lkanies

Yep. I seriously thought about talking about that, but it's rare enough that it didn't seem worth it, and it's not a realistic option for us unless our valuation drops considerably. Even then, I would have had to sell many of my shares at the top of the valuation, and then buy them back at the bottom.

So yeah, if you can afford it, this is great, but basically all of my net worth is already in Puppet stock, so not so useful for me. :)

Tell that to the journalists who have been asking me what my exit strategy is for the last four years, and especially since I hired a CFO. This article started as a literal response to them.

Selling the company is the best form of failure, but it is rarely the plan the board entered with, and my point is that it certainly shouldn't be.

Even great exits like Nest's today; I expect Tony Fadell didn't plan to sell, but Google made him an offer he couldn't refuse.

So the point isn't that you should never ever sell (and I pointedly don't promise that for Puppet Labs); the point is that your strategy shouldn't be to sell. It's an escape hatch, not a goal.

Yes, investors want their money back, but they are forbidden from doing so in an IPO, and they cannot exit for at least six months after. If, six months after the IPO, they sold all of their stock, they would most likely seriously hit the price of the stock and cause a depression in the valuation and screw the company.

My post was primarily about company exit strategies, not founder exits, so I'm surprised that one paragraph stood out so much to you.

Most IPOS see only about 10% of the company sold, and essentially all (literally all?) of that is newly issued stock; basically none is existing shareholders selling stock.

If a successful IPO goes well afterward, then often existing shareholders will have a secondary sale about six months later (after the lock-up expires).

So no, in fact, an IPO is an exit for exactly no one. Major shareholders are locked up and can't sell for at least six months, and for great companies (e.g., Google), they'll often hold even longer.

I thought I made that point in my article, but apparently not.

(disclaimer - Puppet Labs employee)

2-3 months is a long time.

We consistently hear 2-6 weeks to get to full production, with 30-120 minutes for some proof of concept work.

And one of the great things about Puppet is you can start very small - automate the parts that are hardest, most critical, etc., and do bits manually as it makes sense for your problem set.

And yeah, managing dev and prod the same way is absolutely critical for clean deployments.

(disclaimer - founder of Puppet)

We at Puppet Labs have always focused on building tools that anyone can use, not just the best hackers in the world. We've got some of the best sysadmins working with us, but we punish them by making them write software that even people who aren't the best sysadmins can use.

So yeah, we get a ton of enterprise adoption as a result, but we've also got a ton of web companies using Puppet. It's true that in the Rails web startup, we're not always the number 1 choice, though. :)

(disclaimer - founder of Puppet)

Just to be clear, this has always been a core goal with Puppet - very low dependencies to make it easy to adopt.

There are some real downsides - we have to do a lot more coding, and it can be tough to get all of the hot newness - but we think the users benefit from a much simpler solution that's much easier to support.