Slido to be acquired by CISCO.
Or what on earth just happened
December 2020 brought big news: a huge technology conglomerate CISCO announced it wanted to acquire Slido — a small Slovakian company.
This was extremely shocking to me and to most of the160 employees that Slido currently (Dec. 2020) has. This is a story of how I coped with this situation.
I heard about Slido for the first time when a friend of mine shared an interview about a work day at Slido Customer Success team. I was thrilled when reading about a place where people genuinely care about their clients and are keen to get better at what they do every single day. So I decided to apply and after multiple interview rounds, I was lucky to join Slido in July 2016, when the company was already celebrating its fourth year of existence.
Slido was still a small start up with 30 people and a tiny two-room office in Bratislava. On my first day at Slido, I was given a screwdriver and the first rule of business was to mount my desk and a chair, so I’d have a place to work :)
From the moment I joined I knew that Slido could become really big one day. My brain was like a sponge and I was just soaking in all the information with a crystal clear message: help the client to successfully use Slido and everything else (revenue, NPS, growth) will follow.
The feedback and the grateful comments we received from our clients were like a drug: we couldn’t get enough of it and we just wanted more. As we grew over the years, we moved to bigger offices and we started to diversify. Many amazing people from different parts of the world joined Slido until we came to a point where we’ve become a multinational company. Another important milestone!
Fast forward to 2020 which COVID turned into a year of virtual meetings. Many people saw the value of Slido in their remote environment and our numbers started to skyrocket. We were no longer a small startup. The team was growing and we had a clear vision of where we wanted to go and what steps we must take to get there.
And then came the earthquake with the CISCO acquisition.
During our internal Monday Morning Meeting on December 7th, our CEO Peter Komorník announced that we are being acquired by CISCO. What? For real?
All Slido employees knew that we have started to look for external funding to further accelerate our growth. But acquisition? That had never been on the table. The news was brutal and we were in shock.
Our CEO Peter published a memo, in which he explained to us the rationale behind this acquisition and why he couldn’t have told us earlier. We had also opened up Slido for internal Q&A which was planned later during the day. People were insecure about what would come next and why this was happening. Frankly, many people didn’t like this change and we were voicing our concerns. I was afraid too. I was asking myself how can we preserve our culture and the team we’ve built if we’re about to get diluted into a 70.000 employee giant? We have never collected more questions for any other internal meeting.
Afternoon came and we were eager to get some answers. Instead were looking at a powerpoint presentation explaining CISCO’s vision, culture and the team. We wanted to get some answers about the future of Slido, but instead we got a corporate presentation in return. Not helpful.
Everyone had a different way to cope with this announcement. Some people were still in denial, some started discussions on Zoom, I was venting by creating multiple memes and spamming one of our Slack channels.
The first day was over and it still looked pretty grey to me.
I didn’t sleep much that night and when I woke up, I knew that I could not deny this news forever. I knew, that if I want to move on and get onboard, I need to understand what on earth has just happened.
Ultimately there were three main things that helped me to cope with the acquisition announcement:
- Having a transparent internal Q&A
- The opening keynote of Webex One conference
- Accepting that a company success can look differently from what I’d imagined
1. Having a transparent internal Q&A
Everyone acknowledged that the first session with CISCO didn’t answer our questions. So we scheduled a big internal Q&A for Wednesday. But we didn’t wait and the acquisition topic was opened up at every single meeting and during our one on one’s. It was utterly important to make sure everyone in Slido would voice their feelings: positive and negative ones too. On Wednesday, Peter hosted a 90 minute long Q&A where he answered every single question that came his way.
Did I mention that many people were shocked and didn’t like this change at first? The questions were tough and full of emotions. But Peter stayed calm, he embraced those questions and provided candid answers. This level of transparency gave me confidence that we might make this work if we give it a chance and we try enough.
2. The opening keynote of Webex One conference
CISCO hosted a Webex One conference where they wanted to let the world know about the technology they’d built. In the light of the news, many of us joined live to watch the keynote together. Not only did they introduce great new technology, but their way of announcing it was at the next level.
In Slido we’d always tried to create a great community with our clients by organising masterclasses and product launch events. So when I was looking at the presentation and the videos that presented Webex, I got really excited. I just imagined how much better we can get at our own announcements and events when CISCO and Webex can help us with their knowledge, resources and experience.
We were carefully listening when Jeetu Patel entered the stage as we were anticipating the acquisition announcement. Jeetu was passionately explaining the mission to make Webex interactions 10X better than in person. Ultimately, he mentioned that once they got this right, the geography or language barriers wouldn’t be an obstacle for Webex users anymore. This is where I understood that Jeetu has a great mindset and that he would be good fit to help Slido too.
3. Acepting that a company success can look differently from what I’d imagined
I’d always imagined that Slido would become a synonym to great meetings. That one day, maybe 10, 15 or 20 years from now we’d go through an IPO.
It might sound silly, but my personal image of a success story was to help transform a small company into one of the most helpful tools for meeting collaboration in the world. I’m at Slido for over 4 years and I hadn’t realised how much pride I took in this process until the news was announced. Suddenly we are not building a company on our own, but we’ll be a part of CISCO. What can we build now?
But as I was thinking about this, I realised that the playground just got much bigger. We’ll continue to make Slido the best tool out there because we’ll keep Slido as a standalone product. But we’ll also have a chance to help Webex become the best videoconferencing platform. And that’s a possibility to help hundreds of millions users every month and improve their everyday experience. That’s a crazy perspective!
So as the week was ending I started to digest the news.
Do I wish I’d known sooner? Yes.
Am I still mad that I didn’t? No.
I had very mixed feeling on that Monday Morning Meeting, but I got through it. On the one hand, it won’t be easy and we’ll need to do our best to preserve our culture. But on the other, we’ll have a chance to scale up, do what we always wanted and help millions of people faster than we’ve ever imagined.
The acquisition, however shocking, opens up so many opportunities. And I’m excited to be a part of this journey.
