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GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

bloomberg.com

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

#261

Post by dispose13432 »

unethical_ban wrote: post #226
mmastrac wrote: post #3

The thought of losing Github to the startup graveyard is kind of scary. It was bad enough to lose Google Code and when SourceForge had their "great purge" of inactive projects.

Maybe, just maybe, someday we'll have a decentralized web with a web-of-trust identity framework, and people can host their own email, code repository, and even website! P.S. to put a bit more effort into my post: I really do wonder if the discoverability problem of a decentralized web can be better solved for things like social networks, code sharing, etc.

You can host your own "GitHub". It's called "GitLab". For my use, it's just as good.

The only downside is that for a toy project, you have to spend money and resources on it.

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

#262

Post by dsacco »

ithinkinstereo wrote: post #240
mcphage wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Then why not raise your price to $99, and let them negotiate you down to... $35?

Because most customers don't like, or don't know how, to negotiate (yes even B2B customers where you would think this is the norm). So if the initial price is too high, they won't even bother to talk to you. The conversation literally dies.

Alternatively, they know how to negotiate, or don't mind it, but given the bigger picture it's not worth their time to go back and forth through the intro emails -> demo conference call -> pricing negotiation loop with every company that has high prices, and they are faced with an information asymmetry as to which ones are worth it.

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

#263

Post by dsacco »

Spooky23 wrote: post #255
dsacco wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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",…

People do stupid shit like this all of the time. Folks are trained to get many types of products for free. I've seen similar cases where businesses refuse to pay for things like licensed information that have a clear and obvious value.

Clear and obvious to who? What makes you believe this is not a Dunning-Kruger effect on your part? Do the customers have the same special insight you do?

Most importantly, is it more likely that you're not as well informed as you think you are, that you don't fully understand the competing priorities at play, or that the business is actually being stupid, as you say?

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

#264

Post by selectodude »

mcphage wrote: post #215
gizmo wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

> 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. Then why not raise your price to $99, and let them negotiate you down to... $35?

You've just described the business model of essentially every department store.

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

#265

Post by moritzplassnig »

mmastrac wrote: post #3

The thought of losing Github to the startup graveyard is kind of scary. It was bad enough to lose Google Code and when SourceForge had their "great purge" of inactive projects.

GitHub is a $100M ARR revenue company that is probably (2 VC rounds where they had a lot of leverage) still controlled by the founders. They are in a healthy state right now, regardless of the high burn compared to most VC-backed companies.

They certainly made a lot of mistakes, had changes in the leadership team and are successful despite that not because of it, but I don't see them dying anytime soon.

$60M burn over 9 months after raising $250M isn't horrible either. If they continue to grow which seems to be the case, they will be break-even long before they run out of money.

The numbers aren't surprising to me; I'm more surprised why Bloomberg makes such a big deal out of it. GitHub's bigger problem is certainly that they stopped improving, had internal team issues, etc. but that's only a small part of the article (vs. a big focus on those numbers).

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

#266

Post by epriest »

dangoor wrote: post #120
annon wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

New features doesn't generally scale linearly with employee count (due to required communication paths, etc.) That said, I actually do think there's been an uptick in useful new features from GitHub this year. We use Phabricator at Khan Academy, and many aspects of Phab that were superior last year when I joined KA are now in line with GitHub's offering.

We've been working hard to remove features, introduce bugs, and decrease quality throughout the year.

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

#267

Post by mikepurvis »

joshlemer wrote: post #83
Analemma_ wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they can't stand on their own feet, I imagine somebody would/will buy GitHub at a firesale rather than see it disappear completely. For all their missteps, they have developer mindshare that is the envy of everyone. If we're lucky it would be someone like Google or Microsoft, if we're unlucky it might be Oracle or SalesForce. Whoever it would end up being though, GitHub won't just vanish.

Or we could actually luck out, and settle on GitLab or similar.

Not that I hold out too much hope here, but given GitLab's emphasis on the enterprise and self-hosting, it would be amazing if they could put some effort into making disparate GitLab installations behave like one big network (think Six Apart with trackbacks/typekey/etc way back in the day).

Github's huge win is the network effect of having one account and being able to interact on thousands of issue trackers, create PRs, etc. It would super cool if GitLab could achieve some of that same experience without requiring everyone to all be on gitlab.com. It would go a long way toward addressing the criticisms that Github is too centralized.

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

#268

Post by jkelsey »

cyphar wrote: post #179
st3v3r wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not seeing racism. Again, just seeing white men not treated as the default standard, and white people here seeing that as racism.

Here's an easy test to see if such statements are racist. Swap "white" for any other race. If it sounds like racism, then the original statement is by necessity also racist.

Your test completely ignores historical context.

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

#269

Post by StavrosK »

matthewbauer wrote: post #189
0x0 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can't really compare Github to Gitlab, when the former has a fifth the features of the latter.

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

#270

Post by tominous »

dsacco wrote: post #258
tominous wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too true. I had a potential client who had already spent months and a bunch of money on external consultants regarding an intermittent identity management integration issue. They heard about me through word-of-mouth. I offered a fixed-price "no win, no fee" rate equal to about a week of my normal hourly rate. I thought it was a great deal given how much they'd already spent, plus it gave some certainty to them around…

Forgive me if this comes across as patronizing, but I think you might avoid this in the future by doing the following: * Charge daily or weekly, not hourly. * Don't anchor your results to "free" (this includes not getting paid unless specific results happen). * If a customer has been repeatedly burned by other consultants and believes this problem could be solved in an hour, consider either 1) avoiding those customer…

That's good advice, but I don't think getting paid to produce a specific result is anchoring to "free". I guess it depends on how precise the scope is. If it sounds vague and up to the client's discretion, that they just want free work on spec, then run away. But if it's easy to define and measure, then it's a useful way to signal competence and avoid anchoring to a rate instead of the business need.

Anyway, I'm happy to say that I avoided this customer (and others that care excessively about timesheets) and I have no regrets.

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