The thought of losing Github to the startup graveyard is kind of scary. It was bad enough to lose Google Code and when SourceForge had their "great purge" of inactive projects.
I can't find the blog post, but some blog wrote a while ago why VCs invest in companies like Github. TL;DR -- basically it provides infrastructure for other startups.<p>The business itself may not be a great business due to the amount of cost it takes to run it -- but it's necessary for the running of other ventures.<p>Sort of like highways and non-toll bridges.
Everyone is comparing GitHub with GitLab in the comments, but they are ignoring the other competitor.<p>I think Atlassian is the company that makes the most out of the git marketplace, even if they have fewer customers. They are simply more efficient, and are ready to take over with Bitbucket if GitHub fails.<p>Also, many companies pay for Jira+Confluence even if they use GitHub.
The takeaways from the article:<p>(1) They went on a hiring spree in 2015-16, dramatically increasing their costs before their revenue was able to keep up. Something to keep an eye on in 2017.<p>(2) Half the team is remote! Kudos to them for making this work.
Considering the piles of venture money they received it sometimes startles me how few new features they have pushed to production in the last two years. Gitlab, on the other hand, seems to push a new major feature every other month. Of course it helps that they don't have to worry about running a SaaS service for several tens of millions of users, but still it seems that Github is too focused on minor improvements and might just lose the game against the open-source approach of Gitlab.
It's a few years now I can not see Github focused, from the external POV at least, to provide good coder tools. All the new things only marginally improve on what we used to have. I would worry more about that than about the losses themselves, since I feel the losses mostly reflect the fact the company has no clear direction so is spending money on workforce in the hope to have larger effects. Perhaps they don't need more people but more focus.
I'm surprised that they <i>actually have</i> a recreation of the oval office <i>in their office</i>. How arrogant and self-important do you have to be to honestly believe that such a parody is in any way justified? No, GitHub, you're not in charge of the free software world. You were just the first decent choice for code hosting. GitLab is eating your lunch and you're pretending that it's not happening.
Interesting that 600 employees sounds like a lot, but it works out that revenue/employee p.a is $230k+ - which is above average for enterprise SaaS[0] - and you have the 25%+ annual growth on that<p>That said, they <i>should</i> be doing better margin-wise since they would have relatively lower customer acquisition costs compared to the market since they have so much developer recognition.<p>[0] <a href="http://tomtunguz.com/revenue-per-employee-trends/" rel="nofollow">http://tomtunguz.com/revenue-per-employee-trends/</a>
It seemed that Github was doing just fine accomplishing their mission and goals when they were bootstrapping, but things got ridiculous with a massive (and possibly unneeded) VC investment. Or at least an investment of that humongous sum of money.<p>Can someone explain the rationale behind pumping all this money into firms that clearly don't need such vast amounts of it, which only spurs exorbitant and unnecessary spending? Is it some sort of non-obvious game of unicorn musical chairs hoping for a hyper inflated exit before the music stops?
I hope this is a temporary blip on the radar for Github, and that they return to profitability very quickly.<p>Github should be a pillar platform in our community for the next decade, and the only way for them to become that is via profitability.
I once met Chris Wanstrath. He is the most arrogant guy I ever met.<p>I travelled for an hour and he sat there staring at his phone between looking at me like something he had trodden in.<p>At least pointing tens of companies at Gitlab has made me feel better.
I'm surprised that the author doesn't focus more on the other numbers (the burn numbers aren't surprising to me - see here: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13190371" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13190371</a>). According to the author's data, GitHub had $25M in ARR in Sep'14. That's 2 years and 2 months after they announced their $100M round, so probably 28 months after they signed a term sheet.<p>If you calculate back from there, let's say $12M in ARR in Sep'13, $6M in Sep'12 and $4-5M in May'12 - that's insane (them raising $100M). Not sure if Bloomberg's data is correct but if we look at the other data points (probably same source data), $90M in ARR in Sep'16, it seems to be accurate.<p>Sep'12: $6M (assumed) -- raised $100M a couple of months earlier
Sep'13: $12M (assumed)
Sep'14: $25M (according to Bloomberg)
Sep'15: $50M (assumed)
Sep'16: $90M (according to Bloomberg)
>The new digs gave employees a reason to come into the office. Visitors would enter a lobby modeled after the White House’s Oval Office before making their way to a replica of the Situation Room. The company also erected a statue of its mascot, a cartoon octopus-cat creature known as the Octocat. The 55,000-square-foot space is filled with wooden tables and modern art.<p>The Sillicon Valley episodes write themselves it seems haha. This is hilarious.
I remember reading a few years ago how GitHub and StackOverflow were the new resumes. You needed a good profile on both to have any chance of getting hired.<p>It just goes to show that having a profile on a website does not define who you are as a developer. Websites go under, and better ones will rise up. I hope GitHub does stay around... I do not care for their "politics" but I like their service.
<i>"GitHub quickly became essential to the code-writing process at technology companies of all sizes and gave birth to a new generation of programmers by hosting their open-source code for free."</i><p>How much would you be willing to pay to store your open-source code at github?
GitHub has some significant challenges ahead that are not mentioned in this article. As companies move to the cloud, they will run their own development ecosystems--SCM, CI, defect tracking, etc.--in their own cloud; and hosting services like GitHub and BitBucket will have a hard time competing. Already Oracle (and surely other vendors) are offering developer cloud instances that provide these services all wired together.
This is an example of how VCs distort the market for other businesses.<p>I had a recent conversation with a prospect and they took issue with the price of our software. Our app is in a specialized industry (ie. a smaller market). We charge a per use fee of $35. This fee enables our customer to immediately earn nearly $200 (a 5x return with no risk to them). Despite the significant benefit and profitability of using the app the prospect took issue with our price and referred to the cost of other apps.<p>It was that conversation that made me realize how we've become accustomed to the quality and price of software that's been heavily subsidized by massive VC investments.
please guys get your shit together.
I guess I would be able to figure out an alternative but a big chunk of my life as a programmer is centered around Github. It would be a major let down to see them perish.
Fortunately it is easy to push the same repo to multiple hosts with git. So people, use mirrors instead of putting all your eggs in the same basket. Git is a distributed CVS, relying only on github means you are using it just like SVN.
The subtext to this (at least why this made it to the front page) is "github is lighting money on fire, can't last forever, but github is infrastructure-status now what if it disappears?"<p>I think this anxiety is why there's a lot of work being done in the decentralized space right now. The UX-side of "web 3.0" is sorely lacking but I think it's only a matter of time before people begin to crack it.<p>I'd love to see some research into what it would take (in terms of network size) to provide robust, decentralized replacements for service-as-infrastructure products like Github.
Staying in an annual budget of $98 million sounds feasible for a place like github. That's an $8.1m/month burn. Just be a little less elaborate, I'm sure this is doable.
It feels that GitHub failed to create an ecosystem and did little innovating it just turned a single-tenant application to multi-tenant (which sometimes is no small feat). They could've created other developer-oriented products - issue management, CI, code review etc and they could've innovated more in their primary area that is storing code like providing better tools for code exploration than simple search (see GitQL project).
This is why the mania around unicorns is not sustainable. The best part is that github isn't even burning money that fast compared to some of the other ones.
I always freak about some other country attacking github.<p>The world would crumble/ it's probably some sort of weird national security scenario.
Github is too good to fail IMHO: if they raise a bit their prices, all their paying costumers will still stay and their money problems will mitigate.<p>By the other hand, Atom is clearly a long term loser and they should let it go. Their contribution to the text editing world was terrific but now they should focus where they are the best.
I personally moved away from Github, mostly due to political issues, secondarily because of this funding issue. Can't keep burning money forever.<p>I put my private stuff on my own Gogs instance or on Bitbucket, tho I like Gogs UI much better, it's closer to github. The community fork of it, Gitea, is also making progress to enable pull request federation.<p>Would be awesome if I could work together with people using Gitlab, Github or Gitea without them having to sign up
to my site. They just fork to their own site, make their patches and submit the pull request to my upstream.<p>GitHub has little value to me, the social network they built can move elsewhere like it is for many programmers and coders.
> <i>The company paid to send employees jetting across the globe to Amsterdam, London, New York and elsewhere.</i><p>If a company as vitally important to an industry as Github is to software can't do this... it's time to really worry.
If you are an investor, you want to invest $1 to get $2 back (aka shareholder value). If your dividends are not growing, you divest and invest somewhere else.<p>Now, the thing is very competitive, and many companies offer "exponential growth". If your growth slows down, if the perspective is not good, divestment starts and that is a downwards spiral.<p>To stay competitive and to prevent an investor run, companies are forced to take massive risks. And risks materialize into huge disasters... like this one apparently.
> "The income statement shows a loss of $66 million in the first three quarters of this year. That’s more than twice as much lost in any nine-month time frame by Twilio Inc., another maker of software tools founded the same year as GitHub."<p>These sort of statements are a little annoying. I understand that Bloomberg has to write for a less technical audience, but the writer must know this isn't an accurate comparison.
The thing not mentioned is that Bloomberg is a Github Enterprise customer. They ran their own git server for a bit and then transitioned the whole company to github and the pull-request model (relatively quickly too)
It's funny reading Tom Preston-Werner's write up on GitHub in Dec 08:<p>>You Don’t Need Venture Capital<p>>A lot has been written recently about how the venture capital world is changing. I don’t pretend to be an expert on the subject, but I’ve learned enough to say that a web startup like ours doesn’t need any outside money to succeed. I know this because we haven’t taken a single dime from investors. We bootstrapped the company on a few thousand dollars and became profitable the day we opened to the public and started charging for subscriptions.<p>I guess VCing up and losing money is a choice. They probably figure the odd $100m cash loss will end up as $1bn+ on the market cap. He looks quite cheerful in his rich list write up <a href="http://www.forbes.com/profile/tom-preston-werner/" rel="nofollow">http://www.forbes.com/profile/tom-preston-werner/</a>
You know, I can't say I'm surprised. When github first started, it was just about code. Nothing else. Then they started with all the identity politics crap.<p>As soon as a company starts parroting political messages like "white middle managers have no empathy" instead of, you know, building good tools, I know it's time to find another solution. I was a paying customer, and when github got into the political game, I dropped them like a bad habit.<p>I'm not screwing around here, I'm trying to build a business and your political aspirations do _nothing_ for me as a customer, so why don't you take them and shove em. Happy customer at bitbucket ever since.
Am I the only one the tone in this article bothers? The author keeps criticizing and belittling the CEO, who is obviously significantly smarter than him. There might be correlation there.