Ted Waitt

“Our biggest risk is ourselves.”

“I'd be lying to you if I said I had not done some soul searching.”

“When Mike Hammond and I started Gateway 12 years ago on my father's cattle farm, we knew it could be big. We talked big. But there's no way we could have been prepared to go from less than $300 million in revenues to $5 billion in six years. You can't so much prepare for that kind of growth as sort of ride it and try to manage it.”

“Technology for technology's sake is not innovation. What we in the industry have to be concerned about is what products do, as opposed to what the processing power is.”

“We want a Gateway to be the last computer our clients will ever buy.”

“You have to have great products out at the right time. It's difficult to go with one foot on the gas and the other a little bit on the brake.”

“I was fascinated to see that if you knew what you were doing, you could sell a $3,000 computer system over the phone.”

“We like being an independent company. We do not need to merge or do anything different.”

“I don't want a mercenary management team.”

“The biggest challenge is adding the bureaucracy it takes to run the company without becoming fat, lazy, inflexible - bureaucratic.”

“To me, the consumer-electronics business feels a lot like the PC business in the late 1980s. It's an inefficient market.”

“You know, growing up in the cattle business, I know a lot about cattle.”

“For a while there, companies were pushing technology on people and people were buying it. Now the consumer is really in the driver's seat. Now it's more of an overall solution: How can technology make your life better? How can it save you time?”

“We spend as much time looking at companies that are smaller than we are as we do at those that are bigger.”

“Sometimes people have a hard time believing that a company is intentionally trying to make itself smaller.”

“You don't know the impact of Windows XP. You don't know what the economic impact is going to be.”

“I'm not in favor of stealing music.”

“I mean, you don't get a chance to buy a company like Gateway, you know, at or near book value very often.”

“I came from an entrepreneurial family. My father and five generations of people in my family do not make good employees.”

“Let's face it, politics in this country is coin-operated. Does that really equate to a real democracy? It's very difficult to say.”