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Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire AppDynamics

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Re: Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire AppDynamics

#41
post #27
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the chart take liquidity preference into account?

Price clears liq pref, so yup - update tomorrow with new pricing

I guess the number would be different unless you have the details, e.g. their termsheets :)

Re: Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire AppDynamics

#42
post #37
post #8

Taxes, death, and Cisco acquiring a company..

Dell bought a competitor, Thoma Bravo investor bought two competitors. MS has some worse offering. As someone else mentioned MS and IBM were in a bid war with Cisco over AppDynamics. So will MS or IBM try to buy the public company New Relic or one of its competitors?

They can try to buy Sumo Logic.

Re: Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire AppDynamics

#43
post #23

here's how the private investors did (roughly double returns to see at Cisco valuation): https://equityzen.com/path-to-ipo/appdynamics/ (disclaimer: i'm affiliated) good news for late stage companies, now that public-only investors know they have some competition.

Wow, Lightspeed Ventures absolutely crushed it. $5 million series A is projected to be worth $300 million now. That's the kind of return that funds their entire VC firm for the next 10 years.

Re: Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire AppDynamics

#44
post #41
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Price clears liq pref, so yup - update tomorrow with new pricing

I guess the number would be different unless you have the details, e.g. their termsheets :)

Yes, but not substantially. They raised a little under $300 million. Even if all of the money raised had a (high) 2x liquidity preference, that still leaves $3.1B to be distributed among the stock holders.

Re: Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire AppDynamics

#45
post #40
post #9

AppDynamics looked like it was going to have a successful IPO, indicating a welcome market for future enterprise tech IPOs. Interestingly, it's in Cisco's best interest to have a cold IPO market.

It's questionable that any IPO this quarter would be hot. Lots of shadows and cold wind about.

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Re: Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire AppDynamics

#46
post #3

We just implemented AppDynamics. I can't say this hits me as good news. Hopefully Cisco is hands off with them.

How is AppDynamics compared to the other tools in your experience?

In my organization AppDynamics' reputation couldn't be worse, they could never deliver on their promises even after months of consultancy, never ending back and forth with support to fix what ended up being a network issue on their side, in the case of my team they caused 2 P1 production incidents with their buggy agents. And that's without mentioning their slow UI. Wouldn't recommend this to anyone, we hacked together in a few weeks a solution with graphite/grafana that runs circles around it. Perhaps they have more value for client facing systems because otherwise I cannot understand how they are still in business.

Re: Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire AppDynamics

#47
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the number would be different unless you have the details, e.g. their termsheets :)

Yes, but not substantially. They raised a little under $300 million. Even if all of the money raised had a (high) 2x liquidity preference, that still leaves $3.1B to be distributed among the stock holders.

It depends on termsheet, but in most cases liquidation preference only hits when final price is low. Otherwise investors will pick the percentage.

Re: Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire AppDynamics

#48
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps they had some insight that it wasn't going to be that strong? Public markets are very unforgiving if you have a few bad quarters. That 3.7B IPO could wind up a 2B company after a few of those. CISCO stock won't get crushed by a couple bad quarters from AppDynamics.

They've been increasing the initial offer price the last week as demand was high. From $10 to $14 a share. That's a positive sign for them. To then get bought out at 100% premium from that is massively prosperous exit. Consider their last private valuation was 1.9 billion it sounds like the investors, founders and employees all have reason to celebrate tonight. Congrats to them all for this very fortunate exit.

Interesting. You clearly have more insight than me on this.

One thought on the premium to the final round... Late growth investors are still looking for 3X returns (Versus say 10X from early investors) and the earlier investments carry a liquidity discount. 2X is still very good, but it's not the return that will carry the losers in the fund.

And yes - they should all celebrate. As should the rest of us! Every unicorn that exits reduces the backlog, and provides more liquidity for the rest of us.

Re: Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire AppDynamics

#49
post #29
post #23

here's how the private investors did (roughly double returns to see at Cisco valuation): https://equityzen.com/path-to-ipo/appdynamics/ (disclaimer: i'm affiliated) good news for late stage companies, now that public-only investors know they have some competition.

Is there a way to figure out how well employees did in this deal ?

Still waiting on official figures on employee retention to be announced, but it's fair to say all preferred concerted so whatever % employees owner will convert for a decent portion of the buy out price. Say the retention piece is 10% or $370M, an employee that had 0.10% should walk away with ~$3.3M ($3.7B x 90% x 0.10%) plus anything they get under retention

Re: Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire AppDynamics

#50
post #29
post #23

here's how the private investors did (roughly double returns to see at Cisco valuation): https://equityzen.com/path-to-ipo/appdynamics/ (disclaimer: i'm affiliated) good news for late stage companies, now that public-only investors know they have some competition.

Is there a way to figure out how well employees did in this deal ?

[deleted]
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