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Vista Equity writes off PluralSight value, after $3.5B buyout

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Re: Vista Equity writes off PluralSight value, after $3.5B buyout

#61

Post by nikolajan »

mardifoufs wrote: post #52
skywhopper wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Essentially no company bought out by private equity manages to remain high-quality. The entire point is to milk the revenue stream dry while overleveraging on debt to provide investors with a large short-term payout. They do this by slashing costs to the bone, laying off too many people, and betting that the remaining husk will coast long enough to make the target return before they sell off what’s left to second-sta…

Depends on the PE tbh. We recently got acquired (after being split from our previous owner) and if anything we now have much better leadership, and they seem to focus on R&D more than anything else. It does help that they have clearly stated that they aim for making the corporation public in 5-7 years, which makes it less likely that they'd engage in bleeding the current assets dry for short term gains. It might be d…

They're not the exception of the rule, the rule is just going to kick off later for you (pre-IPO, when cost cutting measures will take place and the process described above will start)

Re: Vista Equity writes off PluralSight value, after $3.5B buyout

#62

Post by hugocbp »

Sad to see. When I started my journey into programming, PluralSight was one of the main resources I used, together with Lynda.com and Team Treehouse.

All 3, sadly, have seen the quality nosedive in recent years.

Today I mostly rely on Udemy. I know it has a bad rep and tons of garbage, but there are a handful of instructor that deliver really high quality content there. For example, see Fred Baptiste Python courses.

Even with AI taking charge, I still believe there is a place for a high quality, guided course like PluralSight used to offer back in the day.

Re: Vista Equity writes off PluralSight value, after $3.5B buyout

#63

Post by entangledqubit »

treme wrote: post #4

1B+ write-off's all deserve a full post-mortem. It's crazy to imagine such amount of value disappear into void.

Related to preventing value getting shoveled into the void, I was reading an article about tax write offs for movies that were never released - even though they were basically done. The fun suggestion someone had was that the movies be released to the public domain, since in some sense, society was footing the bill. It seems like something along those lines would be interesting here.

Re: Vista Equity writes off PluralSight value, after $3.5B buyout

#65

Post by mardifoufs »

nikolajan wrote: post #61
mardifoufs wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the PE tbh. We recently got acquired (after being split from our previous owner) and if anything we now have much better leadership, and they seem to focus on R&D more than anything else. It does help that they have clearly stated that they aim for making the corporation public in 5-7 years, which makes it less likely that they'd engage in bleeding the current assets dry for short term gains. It might be d…

They're not the exception of the rule, the rule is just going to kick off later for you (pre-IPO, when cost cutting measures will take place and the process described above will start)

I don't disagree, but I was more talking about the instances of PE acquisitions that get squeezed out. Obviously though you are right, at the end of the day they will want to make the business look as attractive as possible when they offload it. But to me that's still better than getting bought out to get squeezed and left to rot

Re: Vista Equity writes off PluralSight value, after $3.5B buyout

#66

Post by Aurornis »

skywhopper wrote: post #42
eterm wrote: post #34

I don't know if it's my own career development, but it felt like the quality of Pluralsight has also taken a nosedive. I had a bit of career break during the pandemic, so went from being a fairly regular consumer of pluralsight in 2018/9 to only coming back to it fairly recently. Whereas previously it felt like I could find interesting guides at my level, when I tried to look for similar things now, nothing felt quit…

Essentially no company bought out by private equity manages to remain high-quality. The entire point is to milk the revenue stream dry while overleveraging on debt to provide investors with a large short-term payout. They do this by slashing costs to the bone, laying off too many people, and betting that the remaining husk will coast long enough to make the target return before they sell off what’s left to second-sta…

> Essentially no company bought out by private equity manages to remain high-quality.

PE is a big category. Most PE-purchased companies are entirely boring and aren't imploding like these companies you hear about in the news.

I know it seems like every PE backed company just explodes immediately because that's all we hear about in the news, but the selection bias of news stories means you're only hearing about the interesting stories where there's something to report on. Nobody is reporting on PE-purchased companies that are quietly continuing to operate.

Re: Vista Equity writes off PluralSight value, after $3.5B buyout

#67

Post by Aurornis »

blackhawkC17 wrote: post #5

> One source says that the Utah-based company's financials have improved, with a around 26% EBITDA growth in 2023, but not enough to service nearly $1.3 billion of debt that was issued when interest rates were lower. Pluralsight hasn’t failed entirely as a company. It’s just that it can’t produce enough profits to pay down the huge debt Vista took to acquire it. Many tech PE deals happened under low interest rates, b…

> Pluralsight would be very successful if it took minimal VC funding and didn’t go the PE way.

Pluralsight wouldn't have been as big as it was without that VC funding.

You can't just imagine the company being the same as it was but without any debt. The debt was used to make the company what it was.

Re: Vista Equity writes off PluralSight value, after $3.5B buyout

#69

Post by hxriv »

tivert wrote: post #31
ado__dev wrote: post #2

I've been a Pluralsight subscriber for probably over a decade now. Their content is awesome for getting up to speed quickly or just learning about a technology without too much fluff. I do see though how AI is a huge threat to them. Using Claude 3 for coding and being able to ask questions about my specific issues and getting tailored responses every time to my exact issue (vs watching a general video and applying th…

> I do see though how AI is a huge threat to them. Using Claude 3 for coding and being able to ask questions about my specific issues and getting tailored responses every time to my exact issue (vs watching a general video and applying that knowledge through trial and error) has made me much more productive and also greatly reduced my reliance on using sites like Pluralsight to get up to speed/debug/etc. That seems l…

You’ll never get any real insights reading Crime and Punishment or East of Eden anyway. You have to live it.

Re: Vista Equity writes off PluralSight value, after $3.5B buyout

#70

Post by CSMastermind »

I was a Pluralsight subscriber for about a decade before giving up on them in the face of declining quality and higher prices.

My biggest disappointment was their pricing around Flow which I saw as their genuinely killer app - sort of like APM for your actual engineering team. But they priced it out of practicality for almost any organization.

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