Nicira

“What we were able to do over the next, you know, five years and only forty million dollars in funding was to build a billion dollar company. Who, you know, I'd say six months prior to this recording, that product that we built all in software was at a six hund…”

“Ended up getting acquired by VMware, and by the time I left, the product was, ah, at about a six hundred million dollar run rate, and about 50% of that was security.”

“We probably spent six months just refining the story of value. I mean, six months, and it was like six months of every day.”

“We, as our firm, we were investors in Instagram. We were also investors in Nicera. Both those companies sold around the same point for actually Nicera sold for more, I think it was 1.4 billion Instagram, depending on Facebook stock price of 700 to a billion.”

“So we funded this here at NetWeQ's networking lab, and it was the OpenFlow. OpenFlow was the sort of protocol was the approach and Martine had, had, had been one of the main people doing that. And so they start in Asira, and we're all excited, because we're li…”

“And so we spent two years at about 12 people. We didn't grow at all. We stayed very focused.”

“When we launched the company, actually went public with the company, not like public as in the stock market, but we actually came out of stealth. We had AT&T, NTT, eBay, Rackspace, and Fidelity.”

“And we probably got to, Oh, you know, well over a hundred million dollars in actual run rate revenue.”

“There are some classes of innovation where you can get by what I would say is close adjacencies, where the If you're building a product that's closely adjacent to your original product. You can take it from zero to one through the existing Salesforce. Yeah. Ri…”

“My company was acquired for 1.2 billion dollars. We had, let's call it, you know, less than ten million in ARR, right?”

“The run rate of the three and a half years later, like the run rate was, you know, six hundred million dollars within VMware who acquired the company.”

“When we actually sold the company, I mean, it, you know, it returned a fund. You know, it was one of the highest acquisitions on multiples of revenue at the time in enterprise software.”