The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 21 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Raghuram: Selling to new enterprise user personas requires fenced-off teams
“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…”
Rivers: Dell effectively paid only $20 billion net for EMC
“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.”
Levine: Activist Investors Would Have Blocked EMC From Buying 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”
Raghuram: VMware Did Not Know How to Market to Software Developers
“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…”
Raghuram: VMware vSAN failed with storage buyers until sold to compute buyers
“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…”
VMware Cut Time-to-Hire in Half by Switching to Remote Hiring
“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…”
Uretsky: VMware's vCloud failed to gain traction due to its proprietary nature
“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.”
Jonnala: VMware ESX hypervisor relies heavily on open-source software
“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…”
Casado: Nicira was acquired for $1.2B with under $10M in ARR
“My company was acquired for 1.2 billion dollars. We had, let's call it, you know, less than ten million in ARR, right?”
Casado: Nicira reached a $600M run rate 3.5 years post-acquisition
“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.”
Casado: Nicira's NSX passed $100M run rate via direct sales
“And we probably got to, Oh, you know, well over a hundred million dollars in actual run rate revenue.”
Casado: VMware was the only software vendor in Gartner's hardware quadrant
“Number one, this is a hardware quadrant. It's the only pure play software company ever.”
Levine: EMC Buying VMware Was One of Tech's Greatest Acquisitions
“EMC arguably did what I think is one of the best enterprise acquisitions probably in the history of computing when they bought VMware.”
Clark: Enterprise corporate development focuses on transaction execution led by GMs
“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…”
Greene: VMware required board members to offer annual resignations
“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.”
Greene: Larry Sonsini joined VMware board out of anger at Intel
“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.”
Novak: Open-source KVM is the main virtualization engine for cloud providers
“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.”
Casado: Nicira sale returned a fund with historic enterprise revenue multiples
“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.”
VMware bought open-source SpringSource for over $400M
“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.”