Github Raises $100 Million

I'm a little surprised by all of the anti-VC sentiment in this thread so far, especially from this community. I'm perhaps even more surprised by the "what do they need 100 million dollars" sentiment that is being floated around.<p>Github is an impressive company that has, so far, blown away its competition in many aspects. The fact that they have been self-bootstrapped up until this point and that they are profitable to boot is a testament to Tom's incredible leadership and their absolutely exceptional team.<p>Tom has made it abundantly clear that he is not against venture capital. He just thinks it is starting off on the wrong foot if you try to build your company with the expectation of relying on venture capital from the start.<p>So he's taken Github to profitability, and in four years they've all managed to transform the way most of us collaborate online. That is a profound achievement, but those responsible for such a radical change aren't generally the type to sit idly by on the backs of their previous accomplishments.<p>They want to do bigger and better things with Github. They're not quite done trying to change the world. Now they are not only profitable, but they have substantial capital to invest in further innovations.<p>With 0 dollars, a couple of guys built something amazing. I can't wait to see what they can do with 100 million.

I can't help but think that this investment marks the Pets.com point in this investment cycle.<p>GitHub is essentially a web interface to a single open-source DVCS. The switching costs to using another DVCS such as Mercurial (which I personally prefer) or another Git hosting provider are minimal. There are no barriers to entry since Git is and always will be free. There are very few network effect benefits to using GitHub for paying customers who by definition want to keep their code private.<p>GitHub is a good service and I use it myself, but I'm now increasingly cautious about using it since GitHub are now under serious pressure to deliver pretty spectacular returns to their investors.<p>In the end I think this investment has less to do with GitHub and more to do with the fact that e.g. yields on 10-year Treasuries are currently under 2%. Investors are desperately looking for any decent returns on their money and throwing it a company like GitHub is just a Hail Mary pass.

I have to imagine that a chunk of that money is to provide liquidity to the founders, which they very much deserve.<p>I don't really see how this is a bad thing. They were very much profitable, and were likely able to dictate the terms of the deal. Also, the money came from one of the most, if not THE most, reputable and respected VC firms.

I hate to crash the party, but this is a very odd move for an awesome company and a service that I use and &#60;3.<p>Github has always been against taking money. Actually, TPW has used some very harsh words criticizing startups that choose to take VC money.<p>Now, Github raises 100 gazillion dollars? How the f*ck do they plan on spending that wisely? Sure, it's nice to have that sum in the bank. But, in all honesty, someone has to explain how this is a reasonable move, because I simply don't get it.

Many people do not realize that Github has an enterprise product called github:enterprise. Aside the money they raised for this round, there are also help comes together from the VC, Andreessen Horowitz in this case.<p>I don't have any experience in enterprise sales. But, from what I know, enterprise isn't a market that the best product always wins. Yes, Github definitely has one of the best products out there. But, they definitely don't have the required experience to push their enterprise product to the market(look at the developers heavy team). The VC will definitely help in this case.<p>Now, look at another similar product in the market, Atlassion, which raised about 60 millions almost two years ago from Accel. That was also after years of bootstrapping from Atlassian itself. 2 years ago, the funding market was definitely not as good as the funding market today. Yet, Atlassian managed to raise 60 millions. So, the 100 millions Github raised today seems reasonable to me.

Can't read the full article without an account. Try this:<p><a href="http://gigaom.com/2012/07/09/github-finally-raises-funding-100m-from-andreessen-horowitz/" rel="nofollow">http://gigaom.com/2012/07/09/github-finally-raises-funding-1...</a>

<a href="https://github.com/blog/1189-investing-in-github" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/blog/1189-investing-in-github</a> Straight from them. Congratulations on building such a great business.

"finally" raises funding.<p>In my mind the $750M valuation is still actually pretty consevative. GitHub has a long long way to go and I see so many great things ahead for the team, but I don't understand why they would raise $100M?<p>Is this a deal for the founders to take some money off of the table? I don't see what benefits $100M will have for them.<p>(Don't shoot me for my opinions on this one), but I think it's also really only a matter of time before the legacy systems move from SVN/Mercurial/CVS onto GitHub. Some people use BitBucket (I guess because Atlassian makes some other great software). SourceForge (past it's sell-by-date), and Google Code isn't really suitable for anything other than hosting specific release candidates or tags..

"Little-known social coding start-up".<p>Got to love the WSJ.

So Linus Torvalds has created two billion-dollar industries in his spare time?

I am a paying customer and quite torn over what to think.<p>On one hand I feel like my favorite indie band just got signed by a major record label. I will lose the intimacy, or cool factor, I felt as I first enjoyed them. However, isn't it better for all to enjoy them? Especially if they have been signed by the best record company of the bunch? I really have no reason to find this analogy a bad thing.<p>On the other hand I think, why does every company feel the need to take over the world? Can't you be satisfied? At what point have you done enough? I already see Github as a success, and I fear for the founders that true satisfaction will never come. For the most ambitious it probably never does. I do not see this as a good sign for the future of Internet businesses in general. I would rather see more small businesses than fewer large. I think many aspiring hackers have lost a role model today, and VC's everywhere are cheering as a big game trophy has been reeled in.

SharePoint makes Microsoft billions of dollars per year of revenue (the only concrete number I could find was $2B, but it was from a blog that didn't cite sources). If github can pivot from code sharing to general work sharing, $100M doesn't seem like quite so much money.<p>Edit: $800M/yr in 2007 <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/2007/jul07/07-26SPPT800MPR.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/2007/jul07/07-26SP...</a>

Congratulations GitHub!<p>I'm a bit surprised given their previous stance on VC...<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4VtBcmbbSs" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4VtBcmbbSs</a><p><a href="http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2486-bootstrapped-profitable-proud-github" rel="nofollow">http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2486-bootstrapped-profitable-...</a>

"Little-known social coding start-up GitHub Inc. has raised $100 million in its first round of funding, in a sign of how big investment bets are continuing in Silicon Valley"<p>this "little-known" probably has more revenue than a lot of "well-knowns" out there, and the "bet" here is probably a lot safer too...

<i>CEO Tom Preston-Werner said the company hopes to develop new features but also improve existing ones, such as web applications for different operating systems.</i><p>"web applications for different operating systems"?

WTF? Why? What for? What are they planning to do with so much money?

Okay, I think now is the time for GitHub to shut up about being Bootstrap and Bullshit. I think it's high time. I absolutely love the service but this is so lame. Bunch of hypocrites.

On GitHub's blog: <a href="https://github.com/blog/1189-investing-in-github" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/blog/1189-investing-in-github</a>

What a great way to ruin a perfectly awesome company.

I got five words into that article and hit back to find a different source.<p>&#62; "Little-known social coding start-up GitHub..."<p>Really?<p>The Gigaom is a much better read.<p><a href="http://gigaom.com/2012/07/09/github-finally-raises-funding-100m-from-andreessen-horowitz/" rel="nofollow">http://gigaom.com/2012/07/09/github-finally-raises-funding-1...</a>

They certainly deserve it. They have a clear business model that makes money now and a gorgeous product. Look forward to seeing more Octocat in SOMA :)

They deserve every penny. And I am sure their revenue has been increasing over time (at least I hope so).<p>They are a great blueprint on how to spend money wisely and develop features people care about.<p>Off the top of my head: Company Github accounts, many desktop Github redesigns and performance tweaks, Github for Mac, Github for Windows, and a Github Android App.<p>And this is only in the past 12 months or so. Amazing company.

Okay, a question:<p>I have a github (<a href="http://github.com/blhack" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/blhack</a> -- nothing too interesting there), but only use it in the "free" way; saving my javascript stuff, and keeping track of some arduino projects.<p>"Github" and "money" in the same thought here triggered me wondering about maybe buying a monthly plan from them, and letting them host all of my code for work, play, etc. (stuff I'm too embarrassed to release, ha)<p>Maybe I'm just naive, but how large are most git repos?<p>You can get a full pizza box, in a rack, with power and data, and plenty of storage for $50/mo.<p>You could get two redundant linodes for $40/mo.<p>What are people getting out of github that they are willing to spend as much money as some of these plans cost?<p>(What I mean is: if this was $5/mo for unlimited repos, I'd have a plan now. But $7/mo for 5? That seems steep)

So much negativity here regarding the capital announcement. Github got to where it is now from now investment and you want to know the reason why they accepted such a large amount of capital (it's rather simple), Github are wanting to infiltrate the corporate sector because that's where the money is. Lets be honest the $10 per month I pay for my Github account isn't making any difference, a corporation paying $1000 per month to exclusively use Github to manage their code? Now that's making a difference.<p>To expand you need cash, take this as a sign that Github is going to expand heavily in every direction. As an avid Githubber I am ecstatic about this, it's a testament to the product and a good sign Github is never going anywhere.

$750M valuation!?

My suspicion is they are going to be putting a lot of effort towards continuing to develop the GUI, for the lack of a better term, for git. IMO, that's what has helped them be successful in the first place. Git is complex and a bit unfriendly at times. They have made it more accessible and it sounds as though their hope is to increase overall engagement in git and version/source management tools.<p>Who knows, they could be working on their own flavor of git.

I actually forgot github was a business. I'm going to hate to lose their services when they get bought by yahoo or whatever is going to happen :-(

I just hope that the investment will not force Github to change their revenue model. The current private hosting model seems quite adequate. Especially, I hope they won't become the next Geeknet (<a href="http://investors.geek.net/" rel="nofollow">http://investors.geek.net/</a>) where there are more advertising on the page than hosted FLOSS projects.

Maybe the startup in inhouse-incubator developping new apps in small teams. They clearly have all the required skills to launch a couple of commercial interesting apps per year.<p>However a burn rate of 25m$/year — The VC wants 100 times the return of his investment. That's imho not doable with the current "monolitic" github business model.

Now I hope they can at least make the watch button work in Opera, maybe even the rest of the BASIC functionality.

"Little known..." ? Granted, Github isn't eBay, but its hardly obscure, especially within its domain space.<p>The article is otherwise fairly flat about <i>why</i> it might be valued so high. I'm not saying it's fully justified, but the writer clearly did not seem to understand what he was actually writing about.

So, Github taking on some capitalization in order to spur growth in enterprise markets is apparently seen by many on this thread as Github "not keeping it real." (to borrow a "street" analogy.)<p>What exactly would the individuals complaining about this action do differently?

Congrats to Github - great project, great team. Good work, can't wait to see what's next.

"little known" is actually the reality of how the rest of the world sees the tech startup domain. I am sure I can find people even at HP/IBM who will ask "whats a github"?

Why raise money? I love Github. But this bothered me. I believe they can pretty much earn a lot from their current subscription plans. Why raise? Githuubbb!

With all that money they could buyout their competitors.

I wonder what the percentage the founders are pocketing?

They could be moving into "other" markets as well. Version controlling for design? Think that'd be a huge market especially with a simple interface.

Rumors first circulated in May: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4006017" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4006017</a>

Their RSS feed has new hires almost every day. I suppose they need to pay all those hires. I wonder why they need quite so many people.

Awesome. Now they can make more font icons.

I hope this doesn't mean everyone now gets free private repos but now with ads served up.

&#62; GitHub tries to become the standard in software coding<p>Standard. Really?

Damn, github seemed like the perfect model for bootstrapped, they were growing like a weed, seemed to not lack for money from income, etc.<p>In these situations, I'd really love to know the details-- did they go shopping for investment (love to see that deck!) or did A19Z pursue them and talk them into it?<p>Probably perfect timing, too, because I think things are going to cool down in 2013.<p>Anyway, couldn't happen to a nicer company, but I do lament the loss of a bootstrapped example to point to.<p>FWIW, can't read the wsj article because it is already behind the paywall.

2 months ago github was all "we don't need VC funding we're completely profitable"...

I just happened to be on their About page today and I noticed they'd taken down the "VC money raised - $0.00" section.<p>Congrats to the fine folks at GitHub!

Why can't a company worth nearly a billion dollars just go public? There are thousands of public companies worth less than a billion. So why sell your soul to a VC who could push you into a situation that could make you implode, rather than raise money on an open market and give up less control?

I guess it's time to move away code from github. Now a VC has insights into all private repositories ... a VC that possibly is funding competition.