I've seen firsthand how PE ruins startups. I joined a seed co and our founder went with a PE firm rather than a VC for our next round. The VCs were upfront about job cuts but the PE investors did not say anything until they took over.
Needless to say, the founder got a good paycheck but we were left holding the bag.
It was a bloodbath and they completely ruined the culture, product, morale, and any semblance of growth. It was personally the most stressful period of my working life...
From then on, the moment that I see private equity mentioned anywhere, I know its time to run.
VC is musical chairs waiting for the greater fool to come along. Still good times. PE is the chop shop, there is no greater fool left except the customers and the employees. End of the road.
A company I worked at got bought by private equity.
The sales started to slump for the product I worked with, and they decided to make up for it by raising prices. They figured they would make more money than they lost by alienating customers. The other thing they did was drastically ramp up license compliance shakedowns (one of the shadiest practices I have seen in the industry).
The product and company are still around because bits got sliced up, spun off or sold off. PE no longer has its tendrils in it, although I am not sure who does now.
It sounds unusual for a seed-stage company (I assume that’s what you mean) to seek funding from private equity. Did the company already have significant revenue and profitability? Why did the founder go for private equity rather than VC.. was the founder basically looking to sell/exit at that point?
Yeah exactly - it was essentially at the revenue of series B or C at that point. This is in 2021 during the height of ZIRP, so I assume part of it was frothiness but the aftermath was terrible.
Aside from remote images, they store all of your emails on their servers. Not sure why they don't receive the same scrutiny that other email apps like Edison have [1].
I've heard enough fishy stories from former engineers there — people should think twice before logging in and letting them ingest your full account history (as with any third party email app, which Gmail is already cracking down on [2]).
Edison packages up info from user emails and sells that on the data market. Maybe Superhuman isn't doing this (yet), and therefore aren't being scrutinized for this security/privacy lapse in the same way.
I do not think this is true. I'm pretty sure it's all locally stored aside from "scheduled emails" which are temporarily stored on their services before they are deleted.
Note: I'm not using Superhuman currently, but tried it briefly a few months ago.
Needless to say, the founder got a good paycheck but we were left holding the bag.
It was a bloodbath and they completely ruined the culture, product, morale, and any semblance of growth. It was personally the most stressful period of my working life...
From then on, the moment that I see private equity mentioned anywhere, I know its time to run.