Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B • Hacker News Board

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#251

Post by throwaway894345 » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 5:36 PM UTC

zaptrem wrote: post #186

throwaway894345 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like GitHub Discussions is sort of filling a similar niche--I'm guessing they're banking on being able to build that out for less than $1B--since they already have GitHub, they don't benefit as much from the StackOverflow user network / brand. I think that makes sense.

Easy to build out the platform, difficult to build out the knowledge base (especially since so many areas have already been covered on SO)

Sure, GH lags SO considerably on the size of the knowledge base, but I don't think that's very important since, due to the rapid pace of tech, content rapidly loses value with age (consider all of the jquery or flash content, or content pertaining to old versions of libraries or frameworks).

What matters more is the rate at which content is generated, and I think GH has a pretty competitive story considering that people naturally want to ask the project maintainers/community questions directly (as evidenced by all of the GitHub Issues which are formulated as questions) and considering GitHub's significant share of those maintainers/communities. I posit that new content will increasingly appear on GH Discussions.

Please don't mistake this for some exaggerated "GH is going to kill SO" argument--SO will do fine, but there is a compelling story for why MS wouldn't spend $1bn on SO.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#252

Post by hughrr » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 5:36 PM UTC

That’s a hell of a lot of money for all those dead topics on obsolete knowledge moderated into uselessness.

Stackoverflow is where I go when I don’t want an answer.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#253

Post by coliveira » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 5:36 PM UTC

eric_b wrote: post #64

I find parallels between Stack Overflow and Mozilla. Both started with fairly focused products that were best in class. The user base grew and the network effect multiplied. Both were started and largely staffed by engineers. Then both companies started focusing on "bigger", more ambiguous goals. Their about pages are riddled with the latest marketing-speak: Authentically empowering dignity, community, and inclusivit…

One annoying reality of the business world is that to prevail there you need to drink the full BS cool aid. You have to start talking business lingo (growth, empowering, success) to even get access to the financial support to grow the business and hire others. If you're down to earth and don't stand the whole BS, your chances in that area are very slim.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#254

Post by actuator » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 5:36 PM UTC

numair wrote: post #28

This is absolutely phenomenal. Naspers/Prosus are some of the savviest and most forward-thinking players in tech investment — would you have been smart enough to give Tencent all that money, way back when? And remember, they were a bunch of nobodies based out of South Africa when that happened. This is much more interesting than a monopolist like Microsoft buying SO, and I’d be keen to see what the growth strategy is…

Naspers might have made smart bets in past but I am not sure how this means they will run the community well.

I would have been more happy with a Microsoft acquisition (although that ends up making them even more powerful) as it ties into Microsoft's existing products well, so they don't need to necessarily change SO too much to make money from it.

It can tie to their dev tooling story with GitHub, VSCode etc on one end and from LinkedIn end, they could have tied SO's jobs platform to Linkedin one. This makes MS more powerful but it might have left SO largely untouched.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#255

Post by auntienomen » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 5:37 PM UTC

Huh, I wonder what will happen to MathOverflow.net. IIRC, they negotiated an escape hatch when they integrated into the stackexchange network.

I don't imagine Prosus or SE cares very much.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#256

Post by zoomablemind » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 5:37 PM UTC

eric_b wrote: post #64

I find parallels between Stack Overflow and Mozilla. Both started with fairly focused products that were best in class. The user base grew and the network effect multiplied. Both were started and largely staffed by engineers. Then both companies started focusing on "bigger", more ambiguous goals. Their about pages are riddled with the latest marketing-speak: Authentically empowering dignity, community, and inclusivit…

> Now their products are withering. Dying a slow death.

What is SO business model? Is it ads-based?

Just hope it won't devolve into news-sites free-article quota with account points mixed in for some throttling. IMO, the most attractive part of SO is that low friction to contribute an answer, oftentimes seeing a relevant topic to suggest an answer in passing or when looking for answers myself.

Also SO's value is tied to the intensive community moderation effort, hope this would not be discounted in any future roadmap (wonder if there's anysuch).

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#257

Post by pbiggar » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 5:37 PM UTC

rho4 wrote: post #102

Wow, I just wish there was some real competition from a site owned by some independent foundation. Also, what is Jeff Atwood's and Joel Spolsky's net worth now?

> Also, what is Jeff Atwood's and Joel Spolsky's net worth now?

This is a fun game.

Some assumptions: both founders own equally. Early funding rounds take 20%, late funding rounds take 10%, all rounds make a new option pool (I used 15% to account for the Option Pool Shuffle). There were 5 rounds AFAICT.

So each founder would get:

    $1.8B 
    * 0.5 # initial 
    * 0.8 * 0.85 # series A
    * 0.8 * 0.85 # Series B
    * 0.9 * 0.85 # Series C
    * 0.9 * 0.85 # Series D
    * 0.9 * 0.85 # Series E
    = $186M

The numbers usually skew worse than this ideal version,, and it also depends how much of the deal was cash for ownership, vs incentives to keep the existing team (which is often included in the headline number but doesn't cash out owners). So I'd round down to maybe $100M. (They might also have had a few sweetheart rounds, so it could also go better).

Joel also has his sale of Trello (probably >$120M), and his ownership of Glitch (formerly Fogcreek - private) and Hash (private).

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#258

Post by hezag » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 5:38 PM UTC

barreira wrote: post #221

croes wrote: post #115

"The group’s expansion into internet platforms began in the 1990s' spanning online consumer services, including: E-commerce - including its subsidiary, OLX (100%) Takealot.com (96%) Fintech - including its subsidiary, PayU (98.8%) Food delivery - including its subsidiary and associates, iFood (54.8%), Delivery Hero (22.3%) and Swiggy (38.8%) Etail - including its subsidiary, eMag (80.1%) Travel - including its associ…

OLX is the most popular Craigslist-type website at least in Portugal (and maybe in more places in Europe as well?)

In Brazil too. And iFood is the largest "food-tech" company in Latin America.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#259

Post by soperj » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 5:38 PM UTC

irrational wrote: post #241

dested wrote: post #11

I always thought Microsoft would be a natural buyer given the tech stack and Microsoft's support for developers. Unrelated story, I have a day one Stack Overflow account. I don't remember how I found it but I'm sure it was posted on digg or slashdot or something at the time. I had a lot of posts in the first few years about some generally broad concepts, and completely inactive since. In spite of this, I am in the to…

Ironically I was one of the first ones too but never really participated since I didn’t think the site would actually have lasting power. Never ask me to pick the winning horse. Same thing with Bitcoin. I knew about it from the first day, but never mined any since it was such a dumb idea. Face palm.

What are some esoteric things that you think are stupid right now? Asking for a friend.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#260

Post by einpoklum » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 5:40 PM UTC

dstick wrote: post #216

pan69 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I loved listening to the Stack Overflow podcast with Jeff and Joel. It was kinda crazy that they were doing a podcast like that while they (Jeff mostly) were building it and coming up with the name, etc. Still have all the mp3's somewhere. Edit: I'm in the top 2%. Most of my rep. comes from interest earned on questions/answers I posted very early on.

I think most of it is really down to the quality of the answers you've given combined with the vast amount of users on SO. I'm user 537XXXX with an account that can't be more than 8 years old but I did spend a solid 6 months actively posting detailed solutions to problems I ran into - ~50 in total. And some more general answers. Which has amounted to ~4.900 points. Which isn't _that_ much. Just 490 upvotes. Or 10 per…

Yeah, the reputation model is nowhere near representative of the significance of your contribution. Just try not to take it overly seriously...

I got my reputation asking > 1,000 questions and answering > 1,200 , and I can't say whether I should be higher up than people with 10x less reputation than me or 2x more than me.