I think GP poster means “both Pivotal and VMware were owned by Dell.”

IIRC Pivotal’s stock price collapsed, it didn’t seem to have much of a future as a public company, and so Dell consolidated it into VMware to save face.

gotcha, I looked it up, apparently EMC spun Pivotal out from an internal dept, but still maintained a majority stake in the company, then Dell bought both EMC and VMWare, and at some point Pivotal went public, but then I guess due to poor performance the price dropped so dell had VMWare buy it all back.

I'm guessing that's what OPs referring to when he says that the customers and investors were the same, probably most of their customers were other Dell companies.