 10 person Board. One of the incumbent directors who remained on the Board was Rick Hill. Hill was Chairman of Tessera and by far the most vocal opponent of Starboard’s involvement in Tessera. After being on the Tessera Board with Starboard for six months, Hill did a complete one-eighty and even agreed to be a member of Starboard’s dissident slate at TriQuint Semiconductor. Since the Starboard slate went on the Board, the Company’s stock has appreciated by 43.15% versus 16.22% for the S&P500." — The Activist Report's “The Independent Majority” article, August 2014"

""Our ending inventory balance was $205 million, in line with our expectations and up from $81 million a year ago. The difference is primarily a combination of 3 things. First, as we said last quarter, we continue to build back our inventory levels through fiscal '24 to support strong consumer demand. Second, approximately $28 million of the increase is the result of taking ownership of inventory from China when it ships versus when it enters our distribution center here in the U.S. Lastly, our consolidated results include Naturium for the first time, which added approximately $25 million of inventory. We believe we have the appropriate levels of inventory across the business to service our customers and support the demand we're seeing." — Mandy Fields, ELF CFO"

"“Well, again, you're right, we've all used it. I used it in the early '90s and saw the hypertrichosis, which was very, very bad in young women. There are also actually some jaw changes that occur with prolonged use. And it is a drug, not without risk. And like anything else, you have to balance the risk of the disease versus the risk of the drug. They're a one-trick pony at this point. I don't know what the genesis of the idea for the drug was. I have no idea where this came from, why there were some original trials or thoughts about it. But as I said, at this point, am I going to use it? No, I'm not going to use it.” — Pediatric endocrinologist, division chief at an academic center"

""We’ve had new investors come in over the last couple of years based on what they saw us doing in Midstream. And we want to share that gospel with everyone out there that we are committed to that business." — Mark Lashier, Goldman Sachs Conference, January 1, 2025; "I met with management and told them. I think their assets are great – Permian, DJ – I would love to invest. But, I can’t own Phillips for the look through midstream. I would get killed versus my benchmark any time cracks moved. They need to separate the midstream business out and then I am there. I would allocate hundreds of millions if I could buy it separately, but not today." — Large Midstream Investor (>$5bn in AUM)"

"“We’ve had new investors come in over the last couple of years based on what they saw us doing in Midstream. And we want to share that gospel with everyone out there that we are committed to that business.” — Mark Lashier, Goldman Sachs Conference, January 1, 2025; “I met with management and told them. I think their assets are great – Permian, DJ – I would love to invest. But, I can’t own Phillips for the look through midstream. I would get killed versus my benchmark any time cracks moved. They need to separate the midstream business out and then I am there. I would allocate hundreds of millions if I could buy it separately, but not today.” — Large Midstream Investor (>$5bn in AUM)"

""There IS a large margin gap between Arconic's engineered product business... Kleinfeld SHOULD face questions about why he got 2016 guidance so wrong for Arconic." — Bloomberg, February 7, 2017; "I think there is a legitimate question that's being raised by Elliott which is how long before Klaus really delivers versus his peers...I think it would be a better company if the Elliott guys got on this board than this current board." — Jim Cramer, February 1, 2017; "We see as much as 20% downside if Kleinfeld continues as CEO." — Gordon Haskett, February 13, 2017; "It is hard to see him [Dr. Kleinfeld] surviving." — The New York Times, February 28, 2017"

""I was just on -- in your appendix, you obviously showed that the raw material prices and talk about levels for palm oil and rapeseed oil that are unusually high... I'd be interested in your view as to how much is just kind of cyclical factors... versus maybe more structural factors" — Alexander Morrow, Barclays Bank PLC, Research Division. "So there's, call it, a bit of disturbance into the supply chain and supply... And then when you look at this going forward, there is an expectation that prices will come down, but that has been rolling a bit. So at the moment, we're moving -- we're sliding sideways." — Johan Westman, AAK President & CEO."

""This morning, Dexcom management presented and hosted a Q&A break-out session at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference. In the break-out session, CFO Quentin Blackford provided incremental color on the company's outlook for 2019, specifically that guidance contemplates $20-25M in revenue headwinds per quarter from the transition from the DME to the pharmacy channel, similar to the ~$20M headwind that the company saw impact sales in 4Q18. This accounts for a ~10% top-line headwind and implies that underlying volume guidance is +25-30%, versus the +15-20% overall revenue guidance issued ($1.175-1.225B)." — JP Morgan Research Note (1/4/19)"

""In the U.S., we saw an accelerating trend of new users as we ramped up our awareness efforts during the second half of the year and pharmacy insurance coverage continued to increase including an emerging trend of seeing Libre granted preferred co-pay status versus competitive systems due to its compelling overall value proposition." — Abbott Q4 FY18 Earnings Call, "There's nothing of significance that we could point to in either direction where we've been advantaged or any other competitor has been advantaged to our knowledge. So we hear rumblings of it here or there. Usually it's on a very small scale." — Dexcom Q4 FY18 Earnings Call"

""of course...that’s probably what it will come to...I think that’s what it’s going to come to." — Endocrinologist #3; "kids like drinking liquids" — Endocrinologist #3; "if there’s an equation, we’ll find it." — Endocrinologist #3; "If it's on MDCalc, I think we'll feel good about it" — Endocrinologist #3; "MDCalc is this website where you can do some calculations, like corrected calcium levels, fractional excretion...steroid conversions. So, if we're able to have that resource for the suspension versus the tablet, interchanging the dosages, I think that's going to help the docs a lot for prescribing off-label." — Endocrinologist #3"

""And if anything, what they've done is they've increased the validation that robotics are here to stay." — CFO Boehnlein, Q1 2021. "We are confident on the prospect of maintaining our lead versus any of the competing systems on the market." — CEO Lobo, May 5, 2021. "And that, to me, is a tailwind. It's -- robotics, overall, it's still very underpenetrated. So that will grow the actual adoption." — CEO Lobo, Sept 2021. "And that, frankly, has just raised awareness in the category. And that's acted more as a tailwind than, frankly, a problem for us because we know we have the best solution." — CEO Lobo, Nov 18, 2021."

"“Our ending inventory balance was $200 million, in line with our expectations and up from $98 million a year ago. The difference is primarily a combination of three things: first, as we've said in the past few quarters, we continue to build back our inventory levels to support strong consumer demand; second, our consolidated results now include Naturium, which added approximately $26 million of inventory; lastly, an additional $23 million of the increase as a result of taking ownership of inventory from China when it ships versus when it enters our distribution center here in the U.S.” — Mandy Fields, ELF CFO"

""Our ending inventory balance was $191 million, in line with our expectations and up from $81 million a year ago. The difference is primarily a combination of 3 things: first, as we've said the past few quarters, we continue to build back our inventory levels to support strong consumer demand. Second, our consolidated results now include Naturium, which added approximately $26 million of inventory; lastly, an additional $8 million of the increase is the result of taking ownership of inventory from China when it ships versus when it enters our distribution center here in the U.S." — Mandy Fields, ELF CFO"

"So it's interesting from a private equity perspective, I think what that does is ultimately really shows people that are selling their business, just a differentiation between maybe going down that route versus the Limbach route. So I think the saturation in the market has allowed us to differentiate ourselves. And I think what it really comes down to is our approach is just different. We're going to patient, diligent. We're going to take our time. We're really focused not on just the deal itself, but what the deal is going to look like over the long term. — Limbach Management (Q1'25 Earnings Call)"

""We are exercising caution around the industry's recent acceleration of the direct selling or door-to-door sales channels through independent sales dealers." — Lynn Michelle Jurich, CEO of Sunrun, Q4 2019 Earnings Call. "I would suspect that our direct will take share versus the pre-COVID for all those reasons that the market leaders, I think, will take share generally." — Lynn Michelle Jurich, CEO of Sunrun, Q1 2020 Earnings Call. "we expect those channels to continue to grow faster than our direct-to-home and dealer channels" — David H. Bywater, CEO of Vivint Solar, Q4 2019 Earnings Call."

"“they will struggle...extremely hard to compete with KLA...I don’t think Lasertec can pull it out in EUV [versus KLA]” and “they will disappear in five years” if they don’t “re-engineer the tool [with] a simple source.” — Former KLA executive in a leadership role in their EUV mask inspection group. “People would love to buy from KLA. There is no question about that. If KLA comes out with a product, they will get the orders, that’s for sure.” — Leading figure in the development of Cymer/ASML’s EUV light source; headed KLA’s EUV source effort; one of the top scientist/experts in the field"

"I think your second question was on our final landing for 2015 and versus what could have been a previous assumption around the middle of the year. What is true is that the mild conditions in the fall have been negative for all the textile sales that we have in some of our stores. Our vision is nevertheless that we performed better than specialized retailers in textile. You probably have more data than us on that front and you might have heard that most of the specialized retailers have had a very tough time. But we did a little below our initial expectation. — Giscard d'Estaing"

"“Lasertec tries to keep us in the dark” about the performance of the machines with the Urashima source versus the Ushio one, that the Urashima tools “are right next to our two”: “we can look...they can’t really stop us from looking.” He stated that the Lasertec engineers he interacts with work on both EUV light sources, and that “there’s as much downtime on those machines as there is on ours...my impression from being around them is that the production is about the same.” — Ushio field engineer who maintains light sources on Lasertec ACTIS A150 machines at Intel Oregon fab"

"“Derma is a great place to be in ... generally, you are going to be pricing higher than mass cosmetics so the margins are better, but very often you will be going through the same retail channels as mass so there a distribution overlaps if you are already playing in mass. Because it tends to occupy a middle ground between prestige and mass cosmetics it's also one of those items that tends to be less susceptible to budget cutting in a recession as well versus prestige cosmetics” — Former Unilever Prestige Cosmetics Division Brand Director, Oasis interview November 2023"

""That's exactly right. It's a little underwhelming. Your questionnaire result was better in one group versus another. But hard endpoint - heart attacks, strokes, deaths. Granted, that's a very high bar to meet. Very few drugs are going to be so powerful that you knock it out of the park that way. But, if the goal here is largely appetite, weight, that sort of zone, at least show a benefit in BMI or something. Those are the typical endpoints that we use when we talk about medicines in this space." — Endocrinologist in TX, private practice with 5 PWS patients"

"If you are starting from scratch, Shopify is the one I would probably start with. Its easy to set up and its more than enough for the first 24-36 months in business. The only reason I would say Lightspeed is because it's a solution you can grow into versus vs. Shopify which is a solution you grow out of. And that is because Shopify just doesn't cater to complex retailers. You almost never see a 20, 30, 50 location retail business using Shopify. There are much better tactics with Lightspeed. — Former Lightspeed Employee"

""One of the reasons I left, and I think is probably the biggest risk to the business is companies like Microsoft and Amazon doing more and more business direct with the government... I doubt Microsoft or Amazon are going to be subcontractors if they can do it directly." — Former Leidos C-Suite Business Executive. "The decision by the Department of Defense to go with Microsoft Azure versus AWS is really immaterial to us. We won't be affected by that decision in any way." — CEO Krone, Q3'2019 Conference Call."

"Secondly, Colleen is a big-picture thinker and someone who's not afraid to operate in gray areas, and, Although she is very detail oriented, articulate and a rule follower, she's also helped Zebra teams like mine operate with extreme financial responsibility within our existing structures by sitting down, understanding what we need and identifying areas where we can tailor accounting practices to our business processes versus having to re-engineer business processes. — Zebra Blog Interview"

"“…with Marcato establishing a 6% position in the stock, we think it is likely that 1) management will be under pressure to realize a more meaningful portion of the cost savings to EPS versus potential reinvestment 2) initiates a dialogue around the strategic value of DECK's non-core brands in its portfolio including potential alternatives 3) creates a greater sense of urgency around shareholder value enhancing initiatives including accelerated share repurchases.” — Buckingham 3/3/17"

"“I was a consultant and speaker for Nevro from [redacted] to [redacted]. I was on the board of [society name redacted]. I just got tired of the company. I’m really well published in the field and it’s nothing personal against Nevro. Their devices just stopped working. Nevro is like a cult, like us versus them. It’s crazy. It’s like Scientology. They’ll cut you out, jump all over you. They’ll ostracize you and they’re very intense about it.” — Former Nevro consultant and KOL"