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Comment by davidu | Hacker News Reader

The acquisition track record for the Cisco Security business is pretty incredible. Like HBS Case Study good. Sourcefire, ThreatGrid, OpenDNS, Lancope, CloudLock, Observable. Great products and teams brought to scale and maintained. Even IronPort 10+ years later has done fantastically well.

I'm thrilled that Duo will be joining an amazing business filled with a deep bench of security talent and wonderful customers. It's a really strong fit with what Duo has already built and with where both teams are going, now together.

I guess I should mention I was founder / CEO of OpenDNS, was acquired by Cisco, previously led the Cisco Security business, and am still an executive at Cisco. So maybe a bit biased, but still factually on the mark. ;-)

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Wow, that's really cool. OpenDNS is/was awesome. I think Cisco also does some great work in the security research space.

It's been a long time since my negative experience and I should probably update my prejudices. Cheers.

OpenDNS was pretty good until Cisco bought it, made the interface worse arbitrarily, and started increasing the cost without providing anything new worth having. The second we heard it was acquired I turned to my boss and said we ought to be looking for an alternative.

Ironport and openDNS are not doing better. Sourcefire is mediocre and I don't know about the rest.

I hope you read this,the reason why Cisco chooses to aquire rather than compete is the same reason those companies would do better without Cisco. I am glad for the founders who get aquired but at least the John Chambers era aquisitions did not fare well.

Yo can we get some snacks in SJC15?

I'm supportive. Feel free to ping me and I'll see if I can give you some pointers of how to make some progress on that ask.

> Feel free to ping me and I'll see if I can give you some pointers of how to make some progress on that ask

Spoken like a true Cisco executive. You could have just said "I'm supportive but it's out of my hands."

Or perhaps, no reply at all.

I take that as a compliment. I really like working with almost every single one of my peers.

I'm not responsible for the buildings or teams in SJC15 and the OP knows that. The people who work with me at Cisco know that when I say I'll help, I do.

> The people who work with me at Cisco know that when I say I'll help, I do.

The same can be said for people who know David outside of Cisco too. I know David from SHDH, EveryDNS, & OpenDNS. He's a man of his word.

It wasn’t.

Caveating your offer of support three or four times signals hostility not helpfulness.

Any rational actor reading that statement would assume you’d forward their message onto HR without a real response. And make note of the complainer in question.

If you can’t be concrete with your words, why even bother?

I'm not normally one to defend upper management, but that's a dick thing to say to someone who probably genuinely wants to help, but isn't authorized to pay for and ship an expensive snack machine into a random building in a giant company.

"I'll see if I can give you some pointers of how to make some progress on that ask"

probably means

"I'm not the god damn office facilities manager, and I'm not spending my limited time and social capital to quarterback your request for you, but I'll see if I can figure out who in god's name in this 70,000+ person company you should talk to, and tips for how you might convince them to change their budget to give you free snacks".

No way dude! That could cost the company thousands of dollars. Is this good for the company?

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