9 ms·

I hate to crash the party, but this is a very odd move for an awesome company and a service that I use and <3. Github has always been against taking money. Act

by yuvadam 14y ago

I hate to crash the party, but this is a very odd move for an awesome company and a service that I use and <3. Github has always been against taking money. Actually, TPW has used some very harsh words criticizing startups that choose to take VC money. 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.

mrkmcknz 14y ago
http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/09/github-funding-say-what/ http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/09/github-funding-say-what/
leftnode 14y ago
Maybe they're building their own data center? Or really trying to expand into the enterprise market by going up head to head with Atlassian (expanding their issues and Wiki tools to complete separate packages). All speculation, of course.
- alexatkeplar 14y ago
  Data centers can usually be debt funded - the data center is the security.
forgotusername 14y ago
$100m to maintain their current product doesn't make sense, but I imagine they're interested in growing (duh). Adding 100 developers and 50+50 sales/support guys could easily eat $25m a year.
nostromo 14y ago
Pulling from an old blog post, I don't see any inconsistency. http://tom.preston-werner.com/2010/10/18/optimize-for-happiness.html http://tom.preston-werner.com/2010/10/18/optimize-for-happin... > The ironic thing about bootstrapping and venture capital is that once you demonstrate some success, investors will come to YOU. When this happens you will be in a much better place to make a more reasoned choice about taking on additional capital and all the complexities that come with it. Talking to VCs with some leverage in your back pocket is an entirely different game from throwing yourself in front of a conference table full of general partners and trying to persuade them that you're worth their time and money. Power is happiness.
- why-el 14y ago
  I don't see any inconsistency whatsoever between the post you link to and what just happened. Tom was clearly talking about early funding, essentially when you just started, and how that can affect your product and its future. The fact that they raised that much actually proves Tom's point: That you should approach VC money from a strong position, which you can't reach if you start off with VCs watching over you. Update: This post[1] (Above for the moment) says it better. [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4220725 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4220725
  - nostromo 14y ago
    Perhaps you misread my comment? I specifically say, "I don't see any inconsistency."
    - why-el 14y ago
      yes I indeed did misread your comment. Sorry about that! I read a couple of threads here and there and the number of comments raising this issue was increasing, so my eye only caught the inconsistency part of it. Sorry again.
jakebellacera 14y ago
I can only imagine that there is a lot of money in Enterprise. A solid support team is exactly what big companies are looking for when they choose to host their code with Github.
chimi 14y ago
There are a couple metaphors here: 1) Burn the ships By committing so strongly to an anti-VC ideology, they forced themselves to focus on profitability. They required themselves to make a sustainable company without the expectations that eventually someone would expand their runway. In the process, they created a very attractive investment opportunity for the trillions of dollars out there sitting on the sidelines looking for the next big thing. 2) Everything has a price Don't consider this a strike against the github folks, I'm sure they are strong and ethical people, but everything has its price. $100 Million is a lot of money and I'm sure it left the founders with a lot of peace-of-mind that will allow them to focus on building an IPO worthy company. They haven't done anything immoral and no one gets hurt, rather many people may greatly benefit from this move. They changed their mind like everyone in the world does in the face of smaller sums of money than this. Good luck Github.
JonnieCache 14y ago
The person who figures out how to get movie/music studios and the like to use version control is going to be very, very rich.
- megrimlock 14y ago
  Just curious, what makes you think they don't already use version control prolifically? What opportunity do you see? One studio I'm familiar with has some assets with change history back through to SCCS -- back through RCS, CVS, and P4. These places have long dealt with large groups of people collaborating on shared files that are constantly changing, forking, merging, etc.
  - JonnieCache 14y ago
    I'm sure lots of bigger places do use it. In the world of music, there are studios everywhere that have maybe a dozen staff, making a lot of money and producing a lot of output, where version control is an unheard of concept. No audio production software that I'm aware of has any provision for version control. I was kindof assuming that it would be the same for mid to smaller sized movie/tv studios as well, but at the same time I wouldn't be surprised to learn that you can get a plugin for Premier or whatever that does it. I know for a fact that there are many largish advertising agencies out there who have fileservers with hundreds of ProjectName01, ProjectName02 etc style directories. Why do you think apple brought "Versions" or whatever its called in with lion?
    - esonderegger 14y ago
      I use Sequoia (http://pro.magix.com/en/sequoia/overview.527.html http://pro.magix.com/en/sequoia/overview.527.html) and I'm very happy with the 'Save Project Copy' function. When I start a new project, I create a 'history' folder and the project copies go in there, named as project_name-timestamp.VIP. I do that every time I'm a stopping point, much like how I use 'git commit' on a code project. That doesn't mean there isn't huge room for improvement in this arena. An approach like this (or OSX's versions) doesn't allow you to do anything like 'git diff' to see what's changed from version to version. I can imagine this is a very difficult problem for binary data, however. Also, distributed version control on media production software could allow for multiple users to be editing a project simultaneously. Unfortunately, I don't really see GitHub being able to help much here. For example, any work done to make ProTools files git-friendly wouldn't also work on Photoshop files. I'd love to be wrong about this, but I suspect seeing version control in media production software would require redesigning the application's file format from the ground up, and would be a task for each software company to do on their own.
mibbitier 14y ago
Probably makes it easier for them to sell the company to bigco for $1bn.
- shill 14y ago
  I believe that this is the correct answer.
  - kylebrown 14y ago
    And that probably explains the anti-VC sentiment. In multi-level marketing (MLM) pyramids, there's a "business" which serves as an investment vehicle for the money to trickle-up: energy juice, women's cosmetics, etc. A cynic sees startups serving the same purpose for VC. Announcements of funding are publicity stunts to pump up the valuation and then dump it in an "exit". The main difference between now and the late 90's, as far as I can tell, is that insiders sell their shares on SecondShare during later rounds, instead of waiting for an IPO to sell them on NASDAQ.
  - pmarca 14y ago
    It's not.
- Achshar 14y ago
  After all instagram did something very similar, used VC investment to boost sale price. And it seemed to work very well. Can we expect some surprise news from github? I don't know, but that can sure be one valid reason for raising such money which they clearly don't need to work on the product in it's current form.
  - ricardobeat 14y ago
    That would make AH look like complete fools, judging by the blog post. Not happening.
    - Achshar 14y ago
      Why would they look like fools? Investors got 2X in a couple of weeks in insagram's case IIRC.
shanev 14y ago
They specifically said they are raising this round for their enterprise product. Having the backing of top tier VC gives them more validity within the enterprise. That's probably the main reason. I doubt they needed the money. Very happy for them. The talented team they are building is unstoppable.

by yuvadam 14y ago

mrkmcknz 14y ago

http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/09/github-funding-say-what/ http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/09/github-funding-say-what/

leftnode 14y ago

Maybe they're building their own data center? Or really trying to expand into the enterprise market by going up head to head with Atlassian (expanding their issues and Wiki tools to complete separate packages). All speculation, of course.

alexatkeplar 14y ago
Data centers can usually be debt funded - the data center is the security.

forgotusername 14y ago

$100m to maintain their current product doesn't make sense, but I imagine they're interested in growing (duh). Adding 100 developers and 50+50 sales/support guys could easily eat $25m a year.

nostromo 14y ago

Pulling from an old blog post, I don't see any inconsistency. http://tom.preston-werner.com/2010/10/18/optimize-for-happiness.html http://tom.preston-werner.com/2010/10/18/optimize-for-happin... > The ironic thing about bootstrapping and venture capital is that once you demonstrate some success, investors will come to YOU. When this happens you will be in a much better place to make a more reasoned choice about taking on additional capital and all the complexities that come with it. Talking to VCs with some leverage in your back pocket is an entirely different game from throwing yourself in front of a conference table full of general partners and trying to persuade them that you're worth their time and money. Power is happiness.

why-el 14y ago
I don't see any inconsistency whatsoever between the post you link to and what just happened. Tom was clearly talking about early funding, essentially when you just started, and how that can affect your product and its future. The fact that they raised that much actually proves Tom's point: That you should approach VC money from a strong position, which you can't reach if you start off with VCs watching over you. Update: This post[1] (Above for the moment) says it better. [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4220725 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4220725
- nostromo 14y ago
  Perhaps you misread my comment? I specifically say, "I don't see any inconsistency."
  - why-el 14y ago
    yes I indeed did misread your comment. Sorry about that! I read a couple of threads here and there and the number of comments raising this issue was increasing, so my eye only caught the inconsistency part of it. Sorry again.

jakebellacera 14y ago

I can only imagine that there is a lot of money in Enterprise. A solid support team is exactly what big companies are looking for when they choose to host their code with Github.

chimi 14y ago

There are a couple metaphors here: 1) Burn the ships By committing so strongly to an anti-VC ideology, they forced themselves to focus on profitability. They required themselves to make a sustainable company without the expectations that eventually someone would expand their runway. In the process, they created a very attractive investment opportunity for the trillions of dollars out there sitting on the sidelines looking for the next big thing. 2) Everything has a price Don't consider this a strike against the github folks, I'm sure they are strong and ethical people, but everything has its price. $100 Million is a lot of money and I'm sure it left the founders with a lot of peace-of-mind that will allow them to focus on building an IPO worthy company. They haven't done anything immoral and no one gets hurt, rather many people may greatly benefit from this move. They changed their mind like everyone in the world does in the face of smaller sums of money than this. Good luck Github.

JonnieCache 14y ago

The person who figures out how to get movie/music studios and the like to use version control is going to be very, very rich.

megrimlock 14y ago
Just curious, what makes you think they don't already use version control prolifically? What opportunity do you see? One studio I'm familiar with has some assets with change history back through to SCCS -- back through RCS, CVS, and P4. These places have long dealt with large groups of people collaborating on shared files that are constantly changing, forking, merging, etc.
- JonnieCache 14y ago
  I'm sure lots of bigger places do use it. In the world of music, there are studios everywhere that have maybe a dozen staff, making a lot of money and producing a lot of output, where version control is an unheard of concept. No audio production software that I'm aware of has any provision for version control. I was kindof assuming that it would be the same for mid to smaller sized movie/tv studios as well, but at the same time I wouldn't be surprised to learn that you can get a plugin for Premier or whatever that does it. I know for a fact that there are many largish advertising agencies out there who have fileservers with hundreds of ProjectName01, ProjectName02 etc style directories. Why do you think apple brought "Versions" or whatever its called in with lion?
  - esonderegger 14y ago
    I use Sequoia (http://pro.magix.com/en/sequoia/overview.527.html http://pro.magix.com/en/sequoia/overview.527.html) and I'm very happy with the 'Save Project Copy' function. When I start a new project, I create a 'history' folder and the project copies go in there, named as project_name-timestamp.VIP. I do that every time I'm a stopping point, much like how I use 'git commit' on a code project. That doesn't mean there isn't huge room for improvement in this arena. An approach like this (or OSX's versions) doesn't allow you to do anything like 'git diff' to see what's changed from version to version. I can imagine this is a very difficult problem for binary data, however. Also, distributed version control on media production software could allow for multiple users to be editing a project simultaneously. Unfortunately, I don't really see GitHub being able to help much here. For example, any work done to make ProTools files git-friendly wouldn't also work on Photoshop files. I'd love to be wrong about this, but I suspect seeing version control in media production software would require redesigning the application's file format from the ground up, and would be a task for each software company to do on their own.

mibbitier 14y ago

Probably makes it easier for them to sell the company to bigco for $1bn.

shill 14y ago
I believe that this is the correct answer.
- kylebrown 14y ago
  And that probably explains the anti-VC sentiment. In multi-level marketing (MLM) pyramids, there's a "business" which serves as an investment vehicle for the money to trickle-up: energy juice, women's cosmetics, etc. A cynic sees startups serving the same purpose for VC. Announcements of funding are publicity stunts to pump up the valuation and then dump it in an "exit". The main difference between now and the late 90's, as far as I can tell, is that insiders sell their shares on SecondShare during later rounds, instead of waiting for an IPO to sell them on NASDAQ.
- pmarca 14y ago
  It's not.
Achshar 14y ago
After all instagram did something very similar, used VC investment to boost sale price. And it seemed to work very well. Can we expect some surprise news from github? I don't know, but that can sure be one valid reason for raising such money which they clearly don't need to work on the product in it's current form.
- ricardobeat 14y ago
  That would make AH look like complete fools, judging by the blog post. Not happening.
  - Achshar 14y ago
    Why would they look like fools? Investors got 2X in a couple of weeks in insagram's case IIRC.

shanev 14y ago

They specifically said they are raising this round for their enterprise product. Having the backing of top tier VC gives them more validity within the enterprise. That's probably the main reason. I doubt they needed the money. Very happy for them. The talented team they are building is unstoppable.