Vista Acquires IT Education Platform Pluralsight for $3.5B

The hectic M&A cycle we have seen throughout 2020 continued this weekend when Vista Equity Partners announced it was acquiring Pluralsight for $3.5 billion. From a report: That comes out to $20.26 per share. The company stock closed on Friday at $18.50 per share on a market cap of over $2.7 billion. With Pluralsight, Vista gets an online training company that helps educate IT professionals, including developers, operations, data and security, with a suite of online courses. As the pandemic has taken hold, it has breathed new life into edtech, but even before that, there was a market for upskilling IT Pros online. This trend certainly didn't escape Monti Saroya, co-head of the Vista Flagship Fund and senior managing director at Vista. "We have seen firsthand that the demand for skilled software engineers continues to outstrip supply, and we expect this trend to persist as we move into a hybrid online-offline world across all industries and interactions, with business leaders recognizing that technological innovation is critical to business success," he said in a statement.

Re:

[pete6677]

Show us on the doll where the orange man touched you.

Pluralsight Got Private Equity'd

[pete6677]

If the past is any indication, we can look forward to Pluralsight tripling their prices, cutting quality and quantity of offerings, slowing down advances, laying off the good employees, and just generally seeing their company cost cut nearly to death. Typical PE MO.

Someone named their company after Vista?

[jfdavis668]

Microsoft's worst operating system? (Windows 8 is right up there, too)

Re:

[one-time-poster]

Vista Equity Partners was founded in 2000; Microsoft released Windows Vista in 2007.

Pluralsight on downhill slide prior to IPO

[blarkon]

Pluralsight cut its author royalties in half about 6 months prior to IPO. Within a year they'd lost most of their strongest authors and new courses were being created by a lot of first timers. They went on to build a huge new campus which was odd because authors rarely visited their old campus. Pluralsight became more about the people that admin course creation than actually having great courses. They are still losing money hand over fist, so expect the razors to come out further (though they cut bone prior to IPO, so they are kinda farket) It's a great company to work in if you are in marketing - but pointless to work for if you are a technical expert with information to share.

$3.5 Billion? Why?

[cusco]

So Boston Dynamics, with some of the best technology in the world in a field that is exploding exponentially, sells for $1.1 billion but this mediocre MOOC that hardly anyone had heard of sells for three times that? Good grief.

Re:

[pete6677]

MOOO!