Forward this to your friends at Tableau
One of the big pieces of recent Seattle news is Salesforce buying Tableau. It’s their largest acquisition ever, and pretty amazing for the teams that have built Tableau into a $15B+ company (to put that in perspective, Nordstrom’s current enterprise value is ~$10B).
But personally, the main reason I think big acquisitions are exciting is that acquisitions are a great catalyst for teams of people to start thinking about leaving companies and starting new ones.
Acquisitions create a great environment for startup formation because they…
- typically occur when there are great people, who work well together, building great products
- bring a lot of new money into a community/region that can be invested into new startups, allowing people to go take risks
- lead to changes in teams and culture that encourage people to go back to a smaller company environment
- inspire people to build something big!
Of course, the best example of this was “PayPal Mafia.” After PayPal was acquired by eBay, the original PayPal employees went on to start companies like Tesla, LinkedIn, Palantir, YouTube, Yelp, and Yammer to name a few… Let’s hope we see the same success with Tableau!
TL;DR - Ask your friends at Tableau if they want to start brainstorming about their next startup with you ⚡