00:22:55 · Sean O’Kane, Kirsten Korosec
But now that we're talking in more, like, softer skills, you know, in the corporate world, but there's gonna be burnout from that. There's gonna be limits to that when it comes to the humans who are using the tools. And so, like, what kind of balance are they able to strike? How much are they going to be able to sort of, like, put on the shoulders of these employees before they break is a really interesting question for the next few years. [00:23:22] S1: And it's an interesting point in terms of, like, comp... What what it means for companies like Squarespace, and you can see a future in which some companies will double down on, like, human facing customer contact in order to stand out unlike others, and I'll be very interested to see how that plays out. But I really wanna talk about an incredible tech deal that the number raised both of my eyebrows, and I'm talking about the custom chip designer, Marvell. They signed a deal to acquire Lumentum in an all stock deal, and it is, drum roll please, a $115,000,000,000. That's a lot of money. Thoughts?
00:23:22 · Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha
[00:23:22] S1: And it's an interesting point in terms of, like, comp... What what it means for companies like Squarespace, and you can see a future in which some companies will double down on, like, human facing customer contact in order to stand out unlike others, and I'll be very interested to see how that plays out. But I really wanna talk about an incredible tech deal that the number raised both of my eyebrows, and I'm talking about the custom chip designer, Marvell. They signed a deal to acquire Lumentum in an all stock deal, and it is, drum roll please, a $115,000,000,000. That's a lot of money. Thoughts? [00:24:03] S0: I mean, I had the same thought, which is just that, yeah, that is a a lot of money. And I guess... I mean, it's... To me, my reaction to it maybe speaks to this kind of transitional moment that we seem to be in right now where, like... Don't I know, maybe a year ago, this would have seemed, like, kind of normal that just, like, there's so many... The giant rounds being raised, like, m and a. I mean, I think maybe at any time, this would have seemed like a very large deal, but it feels like things have also kind of gotten quieter, particularly for deals of this scale that... I mean, obviously, there's some degree of consolidation as as people are kind of figuring things out and and realizing that that maybe, you know, not all these AI companies are gonna be successful. But to see Marvell spending this much money, albeit not in cash form, but still, like, that is a major major commitment and and just impressive just for the size of the number.
00:24:03 · Anthony Ha, Kirsten Korosec
[00:24:03] S0: I mean, I had the same thought, which is just that, yeah, that is a a lot of money. And I guess... I mean, it's... To me, my reaction to it maybe speaks to this kind of transitional moment that we seem to be in right now where, like... Don't I know, maybe a year ago, this would have seemed, like, kind of normal that just, like, there's so many... The giant rounds being raised, like, m and a. I mean, I think maybe at any time, this would have seemed like a very large deal, but it feels like things have also kind of gotten quieter, particularly for deals of this scale that... I mean, obviously, there's some degree of consolidation as as people are kind of figuring things out and and realizing that that maybe, you know, not all these AI companies are gonna be successful. But to see Marvell spending this much money, albeit not in cash form, but still, like, that is a major major commitment and and just impressive just for the size of the number. [00:24:54] S1: Yeah. I wanna put it into perspective here. So this is one of the biggest acquisitions in tech history. Even though it is an all stock deal, we'll count it as such. No asterisk. Microsoft bought Activision Blizzard for 68,700,000,000 just four years ago in 2022. Dell bought EMC for 67,000,000,000 in 2016. That was a pretty big number back in 2016, by the way. That's, like, quite a long time ago. But it gives you a sense of the scale of what this size deal is.
00:25:24 · Sean O’Kane
[00:25:24] S2: Yeah. I mean, I think that one of the most interesting things to me about this deal is it's like... It seems pretty emblematic of something that... A conversation that I kept having at Disrupt last month, in particular with Carl Alomar from m thirteen, who was sort of lamenting both on stage and backstage about how the inflated valuations of basically any company working in AI, whether that's on the software side or here on the hardware side, is just absolutely tilting the playing field when it comes to startup investing and acquisitions and the tension between those two things. And, you know, his position as an investor was basically, like, they're losing a bunch of opportunities to stick with companies that they think should continue to go through sort of the early to mid to late stage funding process because there's just so much of this kind of, like, funny money stock that companies like Marvell can throw around to just say, hey, we don't, you know, we see value in just acquiring this company and we have the ability to do it now on paper, so let's just do it. And so there are all these kinds of distortions happening in the broader space that I feel like we're gonna have probably some kind of reckoning with over the next few years. And I don't know what that's gonna look like, but I I do not think we're done seeing this this kind of stuff happen.
00:26:51 · Anthony Ha, Kirsten Korosec
[00:26:51] S0: Yeah. So this isn't the only acquisition that we wanted to talk about this week. We're We're about to talk about some other deals that I think on a normal week would seem like pretty sizable deals, but they are kind of dwarfed by by the the Marvell deal. But CrowdStrike paid $400,000,000 for a cybersecurity company called Fiddler AI and then 95,000,000 for another company called Dreadnode. It seemed like these, you know, deals kind of got packaged together in an announcement of, you know, CrowdStrike kind of making a big investment to kind of expand on the AI security side of things, which seems very well timed. [00:27:22] S1: Yeah. Cybersecurity is so hot right now. I wonder why.
00:27:22 · Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane
[00:27:22] S1: Yeah. Cybersecurity is so hot right now. I wonder why. [00:27:26] S2: Yeah. I mean, this is, like, one of those things where I wonder what the backroom process was like. Like, is this the kind of thing where it was these conversations were happening and then the last... You know, and then, you know, quote, unquote, Black October happened and they accelerated? Or I I would love to know more about what kind of pressure CrowdStrike felt it was under to go after acquisitions like this. And with so much up in the air about cybersecurity in general, I think we're gonna see a lot of... A lot more stuff like this where it's like a hardening around the biggest names in the sector because trust is such a big deal when it comes to, you know, cybersecurity in general, which sounds like a dumb statement, but, like, it... Knowing knowing the companies like CrowdStrike and knowing the players having a reputation, like, all that stuff is just going to have so much more of a premium as we move into more uncertain worlds.