What it’s like watching your company be acquired for $8 billion—20 years after leaving

In 2004, after cofounding and leading data management company Informatica for 12 years, Gaurav Dhillon stepped away from the company for good. This week, now roughly 20 years later, Informatica was acquired by Salesforce in an $8 billion deal.

“It’s deeply satisfying,” said Dhillon. “When you look back at it and now see all these people on LinkedIn who have Informatica skills, it gives me a thrill—even though [my current company] SnapLogic is a competitor now. There’s a certain amount of sibling rivalry, where you have an older sibling and a younger sibling, and you can never be older than your older brother. But you can provide interesting, new products and sometimes be more successful.”

Informatica’s last two decades have been complicated. Started in 1993 and going public in 1999, Informatica was a Y2K darling that by the mid-2000s was struggling to find its future. Dhillon left over strategic disagreements with the board, believing Informatica’s technology was falling behind, especially amid the shift to cloud-based solutions. After walking away in 2004, he founded competitor SnapLogic in 2006. Meanwhile, Informatica had a string of owners. In 2015, Permira and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board bought Informatica for about $5.3 billion, and then the company went public again in 2021. There were rumors around a possible Salesforce acquisition last year that crystallized into this week, when Informatica became the latest purchase in Salesforce’s string of deals. (Earlier this month, Salesforce announced plans to acquire Convergence.ai.)

There’s tension in how Dhillon feels about the subject—gratitide for the runaway early success that shaped his life, and a nagging sense that things could have turned out differently. 

“On one hand, we have this $8 billion outcome that’s satisfying,” said Dhillon, who has no stake left in Informatica. “On the other hand, who’s buying who, right? I mean, I was one of Marc [Benioff’s] first public company customers when he was starting Salesforce back in the day. So, you really have to continually double down on market opportunities to go forward. And this is what Informatica stopped doing that later led to the private equity years.”

Dhillon’s SnapLogic—whose backers over the years include Andreessen Horowitz, Floodgate, and Sixth Street Growth—is fashioned as a direct competitor to Informatica. (On its website, there’s copy that reads: “We left Informatica. You can, too.” The company raised its most recent funding round of $165 million in 2021 at a $1 billion valuation.) A lesson Dhillon brought to SnapLogic: Continuous innovation is essential.

“If you use the filter of ‘We’ll for sure make money in this fiscal year’ to say yes or no to projects, you’re going to run out of innovation,” he said. “It’s only a matter of time.”

Ultimately, Dhillon told Fortune that he doesn’t regret leaving Informatica behind. “If you’re graced with some success early in life, you have choice,” he said. “And when we have choice, we have to engage passionately with big problems.” Sometimes, said Dhillon, a clean break is all you need. He thinks back to that point of no return, 20 years ago. 

“We had recruited an Oracle executive on the board,” said Dhillon. “And he said, ‘Gaurav, make a clean break. It’s probably the most difficult thing you can do for a while. But it’s the best thing you can do, instead of hanging around as chairman. If they’re going to do a clean reset and start to cash cow the business, let them do it.’ And I’d worked 12 years of Sundays—I was ready to take a break.”

Dhillon did, taking a year off learning Spanish at a university in Buenos Aires. And then he started over.

See you Monday,

Allie Garfinkle
X: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com