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LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

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Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#121

Post by jacquesm »

x86_64Ubuntu wrote: post #56

Off-topic, but can anyone tell me of an instance whereby a software entity was acquired by a VC firm and things turned out great?

As Skrebbel already mentioned VC firms rarely acquire companies outright, but it is typical that in such transactions VCs are on the selling side and PE parties are on the buying side.

So let's take it as read that you meant PE, in that case, it depends is the usual answer. There are quite a few examples of PE funds buying companies and letting them run as autonomous as possible with positive results and there are examples of PE funds buying a company outright or a controlling interest who then become 'backseat drivers' but without the relevant experience. In those cases - especially if the PE party consists mostly of accountants and financial people - it usually does not take long before the effects become visible. But there are a great many players and the majority of them is both well intentioned and ends up with positive results. The ones you hear and read about in the newspapers are not really representative for the PE market as a whole, that's just the news' habit of focusing on the trainwreck.

PE fund returns nX to their LPs versus PE fund buys controlling stake in struggling company and runs it into the ground after loading it up with debt. Which headline do you think will attract more eyeballs?

Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#122

Post by raiyu »

AznHisoka wrote: post #6

These guys must really be pessimistic about their future if they are accepting a deal of $86/share. Their 52 week high was $96/share, and as high as $120/share last year.

From 2017 to 2018 they nearly tripled revenue, probably a reflection of the price changes that many in this thread have complained about.

The problem is that since then their growth has completely stalled out and is projected to be under 5% for both this year and next year.

While their revenue tops out over $1B their net profit is pretty slim.

Post acquisition expect to see a lot of cuts to improve cash flow as operations are slashed across the board, and depending on how the acquisition is funded it won't be a surprise to see the company burdened with a bunch of debt.

Then PE will either try to return cash through net income, or more likely than not relist the company after two - five years when the restructuring is complete and the company has a more financially interesting profile, akin to what happened with Ping Identity.

In an ideal world they will also try to increase revenue growth as well, so I wouldn't be surprised to see some more price increases coming down the line as well.

Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#123

Post by _jal »

AGKyle wrote: post #104
_jal wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the OP, but I dropped 1Password when it became clear you're forcing folks to cloud storage. I was sort of hoping the carefully chosen weasel-words about that used at the time meant you'd reconsider if enough of us made noise, but later releases made it clear where you're headed. It bummed me out - I really like 1pw. And I still don't have my password situation back to the same level of ease-of-use yet, but I swit…

Thanks for the feedback. I won't pretend that we're the password manager for everyone. If we're not the right one for you then hopefully one of the dozens of others out there fit the bill. I appreciate you taking the time to respond and let me know your opinion on this though. Thanks! Kyle 1Password Security Team

I assume you have numbers showing the total number of whiners like me are an acceptable loss, but I find dropping that feature inexplicable, honestly.

Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#124

Post by erichurkman »

_jal wrote: post #94
AGKyle wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heads up: I work for 1Password Any reason why you'd say unfortunately there? I see it as a pretty big perk rather than an unfortunately. But I would also like to understand a bit more so I can pass along any necessary feedback to our team. Thanks! Kyle 1Password Security Team

Not the OP, but I dropped 1Password when it became clear you're forcing folks to cloud storage. I was sort of hoping the carefully chosen weasel-words about that used at the time meant you'd reconsider if enough of us made noise, but later releases made it clear where you're headed. It bummed me out - I really like 1pw. And I still don't have my password situation back to the same level of ease-of-use yet, but I swit…

I'm souring on 1password, for both personal and work (we have it company-wide), based on unexpected pricing and licensing model changes. I really liked being able to buy a version _and have it keep working_. I could get it set up for my parents and nothing significant changed because it wasn't a "SaaS" product. I don't need a subscription for a password manager.

So we're ditching 1password for our family, and are likely to do so for work, too.

Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#125

Post by _jal »

enraged_camel wrote: post #105
_jal wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the OP, but I dropped 1Password when it became clear you're forcing folks to cloud storage. I was sort of hoping the carefully chosen weasel-words about that used at the time meant you'd reconsider if enough of us made noise, but later releases made it clear where you're headed. It bummed me out - I really like 1pw. And I still don't have my password situation back to the same level of ease-of-use yet, but I swit…

>> Storing my password DB on other people's computers is simply not going to happen. What is the risk scenario you're worried about?

If you have the DB, then bugs, malware, algorithm weaknesses, insider attacks on the code or operational failures on my part could compromise all my stored secrets.

If you don't have the DB, they can't.

Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#126

Post by blackearl »

ceejayoz wrote: post #64
jmuguy wrote: post #54

My old company used Logmein professionally to remotely manage 100s of computers for many years before switching to ConnectWise. They had a great product for a long time but some of the worse licensing decisions I've ever seen. It went from being completely free to several thousand dollars overnight without any additional features, support, etc being offered. And meanwhile development was stagnant with only weird chan…

Great product, hundreds of computers for professional purposes, and "several thousand dollars" is a sticking point? Why?

they're infamous on /r/sysadmin for having a relatively normal price, then suddenly going up 3-400% with little notice. It's not easy to lift and shift this quickly so some companies have been forced into getting hosed for a year.

Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#128

Post by wongarsu »

atomwaffel wrote: post #15
wffurr wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1Password is better and unlikely to be acquired. They are quite profitable on their own.

They did however take $200 million in VC funding in November: https://blog.1password.com/accel-partnership/

According to Accel that was more about the contacts offered by Accel, with a nice side effect of getting lots of news coverage for a $200 million series A.

Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#129

Post by vc8f6vVV »

AGKyle wrote: post #120
oarsinsync wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A situation where the remote datastore is compromised and now with it, all of my passwords. Or if I was to buy into 1Password's worldview, all of my credit cards, bank accounts, ID cards, everything I want to keep a secure digital copy of, is at risk. Having a sense of control is a huge part of the way we think. Despite the greater risk of death in a car compared to an aeroplane, there's less concerns about car trave…

I think you may want to take a closer look at how 1Password works. I'll give a quick rundown here, but our security white paper goes into much greater detail: https://1pw.ca/whitepaper Your data is encrypted locally on your devices, it is never available in a decrypted form on any of our servers. A compromise of our servers would result in the attacker getting gibberish (encrypted data). To decrypt that data the atta…

While what you are saying seems technically sound it implies that you do everything right when generating Secret Key. Let's imagine you have a bug and it fills Secret Key with zeros (or some fixed sequence) and it becomes known after quite some time, and in between your server is compromised. How much easier it makes for an attacker to decrypt data en masse? I would assume some people may not like that such attack vector even exists.

Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#130

Post by rciorba »

jmuguy wrote: post #54

My old company used Logmein professionally to remotely manage 100s of computers for many years before switching to ConnectWise. They had a great product for a long time but some of the worse licensing decisions I've ever seen. It went from being completely free to several thousand dollars overnight without any additional features, support, etc being offered. And meanwhile development was stagnant with only weird chan…

An interesting approach. When I worked at a university and had 100+ machines to handle (back in the WinXP days), we just used udpcast + sysprep to do full disk cloning. We never bothered with individual machines, if anything ever went wrong we just wiped the whole thing and re-cloned it.

Keeping 100+ machines up and running, and caring for individual ones sounds like a whole lot of work. Admittedly we got away with it because those were lab computers used by students, and data persistence did not matter as much (each student had a samba share mounted, which was on a central server and had backups)

I do wonder if full disk cloning + sysprep is still an option with newer versions of windows.

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