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I suspect (based on nothing so take it for what that's worth) that the FogCreek Illuminati feel burned by the Trello experience: there they carefully tended, ha
by mandevil 7y ago
I suspect (based on nothing so take it for what that's worth) that the FogCreek Illuminati feel burned by the Trello experience: there they carefully tended, had high organic growth, spun it out to its own company after three years, and ended up selling for less than half a billion dollars in 2017. This is bad because 2017 was quite probably the highest valuations for privately held technology companies in this cycle, and they weren't a unicorn, unlike plenty of other companies at the time- Quora raised 85m at a 1.7g valuation in April 2017, to pick a business that FogCreek would know well.
SO, like Trello, took a long time to find a business model (honestly Trello never really did); it seems clear that SO Jobs didn't work, but enterprise sales is the key, just based on what they emphasized in the announcement. Using the SaaS website as a loss leader advertisement for the shrinkwrap software is an interesting model: I see it as somewhat similar to the old 'give away Unix and C free to universities, sell System V to the companies those students work at' model, modernized for the internet age.
- triceratops 7y agoI dunno. Quora had a 1.7B valuation but Trello had an actual exit. If I were an investor or employee I might prefer the latter. $425M exit after a mere 3 years of operation as an independent company is nothing to sniff at. Trello is merely a shared todo list, when you boil it down. Was a unicorn exit necessarily expected of them?
- adventured 7y agoI agree with that premise. Quora will be lucky to bail out with a $425 million exit on the downside of this expansion. They're a decade old, the VCs are going to want their money soon and the clock is ticking on this long up-cycle (as the desperate IPO rush blatantly indicates). Who is paying $1+ billion for Quora? There are no overpaying buyers for that type of entity - Yahoo is dead, AOL is dead, and InteractiveCorp is far too shrewd to pay that extreme valuation. Quora is worth $100-$200m tops right now. Genius is in the same boat. A decade old, failed premise (turns out people don't actually want to annotate everything), failed expansion plans (so... back to lyrics then), no business model. At the mercy of the VCs, they'll eventually be passed around for $10m or $20m like MySpace or Tumblr. These companies are this start-up generation's About.com (or the latest eHow). Simple rule for anyone doing a knowledge service: if you put the profit motive over the knowledge motive (which is the only choice if you take a lot of VC), your service will end up in the dustbin of history, no exceptions.
- thrower123 7y agoWhat exactly is the value of Quora? It's Yahoo Answers with better CSS and the idiots filtered out. I assume it's ad-supported - they have started supposedly sharing revenue with users. It could disappear tomorrow and leave barely a memory.
- mjcohen 7y agoDon't know about the idiots. My quora feed keeps coming up with pairs of "What is the square root of nnnn?" for seemingly random integer nnnn. Don't know how to stop it. When I feel like it, I answer "2".
- bluedino 7y agoWhoever said "there is no such thing as a dumb question" never visited Quora. Worse yet, the site is full of dumb answers as well.
- jodrellblank 7y agoQuora pays people who ask questions, based on how many views their question gets. Now it's full of people spamming as many questions as they can, trying to game it.
- thrower123 7y agoAh. When they started, they were seeding it with high quality questions and famous answerers. I guess the floodgates have now opened.
- tanr54ok 7y agoI prefer the idiots of yahoo answers. At least some of them have a sense of humor.
- mmahemoff 7y agoMaybe there's an idiot filter but the CSS spam filter isn't working at all. Look up anything related to SaaS/PaaS.
- mandevil 7y agoA contemporary (to the exit) account certainly thought Trello underperformed, business model wise (was very complimentary of the tech stack, though)[1]. I've never worked in the B2C space so I can't comment on whether freemium was a better option, but I did spend a few years in B2B/SMB SaaS space and the business I worked for looked very different from Trello and was more successful, financially (our tech stack was almost certainly worse). [1]: https://usefyi.com/trello-history/ https://usefyi.com/trello-history/
- triceratops 7y agoThanks that's an interesting take and I learned quite a bit.
- RandallBrown 7y agoWhy do you think SO Jobs hasn't worked? It's the first place I look for jobs.
- mandevil 7y agoAs I said in my comment, because he makes two references to the private SO offering known as Teams, and none to the Jobs monetization. [1] Therefore, it isn't something that the current CEO thinks the next CEO should focus on, therefore, it can't be what is paying the bills. Whether it works for a developer or not I can't say, I have no personal experience using any job board. Just I don't think it can matter much to the bottom line of the company based on what Joel wrote here. [1]: "especially Teams, where we are starting to close many huge deals and becoming a hyper-growth enterprise software company very quickly" "And we want to make it possible for knowledge workers everywhere to use Stack Overflow to get answers to the proprietary questions that are specific to their organizations and teams."
- itronitron 7y agostarting to close is very different from have recently closed ... while Joel and Co. have traditionally come across as forthright in their communications that quote reads like something that is focused on generating sales, so is potentially BS
- sevagh 7y agoAgreed - some of the best communication, interviews, and offers I've got came from SO jobs. It's the first place I look as well.
- neves 7y agoCrazy world were a beloved product sell for half a billion of dollars and isn't considered a great achievement.
- eldavido 7y agoI mean...sort of. The problem IMO is the scale of the opportunity relative to how much money is consumed. There are great businesses at every increment of enterprise value from $5 million up to $5 billion. We just need to realize this, and stop judging greatness by the pure size of the exit. I think Silicon Valley could learn a lot from Hollywood in so many ways. One is how we think about "greatness". Is there the equivalent of a "great indie flick" for software companies? Or will we continue to use "exit value" as the only yardstick?
- herrschnapps 7y agoBasecamp?
- neves 7y agoI probably was developed by half a dozen people. Was sold for half a billion!
- Dunedan 7y agoMaybe Stack Overflow Jobs would work better if they'd publicly state what their job ad pricing is and if they'd improve the user experience (e.g. there is no way to get a nice looking printable version of the developer story). From my perspective Stack Overflow Jobs is a fantastic product, but lacks some tweaks here and there to make it working.
- taneq 7y agoThat’s mental. Trello is nice, I use it, but in the end it’s essentially a to-do list app. Do we really feel hard done by when a to-do list app is ‘only’ worth $500,000,000?
- mr__y 7y agoIt's not a to-do list app worth 500M, it's the to-do list app 's user base worth 500M
- wyclif 7y agoTrello didn't have a business model? I thought the model was easy to use, well-designed kanban for businesses.