创业公司：知晓你的出路在何方

    2005年11月的董事会演示链接在此，你能看到我们的分析非常透彻。执行总结如下：

    I've linked our board presentation from November 2005 here. As you can see, it's a pretty thorough analysis. Here's the executive summary:

    换言之，继续高歌猛进吧！

    战略评估：2007年2月

    2007年初，马克•安德森、本•霍洛维茨和我再度拜访了潜在的收购者，准备与董事会进行新一轮战略评估。自从上次拜访后，公司业务取得了重大进展：年度营收超过1亿美元，与思科（Cisco）合作的分销计划开花结果，增加了储存自动化业务，拓展国际市场。像往常一样，我们展示了一叠美妙的幻灯片，描绘了一个占据战略位置的盈利公司，并在最后一张幻灯片里含糊地提到合作关系。在某些会议结束的时候，我们居然被晾在那里，但我们能感觉到当时某个大公司CEO头脑里只有一个念头：“我们应该抢占其他人前面买下这家公司吗？”然后其中几位提出了后续会面的要求。

    我们也有这样的想法，出售公司现在已不仅仅是理论上的可能了。达到华尔街的期望仍然是每个季度的挑战。我们的主要竞争对手BladeLogic即将上市。尽管经过五年的强劲业务发展，由于在研发和销售拓展方面的持续重大投资，公司的股价仍保持在每股8美元附近浮动。现在我们处在一个关键的战略节点：是在诸如监视及对虚拟化的强化支持这类新领域做更大投资，还是利用我们现有的市场地位和强烈的收购兴趣兑现退出。这个出路很诱人。

    In other words, let's keep marching!

    Stepping back from the fray: February 2007

    In early 2007, Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz and I made another set of visits to the usual suspects in preparation for a new strategic review with the board. We had made major progress since we had seen them last: exceeded $100M in annual revenue, fired up a productive distribution deal with Cisco, added storage automation, expanded internationally. As before, we went through a pretty slide deck that showed a winning company in a strategic category, with a final slide that mused vaguely about partnership. Left hanging in the air at the end of some of the meetings, we could sense the "overwhelming question" in the mind of the big company CEO:"Should we buy these guys before someone else does?" Several of them requested follow-up meetings.

    For us, too, the possibility of actually selling the company was of more than theoretical interest this time around. Meeting Wall Street's expectations was still a challenge every quarter. Our one serious competitor, BladeLogic, was about to go public. Despite five years of strong execution, our own stock price seemed stuck in a narrow band around $8/share due to continued heavy investment in R&D and sales expansion. Strategically, we were now at a critical juncture: Invest even more heavily in new capabilities like monitoring and enhanced support for virtualization—or capitalize on our current position and the strong interest from acquirers. That exit looked pretty tempting.