> .... shady “customers, but also investors, but also customers.” It’s convenient having combo customer/investors. If quarterly numbers look bad, just ask your customers, who are also investors, to buy more services to prop up their own investment. After all, they wouldn’t want their investment decisions to look bad, right?

That's not shady, to me, it is a common practice and does take advantage of the accounting practices that different stakeholders use. This is what all of tech is doing with VC portfolios. That startup that delivers lunch to your startup, do you think that was random? It is an incestuous movement of money around VC portfolio companies to merely print higher revenue numbers so they can sell them one at a time for 10x those revenue numbers.

Pretty much nothing is organic, so I can't make a distinction for this particular practice. The market can bare it.

Honestly, it should be a more common practice for market participants to be taking pseudo-activist roles in their investments. Just because you are used to passive investments - and probably can't do anything else - doesn't mean it is the best strategy for your portfolio.

Not making any opinion about the other problems with Pivotal, just pointing out how this section isn't validation for the complaints.