Cisco

“So I was at Cisco during the financial crisis, which was a good place to be, thirty billion dollars on the balance sheet, meant you saw everything once the, once people stopped Having easy access to capital”

“Geography is important, making sure that folks are kind of in the same room to the extent possible and, you know, working well and collaboratively. Those are the types of important things that buyers look for, and it's really not emphasized enough, I would say…”

“Track record of M and A having done a little bit of it at Cisco in my era is broadly speaking, not super successful. You know, you have to do a lot of them and many of them fail, which is the right methodology.”

“Some companies have a parallel process. Like, you know, you're doing a process for an IPO and you're doing a process for a sale process. We are not doing that for us. It just happened that Cisco came in just a little bit before the IPO and they made an offer.”

“We looked at the offer and actually we decided to say no to the first offer. They came back with a second offer, which we said no to, and then they came back with a third offer, which at that point, it was the right thing to do for all shareholders involved, f…”

“Eric said to me, he said he had about, I think it was about 3000 people who worked for him, And within a week of leaving, he had 2000 resumes in his inbox of people who wanted to work for him.”

“A lot of corp dev groups, I think they're all about the transaction. They get a call. I want to buy this company. And that's what they do for Cisco. It really starts with the strategy.”

“Cisco saw that we also should be willing to invest in one of those startups, despite the fact that we were also trying to build something ourselves, and so in addition to our internal program, we went out and invested in one of those startups. That company was…”

“When we made the decision on who we were going to make part of Cisco, we acquired a company that was not a Cisco investment. We acquired a company called the Viptela. And since that time, Viptela has come onto Cisco. It has become our lead SD-WAN offering. And…”

“If you ignore that because you don't see A Cisco as a potential partner or investor or potentially a future acquirer. What you're doing is you're really prematurely closing the door on what may be the biggest potential accelerator for your business.”

“I think the best measure for success or corp dev is, have we been able to get the company to accomplish something that left to its own wouldn't have been possible?”

“In AppDynamics' case, we acquired the company a day before it went public, and I think what that showcased Is when Cisco decides to do something, we can move faster than anybody else.”

“In fact, if I look at some of our most Strategic or financially successful acquisitions, moves like AppDynamics, moves like Meraki, they, in fact, were some of our highest multiple deals.”

“OpenDNS was a relatively small company. It was less than a hundred million dollars when it came inside Cisco, but we wanted to embrace that philosophy that David had for security, and so shortly thereafter, David Ulovich actually became the GM of Cisco's overa…”

“For a certain level of acquisition, that could be approved by our CEO and CFO, and then if that acquisition begins to get into the billions, that's something that we'll want to involve our board directly on.”

“So when I look at just the partnerships or investments or acquisitions that I've been involved with, Meraki, OpenDNS, AppDynamics, Investments like Cohesity, Turbonomic, all of those relationships, they actually began with corporate development. And when those…”

“If you're in a position that you can see an opportunity to add value, the fair multiple is actually less relevant.”

“A company needs to own its own distribution. And I consider that sort of fundamental to what you need to build as a founder or CEO.”

“Yeah, honestly, the biggest and best companies ever, you know, generational businesses today, the Cisco's, Facebook's, Apple's, Amazon's of the world, they don't rely on those channels very much. Like, in fact, they do become those channels.”

“Mike Volpe, who was famously that head of Corp Dev at Cisco during the heyday of Cisco M&A, he once said something to me, which I never forget. He said, never get the right deal, get the right company. And I think that that really holds true today.”

“It and Microsoft are the two beneficiaries of the first rip and replace cycle that we've seen in the enterprise communication space since the early nineties when Cisco was building out the internet now, but that was on-prem and hardware oriented. Now we're mov…”

“My biggest mistake ever was I was at Sun and Cisco routers was software running on Sun machines and Sun's logo or tagline used to be the network is the computer. And I didn't see, and nobody at Sun saw, routers as more, as maybe a huge thing, even though we ha…”