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$400M Later, JBoss Founder Looking for Red Hat Investment?
URL: Fleury Seeks Further Investment in JBoss
At 7:52 AM on Nov 22, 2006, Rick Ross wrote:
Fresh Jobs for Developers Post a job opportunity
When asked whether the operating system engineers or the middleware engineers were leading the charge, or "wagging the dog" within Red Hat, Fleury waxed eloquent: "I have no power. This is not my company. I have sold my company. So me personally, I am not wagging the dog. But I'm irrelevant in this equation."
That's what happens, Marc. You sell your company, and it belongs to someone else. Maybe you could put a bit of that $400M back into R&D as an investment of your own?
9 replies so far (
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Re: $400M Later, JBoss Founder Looking for Red Hat Investment?
This is unfortunately a reality of being acquired. Reminds me of all the frustrations I went through in my last few years at TheServerSide.I don't think it's possible for a company to maintain it's culture after an acquisition, especialy not if you're bought by a publically traded company whose main worry is keeping the investors happy quarter on quarter.
>Maybe you could put a bit of that $400M back into R&D as an investment of your own?
I think that comment was unfair, Rick. JBoss was VC backed so who knows how much Fleury was left with, and even if it was 100M - it would make no sense to do what you're suggesting.
I hope Marc uses his money to become his own VC to help other startups that had as much passion as him get started and change the world like JBoss did.
Floyd
Re: $400M Later, JBoss Founder Looking for Red Hat Investment?
Well, it's GPL, so he can always fork it and start anew.;-)
Re: $400M Later, JBoss Founder Looking for Red Hat Investment?
> Well, it's GPL, so he can always fork it and start> anew.
>
> ;-)
My thoughts as well. He could just take the money from the sale, rehire his old employees with that cash and start... MBoss. He'd hardly miss a beat. Then in a couple of years he can sell his company to redhat. There has to be some clause in the sale that would prohibit him from doing this. Redhat isn't that dumb. It does make you wonder what redhat bought exactly though.
Re: $400M Later, JBoss Founder Looking for Red Hat Investment?
I wouldn't put that money back. It's now owned by Redhat so they gotta take care of it with their own funds. Hell, if Marc doesn't like it he can just leave, unless he spent all that money. Personally, I would leave.I met a guy who worked for a small local compay that got bought out by VeriSign. His exact words were "Those idiots didn't know what to do with us [our company], they ended up loosing money on us and layed us off."
Re: $400M Later, JBoss Founder Looking for Red Hat Investment?
>> I hope Marc uses his money to become his own VC to
> help other startups that had as much passion as him
> get started and change the world like JBoss did.
>
I agree with this 100%. I had met Marc early in the history of JBoss (EJBoss) as I was using the technology in a product for business process management. Marc is a very determined individual, and the whole history of successful open source Java middleware pretty much owes a good bit of its heritage to him. Anyone who has gone through the founding of a business successfully or unsuccessfully knows how much hard work goes into it and when you have an opportunity to cash out (rare) and to a company that shares your same business goals (even rarer) - that's a net positive. I'm actually surprised to see so much disdain for this. I mean do people hate the Google founders? Oh wait, they are fighting evil Microsoft.
Guys is it so bad that Marc wants his child (JBoss) to mature into the greatness that he thought a merger with RedHat would accomplish? I personally think that Marc is just a little fast on the draw and that better times are coming- RedHat is going to do well by JBoss.... as soon as they deal with Oracle, Novell, Microsoft, and the stack of challengers that are coming out of the woodwork these days.
Re: $400M Later, JBoss Founder Looking for Red Hat Investment?
>Maybe you could put a bit of that $400M back into R&D as an investment of your own?>>I think that comment was unfair, Rick. JBoss was VC backed
>>so who knows how much Fleury was left with, and even if it
>>was 100M - it would make no sense to do what you're suggesting.
Same here. For me Marc is a kind of inspiration in the way he is leading the OSS development
Re: $400M Later, JBoss Founder Looking for Red Hat Investment?
> Same here. For me Marc is a kind of inspiration in> the way he is leading the OSS development
No doubt Marc is a visionary, and I admire him. Regardless, he could easily put $10M into something new if he wants to. That's the amount they initially raised for JBoss way back when, and everyone thought it was a huge development. If Marc wants to see more R&D occur in JBoss, then he certainly has the wherewithal to make that happen.
Rick
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Re: $400M Later, JBoss Founder Looking for Red Hat Investment?
> > Same here. For me Marc is a kind of inspiration> in
> > the way he is leading the OSS development
>
> No doubt Marc is a visionary, and I admire him.
> Regardless, he could easily put $10M into something
> new if he wants to. That's the amount they initially
> raised for JBoss way back when, and everyone thought
> it was a huge development. If Marc wants to see more
> R&D occur in JBoss, then he certainly has the
> wherewithal to make that happen.
>
> Rick
You've no idea if Marc go much if any cash up front from the deal with Red Hat. The VCs have first call on any cash.
And you can be certain that there's an earn out clause in the acquisition (we have to assume Red Hat is not stupid).
And because you can assume there is an earn out, you have to also assume that there is the classic and often repeated problem that the people in a company subject to an earn out want all of the sales team, all of the marketing budget, and all of the development team working on making their particular product a success.
But of course, the other departments/product groups have no earn out and no interest in giving up staff or budget.
Re: $400M Later, JBoss Founder Looking for Red Hat Investment?
Maybe they can start a email campaign targeting the RedHat management demanding more investment $, all under assumed names of course.