Will Herman recalls Viewlogic's financial figures prior to being acquired in the late 1990s.
Insight
Herman: Build In-House When Strategy Is Core; Acquisitions Fail To Integrate
“When what you're working on is sort of core to your long-term strategy I feel like there's no, no better value of developing that in-house, of creating that yourselves, because you can't get your hands around the technology, or the customers, or the employees,…”
Assertion Supported
Herman raised $60M venture funding to buy back $120M of Viewlogic revenue
“A year after we sold it, we bought back about 75% of the revenue, 80% of the revenue of the company in an MBO and then ran that company. Oh, it's a management buyout. We actually got venture funding about 50 or sixty million dollars and bought the bought about…”
Insight
Herman: Raising venture capital locks founders into pursuing an exit
“Most people don't realize that once you take venture capital, you are stuck. You're going for an exit, and that's what everybody wants.”
Insight
Herman: Unmotivated founders should directly ask investors to wind down
“Speaking as an angel investor, no investor wants to be involved in a company that the founders don't want to be involved in. So, you know, it's just going to take a long time to die, and it's going to be a long, painful death. So, so the best way, as hard as i…”
Assertion Partly supported
Herman: Quintus grew to $60M revenue and IPO'd before collapsing
“That was an actually an investment, not one that I was active in, although I did help the VCs spin it out of a of another company. Company was called Quintus. High flyer went from nothing to sixty million in revenue, went public.”
Disclosure
Herman lost nearly $500,000 in his Quintus investment
“I had I had pretty close to half a million dollars.”