guybrush0123

Not necessarily. If you want the best price for the company, you might want to grow it before you sell it.

New Relic went through a few reorgs during his tenure, but they didn't freeze hiring until after the sale.

> As CEO at New Relic, Staples’ strategic leadership and deep product knowledge significantly increased the company’s enterprise value. By accelerating revenue and driving increased profitability, he made New Relic one of the most broadly adopted platforms in its category. Staples has nearly 30 years of experience building developer platforms and serving developers as customers. Prior to New Relic, he spent many years at Microsoft and Adobe in executive leadership roles, building and scaling several multi-billion-dollar businesses.

On a burner account as I am a New Relic employee.

Bill Staples was a nice enough guy, but at New Relic he was specifically brought in as CEO to get the company prepared to be sold. Which is the exact same thing he did at Marketo before that.

He has no relevant tech experience, except when it comes to preparing a company to be sold in the next 2-3 years.