Skyetel Acquired ...
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I saw a notice that Skyetel sent me that they had been acquired. I wasn't familiar with the company that acquired them which they named as HFA group which I had not heard of before. My google foo has not turned up any information on who these folks are.
Is anyone familiar with them? Is anyone using Skyetel concerned about the acquisition and what it's potential impact on Skyetel could be?
Per the email
In the coming months, all of HFA’s products, services, and brands will be consolidated into Skyetel ...Does anyone know what this may entail?
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@BraswellJay said in Skyetel Acquired ...:
I wasn't familiar with the company that acquired them which they named as HFA group which I had not heard of before
Private Equity company. You'd never find a PE firm online. It's a husband / wife investor team.
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@scottalanmiller My only concern is that, while HFA was a simple PE firm, something is changing.
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@BraswellJay said in Skyetel Acquired ...:
Is anyone familiar with them? Is anyone using Skyetel concerned about the acquisition and what it's potential impact on Skyetel could be?
"Acquisition" causes weird reactions in people. It's just some family friends of the founder and the founder joining teams. Companies get investors all of the time, every day. The "owners" of Google, Apple, Bank of America, etc. shift by the second, but we don't care. Yes, this is a change of majority owner, which is a little different, but how different is it? Do you know who owned the company previously? If not, why does it matter who owns it now?
For example. John owned the company yesterday owning 80% of the firm. His friend Bill has money and thinks the company is a good investment so buys most of John's shares so that John now owns 20% instead of 80%, and Bill now owns 60%.
Stocks moving around are not really of concern for end users. There is no need to announce this change as it is private, that it is done so is a marketing tool to suggest that more funds might be available or new synergies available, to encourage users to uptake. That's all. It doesn't suggest that anything has changed. It doesn't mean a change of leadership or anything like that. That can happen with or without a change of stock holding.
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@JaredBusch said in Skyetel Acquired ...:
@scottalanmiller My only concern is that, while HFA was a simple PE firm, something is changing.
Meh, things are always changing. Is that a concern? Sure. But is a change that matters to us tied to stocks changing hands? No. Business changes are cause for concern, but aren't visible in this way and we can't really react to investment injections at the consumer level like this. What affects us as customers is a different set of things that aren't tied to who is investing in the firm(s).
Think of it sort of like a start up. Each round of funding is a change of ownership, but we don't say "the company is being bought out through going to round B funding, should we be worried?" The changes that affect us happen all the time and we always have to look solely at the changes of company direction, not the source of their funds (with very limited exceptions, like Musk "buying" Twitter.)
In this case, it's not VC backed, but owner backed and majority stake is changing hands. But that's a normal behind the scenes investment process that rarely would you be made aware of unless there is a marketing reason to do so. We could have the same reaction previously "I'm worried, a larger investor hasn't bought them out yet..."
I guess what I'm trying to say is that these things are an "under the hood" component of the funding of a business. Business ownership is a complex animal and it's common to see it in a very different light than it really is.
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It's just some family friends of the founder and the founder joining teams.
This hits the nail on the head. HFA isn't some big greedy investment group - and I wasn't looking to retire. When we combine the traffic volumes of their holdings into Skyetel's network, we become big enough to where the letters IPO have been thrown around. It's insane.
The goal is to simply disrupt the market further. Many of Skyetel's competitors are now our customers - that's the scope of scale I'm excited about.
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@Skyetel said in Skyetel Acquired ...:
It's just some family friends of the founder and the founder joining teams.
This hits the nail on the head. HFA isn't some big greedy investment group - and I wasn't looking to retire. When we combine the traffic volumes of their holdings into Skyetel's network, we become big enough to where the letters IPO have been thrown around. It's insane.
The goal is to simply disrupt the market further. Many of Skyetel's competitors are now our customers - that's the scope of scale I'm excited about.
It's kinda like when NTG was "acquired." We moved from a single owner, to three. One being my wife, and one being @pchiodo
Was it a change? Yes. Were we "acquired by a private equity group", yes, technically. Did our customers notice? No, it's just a change of funding. Other than having more or different sources of back end money, the company is still the company.
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@JaredBusch said in Skyetel Acquired ...:
@scottalanmiller My only concern is that, while HFA was a simple PE firm, something is changing.
To be honest, this is actually a good thing. It's pretty hard to explain just how much I had to deal with that was completely unrelated to Skyetel's core products and services.
A lot of that crap are things I'm not great at. Dealing with HR issues, FBI subpoenas, contract reviews, changing federal regulations, etc all have nothing to do with what Skyetel actually does. I want to focus on the actual nuts and bolts of our products and services, and build cool things.
The team I'm surrounded by is really impressive. We have an attorney on staff now, a full group of HR people who know all the things about employment law, and a team of people who can help with all the other little things. It also more than tripled our development team, and quadrupled our support team (and all of those people report to me directly).
So it's scary when you read it in an email, but from my perspective, it's a huge relief. I'm just going to build cool things, and drive our innovation. Someone else can deal with regulations.
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@Skyetel said in Skyetel Acquired ...:
To be honest, this is actually a good thing. It's pretty hard to explain just how much I had to deal with that was completely unrelated to Skyetel's core products and services.
Also like NTG, we used the funding to move me to COO instead of CEO so that I could focus on what I do instead of doing "everything".
In reality, I think a lot of PE backing is similar.
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@Skyetel said in Skyetel Acquired ...:
When we combine the traffic volumes of their holdings into Skyetel's network,
This part excites me. Of everything the HFA has invested into, the SKyetel platform is the one that is so good they are moving everything to it.
@Skyetel said in Skyetel Acquired ...:
we become big enough to where the letters IPO have been thrown around
I know it helps with cash flow, but not a fan. I generally do not think short term appeasing of huge swathes of public investors is a good thing.
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@Skyetel said in Skyetel Acquired ...:
To be honest, this is actually a good thing. It's pretty hard to explain just how much I had to deal with that was completely unrelated to Skyetel's core products and services.
Now with this clarification of reasoning, I have no concerns at all. Thanks.
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@Skyetel said in Skyetel Acquired ...:
When we combine the traffic volumes of their holdings into Skyetel's network, we become big enough to where the letters IPO have been thrown around. It's insane.
I'm with Jared. Public companies are inefficient and impractical. Going the IPO path (which is not how PE firms work, that's a VC path which is a very different animal) is definitely scary. Blind investing, where the owners don't care about the company anymore, and profits are made by trading the ownership rather than providing products, is a nearly guaranteed downhill slide.
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@JaredBusch I should clarify - IPO is not the plan. IPO being thrown around is because our volumes are now equivalent to publicly traded companies. Sorry for the confusion.
