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GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

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Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

#211

Post by danieltillett »

tptacek wrote: post #174
danieltillett wrote: post #77

The most interesting thing about all these massive fund raisings is why. It is almost as if the managers of these companies think we are about to enter a period where raising funds will be impossible, revenue from servicing the startup economy will dry up, and they will need a massive war chest to survive.

If you build a machine that reliably turns $1.00 into $1.10, your next moves are (a) try to turn the next dollar into $1.15 and (b) find as many new dollars as you can to feed the machine.

This is assuming that there is no such thing as market saturation or diminishing returns :)

Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

#212

Post by danieltillett »

e40 wrote: post #83
danieltillett wrote: post #77

The most interesting thing about all these massive fund raisings is why. It is almost as if the managers of these companies think we are about to enter a period where raising funds will be impossible, revenue from servicing the startup economy will dry up, and they will need a massive war chest to survive.

Sometimes fundraising is to get cash to founders, early investors.

mmm - insiders trying to get out is never a good sign.

Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

#213

Post by danieltillett »

patio11 wrote: post #182
danieltillett wrote: post #77

The most interesting thing about all these massive fund raisings is why. It is almost as if the managers of these companies think we are about to enter a period where raising funds will be impossible, revenue from servicing the startup economy will dry up, and they will need a massive war chest to survive.

revenue from servicing the startup economy will dry up One of the salient differences between the 90s tech bubble and our current state of affairs is that in the 90s Yahoo sold to startups justifying a higher valuation for Yahoo justifying more startups... and this largely doesn't happen now. I haven't worked with Github but I have worked with many companies which are "strikingly similar" to Github. Their median cust…

I know SV is the center of the current tech boom, but one of the things this time around is the startup economy is much larger and more wide spread. There seems to be many more startups outside of the traditional centers which is good.

While I agree with you that things are different this time, I still suspect that there is a fair bit of growth acceleration coming from startup dollars being recycled back through the startup economy.

Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

#214

Post by ihunter »

This actually seems undervalued to me. The potential for this app is huge, being the platform for all code/product development _ideally_ for every organization. I think they've sorta dropped the ball a bit in that I don't see a ton more integration into the corporate / programmer day to day, something that Atlassian seems to be picking up on. Still, this is an indespensible tool for engineering teams.

Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

#215

Post by arikrak »

MarkPNeyer wrote: post #99
arikrak wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Github currently may use the "social coding" part for marketing now, but it can build off it in the future. For example, StackOverflow built a whole careers site off Q&A, Github can choose to go further based on real code.

"github labs used machine learning to generate a simple english -> python translation algorithm. it crawled the millions of commits, looking at comments and commit logs to understand software"

(c. 2028) Github announced today that it has acquired StackExchange, known for its Q&A site for developers and algorithms. This will let Github enhance their own automated software development suite. Github analyzes open-source and closed-source code (under licensing agreements) to produce new software automatically on demand. Currently Github primarily determines a piece of code's functionality from its unit tests, but this acquisition will let them expand their source of knowledge.

This may increase the concern among some developers and algorithm managers that Github is becoming too powerful. There has been controversy in the past over Github's restricted API access to open source code on its site. Some developers want to move their code from Github, but they've come to rely on the automatic tools Github provides...

Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

#216

Post by sidi »

timr wrote: post #63
calcsam wrote: post #41

Both this piece, and most commenters, seem to miss the point about where Github's value comes from. It's not for being a social identity for programmers, or hosting open-source libraries. Those are worthy pursuits, but from a business perspective mostly serve as marketing. Github is basically Microsoft Word for programmers, and is an essential part of their workflow. Companies that need enterprise functionality aroun…

Microsoft Word became a valuable monopoly because it was a proprietary standard. But git hosting is a commodity service. There are already a number of players doing exactly what GitHub does, for less money, and it's trivially easy to migrate a repository away from GitHub to those other providers. Something tells me that the "facebook for programmers" angle is essential to selling the dream here. The so-called "networ…

From an employer's perspective, github profile has been one of the highest signal in our hiring decisions. Anecdotally, I have yet to see a gamed profile.

This builds a very tight feedback loop, and ends up with more developers using github. And I don't see anything disrupting this loop for the time being.

Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

#217

Post by ploxiln »

scubadude wrote: post #202
geographomics wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a curious turn of events. Is "retard" particularly offensive in some cultures? I wasn't aware it had such inflammatory power behind it.

Think for a minute that you had an intellectual disability. Would you be comfortable with people casually using the word?

This reaction to the word will over time also come to the replacement word that people will need to come up with to refer to the condition.

"idiot" and "imbecile" used to be the terms used by medical professionals to refer to mentally retarded people in the 50s and 60s. Then those terms became insults, so they started using the term "mentally retarded". Now that retard has become an insult, another word will have to be found, (handicapped? slow?) and then it will become an insult, and they'll have to find another word...

Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

#218

Post by Fishkins »

findjashua wrote: post #129
toomuchtodo wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I very strongly prefer, as an engineer, not to use Atlassian products (Jira, Hipchat, Bitbucket, etc).

okay, i'll bite. My employer recently made the switch from Hipchat to Slack, and I can't really tell any difference in functionality. The only thing slack has is that it's pretty/shiny, which doesn't really make any difference to me personally. If anything, I miss being able to arrange the channels like I could in Hipchat. Also, what does Github give you over Gitlab?

My employer also recently switched from Hipchat to Slack, and I'd say Slack is vastly superior.

Most important for me are the notifications. Slack lets you set per-channel notification settings. With Hipchat I'd either miss messages I wanted to see or have to get constant notifications. "More granular notifications" was either the #1 or #2 highest-voted issue in their feature requests for over three years, and they're only now getting to the point where they have a beta version of the feature.

Also, if I received messages while I had Hipchat closed and opened it back up later, there'd be no indication I had received a message[0]. With Slack, I can always quickly catch up on messages I missed in channels I care about.

It's possible to edit posts in Slack, which isn't as essential, but still very useful.

Hipchat would initiate laggy emoticon autocomplete after I typed an opening paren, which I found very obnoxious. My goal was almost always to add a parenthetical statement, not an emoticon. There didn't seem to be a way to turn the autocomplete off.

Hipchat uad miscellaneous minor bugs that I've never experienced with Slack.

The only real thing I see in Hipchat's favor is the integrated video/voice chat, but there are plenty of other ways for me to do that when I need to. Plus, hopefully Slack will have Screenhero integrated soon.

[0] If I was @tagged I'd receive an email, but the app itself still wouldn't give me any indication of unread messages.

Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

#219

Post by fokinsean »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #199
blazespin wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it depends on how big your teams are. There are some perf issues on the on premise solution, but when you're dealing with dozens of teams, each about 5-6 engineers all following scrum or kanban, you really need something like Atlassian.

> you really need something like Atlassian. While this is typically how it's been done in my experience I really don't agree. My take on JIRA is that it can literally do anything project-management wise but everything it does is cumbersome and slow. I wish there were more alternatives that had SOME similar feature sets (certainly not all of the features; most of the JIRA ones can be interchanged with its other featur…

We just updated Jira at my job, it feels pretty snappy. It has always felt reasonably smooth to me, but I have also only been using it for about 2 months.

Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

#220

Post by simplyluke »

blazespin wrote: post #112
timr wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft Word became a valuable monopoly because it was a proprietary standard. But git hosting is a commodity service. There are already a number of players doing exactly what GitHub does, for less money, and it's trivially easy to migrate a repository away from GitHub to those other providers. Something tells me that the "facebook for programmers" angle is essential to selling the dream here. The so-called "networ…

Agreed, the valuation makes no sense to me. There's really no switching costs that I see. Bitbucket is actually superior in many ways because of its tight integration with Atlassian - the real Microsoft Word of the Developer community. Sourceforge had this kind of play at one point and look at it now. Maybe they're going to start displaying ads for jobs for developers. Not sure that's worth 2B though...

Of dozens of projects I've contributed to in the past 18 months or so, including open source, freelancing, and at work, all of one has been on anything other than github (Bitbucket) and the other dev and I ended up migrating it to github because we preferred it.

Slack ate HipChat's lunch, too. From the trenches it's hard for me to consider Atlassian the "standard" of modern development focussed organizations.

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