GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation • Hacker News Board

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

#361

Post by toomuchtodo » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 2:56 PM UTC

timblair wrote: post #327

findjashua wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my apologies if my tone come across as combative. Slack: 1. I agree on the part about multiple teams, but since I only use it for work, it hasn't really been much of an issue. 2. I never really had any issues w message delivery, I'm on Android though, and it seems like you're on iOS. 3. I also don't remember having any issues w integrations, do you have a specific example of something that it wasn't able to do? 4. Wh…

Regarding (Slack/4)... I believe that toomuchtodo is talking about the following features within Slack: * Stars: the ability to privately star individual messages (so you can easily find them again) * Pinning: the ability to publicly highlight specific messages within a channel, much like pinned posts in a forum (effectively channel-wide starring) * History links: click on the timestamp next to any Slack message and…

Thanks for clarifying. That's exactly what I meant.

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

#362

Post by Novex » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 3:05 PM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #134

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.

I'm on a team of ~40. Doing fine with Slack, Github, and Trello (and no Atlassian products).

Would you mind elaborating on your workflow? I tried pitching something similar to this to my team of 12 and got a lot of resistance.

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

#363

Post by devy » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 3:07 PM UTC

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…

Github Enterprise is essentially a self-hosted version of Github. And there are similar open sourced alternatives like GitLab and Gitorious too. I wonder why those alternatives didn't threat Github Enterprise? First-mover advantage? Branding?

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

#364

Post by joesmo » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 3:10 PM UTC

s73v3r wrote: post #247

joesmo wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The great point, in relation to this topic of their latest investment, is that companies that depend almost entirely on their "communities" can screw those up and destroy their value." I think it's pretty much inevitable once the money rolls in that companies like Github and others will start censoring content and generally doing things that upset the community to appease their investors. I can't think of a single c…

I don't think as many people are upset by these being taken down as you think.

Not this particular Github repo maybe, but once they start taking down stuff, they will eventually hit something that will make people quite upset. Though from what other social networks generally experience, that won't be enough to drive a lot of users away, usually just the core ones which is enough to start the momentum away from the platform.

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

#365

Post by nivertech » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 3:11 PM UTC

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…

IBM acquired Rational Rose and was selling ClearCase to F500 companies for if I'm not mistaken: $13K/developer/year and ClearCase Lite for $2K/developer/year.

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

#366

Post by billmalarky » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 3:17 PM UTC

joeblau wrote: post #32

gamesbrainiac wrote: post #17

Just $2Bn? Sound a little low to for something like Github.

It's probably because it has 10 million registered users. When you compare that to something like Instagram, Twitter, or even mobile apps like WhatsApp; it's not a huge user base. That being said, I like GitHubs business model a lot more because their product actually provides me with a lot of value.

Not all users are alike. 1 sr engineer is probably worth 1000 teenagers in regards to revenue potential.

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

#367

Post by aroben » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 3:26 PM UTC

mizzao wrote: post #127

digikata wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, they could buy Sourceforge and Slashdot. Though that might end up a distraction...

Buying SourceForge and apply a svn-to-git converter on top of everything; that would really cement the monopoly.

Subversion is already supported. See https://help.github.com/articles/support-for-subversion-clie...

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

#368

Post by veddermatic » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 3:35 PM UTC

kristiandupont wrote: post #258

bskap wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BitBucket is free for private repos with less than five people. Doesn't work for a lot of businesses, which is where most of the money is.

..but if they didn't charge what does it matter that it's where the money is?

Because when your team gets to 6 people, you A) have money (hopefully) and B) your code is already in BitBucket, so choosing to pay them over GitHub is a no brainer.

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

#369

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 3:36 PM UTC

hueving wrote: post #292

Retra wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that it is a standard, critical work tool.

No it's not. I work in open source and very rarely use github. git is a standard tool, github is only a polished frontend that seems to be a standard amongst web developers.

[deleted]

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

#370

Post by deniszgonjanin » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 3:36 PM UTC

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…

Except GitHub isn't selling Git hosting. Github is right now a central piece of infrastructure for a huge number of tech companies. Infrastructure-wise, so many pieces connect to GitHub. CI, deployment, bug tracking, releases, etc...

Yes git hosting is commodity, but if you switch away from GitHub you have to switch so many other things as well. That takes time (hence money) and can be very disruptive to your infrastructure.

So unless GitHub starts to suck while someone else comes up with a different awesome solution that solves most of it, GitHub it could be worth way more than $2B.