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Ask Tom Preston-Werner, cofounder of GitHub, anything Today, Mon 18 Oct 2010.

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Re: Ask Tom Preston-Werner, cofounder of GitHub, anything Today, Mon 18 Oct 2010.

#81

Post by tlrobinson »

PStamatiou wrote: post #75
tlrobinson wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. GitHub has the mindshare to get a critical mass of people to their drinkups, but a lot of startups don't. But if those startups were to combine forces they might... Proposal: GitHub used to do their San Francisco drinkup bi-weekly, now it's monthly. How about a bunch of smaller (popularity-wise) startups (or any project with a community) in SF fill in that gap? This would also facilitate the "cross-polination…

280 North + Notifo + X + Y + Z Drinkups.. I like it. Though 280 could probably pull off their own drinkup ;) If there is enough interest in this from other local startups, I'll setup some google group where we can discuss logistics/planning.

We need a name. "Startups" + "drinks" = DRINKUP!

Re: Ask Tom Preston-Werner, cofounder of GitHub, anything Today, Mon 18 Oct 2010.

#82

Post by mojombo »

bobf wrote: post #78
mojombo wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's higher than one percent, but we don't publicize those numbers. It's hard to compute the difference in ratio internationally vs. domestically because we only have the optional user specified location field to go off of.

Any anecdotal guesses from your drinkup experiences? Perhaps reworded, do you feel people are more or less willing to pay for SaaS domestically/internationally?

Yes, I've met all kinds of people while travelling that pay for GitHub accounts.

I'm always surprised at how many people have heard of GitHub in other countries. I think it shows how successful virality can be. We plant the seeds of GitHub usage in foreign countries through conference talks and drinkups, and the people that attend become patient zeros for the spread of Git/GitHub in those locales.

Re: Ask Tom Preston-Werner, cofounder of GitHub, anything Today, Mon 18 Oct 2010.

#83

Post by icco »

PStamatiou wrote: post #75
tlrobinson wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. GitHub has the mindshare to get a critical mass of people to their drinkups, but a lot of startups don't. But if those startups were to combine forces they might... Proposal: GitHub used to do their San Francisco drinkup bi-weekly, now it's monthly. How about a bunch of smaller (popularity-wise) startups (or any project with a community) in SF fill in that gap? This would also facilitate the "cross-polination…

280 North + Notifo + X + Y + Z Drinkups.. I like it. Though 280 could probably pull off their own drinkup ;) If there is enough interest in this from other local startups, I'll setup some google group where we can discuss logistics/planning.

This sounds like it would be easy to make an app for it. Just let everyone vote for their favorite bar for a drinkup in SF, and a day, and then you all show up.

Re: Ask Tom Preston-Werner, cofounder of GitHub, anything Today, Mon 18 Oct 2010.

#84

Post by mojombo »

paulca wrote: post #67

Err the Blog had about 10,000 readers when GitHub launched and Chris and PJ already had a ton of users of their popular Rails plugins. This was a huge audience to launch to. What advice would you give to people who want to dive in to their own company without trying to build up such a huge following before hand? Is it madness to try to bootstrap without establishing an audience beforehand?

I started Gravatar when I knew nobody and nobody knew me. It grew quite rapidly. The single most important lesson you can learn from GitHub and Gravatar is that virality and community can help turn any good idea into a huge success. Make something that people can use to show others how great they are. Kathy Sierra talks a lot about this concept. People love interacting with other people. Figure out how to make that work for your idea.

Re: Ask Tom Preston-Werner, cofounder of GitHub, anything Today, Mon 18 Oct 2010.

#85

Post by mojombo »

cmelbye wrote: post #68
mojombo wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have an awesome tool we call Haystack that we use to collect, categorize, and search exceptions and other notices. It uses MongoDB capped collections to keep the number of stored entries to a manageable level. "Needles" are simple JSON hashes and the views are customizable with Mustache. Exceptions can be rolled up based on a custom value provided by the producer. For instance, we roll up exceptions by filename an…

Do you think Haystack will ever be released to the public? If not, could you guys post a blog post on the GitHub blog or one of your personal blogs with more details? It sounds very interesting.

It's hard to say. We don't have a lot of extra bandwidth to put towards properly releasing these kinds of side projects. I'd love to get it into the public's hands someday though.

Re: Ask Tom Preston-Werner, cofounder of GitHub, anything Today, Mon 18 Oct 2010.

#86

Post by holman »

Lewisham wrote: post #51
mojombo wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It took three months to go from inception to private beta. We used an invite only system to introduce artificial scarcity and drive buzz on Twitter (each new signup got five invites to use). After six months we launched to the public and started charging for private repos. Because we had such a great beta period, we converted a large number of users that day and were making money immediately! For the next several mon…

Who are your customers for GitHub FI? It seems that Github is SaaS done really, excellently right: I can have private repos up and running for a cheap cost in minutes. Is FI just for people who are very protective about who has access to their source code, or is it filling some other niche that SaaS can't handle?

There are a couple of different "types" of customers. Some, like you said, are just concerned about their code. Some are interested in control (meaning they control their backup policies, uptime, redundancy, etc.). Some want better integration (we support LDAP and CAS authentication, let you plug directly into various git hooks, that sort of thing).

Hosted plans work great for a bunch of companies, and self-hosted installs work great for a bunch of companies. Might as well help out both. :)

Re: Ask Tom Preston-Werner, cofounder of GitHub, anything Today, Mon 18 Oct 2010.

#87

Post by mojombo »

vanstee wrote: post #44

Are you guys hiring? Also, what other startups do you think are on the same level of awesome as GitHub?

We hire very slowly and very carefully. And we draw from our personal network first. The best way to get hired by GitHub is to be in San Francisco, come to the Drinkups, write awesome open source code or make insanely beautiful designs, and be a genuinely interesting and hard working person.

As for other startups, I don't really know firsthand the culture of many of them, but I do know the founders of CrowdFlower and they're amazing. And they're hiring. Go check them out.

Re: Ask Tom Preston-Werner, cofounder of GitHub, anything Today, Mon 18 Oct 2010.

#88

Post by mojombo »

s_n wrote: post #50

In your blog post ( http://tom.preston-werner.com/2008/10/27/looking-back-on-sel... ), you say "As it’s become one of my favorite parables, I’ll save the details of how I came up with the idea for Gravatar for a future post." When will that post happen? :-)

Oh, good point, I still need to write that. I'll put it on the list!
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