Private Equity companies only want one thing and it's.......
328 | Fri 02 Aug 2 p.m.–2:45 p.m.
Presented by
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Ben Ford
https://binford2k.com
Ben is director of Community Developer Relations at Puppet which tickles his funnybone because he gets to strategize over community engagement, build neat things, -and- talk to people! \o/ He's been in the tech industry in one way or another since the late 90's doing everything from devops before devops was a thing at a tiny security startup, to forensics investigations, to maintaining a compute cluster for a computational anthropology department at an American university and teaching the grad students how to write distributed Java code to run on it.
He's one of those weirdos who runs marathons in those funny finger shoes and yes he's read the book. It was ok.
Ben Ford
https://binford2k.com
Abstract
The experience of being acquired by a private equity company is often traumatic. There are layoffs and reorgs and canceled projects and nobody knows who's working on what and the back office suite always changes so you're off balance to begin with and... and the community. Who's keeping the community engaged through the process? How do you even keep a community alive, when all the metrics seem to be up in the air and nobody seems to care about what's important? Complaints are piling up, community members feel unappreciated, and we keep stepping on them. Don't they know that community is what built this company?
It doesn't have to end here. This talk will go through our experiences with this situation and how we learned from it and are coming through the other side. I will talk about how we learned to communicate our business value and how we had to reset some of our expectations. Most importantly, I'll talk about how we taught the new company to look at our community, not with greed, but with appreciation.
The experience of being acquired by a private equity company is often traumatic. There are layoffs and reorgs and canceled projects and nobody knows who's working on what and the back office suite always changes so you're off balance to begin with and... and the community. Who's keeping the community engaged through the process? How do you even keep a community alive, when all the metrics seem to be up in the air and nobody seems to care about what's important? Complaints are piling up, community members feel unappreciated, and we keep stepping on them. Don't they know that community is what built this company? It doesn't have to end here. This talk will go through our experiences with this situation and how we learned from it and are coming through the other side. I will talk about how we learned to communicate our business value and how we had to reset some of our expectations. Most importantly, I'll talk about how we taught the new company to look at our community, not with greed, but with appreciation.