Michel Feaster: evaluation

Transcript context

…This is pre GitHub. Yeah. And as you know, in that time, that was just almost impossible. So there was a lot of these kind of weird operational hurdles that I wouldn’t have anticipated. That's kind of a whole class of problem that you have to deal with. Again, I feel like I was very lucky because I was kind of a liaison. I probably absorbed a lot of that weird cultural friction for those guys in that sense, at least during the integration. And actually, at the time Scott Cooper was my partner on the Opsware side so he’s now I guess the COO running all the operating arm of Andreessen Horowitz. And he’s a great partner on the Opsware side. For me, working with them was very easy and a lot of my job was basically trying to prevent the big mechanism of HP from making unnatural things happen. But once we had them integrated, I think then it was a lot more interesting so you kind of get this middle period where you’re dealing with all the organizational administrivia that’s frustrating. I think one thing we did well in that period was we took market share so we kind of really sold the heck out of Opsware in that period and gained a pretty good advantage over BladeLogic because at the time, BMC hadn’t yet announced their deal with Blade. And then was we formally integrated them, we had all of the challenges you can imagine. So the software, the sales organization, you start to break up the teams so instead of being Opsware now, engineering is part of Ben’s organization, so Ben took over products and engineering for HP software. So on some level that’s a little safe. The sales organization got put under some of the sales leaders as overlays and to be honest, that’s an area where if I look back, gosh, I wish we had done a better job. So the good news is we had these experts, these black belts, and Opsware was global. So we immediately got traction globally. But, you know, overlays are a hard thing to make work, I feel like. You say overlays as in there’s HP management on top of each of them.…

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