Pivotal Buys Xtreme Labs for $65M in Cash | Hacker News Reader

Pivotal Buys Xtreme Labs for $65M in Cash

allthingsd.com

61 pointscpymchn32 comments

As a bit offtopic, I've never "heard" of Pivotal directly regarding the kind of work that they do. But I recently started using Jasmine, and decided to look into who is behind it, and I see Pivotal.

I think, "Oh cool. Let's see what else they do.", and man, they fund so many open source projects that are considered "standard".

Just take a look:

http://pivotallabs.com/tools/

http://www.gopivotal.com/about-pivotal/community

Happy to see a company push open source forward as much.

Whenever I see "... for $X in Cash" I really want to believe they rolled up with a cardboard box full of money.

Interesting. Why a cardboard box? I picture a briefcase handcuffed to some sort of emissary.

I picture an old bus full of pennies.

Unless it is a bank cheque, I don't think you can fit $65M in a briefcase. If we use breaking bad as reference, we'd need 6 of those 55 gallon barrels to transport $65M in cash, or a really really large cardboard box.

4 barrels at absolute minimum. 5 at a practical minimum, depending on how tightly packed.

- Volume: ~ 74 L (19.6 gal) -

6.5e7 [$] * (0.06943 [in^3/bill] / 100 [$/bill]) = 45129.5 in^3 ~ 195.366 gallons or 739.54 L

195.366 [gal] / 55 [gal/barrel] = 3.5 [barrels]

Rule-of-thumb: 1.1 L (0.3 gal) / Mega$

- Weight: ~ 650 kg (1433 lbs) -

A $100 bill weighs exactly 1.00 gram, so $65M (MM) weighs 650 kg (1433 lbs).

The money in each barrel would weigh at most 183 kg (360 lbs), so a water barrel will work since water would weigh about 45 kg (100 lbs) more. Therefore, sealed money barrels float.

Rule-of-thumb: 10 kg (22 lbs) / Mega$

- Other Hazards -

Mold, insects (silverfish, etc), mudslides, ground-penetrating radar and federal agents

Mold, insects (silverfish, etc), mudslides, ground-penetrating radar, federal agents, and neo-nazis!

Thanks for the awesome analysis!

So, does Xtreme Labs build custom mobile apps for enterprises? It is sort of hard to cut through all the buzzword bingo in the article.

Xtreme Labs builds mobile apps. Our portfolio includes the Facebook, Twitter, and MTV apps, to name a few. We are essentially a contractor, and work on all mobile platforms - Android, iOS, WP8, BB, and Web are the main ones I think.

Source: I work for XL (now part of Pivotal and Pivotal Labs).

Not sure having worked on the Facebook and Twitter apps is a selling point - at least not the Android versions!

When you buy service providers, it`s usually for the client book. Not for the work or the grunts.

Specially if you bought them in cash...

Like all contractors, either the contractor makes the design and follows up with the client, or the client makes the designs for the contractor to follow. If you have any issues or complaints, please direct them to the appropriate party. There's a 50/50 chance you'll get it right (I don't know who which path was taken :p).

Can I ask what it is that you don't like about the Facebook and Twitter apps?

Oh, that is a long, long list, but I'll give a few things:

Facebook: UI doesn't fit with Android standards, and on top of that it sucks too. An example of how to get it right on Android is the Google+ app. They should really be using the standard action bar (or at least a better emulation of it), and the standard navigation drawer. Facebook had an update for the iOS7 visual standards on release, but they still haven't fully embraced the Holo themes introduced 2 years ago on Android. In fact, the Android app's UI is essentially just bad port of how their old iOS6 app looked.

Poor performance overall, this has gotten better as they've switched to a more native UI, but it's still worse than it should be. Scrolling performance is still a bit janky, even on the Nexus 4 - A few seconds with overdraw shown gives plenty of things to fix.

The Image upload UI is pretty bad, especially that horrifically designed notification.

Twitter has similar issues, mostly to do with using non-standard + bad UI. They have a beta version now with a faked Navigation Drawer, but they got lots of things wrong so feels really out of place (why they didn't use the standard one is a mystery).

Overall, the FB + Twitter Android apps clearly get a lot less love than their iOS apps. They have actually been getting better - the facebook app a few years ago was far worse (e.g. couldn't see or add event comments, which is pretty obviously important on mobile), but they still have a long way to go before they match up to the quality of the Google apps on Android (some of which I have problems with also, but that's a different issue!)

(now part of Pivotal Labs)

Ok, I'm now very confused. When I saw the title I thought "Pivotal Labs" for a second and then "oh no, the 'other' Pivotal that is not Pivotal Labs and which I have no idea what they're doing". I got confused and the past and realized (or thought at least) they were two different entities.

But now, you, as well as an investor quoted in the OP[0], say "Pivotal Labs". Are these two the same thing? Are these two different but related entities? A cursory look at each sites don't seem to mark them linked, though it does show that the OP is about Pivotal as in http://www.gopivotal.com/

Thanks for the clarification!

[0] Actually he's quoted like so: "Palihapitiya even noted that Xtreme had built a “Pivotal Labs for mobile.”", which in itself doesn't mean the buyer is Pivotal Labs, but, in the context, is confusing. It almost sounds like the post's author get the two confused as well. (unless, they're the same thing obviously)

To my knowledge, Pivotal has a small mobile division called Pivotal Labs. That is the division that Xtreme Labs is most relevant to, as XL is a mobile company. This will increase Pivotal's presence in the mobile scene, which was nowhere near the size of Xtreme Labs.

To hopefully clarify a little, Pivotal is the "joint venture" of EMC and VMware to which the article refers. Big data in the cloud is the idea behind the business.

Pivotal Labs was purchased by EMC, though, and is thus a part of Pivotal. I can't say for sure, but I'm betting that's where the name comes from.

Source: Pivotal Labs employee.

I never heard of Pivotal having big data experience before the acquisition announcement.

Their bread-and-butter was providing pairs of Rails programmers and best practices at $500/hr.

You're thinking of Pivotal Labs.

Same thing, nit picking and even they refer to themselves as Pivotal.

"Mee oversaw Pivotal Labs’ acquisition by EMC Corporation in March 2012, and continues to lead and guide the vision for Pivotal Labs as vice president of the Cloud Application Platform Group at Pivotal."

http://pivotallabs.com/team/executives/

It's not the same thing. Labs is part of the greater Pivotal umbrella which includes SpringSource, Cloud Foundry and others.

There is no Cloud Application Platform Group at Pivotal Labs. This is also part of the greater Pivotal umbrella. Rob oversees that group and Pivotal Labs, which he founded.

I'll admit that we do sometimes colloquially refer to Labs as just "Pivotal," but that's not what the name Pivotal is referring to in what you're quoting. It's referring specifically to the company named Pivotal (http://gopivotal.com/)

Writing is on the wall with mobile.

Here is a great presentation on the topic, Mobile is Eating the World. http://www.slideshare.net/bge20/2013-05-bea

Disclaimer: I'm biased. I work for http://mokriya.com

Nice portfolio!

Thanks! We are having a blast working with such awesome folks.

The majority of stake in Xtreme Labs was bought by Chamath Palihapitiya one year ago for $20 million. http://allthingsd.com/20120925/chamath-palihapitiya-personal...

Now it's being sold for $65 million. I'm wondering what made Xtreme Labs three times as valuable in a year? And why Chamath sold it so quickly?

You made a common error there, Chamath put in $20 for a 'majority' stake, which can be either 50.1% of the shares, or x% where X < 50.1 but represents the largest single block of shares (I've seen both types of stakes being called 'majority stakes')

Lets say it was 50.1% then the post money valuation of the company was $40M (not $20M) so in that scenario the growth in value was 50% (rather than 300%)

That said, since these things don't go into details, he may have lost money on the deal if the deal is structured more for retaining the talent than paying back the investors.

It's hard to know for certain; some people use majority as >50.1%, some as "plurality".

This is a good point, and also its worth another note (from the linked article):

Palihapitiya put $6 million into the company upfront, he said, and has committed $20 million over the next three years.

The article goes on to note that this was a personal investment, not an investment of his fund. So, all things considered, perhaps not so surprising that he chose to exit opportunistically.

For starters, Xtreme Labs has had 100% annual growth every year since 2007 -- http://www.xtremelabs.com/2013/01/how-to-double-your-growth-...

Historical performance is not... you know the rest.

Anyway, there is no evidence in that blog post to verify there has been 100% annual growth rate.

Also, growth of WHAT? Is it growth of revenues? Number of employees? Number of customers?

This is surprising. Consultancies are generally worth 1.25x their annual revenue, or 5x their EBIDTA meaning they are doing 52mm in annual revenue or 13mm in EBIDTA. Perhaps the multiple is significantly higher for the client book.

hiring and onboarding 300 "hot" mobile developers (well more probably something like 100 devs plus 100 PM/mgr/etc plus 100 GSA) - this way they paid 200K/head and have them from day 1. Add client book too.

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