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This is absolutely phenomenal. Naspers/Prosus are some of the savviest and most forward-thinking players in tech investment — would you have been smart enough t
by numair 5y ago
This is absolutely phenomenal. Naspers/Prosus are some of the savviest and most forward-thinking players in tech investment — would you have been smart enough to give Tencent all that money, way back when? And remember, they were a bunch of nobodies based out of South Africa when that happened.
This is much more interesting than a monopolist like Microsoft buying SO, and I’d be keen to see what the growth strategy is here. This might very well be one component of a larger suite they will assemble to create something very interesting and valuable for the developer community. They’ve got the money and the brainpower to put it together.
- DavidWilkinson 5y agoAgreed, it's an interesting complement to Codecademy and SimilarWeb
- dgb23 5y agoThey might have first class access to data that enables a powerful shift in integrated development.
- systemvoltage 5y agoI don't see how giving money to Tencent has anything to do with the ability to steer SO. The best thing would have been the status quo. SO has been running on its feet for many years. This consolidation, while disputably better than Microsoft acquisition, is no worse than large companies buying out small ones usually guaranteing their demise. If anything else, Microsoft has left Github untouched so far. I am not convinced that this is "absolutely phenomenal".
- teh_klev 5y ago> The best thing would have been the status quo. SO has been running on its feet for many years You forgot that there's a bunch of VC's who now want their investment back plus interest.
- B1FF_PSUVM 5y agoThat's it, the VC money is strictly for a limited time - when the fund time ends, there must an "exit" - either IPO or sale. (In case of success, of course; failures are just written off, the losses hopefully paid by the successful exits.)
- arp242 5y ago> If anything else, Microsoft has left Github untouched so far. Actually, I think it has gotten better. I don't like the consolidation of independents like GitHub to big corporations like Microsoft, but I can't deny that thus far, it actually worked out pretty well. Stack Overflow is a difficult company/website to manage though; it's not "just a website with a SaaS product" and really requires a good understanding of the social dynamics and such to run well, much more than e.g. GitHub.
- systemvoltage 5y agoThat's a good point. I wonder why SO is so political? As an outsider it is just like a bunch of people asking questions and getting answers.
- arp242 5y agoWhat do you mean with "so political"? The hard part is getting the social dynamics right. Askers want to ask any question, answerers want to answer interesting questions. Keeping both groups happy is a hard task. People complain about questions being closed (technically: "on hold") and marked as duplicated, but it serves a real purpose as no one wants to answer the same question over and over again. How you do it matters a lot though. I have a number of gripes with Stack Overflow, and there are quite a few things I would do different. But I see a lot of people complaining about it who probably don't realize just how hard of a problem it is.
- b3morales 5y agoAnd this is complicated even more by all the "soft" topic sites, each of which has its own culture.
- stjohnswarts 5y agoIt's just a very rigid structure, you have to put your square block in their square hole or you will be ripped a new one and tossed when asking a question. Also mods need to be in a good mood that day.
- selfhoster11 5y agoTo me, it seems that Github has become more proactive (or hair-trigger) in pulling down content via DMCA in the recent years. This could be down to companies finally figuring out that you can DMCA code repos, but I can't help thinking that the Microsoft acquisition was a factor.
- meh99 5y agoIf I had access to their business network, data analysis, and knew in the end it wasn’t my money, society will just bail us out, sure why not make that choice? You’re making it sound like they had real skin in the game. If it fails they walk away with enough to retire on anyway. Let’s not make celebrities of the biggest grifters out there, emotionally coloring them in as possessed of magical insights. They’re people playing a game where the deck is stacked in their favor by that sort of fawning. It’s an unverifiable claim to suggest they were uniquely gifted. Uniquely positioned is not the same thing.
- mitchdoogle 5y agoIt's crazy the kind of hero worship towards anyone who makes a ton of money. When you account for all the smart people hustling trying to make their startup work, you realize it boils down to luck. Which, of course, is not a great comfort to most people since we all want to believe we can achieve anything if we only work hard enough.
- sokoloff 5y agoI think of hard work as being more of a necessary but not sufficient condition for most of these outcomes, so to some extent: "The harder I work, the luckier I get..." You can't control your luck, but you can control how hard you work. Some will read that sentence and conclude that working hard is a fool's errand. Others will read it and conclude the opposite. Neither is entirely wrong.
- craftinator 5y agoIf you really want to be rich, don't work hard; either inherit, or get other people to do hard work. Working hard is easy, hundreds of millions of people do it, the trick is getting the hard workers to give you a percentage of what they earn, and scale that model up.
- sokoloff 5y agoGetting other people to do hard work in a coordinated fashion to create a valuable collective outcome is itself a form of hard work. On that point, we seem to agree.
- croes 5y agoEver heard of survivorship bias?
- bigdict 5y agoYeah but why do those who survive survive?
- femiagbabiaka 5y agoMostly luck.
- ytNumbers 5y agoTo quote Mazarin, "One must not ask of a general, 'Is he skillful?', but rather, 'Is he lucky?'". I think what Mazarin was probably getting at was that the best generals will always have others claiming that their success was due to luck.
- andrewflnr 5y agoLuck, usually.
- ttul 5y agoMostly it’s random chance. The reality of investing is that it’s mostly down to chance. Take an equally skilled set of investors and give them the same market access and some will do exceptionally well.
- bidirectional 5y agoThis does not stand up to scrutiny at all, for any kind of investing. There have not been so many VC/hedge/PE funds in history that the top ones would arise through chance.
- SanFranManDan 5y agoI mean you can get ten thousand monkeys throwing darts at a board full of companies as an investment strategy, and a handful of those monkeys will be top performers with excellent returns.
- sangnoir 5y ago> And remember, they were a bunch of nobodies based out of South Africa when that happened. Hard disagree - they weren't nobodies, Naspers was already a media juggernaut by 2001 (print and TV). Naspers was founded in 1915 (as De Nasionale Pers Beperkt - National Press) to promote Afrikaner Nationalism in the aftermath of the Anglo-Boer war. One of Naspers founders was also the founding president of the National Party (you might know them from their hit - Apartheid) and the mutually-beneficial, cozy arrangement between the NP and Nasionale Pers lasted until the very end of the Apartheid government in 1992.
- herodoturtle 5y agoJa true, but don't we Saffers all wish we bought more Naspers on the JSE before their gamble on Tencent.
- foobarbazetc 5y agoA bit ironic that the “nationalists” made their money from a Chinese company though…
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ineedasername 5y ago>Apartheid Sure, but it did gain significant market share and had a massive ROI for many decades for anyone on the profitable side of it. For raging racists & (white) sociopaths, it wasn't so bad.
- throwaway158497 5y agoWhat is good for the company is not necessarily good for developers or community.
- actuator 5y agoNaspers might have made smart bets in past but I am not sure how this means they will run the community well. I would have been more happy with a Microsoft acquisition (although that ends up making them even more powerful) as it ties into Microsoft's existing products well, so they don't need to necessarily change SO too much to make money from it. It can tie to their dev tooling story with GitHub, VSCode etc on one end and from LinkedIn end, they could have tied SO's jobs platform to Linkedin one. This makes MS more powerful but it might have left SO largely untouched.
- tclancy 5y agoAnything beyond leaving SO alone is going to go poorly. Your prediction is this, my prediction is this is going to push SO toward expertsexchange.com, pre-hyphen.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- codeulike 5y agoI heard that the deal got closed by the mods
- swyx 5y agocan you substantiate more here.. it reads like they made one good bet on Tencent and you suddently regard them as "the savviest and most forward-thinking players in tech investment ". have you looked at their other bets?
- tibbydudeza 5y agoThey invested in takealot.com which is the goto online site for non-food in South Africa. Revenue in 2020 was US$238-million up by 41% the previous year no doubt due to the lockdown.
- Aeolun 5y ago> would you have been smart enough to give Tencent all that money, way back when? Investing in China at the time seems like it would have been a valid strategy. They’re just incredibly lucky with the scale of their success.