Bootstrapped GitHub Now Raising a Round from Andreessen Horowitz

I think it's easy to over-estimate the success and ubiquity of GitHub if you spend all day on HN. The real money-make for SCM is still Perforce, according to schacon at a somewhat recent drink-up in Boston.<p>These questions about GitHub vs. Pinterest are revealing in that I think many folk on HN don't realize what a relatively small community of developers this is. Relative to the tens of millions of folk on Pinerest. Heck, GitHub's front page reveals they have only 1.6 million users.<p>I wonder if their growth curve has started to flatten out. I hope they have a great plan/vision for what to do with the money, because running GitHub ad infinitum as an immensely successful small software company would seem to be a dream to me.

Two questions:<p>- How is GitHub worth less than Pintrest?<p>- What could GitHub possibly gain from raising money? It's clearly not about money. Is this a liquidity event? Couldn't they just issue a dividend for that, they've clearly got plenty of cash… Or is this about the credibility of having a valuation. In that case, couldn't they have gone public? Amazon went public at a sub-$500M valuation, and look at them now!<p>Edit: come to think of it, I can see the possibility of wanting to acquire other companies, and not currently having the capital to do so. That's about it.

I'm surprised by this. Tom Preston-Werner's talk at Startup School 2010, which had a strong influence on me and many of my friends (we still refer to it often), was very anti-VC.<p>Here is a link to the talk, and a relevant quote from the introduction:<p><a href="http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272031754" rel="nofollow">http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272031754</a><p>"But for me, I don't have to worry about these things, because GitHub has never taken any funding, ever. So I want to talk a little bit about how you can avoid this mess of VC, if you so choose, by telling you a little bit of my story."

An "impressive" 600 or 800 million?<p>This makes the Instagram deal look even more out of proportion. Github ought to be worth a <i>lot</i> more, it's a profitable huge business with real assets, used by millions everyday for <i>work</i>.<p>But the question is: what could they do with more money that they can't do now?

This makes sense in a "as go the alpha geeks, so goes the rest of the world... eventually" sort of way.<p>Git and github-style content-management requires a mental model very different from the mass/mass-enterprise market... but the tech-leaders way of thinking will reach there over time via repeated exposure, <i>and</i> Github is doing a great job of providing the benefits in approachable steps, and a whole package of related modern hosting/distribution/authoring assistance.<p>Why wouldn't presentations, spreadsheets, and all other forms of writing eventually be amenable to dvcs-style revision control?

I'm surprised that Github is taking on capital, they must have some pretty hefty goals in mind because my understanding is that they're quite profitable. It's like taking out a home loan after building your own home with your own cash and labour.<p>What would the repercussions be from taking cash from Andreessen Horowitz? Will the original Githubber's keep their control over the company? I'm honestly a little worried, but at the same time if they want the cash to expand and make Github better, then I am all for it.

As the founder of a self-funded startup, I need to be careful with how I spend my savings. So far, my costs are $20/month for cloudflare (ssl), $2/week on AppEngine (still working off that free $50 credit I got for being an early adopter) and $7/month happily paid for Github hosting. More power to them, I've been around open source for a long time now and this is the first company that has revolutionized software development for me.

Given that they haven't ever taken any VC money, I wonder if they're doing this so the founders can cash out.

If you browse through github's blog you can easily see what happened the last few months:<p>* github managed to hire &#38; acquihire top talent like crazy<p>* their UI/UX people really focused on making github's UI more consistent and usable<p>* they spent time to go native<p>* the enterprise solution got a lot of love<p>so they have huge momentum and spend their time very well. personally I think they should look into making jobs.github.com THE resource to hire great talent. In a way github already is very relevant in the hiring process but similar to carreers.stackoverflow there is huge untapped opportunity to disrupt the hiring market.<p>Anyway I think github has a bright future ahead and I'm very curious about what will happen in the coming months.

Andreessen Horowitz is a GitHubber!

Why is defunkt the only listed founder of github on pandodaily?

I don't believe this. Github and Particularly TPW, and their successful bootstrap was the main inspiration for me to startup.<p>As many has said it, Github &#62; Instagram + Pinterest. I would say at least 5B$.

Did they consider a loan?

No doubt Atlassian sees GitHub quickly approaching in their rear view mirror

This is pretty light on details and it kind of makes no sense. Everyone loves the product and it's a (apparently very) profitable business. What can Andreesen Horowitz do to help them other than come in and do another bubbly ol' flipparoo?

I still remember the founder Tom speaking at the Startup School (2010) and advising around 1000 people on why NOT raise funds. As I still remember the old About page of Github: "VC FUNDING = 0". LOL<p>Enjoy: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4VtBcmbbSs" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4VtBcmbbSs</a>

If I were to guess, this is probably to help them move off of Rackspace onto their own hosting solution in order to appeal to that enterprise customer segment that keeps getting mentioned.