7 ms·

Pluralsight will acquire GitPrime for $170M

134 points by marcc 7y ago

jayp 7y ago
Congrats to the GitPrime team. While the acquisition price is public, would love to learn more about revenue or # of customers. They must have had some serious revenue/traction to be bought for $170M.
- windexh8er 7y ago
  > While the acquisition price is public, would love to learn more about revenue or # of customers. They must have had some serious revenue/traction to be bought for $170M. Not exactly. I was at a startup that was only doing about $15M in annual revenue that got picked up for $350M. A lot of common PE values in tech are well past 25x in public stocks which seems (oddly) "normal" these days.
  - mi100hael 7y ago
    Usually the Earnings part of P/E is 0 in startup acquisitions, so technically the P/E ratio is undefined. 25x revenue isn't unheard of, though. It's not that odd either if you figure out what angle the acquirer is betting on. Often it involves a mix of: - opportunity to easily cross-sell to a new swath of the market - continuing to grow the acquired business - realize economies of scale that the acquired business were working towards
- newsoul2019 7y ago
  You'd be surprised how often acquisitions boil down to former frat buddies on the golf course
- parakeet9 7y ago
  Per Pluralsight's earning's call yesterday [1]: "Pluralsight will acquire GitPrime for a total purchase price of $170 million to be paid in cash. This amount represents a multiple of approximately 5 times to 6 times expected 2020 billings." That puts 2020 projected revenue at $28-34 million. During the Q&A portion of the call, Pluralsight's CEO mentioned that "they [GitPrime] only have a few hundred customers". [1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/pluralsight-inc-ps-q1-2019-014945006.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/pluralsight-inc-ps-q1-2019-01...
georgewfraser 7y ago
GitPrime is a great exemplar of a whole class of companies that are waiting to get built: domain-specific business intelligence (BI) tools. And it’s gotten radically easier to build something like GitPrime even in the last year. You can use an automated data pipeline like Fivetran (my company) to centralize all your users data in a single multi-tenant Snowflake data warehouse, and then build your analytics on top of that foundation. Finally, you can sell direct access to the curated data via data sharing as an enterprise feature. It’s a highly repeatable pattern. There should be a GitPrime for every industry.
- grantlmiller 7y ago
  Generally agree on your broad point, but not on the architecture. I'm biased, but I would suggest that if you follow GitPrime's lead, you architect with OSS components that you can deploy on-prem as it was crucial to their success: https://blog.replicated.com/gitprime-enterprise-saas/ https://blog.replicated.com/gitprime-enterprise-saas/
  - georgewfraser 7y ago
    Trying to build a vertical analytics offering on top of OSS increases the level of difficulty by 100x. I’m not saying that it’s never the right answer, but I am saying there’s a large category of companies waiting to be built where the primary value is the expertise around how to analyze the data, not the infrastructure. If you’re analyzing data that comes from cloud data sources anyway, there’s really no sense in “deploying”. CIOs ask for it, you say no, you do the security compliances and eventually they come around.
    - grantlmiller 7y ago
      "If you’re analyzing data that comes from cloud data sources anyway, there’s really no sense in “deploying”." - This is only true if the security controls that your team, application, infrastructure has in place is matches the major cloud providers (i.e. Salesforce, Google, AWS, Microsoft). Even then, spreading your data around to 1,000 different SaaS vendors increases the surface area for attack/loss by 1000x. "Trying to build a vertical analytics offering on top of OSS increases the level of difficulty by 100x" - 100x is hyperbole, it significantly harder before OSS was focused on operations, but now there is an HA Helm chart, or even an K8s operator for most of the popular OSS components. It might still be slightly harder today, but organizations that want to pull insights from THEIR data often value the proprietary nature of that data.
minton 7y ago
I can’t imagine how this product could give any meaningful reports to management when its data is coming from git history.
- sieabahlpark 7y ago
  git commit -m "fix the problem"
- rocgf 7y ago
  A previous company was using it and I think it was largely useless. The manager knew it and was quite vocal about it, but we still went through the tool in our 1-2-1s. It tells you what the reality in Git is - how many commits, how many lines of code changed, how much refactoring etc., so there's nothing really wrong with it. If that's what you're interested in, that's what you get.
  - robalfonso 7y ago
    Agree, there is an old saying "What gets measured gets managed" These numbers are handy (we look at similar numbers) but they absolutely do not tell the whole story and it's dangerous to think they do. You can often find yourself optimizing the wrong area and in large organizations even marginalizing your best performers because they don't fit the mold.
unreal37 7y ago
Why would Pluralsight, a training company, be interested in this. At $170 Million? Not sure why they thought it was a purchase that helped them in their mission.
- jMyles 7y ago
  I thought sure this was a stock deal (ie, a handshake basically). I didn't realize Pluralsight had $170 million in cash on hand. I guess that's why they give out such high quality fidget spinners as swag at PyCon.
  - austenallred 7y ago
    They went public
  - sundvor 7y ago
    The subscription fees make sense now. It's not a cheap service.
    - UweSchmidt 7y ago
      35$/month to live in selfstudy-paradise is not cheap?
      - dewey 7y ago
        Depends where you are living and what's the average salary in your country I'd say?
        sundvor 7y ago
        Yeah it's AUD 50 per month. Everything adds up. Especially if you've also got a family. I do miss it though, and am hoping to see another 50% off Black Friday special.
      - chrshawkes 7y ago
        There is a ton of filler content on Pluralsight. Half of all the courses are entirely setup, beginner level bullshit. Great content can be found there and everywhere. Poor content too.
kerbs 7y ago
I tried GitPrime and thought it was extremely well done. If you ignore the obvious use case of management using it for bean-counting, if you work with 10, 25, 50+ developers it really reveals some enlightening patterns. It is fairly expensive, however. Starts at around $10k/year which can make it a tough budgetary sell. I wonder if they'll price it in with Pluralsight as a package or keep it independant.
- detaro 7y ago
  Can you share a good example of the kind of interesting thing it shows?
  - nwhatt 7y ago
    I did a trial in 2018 and liked the product a lot. There were some simple metrics like "does a developer commit code every business day" and "how long do your PRs sit waiting for review". Other more complex things they produced from the git log were statistics about churn (how often you touch the same code), and new code vs. refactoring vs. bug fixing. Overall, I thought they handled the "you can't make metrics for developers" type objections fairly well. To get everyone on the dev team engaged and thinking about their metrics seemed like too big of a hurdle given the cost per seat of GitPrime.
  - kerbs 7y ago
    It used some pretty interesting strategies around creating Git statistics such as the concept of seperating "new code" vs "churn". They defined churn as "modifying a line that had been previously modified in the last month" (I forgot if it was month or some other timeline). It would chart if an engineer made a large number of "churn" diffs vs new code vs "legacy/refactoring" which was modifying code that was last touched a long time ago.
- moreira 7y ago
  Might be interesting/feasible to build a GitPrime competitor and sell it for far less, making it approachable to much smaller businesses or teams. Since the data comes from git one assumes the analysis can be done asynchronously in the background, so there's no complex scalability engineering. I might well be wrong though.
sleepychu 7y ago
If we have Pluralsight do/will we get git prime with it?
fs111 7y ago
170M for what can essentially be done with https://github.com/tj/git-extras/blob/master/Commands.md https://github.com/tj/git-extras/blob/master/Commands.md? Wow
- MachineShedFred 7y ago
  You really don't have a clue. Sure, you could have a team of people running those git commands against every repository you have and compiling an excel spreadsheet to create data visualizations for each and every engineer you've got on a team, and you might end up with something roughly where GitPrime was 3 years ago, and taking hours to do what it does in seconds. Now scale it to 2,000 engineers for reports the CTO of Walmart can look at. Scale it to give insight at the team level. You've basically said "oh AWS isn't anything special, you can do all of that with KVM."
nullwasamistake 7y ago
Not a fan of git prime. It's built for micro managers, measures mostly meaningless metrics. Encourages frequent small commits with low "churn". Trivial to game if you write a script to split your commits and artifically remove "churn" by making sure you don't touch your changes more than once. Also penalizes you for high "impact" commits. Adding a bunch of docs, renaming packages, or even running auto format penalizes you in metrics. It's completely blind to the language. Doesn't understand the code one bit. Doesn't tell you anything about code quality or if your "rockstar" only writes so much code because he copy pasted everything. Not kidding, almost all the code our "top coder", per git prime, wrote had to be redone after he got canned. He was copy pasting trash everywhere. I'm not against metrics but what it measures largely isn't meaningful. Ex. It's well known that lines of code across different languages are not equivalent.

134 points by marcc 7y ago

jayp 7y ago

Congrats to the GitPrime team. While the acquisition price is public, would love to learn more about revenue or # of customers. They must have had some serious revenue/traction to be bought for $170M.

windexh8er 7y ago
> While the acquisition price is public, would love to learn more about revenue or # of customers. They must have had some serious revenue/traction to be bought for $170M. Not exactly. I was at a startup that was only doing about $15M in annual revenue that got picked up for $350M. A lot of common PE values in tech are well past 25x in public stocks which seems (oddly) "normal" these days.
- mi100hael 7y ago
  Usually the Earnings part of P/E is 0 in startup acquisitions, so technically the P/E ratio is undefined. 25x revenue isn't unheard of, though. It's not that odd either if you figure out what angle the acquirer is betting on. Often it involves a mix of: - opportunity to easily cross-sell to a new swath of the market - continuing to grow the acquired business - realize economies of scale that the acquired business were working towards
newsoul2019 7y ago
You'd be surprised how often acquisitions boil down to former frat buddies on the golf course
parakeet9 7y ago
Per Pluralsight's earning's call yesterday [1]: "Pluralsight will acquire GitPrime for a total purchase price of $170 million to be paid in cash. This amount represents a multiple of approximately 5 times to 6 times expected 2020 billings." That puts 2020 projected revenue at $28-34 million. During the Q&A portion of the call, Pluralsight's CEO mentioned that "they [GitPrime] only have a few hundred customers". [1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/pluralsight-inc-ps-q1-2019-014945006.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/pluralsight-inc-ps-q1-2019-01...

georgewfraser 7y ago

GitPrime is a great exemplar of a whole class of companies that are waiting to get built: domain-specific business intelligence (BI) tools. And it’s gotten radically easier to build something like GitPrime even in the last year. You can use an automated data pipeline like Fivetran (my company) to centralize all your users data in a single multi-tenant Snowflake data warehouse, and then build your analytics on top of that foundation. Finally, you can sell direct access to the curated data via data sharing as an enterprise feature. It’s a highly repeatable pattern. There should be a GitPrime for every industry.

grantlmiller 7y ago
Generally agree on your broad point, but not on the architecture. I'm biased, but I would suggest that if you follow GitPrime's lead, you architect with OSS components that you can deploy on-prem as it was crucial to their success: https://blog.replicated.com/gitprime-enterprise-saas/ https://blog.replicated.com/gitprime-enterprise-saas/
- georgewfraser 7y ago
  Trying to build a vertical analytics offering on top of OSS increases the level of difficulty by 100x. I’m not saying that it’s never the right answer, but I am saying there’s a large category of companies waiting to be built where the primary value is the expertise around how to analyze the data, not the infrastructure. If you’re analyzing data that comes from cloud data sources anyway, there’s really no sense in “deploying”. CIOs ask for it, you say no, you do the security compliances and eventually they come around.
  - grantlmiller 7y ago
    "If you’re analyzing data that comes from cloud data sources anyway, there’s really no sense in “deploying”." - This is only true if the security controls that your team, application, infrastructure has in place is matches the major cloud providers (i.e. Salesforce, Google, AWS, Microsoft). Even then, spreading your data around to 1,000 different SaaS vendors increases the surface area for attack/loss by 1000x. "Trying to build a vertical analytics offering on top of OSS increases the level of difficulty by 100x" - 100x is hyperbole, it significantly harder before OSS was focused on operations, but now there is an HA Helm chart, or even an K8s operator for most of the popular OSS components. It might still be slightly harder today, but organizations that want to pull insights from THEIR data often value the proprietary nature of that data.

minton 7y ago

I can’t imagine how this product could give any meaningful reports to management when its data is coming from git history.

sieabahlpark 7y ago
git commit -m "fix the problem"
rocgf 7y ago
A previous company was using it and I think it was largely useless. The manager knew it and was quite vocal about it, but we still went through the tool in our 1-2-1s. It tells you what the reality in Git is - how many commits, how many lines of code changed, how much refactoring etc., so there's nothing really wrong with it. If that's what you're interested in, that's what you get.
- robalfonso 7y ago
  Agree, there is an old saying "What gets measured gets managed" These numbers are handy (we look at similar numbers) but they absolutely do not tell the whole story and it's dangerous to think they do. You can often find yourself optimizing the wrong area and in large organizations even marginalizing your best performers because they don't fit the mold.

unreal37 7y ago

Why would Pluralsight, a training company, be interested in this. At $170 Million? Not sure why they thought it was a purchase that helped them in their mission.

jMyles 7y ago
I thought sure this was a stock deal (ie, a handshake basically). I didn't realize Pluralsight had $170 million in cash on hand. I guess that's why they give out such high quality fidget spinners as swag at PyCon.
- austenallred 7y ago
  They went public
- sundvor 7y ago
  The subscription fees make sense now. It's not a cheap service.
  - UweSchmidt 7y ago
    35$/month to live in selfstudy-paradise is not cheap?
    - dewey 7y ago
      Depends where you are living and what's the average salary in your country I'd say?
      - sundvor 7y ago
        Yeah it's AUD 50 per month. Everything adds up. Especially if you've also got a family. I do miss it though, and am hoping to see another 50% off Black Friday special.
    - chrshawkes 7y ago
      There is a ton of filler content on Pluralsight. Half of all the courses are entirely setup, beginner level bullshit. Great content can be found there and everywhere. Poor content too.

kerbs 7y ago

I tried GitPrime and thought it was extremely well done. If you ignore the obvious use case of management using it for bean-counting, if you work with 10, 25, 50+ developers it really reveals some enlightening patterns. It is fairly expensive, however. Starts at around $10k/year which can make it a tough budgetary sell. I wonder if they'll price it in with Pluralsight as a package or keep it independant.

detaro 7y ago
Can you share a good example of the kind of interesting thing it shows?
- nwhatt 7y ago
  I did a trial in 2018 and liked the product a lot. There were some simple metrics like "does a developer commit code every business day" and "how long do your PRs sit waiting for review". Other more complex things they produced from the git log were statistics about churn (how often you touch the same code), and new code vs. refactoring vs. bug fixing. Overall, I thought they handled the "you can't make metrics for developers" type objections fairly well. To get everyone on the dev team engaged and thinking about their metrics seemed like too big of a hurdle given the cost per seat of GitPrime.
- kerbs 7y ago
  It used some pretty interesting strategies around creating Git statistics such as the concept of seperating "new code" vs "churn". They defined churn as "modifying a line that had been previously modified in the last month" (I forgot if it was month or some other timeline). It would chart if an engineer made a large number of "churn" diffs vs new code vs "legacy/refactoring" which was modifying code that was last touched a long time ago.
moreira 7y ago
Might be interesting/feasible to build a GitPrime competitor and sell it for far less, making it approachable to much smaller businesses or teams. Since the data comes from git one assumes the analysis can be done asynchronously in the background, so there's no complex scalability engineering. I might well be wrong though.

sleepychu 7y ago

If we have Pluralsight do/will we get git prime with it?

fs111 7y ago

170M for what can essentially be done with https://github.com/tj/git-extras/blob/master/Commands.md https://github.com/tj/git-extras/blob/master/Commands.md? Wow

MachineShedFred 7y ago
You really don't have a clue. Sure, you could have a team of people running those git commands against every repository you have and compiling an excel spreadsheet to create data visualizations for each and every engineer you've got on a team, and you might end up with something roughly where GitPrime was 3 years ago, and taking hours to do what it does in seconds. Now scale it to 2,000 engineers for reports the CTO of Walmart can look at. Scale it to give insight at the team level. You've basically said "oh AWS isn't anything special, you can do all of that with KVM."

nullwasamistake 7y ago

Not a fan of git prime. It's built for micro managers, measures mostly meaningless metrics. Encourages frequent small commits with low "churn". Trivial to game if you write a script to split your commits and artifically remove "churn" by making sure you don't touch your changes more than once. Also penalizes you for high "impact" commits. Adding a bunch of docs, renaming packages, or even running auto format penalizes you in metrics. It's completely blind to the language. Doesn't understand the code one bit. Doesn't tell you anything about code quality or if your "rockstar" only writes so much code because he copy pasted everything. Not kidding, almost all the code our "top coder", per git prime, wrote had to be redone after he got canned. He was copy pasting trash everywhere. I'm not against metrics but what it measures largely isn't meaningful. Ex. It's well known that lines of code across different languages are not equivalent.