[HN Gopher] Vista Equity writes off PluralSight value, after $3....
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Vista Equity writes off PluralSight value, after $3.5B buyout
Author : belter
Score : 127 points
Date : 2024-05-31 16:16 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.axios.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.axios.com)
| ado__dev wrote:
| I've been a Pluralsight subscriber for probably over a decade
| now. Their content is awesome for getting up to speed quickly or
| just learning about a technology without too much fluff.
|
| I do see though how AI is a huge threat to them. Using Claude 3
| for coding and being able to ask questions about my specific
| issues and getting tailored responses every time to my exact
| issue (vs watching a general video and applying that knowledge
| through trial and error) has made me much more productive and
| also greatly reduced my reliance on using sites like Pluralsight
| to get up to speed/debug/etc.
| burnte wrote:
| I agree that their products are amazing but having dealt with
| their sales staff last year and this year, I completely
| understand why they're underperforming. They're rude,
| sarcastic, always have a very take-it-or-leave-it attitude, and
| had a bad attitude when I asked about certain features, like I
| was wasting their time. I canceled talks for 6 months just to
| let the memory fade.
| tivert wrote:
| > I do see though how AI is a huge threat to them. Using Claude
| 3 for coding and being able to ask questions about my specific
| issues and getting tailored responses every time to my exact
| issue (vs watching a general video and applying that knowledge
| through trial and error) has made me much more productive and
| also greatly reduced my reliance on using sites like
| Pluralsight to get up to speed/debug/etc.
|
| That seems like a learning cul-de-sac, sort of like trying to
| learn a city only by following turn-by-turn directions and
| never looking at a map. You're going to have no idea all kinds
| of things are even there.
|
| Also, this: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/02/opinion/ezra-
| klein-podcas...
|
| > And reading the Sparknotes often would be enough to fake your
| way through the test, but it would not have any chance, like,
| not a chance, of changing you, of shifting you, of giving you
| the ideas and insights that reading "Crime and Punishment" or
| "East of Eden" would do.
|
| > And one thing I see a lot of people doing is using A.I. for
| summary. And one of the ways it's clearly going to get used in
| organizations is for summary -- summarize my email, and so on.
|
| > ...But what matters about reading a book, and I see this all
| the time preparing for this show, is the time you spend in the
| book, where over time, like, new insights and associations for
| you begin to shake loose. And so I worry it's coming into an
| efficiency-obsessed educational and intellectual culture, where
| people have been imagining forever, what if we could do all
| this without having to spend any of the time on it? But
| actually, there's something important in the time.
|
| > There's something important in the time with a blank page,
| with the hard book. And I don't think we lionize intellectual
| struggle.
| acchow wrote:
| Learning/Coding with Claude 3/GPT4 is not like following
| turn-by-turn directions. It's like having a city guide next
| to you that knows everything about every street and the
| history of every building.
| throwanem wrote:
| How often does it tell you things you're glad to know but
| wouldn't have thought or known to ask about?
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| Very often, when I ask 'how do I do x' and had no idea
| how to do it in the first place.
|
| I know what your trying to say, but if you ask how to do
| your problem, instead of something like how do I use a
| for loop to do it, you'll be given a solution.
| throwanem wrote:
| Yeah, I've definitely seen it come up with API methods
| and the like, that I'd never have known to look for in
| docs. That's not _quite_ what I have in mind here,
| though, but more how well LLMs tend to replicate the
| ancillary context that _is_ available when reviewing
| documentation. My experience has been that they tend more
| narrowly task-focused than I do, although it occurs to me
| I don 't think I've tried prompts around "suggest _some_
| solutions for the following... "
|
| In general, I still find it frequently surprising just
| how much subtle differences in formulating a question can
| yield significant differences in response.
| 1270018080 wrote:
| More like a city guide hallucinating streets and the
| history of every building and hoping no one questions it.
| bredren wrote:
| > That seems like a learning cul-de-sac, sort of like trying
| to learn a city only by following turn-by-turn directions and
| never looking at a map. You're going to have no idea all
| kinds of things are even there.
|
| But you do walk the streets. Sometimes learning this way lets
| you deliver on stuff way faster, even if you don't understand
| the whole.
| elicksaur wrote:
| How regularly do you work in a new domain where studying on
| pluralsight has been helpful? Genuinely curious; I've used it
| when I started my current job, but haven't thought to reach for
| it since.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Pluralsight is a classic example of a small tutorial site forced
| to become a giant company. It just doesn't work. There was
| another: Treehouse, which had a similar fate. On the other hand
| Jeffrey Way's Laracasts is an astounding success and had a huge
| role to play in the second coming of PHP.
| sb8244 wrote:
| I mean, it does work--just not at 1B of leveraged debt. The
| actual company financials look decently healthy.
| jamestimmins wrote:
| I've always been curious about what companies in the graveyard
| of VC-backed companies would do really well as bootstrapped or
| 1-person shops. Laracasts is a great example.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| I bet a lot of "failed" companies could provide a nice steady
| income for a small team if they weren't forced to grow fast.
| treme wrote:
| 1B+ write-off's all deserve a full post-mortem. It's crazy to
| imagine such amount of value disappear into void.
| blackhawkC17 wrote:
| I consider it the beauty of capitalism. People are equally free
| to create huge value or destroy huge value.
| akritrime wrote:
| That also begs the question how much of that value is
| substantial and how much of that is just narrative froth from
| speculation.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| All value is subjective. If I'm dying of thirst I will pay
| anything for a bottle of water.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| Rarely is value created or destroyed. It's transferred, as it
| is here.
|
| There are a few big exceptions to this. Discovering a new
| deposit of mineral wealth and the microcomputer revolution
| drastically speeding up business tasks are examples.
| nradov wrote:
| Why would any of us care? It's not our money. $1B+ valuation
| changes happen all the time.
| BillSaysThis wrote:
| Taxes? The investors in the PE's fund that owned this
| company?
| nradov wrote:
| What? Are you saying that you think there needs to be some
| kind of post-mortem because the investors might end up
| paying less income tax then they would have in some
| unlikely alternate reality where the deal was a success?
| That doesn't make any sense at all.
| glennpratt wrote:
| I'm not GP, but perhaps something like the following
| would be a reason (investigation might be a more accurate
| term than post-mortem in that case).
|
| >In October 2020, Vista's CEO Robert F. Smith and
| investor Robert T. Brockman were named in a tax evasion
| case.[33][34] That month, Smith signed a non-prosecution
| agreement with the IRS, agreeing to pay $139 million and
| testify against Brockman.[33]
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vista_Equity_Partners#Tax_e
| vas...
| blackhawkC17 wrote:
| > One source says that the Utah-based company's financials have
| improved, with a around 26% EBITDA growth in 2023, but not enough
| to service nearly $1.3 billion of debt that was issued when
| interest rates were lower.
|
| Pluralsight hasn't failed entirely as a company. It's just that
| it can't produce enough profits to pay down the huge debt Vista
| took to acquire it.
|
| Many tech PE deals happened under low interest rates, but higher
| interest rates mean debt has become more expensive to service.
|
| Pluralsight would be very successful if it took minimal VC
| funding and didn't go the PE way.
| camdenreslink wrote:
| One reason for Pluralsight's success is through acquiring a
| bunch of tech training and e-learning companies to have a huge
| content library. No doubt they used some of their quarter of a
| billion in VC cash to perform those acquisitions.
|
| Who is to say they reach "unicorn" status and have a good exit
| if they didn't take on that VC cash to do those acquisitions?
| evilduck wrote:
| Besides the founders, who gives a shit if they have a good
| exit?
|
| As a user, them destroying chunks of the e-learning space and
| cashing out is something I view as a negative.
| camdenreslink wrote:
| I was just referring to the idea that they could just not
| take VC cash or the PE deal and that would have worked out
| better for them. The current structure and offering from
| the company are based on those things. It would look very
| different without those things.
|
| For context, I've used PluralSight for 10+ years. Scott
| Allen (RIP) was my favorite. I'm still salty about
| PluralSight acquiring CodeSchool and effectively shutting
| it down (what was the point of that?).
| mlhpdx wrote:
| This is arguably more fallout from elevated interest rates, and
| the risk thereof, being off the radar of people that work(ed)
| finance professionally. The company was performing and without
| the debt would be fine. Vista gambled and lost. It happens.
| creativeSlumber wrote:
| This is kind of sad. It was /is a functioning profitable public
| company with employees. A PE firm decides to take a huge loan
| to buy it, and now the company is gone. All those people lost
| their jobs. A huge net negative on the world and society
| because of greedy PE.
| lucretian wrote:
| the company isn't gone. vista is likely getting wiped out and
| the lenders will own the business.
| pseudosavant wrote:
| More than half the employees have been let go in round
| after round of layoffs for 6 quarters straight.
| chollida1 wrote:
| Normally PE funds are know for not writing things down due to a
| few reasons:
|
| - they are private so whose to say what its worth
|
| - rolling funds where as one fund closes the new fund that is
| raising can take in those positions so no need to mark down or
| try and sell those positions at firesale prices.
|
| This is a bit different as this is a "dropdown". Here the company
| is moving some IP into a new company and using that to get new
| financing, hence Pluralsight being written down to zero. Existing
| lenders get less security so this is often used to bring in new
| lenders money to pay off old lenders and get in new ones at
| better rates.
|
| Vista probably made money here by having their old debt bought
| out so they may not be to unhappy about this and this isn't a
| position going to zero as is being reported.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Tax-loss harvesting.
| cj wrote:
| The timing coinciding with the founder exiting is interesting.
|
| I've heard multiple horror stories from founders who sold to
| Vista. They don't exactly have the best reputation.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if this move stripped value away from
| other stakeholders in some slightly questionable manner.
| texas2toss wrote:
| I know many who have had hugely successful exits to vista. They
| are extremely good at what they do - but perhaps what they do
| doesn't align with your morals
| tomrod wrote:
| If drop in quality and increases of price for the same
| product is good morals, I question the supporting worldview.
|
| "Profits above all" is not a good thing. Authentic delivery
| and growth is a great thing -- it means people want your
| product. Profits above all is just pillaging.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| Sad. Pluralsight has been my favorite site in that category. But
| in truth I haven't visited in several years.
| colin_jack wrote:
| "It's also a company whose future could be dimmed by advances in
| artificial intelligence, since some of the developer skills it
| teaches are becoming automated."
|
| Interesting take.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| There's absolutely a tail risk of this stuff making the vast
| majority of "knowledge workers" jobless.
| azemetre wrote:
| I took it more as Pluralsight courses are barely better than
| documentation, and from my experience of being a subscriber I
| definitely agree.
| zerkten wrote:
| I don't think there is much vision or editorial control.
| Anyone with an idea can seemingly produce content for these
| platforms and it almost always falls short.
|
| How do you position this video content versus
| documentation? Anecdotally, younger audiences may have a
| preference at times, but I think it's more about the use
| case and preparation. I've seen really good video content
| and bad. Same applies to docs, or any content.
| azemetre wrote:
| I mean IME with Pluralsight, I fully meant what I said.
| Most videos barely go beyond the documentation.
|
| I've paid for Lynda (now LinkedIn learning), Frontend
| Masters, Egghead, educative.io, Udacity, Laracasts,
| UI.dev, Safari, Ardan Labs, etc.
|
| If you want to interview for a FAANG job, educative.io
| has the best content. Everything else on the site is
| extremely poor but hey if you need to refresh on system
| design or leetcode patterns no other content is as good.
|
| I use to like Frontend Masters, but the decay rate of
| their courses is too high. You can take a workshop from 2
| months ago but the instructor will never mention the
| version of the language they use and often the project
| files will fail to install. I absolutely do not think
| this is a good thing and should absolutely not be
| tolerated. You can blame NodeJS but it's a terrible
| indictment when 90% of your catalog is worthless. I've
| also disliked the new generation of instructors they have
| where it's mostly the same 3-4 people every year that
| always talk about the same topics. It's disappointing
| because this would be a service I use to recommend every
| frontend dev 3 years ago.
|
| The only thing I continued to subscribe to is
| Safari/O'Reilly. Here you get books from all the major
| publishers and some decent courses as well (like Ultimate
| Go by Bill Kennedy); but I won't be renewing this. Books
| on extremely advance topics aren't released in massive
| amounts annually. There's like maybe one or two software
| books truly worth buying every year. Here's what I've
| bought the last 5 years (Beautiful Code, The Cathedral &
| the Bazaar, The Soul of a New Machine, Writing An
| Interpreter In Go, Game Engine Black Book, Refactoring
| UI,
|
| Maybe I've progressed enough in my career that I see the
| best way to learn is to just read the docs ASAP then just
| build as many things as possible after. I truly mean
| build too, you can't watch someone make a project for you
| and copy them. You have to struggle when learning,
| because that's how you confirm your priors and what you
| actually know. There's also the benefit of just getting
| better at delivering software the more you make.
|
| They've done studies about pottery classes where two
| groups of students were graded differently, one would be
| graded on the amount of pottery they make and the other
| would be graded on a single piece at the end of the
| system. The students that were graded on the amount of
| pottery tended to do better and make more advance things.
| This mimics my experience as a dev too.
| gum_ina_package wrote:
| Another article with seemingly more details
| https://finance.yahoo.com/news/vista-backed-tech-firm-moves-...
| eterm wrote:
| I don't know if it's my own career development, but it felt like
| the quality of Pluralsight has also taken a nosedive.
|
| I had a bit of career break during the pandemic, so went from
| being a fairly regular consumer of pluralsight in 2018/9 to only
| coming back to it fairly recently.
|
| Whereas previously it felt like I could find interesting guides
| at my level, when I tried to look for similar things now, nothing
| felt quite right.
|
| Worst still, some of my previous favourite series were no longer
| available. It seemed really short sighted to destroy so much
| value.
|
| Even if videos were produced on "old" (i.e. .Net framework)
| technology, they should be marked as such, not removed from the
| platform.
|
| They could have been a massive hub of long tail content, instead
| it feels like they're trapped re-recording and refreshing the
| same content.
|
| Perhaps it's also just market forces, I think 5 years ago there
| was a lot more .Net content and perhaps .Net is just a lot less
| in vogue now.
|
| One of the recent videos on .net benchmarking had serious flaws.
| I realised half-way through I had seen an article on hacker news
| about it, but hadn't realised it was the same course. (
| https://sergeyteplyakov.github.io/Blog/benchmarking/2023/11/...
| with hn discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38137879
| )
| bostonsre wrote:
| It was not great to work at a company Vista acquired company
| ~10 years ago. Engineering talent fled, code quality dropped,
| product prices were jacked up, etc. I guess the company I
| worked for was then sold to another pe company in 2017, but
| it's not public if Vista made money or not. I would guess
| they're still using cold fusion to this day.
| skywhopper wrote:
| Essentially no company bought out by private equity manages to
| remain high-quality. The entire point is to milk the revenue
| stream dry while overleveraging on debt to provide investors
| with a large short-term payout. They do this by slashing costs
| to the bone, laying off too many people, and betting that the
| remaining husk will coast long enough to make the target return
| before they sell off what's left to second-stage vultures.
|
| So, while it's sad, the only surprising outcome would have been
| if quality stayed the same.
| 1270018080 wrote:
| A product isn't going to improve under private equity ownership
| abeyer wrote:
| Agreed -- we had a team account at work for a while, but then
| they both took away a huge portion of the back catalog
| (something like 60% of my queue disappeared) and then
| immediately after wanted to increase our pricing enormously...
| we passed.
| nextworddev wrote:
| It's very rare that a PE investment fails this big, this fast.
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