Sep 6, 2015 · 29m · news
FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this episode of The 20 Minute VC, host Harry Stebbings interviews Javier Soltero, Corporate Vice President of Outlook at Microsoft, discussing his journey co-founding Hyperic and Accompli, capital discipline, achieving product-market fit, and navigating major acquisitions.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Harry holds 12.5% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Harry as informed peer 1.4 Guest teaching 2.7 Guest disagreement 2.1 Harry pushing back 0.3
speaking balance: gold is Harry, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 20:11 Calling fundraising skills shallow and valuation talk BS
Javier aggressively dismisses host tropes around fundraising prowess, labeling valuation bragging as incestuous term-sheet nonsense.
Hardest push from Harry ▶ 25:20 Synthesizing the acquisition rationaleHarry intervenes in a lengthy monologue to restate Javier's motives sharply, summarizing it as scaling into an enterprise solution.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 15:45 The Vitamin, Painkiller, and Viagra product heuristicJavier delivers a structured lesson detailing how to categorize product-market fit using a three-tier metaphor.
Harry holds his own ▶ 25:20 Summarizing complex acquisition dynamicsHarry demonstrates domain understanding by extracting the strategic enterprise motive from Javier's rambling answer.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Harry as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Harry pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Javier's Early Career and Hyperic Origins | 1 | 2 | 1 | 0 | Host opens with a standard background query. Javier playfully teases Harry about his age regarding Netscape, but the exchange is warm and informal. | |
| Lessons from Startup Failure | 1 | 3 | 2 | 0 | Javier lightly mocks the standard podcast framing before offering a nuanced perspective on what makes a valuable VC partner. Host asks broad follow-ups. | |
| Capital Discipline and Controlling Burn Rate | 2 | 3 | 2 | 0 | Harry asks a sharp operational question about controlling burn rate after fundraising. Javier offers a detailed breakdown on capital discipline and criticizes the superficial hype surrounding tech funding. | |
| Evaluating Product-Market Fit: Vitamins, Painkillers, and Viagra | 2 | 4 | 2 | 0 | Host prompts Javier to elaborate on product-market fit. Javier educates the audience with a popular three-part product taxonomy while noting VCs are often wrong. | |
| Founding and Fundraising for Accompli | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 | Standard backstory on founding Accompli and working with Redpoint. The conversation is collaborative and storytelling-focused. | |
| Philosophies on Fundraising and Venture Dynamics | 2 | 5 | 6 | 2 | Javier forcefully rejects the host's premise that fundraising is a key skill, calling valuation posturing shallow BS. Later, Harry attempts to synthesize Javier's long acquisition answer into a neat takeaway. | |
| Quick Fire Round and Future Outlook | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 | Standard quick-fire round. Javier passes on one question due to the rapid pace, and shares a touching story for his career highlight. |
Statements from this episode (16)
Microsoft Acquired Accompli for $200 Million in 2014
“Prior to Microsoft, Javier co-founded Accompli, the mobile personal information manager acquired by Microsoft for two hundred million dollars in 2014.”
Hyperic reached nearly $10 million in revenue before 2009 exit
“We were at the time when we sold it in 2009, close to ten million in revenue thousands of customers, deeply, deeply adopted open source product and a pioneer in some new business model elements”
Soltero: Open-source software cannot be sold via traditional top-down enterprise models
“They were doing a sort of typical top-down sales approach and the type of go to market dynamics usually reserved for the Siebels and you know, oracles of the world, and you couldn't do that then, you can't do it now.”
Soltero: Hyperic bootstrapped two years before Accel/Benchmark funding and $420M exit
“We ended up bootstrapping Hyperic actually for two years before we raised money ultimately from Excel and Benchmark who were great investors. And helped us take this thing to you know, ultimately a four hundred and twenty million dollar acquisition by VMware, …”
Soltero: Hyperic bootstrapped to over $1.5M in bookings before VC funding
“When we first started working with venture investors we had already bootstrapped the company for two years. We had taken it from a zero dollars to north of like 1.5 million in bookings strategic OEM relationships, all the, you know, two dozen customers, all of…”
Soltero: Founders in 2015 haven't internalized lessons from 2008 crisis
“I, we thrived through the 2008 financial crisis. That was a really challenging time for me, and something that I think has sadly not been internalized enough, frankly, by most entrepreneurs today.”
Soltero acquired software costing $15 million to build for just $1
“All we had was this product that had cost about fifteen million dollars to build, and we had been lucky enough to buy it for a dollar”
Soltero: Most current founders would fail in a sudden macro crash
“I'm certain that most people you know, that are building companies nowadays would have a very hard time in such a sudden and drastic adjustment to the way people look at cash and capital and barn rates and whatnot.”
Soltero: Sequoia wrongly called Hyperic a product in search of a market
“Maybe that comment from Sequoia had really left a mark, this idea that, that they thought that Hyperic was a product in search for a market, which of course hundreds of millions of dollars of years later, or hundreds of millions of dollars later, I'm happy to …”
Soltero: Painkiller products carry hidden churn risk when customer pain subsides
“Painkiller products fall under a class of product that is the name implies they take away pain. And the challenge with those products is yes, they're attractive and everybody needs them. However, you're always subject to the let's say the person metaphorically…”
Soltero: 'Viagra products' enable users to do what seemed impossible
“Viagra products are the simplest products. They help you do things you previously thought were not possible.”
Soltero: Hyperic was infinitely harder to build than Accompli
“I don't mean to suggest that, that one was actually, if anything, Hyperic was infinitely harder for many, many reasons.”
Soltero: Ability to raise capital is a shallow founder metric
“That seems to be a really sort of shallow skill to cite. It's important, but it's not what makes a great entrepreneur, frankly.”
Soltero: Venture capital is an incestuous market where players collude on deals
“Venture capital is not a true market in the sense that it's a very limited number of players often colluding with and really incestuously sort of managing deal flow back and forth, and it works.”
Accompli had millions in enterprise pipeline before Microsoft acquisition
“At the time, We were very, very, very fortunate to already have, like, multiple millions of dollars of sales pipeline, and customers actually two in Europe, one in the UK, and two in the US, who were working with us very closely to really sign up and craft wha…”
Soltero: Microsoft will modernize email into a beloved medium within five years
“Over the next five years, we're here to make email awesome, and really take this incredibly powerful and pervasive medium that, that we often sort of complain about and hate and really turn it into something that people genuinely love and feel like it has adap…”