EMC

“In the traditional world, that was six hundred billion dollars of spend, and AWS was going after all of it. This was the biggest market in business IT ever, because previous markets were just the server market, or just Cisco was good in networking, EMC was goo…”

“Technically EMC was the private equity buyer. They spent about six hundred fifty million dollars and sold it for sixty billion. So that's a sixty billion dollar gain plus or minus.”

“He buys EMC VMware, right? Sixty seven billion dollars with like four billion of equity. So it's like, there was like a special dividend or something like that, but they wind up borrowing like fifty billion, 50 billion dollars.”

“None of these products that run very well on, on premises are going to run well on, on the public cloud.”

“I spent almost nine years at a company called Data Domain, where I joined at zero dollars in revenue, and by the time I left, we'd gone through an IPO, took it to about a billion dollars, and then we got acquired by EMC in a hostile acquisition in 2009.”

“Yeah, but imagine buying a company at the time, five hundred and fifty million in revenue, 75, 80% margins for two billion dollars.”

“That company inside of EMC, we drove it to a billion that first year, and two billion dollars in the second.”

“I like to think about Airbnb as kind of distributed storage, but not for bits, or images, or sound, or video. It's distributed storage for people. You know, you can have a EMC big drive like on-prem in your enterprise, Or you can have things distributed, and i…”

“We hit three billion dollars in two years as part of EMC, of course.”

“I think we sent it out to about seven organizations that we thought would have interest back in, in this space. Three of them responded. Only one of them was super serious and that was EMC and they wanted to do the deal in four weeks in one month, which was un…”

“So this deck, this memorandum that we put together allowed us to get an offer for a hundred and eighty seven million. But what was key when we got to the LOI here is that we also got to keep the cash. That was in the business. So the deal was really north of t…”

“We just witnessed the largest tech deal in history when Dell bought EMC.”

“When they went private, their market cap was twenty four billion dollars. So tell me in what public market you're going to find a twenty four billion dollar company acquiring a sixty seven billion dollar company. Not going to freaking happen.”

“Dell's business moving from PC to server vendor, now server vendor to systems vendor, Makes a lot of sense. I mean, that logic there does hang together. Servers and storage kind of make up, and networking make up the bulk of make up the bulk of the data center…”

“Count on your hands how many people have, like, well-vetted, truly, undeniably, world-class enterprise sales forces. There aren't that many, right? And I think you have to say EMC's got one of them.”

“When I was at Cisco, I was the VP of systems architecture for UCS, the unified computing system for Cisco, and the number one goal was to get EMC to help sell UCS because we weren't quite sure Cisco sales force could pull it off.”

“In fact, at the Gartner event, what is fascinating? Was the entire floor. There was not a single hardware vendor except a small booth by EMC, and even small booth by Pure Storage, because I guess they were going public and they had a token show that. There was…”

“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”

“Dell was able to do this deal because they had no active. They were a private company and had no activists. EMC could only do this deal because they had activists”

“Dell is amazingly good at selling commodity components and EMC is amazingly good at selling high margin components.”

“So, 10 years ago, everyone would look at Fidelity and Morgan Stanley, and those were the prototypes for the data center. And it was, guess what? It was EMC storage, an Oracle database, a Sun Microsystems server, and a Cisco switch. And the entire world copied …”

“You know, some of the ones are the ones that, for example, IBM and Oracle, and EMC, and all the big behemoths have app acquired and they just become so bloated and expensive, and implementations fail”