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Welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Michael Copeland. We just witnessed the largest

tech deal in history when Dell bought EMC. But how does a much smaller private company, Dell,

buy a much larger public company, EMC? What are the technology forces at work and what are the public and private market forces

that work? And if you're a customer of EMC in particular, how are you supposed to view this?

To help us unravel all of that, we brought in A16Z general partner Peter Levine, co-founder and

CEO of Cumulus J.R. Rivers, and founder and CEO of Actifio Ash Ashatosh.

The Dell EMC merger on this segment of the A16Z podcast.

Welcome, gentlemen. So let's break this down. Did it come as a surprise? And I know the sort of news was leaking out and now the deal is public.

But when you see the forces at work, and what I'm talking about, the technological forces,

you know, Dell had made this shift from longtime PC manufacturer, the margins get squeezed

out of that.

It's shifting gears to services. You know, Delgo's private with the help

of Silver Lake. So now as a private company, it's going after EMC, this large tech public company.

What's driving this marriage, do you think? Ash, why don't we start with you?

Well, I think there has been a secular shift of enterprise, IT, and IT in general.

As businesses start to become more about digital, more about information, fast becomes the new big.

And the old notion of building the three-tier architecture with boxes all over the place

and large IT organizations running around managing these boxes became one of the biggest boat anchors

for businesses. And the consumer market demonstrated that you could actually build a business

where IT becomes an accelerator. And that adoption certainly led to a huge amount of

commoditization and inevitably led to this consolidation. I think that is as simple as that.

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