VMware acquires Heptio, the startup founded by 2 co-founders of Kubernetes

> They loose screen time to mobile devices, they buy Snaptu.

This was acquisition for feature phones and not touch phones. Your comment implies that Facebook mobile app came out of this acquisition - which is not true.

https://techcrunch.com/2011/03/20/facebook-reportedly-acquir...

* Maps (maps from Where2 Technologies, acquired in 2004; real-time traffic from ZipDash, acquired in 2004; satellite imagery from Keyhole, acquired in 2005)

* Android (founded in 2003, bought for $50M+ in 2005)

* YouTube (founded in 2005, bought for $1.7B in 2006)

* Adsense (Google acquired Applied Semantics in 2003, DoubleClick in 2007, and AdMob for mobile ads in 2009)

* Google Docs (spreadsheets by 2Web, acquired in 2005; docs by Upstartle, acquired in 2006; slides by Tonic Systems, acquired in 2007)

* Waymo (Thrun's team, 510 Systems)

A long list of Alphabet's acquisitions are on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

The website advertises professional services, training, support subscriptions, and books. Redhat model I guess.

[0] https://www.gwern.net/Complement#2

I think they spent roughly half of their series B money on this brilliant plan, with headcount increasing at a steady clip. Meanwhile they probably realized building an enterprise sales and support organization is no fun, and growing it fast enough to justify ballooning R&D costs is not as easy as it looks. Given the profile of the founders - former Google and Microsoft employees with no enterprise sales experience to speak of - they were either deeply bored by the prospect of scaling this part of the company, or the board started pressuring them to bring a more sales-savvy CEO, or possibly both. It’s also possible that there was founder conflict brewing - those guys had zero experience outside of giant corporations, so they jumped straight into the deep end of the pool with a high-profile launch, rapid team growth, etc. For inexperienced founders who haven’t had time to gel as a team, it can be a jarring experience. Given that they still had reasonable runway (let’s say 12 months), they were not desperate to sell. My guess is that their number was $250M: plenty of money for the founders, and it matches the recent CoreOS acquisition. In early stage acquisitions it’s often important to stroke the ego of the founders, so that they can experience the acquisition as a victory rather than a defeat. A lot of times that boils down to a pissing contest on valuation. $250M is a steep price for a $5M business, but it’s still a great deal for Vmware. They need a credible Kubernetes story, and as much open-source DNA as they can.

EDIT: others are pointing out that the acquisition price might be below $84M. It’s likely that VMware structured the deal into a modest a acquisition price for shareholders, augmented by a somptuous retention package for key employees (basically the founders and engineers). I think they pitched the resulting deal as a $250M “acquisition” from the founder’s perspective. This is very common for acqui-hires, especially when the risk is high that the team will be unhappy and be tempted to leave.

"Heptio’s mission is to build a platform that accelerates IT in a multi-cloud world."

Just feels like some overlap with PKS, and both companies being Dell owned is interesting.

(And thankyou!)

In general though seems likely there will be a load of consolidation across the container space over the next year or so.