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I can't help but think that this investment marks the Pets.com point in this investment cycle. GitHub is essentially a web interface to a single open-source DV

by jbarham 14y ago

I can't help but think that this investment marks the Pets.com point in this investment cycle. GitHub is essentially a web interface to a single open-source DVCS. The switching costs to using another DVCS such as Mercurial (which I personally prefer) or another Git hosting provider are minimal. There are no barriers to entry since Git is and always will be free. There are very few network effect benefits to using GitHub for paying customers who by definition want to keep their code private. GitHub is a good service and I use it myself, but I'm now increasingly cautious about using it since GitHub are now under serious pressure to deliver pretty spectacular returns to their investors. In the end I think this investment has less to do with GitHub and more to do with the fact that e.g. yields on 10-year Treasuries are currently under 2%. Investors are desperately looking for any decent returns on their money and throwing it a company like GitHub is just a Hail Mary pass.

emperorcezar 14y ago
Go use Bitbucket and tell me it's comparable. It's not. On every level.
- jbarham 14y ago
  I do use Bitbucket and it does exactly what I need: track changes to my private source code repos and manage issues. Does GitHub do some things better than Bitbucket? Sure, but I don't believe that those differences justify a valuation approaching a billion dollars.
  - wildmXranat 14y ago
    Indeed. I use both and have to say that there's nothing killer about both of them. I have my private projects on bitbucket, but feature wise they are interchangeable.
- chipotle_coyote 14y ago
  I think Bitbucket is pretty good, and has some advantages--most notably that I can have private repositories there without paying. Yes, this may identify me as a cheapskate, but, well. If anything, I suspect this investment is to make Github more competitive with Bitbucket -- remember, BB's parent company is Atlassian, which has pretty deep enterprise experience they can leverage. You may like GH's issue system better than BB's free one, but a paying BB customer can integrate it seamlessly with Jira and other Atlassian tools.
- enjo 14y ago
  I do honestly prefer Unfuddle.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
pmarca 14y ago
None of what you said is true :-).
- msellout 14y ago
  So he doesn't use GitHub and he's not cautious about using it?
  - pmarca 14y ago
    You're right -- let me reword -- nothing that he wrote is true except for the first half of the third paragraph.
    - jbarham 14y ago
      > GitHub is essentially a web interface to a single open-source DVCS. Maybe I'm missing something, but does GitHub support something other than Git? > The switching costs to using another [...] Git hosting provider are minimal. $ git clone git://github.com/jbarham/stathat-line-counter.git $ cd stathat-line-counter/ $ git remote add bitbucket ssh://git@bitbucket.org/jbarham/stathat-line-counter.git $ git push -u bitbucket master See, it's not so hard. > There are no barriers to entry since Git is and always will be free. http://git-scm.com/downloads http://git-scm.com/downloads > yields on 10-year Treasuries are currently under 2% http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=%5ETNX http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=%5ETNX I've worked in investment management. I know that investors with $100 million to throw around don't have a lot of good places to put their money. No pressure. Good luck.
      - lusr 14y ago
        GitHub recently announced Subversion bridging: https://github.com/blog/1178-collaborating-on-github-with-subversion https://github.com/blog/1178-collaborating-on-github-with-su...
      - statictype 14y ago
        > GitHub is essentially a web interface to a single open-source DVCS. Maybe I'm missing something, but does GitHub support something other than Git? The wrong part of that sentence is the word essentially. GitHub is essentially a social/collaboration app for people who spin code. The fact that it uses the git distributed version control system is an implementation detail. The essence of GitHub is in the network of people who use it and how easy it is to do so. Not in the fact that its a (really really) good front-end to a particular tool.
ricardobeat 14y ago
Your argument is contradictory. If they only need to beat those 2%, they are not under pressure to deliver spectacular returns.
- jbarham 14y ago
  That's not how venture capital funds work. By definition they make high-risk investments which means there is a high variance of returns from the invested companies. Most of the investments will in all probability lose money, which means that those that do make money at all will need to make very good money for the overall fund to break even and beat guaranteed investments like Treasuries. It should go without saying that Treasuries are risk-free since the government can print dollars to pay back its debts. But in this economy, investors are willing to get negative real returns (i.e., after inflation) on Treasuries since they're more concerned about the return of their money than returns on their money. (For fairly approachable commentary on the current macro investment climate, I'd recommend reading Bill Gross' monthly columns at http://www.pimco.com/EN/Insights/Pages/InvestmentOutlookOverview.aspx http://www.pimco.com/EN/Insights/Pages/InvestmentOutlookOver...)
  - aausch 14y ago
    So, this investments signals a shift in focus. Up until now, github was a long term growth company, a much more stable (if slower growing) setup? Ie, they've shifted gears, more towards a hit or flop kind of scenario, where they have to get fairly big fairly quickly, even if the process means they're at a higher risk of permanently failing. It doesn't look to me like the people who love and use github have been using it because it looks like it will be stable, and stick around for a while. They seem to have been won over by popularity effects and performance/cool tech factors. So, if github fails, it may not really be as big of an issue. Github could fail as an investment or company, and still leave a running system behind, up as a non-profit even; the risk to its customers doesn't seem that big. And the potential rewards, depending on how they invest the money, can be really big. There's lots of good work they can still do, that everyone will benefit from.
- lusr 14y ago
Mizza 14y ago
I completely disagree with this. There is no WAY that anybody ever loved Pets.com the way that I love GitHub. And I'm not the only one! Not by a long shot.
statictype 14y ago
GitHub is essentially a web interface to a single open-source DVCS I don't think GitHub is popular because it's just a web front-end over a DVCS. I'm basically a mercurial user. Use it for work. Used it for all my personal projects. The commands and workflow seem much cleaner and make much more sense to me than git's. I switched to git for personal projects soley because of GitHub. Partly because it has a very good user experience and is snappy (bitbucket is slow in comparison) but mostly because that's where everyone else is. I'd go as far as to say that GitHub has done more for git than git has done for GitHub.
marshally 14y ago
Saying that Github's switching costs are zero ignores the vibrant community that is in place. It is in effect like saying that Facebook's users have zero switching costs to jump over to Diaspora.

by jbarham 14y ago

emperorcezar 14y ago

Go use Bitbucket and tell me it's comparable. It's not. On every level.

jbarham 14y ago
I do use Bitbucket and it does exactly what I need: track changes to my private source code repos and manage issues. Does GitHub do some things better than Bitbucket? Sure, but I don't believe that those differences justify a valuation approaching a billion dollars.
- wildmXranat 14y ago
  Indeed. I use both and have to say that there's nothing killer about both of them. I have my private projects on bitbucket, but feature wise they are interchangeable.
chipotle_coyote 14y ago
I think Bitbucket is pretty good, and has some advantages--most notably that I can have private repositories there without paying. Yes, this may identify me as a cheapskate, but, well. If anything, I suspect this investment is to make Github more competitive with Bitbucket -- remember, BB's parent company is Atlassian, which has pretty deep enterprise experience they can leverage. You may like GH's issue system better than BB's free one, but a paying BB customer can integrate it seamlessly with Jira and other Atlassian tools.
enjo 14y ago
I do honestly prefer Unfuddle.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

pmarca 14y ago

None of what you said is true :-).

msellout 14y ago
So he doesn't use GitHub and he's not cautious about using it?
- pmarca 14y ago
  You're right -- let me reword -- nothing that he wrote is true except for the first half of the third paragraph.
  - jbarham 14y ago
    > GitHub is essentially a web interface to a single open-source DVCS. Maybe I'm missing something, but does GitHub support something other than Git? > The switching costs to using another [...] Git hosting provider are minimal. $ git clone git://github.com/jbarham/stathat-line-counter.git $ cd stathat-line-counter/ $ git remote add bitbucket ssh://git@bitbucket.org/jbarham/stathat-line-counter.git $ git push -u bitbucket master See, it's not so hard. > There are no barriers to entry since Git is and always will be free. http://git-scm.com/downloads http://git-scm.com/downloads > yields on 10-year Treasuries are currently under 2% http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=%5ETNX http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=%5ETNX I've worked in investment management. I know that investors with $100 million to throw around don't have a lot of good places to put their money. No pressure. Good luck.
    - lusr 14y ago
      GitHub recently announced Subversion bridging: https://github.com/blog/1178-collaborating-on-github-with-subversion https://github.com/blog/1178-collaborating-on-github-with-su...
    - statictype 14y ago
      > GitHub is essentially a web interface to a single open-source DVCS. Maybe I'm missing something, but does GitHub support something other than Git? The wrong part of that sentence is the word essentially. GitHub is essentially a social/collaboration app for people who spin code. The fact that it uses the git distributed version control system is an implementation detail. The essence of GitHub is in the network of people who use it and how easy it is to do so. Not in the fact that its a (really really) good front-end to a particular tool.

ricardobeat 14y ago

Your argument is contradictory. If they only need to beat those 2%, they are not under pressure to deliver spectacular returns.

jbarham 14y ago
That's not how venture capital funds work. By definition they make high-risk investments which means there is a high variance of returns from the invested companies. Most of the investments will in all probability lose money, which means that those that do make money at all will need to make very good money for the overall fund to break even and beat guaranteed investments like Treasuries. It should go without saying that Treasuries are risk-free since the government can print dollars to pay back its debts. But in this economy, investors are willing to get negative real returns (i.e., after inflation) on Treasuries since they're more concerned about the return of their money than returns on their money. (For fairly approachable commentary on the current macro investment climate, I'd recommend reading Bill Gross' monthly columns at http://www.pimco.com/EN/Insights/Pages/InvestmentOutlookOverview.aspx http://www.pimco.com/EN/Insights/Pages/InvestmentOutlookOver...)
- aausch 14y ago
  So, this investments signals a shift in focus. Up until now, github was a long term growth company, a much more stable (if slower growing) setup? Ie, they've shifted gears, more towards a hit or flop kind of scenario, where they have to get fairly big fairly quickly, even if the process means they're at a higher risk of permanently failing. It doesn't look to me like the people who love and use github have been using it because it looks like it will be stable, and stick around for a while. They seem to have been won over by popularity effects and performance/cool tech factors. So, if github fails, it may not really be as big of an issue. Github could fail as an investment or company, and still leave a running system behind, up as a non-profit even; the risk to its customers doesn't seem that big. And the potential rewards, depending on how they invest the money, can be really big. There's lots of good work they can still do, that everyone will benefit from.
lusr 14y ago

Mizza 14y ago

I completely disagree with this. There is no WAY that anybody ever loved Pets.com the way that I love GitHub. And I'm not the only one! Not by a long shot.

statictype 14y ago

GitHub is essentially a web interface to a single open-source DVCS I don't think GitHub is popular because it's just a web front-end over a DVCS. I'm basically a mercurial user. Use it for work. Used it for all my personal projects. The commands and workflow seem much cleaner and make much more sense to me than git's. I switched to git for personal projects soley because of GitHub. Partly because it has a very good user experience and is snappy (bitbucket is slow in comparison) but mostly because that's where everyone else is. I'd go as far as to say that GitHub has done more for git than git has done for GitHub.

marshally 14y ago

Saying that Github's switching costs are zero ignores the vibrant community that is in place. It is in effect like saying that Facebook's users have zero switching costs to jump over to Diaspora.