7 ms·

Vista Equity Partners revamps software companies by following detailed protocols

116 points by jedwhite 8y ago

neo4sure 8y ago
This is nothing new. The socio-economic hierarchy was there in every human society throughout history. Some times journalists don't have any imagination.
- StaticRedux 8y ago
  Not everything requires imagination. Sometimes explanation is good too. While it may be obvious to you, other people find it enlightening and interesting.
Puer 8y ago
Full article here: https://outline.com/6kWxDs https://outline.com/6kWxDs
- atomical 8y ago
  How do publishers feel about this?
  - therein 8y ago
    Same way they feel about this [1], they are simply unaware. [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=Billionaire’s+Secret+Buyout+Formula%3A+110+Instructions+and+an+Intelligence+Test&oq=Billionaire’s+Secret+Buyout+Formula%3A+110+Instructions+and+an+Intelligence+Test&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i61j69i60j69i61.933j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=Billionaire’s+Secret+Buyout+...
    - sigacts 8y ago
      That doesn't work for the Wall Street Journal any more, and hasn't for a year: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-05/wsj-ends-google-users-free-ride-then-fades-in-search-results https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-05/wsj-ends-...
      - therein 8y ago
        I don't question your source but my personal experience is that it still consistently works. It works just now in fact.
- gruez 8y ago
  i personally prefer the l.php workaround as it preserves the site layout and formatting https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/articles/billionaires-secret-buyout-formula-110-instructions-and-an-intelligence-test-1531151197 https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/article...
- fwdpropaganda 8y ago
  Alternative: If you're on Firefox, this addon automatically adds "Facebook" to the referer so you can bypass the FT and WSJ paywalls https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/read-ft-wsj/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/read-ft-wsj/
checker659 8y ago
> Vista is currently trying to raise $12 billion for a new buyout fund. Ok
- sushid 8y ago
  Yeah it sounds like a typical puff piece for me. Oh look how methodical this man/firm is! His company is progressive and he's a philanthropist to boot! No negative acquisitions experiences or anything like that in the article either.
- arbuge 8y ago
  Submarine...
- charmides 8y ago
  Is that a typo?
snarfy 8y ago
I work for a company that was acquired by Vista. Ask me anything.
- theDoug 8y ago
  How's your day going? Up to anything fun? Also, whatcha think on the article? Do you feel the process was valuable or brought positive non-obvious changes faster than they might have otherwise occurred? Also given the "tastes like chicken" genericism comment in the piece, what's a story that you think could /only/ have happened there? Thanks! Edit: real question
  - snarfy 8y ago
    The article does a good job explaining Vista and their process. I took the intelligence test. It seemed trivial, but I suppose it's better than having nothing. It very much reminds me of that show The Profit. Fix the books first, so you know where you're really at and what really needs fixing. Cut anything not making money. Focus on scaling the core business. I've seen all of these changes happen or are in progress. Overall they've done a good job. As an old timer that's seen the good times and the money just spilling out, I can't help but want to grumble when they start cutting the fat, but it all makes perfect business sense.
    - manicdee 8y ago
      "Cut anything not making money," works great when you're a monopoly or your business wasn't built on customer service.
      - jib 8y ago
        Customer support can easily be a competitive advantage. I guarantee you that unless your company recently downsized (or is very small) there are things you can cut, because no one cared enough to fix them or they thought it was cool to have X even though X is not returning value.
pedalpete 8y ago
"The ultimate gauge of success for any private-equity firm, however, is the price at which it cashes out of its investments." Is this correct? That sounds like the measure of success for a VC, I thought PE was about a consistent return better than the public markets, I didn't think that had to mean "cashing out".
- notyourwork 8y ago
  Isn't a return on your investment a slow cash out? Over time you receive money in return for your up front investment. Either way, you don't invest money to lose money.
- harryh 8y ago
  It both VC and PE firms try to value their investments while still holding equity in companies. This can be a challenge though as these investments are often illiquid and there is a lot of uncertainty about the future. Ultimately investors in both kinds of operations want to eventually sell their holdings for cash. It is only at that point that one can truly judge the success or failure of an investment. That's all this is really saying. Vista owns a bunch of stock that will probably be valuable but they won't really know for sure until they turn it into cash.
- Nasrudith 8y ago
  Well in addition to reflection of the problems of rampant short-termism, bubble-surfing, and crash-and-burn corporate raiding as opposed to creating something of lasting value there is a more charitable and sensible explanation for that mentality: risk and returns tend to correlation for many reasons that all add up to the same thing. As a company becomes big the risk goes down but the growth goes down as well by necessity as it saturates its niche. Look at say Cellphone manufacturers - when everyone has a phone already growth potential is limited vs selling everyone a phone. On the other hand it becomes far harder t be wiped out when a behemoth. Corporations that were pretty much dead and everyone else knew it zombied along for decades. Even if they closed operations tomorrow they would still have a large amount of capital and collateral and thus investments are more protected and less risky. You can turn a restaurant into a franchise chain or have it go bankrupt or but short of managing to get the entire chain seized as a front for illegal activity or similar extremes you can't lose all of the value of an entire franchise. They technically can hold onto their early successes as the start-up became google but then they aren't really venture capitalists anymore and have shifted into being company stockholders. In order to see those types of exponential returns again you need to fund new businesses. However there is also the growing expense of all of the failures making it not a free lunch. If their total returns between all of their failures and successes are less than just holding their existing ones it is clear in retrospect that they should shift their funding to just the safer investments and they should have quit while they were ahead.
jacques_chester 8y ago
> A personality test aims to determine which of them are suited to which jobs. Salespeople are better off being extroverted, and software developers more introverted. If my eyeballs were rolling any harder at this they'd pop out of their sockets and race off over the back of my head. That's the thing about billionaires. Everyone agrees with them. Just ask them: everyone they knows agrees with them. Every brainfart is the golden truth, hand-delivered by Minerva. The idea that people might be nodding at any halfbaked notion to get a fullbaked paycheque seems to have slipped their mind. > Vista, which has done more than 300 deals, tells investors it has never lost money on a buyout I can't tell who they're kidding here, their customers or themselves.
- viburnum 8y ago
  People loves their plutocratic masters.
- SamReidHughes 8y ago
  Is that controversial? Software development doesn't have a lot of human interaction, compared to, say, sales, golf instruction, or professional basketball, so introverts like it more.
  - walterbell 8y ago
    If humans use the software, it may be useful to interact with humans to understand human requirements.
    - SamReidHughes 8y ago
      So? It's still way less interaction than sales.
      - walterbell 8y ago
        It’s not about hours of interaction. One poor sales interaction can hurt one transaction. One poor requirements interaction can have years of software consequences.
hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
Two thoughts on this article: 1. I agree with the "tastes like chicken" argument, especially for enterprise software. Most enterprise software is basically CRUD apps with a data analytics component where most of the complexity is in integrating with existing 3rd party systems and processes. It really is mostly plumbing. 2. I think this article does a fairly good job in raising the red flag that most of the profits are on paper. I say this because a funny thing about enterprise subscription software is that companies can spend a lot of money on it, but the purchasers are often not the people actually using the software. This can create a situation where things look OK for a while as the revenue rolls in, until one day when the folks with purchasing decision power actually talk to the end users, and the end users say how much they hate the product and all they are doing is working around it with an inefficient process (yes, I've been involved with enterprise software before). Then the software subscription is cancelled, and the subscription revenue can have a huge decline over a very short period.
- oculusthrift 8y ago
  i feel like if your theory was true then microsoft would be bankrupt by now. i don’t think the person who purchased the software ever ends up taking feedback or caring about the end user
- mathattack 8y ago
  Yes. The future cash flows look great when gross Churn is less than 10% and net Churn is negative. But if you underinvest, eventually the tide turns. Look at Taleo as an example. I’m sure they had great Churn metrics once upon a time. Now it’s a signal that a company has obsolete technology.
a-dub 8y ago
It's fun to read glassdoor reviews from their acquirees. Sounds like the formula is: 1) Buy the company 2) Shut down the main office and move it to some cheaper city, accept attrition 3) Fire all employees over 30 (using the patented "IQ" test as a cover), replace them with young kids or "HPELs" 4) Install a Glengarry Glen Ross style sales regime 5) Hold on for a few quarters while numbers are improved from all the cost cutting 6) Quickly bail and sell the thing off before anyone notices it's all being held up by duct tape and bailing wire 7) Wash hands. Repeat.
- sigacts 8y ago
  Except the article says they haven't sold very many times.
- hueving 8y ago
  Where does it show they are doing step 6? That seems to be critical to your thesis of this being a pump and dump.
- motohagiography 8y ago
  Is this different from private equity / distressed asset investing in general, or standard activist investor asset stripping? All that is missing is loading the company with debt to pay "management fees," to the acquirers before cutting and running, leaving the founders and remaining shareholders with the bill. Organized crime have been known to do this as well. A handbook of investment anti-patterns, common hustles, and ways to identify crappy investors would be really useful. There seems to be a tier of capital that just needs somewhere to go. It is not allowed to take the direct risks of angel or seed rounds, but can participate in venture funds, or funds of funds that include hedge funds and alternative assets, participate in growth rounds, and some really sketchy penny stock RTOs, but it's like they are prevented from investing while exercising any specific expertise.
- TheCoelacanth 8y ago
  I work at a company that was acquired by Vista a few years ago and I haven't noticed much of that. The main office is in a pretty expensive location and it is currently being expanded to close to double the size it was when the company was acquired. There are a lot of young kids being hired, but also a lot of older people as well. Attrition has been pretty low and I think only a handful of people at the entire company have been layed off. Cost cutting does not seem to have been particularly extreme if it has occurred. The benefits package and travel policies have gotten slightly more generous since the acquisition and annual raises have continued the trends from before the acquisition which made it possible to keep reasonably close to what you could get by changing companies.
andyidsinga 8y ago
If i ever encounter a situation where I'm selling my company and the buyer asks me to submit to a "proprietary cognitive assessment" ..I think there are going to be more $ involved. I'm not at all convinced one should give that information away for free - meaning this is a separate fee negotiated outside of the business price. So, here's the complication - I can speak for myself in this regard, but i'm not sure how a principal could or should navigate this issue with coworkers or on behalf of employees. ideas?
qop 8y ago
Why are WSJ links still allowed on HN? Or any paid-reader only sources?
- tomhoward 8y ago
  Paywall bypass link: http://archive.is/UUhj6 http://archive.is/UUhj6 HN FAQs [1]: It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds. In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
thisisit 8y ago
Companies come up with all sorts of reasons to fire people. Especially after they go through years of excess. A friend who works at ANZ tells me that they have come up with another way of culling jobs. They have embraced Agile wholeheartedly. And every employee has to be certified in Agile. Once an employee is certified he has to apply to be part of a squad, chapter, tribe etc. Now to ensure that people are fired for "performance" reasons, there are only 800 openings up for grabs for 1000 odd people. I think it is a nightmare when after spending years in a company you have to re-apply back to just keep your job.
wb36 8y ago
"Vista has yet to unload some of its biggest bets," Translation - the majority of the returns reported here are based on estimated valuations calculated by Vista rather than actual returns resulting from business sales. It goes without saying that 99.99% of the time this means the returns are inflated. It is possible that they've only calculated returns based on companies sold, but unlikely. So not only can they manipulate the valuation on firms they haven't sold to make their funds look better. Even with that + the ability to fudge IRR numbers, their last few fund returns are not so mind blowing that we should believe these guys have a magic formula.
apohn 8y ago
I worked for a company that was acquired by Vista. Was there for a few years before the acquisition and ~18 months after. I'll just say this - whatever Vista's top secret directives are, they didn't seem to have any sensible directives around employee retention for individual contributors. IMO their policies actually encouraged people to leave. The team I was on lost 6 people in 6 months and it became comical to watch my manager try to hire people as upper management constantly froze/unfroze hiring, destroying hiring pipelines and providing a terrible experience to some great candidates. I've kept in touch with quite a few of my colleagues from those years and there's a clear pattern. People who have left (including me) have gotten promotions, large pay raises, are working for companies with better brand recognition, etc. People who stayed are doing the same jobs for basically the same pay, but have a much higher workload to fill all the gaps that came from multiple rounds of layoffs and higher than expected (the CEO stated this in an all-hands call) attrition. Lesson I learned in all this: Private equity acquisition = Immediately find a new job. If you have a good manager ask them to lay you off so you get a severance package and help the manager hit their headcount reduction quota. Unless you are in a privileged position, you're not going to get anything for sticking with the company through tough times.

116 points by jedwhite 8y ago

This is nothing new. The socio-economic hierarchy was there in every human society throughout history. Some times journalists don't have any imagination.

StaticRedux 8y ago
Not everything requires imagination. Sometimes explanation is good too. While it may be obvious to you, other people find it enlightening and interesting.

Puer 8y ago

Full article here: https://outline.com/6kWxDs https://outline.com/6kWxDs

atomical 8y ago
How do publishers feel about this?
- therein 8y ago
  Same way they feel about this [1], they are simply unaware. [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=Billionaire’s+Secret+Buyout+Formula%3A+110+Instructions+and+an+Intelligence+Test&oq=Billionaire’s+Secret+Buyout+Formula%3A+110+Instructions+and+an+Intelligence+Test&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i61j69i60j69i61.933j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=Billionaire’s+Secret+Buyout+...
  - sigacts 8y ago
    That doesn't work for the Wall Street Journal any more, and hasn't for a year: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-05/wsj-ends-google-users-free-ride-then-fades-in-search-results https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-05/wsj-ends-...
    - therein 8y ago
      I don't question your source but my personal experience is that it still consistently works. It works just now in fact.
gruez 8y ago
i personally prefer the l.php workaround as it preserves the site layout and formatting https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/articles/billionaires-secret-buyout-formula-110-instructions-and-an-intelligence-test-1531151197 https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/article...
fwdpropaganda 8y ago
Alternative: If you're on Firefox, this addon automatically adds "Facebook" to the referer so you can bypass the FT and WSJ paywalls https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/read-ft-wsj/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/read-ft-wsj/

checker659 8y ago

> Vista is currently trying to raise $12 billion for a new buyout fund. Ok

sushid 8y ago
Yeah it sounds like a typical puff piece for me. Oh look how methodical this man/firm is! His company is progressive and he's a philanthropist to boot! No negative acquisitions experiences or anything like that in the article either.
arbuge 8y ago
Submarine...
charmides 8y ago
Is that a typo?

snarfy 8y ago

I work for a company that was acquired by Vista. Ask me anything.

theDoug 8y ago
How's your day going? Up to anything fun? Also, whatcha think on the article? Do you feel the process was valuable or brought positive non-obvious changes faster than they might have otherwise occurred? Also given the "tastes like chicken" genericism comment in the piece, what's a story that you think could /only/ have happened there? Thanks! Edit: real question
- snarfy 8y ago
  The article does a good job explaining Vista and their process. I took the intelligence test. It seemed trivial, but I suppose it's better than having nothing. It very much reminds me of that show The Profit. Fix the books first, so you know where you're really at and what really needs fixing. Cut anything not making money. Focus on scaling the core business. I've seen all of these changes happen or are in progress. Overall they've done a good job. As an old timer that's seen the good times and the money just spilling out, I can't help but want to grumble when they start cutting the fat, but it all makes perfect business sense.
  - manicdee 8y ago
    "Cut anything not making money," works great when you're a monopoly or your business wasn't built on customer service.
    - jib 8y ago
      Customer support can easily be a competitive advantage. I guarantee you that unless your company recently downsized (or is very small) there are things you can cut, because no one cared enough to fix them or they thought it was cool to have X even though X is not returning value.

pedalpete 8y ago

"The ultimate gauge of success for any private-equity firm, however, is the price at which it cashes out of its investments." Is this correct? That sounds like the measure of success for a VC, I thought PE was about a consistent return better than the public markets, I didn't think that had to mean "cashing out".

notyourwork 8y ago
Isn't a return on your investment a slow cash out? Over time you receive money in return for your up front investment. Either way, you don't invest money to lose money.
harryh 8y ago
It both VC and PE firms try to value their investments while still holding equity in companies. This can be a challenge though as these investments are often illiquid and there is a lot of uncertainty about the future. Ultimately investors in both kinds of operations want to eventually sell their holdings for cash. It is only at that point that one can truly judge the success or failure of an investment. That's all this is really saying. Vista owns a bunch of stock that will probably be valuable but they won't really know for sure until they turn it into cash.
Nasrudith 8y ago
Well in addition to reflection of the problems of rampant short-termism, bubble-surfing, and crash-and-burn corporate raiding as opposed to creating something of lasting value there is a more charitable and sensible explanation for that mentality: risk and returns tend to correlation for many reasons that all add up to the same thing. As a company becomes big the risk goes down but the growth goes down as well by necessity as it saturates its niche. Look at say Cellphone manufacturers - when everyone has a phone already growth potential is limited vs selling everyone a phone. On the other hand it becomes far harder t be wiped out when a behemoth. Corporations that were pretty much dead and everyone else knew it zombied along for decades. Even if they closed operations tomorrow they would still have a large amount of capital and collateral and thus investments are more protected and less risky. You can turn a restaurant into a franchise chain or have it go bankrupt or but short of managing to get the entire chain seized as a front for illegal activity or similar extremes you can't lose all of the value of an entire franchise. They technically can hold onto their early successes as the start-up became google but then they aren't really venture capitalists anymore and have shifted into being company stockholders. In order to see those types of exponential returns again you need to fund new businesses. However there is also the growing expense of all of the failures making it not a free lunch. If their total returns between all of their failures and successes are less than just holding their existing ones it is clear in retrospect that they should shift their funding to just the safer investments and they should have quit while they were ahead.

jacques_chester 8y ago

> A personality test aims to determine which of them are suited to which jobs. Salespeople are better off being extroverted, and software developers more introverted. If my eyeballs were rolling any harder at this they'd pop out of their sockets and race off over the back of my head. That's the thing about billionaires. Everyone agrees with them. Just ask them: everyone they knows agrees with them. Every brainfart is the golden truth, hand-delivered by Minerva. The idea that people might be nodding at any halfbaked notion to get a fullbaked paycheque seems to have slipped their mind. > Vista, which has done more than 300 deals, tells investors it has never lost money on a buyout I can't tell who they're kidding here, their customers or themselves.

viburnum 8y ago
People loves their plutocratic masters.
SamReidHughes 8y ago
Is that controversial? Software development doesn't have a lot of human interaction, compared to, say, sales, golf instruction, or professional basketball, so introverts like it more.
- walterbell 8y ago
  If humans use the software, it may be useful to interact with humans to understand human requirements.
  - SamReidHughes 8y ago
    So? It's still way less interaction than sales.
    - walterbell 8y ago
      It’s not about hours of interaction. One poor sales interaction can hurt one transaction. One poor requirements interaction can have years of software consequences.

hn_throwaway_99 8y ago

Two thoughts on this article: 1. I agree with the "tastes like chicken" argument, especially for enterprise software. Most enterprise software is basically CRUD apps with a data analytics component where most of the complexity is in integrating with existing 3rd party systems and processes. It really is mostly plumbing. 2. I think this article does a fairly good job in raising the red flag that most of the profits are on paper. I say this because a funny thing about enterprise subscription software is that companies can spend a lot of money on it, but the purchasers are often not the people actually using the software. This can create a situation where things look OK for a while as the revenue rolls in, until one day when the folks with purchasing decision power actually talk to the end users, and the end users say how much they hate the product and all they are doing is working around it with an inefficient process (yes, I've been involved with enterprise software before). Then the software subscription is cancelled, and the subscription revenue can have a huge decline over a very short period.

oculusthrift 8y ago
i feel like if your theory was true then microsoft would be bankrupt by now. i don’t think the person who purchased the software ever ends up taking feedback or caring about the end user
mathattack 8y ago
Yes. The future cash flows look great when gross Churn is less than 10% and net Churn is negative. But if you underinvest, eventually the tide turns. Look at Taleo as an example. I’m sure they had great Churn metrics once upon a time. Now it’s a signal that a company has obsolete technology.

a-dub 8y ago

It's fun to read glassdoor reviews from their acquirees. Sounds like the formula is: 1) Buy the company 2) Shut down the main office and move it to some cheaper city, accept attrition 3) Fire all employees over 30 (using the patented "IQ" test as a cover), replace them with young kids or "HPELs" 4) Install a Glengarry Glen Ross style sales regime 5) Hold on for a few quarters while numbers are improved from all the cost cutting 6) Quickly bail and sell the thing off before anyone notices it's all being held up by duct tape and bailing wire 7) Wash hands. Repeat.

sigacts 8y ago
Except the article says they haven't sold very many times.
hueving 8y ago
Where does it show they are doing step 6? That seems to be critical to your thesis of this being a pump and dump.
motohagiography 8y ago
Is this different from private equity / distressed asset investing in general, or standard activist investor asset stripping? All that is missing is loading the company with debt to pay "management fees," to the acquirers before cutting and running, leaving the founders and remaining shareholders with the bill. Organized crime have been known to do this as well. A handbook of investment anti-patterns, common hustles, and ways to identify crappy investors would be really useful. There seems to be a tier of capital that just needs somewhere to go. It is not allowed to take the direct risks of angel or seed rounds, but can participate in venture funds, or funds of funds that include hedge funds and alternative assets, participate in growth rounds, and some really sketchy penny stock RTOs, but it's like they are prevented from investing while exercising any specific expertise.
TheCoelacanth 8y ago
I work at a company that was acquired by Vista a few years ago and I haven't noticed much of that. The main office is in a pretty expensive location and it is currently being expanded to close to double the size it was when the company was acquired. There are a lot of young kids being hired, but also a lot of older people as well. Attrition has been pretty low and I think only a handful of people at the entire company have been layed off. Cost cutting does not seem to have been particularly extreme if it has occurred. The benefits package and travel policies have gotten slightly more generous since the acquisition and annual raises have continued the trends from before the acquisition which made it possible to keep reasonably close to what you could get by changing companies.

andyidsinga 8y ago

If i ever encounter a situation where I'm selling my company and the buyer asks me to submit to a "proprietary cognitive assessment" ..I think there are going to be more $ involved. I'm not at all convinced one should give that information away for free - meaning this is a separate fee negotiated outside of the business price. So, here's the complication - I can speak for myself in this regard, but i'm not sure how a principal could or should navigate this issue with coworkers or on behalf of employees. ideas?

qop 8y ago

Why are WSJ links still allowed on HN? Or any paid-reader only sources?

tomhoward 8y ago
Paywall bypass link: http://archive.is/UUhj6 http://archive.is/UUhj6 HN FAQs [1]: It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds. In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

thisisit 8y ago

Companies come up with all sorts of reasons to fire people. Especially after they go through years of excess. A friend who works at ANZ tells me that they have come up with another way of culling jobs. They have embraced Agile wholeheartedly. And every employee has to be certified in Agile. Once an employee is certified he has to apply to be part of a squad, chapter, tribe etc. Now to ensure that people are fired for "performance" reasons, there are only 800 openings up for grabs for 1000 odd people. I think it is a nightmare when after spending years in a company you have to re-apply back to just keep your job.

wb36 8y ago

"Vista has yet to unload some of its biggest bets," Translation - the majority of the returns reported here are based on estimated valuations calculated by Vista rather than actual returns resulting from business sales. It goes without saying that 99.99% of the time this means the returns are inflated. It is possible that they've only calculated returns based on companies sold, but unlikely. So not only can they manipulate the valuation on firms they haven't sold to make their funds look better. Even with that + the ability to fudge IRR numbers, their last few fund returns are not so mind blowing that we should believe these guys have a magic formula.

apohn 8y ago

I worked for a company that was acquired by Vista. Was there for a few years before the acquisition and ~18 months after. I'll just say this - whatever Vista's top secret directives are, they didn't seem to have any sensible directives around employee retention for individual contributors. IMO their policies actually encouraged people to leave. The team I was on lost 6 people in 6 months and it became comical to watch my manager try to hire people as upper management constantly froze/unfroze hiring, destroying hiring pipelines and providing a terrible experience to some great candidates. I've kept in touch with quite a few of my colleagues from those years and there's a clear pattern. People who have left (including me) have gotten promotions, large pay raises, are working for companies with better brand recognition, etc. People who stayed are doing the same jobs for basically the same pay, but have a much higher workload to fill all the gaps that came from multiple rounds of layoffs and higher than expected (the CEO stated this in an all-hands call) attrition. Lesson I learned in all this: Private equity acquisition = Immediately find a new job. If you have a good manager ask them to lay you off so you get a severance package and help the manager hit their headcount reduction quota. Unless you are in a privileged position, you're not going to get anything for sticking with the company through tough times.