Meraki

“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.”

“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…”

“That has worked for us across both companies and many, many products that we've built.”

“We bootstrapped the company the first year, which I can talk about. We didn't actually have venture money. We managed to sell enough product to get off the ground.”

“That was a big transition because I'd never managed anyone before. I never went to like a management training course, had no idea what I was doing.”

“So that was a mistake that we made at Meraki as well. We built some exotic networking products that didn't quite get off the ground.”

“So we got to close to a million dollars in, in revenue.”

“We all, we started market first with this company. We said, who's the customer? What are the problems we can solve in a kind of scalable way? And let's work backwards from that, which is to find the commonality.”