This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
For background, despite the name, Autonomy was a pretty generic business middleware-ish corporation, mostly based around database search. AFAIK, no significant AI focus. HP bought, as Tophattingson says, for 11bn USD in 2011, and it was pretty much scrap by late 2012, eventually getting sold to OpenText (with some handoffs on the way) in 2016.
Matt Levine had some good contemporaneous reporting, though I'll caveat that he's prone to thinking everything's a scam, if in a scam-heavy field. Regardless of whether it was a scam to start with, several billion dollars in losses would pretty easily get enough negative attention to get a few people homicidal, though ten years is a long time to wait for justice if you're willing to just hit someone with a lorry.
"Middleware-ish enterprise software company that does something related to like ... search maybe?"
This partially explains the tendency for overvaluation. Back in this time period, if you were selling SaaS and could point to big enterprise clients with 6-7 figure/yr annual spend, nobody looked under the hood that much more - especially if it was a "backend nobody really "sees" it that much" service.
It does not surprise me at all that some greedy founders probably realized this and started to slap all sorts of very optimistic numbers on everything.
There's definitely some of that going on, and HP certainly seemed primed to buy those optimistic numbers and then some. At one point HP internally valued Autonomy at a 40bn+ USD.
But allegedly the behavior here was Worse than hilarious optimism. From the Hussain (Autonomy CFO) trial appeal:
And there's a really big list of individual screwy behaviors (the Vatican gets involved! Twice!). While a lot of them were 'just' recognizing revenue earlier in sketchy ways, others look like pretty overt efforts to manufacture revenue or 'revenue' while hiding costs. I have absolutely no idea about the legality of this sort of accounting foolery in a public company normally, nor in the context of a sale/audit. Hell, I don't even enough about accounting to know if they're as clearly sketchy as they look at first glance -- as much as 'just write it all off' is rightfully a meme, there are a lot of ways to legally mess with numbers or have a 'pure software' company that's selling hardware at a loss for large portions of its revenue.
But even if HP was willing to make up whatever numbers would make that deal flow, Autonomy was willing to at least bend over backwards to give numbers making the company look like a better buy.
Awesome write up, thanks.
It does provoke some interesting thoughts about the threshold for fraud.
A ton of SaaS deals go south because when someone comes in to actually look at the quality of revenue, they realize it's a lot of handshake deals and one-off breaks that can't scale into a stable business. The term "growth hacker" is thrown around a lot in Silicon Valley and it's both true and too true. A startup, well funded, can "hack" its way to growth in ways that aren't the core of business; sell your shit for more than it cost to produce and satisfy customers. But then there's a point where, if the hack was too hacky, it's actually unrecoverable and it's better to pass on the deal. There's an analogy somewhere in here about when a codebase gets too fucked up to save, so you just throw out the whole damn thing and start from scratch.
A major issue at both the startup and 30 year blue chip S&P 500 component is tax code. Corporate and business taxes, layered with R&D treatment, amortization, and everything else means that companies often don't know how much money (in terms of free cash flow or even gross margin) they've made until a year or two after the transactions have occurred. Restating earnings is common enough, you just want to avoid doing it too often or have the restatement be too large. This is, in part, why so many public companies view success as "stock price go up," and why those intrepid souls who are willing to actually dig through the financial reports of a company (often known as "value investors") can make a nice chunk of change. Complexity is hard on its own, mind-numbing tax code complexity is an active deterrent to basic information analysis.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link