Cisco pulled out of SentinelOne acquisition after due diligence | Hacker News Reader

Cisco pulled out of SentinelOne acquisition after due diligence

calcalistech.com

61 pointslopkeny12ko22 comments

"You can do that?!"- Elon, probably

"Yes, remember when we defined due diligence for you, before you decided to go another way?"- Elon's lawyers, probably

"What is due diligence?" - Elon, probably

Due diligence usually refers to the review of the asset you're trying to acquire. There weren't any significant surprises about Twitter's state. Elon's issue was Elon.

Elon specifically waived the ability to withdraw because of post-signing due diligence in his offer to twitter's board. It's one of the (many) reasons he had little ability to get out of the deal once he changed his mind.

Sure, but how does that address what I said?

As I just argued, due diligence wouldn't have uncovered any surprises. It's merely that Elon could have used the process to ascertain what consequences the acquisition would have for his own assets (compatibility/marketing audit) and what his ideas would lead to.

It potentially could have. For example, post-signing he had a big fight with twitter's lawyers over the right way to measure bot accounts. If he could prove it was much higher than twitter's SEC filings, he might have been able to withdraw from the deal if he kept the due diligence condition.

He waived it to look cool.

Then he complained about 'bots' as if he was trying to do his due diligence after the fact.

Are there any successful security firms? They all seem to be burning money.

I’m convinced most of their products are a scam. You can’t buy security after you’ve done a shitty job engineering everything

Crowdstrike

I sometimes view security firms as I view Wordpress security plugins. Back when I did Wordpress consulting I went through most security plugins and realized they were pretty much scams. Obfuscate some names and hashes and show some checks. They would run as part of your app, so your servers would need to be beefier. But you’d soon realize putting your server behind a waf, and hardening your server and db and generally following best practices got you 100% there. But novice developers felt very safe with these plugins and every website I fixed that had them was a mess. They didn’t understand what the plugins were doing, only that they showed green checkmarks. Security firms like to show green checkmarks.

If this is indeed an excel mistake (which I strongly suspect), I wonder if it is one of the more expensive ones.

What makes you think it's an excel mistake? I didn't see anything particularly suggestive in the article itself, so perhaps you know more than is mentioned?

If it was indeed an off-by-one error (hard to see why not), I wonder if it is one of the more embarrassing ones.

If it was indeed a spirit-medium con (who could say otherwise), I wonder if it is one for the ages.

If it was indeed a Feng Shui conflict (many might say it was), I wonder if it is one of the more consequential ones.

I'm unfamiliar with a spirit-medium con and a Feng Shui conflict. Do you mean just a 'medium sized con game' and Feng Shui meaning that things just didn't line up in the ultimate vision?

I'd love to know more.

Corporate Feng Shui gets pretty technical, but that’s basically it. Spirit medium con is more seance than size. Amazing times we live in!

>> This discovery even led the company to change its ARR calculation method to reflect reality more accurately and also take into account scenarios of reduced usage of its solutions by customers.

It sounds like they were using an ARR model that failed to take into account partial usage, in a significant way.

I don't understand why you need a model for ARR

The link is dead.

Long live the link

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