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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

#341

Post by flukus »

inthewoods wrote: post #237
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.

Or is it - to me Github is just another example of the developer tools market cycle. Reminds me a bit of the image hosting market - image hosting company is created and gains momentum, then has to monetize, so they add advertising and people start to drift away when someone else then creates the next image hosting site. In the developer space, it seems pretty much the same. SourceForge was good/cool until it wasn't,…

But github has a monetization strategy, they're a paid service. This is more about their headcount expanding and possibly losing paying customers because they decided to get political.

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

#342

Post by vacri »

> The company paid to send employees jetting across the globe to Amsterdam, London, New York and elsewhere.

If a company as vitally important to an industry as Github is to software can't do this... it's time to really worry.

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

#343

Post by flukus »

icebraining wrote: post #173
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People keep bringing that up, but that's missing the bigger picture: GitHub is more than just a git host, it's also a "social hub" where people can fork repos and offer changes back (pull requests), a passable bugtracker (issues), even wiki, and even web host (github.io). Many people have warned that using these added-value features makes you dependent on GitHub (Linus Torvalds has a kernel mirror on GitHub, but for…

Joey Hess' github-backup backs up everything github knows about a repository (including branches, tags, other forks, issues, comments, wikis, milestones, pull requests, watchers, and stars) to the repository. I'm sure most of these could be re-imported into an alternative service through its API, even if with some loss of fidelity. https://github.com/joeyh/github-backup

The other problem is that "cloud services" have taught people not to back up their data.

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

#344

Post by flukus »

jkelsey wrote: post #268
cyphar wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So does the definition of racism.

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

#345

Post by flukus »

sctb wrote: post #61
dijit wrote: post #4

Part of me is glad the "inclusive" practices of only hiring women and minorities isn't being rewarded. At the same time, GitHub really is at the centre of opensource- how can they be losing money when they are literally the defacto code hosting site? And if they go under, who could replace them?

Please don't introduce generic controversy like this with such a tenuous connection to the discussion at hand, especially with an unsubstantiated causal implication. We're just so unlikely to learn something in the inevitable flamewar that follows.

Do we know it's unconnected? I know I've canceled my paid account over their political shenanigans.

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

#346

Post by carussell »

connorshea wrote: post #160
fbnlsr wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm using both Gitlab and Github for different projects, and I just can't stand Gitlab's interface. Informations are scattered all around the place and there's no distinctive way of finding the information you want. Plus it's slow as hell. Github's UI makes sense. I can find anything in the blink of an eye and it's blazing fast. The team I'm currently working with is completely fed up with Gitlab.

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.

I can't speak for other browsers, but keeping a GitLab tab open in a background tab consistently causes my CPU dedicate 15-25% of its cycles to Firefox.

I do file bugs against GitLab every now and then, but I haven't done so for this one because I assume that there's an existing item on file for this (and I don't care to look for it) and that this is all part of the the longstanding, "Yeah, we really need to work on our frontend story, especially for mobile."

The end result is that just don't keep GitLab tabs open. Which is a little obnoxious, given the well-known issues with how slow GitLab is to complete requests.

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

#347

Post by cyphar »

mikepurvis wrote: post #267
joshlemer wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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).

Yeah, I think it'd be awesome if there was some form of optional federation between GitLab instances (sort of like Matrix or NextCloud).

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

#348

Post by pm »

camus2 wrote: post #307
pm wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

~4000 for Twitter (although I vaguely recall a culling recently, not sure how many they let go).

I'm curious what does these 4000 employees do at Twitter ? let's say half of them are engineers, what are these 2000 engineers working on ? Twitter is mostly CRUD and messaging.

There'd be more than the consumer-facing systems. Whether they require 4000 people to run it all is another question, but without a deeper look into what's running, it would be hard to surmise.

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

#349

Post by daveguy »

alistproducer2 wrote: post #340

The subtext to this (at least why this made it to the front page) is "github is lighting money on fire, can't last forever, but github is infrastructure-status now what if it disappears?" I think this anxiety is why there's a lot of work being done in the decentralized space right now. The UX-side of "web 3.0" is sorely lacking but I think it's only a matter of time before people begin to crack it. I'd love to see so…

Wait. We're on web 3.0 now? What does this version add?

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

#350

Post by sorbits »

moritzplassnig wrote: post #265
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 ove…

> If they continue to grow which seems to be the case, they will be break-even long before they run out of money

What are you basing that on?

The article says that in 2015 they had revenue of $95 million and lost $27 million.

For the first 3 quarters of 2016 the article says they “surpassed last year’s revenue […] with $98 million”, but also that they lost $66 million in that same period.

So while revenue doubled, the loss more than doubled, which does not look like they are on the path to break even.

Of course there are many unknowns, but going by the numbers in the article alone, it does not look like a slam dunk.

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