Erica is an incredible founder who worked on Bitnami/Bitrock for 14 years. I’m lucky enough to have invested in her at Demo Day, have her as my partner at XFactor Ventures and as my friend. She is going to be phenomenal in this role, she is so deserving of this win and Microsoft is very lucky!
Didn't bitnami get acquired less than a month ago? How come the co-founder moves out so quickly? Was it an acqui-hire? Atleast https://blog.bitnami.com/2019/05/vmware-to-acquire-bitnami.h... talks about doubling down and what not but the co-founder has moved on already?
It happens. Sometimes a founder doesn't want to be part of the new organisation and negotiates a quick departure as part of their terms. If all parties are happy it's fine, and not a sign of anything negative.
Additionally when people want to leave but an acquisition is in progress, they might want to wait and finish their role during due diligence and term setting, and leave on good terms afterwards, than a hasty leave that might
raise red flags and endanger the process.
(not implying that this is what happened here, just adding a scenario where that happens)
GitHub is far bigger than Bitnami. IE the Github founders are all among the biggest individuals with equity in Microsoft just because of the acquisition. GitHub will likely be its own subsidiary under Microsoft for some time.
VMWare has annual revenue of about 9B$. Github.... 300M$
Github is way more hyped accross engineers but VMWare is 30 times bigger! VMWare is simply one league above Github.
Github is a Business Departement part of Microsoft. VMWare is a huge company.
This is the typical fallacy of B2C vs B2B. Consumer products are way more hyped and therefore people think they are way bigger than other less famous B2B Enterprise products
Have you worked as an executive in an enterprise company ? It really isn't everyone's cup of tea. There is far more bureaucracy, politics, considerations than a small or medium company and your ability to meaningfully effect change is much more limited.
Most people with experience in this area would appreciate that one isn't better than the another. They are just different.
Yes, VMWare is a league above GitHub. I doubt many in this thread think otherwise. But a VP is a league below a COO. And Bitnami is a league below GitHub. And a VP of VMWare doesn’t work with all $9B of rev VMWare is doing.
Most of the article explains why she took this job. My take-away is that she saw Github as a growing company and she would be taking on similar challenges as her previous COO duties.
Sure. Depends which VP position you end up getting. And even so, I would say that most VPs at VMWare are a more "prestigious" and "important" position than the COO of Github (which as most COO position is a not fully defined position in between other CxOs)
Maybe nothing? Many founders have no desire to stick around for an acquisition, and VMWare has a lot of competent people who would be eager to take over.
It's possible that's _why_ they sold to VMWare... they get to walk away rather than being stuck at a big company for 4 years vesting.
And when it’s back online you will still probably be unable to read due to intrusive pop-ups, reloading on scroll and other dark patterns in which Techcrunch excels
