WTF? Why? What for? What are they planning to do with so much money?
Enterprise sales?
Github Raises $100 Million
221–230 of 230 posts
Re: Github Raises $100 Million
#222WTF? Why? What for? What are they planning to do with so much money?
Enterprise sales?
That's been around for a while, actually.
Re: Github Raises $100 Million
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, with this $100M, they can really dominate the code hosting market? There's a reasonable case to be made that they're either going to or already dominate the code hosting market anyways, depending on how big you define it. The only way $100M makes sense is if they're expanding into one or multiple other things.
Not sure why an enterprise would want to host their source code at a separate company when it is just as easy to host their own source control system (git, mercurial, tfs, whatever) with their other cloud services (S3, Azure). I do not think enterprises see their source as a "social" connection, and do not see any benefit to thinking of it as such.
1: GitHub Enterprise is an internally hosted solution. They currently distribute it as a VM image.
2: GitHub >>> git
3: Enterprises very much love social in anything they do, they just call it collaboration. See Sharepoint. Also, the pressure from within to use something like GitHub is only going to increase as new hires have experience with it from the outside.
Re: Github Raises $100 Million
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
Enterprise sales?
That's been around for a while, actually. https://enterprise.github.com/
Right, the enterprise product has been around. But the process to actually sell enterprise-level products to big companies usually involves long, high-touch sales cycles; as well as quite a bit of initial consulting. My guess is that's what Github will use their $100MM for.
Re: Github Raises $100 Million
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're not talking about GitHub. Because I see A company which started from zero, revolutionized SCS, socialized coding. Makes a lot of cash, not from advertisement, but from an actual useful product. A Product that people love to use. I think A16Z is a very clever firm that invested in a very solid product. GitHub has 102 employees. Which means they're already paying around $10M wage in a year and they're pr…
$10M/year in wage? That would imply $100k per employee per annum. I understand that it was just a budgetary figure, and I understand the premium that employer-side payroll taxes and benefits add - it is very non-trivial. Still, do you suppose the median wage at GitHub is that high? For everyone? Salespeople, receptionists, accounts payable clerks? Are you sure? I should hope they are spending a good bit less on payro…
No I am not sure and that's not the point...
Re: Github Raises $100 Million
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your argument is contradictory. If they only need to beat those 2%, they are not under pressure to deliver spectacular returns .
That's not how venture capital funds work. By definition they make high-risk investments which means there is a high variance of returns from the invested companies. Most of the investments will in all probability lose money, which means that those that do make money at all will need to make very good money for the overall fund to break even and beat guaranteed investments like Treasuries. It should go without saying…
So, this investments signals a shift in focus. Up until now, github was a long term growth company, a much more stable (if slower growing) setup? Ie, they've shifted gears, more towards a hit or flop kind of scenario, where they have to get fairly big fairly quickly, even if the process means they're at a higher risk of permanently failing.
It doesn't look to me like the people who love and use github have been using it because it looks like it will be stable, and stick around for a while. They seem to have been won over by popularity effects and performance/cool tech factors.
So, if github fails, it may not really be as big of an issue. Github could fail as an investment or company, and still leave a running system behind, up as a non-profit even; the risk to its customers doesn't seem that big. And the potential rewards, depending on how they invest the money, can be really big. There's lots of good work they can still do, that everyone will benefit from.
Re: Github Raises $100 Million
#227I just hope that the investment will not force Github to change their revenue model. The current private hosting model seems quite adequate. Especially, I hope they won't become the next Geeknet (http://investors.geek.net/) where there are more advertising on the page than hosted FLOSS projects.
Re: Github Raises $100 Million
#228https://github.com/blog/1189-investing-in-github Straight from them. Congratulations on building such a great business.
I love GitHub, but anyone else felt it was a little immodest for TPW to say they'd "hire Marc" if they could? Can't put it into words, but I don't feel that Tom is in the position to make that statement.
I read this as a commentary on the respect that they feel for him.
Re: Github Raises $100 Million
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
"I don't really see how this is a bad thing." They were independent and profitable company. Now they are virtally deep in debt. Everything they do now will be focused on one thing only - how to pay back that debt. They have people on board who's only goal is to get that loan back in multiples. Every decision from now on will be waged against the question "will it pay back the loan". Independency is lost, now we have…
They aren't in debt. They sold something like one seventh of their company. That's not enough to lose control of the company in any meaningful sense.
Debt-holders don't control a company either. But when you have somebody's money and the expectation you are going to give them a lot more money in return, it changes things.
You're correct that they haven't lost control, but now they have somebody to answer to. Somebody who just gave them $100m. Somebody with more equity than all but a few of the people involved. Somebody who's powerful and respected and whose job is to push tech companies in the direction of maximum return.
It changes things.
Re: Github Raises $100 Million
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
$10M/year in wage? That would imply $100k per employee per annum. I understand that it was just a budgetary figure, and I understand the premium that employer-side payroll taxes and benefits add - it is very non-trivial. Still, do you suppose the median wage at GitHub is that high? For everyone? Salespeople, receptionists, accounts payable clerks? Are you sure? I should hope they are spending a good bit less on payro…
Yes. 100k for developers is definitely on the low end (not even including overhead), and for others it might be on the high end, so assuming most of their employees are developers, 10M is a pretty low estimate of their payroll.
I would be very surprised if most of their staff were developers.