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

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

#171

Post by bmir-alum-007 » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 1:47 AM 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…

The value is a premium considering Atlassian was valued last year at $3.3B even though it has significantly more enterprisey features/ecosystem in the wiki/issue tracker/CI space, although it's not yet owned the social VCS enterprise/SaaS space.

Atlassian has an interest in dominating the enterprise-side with JIRA (issue tracker) & Confluence (wiki). Atlassian's Github non-Enterprise competitor, Bitbucket, has unlimited private repos for free or $200/enterprise. Atlassian also offers FishEye/Crucible and Stash to compete with GE.

The big plus with JIRA/Confluence are the plethora of free/paid plugins and lots of enterprisey features that aren't available in Redmine/Chili, Trac, etc. without significant work. In those circumstances, IT shops appreciate Active Directory provisioning, fine-grained permissions and such when any of mediawiki, google docs/quip, asana aren't often up to task without lots of extra work. (Yes, deploying Atlassian to production used to be a PITA, but it's much better than it was some years ago.)

Atlassian's HipChat is basically a 37signals' Campfire clone, and Slack/FlowDock are significantly better for most use-cases.

In the CI market, most shops end up deploying Jekins/Hudson because of it's cross-platform slave builder agents and massive plugin ecosystem. I wouldn't use Bamboo. CI needs to be deployed when enterprise can't use TravisCI or similar.

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

#172

Post by tptacek » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 1:50 AM UTC

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...

Do we know Github's revenue? What revenue multiple "makes sense"? If we don't know their revenue, how can we judge their valuation?

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

#173

Post by jhund » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 1:54 AM UTC

blizkreeg wrote: post #34

What would the exit strategy for a company like Github be? Get acquired by a big co like say, Google or IPO? An IPO and the accompanying scrutiny of a public company sounds like an unlikely strategy for a Github. Thoughts?

I have a hunch that Microsoft may want to purchase Github.

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

#174

Post by tptacek » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 1:55 AM UTC

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.

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

#175

Post by idlewords » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 1:58 AM UTC

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.

Why not just loop the dollar through and live comfortably on the surplus?

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

#176

Post by huac » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 1:58 AM UTC

erics32 wrote: post #163

netheril96 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to elaborate about it? I just found it accessible at https://github.com/ErisBlastar/cplusequality

The original C+= repo ( https://github.com/FeministSoftwareFoundation/C-plus-Equalit... ) was taken down by Github after twitter backlash. http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/12/14/1618239/github-takes...

it was removed by bitbucket as well.

god, this repo is reprehensive.

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

#177

Post by partiallypro » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 1:59 AM UTC

blizkreeg wrote: post #34

What would the exit strategy for a company like Github be? Get acquired by a big co like say, Google or IPO? An IPO and the accompanying scrutiny of a public company sounds like an unlikely strategy for a Github. Thoughts?

I almost feel like a buyout would not be possible without alienating companies from using it. If Microsoft bought Github, Google might be hesitant to use it, and vice versa. I think they will likely stay private and take capital injections from institutions like Google/Microsoft which will own a small bit of equity in exchange for funding.

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

#178

Post by tptacek » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 2:01 AM UTC

idlewords wrote: post #175

tptacek wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why not just loop the dollar through and live comfortably on the surplus?

More money > less money?

Don't look at me. We didn't raise VC either. Nor will we, until I take off this "WWMCD" bracelet.

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

#179

Post by mpdehaan2 » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 2:04 AM 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…

I'm a bit curious how much GitHub Enterprise is being adopted.

Obviously winning someone like IBM and HP (I don't know what they use) would be big.

But I see most companies using GitHub private organizations (paid per repo) even when they are sometimes quite large. I might be totally wrong here, but I'm kinda interested in what the split is.

Obviously every software company having a huge chance of keeping their private source control code in you is a big deal, and even "monetize way later" makes sense here considering the dominance they are showing.

And mostly showing without any major improvements to the product (.com) in a LOOOOONG time, but I will say the stability has gotten much better, and I do appreciate that at least.

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

#180

Post by mpdehaan2 » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 2:06 AM UTC

mszyndel wrote: post #119

blazespin wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Yet to meet a developer who's as excited about using Jira as about using Github issues...

Despite having a gazillion issue trackers, something halfway between the two would be welcome.

GitHub issue tracking is not good enough to manage any kind of large project, JIRA is a bit of a beast.

I'd prefer having an integrated JIRA any day, though I do still strongly DISLIKE JIRA. There's still opportunity for something better IMHO.

(For very small teams, I find that's Trello, but Trello isn't really for large groups)