Opsware (with Michel Feaster)

Acquired dives into the legendary acquisition of Ben Horowitz & Marc Andreessen’s “second act” software company Opsware, from a perspective never before heard—HP’s side of the story! Our heroes are joined by Michel Feaster, who led both the acquisition for HP and then the Opsware product as part of the integrated company afterward under Ben Horowitz. Today the tables have turned: Michel is the Co-Founder and CEO of Seattle-based startup Usermind, and Ben Horowitz sits on her board on behalf of A16Z. This episode is not one to miss! Sponsors: Vanta: https://bit.ly/acquiredvantaServiceNow: https://bit.ly/acquiredservicenow26Legora: https://bit.ly/acquiredlegoraStatsig: https://bit.ly/acquiredstatsig26 More Acquired! Get email updates https://www.acquired.fm/email with hints on next episode and follow-ups from recent episodesJoin the Slack http://acquired.fm/slackSubscribe to ACQ2 https://pod.link/acquiredlpMerch Store https://www.acquired.fm/store! © Copyright 2015-2026 ACQ, LLC Topics covered include: Opsware’s early history and origins as Loudcloud, the “second act” of internet wunderkind Marc Andreessen and Netscape product manager Ben HorowitzBen’s first person telling of the Loudcloud/Opsware history in The Hard Thing about Hard Things https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DQ845EA/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1, as well as the great Wired "period piece” https://www.wired.com/2000/08/loudcloud/ covering Loudcloud’s launch in August 2000The importance of timing, and Loudcloud’s too-early vision of—essentially—AWS before AWS (including eerie parallels between the metaphor Andreessen used to describe Loudcloud during the company’s first press briefing, and Jeff Bezos’s description of AWS at YC https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nKfFHuouzA nearly a decade later)Creation of the “Opsware” tool inside of Loudcloud to automate deploying and configuring servers within Loudcloud’s data centersLoudcloud's meteoric rise, crash following the burst of the internet bubble, and hard pivot as a public company into Opsware—now an enterprise software company selling datacenter tools Michel’s role in HP’s evaluation of the company as an acquisition target, and process leading to its $1.6B acquisition in July 2007Integration of the company into HP’s culture and sales channelThe creation of Ben & Marc’s “third act”, the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, and what it’s like for Michel now having Ben as an investor on her board at Usermind The Carve Out: Ben: StarStaX star trail photography software http://www.markus-enzweiler.de/StarStaX/StarStaX.htmlDavid: Jimmy Iovine on the Bill Simmons Podcast https://soundcloud.com/the-bill-simmons-podcast/rockets-gm-daryl-morey-and-music-legend-jimmy-iovine-ep-233

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ben Gilbert?

  So we also grade acquisitions.

• 0:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:03Ben Gilbert?

  David and I will each give it a grade and our guests can opt to either grade or not, especially since you were part of it.

• 0:09Speaker 01

  I'm happy to grade.

• 0:10Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, all right.

• 0:21Ben Gilbert?

  Welcome back to episode 42 of Acquired, the podcast about technology acquisitions and IPOs. I'm Ben Gilbert.

• 0:29David Rosenthal?

  I'm David Rosenthal.

• 0:30Ben Gilbert?

  And we are your hosts. Today, we are covering the 2007 acquisition of Opsware by HP. We have with us a fantastic guest, Michelle Feaster. So David will give Michelle's full bio in a minute, but I want to say I'm personally very, very excited to have Michelle with us. A lot of people know the story of the deal from the Opsware side, as told in Ben Horowitz's "The Hard Thing About Hard Things." So Michelle was the Director of Products for the division that purchased Opsware and is going to share the story from the HP side of that acquisition today. So David, can you tell us a little bit about Michelle's background?

• 1:07David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, so Michelle today is the co-founder and CEO of Usermind, which is a unified customer engagement hub based in Seattle and that she founded in 2013. But as Ben was alluding to, a decade ago, before Usermind, Michelle was working at the opposite end of the tech spectrum from a startup. She was the Director of Product for a division of Hewlett Packard's enterprise software business, where she led the acquisition of Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen's legendary company Opsware for $1.6 billion. And most fun, flash forward to today, and the tables have turned. Ben Horowitz is now on her board at Usermind on behalf of Andreessen Horowitz, his venture

• 1:52David Rosenthal?

  capital firm. And we are honored to have Michelle on the show to cover this deal. So thank you for joining us.

• 1:59Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me, guys. Really excited.

• 2:01Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, we appreciate it. Appreciate it. So before we dive in, we want to mention to new listeners of the show, we've got a Slack and we are over 800 strong. That is at acquired.fm. On the sidebar, you can, you can join us in the Slack and talk all things M&A, tech news, and anytime there's something pretty exciting that happens, like the Whole Foods acquisitions, that's when it really shines and, and there's lots of great speculation in there. Second is, we love reviews. So you can help us grow the show by, by leaving a, a review on iTunes, or I'm sorry, on Apple Podcasts, that's what we call it now, and tell your friends. All right, listeners. Now is a great time to tell you about a longtime friend of the

• 2:42Ben Gilbert?

  show, Vanta. AI has scrambled the whole security picture. It used to be that you proved that you were secure once a year on audit or a static PDF, then everyone would nod and you're done. But in an AI-first world, that doesn't hold up anymore.

• 2:57David Rosenthal?

  Yep. Your risk surface changes every week now. A vendor turns on an AI feature, or someone writes in a new model without telling IT, and your posture is different than it was last week, let alone at your last audit. Vanta's own research found that around 70% of companies have this quote-unquote "shadow AI" running with no security review at all.

• 3:18Ben Gilbert?

  Right. And that's where Vanta comes in. They're the leading agentic trust platform, meaning they've built the thing that closes the gap. And the way that they close that gap is Vanta Agent. Think of it as a GRC engineer, that's Governance Risk and Compliance, except that it's software and it doesn't sleep. It finds the issues, drafts the fixes, and cuts the time that you'd spend on vendor assessments in half.

• 3:40David Rosenthal?

  In half! Which is exactly why more than 16,000 companies today run on Vanta. Companies like Ramp, Cursor, and Snowflake all stay audit-ready and catch the risks that crop up between audits across every vendor, every AI tool, the whole environment.

• 3:58Ben Gilbert?

  And that's the real value. Trust has to be continuous now, which is why Vanta automates your security, your compliance, and the work to earn and prove trust. We're huge fans of Vanta over here, and literally hundreds of Acquired listeners have become Vanta customers at their companies over the years. So you can get $1,000 off Vanta at vanta.com/acquired. That's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash acquired for $1,000 off, and just tell them that Ben and David sent you.

• 4:26Ben Gilbert?

  David, do you want to take us through the acquisition history and facts?

• 4:30David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, as always. So as Ben alluded to, we're going to try and focus mostly on the HP side of the story with Michelle, because much ink has been spilled about the Opsware side. And if you haven't heard about Opsware, we totally recommend reading The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben. It is such a great book. And there's also a really great sort of period piece that Wired did in August 2000, right before the tech bubble burst, all about the company and about Ben and Marc Andreessen, and this being Marc's sort of second act after Netscape. So we'll link to that in the show notes. And that provides

• 5:10David Rosenthal?

  a really good full history of Opsware. But to sort of set the stage, we're going to, I'm going to take sort of five minutes and do a quick truncated history, just so we're all on the same page and can then dive in with Michelle about how HP viewed things. So the company that ultimately became Opsware was founded as a different company called LoudCloud, and it was started in September 1999 by four people: Marc Andreessen, who had been the co-founder and CTO of Netscape and was famously the internet's golden boy on the cover of Time Magazine, among many other press outlets, and Ben Horowitz, who

• 5:52David Rosenthal?

  was the CEO of LoudCloud. And Ben had been a PM for Marc at Netscape. And two other folks: Tim Howes. Howes was the CTO of Netscape's server division, and he was a total expert in sort of internet infrastructure and plumbing. He created LDAP, the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, which if you use any sort of, you know, internal company directory service or log-on service these days, it's probably based on that. Pretty amazing.

• 6:28David Rosenthal?

  And then the fourth person was a guy named Sick Ree. And Sick, I believe, had briefly been part of Netscape. But when Netscape got acquired by AOL, he was CTO of the e-commerce platform division within AOL. So that was the division, and this becomes important for LoudCloud, that when companies back in the day did deals with AOL to be part of the sort of walled garden and sell things on via e-commerce through AOL, they needed to spin up sort of microsites to do that quickly. And Ree was kind of in charge of helping them, helping Nike or whatnot do that at AOL.

• 7:08David Rosenthal?

  And so the idea for what LoudCloud would be, it actually comes from Sick, from Ree. And the idea was basically that it would be AWS before AWS. It was going to be an infrastructure-as-a-service product. And the idea was that, just like these companies who didn't have software developers or internet infrastructure teams, like Nike or L.L. Bean or whomever, needed to spin up websites to sell on AOL, they would also need to do that on the broader internet. And why would they go build their own teams to do this? They should just use a service to do the infrastructure for them.

• 7:49Ben Gilbert?

  And that was both, David, that was the human power as a service, as well as the actual servers as a service, right?

• 7:58David Rosenthal?

  Well, I think it was mostly the servers as a service. Because remember, the idea of the cloud doesn't really exist in these days. If you wanted to build a website, the first thing you had to do was go buy a bunch of servers and stick them in a closet somewhere.

• 8:12Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 8:13David Rosenthal?

  And so that's what LoudCloud was sort of designed to be, your virtual servers.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  But by the way, that is why they partnered with EDS. So later, there's a big transaction they did with those guys, and that was for the managed service offering. So Ops were sold, the AWS element, and they partner with EDS to provide a full managed service. And that'll be a chapter in the later. Element of their story.

• 8:38David Rosenthal?

  To come. But there's this, there's this great Marc Andreessen quote from the first press briefing that they do about the company when they're, and there's so much buzz around this company before they even launched, because these are obviously sort of early, the first generation of tech celebrities, and this is their second act. And the quote from Marc is that it's like providing the electric power grid and companies can plug in. And I just thought this was so awesome, because we'll also link in the show notes, when Jeff Bezos launches AWS later in the mid 2000s, he goes and he talks at Y Combinator, and he uses this exact analogy for AWS. So he's literally, I didn't realize this, I don't

• 9:20David Rosenthal?

  know if Jeff realized this, if he came up with it independently or not, but he is literally using the same analogy that Andreessen used when he was launching LoudCloud.

• 9:29Ben Gilbert?

  Wow. And so, Michelle, I mean, we'll get into this in tech themes, but clearly, AWS, huge successful business right now, LoudCloud, not a huge successful business then. Why, you know, obviously, timing is the issue, but what was it about the timing?

• 9:43Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I think, you know, I mean, look, look at the readiness of the internet for enterprise cloud adoption. I mean, the reason to me Bezos is so successful today is, one, you know, development is so much more pervasive. So the number of people who could leverage AWS has exploded. Number two, the cost of starting a company has gone to zero. So the number of targets who would be, you know, leveraging something like AWS is so much greater now. And three, I think, security, privacy have evolved enough that companies are actually willing to build. So you, you know, the number of kind of target enterprises, your deal size, all of these elements around kind of go to market have finally matured to where AWS is not an idea, it's a business.

• 10:26David Rosenthal?

  And there's also, there's another really big piece of this, which is that the whole concept of virtualization, server virtualization, didn't really exist yet. Like, it's sort of existed. The company VMware, which listeners may or may not be familiar with, but is one of the largest enterprise software and infrastructure companies in the world. It's, it's majority owned by EMC these days.

• 10:52David Rosenthal?

  What they do, they created a product that was just starting to take off around this time, but wasn't widely used, that essentially let you take physical server machines and slice them up into multiple virtual machines. So one box could serve multiple customers essentially. And that was a big key for making something like AWS work because without that, you needed, you know, essentially a separate box for everybody. And that was not yet a paradigm that existed in these days.

• 11:24Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, it feels like that would hamstring Amazon these days. I don't know.

• 11:28Speaker 01

  Well, you know, now we're on to containers, right? That whole technology's emerged. By the way, you know, on our side, when we were doing the deal, virtualization is a key reason why HP needed to buy Opsware. So it's not really just about, you know, do you need virtualization to be able to run an effective, you know, AWS offering? It's what problem does that create in IT? And so one of the central reasons to me for Opsware's growth is that as virtualization exploded in the IT infrastructure, the old human way of managing servers and networks and storage couldn't scale. And so, you know, one of the single biggest reasons for their success was the exponential growth and complexity that virtualization drove in IT. So if you look at,

• 12:12Speaker 01

  you know, Opsware's, you know, as it went from LoudCloud later to become Opsware, you know, its growth from, you know, whatever, four, 10 million to, you know, 80 or 100 million at its exit, you know, virtualization was the technology that drove the majority of their market opportunity. And it was a big factor in our belief that we needed to be and own the technology, right? That this was a key control point in the future of how IT was going to work.

• 12:39David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. And well, we'll come right back to that. But for the, in the meantime, this isn't really what LoudCloud is trying to do. They're trying to be AWS and there's so much hype. And we'll just run through really quickly sort of the corporate timeline. And fortunately, Ben Horowitz himself made a nice little truncated version.

• 13:02David Rosenthal?

  In a, in a blog post that we'll, we'll also link to in the show notes, but this is, this is nineties bubble era internet at its, at its finest. So November 99, before launching the product, LoudCloud raises $21 million at a $45 million pre-money valuation. And Andy Radcliffe at Benchmark led that round. January 2000, so just a couple of months later, they raised another $45 million in debt from Morgan Stanley. Of all places, they haven't even launched a product yet. A few months after that, June of 2000, they raise $120 million at a $700 million pre-money valuation. And then things go, start to go a little rocky.

• 13:46David Rosenthal?

  And, but nonetheless, the, the company sort of perseveres. They, they do end up going public in March of 2001. They list on the NASDAQ, they raise another $160 million. But the valuation goes down from the last private round. Echoes of this happening again today. So they have about a $480 million market cap. And then the whole world just blows up, the tech world. And, and all of the customers for LoudCloud were these, you know, pets.com era startups and they just go out of business. And so there's essentially no business left for, for LoudCloud, for the AWS managed service product.

• 14:25David Rosenthal?

  So in August of 2002, as, as Michelle was alluding to, they sell that business to EDS, which is Ross Perot's software company.

• 14:36Ben Gilbert?

  And what does EDS stand for? Is it electronic data service?

• 14:39David Rosenthal?

  Systems. I think it's electronic data systems. They sell that for just over $60 million. But that's the whole business. Like there is no other business within the company and, and Ben writes about this at length in the book. But what they do have is this technology, this sort of internal tool that they'd created called Opsware. And, and Tim Howes, the guy who, who invented LDAP previously at Netscape. He had created this tool within LoudCloud that was basically an auto.

• 15:12David Rosenthal?

  way to provision and then deploy and manage all the servers that they had in their data centers. And they sort of have this idea that like, okay, LoudCloud isn't working at all. Let's get rid of it. We have this tool. We use it. We think it's great. Maybe other customers who have big data centers would want to use this. So they essentially completely pivot as a public company after the tech bubble burst. And they start down this journey to build an enterprise software company selling data center technology.

• 15:44Ben Gilbert?

  Michelle's shaking her head over there.

• 15:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:46Ben Gilbert?

  What's going through your head right now?

• 15:48Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, that's, that's an almost impossible task. I just, I was hearing it read about, you know, I obviously got to know Ben much later in his life. But, you know, it's hard enough to build. So think about how hard it is to build shrink wrap software that you're going to sell and install at a customer. When you know you're going to do it. And this is before SaaS, right? So his stuff was all on prem. And they had to take basically tooling that was built for internal ops people to manage customer environments and turn it into a shrink wrap product. And so, you know, you just think about like the usability of stuff you would build for like, you know, internal use versus a UI for customers.

• 16:25Ben Gilbert?

  Oh, yeah.

• 16:26Speaker 01

  You know, and the level of complexity you tolerate. And so just, you know, the amount of heroic effort that it must have taken to get that product to be, you know, a real product, I think, pretty huge. On the flip side, if you think about it, you know, they built something that was ahead of its time because their business was so complex. And, you know, to my earlier point, as enterprises start to adopt virtualization, they start needing something that looks very much like what they built for their own internal management. So, you know, is it, is it crazy or genius? I don't know. But talk about, and I can't even imagine doing that public. Like, that would be incredibly hard as a pivot if you're, you know, a private venture backed company. Never mind. You're on the stock exchange.

• 17:11Ben Gilbert?

  Right, right.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:13David Rosenthal?

  So just for, just for context, or go ahead, Ben.

• 17:16Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, I mean, we'll get into tech themes later, but thinking about.

• 17:20Ben Gilbert?

  You know, my job all day in working on an early-stage idea and doing customer validation, you have to always find a proxy for your customer and figure out, you know, would someone use this? Is this feature useful? Try and get inside their head and be into it, what the customer might want.

• 17:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:36Ben Gilbert?

  But, you know, the, you know, Michelle, you said on the flip side, like, they were their own customer.

• 17:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:42Ben Gilbert?

  And they were years ahead. So they were kind of, you know, building something that was going to be valuable a few years in the future, once all the dust settled with absolute perfect information on what the necessary components of that thing were.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, the perfect, you know, the perfect scenario there is they had the persona 100% right.

• 17:58Ben Gilbert?

  Right.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  They were building tooling for server admins who were needing to manage environments at scale with multiple applications in there. And that, that's, that's the way IT began to look five years after they started selling that software. So you're, you're, you're dead right. You know, probably their biggest advantage was they were ahead in, in kind of the kind of software operation they were building.

• 18:19Ben Gilbert?

  Mm-hmm.

• 18:19Speaker 01

  And they had the persona 1,000% dialed in because they had lived that pain, right?

• 18:24Ben Gilbert?

  Right.

• 18:25Speaker 01

  All day, every day, trying to run that service offering. So, you know, with the challenges came huge advantages that they were able to parlay into a incredible software company.

• 18:34Ben Gilbert?

  Yep.

• 18:36David Rosenthal?

  And I'm, and I'm wondering, I mean, given that you, you both saw this when you acquired the company from the outside, but now, you know, you're a founder and CEO of an enterprise company. I mean, what, when you founded Usermind in, in 2013, how long did it take you and how long did you work on building the product before you felt that it was ready to ship for customers? You know, you, you knew the customer persona when you started, but, you know, just so we have context and our listeners have context, like, how hard is this task?

• 19:07Speaker 01

  Oh, it's really hard. I mean, we spent four months interviewing. So for me, just to think about and define the persona, the use cases, the product, four months of interviews, probably 300 interviews.

• 19:18Ben Gilbert?

  Wow.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  Just to kind of get to a set of requirements. And then we went through multiple iterations. So probably it took us two and a half years to go from an alpha or prototype, alpha, beta, to launch the software publicly and begin selling it. And, you know, look, necessity is the mother of invention. So they, they had to do what they were doing or fail. And I'm sure that was, you know, that gritty determination was another, you know, big part of their later success. But- That that's a pretty hard turn to make, right, to take that software and figure out how to package it up. And and I would imagine a lot of their challenges were UI related, right, where how do we now, how do we now expose this tremendous tooling and IP into an application, right, that users can use who are not Opsware employees?

• 20:03David Rosenthal?

  Mm hmm.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  And oddly enough, by the way, I never really talked to Ben about that part of their history. I never spent a lot of time talking about this particular moment in time.

• 20:14David Rosenthal?

  Well, what's funny is, you know, you'd imagine, I think if I went through this, I'd probably never want to talk about it again. But Ben went and wrote a whole book about it.

• 20:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. And thank God, right?

• 20:25David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 20:26Speaker 01

  I mean, I feel like he's the first, not investor, but first CEO who essentially exposed the myth that it's all perfect all the time and kind of gave, I think, CEOs and leaders permission to talk about all of the hard things, right, that really make, or what he calls the struggle. I remember when I was going to found and he told me, you know, your hardest challenge is going to be managing your own psychology. And it's, he's, you know, dead right. And to me, his book gives people permission to talk about what that's really like.

• 20:53Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, I never, I never attributed to that. But you're right. The last few years, it does seem like the, the climate of okayness to talk about these things is dramatically increased.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. Yeah. I think he was a big part of it. I don't remember, and, you know, and I wasn't an entrepreneur, you know, Ben is the person who changed my life and kind of got me out of Mercury and into startups. But, you know, I think, at least in my mind, that permission from someone like him to talk about the truth.

• 21:19Ben Gilbert?

  Mm hmm.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  It's a great gift.

• 21:22David Rosenthal?

  Hmm. So you mentioned Mercury, just for context for, for our listeners. So you, the way you came to HP was you had been at Mercury Interactive, right, which HP had acquired shortly before the Opsware acquisition.

• 21:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, sad day.

• 21:39David Rosenthal?

  Sad day when HP acquired Mercury.

• 21:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love Mercury. I mean, we weren't looking to be all acquisitions are hard on all sides.

• 21:47Ben Gilbert?

  All right, listeners. Now is a great time to thank our longtime friend of the show, ServiceNow. If you are running a large enterprise, AI agents are likely spread across every team, and deploying them is no longer the hard part.

• 22:01David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, the hard part is knowing what permissions they have, what employees are using them for, or what decisions AI is making. AI security for an enterprise at scale is not a small concern. Like, the risks are real.

• 22:15Ben Gilbert?

  Exactly. And the challenge with AI is governing it, securing it, measuring it, and making sure that it actually delivers value. That is why ServiceNow built the AI Control Tower.

• 22:25David Rosenthal?

  Yep. AI Control Tower gives enterprises a single place to see, manage, govern, and optimize AI across the entire business. And it works with any AI, not just theirs. Every device on your network, every permission across every system, every AI agent, visible and secure in one place.

• 22:42Ben Gilbert?

  And ServiceNow can do this because they've spent more than 20 years building the operational backbone of the enterprise. The workflows, governance, approvals, security controls, and institutional knowledge that power how work actually gets done across IT, HR, customer service, finance, and security.

• 22:58David Rosenthal?

  ServiceNow already runs more than 100 billion workflows annually, and trillions of transactions for more than 85% of the Fortune 500. So when companies need a place to govern AI at enterprise scale, they're building on a platform at the center of how their business already operates.

• 23:15Ben Gilbert?

  And in a future that isn't going to be one AI, it's going to be thousands of AI agents working across every function of the company. But the question is, who's managing them all?

• 23:24David Rosenthal?

  So if you're trying to turn AI ambition into real business outcomes and make it work safely, securely, at scale, go check out servicenow.com/acquired and tell them that Ben and David sent you. So what was Mercury and how did you come there? And what ended up being the fit that you saw between what Opsware became and Mercury?

• 23:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, so one, so I was at Mercury for almost eight years. I was originally in the pre-sales organization. So I was in, for people who don't know, it's like technical sales, right? You're going out installing software and you're kind of the technical half of the selling motion in an enterprise software company. And I joined Mercury, probably about 200 people or 250 employees, and I stayed through 3,000 through almost a billion in revenue. So it was an incredible experience.

• 24:10David Rosenthal?

  I bet.

• 24:11Speaker 01

  Really amazing, yeah. And I spent half my time there in the field and in New England and in fact, you know, started out really just, you know, POC-ing and selling technology. And I was very blessed as the company scaled, I ended up owning more strategic accounts from a technical pre-sales perspective. And so when you're selling to GE or Fidelity, they'll say, no, you know, we want a three year roadmap with Mercury. We want to talk about how to partner strategically. And so I started to work very closely with a product organization and eventually moved out to the California and took my first product role. And I was very blessed. So I was the product, the second product manager of a product called LoadRunner, which when I took over that product was already a $250 million business. It had 65% market share. Customers loved it, the product worked.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  And so I learned product management or how to think about product strategy, you know, taking over like an incredibly successful business. And so I was given such freedom to put it in telesales, put it in partners, innovate on the product. And I can't imagine a better school of product management. And I, you know, rotated around. I basically managed all pieces of the testing business. And then when we got acquired by HP, my boss called me and said, hey, you know, there's this really broken business. So this is now the time when virtualization is just exploding and the enterprise, Opsware is probably is the market leader in data center automation, competing with Blade Logic and IBM. You know, HP had a business.

• 25:35David Rosenthal?

  This is kind of five years after the pivot. And as you said, we're in 2007 now, virtualization is finally a thing.

• 25:44Speaker 01

  It is. And you know, when you look at that, what that really means is that all these kind of human methods, right, the manual ways of now automating data center management end to ends start, you know, to break down essentially. You can't scale human beings indefinitely. And so there's this incredible froth and excitement over this automation market. And HP had acquired a couple of companies. They acquired a company called Radia. They had acquired a company which did, you know, server, kind of like Opsware server automation, but they did client desktop management as well. And they'd acquired a storage product called App IQ. But really, you know, after spending probably a hundred million dollars, having 200 engineers on this problem, we're fifth in the market. And so, you know, my,

• 26:29Speaker 01

  you've all said to me, my boss, the head of products at Mercury said, hey, you know, there's a lot of heat in the sales organization about this. Customers want a solution from HP and we're losing a lot of deals. You know, you're kind of my glass breaker. You want to go in there and figure it out and it'll be a great opportunity for you, great exposure. And so that's, that's kind of how I got in a position where I needed to think through a strategy, which ultimately led to acquiring Opsware.

• 26:53Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, did you, I might be skipping ahead here a little bit and then David could take us back, but it's a perfect tee up for how did you do that build versus buy? How did you do that calculation? How is that done in a company like that?

• 27:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, it's kind of interesting. So I took over, agreed to do it, took over the business. And two weeks later, we had this, I don't even know what we call it, quarterly business review, QBR. And I'm supposed to be updating, you know, the head of software, Tom Hogan and Deb and you've all, kind of all the execs of software on our strategy. And I don't, I just took over. Like, I don't know what our strategy is. And so I just kind of went back to first principles. And so to me, first principles are what do users want to do and what's happening in the market. And so I kind of interviewed everybody in the team and I talked with the analysts and I got some basic data. And the math to me was incredibly clear. So when I looked at it, you know, we had 200 engineers on something where we were, you know, generating whatever, 20 million in revenue. We're fifth in the

• 27:50Speaker 01

  market. And when I looked at the first three players, so to me, there's either emerging markets or consolidating markets. And it's important to know what market you're in. And when I looked at that, I thought, well, gosh, you know, between Opsware, market leader, Blade Logic, second player, IBM, who'd done an acquisition, 80% of the market is in the hands of three vendors. Well, that's not an emerging market. That's a consolidating market. And and I so that's kind of question one is where are we at in the market evolution? And question two is who are we as a company? And you know, there are companies who can disrupt a market that's consolidated. They're they're and that's you know, I Mercury could have done it if we wanted to. But my point of view is that, you know, HP at the time and still, by the way, probably is, is a channel company.

• 28:35Speaker 01

  And what they really have, just like IBM, is an incredible channel. And what they're great at is selling good software to companies who trust them and delivering it. And what they're not good at is building new things from scratch. And so a second part of my calculus was, you know, Sun Tzu says, you know, if you know yourself and you know the enemy, you'll be victorious in a thousand battles.

• 28:54David Rosenthal?

  We are big fans of Sun Tzu on this podcast.

• 28:57Speaker 01

  I'm a huge fan. And so my second rationale was in a consolidated market, there is no path for a company like HP to build its way to victory. So you're only left with buy or exit the market.

• 29:09Ben Gilbert?

  And you think if it was an emerging market, then HP would have had a chance at building their own, but still would be typically worse than than a startup?

• 29:18Speaker 01

  It would have been almost impossible for that to happen. But but yes, I mean, in theory, we could have had a chance. And you probably would have taken a different strategy in that context, right? But but so that, I mean, I actually was given a very simple problem. There was nothing really complex about answering that question. I mean, there's there's more to it, but but that's essentially the math. And so and you know, and and you know, even more, if you looked at it in the context of the whole portfolio, you know, why would you invest so much engineering for so little return? Because, you know, the other part about software, which we all understand in valuation, is that the only players that make any money are the number one or number two player in the market.

• 29:59Speaker 01

  So so even if there was a path for HP to become from five to four or take out IBM in five to three. Profitability goes to the winner. And so you lose money indefinitely on a software business unless you become the dominant player and then you make insane profit. And to me, if there's no path to number one or number two for you, based on who you are, you know, that's really when you need to look at a buy solution. And so that was really, I think I presented five slides. It was very concrete. I probably, I also, by the way, spent a bunch of time interviewing salespeople and trying to understand how important this was, meaning, you know, we're, you know, how often was it coming up in deals? You know, what was the channel relevance, right? Because the other piece of it is if we did a deal, can we monetize?

• 30:44Speaker 01

  Are we talking to the people who'd buy it? Or do we feel like we could have gotten that money that went to Opsware or IBM? And that was maybe the last piece of the calculus was the channel fit was very high. So HP at the time had many brands, OpenView being one of the most famous ones that we were selling to the operations teams. So we had a very experienced channel selling to the same buyer that would be buying Opsware or buying Blade Logic. And then when you, when you really step back and look at that math, it's pretty obvious that it has to be an M and A scenario, or you should shut the business down.

• 31:18Ben Gilbert?

  Right.

• 31:18Speaker 01

  So that was phase one.

• 31:20Ben Gilbert?

  But you probably did enough calculus on what does this market look like in five or 10 years where it was like, we can't afford to not play in this market.

• 31:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that's all the obvious math. I mean, yeah, I guess that was implied in my head. I mean, I, I think probably if that didn't make sense, HP wouldn't have already been in this space. So maybe that's why I didn't reference it. You know, I, I think it was pretty.

• 31:41David Rosenthal?

  This is the future of, of the data center, right? I mean, virtualization is now, I mean, I don't know that there's any data center probably in the world that doesn't at least have some degree of virtualization now.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Oh, and by the way, now it's become containerization. So, so if you had won this battle, in theory, you have a very strategic control point. So to me, that goes to the, now you're in the second question, which is, okay, if it's either go buy the winner or shut your business down, that you've asked the next question, which is, do we, is this strategic land? Do we have to own this land? Is it a strategic control point to owning? The future disruption of the enterprise, or does it, is it strategic to my buyer to the point where if I don't have this, I undermine other businesses? And you've kind of

• 32:23David Rosenthal?

  And the buyer being the end customer here that HP was selling to.

• 32:26Speaker 01

  This IT operations person, yeah. And so, you know, you guys have already made the argument. It's pretty clear that, you know, our actual Uber theory at the time was that for IT operations folks, automation and monitoring would ultimately converge. And so, the winning vendor for IT operations wasn't just the winning vendor who had HP OpenView, but it was the one who had the best automation and the best monitoring. And, you know, and when you think about it at that level, by the way, then your competitors are very few people. You're competing with HP and with BMC and CA. And, and so, the number of people who could actually, if that's really the winning strategy in IT operations, you know, how many people are positioned well to compete with us? And so, we really thought that if we did this deal, it was us and BMC competing to dominate IT operations.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  And, you know, in light of that, you can see why the buy decision became very clear that, that we felt it was strategic land, not just because of the immediate opportunity around, you know, virtualization and kind of the core automation problem, but, but our hypothesis that it would become a converged solution and that that would actually strengthen our already dominant OpenView business, right? And that it would be a one plus one is three in the broader IT operations business. So, you can see what drove, you know, from our point of view, we called it a coveted asset. We felt that Opsware would be, you know, not just bringing the Opsware business, but it would be affecting a much larger existing business within HP.

• 33:55David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. So, so you do end up buying it in July 2007 for $1.6 billion. And after the pivot five years earlier, in the public markets, the public market pivot, what then became Opsware was trading for $28 million of market cap, which was $40 million less than the amount of cash that they had in the bank. So, they had 60 million, 70 million of cash in the bank, and they're trading for $28 million. So, five years later, you know, incredible turnaround and, you know, achieve an exit that's 50 times that.

• 34:35David Rosenthal?

  What was it like after you bought them, though? I mean, from an integration process and a culture? I mean, this was a team that had been through the fire twice.

• 34:46Ben Gilbert?

  And now they're part of HP.

• 34:49Ben Gilbert?

  Absolutely, I want to know that. And I, Michelle, the one thing I've really been like with, um, holding back from asking is, okay, so you make this presentation and it's five slides and you make the decision, like, what logistically happens after that? Like, you shoot an email to, like, you know, Ben at Opsware? Like, how does that happen?

• 35:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, so there's actually two interesting thing that happens, if you don't mind, before we get to the integration. So the process, obviously, the executives have to kind of come to some consensus that they agree to that. And there was, you know, quite a lot of discussion that I wasn't part of, but where, you know, the head of software talked to his head of sales and so kind of validating, hey, this is important, you know, hey, we're seeing them in all the deals. So that, you know, the executives needed to go and both think about it as well as kind of validate the data I put forward to them about how important this was going to be. So, you know, it took, it took some time for us to get kind of organizational alignment on the state of the market and, you know, how key this could be. And, and, you know, honestly, that was, that was not that controversial.

• 35:53Speaker 01

  I think, you know, it's really clear that we needed something, that customers wanted us to have a product. The interesting discussion was then, who do you buy? So kind of before you get to the buying Opsware, there was an alternate, you know, vendor.

• 36:06David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, Blade Logic, right?

• 36:08Speaker 01

  Blade Logic, right, yeah, so.

• 36:09David Rosenthal?

  Which BMC did buy.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  Which BMC did buy, right. So, you know, the interesting thing about that is, you know, you don't email. So what happened is someone from Corp Dev was assigned to us, right? So Sandeep Jory at the time was running corporate development and he, he kind of took ownership of the project on the Corp Dev side. And I, I wasn't, you know, actually that involved in that, not in that piece of it, but, you know, I wasn't on all the email chains where they're emailing Ben. I was in most of the meetings. I did all the technical due diligence. So you kind of start these threads and we ran our threads in parallel. So we were talking to both Opsware and Blade Logic. And, you know, that involved, you know, financial due diligence, customer reviews, technical diligence, it was pretty fascinating. In fact,

• 36:53Speaker 01

  Once we had decided our vendor, I was actually onsite, we were onsite during their sales kickoff, which was a little-known fact, and I, in fact, couldn't leave the room. So, everybody else is allowed to leave, but there were so many Mercury people at Opsware that people were worried that if I left, everyone would know who I was. Oh, wow. So, there was more, there was quite a lot of drama to that. But, but look, the net of, you know, how do you, why HP versus, or why Opsware versus BladeLogic? You know, to me, it boiled down to what do you need to buy and how many acquisitions can we execute? So, there's kind of a little-known wrinkle here, which is while they started as a server automation company, that was the LoudCloud heritage. You know, Ben's vision was to automate the entire data center.

• 37:37Speaker 01

  So, they did acquisitions to acquire a run-book automation technology from a company called I Conclude that was based in Seattle, actually. And they bought a network automation company, actually believe that one was based in Seattle as well. So, they made a couple acquisitions to extend their product line from server automation to what they called data center automation. And our theory was actually slightly bigger than that, is we felt that what customers wanted to do was deploy services end-to-end. And so, the winning vendor would be executing a product strategy to bring, you know, desktop, server, network, storage, all of the automation elements into a suite to automate application deployment, so that, you know, servers on some level are just one tiny piece of an end-to-end IT service.

• 38:21Speaker 01

  So, that was the strategy we were executing. And when you look at that, we had a client product already at HP, and we had a storage product from these acquisitions we had. And so, really what, you know, there was a lot of differences from a market share perspective. Clearly, Opsware was ahead of BladeLogic, and that's very attractive. You kind of, de facto, always want to buy the market leader. However, at the time, BladeLogic had a better product than Opsware. So, that is the downside of this kind of LoudCloud. And I would say better product in the sense of usability. So where they lost deals, it was on usability. Where they won deals, it was on enterprise scale. So there were product implications to this kind of pivot that they did.

• 39:02David Rosenthal?

  And this is, to preview tech themes a little bit. I mean, this is something that for listeners that aren't as familiar with enterprise technology, you know, it's just such a hard thing initially to get your mind around. Steve Jobs talked about this, that like in the enterprise, it's not always the best product that wins. You know, Opsware was the market leader, but as you're saying, they didn't have the best product. They had the best sales motion.

• 39:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, and at least in server automation. So, you know, their strategy was to basically move to the suite motion. So they had the best suite. Blade Logic did not have other products. They had partnerships to solve that problem. So, you know, if Opsware could, you know, could move the buying criteria to being data center automation, they won because it isn't just head to head product to product. So, you know, our, our assessment was number one, we wanted to buy the market leader and that having the, you know, first mover in our channel, best, best current position in what we thought was one of the best channels in the world is the best combination. But the second piece of math for us was that if we had gone after Blade Logic, we would have had to do three additional acquisitions.

• 40:12Speaker 01

  And we felt that the risk, even though if it would have been cheaper, we didn't, we thought that actually the likelihood of our ability to successfully acquire four companies was significantly less than one. And if you look at big companies buying, you know, small companies, in many cases, the medium sized ones do the best. You know, they're big enough that they can be put in the channel and it works. And in many cases, these little technology tuck ins, you know, a $10 million acquisition is harder to make work than a billion dollar acquisition because there's not critical mass of people and ideas to teach the rest of the company how to sell.

• 40:49David Rosenthal?

  Oh, wow.

• 40:50Speaker 01

  So the two pieces for us on Opsware were, I guess, three strategic alignment. They had the full suite. They were the market leader. And even if they had some product efficiencies, we felt that we were much more likely to be able to execute that successfully than Blade Logic plus three others. And so that's kind of the math that led to the end of us saying, you know, our preference, our top. Partner, you know, our top target would be Opsware versus Blade Logic. And, you know, we continue talking about Blade Logic to the end. So if we had lost Opsware to BMC or to whomever, you know, we would have had a fallback plan. But we, we, we had a clear preference. And paid a premium for it, frankly.

• 41:30David Rosenthal?

  So now I want to jump to the, to the culture and the people piece now. I mean, that all makes, that is bulletproof logic there. But, you know, you read Hard Thing About Hard Things or you listen to Ben or you look at Andreessen Horowitz. And, uh, you know, the first thing that comes to mind is not, you know, HP.

• 41:48David Rosenthal?

  What was it like, you know, integrating this team?

• 41:52Speaker 01

  Well, you know, interesting. So, you know, one, if you've read the book, Ben has a management technique called Freaky Friday. So I thought, hey, I'm going to run the integration and they're just going to give me some special projects and send me off in the sunset. You know, I didn't have a product, I wouldn't, I didn't expect to have a product ownership at that point. So Ben actually swapped me and his head of product at the time, Eric Vischeria. So Eric took over ITSM. Eric is now at Benchmark Capital as a VC. And, and founded his own company kind of in between his stint at HP and that, and joining Benchmark. But, you know, Eric joined the ITSM team and took it over. And Frank Chen, who's, who was the product management half of that partnership.

• 42:34David Rosenthal?

  And is now at Andreessen Horowitz.

• 42:36Speaker 01

  And is now at Andreessen Horowitz, moved into engineering to help, under Jason Rosenthal, who was the head of engineering there at the time. And so Ben gave me product and that was an incredible, so he, he calls it Freaky Friday, where he swaps executives.

• 42:50David Rosenthal?

  Oh, like the, like the Jamie Lee Curtis movie.

• 42:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, that's one of his management techniques that he wrote about. And I think, um, so, and then, and I worked directly for him. So that was pretty amazing as an, as an opportunity and experience. I think a part of why it worked is that I was at HP. So, you know, I was a Mercury person where the DNA is much closer to Opsware. You know, many, many, by the way, like that sale, that silly sales kickoff story, there were many Mercury people at HP. You know, Mercury was a very Israeli company, very, very aggressive, very direct. You know, we were, you know, very customer focused and winning was incredibly important. So a lot of external values that I think mapped really closely to the Opsware teams. So I think one piece of it was, um, you know, he, he put someone in charge of the integration

• 43:34Speaker 01

  who, um, had the same cultural values as his own team, and I think that made things easier. Um, but you know, for sure, there's culture friction. I mean, you know, as an example, we're, we're going through the integration, the formal integration process, and I remember being on the phone with the IT organization and the IT organization is insisting that we have to shut down all these non-approved apps that Opsware has, and one of the non-approved apps, I'll give you two that are just outrageous. One of them happened to be the license key generator for all of the Opsware software. And we had to shut it off at the time of acquisition, according to, um, IT. And I'm like, someone help me understand why we would, you know, spend $1.6 billion and then basically be unable to sell and turn on any of it.

• 44:18Speaker 01

  You know, or the other one was they wanted us-

• 44:20Ben Gilbert?

  There was no like grace period of like, we should spin up something else to make it-

• 44:22Speaker 01

  Day one. So you know, you're in this like, you know, six month, whatever it was, four month, I don't even remember, it was kind of like dog years. You're in this integration, which is super intense, but you have this deadline. And you know, IT had very strict objectives. I mean, Mark Hurd was running HP at the time, so that was Mark Hurd's HP. Um, second, you know, they had a source control standard within the company. And of course they were like, well, you'd have to migrate all the source control and source code into this new, and like-

• 44:48Ben Gilbert?

  This is pre-GitHub.

• 44:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, and as you know, like, you know, in that, in that time, you know, that was just almost impossible. So, so there was a lot of these kind of weird, uh, operational hurdles that I wouldn't have anticipated, um, you know, that's kind of a whole class of problem that you have to deal with. Um, you know, again, I feel like- I was very lucky because, you know, I was kind of a liaison between, I probably absorbed a lot of that weird cultural friction for those guys in that sense, at least during the integration. And actually, at the time, Scott Cooper was my partner on the Opsware side, so he's now the, I guess, COO, you know, running all the operating arm of Andreessen Horowitz. But, you know, he was a great partner on the Opsware side. So, I found, for me, working with them was very easy, and a lot of my job was basically

• 45:34Speaker 01

  trying to prevent the big mechanism of HP from, you know, making unnatural things happen. But, you know, you know, once we had them integrated, I think, you know, then there was, then there was a lot more interesting. So you kind of get this middle period where you're dealing with all the organizational administrivia, that's frustrating. You know, I think one thing we did well in that period was we took market share. So we kind of, you know, really sold the heck out of Opsware in that period and gained a pretty good advantage over Blade Logic, because at the time, you know, BMC hadn't yet announced their deal with Blade. And then, you know, as we formally integrated them, we had all of the challenges you can imagine.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  So the software, the sales organization, you start to break up the teams, right? So instead of being Opsware now, engineering's part of Ben's organization. So Ben took over products and engineering for HP Software. And so, you know, on some level, that's a little safe. You know, the sales organization got put under some of the sales leaders as overlays. And to be honest, that's an area where if I look back, gosh, I wish we had done a better job. So, you know, the good news is we had these experts, these black belts, and Opsware was global, so we immediately got traction globally. But, you know, overlays are a hard thing to make work, and I feel like, you know...

• 46:49Ben Gilbert?

  And you say overlays as in there's HP management on top of each of the...

• 46:54Speaker 01

  Oh, no, yeah, sorry, not being clear, sales overlays. So, generally speaking, when you, you know, put a new product that's hard to sell, there's a lot of IP in how to sell it. And so you take these sales organization of Opsware, and who used to just sell Opsware, and now they're basically what we call overlays. They work with the HP people, because the HP people already own all those... Accounts and they sell this huge portfolio of software, but they don't know Opsware. So you have this kind of digestion period where you're you're having you're trying to disseminate the expertise of of the acquired company into your sales organization. And eventually you want the motion to be that it's fully absorbed and everybody's fully trained and you can

• 47:35Speaker 01

  sell, but you know, that's the biggest question is how do you train and enable that sales organization to be even half as effective as an Opsware person was in, you know, objections and challenges and competitive landscape and so forth. And so that presents just its own, its whole own set of challenges. I'm sorry.

• 47:55David Rosenthal?

  Oh, I was gonna say, I think this is a, this is a big thing for listeners to understand, you know, when it's easy to look at this from the outside and say, you know, okay, like each, you know, enterprise is about sales channels and sales motions, like, I sort of get what that means, but like this is it in practice. I mean, the Opsware sales team was, you know, sort of a finely tuned machine to sell data center, you know, automation and management, but the HP sales team is selling all sorts of things, a whole portfolio of everything you could imagine to CIOs at companies. And, and so now Opsware is gonna be just a small piece of that portfolio.

• 48:36David Rosenthal?

  And, and so you need the HP sales team to digest that and understand how to, how to sell Opsware best. But it's not just about selling Opsware, it's about selling everything.

• 48:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So you have a huge enablement challenge and that, you know, that was, I, I loved that. You know, I ran, I ran the product management and product marketing organization for the combined business, what we ended up calling BSA. So it was business service automation. We kind of did away with the DCA term. But it was, you know, phenomenal challenge. I mean, we did so much training. I, I actually flew in the year after that acquisition, I think I flew 350,000 miles worldwide. You know, visiting customers, doing deals, trading reps, you know, it was pretty phenomenal. And we saw huge growth. You know, it's been a long time for me. It's been a decade, but you know, I don't, I don't remember. I think, I think by the time I left, we'd seen, you know, 350% growth in the business.

• 49:27Speaker 01

  So from that perspective, you know, talk about a huge, you know, it's at least a huge early down payment of success on your, on your vision of, of kind of the value of that technology.

• 49:39David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 49:40Ben Gilbert?

  All right, listeners. Now is a great time to talk about a new partner of ours here on Acquired, Logora, the agentic operating system that is redefining how the world's best legal teams work.

• 49:54David Rosenthal?

  Yep. It's sort of obvious that AI is going to completely change the legal industry. I bet most of you listening have dropped a contract into some sort of AI chatbot out there. Logora took that insight and asked the question, what if you really built something with that power from the ground up for the legal industry?

• 50:10Ben Gilbert?

  So the founders did exactly what great founders do, operate with obsessive customer focus. They embedded inside a massive law firm for months. They sat with the lawyers just watching how the work really gets done.

• 50:25David Rosenthal?

  And that's how you get features that customers love, like Tabular Review, where you drop in a folder of hundreds of contracts and it pulls every key term into a grid a lawyer can actually work with. Logora's bet here is interesting. Since it lets each lawyer handle more complexity, any given person can increase the quality of their work and do higher value work. And this means that the pie can grow even as each individual task takes less time.

• 50:49Ben Gilbert?

  And they recently launched Logora Agent, offering greater intelligence and performance. The agent lets lawyers set an objective. Then it can handle the planning and the execution and delivery of the final product. Legal teams get to maintain full control and transparency since they're still involved where judgment is required.

• 51:08David Rosenthal?

  And Logora works where you already work. You can use it within Microsoft Word while redlining or drafting. The early Logora numbers essentially speak for themselves. When they have a head-to-head pilot with their top competitor, they win 70% of the time. Logora now has over 100,000 lawyers on the platform from 1,200 legal teams in 50 countries. And crazily, they went from 1 million to 100 million in ARR in about 18 months.

• 51:38Ben Gilbert?

  Truly insane numbers. And that is the real test. Plenty of things demo well, but the question is whether a busy associate actually reaches for it during crunch time, or whether a partner trusts it before going into a conversation with a major client. If your legal team wants to check it out, whether you're a law firm or you're in-house at a company, you can learn more at logora.com/acquired and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. You know, we've got a format to this show that at some point we'll move here into into categorization, but I'm curious, looking back on it all, where the state of, you know, data centers are today and with the rise of cloud services and the major players being Google, Amazon, Microsoft, or, you know, you can make arguments about that, but you

• 52:23Ben Gilbert?

  don't often hear HP thrown around in there. And what do you think happened in the last decade from the world of, you know, data center automation into business soft or business center automation?

• 52:35Speaker 01

  Business service automation.

• 52:35Ben Gilbert?

  Business service automation into the world that we have today and, you know, why isn't HP one of those big three, big four?

• 52:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, interesting. Well, I mean, I, I look at the natural successors of Opsware and I think of companies like Puppet and Chef. And by the way, how fascinating, you know, one's local in Seattle here, but they're both going to be public companies. I don't remember if Puppet already filed, but, you know, it's pretty clear that those companies are on their way.

• 53:02Ben Gilbert?

  Yep.

• 53:02Speaker 01

  So, you know, the inheritors of the problem and the market opportunity are those companies. And in fact, it'll be very interesting to see, you know, whether, you know, Dockerization brings a new generation, a third generation, or whether Dockerization just accelerates Chef and Puppet, they're able to capitalize on that motion. But, you know, why not HP? Look, it's very hard for big companies to innovate. And here, here's the reason why, you know, innovation, number one, is a people thing. So you have to have a really high quality of thought. And that's, that's all people. And at least at the time I was at HP, it was interesting, it was a very, you know, herd had a very manufacturing mindset.

• 53:43Speaker 01

  And manufacturing companies look at people as very interchangeable. Software companies have this idea of the 10x'er, where, you know, the 10x developer can do things that no one else can do, and the 10x product person can see things no one else can see. And it's really true, that there isn't a scalability to the way software works inherently. Like, you can't replace Steve Jobs with You know, a hundred other people and get the same work that Steve Jobs did, right? It just doesn't work that way. So, you know, when you, when you look at kind of our, our software organization or a software business, um, one, you need to retain those top people. And I think big organizations have just an incredibly hard time doing it because of a culture mismatch. You know, my level of patience for the HP culture was very low.

• 54:26Speaker 01

  Um, and by the way, my culture fit with them was very low. You know, I swear to much for HP, for example. Um, but, but so you, you get that like weird DNA mismatch. So that's kind of one big challenge. I think the other big challenge is that institutionally you need courage. So I actually think Mercury is an example. There are big software companies that can innovate and can, um, you know, uh, not have a disruption, you know, destroy their business, but take advantage of it. Maybe Chef and Puppet will as an example, but you know, Mercury went from, you know, zero to 3,000 people, zero to a billion. So you, you can do it. Um, and I think the second thing required besides, you know, these ten Xers in, in your key roles and product and engineering and sales is you need the courage to basically

• 55:10Speaker 01

  bet before the date is obvious. So, you know, Ops was an unusual situation where the product, uh, you know, by the way, their, their vision was, you know, whatever 10 years ahead of its time really. So timing might've been a problem for them, but the vision's dead on and product was close enough that they could go monetize it. And they ended up, their timing was right on virtualization. So talk about the confluence of events. You know, I think when you're in a big company, the second challenge that's really hard is that disruptions often sneak up on you. So if you're HP and you own Ops where you've won, do you really have anyone in the company who can feel that Docker's coming and know that existentially Docker is a threat to your control? Or that, you know, whatever it was, um, I don't, I don't know.

• 55:53Speaker 01

  I wasn't close enough to the business around the Chef and Puppet timeframe. Yeah, I actually probably was DevOps, right? So the fact that like development and Ops were converging represents an existential threat to your business. So that, you know, the second challenge a big company has is Not only do you have the right person, but that person would see that threat coming

• 56:11David Rosenthal?

  Mm hmm.

• 56:11Speaker 01

  And be able to mobilize the leaders to move. And so, you know, how do you, in a big company, you need that, the geniuses, you need them to see far, like with almost no data.

• 56:22David Rosenthal?

  Mm hmm.

• 56:22Speaker 01

  And you need leadership who'll bet based on that. And that's, I mean, to be honest, you know, most executives in big companies are used to waiting until the entire PowerPoint deck is 50 slides and all the data is there. And the decision's safe. And you have Microsoft, not under Satya, but maybe that's Ballmer's Microsoft. And you miss the entire market. And so I think that's, that's, that's probably why it's not HP and it is Puppet. Uh, cause it's much more than those. The software is the outcome of the people and the process, the leadership used, right?

• 56:49David Rosenthal?

  Mm hmm.

• 56:49Speaker 01

  And that, once that falls apart, it's, it's a, it's almost impossible to replicate.

• 56:55David Rosenthal?

  Oh, man, I'm just.

• 56:56Speaker 01

  My two cents.

• 56:56David Rosenthal?

  Here, this is so, this is gonna fit in so perfectly with my tech theme. Uh, should we move along to get there? I do, I, I definitely want to come back and talk about what it's like now having Ben on your board at Usermind, but um, let's, let's finish out Opsware first. Um, so acquisition category, uh, for me, this, this seems pretty clear. It's, it's a product that you bought to put into the, into the HP sales channel. Um, so to me, this is a, a product acquisition.

• 57:26Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, and you know, I've been torn between product and business line. And we sort of define business line as um, self-sustaining, independently functioning um, product that comes with sales and vision that just um, you know, may not be independently broken out to shareholders as a separate, uh, you know, a separate line item, but basically functions as its own independent business. It seems like after um, hearing you talk and after, you know, David asserting product, I'm closer to product now and I'm, I'm thinking there was much tighter integration, much more quickly, and it was not really an independent business, but would love to hear your thoughts on that.

• 58:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, not really. I mean, you know, Ben took over the whole HP software business. I mean, he became the head under Tom Hogan of, of product and engineering. Um, and we, we definitely had the um, Opsware organization separate for a short period of time, but no, the integration was incredibly rapid.

• 58:17David Rosenthal?

  Hmm.

• 58:17Speaker 01

  Um, and, and the purpose of that was to um, inject the DNA into the broader organization. So you know, there was a larger transformation happening within HP Software at the time, right? You know, they, the acquisition of Mercury was, I think, the first and then, you know, Opsware and they did others after I left, you know, autonomy not being, not being a great example, but there was a bunch. And, and there was an Uber strategy and overarching strategy there that they were trying to transform the culture and transform the software organization. So the integration strategy was very much driven by this overarching vision that they had about kind of bringing in a bunch of fresh DNA. So, no, it was not run as a standalone

• 59:01Speaker 01

  business, except for the, you know, period during the integration when that's required.

• 59:04David Rosenthal?

  Cool.

• 59:05Ben Gilbert?

  Moving to, David, go for it.

• 59:09David Rosenthal?

  Well, I was gonna say, then we have what would have happened otherwise. I actually, I think we probably covered that pretty well with the discussion of BMC and Blade Logic.

• 59:19Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, I have, I have one thing to sort of posit on that. And Michelle, if you guys had made the decision that, you know what, we're not going to buy, we're not going to build, we're just going to be done in this market, would HP be in a significantly different position today?

• 59:33Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I've been gone so long, it's a very, very hard question to answer. Look, I think, I mean, I guess if I had been there and the answer was, we didn't want to do Opsware or Blade, then I think I would have proposed that we take all the engineers, I would shut down the DCA business and I would have proposed essentially shooting for the next product and taking that engineering team and building a converged automation and monitoring product with every engineer from the team and basically give up the land for the current iteration and wait for the next disruption and bet that we'd be on time. I don't know if that would have happened or if.

• 1:00:17Speaker 01

  It would have been successful, but I believe I wouldn't have gone down without a fight. I would have, I would have, you know, fought for what I thought was the right thing for the company.

• 1:00:26Ben Gilbert?

  Right. Yeah, it's, it's, it's very interesting tech theme where, you know, this is, we've seen this multiple times with multiple companies, but when you miss one hill, it really gives you an opportunity to see the world from a different perspective and be better at taking the next hill and be better at, you know, targeting exactly what customers want. And there's a little bit of desperation there. I mean, Apple and the iPhone, there's, there's tons of examples of, of.

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  Mother of invention.

• 1:00:53Ben Gilbert?

  Yep, yep. We missed this war and, or we missed the battle, but hopefully we, we hit the next one.

• 1:00:57David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, I mean, LoudCloud into Opsware.

• 1:01:00Ben Gilbert?

  Yep.

• 1:01:03David Rosenthal?

  Should we jump into tech themes?

• 1:01:04Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:01:06David Rosenthal?

  Ben, you wanna kick it off?

• 1:01:08Ben Gilbert?

  Um, oh, that was the, that was the main one that I wanted to, to, to point out. So why don't you go for it?

• 1:01:13David Rosenthal?

  Okay. Well, I, I just loved, I was smiling, grinning ear to ear, Michelle, when you were talking about timing and, and management and, and this is for me, what this, this story just illustrates so well is like the absolutely critical role of timing in, in technology, both consumer and enterprise. I mean, LoudCloud was a hundred percent the right product. Um, you know, I mean, it was AWS before AWS and AWS is one of the probably top three biggest and most important products in technology today, but the timing was wrong.

• 1:01:52David Rosenthal?

  And, and, and I think about, you know, I, I heard, I can't remember where I heard this, but I think Sequoia, the venture capital firm, did a study, um, you know, a number of years ago about what is sort of the most important factor for, for their investment partners in, in how the quality of their decision-making and the quality of their investments. And they concluded that it was, it was timing. It was getting the timing right in a market. But what I think you, you said that I, so that was what I had down as my theme for this episode, but I think what you said, there's more to it than that. And that's that the role of talent in technology, both from a product and a management

• 1:02:34David Rosenthal?

  standpoint, is managing that timing. Like, you know, it would have been so easy at Loud Cloud to say like, well, we got the timing wrong, we're done. But what Ben and Mark were able to do was say, we got the timing wrong, but we're going to get the timing right on this other piece of it, and we're going to pivot into that. And I think that's what like, you know, talking about 10x folks in in tech, that's like what it's having that vision and being able to manage timing in a market. That's really, you know, what it comes down to, I think, both in consumer and enterprise.

• 1:03:09Speaker 01

  I mean, yeah, look, I think timing is just, it's, it's the one law you just don't control. You know, I think it's, it's interesting. I don't, I think Mark Andreessen talks about it, you know, you know, good market, bad team, they do all right. You know, terrible market, great team, you're kind of screwed. And so like, what trumps what, you know, you've got, you've got kind of what is the, is the idea good enough? How big is the market? You know, timing and then people. And so I always say like, what's the, what's the why? Why? What's the idea? What problem are you solving? Why? The second question is, why now? Why is it inevitable now that this idea should matter or be more relevant or actually be a business? And the third part is where team is in is like, you know, what's

• 1:03:53Speaker 01

  the likelihood you have to execute into that? And then it's, it's interesting, you know, I think on the people front, it's, you know, if you go into Ben Horowitz's office within Andreessen, he has people on the wall, pictures of people, and it's scientists on one wall and boxers on the other. And we're both, we're both big boxing fans. But he, he would summarize it this way, which is, he says, entrepreneurship is the intersection of intellect and courage. And so I think it's not just seeing that the, that the thing is happening, it's having the courage to fight for the deal, you know, in the case of an acquisition, or fight for, you know, the strategy, or fight for like, your life in the company

• 1:04:34Speaker 01

  if you're failing. And I think that is, that can't be underestimated, right? Is that, is the level of grit and kind of I call it a little bit irrationality that's required in that human capital to be successful.

• 1:04:51David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, I mean, it was, it was that right that took a, a negative equity value public company at the time of the pivot to, you know, a 1.6 billion dollar acquisition, right?

• 1:05:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think Ben is a great man. There's no question about that. And, and one of the most genuinely humble and nice people I've ever met in my life, which just is doubly incredible.

• 1:05:13David Rosenthal?

  That's awesome. All right. Should we grade this?

• 1:05:18Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, yeah. So, Michelle, we were talking before the show and you said, yes, indeed, I will, I will help grade. So I'm curious, you know, looking back on this and sort of taking yourself out of the equation.

• 1:05:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:29Ben Gilbert?

  You know, how'd it go?

• 1:05:31Speaker 01

  I would probably give it a B. You know, I think we, we were able to get, you know, a huge revenue boost. You know, we essentially accelerated the market dominance of Opsware. I, I think the reason I wouldn't give it an A is I don't think we saw the strategic long-term vision come to fruition the way it certainly could have. And I think the biggest difference is people. You know, you lose Ben, you lose me, you lose Mark Cranny. You know, those are the people who would have made that next wave of value creation happen. So that's my, my perspective.

• 1:06:02Speaker 01

  Although I guess maybe it's an A plus in the sense that if we hadn't acquired Opsware, Mark and Ben wouldn't have founded Andreessen Horowitz.

• 1:06:09David Rosenthal?

  David wouldn't have founded Usermind.

• 1:06:10Speaker 01

  And I think they've disrupted the valley. So, you know, maybe it's an A, an A from that point of view.

• 1:06:15Ben Gilbert?

  David's pulled that card before where the actual financial outcome for the company was something, but the goodness for the world was something else.

• 1:06:21Speaker 01

  And maybe I meant B from HP's perspective, you know?

• 1:06:25Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. And that is, that is how we grade on the, on the show typically is how good of a decision was it for the acquirer to make the decision?

• 1:06:30Speaker 01

  Great.

• 1:06:31Ben Gilbert?

  And David, I think the time when you pulled that was PayPal Mafia.

• 1:06:34David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, well, and it's like, I think it's completely relevant here again. I mean, there is an Opsware mafia. You know, you talked about Eric at Benchmark and, you know, the whole, practically the whole Andreessen Horowitz team, or at least the initial team. You know, you and

• 1:06:51Ben Gilbert?

  And we're sitting here in the beautiful Usermind office, looking out over the skyline of Seattle, so.

• 1:06:57Speaker 01

  Well, and you know, locally in Seattle, obviously, Aptio was their first investment. So that's where I was there, had a product, and that company has since IPO'd. And, you know, Sunny Gupta, that CEO, Ben had acquired his last company, I conclude. So, I mean, there's many more, right? You know, their initial investment in Okta, and, you know, now Signal FX, where that's, one of the CTOs of Opsware is now the co-founder there, and Karthik Rao, Eric Vishri, his roommate, is the CEO, and it just, and it goes on and on and on.

• 1:07:30Ben Gilbert?

  Wow.

• 1:07:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's pretty crazy.

• 1:07:32David Rosenthal?

  Wow, that's totally crazy. Well, I can't argue with those grades.

• 1:07:36Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, I mean, I have no, I have far less perfect information, so B sounds great to me.

• 1:07:43David Rosenthal?

  Let's, before we jump into carve-outs, you know, I'm sort of dying to talk about, given all that, like, what's it like now on the other side of the world where, you know, Ben's at Andreessen Horowitz and he's on your board?

• 1:07:59Speaker 01

  Well, well, number one, I mean, Ben's an incredible board member. So, you know, taking away Usermind and just my personal journey, he's phenomenal. I think their whole philosophy, so now, you know, obviously at Aptio, I was in the leadership team and I was part of the board meetings and would present to the board. And so I got to see that board. And, you know, now I've got my own board. But, you know, it's really striking to me, this thesis that they have, even more broadly than Ben, that operators, former CEOs, make better board members. And for me, you know, I don't know if that's true broadly, because I'm working with Ben, but I feel that Ben's experience as a CEO helps me. You know, every day, every week, every month, every board meeting, um, he's been just incredibly,

• 1:08:44Speaker 01

  um, you know, just been invaluable in my development as a CEO and, and helping me kind of think about how to grow the company on every level. And, you know, you think about board members as being really valuable in the context of a board meeting, you know, reviewing financials and helping you think about when to scale what function and when do you add what executive and, you know, kind of how, how are you doing from a customer traction point of view? And he, and he's phenomenal there. But, you know, Ben to me is as or more valuable to a CEO in your one-on-ones where I might be talking with him about a management challenge. Or how do you run a staff meeting as you grow the company? Or, you know, how do you think about different inflection points in your own leadership style and the way the business is changing? And where do you spend your time? And think about hiring your first exec, you know, how do you do that? And what's, what are you looking for?

• 1:09:30Speaker 01

  There's so many more ways that a board member adds value to a CEO's both decision-making and, and growth as a CEO than the board meetings. And I, I found him to be, you know, and part of it is our relationship, I'm sure, because I trust him and he knows me very well. But he's just an incredible sounding board with such a wealth of talent. You know, I, I remember asking him, as an example, to share advice. I asked him when I was hiring my first executive, my first non-co-founder executive in the company, kind of like, what's the central thing I'm looking for? And I'll just generalize it because I don't need to talk about the specific role. And his answer was, an executive is someone who gives you leverage. I'm like, okay, that's the, actually, that is the ultimate truism.

• 1:10:12Speaker 01

  So if you're hiring as a CEO, a person, one of the things is they probably know more about their function than you, which means that it's very hard to interview them and know you're selecting the right person. But on the flip side, it also means that if that person joins and doesn't give you instant leverage, you've hired the wrong person. Yep. And talk about like, I've never in my entire life heard anyone in like a single word, Distill it so succinctly. articulate how to evaluate a hire and how to both pre, both before hiring them and as they've joined the company. Um, and, and those, that's just a simple example of like one question I've asked him and the kind of response that I get. So I don't know if that's the type of information you're looking for, but, uh, Yeah, I feel blessed every day.

• 1:10:55Ben Gilbert?

  Hey, I learned something today.

• 1:10:57David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, me too. Well, and it's just, I mean, this is something I've been reflecting on a lot recently. As being in venture myself and, you know, Ben and I have been doing this together too. You know, really, this is making the case for, you know, as a venture investor, being, there's this concept of, you know, being a company builder and contributing to the building of the company. You called it adding value, Michelle, but, you know, and I really think like, if you're not doing things like that, you know, then you're, then what are you? You're, you're a stock picker, right? And does that even make sense in startups? Like, you can't pick stocks in startups. And, and if you want to, you know, earn returns for your investors and yourself,

• 1:11:42David Rosenthal?

  the only thing that makes sense really is, is to do, you know, approach this, this craft like Ben does, you know, and like Eric does, a benchmark and, you know, like many, many good VCs do, which is, you know, there has to be, and, and for you, I would imagine, that provides a hugely compelling value why you wouldn't want them on your board.

• 1:12:02Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I mean, well, you know, there's so many kind of elements to how you think about your board composition and I think what you're looking for, but, you know, if you can get a person who is, you know, that level of genius, right, who can contribute in such a fundamental way to value building, you know, let's not underestimate when, you know, kind of the value of the brand as well. So not just Ben Horowitz, but Andreessen Horowitz. I mean, I think, you know, I remember in the early days of, of the company, engineers would say, you know, I'd be like, why did you take the meeting with us? And they'd say, well, you're an Andreessen Horowitz company. So, you know, the, the brand is also something that helps you build the company and, and separates you from other startups that, you know, helps you kind of be competitive in this war for talent, right, which is happening all around us in Seattle.

• 1:12:49Speaker 01

  And then, you know, I think just the particular expertise that that board member brings is something extremely unique. So. I uh, I don't, I did not know Ben was going to leave and start a venture capital firm when, when, you know, he left HP, but um, it's shaped my life. I mean, he's the person who said to me, you need to go be in a startup. He's why I went to Aptio and joined. I mean, in fact, at the time he said, you know, you should just found. Um, but I had never worked in a startup, so I wanted to go work for a serial CEO and learn something. And I'm glad I did. I mean, I think it's the right choice for me. I, I knew the right choice for me. Uh, but you know, he fundamentally shaped my life trajectory. So if I shaped his by kind of changing his trajectory by the acquisition, he's profoundly changed mine. I mean, I,

• 1:13:34Speaker 01

  I wouldn't have known I'd be a CEO. I wouldn't have thought I would end up in startups. You know, I love product. I'm certainly a product person, but uh, and I don't wake up at 23 thinking that's what I was gonna do, so.

• 1:13:47David Rosenthal?

  Well, what a-

• 1:13:48Ben Gilbert?

  Great perspective.

• 1:13:49David Rosenthal?

  Great, great note to uh, to wrap this one up on. Um, we uh, we do have our last final segment of carve-outs, uh, and um, and, and actually this is a, a really good um, tee-up for mine for the week. Mine is, is Jimmy Iovine, the um, the, the um, record industry executive uh, and co-founder of Beats with, with Dr. Dre, uh, who he produced as a music producer, was on uh, the Bill Simmons podcast on The Ringer last week, and it's wonderful. And um, you know, it's the music industry and the record industry and lots of great stories there from all the

• 1:14:31David Rosenthal?

  artists, from all genres that Jimmy worked with. Um, but he talks about kind of just that, what you were talking about, Michelle, and like, the um, sort of courage to, to go and do his own thing and um, blaze his own path in, in the business. And, and he, he talks about this concept of like, having fear and like, uh, fear can be sort of paralyzing. And for a long time he was paralyzed until he found like this, this thing, and that was music and the music industry that like- The fear kind of motivated him. The fear was like, you know, I, I fear that I'm gonna miss out if I don't go, um, if I don't go and I, you know, capture this opportunity. He, he used the analogy of like, you know, when you're playing baseball and like, either, you know, you're in the outfield and you could think like, don't hit the ball to me,

• 1:15:16David Rosenthal?

  you know, you could be fearful of it, or you could say like, you know, hit the ball to me because I'm fearful like, you know, I'm gonna make the play.

• 1:15:23Ben Gilbert?

  Right.

• 1:15:24David Rosenthal?

  You know, if it doesn't come to me, I'm not gonna make the play.

• 1:15:26Ben Gilbert?

  Right. It's like opportunity to succeed rather than an opportunity to fail.

• 1:15:30David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, it's great. Highly recommend.

• 1:15:32Ben Gilbert?

  Huh. Man, I love the Ringer podcast. If like, if you're listening to this show and you're thinking, I've listened to a lot of shows and, um, you know, I've listened to a lot of episodes of Acquired. If there was any that was particularly good where I was like pumped up and like you felt like I was on my A game, it's because I listened to Bill Simmons before and I got Bill Simmons' voice in my head and, uh, and I was ready to go. So I, you know, that's your carve out. You can take that one, but I also recommend you listen to the Ringer podcast. Um, mine is a software package called StarStax and um, I have been, uh, it's, it's, it would be overselling to say I've been an amateur photographer. I've enjoyed taking pictures for a long time and especially I do these

• 1:16:15Ben Gilbert?

  big backpacking trips every summer with my dad and um, this time I decided to, to carry the extra weight and bring about a two and a half pound tripod out with me and try and do some, some star photos. And so this is super hard and I was batted it four out of the five nights with either crazy blurry photos or like, you know, it was cold and the lens fogged or clouds rolled in, but uh, it was one night where, where I kind of nailed it. And uh, so you, the, the process is wild. You like leave your, um, leave the, the camera out on a tripod, you go to bed, you set an alarm, you wake up in the middle of the night, like three, four hours later and you go collect it and you cross your fingers and hope for the best when you import it all later. And StarStax is this incredibly

• 1:16:57Ben Gilbert?

  cool piece of software on your computer that will take hundreds of, of, uh, long exposure photos that are taken over several hours and overlay them all on top of each other kind of automatically. So you don't have to do it all manually in Photoshop and, um, and really produce some, some cool, uh, star trails. So if anybody's interested, we can link to that from the show notes and, uh, I highly recommend StarStax.

• 1:17:21Ben Gilbert?

  That's all we've got. Michelle, thank you so much. Where can our listeners find you? Are you on the socials?

• 1:17:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Michelle Feaster at Twitter. We're at UserMind Inc. Both easy ways to meet, make, you know, kind of meet my acquaintance. You know, we're also on Facebook, obviously, as UserMind, and I'm Michelle Feaster pretty much everywhere socially. Or Michelle at UserMind. You know, if people are out there and you're an early founder and you're terrified, you know, I don't take every meeting because I'm super busy, but I feel like I've only gotten where I've gotten because so many people have helped me. So, you know, easy to get me and, you know, if I could make time to help folks, I definitely will.

• 1:18:00Ben Gilbert?

  Awesome.

• 1:18:01David Rosenthal?

  All right, listeners. Now is a great time to talk about one of our favorite companies, Statsig.

• 1:18:07Ben Gilbert?

  Yes, there is a reason why the best product teams rely on Statsig, whether they are iterating on their core product features or shipping AI-powered experiences at scale.

• 1:18:18David Rosenthal?

  Yep. In the crazy speed of today's AI world, shipping fast is just table stakes now. It's basically trivial to build and deploy your app constantly. The real advantage is how quickly you learn what changes actually created value for customers and how fast you can use that signal to guide what you ship next.

• 1:18:38Ben Gilbert?

  This is where Statsig comes in. It brings experimentation, feature flags, and product analytics into one unified system so teams can ship safely, test rigorously, and directly link what they changed to how users actually behaved.

• 1:18:51David Rosenthal?

  So if you want to make learning your competitive advantage, whether you're building new AI experiences or just evolving your existing core product, go to statsig.com/acquired to get started.

• 1:19:01Ben Gilbert?

  Listeners. Thank you, Michelle. Listeners, check out the Slack, acquired.fm, and we would love, love, love a review on iTunes. So, thank you so much. Have a great day. We'll see you next time.