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GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

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Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

#181

Post by viraptor »

praisewhitey wrote: post #113
jakub_g wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is more or less, if VC invests (or plans to) in 20 software companies, investing additionally in something like GitHub or npm makes it more likely that the other 20 companies will succeed. They don't invest just in GitHub from the goodness of their hearts.

To add, if Github goes into a death spiral they'll likely take a few of those 20 companies with them. In the same way if AWS goes down, so does half the Valley.

I'm actually curious how true is this. Most of the companies I talked to / read about use a very small set of services which are popular everywhere (compute + storage) or services which can be relatively easily distributed across other providers (for example outbound emails, event notifications, etc.) Projects that really use a lot of the AWS and are really tied up in that environment are much less common.

Is that a skewed view? Are there many big companies that would disappear without being able to move to a different platform in under 2 weeks?

Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

#182

Post by josho »

dsacco wrote: post #157
josho wrote: post #102

This is an example of how VCs distort the market for other businesses. I had a recent conversation with a prospect and they took issue with the price of our software. Our app is in a specialized industry (ie. a smaller market). We charge a per use fee of $35. This fee enables our customer to immediately earn nearly $200 (a 5x return with no risk to them). Despite the significant benefit and profitability of using the…

I agree with the idea that venture capitalists alter ("distort" is a loaded term) the market in their favor. That's part of the natural process of systems commoditizing their complements. But I really think that you characterize this in an uncharitable way with your example, which I have difficulty believing as it was stated. If your lead really understood that they would "immediately earn a 5x return with no risk",…

Yes, I purposely choose colourful language. Github is an amazing product, in part because they had $66M to spend making it amazing. Think about all of our other favourite pieces of software, and many will have the same story. This results in the marketplace having unrealistic expectations for software quality when the market size won't sustain VC levels of investment.

Regarding your disbelief, you assume (like economists) that consumers are rational actors. They aren't. There are 2 reasons why the customer pushed back. One, they thought the price was unfair--e.g. "Hey MS Office costs me $5/mth, and your software which does less costs me several hundred a month, you charge too much."

Second, the customer is already earning a significant salary, so an extra $5,000 a year isn't meaningful for him. (Yeh, crazy isn't it). This is our first sales effort and we are learning how to position the product to overcome these objections--part of the problem was that we didn't anticipate push back and didn't properly position the product to avoid these concerns.

Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

#183

Post by palunon »

thebspatrol wrote: post #132
knownothing wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. That's why we never find out we were wrong about anything in science.

The laws of physics aren't interchangeable with our understanding of them

And in that case, maybe our understanding that there are laws of physics and that they don't change is false.

Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

#184

Post by dsacco »

josho wrote: post #156
yesimahuman wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well my company is paying GitHub a lot of money right now so I'm not sure this really applies to customers that are real businesses.

Agreed. B2B still knows what software and support really cost, and they are willing to pay when it solves their needs. But, at the individual level people just don't realize it. Heck, look at all the free software your new Mac comes with.

That software is free because Apple has a strong incentive to develop a "platform" with which to sell their comparatively expensive hardware. In that context, I wouldn't say people don't realize that real software has a significant cost. That may be the case, but I'd sooner say the market values the software's complements (in this case, hardware, robust compatibility and a healthy development ecosystem) more than the software itself.

One perspective is that people are trained to be too cheap because of market incentives, but another perspective can be even well-informed consumers make a reasoned pricing decision that concludes with free or low cost software. And if you want to make a normative point, you can say that this is bad for small companies trying to make software for these consumers, but you can also say that consumers are benefiting more by purchasing the software's complements rather than the software itself.

Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

#185

Post by cyphar »

connorshea wrote: post #46
enraged_camel wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never used GitLab, but I keep hearing lots of positive things. Is there anything they don't do as well or better than Github?

I'm a GitLab Community Advocate, so I'm biased, but off the top of my head: - Performance, we're working on improving this for GitLab.com but right now it's slower than we'd like. If you run your own instance it'll be fine as long as you meet the recommended specs, GitLab.com struggles because we have so many users by comparison. - Following users/social network-y things, we haven't really focused on this and don't h…

> EDIT: Also I want to mention that we value diversity, I strongly disagree with the grandparent comment about how inclusivity shouldn't be rewarded.

I think that GP's point was not that inclusivity is bad, but that only hiring one group of people (be it minorities or not) is not something that should be rewarded (because it's counteracting diversity, and also being a bad hiring manager).

Just want to note that it's awesome that GitLab has community activists. You're really eating GitHub's lunch at this point, and it's amusing that they haven't noticed.

Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

#186

Post by tcpekin »

0x0 wrote: post #118
munchor wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their UI/UX is still nowhere comparable to GitHub's. GitHub is so much simpler to use that GitLab and everyone I talk to seems to have the same opinion. GitLab is still lagging far behind when it comes to user experience, it's just not easy to find stuff.

Well, I find both Bitbucket and Gitlab to be superior to GitHub in the UI department. I haven't even been able to find a graphical tree log of branches and commits on GitHub. ("network" on Gitlab, "commits" on Bitbucket). They also both offer unlimited private repositories (albeit bitbucket has a limit on the number of users granted access, but very cheap pricing if you need to bump the user limit.). GitHub only rece…

I had the same issue with finding the tree log, it's under graphs and called network.

https://github.com/altmany/export_fig/network

Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

#187

Post by VonGuard »

annon wrote: post #96
drchiu wrote: post #19

I can't find the blog post, but some blog wrote a while ago why VCs invest in companies like Github. TL;DR -- basically it provides infrastructure for other startups. The business itself may not be a great business due to the amount of cost it takes to run it -- but it's necessary for the running of other ventures. Sort of like highways and non-toll bridges.

Except as pointed out in the article, the massive increase in spending was fairly frivolous. They spent crazy money on a new huge office, threw big parties, and sent their employees traveling everywhere. They also doubled their headcount, when I think we can all agree that they haven't had a surge in volume or features that merits that many new employees. There's no reason that GitHub couldn't be run profitably if th…

They built a replica of the Oval Office as their lobby. I don't think it lasted more than a year. It's all gone now, and not a spec of the original Oval Office is there anymore. It's an open seating area for coffee...

Nice big fat waste of money, right there.

Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

#188

Post by palunon »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #30
ZenoArrow wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, as Git is a DVCS even if GitHub went down the repos still live on local developer machines, so it'd be easy enough to move to a different Git hosting provider.

The features that github has would be pretty hard to migrate even to something that has almost 1:1 feature parity like GitLab. I don't know of an export tool they have for all the data associated with github.

They have an import tool :

https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/workflow/importing/import_project...

Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

#189

Post by matthewbauer »

0x0 wrote: post #118
munchor wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their UI/UX is still nowhere comparable to GitHub's. GitHub is so much simpler to use that GitLab and everyone I talk to seems to have the same opinion. GitLab is still lagging far behind when it comes to user experience, it's just not easy to find stuff.

Well, I find both Bitbucket and Gitlab to be superior to GitHub in the UI department. I haven't even been able to find a graphical tree log of branches and commits on GitHub. ("network" on Gitlab, "commits" on Bitbucket). They also both offer unlimited private repositories (albeit bitbucket has a limit on the number of users granted access, but very cheap pricing if you need to bump the user limit.). GitHub only rece…

GitHub has a "network" tab under "Graphs" that might provide what you're looking for.

But when people say that GitHub has better UI, they're more talking about the clean menus and intuitive UI. Some of it might just be getting used to one design over another. Although, BitBucket to me has always felt too cluttered.

Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

#190

Post by gizmo »

dsacco wrote: post #157
josho wrote: post #102

This is an example of how VCs distort the market for other businesses. I had a recent conversation with a prospect and they took issue with the price of our software. Our app is in a specialized industry (ie. a smaller market). We charge a per use fee of $35. This fee enables our customer to immediately earn nearly $200 (a 5x return with no risk to them). Despite the significant benefit and profitability of using the…

I agree with the idea that venture capitalists alter ("distort" is a loaded term) the market in their favor. That's part of the natural process of systems commoditizing their complements. But I really think that you characterize this in an uncharitable way with your example, which I have difficulty believing as it was stated. If your lead really understood that they would "immediately earn a 5x return with no risk",…

Perhaps you live in a world different from mine, but what you describe as "cartoonishly foolish" behavior I consider completely standard. Customers refuse to spend 5000 to make 20.000 all the time, or they're willing to waste weeks finding a different vendor that can offer the same for 3000. Others are willing to walk away from a great deal unless they get a discount, but are content with a tiny discount. Because a discount to them signifies a moral victory, or that they're not being taken advantage of, or they simply want to believe they're great negotiators or something like that. I don't get it, but I have seen it often enough for it not to be unusual.

We don't live in a world of rational agents. And even if we did we don't live in a world where most business purchases are made with people's own money. People have complex and contradictory goals and in my experience pointing out the value customers get for the price they pay is the least effective sales strategy.

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