
Pluralsight will acquire GitPrime for $170M - marcc
https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/01/pluralsight-will-acquire-gitprime-for-170m/
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georgewfraser
GitPrime is a great exemplar of a whole _class_ of companies that are waiting
to get built: domain-specific business intelligence (BI) tools. And it’s
gotten radically easier to build something like GitPrime even in the last
year. You can use an automated data pipeline like Fivetran (my company) to
centralize all your users data in a single multi-tenant Snowflake data
warehouse, and then build your analytics on top of that foundation. Finally,
you can sell direct access to the curated data via data sharing as an
enterprise feature.

It’s a highly repeatable pattern. There should be a GitPrime for every
industry.

~~~
grantlmiller
Generally agree on your broad point, but not on the architecture. I'm biased,
but I would suggest that if you follow GitPrime's lead, you architect with OSS
components that you can deploy on-prem as it was crucial to their success:
[https://blog.replicated.com/gitprime-enterprise-
saas/](https://blog.replicated.com/gitprime-enterprise-saas/)

~~~
georgewfraser
Trying to build a vertical analytics offering on top of OSS increases the
level of difficulty by 100x. I’m not saying that it’s never the right answer,
but I am saying there’s a large category of companies waiting to be built
where the primary value is the expertise around how to analyze the data, not
the infrastructure. If you’re analyzing data that comes from cloud data
sources anyway, there’s really no sense in “deploying”. CIOs ask for it, you
say no, you do the security compliances and eventually they come around.

~~~
grantlmiller
"If you’re analyzing data that comes from cloud data sources anyway, there’s
really no sense in “deploying”."

\- This is only true if the security controls that your team, application,
infrastructure has in place is matches the major cloud providers (i.e.
Salesforce, Google, AWS, Microsoft). Even then, spreading your data around to
1,000 different SaaS vendors increases the surface area for attack/loss by
1000x.

"Trying to build a vertical analytics offering on top of OSS increases the
level of difficulty by 100x"

\- 100x is hyperbole, it significantly harder before OSS was focused on
operations, but now there is an HA Helm chart, or even an K8s operator for
most of the popular OSS components. It might still be slightly harder today,
but organizations that want to pull insights from THEIR data often value the
proprietary nature of that data.

~~~
georgewfraser
I stand by 100x in this context. OSS is way behind the commercial analytical
databases. And deploying a horizontally scaleable analytical database is a
completely different ballgame than, say, Postgres.

~~~
babuskov
I don't have much experience with the exact topic, but anyone throwing phrases
like "100x more difficult" very quickly loses credence with people.

How do you measure 100x? How come it isn't 90x or 112x?

Does that mean what one engineer can do with a commercial database, you would
need 100 people do the the same thing with OSS in the same time frame?

If you used a phrase like "difficulty on another level" or something
descriptive like that instead, I'm sure people would be more interested to
hear what you have to say.

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nullwasamistake
Not a fan of git prime. It's built for micro managers, measures mostly
meaningless metrics.

Encourages frequent small commits with low "churn". Trivial to game if you
write a script to split your commits and artifically remove "churn" by making
sure you don't touch your changes more than once. Also penalizes you for high
"impact" commits. Adding a bunch of docs, renaming packages, or even running
auto format penalizes you in metrics.

It's completely blind to the language. Doesn't understand the code one bit.
Doesn't tell you anything about code quality or if your "rockstar" only writes
so much code because he copy pasted everything. Not kidding, almost all the
code our "top coder", per git prime, wrote had to be redone after he got
canned. He was copy pasting trash everywhere.

I'm not against metrics but what it measures largely isn't meaningful. Ex.
It's well known that lines of code across different languages are not
equivalent.

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unreal37
Why would Pluralsight, a training company, be interested in this. At $170
Million?

Not sure why they thought it was a purchase that helped them in their mission.

~~~
jMyles
I thought sure this was a stock deal (ie, a handshake basically). I didn't
realize Pluralsight had $170 million in cash on hand. I guess that's why they
give out such high quality fidget spinners as swag at PyCon.

~~~
sundvor
The subscription fees make sense now. It's not a cheap service.

~~~
UweSchmidt
35$/month to live in selfstudy-paradise is not cheap?

~~~
chrshawkes
There is a ton of filler content on Pluralsight. Half of all the courses are
entirely setup, beginner level bullshit. Great content can be found there and
everywhere. Poor content too.

~~~
UweSchmidt
Getting started is important, I'll gladly follow along someone setting up the
IDE and installing stuff as this will avoid countless problems.

Where do you find the best content?

~~~
chrshawkes
Honestly, I make my own content but some of the courses on Pluralsight are
some of the best.

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kerbs
I tried GitPrime and thought it was extremely well done. If you ignore the
obvious use case of management using it for bean-counting, if you work with
10, 25, 50+ developers it really reveals some enlightening patterns.

It is fairly expensive, however. Starts at around $10k/year which can make it
a tough budgetary sell.

I wonder if they'll price it in with Pluralsight as a package or keep it
independant.

~~~
detaro
Can you share a good example of the kind of interesting thing it shows?

~~~
kerbs
It used some pretty interesting strategies around creating Git statistics such
as the concept of seperating "new code" vs "churn". They defined churn as
"modifying a line that had been previously modified in the last month" (I
forgot if it was month or some other timeline).

It would chart if an engineer made a large number of "churn" diffs vs new code
vs "legacy/refactoring" which was modifying code that was last touched a long
time ago.

------
jayp
Congrats to the GitPrime team.

While the acquisition price is public, would love to learn more about revenue
or # of customers. They must have had some serious revenue/traction to be
bought for $170M.

~~~
windexh8er
> While the acquisition price is public, would love to learn more about
> revenue or # of customers. They must have had some serious revenue/traction
> to be bought for $170M.

Not exactly. I was at a startup that was only doing about $15M in annual
revenue that got picked up for $350M. A lot of common PE values in tech are
well past 25x in public stocks which seems (oddly) "normal" these days.

~~~
mi100hael
Usually the Earnings part of P/E is 0 in startup acquisitions, so technically
the P/E ratio is undefined. 25x revenue isn't unheard of, though. It's not
that odd either if you figure out what angle the acquirer is betting on. Often
it involves a mix of:

\- opportunity to easily cross-sell to a new swath of the market \- continuing
to grow the acquired business \- realize economies of scale that the acquired
business were working towards

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minton
I can’t imagine how this product could give any meaningful reports to
management when its data is coming from git history.

~~~
rocgf
A previous company was using it and I think it was largely useless. The
manager knew it and was quite vocal about it, but we still went through the
tool in our 1-2-1s.

It tells you what the reality in Git is - how many commits, how many lines of
code changed, how much refactoring etc., so there's nothing really wrong with
it. If that's what you're interested in, that's what you get.

~~~
robalfonso
Agree, there is an old saying "What gets measured gets managed" These numbers
are handy (we look at similar numbers) but they absolutely do not tell the
whole story and it's dangerous to think they do. You can often find yourself
optimizing the wrong area and in large organizations even marginalizing your
best performers because they don't fit the mold.

------
sleepychu
If we have Pluralsight do/will we get git prime with it?

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fs111
170M for what can essentially be done with [https://github.com/tj/git-
extras/blob/master/Commands.md](https://github.com/tj/git-
extras/blob/master/Commands.md)?

Wow

~~~
MachineShedFred
You really don't have a clue.

Sure, you could have a team of people running those git commands against every
repository you have and compiling an excel spreadsheet to create data
visualizations for each and every engineer you've got on a team, and you might
end up with something roughly where GitPrime was 3 years ago, and taking hours
to do what it does in seconds.

Now scale it to 2,000 engineers for reports the CTO of Walmart can look at.
Scale it to give insight at the team level.

You've basically said "oh AWS isn't anything special, you can do all of that
with KVM."

