Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2012/05/23/speaking_in_tech_episode_9/
Speaking in Tech: Leo Apotheker vs Meg Whitman
Money man Chris Lynch talks to Greg and the gang about who did it better
Posted in On-Prem, 23rd May 2012 17:04 GMT
Podcast
It's a bulging bag of treats today at our enterprise tech cast, hosted by Greg Knieriemen, Ed Saipetch and Sarah Vela.
Our special guest this week is Christopher Lynch, a tech venture capitalist. Chris is a partner at Atlas Venture and former CEO and President of Vertica (which was sold to HP last year) and Acopia (which was sold to F5 in 2007), and has led a number of startups to big acquisitions.
In this episode, Chris shares his thoughts on Facebook's IPO; talks about his work with the now "ex" CEO of Yahoo!, Scott Thompson; the sale of Vertica to HP last year; and shares his personal reflections on the management styles of Leo Apotheker and Meg Whitman.
In the podcast, we discuss:
- A VC’s view of the Facebook IPO Facebook’s impact on other VC’s and irrational investments
- Chris and his roots growing up in Boston
- From punker to VC
- From DEC, to Prominent, to Lucent
- The leap to Arrowpoint and eventual $5.7bn acquisition by Cisco
- As President & CEO of Acopia Networks, sold to F5 for $210M in 2007
- As President & CEO of Vertica Systems, sold to HP last year for $320m
- How ex-Yahoo! CEO Scott Thompson helped marry HP and Vertica
- Thoughts on Leo as a leader?
- What did the transfer to Meg look like?
- Atlas Venture and the focus on Big Data
Next week we'll be concluding our special discussion with Chris Lynch in Part II of the conversation.
Storage-heads, please note that Speaking in Tech will be podcasting from the Dell Storage Forum in Boston from 11 to 13 June as a dedicated session at the conference. We'll be grilling Dell executives in front of a live audience. ®
Listen with the Reg player below, or download here.
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