
A New Name for Stack Overflow (with surprise ending) - ssclafani
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/03/a-new-name-for-stack-overflow-with-surprise-ending/
======
staunch
I feel like Spolsky is just doing this whole VC-backed startup thing just to
see how crazy and ridiculous it is, so he can credibly make fun of it in his
future writing.

Future blog post:

 _"We didn't even have any idea how to go beyond programming questions. Our
our 'technology' if you can call it that was trivial. We had no business
model. My personal job board had higher revenue. Still, these crazy guys in
suits offered to give us millions of dollars at ridiculous valuations because
I'm a blogging celebrity and we did what any sane person would do: we took it!
It was fun while it lasted..."_

~~~
patio11
I don't know if his hour-long talk at BoS2010 will get posted eventually, but
a major theme was that value was shifting from creating "technology" to
creating communities around a shared experience. StackOverflow is more
sophisticated than the clone-it-in-a-weekend crowd gives it credit for, but
even if it were Baby's First CRUD App, it would be Baby's First CRUD App Which
Contributes Hundreds Of Millions In Productivity To Developers. That community
and their accumulated knowledge have value even if the technology is a hacked-
together Wordpress plugin (and again, it isn't).

It is an open question whether they successfully move beyond developers. If
they do, gadzooks, good news for the world. There are similar expert questions
with canonical right answers which are a) difficult to find at present and b)
extraordinarily consequential for people.

I had two canonical examples in recent weeks on tax and visa questions, for
myself and other people. Answering one took a week of research and directly
lead to $5,000 in my pocket. It is ungoogleable at present. The one asked by a
friend of mine is similarly ungoogleable, the right answer is easy but
nonobvious and virtually undocumented, and many of the _numerous_ wrong
answers lead to _deportation_.

------
guelo
I don't know, it makes sense but it kinda reminds me of that sex change
company.

~~~
weaksauce
experts exchange?

expertSEXchange dot com

edit: wow. Just showing the people who didn't get the reference.

~~~
michael_dorfman
Did you really think there were many of those folks around? The fact that the
parent got lots of upvotes, and no follow-up questions, might have been a
clue.

~~~
sp4rki
Regardless of the actual ratio of people that get it in contrast to those that
don't get it, there has to be people that didn't get it and are directly
benefited from his 'explanation'. On another point, I immediately knew about
what the OP was talking about, but the actual name completely slipped my mind,
so I guess I also found the explanation useful. It's right up there with the
people that post "clickable links" to a website. It might seem distasteful to
some, but hell they are useful in a myriad of situations.

------
cletus
I'm still seeing no evidence of success or traction beyond the original
Stackoverflow.

I'm kinda curious what their burn rate is. I think there are 20 odd employees
now, not all of them engineers. That'll consume $2-3 million a year. One hopes
they're simply stockpiling cash while valuations are good.

I'm kinda curious what valuation they got. I haven't seen anything about that
anywhere.

~~~
spolsky
Thank you cletus; I needed a link to match this one.
[http://www.codeproject.com/Lounge.aspx?msg=2724411#xx2724411...](http://www.codeproject.com/Lounge.aspx?msg=2724411#xx2724411xx)

The burn rate is very low.

The valuation is private.

~~~
cletus
This response confuses me.

The linked comment is dismissive and, in hindsight, ludicrous, saying that SO
won't be around in a year (in 2008).

The only reasonable conclusion to reach from this is that your response is a
not-so-subtle derision of my statement, basically claiming it is just as
ludicrous. Or am I reading this wrong?

If not, this confuses me for several reasons:

1\. It's very un-HN to be so snarky, even petty. You might be confusing HN for
proggit?

2\. I love SO, the (original) site. Not once have I ever questioned its
viability or value;

3\. I have however raised questions about the ability of SE sites to gain
traction in their respective verticals, a position thus far backed up by your
own numbers [1].

4\. I actually wish you guys well. I'm a big fan. The snarky response to a
dispassionate position/question makes me wonder if I've hit a nerve?

There are two kinds of comments you'll see on the Internet: uninformed
hate/trolling like you linked to. You seem to be suggesting my comment falls
into that. I disagree but hey, that's your prerogative. Whatever the case,
there's no point in responding to those kinds of comments.

The second kind are neutral/positive, arguably informed and generally
reasonable. My position is my comment falls into this category. When you
respond to those with snarky comments, it actually does you a great
disservice, portraying you as petty and small-minded (neither of which, for
the record, I believe to be true).

Weird morning.

[1]: [http://blog.stackoverflow.com/wp-
content/uploads/FebMonthlyU...](http://blog.stackoverflow.com/wp-
content/uploads/FebMonthlyUniques1.png)

~~~
logicalmind
My interpretation is that he is going to use your comment, like the one he
linked to, as motivation to prove you wrong. Maybe your comment will be
printed out and put onto the wall of the SE office.

~~~
jswinghammer
Considering he's a fairly active user on stackoverflow it seems like kind of a
silly thing to do.

------
ibejoeb
> ...long since stopped being about programmers ...whenever we told The New
> York Times that we were “Stack Overflow,” they would go to stackoverflow.com
> and have a heart attack. At least this way people wondering about the
> company understand that we’re about more than just programmer questions.

What? That's not good enough? Look at the graph. That's what it's about.

~~~
skeletonjelly
That's a good point. I'd guess that their direction is the driving force here,
as their current position doesn't reflect where they want to go or be (that I
don't know).

~~~
ibejoeb
Yeah, I'm just reacting. It's a good resource, and I worry that it'll be
ignored or diluted. It's the first time I've felt the management considers
"just programming" a trivial thing.

Good for them for growing. I hope they remember their base.

------
nikcub
I wish more companies would write simple and clear blog post announcements
like this one. The transparency is also refreshing given that corpspeak in
company communications is making a comeback (see AOL and Yahoo).

You don't need books and consultants on social media marketing, you just need
a bit of personality and to treat your audience and community as real people.

(this blog does fail at something I always note here - not having a paragraph
bio on the article pages that a lot of people land on, but they have nailed
everything else)

~~~
michaelbuckbee
I agree, it reminded me of the Woot! acquisition letter (which appears to no
longer be up), but is largely excerpted here:
<http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100630/15230910030.shtml>

It does sort of make you wonder what the reasoning is behind the stilted and
formal marketing speak that is everywhere. How can that possibly be effective?
Is it all just CYA and writing in such a way that nobody could possibly take
offense to it?

------
akent
tldr: Don't panic, stackoverflow.com is not changing, it's just the name of
the company they are changing to "Stack Exchange Inc."

~~~
AgentConundrum
I really wish that had been made clear from the title. I mean, I don't really
see a site of their (stackoverflow.com) size up and changing their name
overnight (though I _could_ see patio11 making grabbing a second domain like
AnswersToProgrammingQuestions.com), but the title had me a bit worried. It was
only made worse by blog.stackoverflow.com taking it's own sweet time
responding to my request.

I've long been confused about the naming of SO/SE. I mean, there was
stackoverflow.com (the site), stackoverflow inc. (the company), and
stackexchange. For a while I thought that the VC money was only for
stackoverflow.com because of this. Hopefully the company name change will help
me keep things clear in my head.

------
marcamillion
So just to be clear, the surprise ending is that they raised another round ?

I am not trolling, btw.

~~~
lylejohnson
Given that he begins that paragraph (where he discusses the new investors)
with, "Now the surprise ending..." I'd say you're correct.

------
statictype
There are some interesting sites there. I hope the home improvement one
becomes really popular. I can see that as becoming an incredibly useful
resource. Especially for people (like me) who are clumsy with handy work.

------
rriepe
I was thinking about this naming issue the other day, and I'm glad they made a
move.

I convinced myself they'd rename to simply _Stack_ for shortness' sake. I
still think they should; stack.com doesn't look too expensive.

~~~
spolsky
I like stack, too, but there's already an awesome company using stack.com. You
probably don't know stack magazine because you're not a high school jock, but
it's the #1 high-school-jock magazine in America

------
spicyj
Page was down, full text follows:

It’s been a while since we’ve done something arbitrary, complicated, and
confusing, so today I’m happy to announce that the name of the company has
been changed, effective immediately, to Stack Exchange Inc!

There’s a method behind this madness, of course: we want to emphasize the
importance of the 45 sites in our network, which has long since stopped being
about programmers:

That, plus, whenever we told The New York Times that we were “Stack Overflow,”
they would go to stackoverflow.com and have a heart attack. At least this way
people wondering about the company understand that we’re about more than just
programmer questions. We have Battlestar Galactica too!

Now the surprise ending. When we first raised venture capital way back in the
long-ago year of 2010, we actually had quite a few great investors interested
in buying our stock. And since then, the buzz hasn’t abated. We were pretty
sure that given the current market conditions, we could easily raise a big
pile of new Unicorn-bucks without losing control of the company. We made a few
phone calls, took a few meetings, I flew to London and Boston, and hey presto,
we sold another $12 million worth of the company to some great investors.

The new investors are Index Ventures, based in Geneva and London, and Spark
Capital, based up in Boston. Our first investor, Union Square Ventures, will
also put in more money so as to keep the same ownership percentage that they
had before (this is called a “pro-rata”).

Needless to say, the new investors will want to keep an eye on all that money,
so Neil Rimer from Index will be joining the board of directors, and Bijan
Sabet from Spark will be an observer on the board (he can come to meetings but
he can’t vote). And to keep from tipping the board to the investors, the
“common shareholders” (that is, the founders and employees) will be entitled
to elect another representative of their own to the board. We picked Anil
Dash, who has been blogging for even longer than I have and has been one of
our most valuable advisors.

Now, you may be wondering how we plan to spend all that money. First of all,
of course, we need new stickers and T-shirts. And a ping pong table…

We’re also improving the employee snack room a little bit:

If you would like to receive your own totally free commemorative 1,000,000
Unicorn Buck Bill and a Stack Exchange sticker, send a self-addressed stamped
envelope to:

    
    
      Stack Exchange Inc.
      55 Broadway 26 FL
      New York, NY 10006
    

If you live outside the United States, include about a dollar worth of
whatever kind of weird thing it is that you use over there for money (no goats
or Yap coins, please).

------
br1
The partition of stack exchange into n different sites is sad. Tags should be
able to impose order at least in the IT questions. The current situation
heightens the artificial boundaries between programmers, users and sys admins.

~~~
beaumartinez
Use the StackExchange API, hack together a site aggregating questions from all
StackExchange sites by tags, ???, make the world a better place.

------
davros
So, what is the valuation of stack exchange?

~~~
Zakuzaa
My guess: $80mm

~~~
iwwr
Remember, valuations come in unicorn dollars.

------
r00fus
As cool as naming your site after a class of software bug, I think Stack
Exchange is more descriptive of the whole initiative, and it rolls off the
tongue more easily.

Good move, and keep up the good content (now that Google has woken back up and
is indexing them properly!)

~~~
astrodust
Future competitors: Null Pointer, General Failure, Segmentation Fault.

~~~
flomo
I would be laughing, but I just a couple days ago I was googling for
information on an actual Stack Overflow error.

~~~
iwwr
Stack Overflow on their namesake:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/214741/what-is-a-stack-
ov...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/214741/what-is-a-stack-overflow-
error)

~~~
ry0ohki
And would things be different if they had called it PrivateVoid
[http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/04/help-name-our-
websi...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/04/help-name-our-website.html)

------
acangiano
> we want to emphasize the importance of the 45 sites in our network, which
> has long since stopped being about programmers:

You may want to add an "only" in there.

~~~
iy56
No, it's intentional.

