Pivotal Labs Acquired?
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Pivotal Labs Acquired?
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Re: Pivotal Labs Acquired?
#2It's interesting how big companies have gone from attempting to cobble together teams to simply slurping up existing ones. Inter-product acquirhires (buzzwords, ahoy!) like Twitter + Posterous and cases like this, Github + Ordered List, and so on are becoming more and more common. I think it's interesting (and, of course, helpful to me as a consultant that works in the same spaces as these guys and gals), but I wonder if there will be any larger negative impact from it?
I can't see any, but I don't know if I can see the whole picture or not.
Re: Pivotal Labs Acquired?
#3It's interesting how big companies have gone from attempting to cobble together teams to simply slurping up existing ones. Inter-product acquirhires (buzzwords, ahoy!) like Twitter + Posterous and cases like this, Github + Ordered List, and so on are becoming more and more common. I think it's interesting (and, of course, helpful to me as a consultant that works in the same spaces as these guys and gals), but I wonde…
Well, its probably a bit early to say this was a talent acquisition. Pivotal is a real company with customers and revenue that could be attractive to any number of larger companies on the basis of any of their assets.
Re: Pivotal Labs Acquired?
#4For obvious reasons I'm guessing Twitter or Square. Though I wouldn't be surprised by a Salesforce acquisition either.
Re: Pivotal Labs Acquired?
#5For obvious reasons I'm guessing Twitter or Square. Though I wouldn't be surprised by a Salesforce acquisition either.
My best guess is a very large company who was in a hiring crunch and made an offer they couldn't refuse. Twitter or Salesforce are good guesses.
Re: Pivotal Labs Acquired?
#6This may explain the rager party going on next door... (Pivotal Labs is in our building).
Re: Pivotal Labs Acquired?
#7Companies that Pivotal has extensively worked with: Twitter, Square, and Google.
The first two seem, well, obvious. I can count many Pivots that ended up at Twitter over the last 2-3 years. Both companies rely on Ruby/Java and SF's talent pool is practically drained.
A Google acquisition, while far fetched, also makes sense given that Pivotal is stacked with agile/Java broskis. Hard to imagine what the Pivots would work on. Android? Google+?
Re: Pivotal Labs Acquired?
#8I was guessing it would be GitHub.
Re: Pivotal Labs Acquired?
#9I guess Square. Why?
1. Pivotal's business is solid, and growing. But they must feel chagrin when they can only charge consulting fees while their clients, whose products they helped build, are going to be creating hundred-millionaires in short order. This might persuade Pivotal to give up their future business potential in exchange for stock options to share in the goodness. This rules out Google.
2. Twitter doesn't really need more programmers. It needs to figure out how to monetize. So Twitter+Pivotal is not worth that much more than Twitter alone.
3. Square has obvious potential, proven monetizability, and the only thing holding them back from chasing the huge array of obvious opportunities is a lack of programming talent. If they go too slow, their well-funded competitors (Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, banks) may well beat them to some markets. There's definitely a first-mover advantage to getting payment devices in the hands of businesses in any given market.
All this should incentivize Square to offer a large chunk of stock to Pivotal, which should incentivize Pivotal to be acquired by them.
Re: Pivotal Labs Acquired?
#10Proof perhaps that running an extremely high-quality client-services business also has potential for an exit in the same way a startup does?
(Whilst also generating healthy profits in the meantime.)