Pivotal was born in 2013 as a corporate spinout, assembled from pieces of EMC and VMware and a San Francisco consulting shop famous for pair programming. Its pitch was simple. Banks, carmakers and insurers needed to ship software fast, and Pivotal would teach them how, then sell them the platform to run it on. General Electric was an early backer. By the time it filed to go public in 2018, Pivotal sold Cloud Foundry software to many of the largest companies in the world.

Two Programmers, One Keyboard

The heart of the company was Pivotal Labs, a consultancy where engineers worked in pairs at a single machine and shipped code every day. Clients sent their own developers to sit beside Pivotal's and learn the habits. Pivotal paired that teaching with Pivotal Cloud Foundry, a platform that let a company's programmers push an app live without waiting on the IT department. The bet was that every big company would become a software company, and would pay well to learn how.

Back Where It Started

Pivotal priced its offering at $15 a share, the middle of its range, and began trading on the New York Stock Exchange on April 20, 2018, as PVTL. The stock opened at $16.75 and closed the day at $15.73. Growth slowed as rivals like Kubernetes changed how companies ran cloud apps. In August 2019, VMware, its own former parent, agreed to buy Pivotal back. The merger closed on December 30, 2019, and Pivotal's products became part of VMware Tanzu.

Cover: Running Horse Weather Vane, Alvin L. Jewell. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a weathervane turning on its pivot.