1: Yesterday, we looked at the wild story of Opsware’s acquisition of Tangram.

Which saved Opsware.

Because it allowed them to retain EDS as a client.

Which accounted for 90% of Opsware’s revenue.

“During acquisition talks,” Opsware CEO Ben Horowitz writes in his book The Hard Thing About Hard Things, “both sides had agreed that Tangram’s CFO, John Nelli, would not become part of Opsware.”

2: But, … continue reading

1: The two Opsware leaders sat in a sterile conference room at the EDS headquarters in Plano, Texas.

EDS was their largest customer.

“Largest customer really understates it,” Opsware CEO Ben Horowitz writes in his book The Hard Thing About Hard Things.  “EDS accounted for 90 percent of our revenue.”

On the other side of the table sat Frank Johnson (not his real name)—“a big guy who grew up … continue reading

1: In the middle of the dot-com crash, against all odds, Ben Horowitz had succeeded in finding a buyer for Loudcloud, the cloud computing company he had founded.

EDS agreed to acquire the firm for $63.5 million in cash, along with the associated liabilities and cash burn.

Not only that, “we would retain the intellectual property, Opsware, and become a software company,” Ben writes.

“EDS would then license … continue reading