#10-community

I want to hear your thoughts!! Is this a PE company that purchased?

I'll be out for a lot of time today but I'd love to know more about this.

@Liz Richardson just posted about this on LinkedIn too. It's tricky since the PE company that bought Khoros is also the one that bought Influitive 😅

Ooh thanks for sharing <@U0806J8HHHR>! Definitely looks like it's all the buzz for today's CMA news 📰

🍿 👀

Now that I hear it was bought by the same company I’m disappointed.

It’ll be interesting to see what they do…

I’ll beat smash Influitive and Khoros together like Vista Equity Partners did with Drift into Salesloft.

Since Khoros is the “winning” company here with the clients and whatnot…

Yeah

Agreed, just interesting to see if this firm takes a page from their book and combines Khoros and Influitive.

• I worked at Lithium when the Vista acquisition happened, and that was a rough transition time in itself, but the company did need to grow up after the Klout fail. I will agree that Vista was competent in terms of running a business (they glowed Marketo up before selling to Adobe), although I still don't understand why they acquired InSided for Gainsight.
• I still have a lot of very close friends that work at Khoros, and their morale is in the dumps. They've massively cut resources recently and have increased outsourcing and off shoring, and cut local marketing teams.
• Seeing the IgniteTech website full of AI imagery, and with its generally completely outdated vibes makes me genuinely sad; and just feels wrong in the context of COMMUNITY: https://ignitetech.ai/khoros. My biggest gripe with Khoros for a while has been that their leadership didn't "get" community, and prioritized the wrong things. This is just the embodiment of that.
I left Lithium/Khoros 8 years ago, but my nearly 5 years there were incredibly foundational to my career and life here in the UK; from a strategy consultant working with some incredible brands to leading their local marketing team, and meeting some of my best friends, I can't help but feeling attached to what it was, and what it meant, and just general sadness with what's to come with this.

I had a chat with my former head of Community, who's really concerned with the impact of their overall AI tech stack with compliance (Blue Prism works in highly regulated markets): "First impressions not good though. I raised some concerns yesterday over data and confidentiality (eg - our private spaces have never been exposed to AI. Now with platform level access, they will be, and I'm not sure our govt body user groups will be comfortable). And I got a response from an LLM."

-- Ramble over --

Maybe they will combine the two, @Joel Primack I believe Discourse was the community platform under Influitive, so they might not have been able to strike an appropriate deal to continue that in the future, or they just wanted to own the whole product and an acquisition is the fastest, most lucrative way?

I don’t believe Discourse was part of Influitive…

I thought it’s been 100% open-source based and independent in the space.

I’m sure it makes sense for Vista Equity to only have one community platform/company in its portfolio though…

Influitive's community wasn't a fully baked internal product, it was either Discourse or one of the other open source, but I'm pretty sure someone at Influitive said they used Discourse.

I know that 5 years ago, Influitive had a white labelled version of Discourse within the platform, but not sure if they kept it or not?

Got it, thanks for the clarification!

What a mess that would be, to bring those together, considering how awful they've handled all of the Influitive acquisition. It's sad for customers.

@Mary Green (Owner CMAweekly), those are my thoughts exactly. So many people build their careers and put their reputation at stake when bringing in these types of platforms in, and develop programs around them.

Let alone the cost of Khoros definitely makes it a reputation-level investment for a platform.

@Joel Primack I will say that is a reputation that proceeds them (and when I worked there, they did milk their license cost).

However, when we migrated off Higher Logic (last year), our Total Cost of Ownership went down (incl. License costs), with less customisation needs and more OOB integrations, better SEO lift, and generally less time trying to keep it from crashing and battling with the admin, and more time focusing on strategy.

It did take me 18 months to build that business case, and ended up having to present it to the board of our parent company. (And I'm kinda glad I'm not there anymore needing to deal with the aftermath of "this" 😅)

<@U0806J8HHHR> - not Vanilla for sure, so assuming it was Thrive :)

I just implemented Vanilla <@U0806J8HHHR> 😄 we launched last week. I'd be open to chat, help you prepare, etc. LMK