4 ms·
What’s the endgame with SO here? A series F investment? Going public? Selling to Microsoft? I would assume selling to Microsoft would be the thing to do. But
by eric4smith 6y ago
What’s the endgame with SO here? A series F investment? Going public? Selling to Microsoft?
I would assume selling to Microsoft would be the thing to do.
But whoever buys it has no revenue model so that’s tricky. Unless they’re doing it for altruistic purposes.
Don’t get it twisted I love SO.
- latk 6y agoAt this valuation an acquisition is less likely. I would have rather expected an acquisition by Microsoft than a series E, but I guess it's too late now. That would leave an eventual IPO as the only way out, but they'd need to break even first (or at least have a very compelling vision to break even soon). I don't see that happening with their current Teams product, which is an uncompelling entry in a crowded market. Also, whether Teams eventually succeeds is largely unrelated to SO's unique value: the community. Teams is not valuable because of the community, it's just a spin-off from their public platform. They really need to find a better path to success, because wasting $85M on the status quo is not going to get them there. Their Careers product was more interesting in this respect, but it seems they failed to achieve sufficient scale there.
- corobo 6y ago> has no revenue model Half the smartest people in the world are working on the revenue model Ads. Ads everywhere.
- matsemann 6y agoThe internal SO offering (SO for teams or what it's called) works reasonably well for huge orgs.
- Slartie 6y agoThey're secretly waiting for GPT-4 to be finished, which will be trained on the whole SO question/answer corpus and can then be sold to big corporations desperate to scale up their teams of monkeys copy-pasting code from SO...sorry, I meant to say "engineers writing enterprise grade software".