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Silver Lake being one of Unity's largest shareholders explains their recent behavior perfectly. It's a private equity firm whose sole concern is squeezing blood

Silver Lake being one of Unity's largest shareholders explains their recent behavior perfectly. It's a private equity firm whose sole concern is squeezing blood out of a rock.

3seashells 3y ago
Accidentally funny name https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silbersee_(Bitterfeld) https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silbersee_(Bitterfeld)
bdw5204 3y ago
That's basically the reputation of a significant number of private equity firms. Their standard operating procedure is to load the company up with debt, cut R&D, cut investment into the product, cut wages and raise prices to increase short-term profits while pretending you're trying to turn around the company and save it. That's basically why Sears and K-Mart don't exist anymore[0] and why so many newspapers fired their journalists and replaced most of the local news with national news from the wire services[1]. [0]: https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/16/investing/retail-sears-private-equity/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/16/investing/retail-sears-privat... [1]: https://www.stern.nyu.edu/experience-stern/faculty-research/what-happens-local-newspapers-under-private-equity-ownership https://www.stern.nyu.edu/experience-stern/faculty-research/...
- c420 3y ago
  Sounds like Twitter.
  - flarg 3y ago
    Elon's Twitter acquisition was exactly to do that but he muffed it.
    - red-iron-pine 3y ago
      Elon's twitter acquisition was a play to sell lots of incredibly overvalued TSLA stock without tanking the price. May a lot of noise, declare you're done with Twitter's bots and BS, sell a ton of stock -- not because it's overhyped, no it's for Twitter -- and then back out of the sale. And he would've gotten away except he tried to back out 3 times and they held him to it. So now he's got this trainwreck situation, and he's doing what he thinks is the right play, lemons into lemonade.
  - xNeil 3y ago
    Everything except short-term profits. X seems decently focused on the long term, especially with subscriptions being introduced as a (new) revenue stream. Also not sure about R&D, as I don't know what R&D Twitter was doing pre-acquisition, but there's been an extraordinary increase in the rate of addition of new features and changes to the platform.
    - ffgjgf1 3y ago
      > especially with subscriptions being introduced as a (new) revenue stream. I don’t think that’s ever likely to offset the massive amounts of debt Musk offloaded to Twitter’s balance sheet to fund the acquisition. > changes to the platform. Likely one of the most horrible rebrandings in the history of corporate rebranding?
    - water-data-dude 3y ago
      He fired the ML Ethics Transparency and Accountability team. They did a lot of high quality work on understanding bias in opaque ML models. https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-ethical-ai-team/ https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-ethical-ai-team/
  - rchaud 3y ago
    Exactly. Most of the Twitter acquisition money was borrowed, and that debt is now sitting on the company's balance sheet as liabilities.

Silver Lake being one of Unity's largest shareholders explains their recent behavior perfectly. It's a private equity firm whose sole concern is squeezing blood out of a rock.

3seashells 3y ago

Accidentally funny name https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silbersee_(Bitterfeld) https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silbersee_(Bitterfeld)

bdw5204 3y ago

That's basically the reputation of a significant number of private equity firms. Their standard operating procedure is to load the company up with debt, cut R&D, cut investment into the product, cut wages and raise prices to increase short-term profits while pretending you're trying to turn around the company and save it. That's basically why Sears and K-Mart don't exist anymore[0] and why so many newspapers fired their journalists and replaced most of the local news with national news from the wire services[1]. [0]: https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/16/investing/retail-sears-private-equity/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/16/investing/retail-sears-privat... [1]: https://www.stern.nyu.edu/experience-stern/faculty-research/what-happens-local-newspapers-under-private-equity-ownership https://www.stern.nyu.edu/experience-stern/faculty-research/...

c420 3y ago
Sounds like Twitter.
- flarg 3y ago
  Elon's Twitter acquisition was exactly to do that but he muffed it.
  - red-iron-pine 3y ago
    Elon's twitter acquisition was a play to sell lots of incredibly overvalued TSLA stock without tanking the price. May a lot of noise, declare you're done with Twitter's bots and BS, sell a ton of stock -- not because it's overhyped, no it's for Twitter -- and then back out of the sale. And he would've gotten away except he tried to back out 3 times and they held him to it. So now he's got this trainwreck situation, and he's doing what he thinks is the right play, lemons into lemonade.
- xNeil 3y ago
  Everything except short-term profits. X seems decently focused on the long term, especially with subscriptions being introduced as a (new) revenue stream. Also not sure about R&D, as I don't know what R&D Twitter was doing pre-acquisition, but there's been an extraordinary increase in the rate of addition of new features and changes to the platform.
  - ffgjgf1 3y ago
    > especially with subscriptions being introduced as a (new) revenue stream. I don’t think that’s ever likely to offset the massive amounts of debt Musk offloaded to Twitter’s balance sheet to fund the acquisition. > changes to the platform. Likely one of the most horrible rebrandings in the history of corporate rebranding?
  - water-data-dude 3y ago
    He fired the ML Ethics Transparency and Accountability team. They did a lot of high quality work on understanding bias in opaque ML models. https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-ethical-ai-team/ https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-ethical-ai-team/
- rchaud 3y ago
  Exactly. Most of the Twitter acquisition money was borrowed, and that debt is now sitting on the company's balance sheet as liabilities.