LogMeIn selling to private equity firms

Has there been any coverage on TWiT about LogMeIn (owner of LastPass) selling to private equity firms?

Hopefully there will be no change for LastPass.

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Might explain why LastPass support has been feeling less than stellar.

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Because I hate paying for news information I read the article from gHacks:

This part worries me however:

The future owners plan to “accelerate growth and product investment organically and inorganically”.

I’ll admit I’m not too knowledgable in the field of finance but if my experience of working in a company that has been bought up and sold to different private equity firms over quite a few years is any indicator, I should probably going to start prepping to leave LastPass unfortunately.

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and i really like lastpass, so if we must blame someone lets just go with @Leo its his fault for naming his studio the LASTPASS Studio or whatever it is :crazy_face:

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Strange, when I went to it earlier on WSJ I got the full article…

Lucky, I think WSJ has had a subscriber model for a while.

I was recently thinking why I was seeing/hearing so many LP ads. My guess…beefing up their user count before they got sold?

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It looks like Elliot Management is part of the take over. Unfortunately, I don’t have good things to say about them. They are the reason EMC sold to Dell (to be taken private) and that Citrix had to divest their product line. If things hold true, I see LastPass being spun out, as its not part of LogMeIn’s core business.

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An interesting wiki entry for Francisco Partners Amazing how so many tech companies end up bought and sold, combined, broken up, spun-off, etc. No job security.

Elliott Management Corporation has widely been described as a vulture fund, which doesn’t seem very encouraging for LastPass.

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My former employer was bought by one of those vulture funds, and they basically turned the company into debt, that they used to buy the company. as the company subsequently made any money, they pulled it out, until the banks pulled the debt. They had planned to have spun out the company by then, but shit [didn’t] happen, and we went bankrupt instead. So much fun! I really hate “high finance” and their bad influence ruining perfectly operational if marginal companies!

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Like @tingspace I’m going to start preparing just in case LastPass does not survive as a workable solution.

I started using LastPass in 2008 or 2009 and continue to use it. However it has become less useful over the years. In particular I’m finding more and more sites where it won’t auto-login, auto-fill or even manually fill in credentials. This leaves me all too often having to open the LastPass site record for editing, unhide the password and then manually copy and paste the username and password one at a time in to the web login screen.

Up until four or five years ago I tried to get friends, family and work to use LastPass but all found it more work than using a paper list for their important passwords and using simple passwords for non-critical logins (e.g. social media). The few iPhone/MacBook users I know all preferred Apples’ own solution.

Lately as LastPass has had more and more annoyances for me I stopped recommending it to anyone. The most recent frustration is that now every time one of my browser’s updates LastPass re-installs a useless desktop icon and usually forgets the previous extension settings, especially the all important automatic logout on browser close.

My general experience is that only partially failing companies get bought up by vulture capitalists. I suspect there’s better than a 50/50 chance that LastPass will end up getting worse on performance and support. Then they’ll start raising the subscription prices and finally close their doors. I plan to bail the minute they try to charge more for a less functional service.

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All I can hope for is that LastPass survives. Time will tell.

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Sho nuff!!! :smiley: :smiley:

I agree.

It would be ashamed to see them go away

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And I just thought no-autofill was some baked in extra security various websites programmed. Ex: Google requires multiple track-pad taps to activate LP whereas Amazon does auto-fill and this forum requires clicking the LP icon. So @PaulHutch this is a LastPass issue and not the website login script doing some kind of input field sanitation?

I know with Verizon, I need to copy the password and paste it in.

In the end, I expect that Last Pass will survive. Just whether or not it remains part of LogMeIn remains to be seen.

PayPal is set to fill userID with email including the ‘@foo.com’ and it ALWAYS removes that from autofill and I have to manually go cut and paste. I presume it has something to do with an interaction between the way LastPass sends the text and the validation Javascript running on the page receives it. I can’t see how it’s helping anything since it seems to me that an email address is EXPECTED for that field and anything that does automation is more likely to be secure than me trying to type it myself.

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As one that just started dipping my toes into using LastPass, this is a little concerning. It could end up being completely transparent to the users but there is a chance that it could mean the end to LastPass. Most equity firms aren’t buying companies for the long term. They look for good value, trim the fat, and re-sell. If LastPass has “value” (are they profitable) then it will stick around. If its bleeding money, they will shut it down or sell it off. VC firms don’t want to hold unprofitable assets. Only time will tell what the future holds for LastPass.

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I can’t wait until Steve shares his option about this. My main concern is how this could affect the privacy of our data. I wonder if @Leo knew this was in the works before accepting LastPass’s sponsorship of the TWiT studios and if it will affect his decision going forward.

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I’m afraid money talks and an agreement like this most likely has penalties on either side if cancelled for no good reason.

There are exceptions to like withholding significant information like this during the negotiations. But I don’t want to get too deep into this kind of speculation until we’ve heard from @Leo about it.

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