Cisco Is Said to Have Offered $7B-Plus for DataDog

I showed up and there were a handful of people, turns out the coworker had rented the whole track (and skid pad) for the weekend for “trying out” different driving moves. I expect it cost them less than $100,000 for the weekend.

But the engineer in question here probably had a net worth of more than $50M and yet they came into work every day and built cool stuff.

Now the Sun case was more “typical” of the valley at the time where a company goes public and now there are lots of millionaires in the ranks. Same thing at Google when they went public, and Facebook. In my experience it is the unusual case that the newly wealthy person quits work and pursues a life of idle hedonism.

Not saying that it doesn’t happen, just saying that there is an alternative response to being wealthy.

My reasoning: I worked in the APM space and there appeared to be an upper limit to how much companies were willing to spend on APM and related technologies that caps the opportunity. In general, the charging per agent/server model runs into trouble on big infrastructure - do I cover production? What about staging? If I don't cover staging, then am I creating a testing/QA problem? Etc. It just becomes a much tougher sell when you get over $500k. Hell, over $200k. I would regularly hear companies say things like "well, we can cover half of production because I can't bring that to our CEO - he'll freak."

So I think that might be part of what we're seeing with New Relic's recent revenue performance (they recently cut guidance on full year revenue). New Relic does about $600m a year and is valued at $3.5b - their max value was about 2x that - so $7b.

Caveats: - Are they growing faster? Absolutely. - Are they a great company? Absolutely. - Does taking the deal and giving up full control of your company always make sense? Of course not. - Is money the only metric of success? No of course not. - Does it matter when you're talking billions? Probably not.

At the maturity of a company like Datadog post-would-be-acquisition is all about cross-selling your product into existing enterprise accounts, not necessarily enhancing the product. So this woulda actually save them money.

Say what you want about Oracle, but this is their modus operandi and it's worked.*

*- asterisk bc they have to continually do it like a treadmill in order to stay afloat.