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CRN: So five years from now, will VCE be a separate company?
Tucci: That’s the plan.
CRN: And if you were doing this thing today, would you do anything differently?
Tucci: Look. Anybody in any place in life with the benefit of hindsight which by definition is always 20-20. Foresight is never 20-20. I don’t know how many things I’ve gotten right in my life, but it’s a small percentage.
Now, before you react to that, I’ve had things that have been way more successful than I thought, I’ve had things be way less successful than I thought. It’s very tough when you put together a plan, especially when you go into the unknown, to hit it perfectly. It’s almost never done. So when you look across a company on a product basis, on a business plan basis, they almost never work out perfect. Now, obviously if you’re going to do good, hopefully more of them will work out better than they don’t.
Obviously, with the benefit of hindsight, 20-20, yeah, there’s things we could have done better. Things we would have done a little differently.
I think forming a joint venture, the roots of what we did, were right on. We started out VCE as, I forget what the name was, does anybody remember it. ...
CRN: Well it originally started out as VCE—VMware, Cisco, EMC—and became Acadia...
Tucci: Acadia. There you go. Thank you. If you look at the mission statement of Acadia vs. where VCE is today, it’s vastly different. So obviously, if [I had known] this, John and I would not have started out with Acadia. We would have started out with VCE. There’s one right there.
Acadia was a BOT, a build, operate and transfer. It’s very different from where we ended up. Just the fact that we registered the Acadia name, just the fact that we started down that path, we’d say, wow, that's not where we wanna be. And we moved it.
So now, with 20-20 hindsight, John and I and [others] would say, that didn’t serve us well, this serves us extremely well, let’s do less of this and more of that.
Think of your life. Put together a plan for something. How many times does it work out exactly like you thought? One of life’s joys, I think, is that life is the journey. And that journey never ends up 100 percent like you like, like you think. It ends up, it’s exciting, you react to it, and that’s the excitement of life to me, and that certainly is the excitement of running a business.
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