The word empire is used for anything these days. Mistral is successful, but their market cap $14B is less than than revenue of OpenAI or Anthropic. They may not have the scale to compete with the American and the Chinese companies.
a big part of the process is getting the permits in each city. Even if there is a miracle, they still need to go to each city and establish their operations.
Not everyone was laid off immediately in the government. Some people were given 6 months notices, etc. Then the local authorities started to discuss the gap in their budgets. In my town they stopped hiring first and then they decided to cut some positions starting from 2026.
We've gone full circle. I asked Gemini what is the sale price and I got this answer:
"Within the tech community (such as discussions on Hacker News), estimates have varied wildly. While some speculate on a "9-figure" deal (over $100 million), others suggest a more modest range of $10–$20 million based on Polarr's estimated revenue and team size at the time of the sale."
Their game is survival. Their original data business is under heavy attack from smaller companies and the cloud providers. They had to pivot somewhere and the cloud business looks like a natural direction for them. They play the role of the disruptor here. They offer significantly lower traffic fees than the rest. That's why they attracted Zoom and similar companies which require high traffic.
The biggest difference is not the morality of the management of the two types of companies, but the type of business they are into.
Many private companies are growth businesses. On the opposite side, private equity targets businesses which are stable, but not growing or declining. PE looks for products which have high cost to switch or products with no alternatives.
So when private equity buys the business they extract money in 3 ways:
- Raise their prices. This is similar to the public companies, but they do it more aggressively, because their customers don't have a choice. For reference see, what VMWare did after it was bought by Broadcom (Broadcom is a public company which acts as a private equity).
- Reduce costs, via layoffs and cutting smaller products. Also done by public companies, but the difference here is the magnitude. It is quite common for Private equity owned companies to have several years of 20% layoffs, until the original workers are completely replaced by workers in cheaper locations. Or not replaced at all which leads to a worse service.
- And finally the third way a private equity extracts money from the acquired company by providing "services". Employees from the PE company are elected on the board of directors of the acquired company. A PE executive can become a CEO of an acquired company. PE companies have satellite companies, which provide legal, administrative and financial services to their companies.
On top of that the acquired company has to pay the loan which was used to be acquired.
Evernote was in decline in more than 5 years before their sale to Bending Spoons. The sale didn't improve anything, because Bending Spoons act as private equity. They layoffs, moving the job to cheaper locations and increasing the prices.
The housing prices and the rents are extremely high right now. Everyone who bought in the last 3 years, doesn't have much room to work for a lower wages.
In addition to that health care will become more expensive, the student loans will resume, etc, etc.