{"id":5945,"date":"2014-06-20T11:06:18","date_gmt":"2014-06-20T15:06:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=5945"},"modified":"2014-06-24T14:30:39","modified_gmt":"2014-06-24T18:30:39","slug":"why-va-bought-slashdot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=5945","title":{"rendered":"Why VA bought Slashdot"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Jeff Covey has responded to the demise of freshmeat\/freecode by reminiscing about <a href=\"http:\/\/jeffcovey.net\/2014\/06\/19\/freshmeat-net-1997-2014\/\">his past at Freshmeat<\/a>.  He reports a rumor that VA bought Andover just because the CEO thought it would be cool to own Slashdot.<\/p>\n<p>I set the record straight in a comment on the post.  No, that&#8217;s not why it happened; Larry Augustin never would have made a business decision for a reason that flimsy.  In fact, buying Slashdot was <em>my<\/em> idea, and I had a solid reason for proposing it.  The rest of my comment explaining this follows.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>I can supply a missing piece of the story. VA Linux\u2019s purchase of Andover was my idea.<\/p>\n<p>Here\u2019s how it happened. It was just after the record-breaking IPO, and the U.S.\u2019s crazy accounting rules more or less forced us to do an acquisition to maintain our valuation. There were four acquisition targets short-listed: Andover, SGI, SuSE, and a Linux service business I forget the name of that cratered spectacularly not long after. The other board members argued back and forth but were unable to reach a resolution<\/p>\n<p>Up to that point I had been pretty quiet in the board meetings, keeping my mouth shut and my ears open. It was with considerable surprise that I realized that I remembered something basic that the other directors had forgotten \u2013 most mergers fail through cultural incompatibility between acquirer and acquiree. I\u2019ve never been to business school, but I hear that anyone who does learns this early.<\/p>\n<p>So I stood up and reminded everybody about the compatibility issue and made the case that our first acquisition needed to above all be an easy one. Then I said \u201cAt Linux conferences, think about which of these crews our people puppy-pile with on the beanbag chairs.\u201d Light began to dawn on several faces. \u201cThe Slashdot guys. It has to be Andover, \u201d I said.<\/p>\n<p>Silence. The king-shark VC on the board, Doug Leone, thought for a moment and said \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of wisdom in that.\u201d And so it was decided.<\/p>\n<p>That is the only time I recall driving a major decision at VA, but it was enough to earn my stock options. Media businesses like Andover don\u2019t deliver huge growth, but they\u2019re reliable cash cows. Which turned out to be exactly what VA needed to survive the dot.com bust and eventually morph into GeekNet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jeff Covey has responded to the demise of freshmeat\/freecode by reminiscing about his past at Freshmeat. He reports a rumor that VA bought Andover just because the CEO thought it would be cool to own Slashdot. I set the record straight in a comment on the post. No, that&#8217;s not why it happened; Larry Augustin&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=5945\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Why VA bought Slashdot<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5945"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5945\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5975,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5945\/revisions\/5975"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}