What's the purpose for this?
1.) Technology
2.) Talents
3.) Relationship
Four independent sources say hyper-converged poster child Nutanix is buying hypervisor flash-cacher PernixData, thus gaining crucial technology to speed up its appliances. A Nutanix spokesman told us: "No comment." A PernixData spokesperson added: "We are not commenting at this time." A PernixData insider told The Register: " …
"PernixData employees, particular the early ones, have bought stock in the company, writing their own checks for this, and that stock is now essentially worthless; they get the short end of a nasty stick while the VCs get their dollars back."
Early employees in a VC backed startup are usually granted equity in the company in the form of stock options. The reality is those options are likely to become expensive toilet paper most of the time. Turning that equity stake into real money takes a lot of hard work and even more luck. If these early employee actually cut checks to give the company more capital in exchange for increased equity, that just speculating. Sucks for them but most bad investments do.
Then again, if the company was actually soliciting employees to invest in a pre IPO software company in addition to tin-cupping Sand Hill Rd, that's REALLY bad.