OK, That's It

Well, it's kinda hard to grow revenues when the company hasn't really invested in any of its homegrown products in several years. Instead, McAfee borrowed a ton of money from Wall Street, using some to buy Skyhigh Networks (getting into the cloud security market to catch up with Symantec/Blue Coat). Add to that a well-deserved reputation for laying off solid talent in favor of keeping or hiring highly-paid management who can't deliver growth, and you have a recipe for stagnation.

The new CEO was clearly brought in to dress up McAfee for sale, though it's unclear who would want to buy the company in its current state. There was talk of McAfee buying NortonLifeLock, but that would have been a disaster because the latter shed its enterprise business for lackluster growth. Why would the shareholders NLOK want to tie itself to a single-digit growth albatross again?

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I thought I would be more impressed with TPG, but they know how to do two things only pull dividends and cut cost.

True, the markets today are not conducive to sale or IPO, and likely won't be for a year or more. TPG will keep a tight lid on expenses and hiring. Unfortunately, that will probably mean another brain drain to more active cyber security companies, or more likely, larger players who have cyber security as a line of business but cash cows in other areas of technology. If TPG wants out sooner rather than later, it will sell at a price slightly higher than it paid, having already taken money off the table a couple of years ago.

In current market conditions there is no exit for TPG for years. They have to run the company or they have lost all their money. It’s a zero sum game.

New CEO cannot override current downturn of global markets.

Yep.

“If they hired Peter Leav they are setting up to sell,” Kerravala said. “He’s done a tremendous job of completely revamping the structure of his last two companies and making them more operationally efficient. If they wanted to IPO, they would have hired somebody who was more of a visionary. With Peter, he’s an operations machine. There may be nobody better at it than him. If they want to sell, he’s certainly a good fit.”

During its four years as a standalone security company, McAfee has struggled to make the transition from a consumer endpoint business to an enterprise security powerhouse.

https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/mcafee-hires-new-ceo-mulls-sale-or-ipo/2020/01/

Thread regarding McAfee layoffs

OK, That's It

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