VMware

“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.”

“And guess what, JR, to your point, right, which is the next Cisco VMware sorry, VMware, that's open source too. I mean, literally, if you looked at how much of ESX is based on open source, It's just that, you know, they probably don't come out and claim it rig…”

“So VMware and Hyper-V definitely are there, but KVM, which is open source, in many cases, especially with cloud provider, Is the main virtualization scheme.”

“Thing is that you make sure, and I did this in my startup, and I don't know if startups do this, but I adopted the big board practice of you resign every year. You offer your resignation every year.”

“He got so, the reason he joined was I told him what was happening with Intel, and it made him so angry, he's like, okay, I'll join your board.”

“If you look at, ah, the corporate development teams on the enterprise side, and so I'm talking about Oracle, and Cisco, and VMware, and those kind of companies, they tend to be more M&A execution focused, ah, and so you hear a lot of times, you know, CorpDev p…”

“How much did Dell really pay for EMC? About twenty billion dollars. Because the rest of it, I mean, if they took VMware and spun it out, they'd, you know, they'd make back at least 40.”

“EMC arguably did what I think is one of the best enterprise acquisitions probably in the history of computing when they bought VMware.”

“Because activists were involved with current EMC, if EMC were now, it was 15 years ago, and EMC were faced with buying VMware, and they had activist pressure on their board, they would not be allowed to buy VMware”

“If we were running a VMware cloud, it wouldn't make sense to run open source, ah, on top of it, which is why I think VMware's, like, vCloud initiative hasn't necessarily hid the traction that they wanted to see.”

“Number one, this is a hardware quadrant. It's the only pure play software company ever.”

“SpringSource is like the most popular Java programming framework in the world, bought by VMware for pretty famous money, over four hundred million dollars as an open source project.”

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

“VMware, for instance were, did a sort of before and after comparison in terms of their time to hire when it comes down to where they doing on-premise hiring pre pre the big over period, and then they switched to remote hiring and they reduced their time to hir…”

“The cloud, I mean, initially Amazon AWS did not change The abstraction of a virtual machine but everything else, the business model changed, and the most important change that AWS brought about was it made infrastructure available to developers without IT. Tha…”

“In fact, we had two iterations on vSAN, right? Initially, we said, hey, let's go after the storage buyer. That did not work as well. And then we said, look, we're going to go expand the compute buyer's purview. Right? Then it started working. So the go-to-mark…”

“If you look at VMware's roughly 20 year history, the first decade was us disrupting and growing, and the second decade was others coming after us to disrupt us, right?”

“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.”