Puppet CEO Yvonne Wassenaar wasn’t looking to sell the company. In fact, the work that resulted in the company’s announced sale started as fundraising for the company to go out and make its own acquisitions.
“What came out was a really compelling opportunity to join forces with Perforce,” she said.
On Monday, Puppet, one of Portland’s high-profile, home-grown software companies announced it agreed to be acquired by Minnesota-based Perforce Software. Under the deal, which is expected to close in the second quarter, Puppet will be an operating company within the bigger Perforce portfolio.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed but Wassenaar said Perforce is taking Puppet “en masse” meaning the staff and leadership will continue to run the business.
“Puppet is the perfect fit into their DevOps portfolio. It’s the missing link to what they have,” she said. Plus, the company is a good fit on values and culture.
Perforce and Puppet didn’t have any business relationships prior to acquisition talks. Over the years, Puppet had gathered a lot of folks who have been tracking the company. Once word was out Wassenaar was fundraising, the phone calls began, she said. She noted that she talked to many parties before this deal came together.
Perforce and Puppet met through all of those talks.
Under this ownership, Puppet will have not only the access to capital to make the acquisition Wassenaar was seeking but also a talent pool with M&A expertise. Puppet has made good momentum on new product offerings to meet customers’ accelerated cloud infrastructure needs. However, she wants the company to move even faster. That is where inorganic growth from acquisitions comes in.
Also important for finding the right partner was finding cultural alignment. Wassenaar acknowledged that people come to Puppet not only for the interesting technology and what it does for customers, but for the values of the company: being open, transparent, caring for each other and engaging in the community.
“It’s core to (Perforce) as well,” she said, adding that it was something she and Perforce CEO Mike Ties talked a lot about.
“Puppet will continue the way we have been running. We will be the same after the close (of the deal) as we were before,” she said. The company's downtown Portland office is open, and employees are starting to trickle back in after working remote during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Founder Luke Kanies, who stepped down as CEO in 2016 but remains on the board, said he is proud of what the company has accomplished, including building the initial Puppet tools, creating the DevOps space, and building a “an amazing community” around the technology.
“We changed the lives of countless people: So many jobs are better today because of work we helped start. And we helped launch a ton of amazing careers,” he wrote on Twitter.
He called the deal the right outcome for Puppet, even though he isn’t “a huge fan of acquisitions.”
“Perforce is a great home, and we’ll help them as much as they’ll help us,” he wrote. “Whether I like it or not, DevOps teams are different now. Companies are looking for a complete solution rather than wanting to integrate individual best of breed vendors.”
Wassenaar started as CEO in 2019. She continued with diversity and inclusion work that was started under Kanies and she built out the executive team and the board.
She also continued the push for a potential IPO for the company. In an open letter posted to the company’s blog about the acquisition she acknowledged that she was one of many who thought Puppet would be “one of the great IPOs to come out of the Pacific Northwest.”
“But what matters long-term is not what financial milestones fuel a company’s growth. What matters long-term is that we continue to empower our customers to be leaders in their markets and that we provide our team members with some of the best years of their careers,” she wrote.
Puppet was founded in 2005. As it has grown its alumni have popped up in lots of tech companies throughout the Portland startup ecosystem. Puppet alums can be found in places like Orca Security, Twistlock, Torq, and Anitian. Unlike IPOs that grab lots of headlines, this seeding of talent is just as important.
For years, entrepreneurs and others have lamented the difficulty of finding not only the highest level of leadership but also mid-level managers who have scaled businesses before. Some talent has been brought in from other areas and they have stayed in the region, or talent has been trained.
