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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

#321

Post by bato »

dotnetisnotdead wrote: post #288
bato wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice of you to assume that women and minorities are less qualified. Especially in light of the numerous studies that show that people (men AND women) keep assuming on your technical skills solely based on genders.

You completely missed my point. Drastically. I never said they (we) are less qualified, I was referring to the action of hiring a less qualified person based on the fact that they are a minority or a woman. When this happens, it angers EVERY more qualified person in the position. I'll break it down. Candidate A is a white male with all qualifications. Candidate B is a black woman with far less, but is more "diverse".…

But that is already how it works for quite a few white male engineers.

How many of us have had to work with "that guy" who interviews really well, but sucks at his job and coast for 6 months before people finally realise how rubbish at his job he is and he finally gets the boot. In more extreme cases they even get promoted over you and become your manager in spite of their incompetence.

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

#322

Post by logicallee »

tominous wrote: post #270
dsacco wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 happ…

Anchoring is a different effect than you might have thought. In breakthrough research, it was shown that when people were asked to write down completely random numbers (such as the last four digits of their social security number), before taking a guess at the value of a home (say; might have been something else), it had an absurdly strong effect on the value of their guesses. (People with coincidentally high last-four-digits wrote much, much higher ones than people with coincidentally low last-four-digits, even though it's obvious they wouldn't have even thought twice about it. If I asked you to think about the last four digits of your social security number, what that happened to be would impact any other valuation you were making immediately after.

The mere mention of a number - any number - "anchors" psychologically in an absurdly strong way.

So in that sense, the statement: "I offered a fixed-price 'no win, no fee' rate" includes the literal mention (like the social security ending digits 0000) of "no fee" -- so it doesn't matter what the sentence is. The sentence could read "Obviously I wouldn't be able to do it for no fee" and it would anchor to $0, whereas, if you said, "I obviously wouldn't charge a hundred billion dollars" it will anchor it to a hundred billion dollars.

These effects are incredibly bizarre. I'm not an expert salesperson but I do know about them.

---

I guess I should give a reference: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/books/review/thinking-fast...

Is a good introductory article. Daniel Kahneman is the name most associated with this research, or at least reporting it, and he won a Nobel prize* in Economics in 2002 for his work.

* (the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences by the Swedish National Bank)

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

#323

Post by fredsters_s »

rexreed wrote: post #319

It seemed that Github was doing just fine accomplishing their mission and goals when they were bootstrapping, but things got ridiculous with a massive (and possibly unneeded) VC investment. Or at least an investment of that humongous sum of money. Can someone explain the rationale behind pumping all this money into firms that clearly don't need such vast amounts of it, which only spurs exorbitant and unnecessary spen…

It's opportunistic investment from investors who predict continued growth.

The hook for the founders? Who knows. My guesses:

- assumption that eventually the enterprise play will win the majority of the $ in the market

- that there is possibly a winner-takes-all dynamic in the market, given the strong ecosystem benefits

Also, it's very expensive to sell top-down to enterprises. In SaaS your cost of sale is up-front (sales salaries, commissions, acquiring the customer etc) whereas the payout is typically over time. Even if the contracts are mostly paid up front, you still have to build the enterprise sales team and ramp the reps, which can take around 6 months. So it's possible that the logical premise "pumping all this money into firms that clearly don't need such vast amounts of it" may be incorrect if enterprise sales success is required for long term success and they don't have the cash to 'go enterprise'.

Will be fascinating to see how this market plays out. My money is on Sid.

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

#324

Post by sixstringtheory »

throwanem wrote: post #175
connorshea wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you using GitLab.com or hosting it yourself? We're working on improving GitLab.com, but self-hosting GitLab should be pretty fast in most circumstances. As for the interface, we're working on improving the design of the product and have just hired a UX Researcher to help with that. Would be happy to hear any specifics you have to offer.

Searching an issue number in the list page's text input should take me to the issue. Sounds small but it's a frequent irritation; I will be 200% happier with Gitlab once it's solved, and my teammates even more so.

If you have Alfred, you can set up a custom web search since issue numbers are in the URL. I have tons of these set up to get to different repos, my global list of PRs, etc. It's that much faster because you don't even need to open a browser or navigate to the page to type in a search field.

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

#325

Post by maxxxxx »

tominous wrote: post #229
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…

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…

When I was freelance I noticed that some consultants got the big checks without question whereas others got nickled and dimed for the same work. I think the key is to be able to "talk business" with the business people. It's a skill to have. I didn't :-(

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

#326

Post by nerdponx »

sumedh wrote: post #310
camus2 wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is Imgur making money ?

Ads, they are making good money from the ads that they removed paid plans and gave all the features to everyone.

Keep in mind that also have a superior product to just about every image host that came before them (other than Flickr), they are the de-facto favored image host for Reddit, and to top it off have their own social networking features with non-trivial market adoption.

With that many eyeballs on your site it's no surprise that even their subtle advertising style [1] is profitable. I'd personally much rather see sponsored posts everywhere than pandering direct marketing and spying/tracking.

[1]: http://www.imgurads.com/

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

#327

Post by angry_octet »

dsacco wrote: post #262
ithinkinstereo wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When I think of how much of my life sales people have wasted on meetings and calls and blah blah it makes me want to cry. Just tell me the goddamn price. I'll tell you if it's too much.

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

#328

Post by fredsters_s »

noobermin wrote: post #110
joeax wrote: post #54

The takeaways from the article: (1) They went on a hiring spree in 2015-16, dramatically increasing their costs before their revenue was able to keep up. Something to keep an eye on in 2017. (2) Half the team is remote! Kudos to them for making this work.

>Half the team is remote! Kudos to them for making this work. Are you being sarcastic (esp, in light of your point 1) )? Out of curiosity from someone not in the know, would remote employees cost more or less than ones made to come in every morning?

Much less. Not just localized salaries (GH didn't used to do this, they may do now) which are always cheaper than SF, but for employees outside of the US no benefits cost, health insurance etc.

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

#329

Post by sleepyhead »

tim333 wrote: post #224

It's funny reading Tom Preston-Werner's write up on GitHub in Dec 08: >You Don’t Need Venture Capital >A lot has been written recently about how the venture capital world is changing. I don’t pretend to be an expert on the subject, but I’ve learned enough to say that a web startup like ours doesn’t need any outside money to succeed. I know this because we haven’t taken a single dime from investors. We bootstrapped th…

He was right though. They didn't need it. But it was just too much money for the founders to say no to. I'm also in the bootstrapping camp but I don't blame them for filling up their bank account.

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

#330

Post by dsacco »

arctangent wrote: post #299
dsacco wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Charge daily or weekly, not hourly. This can work for the provider of a service, in certain circumstances. But my opinion is that it is always better to charge a price that reflects the value delivered, no matter how long it takes to deliver that value. There is a (possibly apocryphal) anecdote I read once in which a consultant was brought in to service a machine with many parts. He replaced one part and invoiced (…

Yep, I agree. Part of my philosophy in charging weekly is to abstract away the cost from an hourly metric and anchor it closer to the project itself.
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