
GitHub to Seek $2B Valuation in Latest Funding Round - sqs
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-15/github-said-to-seek-2-billion-valuation-in-latest-financing
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vonklaus
Github is one of the best examples of a successful company built around open
source technology. This is proof open source software can be profitable.

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kiba
It is proof that building a proprietary business around open source is
profitable.

It is not proof however that being full on open source in everything you do is
profitable however I wished that to be the case.

~~~
vonklaus
Right. I think open source software is great. The community, collaboration and
transparency make it a great way to build and maintain software. It is not a
great way to build and maintain a business. Github has struck a balance
between open source and proprietary. I can't think of a successful open source
company that has 100% FOSS. Can you? Would be really interested in that
actually, it would be an interesting case study.

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sytse
GitLab CEO here, I think Hortonworks is 100% open source. And we like to think
that open core is a better model (making the core experience of the product
open source instead of just tools surrounding it).

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jMyles
I know that common sense isn't always a useful lens for these matters, but how
is it possible that Github, which has actual paying clients and revenue, is
worth 10% of whatsapp?

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arfliw
I know, right? Also, how is that Whatsapp is worth more than a liquor store,
which has actual revenues and profits?

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jMyles
I surmise you are being sarcastic, but this is a reasonable question. There
are plenty of liquor stores which seem to be of greater value (and likelihood
to generate future revenue) than whatsapp.

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arfliw
All they'd have to do is start running ads to show how absurd what you just
said is.

I find it laughable that in 2015 people are still claiming companies
strategically delaying monetization have worthless businesses. They care about
long term growth, not money in the hand. See Facebook and Twitter. And a bunch
of other companies.

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jMyles
I don't disagree at all, but I don't see even the advertising or collection
value of whatsapp. Even if it does exist, it is not similar in kind to
facebook or twitter, where you have a captive audience using a stateful
application suite.

Whatsapp seems to have less revenue potential than products which have already
shown an inability to find the black, such as AIM.

~~~
arfliw
If they started charging a monthly fee to use the app enough people would
stick around that they'd be able to buy a sizable % of all the liquor stores
in the USA. How many, I don't know. That would make an interesting interview
question.

Edit: gonna try it

My city has 500,000 people. I'm going to estimate there are 500 liquor stores
here. So that's 1 per 1,000 people. The USA has 330 million people, thus
330,000 liquor stores.

A liquor store is probably worth about $50,000. Thus, they are all worth $16.5
billion.

Whatsapp has 800 million MAU's. If 2% of them convert to $10 a month paying
customers, that is $160 million per month.

They could run that business much cheaper than the current one, so say 50
employees at $10k a month each. $500k a month. Double that for hosting and
rent etc. $1 million a month.

Those costs seem way too low in relation to revenue so let's just bump that up
to 50% of revenue. $80 million/month.

So $80 million per month profit. Or over 2 liquor stores per hour, 24/7/365\.
In about 15 years they'd own every liquor store in America.

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malkia
Awesome for the github folks!

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rokhayakebe
The valuation may be cheap. They have 9 million developers sharing their code
on their network, or at least using it to save their code. Certainly that must
be worth more than $2B, or in other words $222 per user.

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arthurcolle
I thought Tom Preston-Werner left GitHub? Out of the loop

~~~
tomphoolery
Yeah, I think it was just the last video they had of them and every article
just HAS to have a video on top these days doesn't it? ;-)

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comrade1
How does github make money? I read the article but it's only a couple of
paragraphs.

Github seems to be mostly personal and open source projects. With good reason
since it's trival to set up a git server yourself and so you'd only want to
put up stuff that you want public-facing. But it's not so trivial to set up
the web ui in git server and so I could see some value there (not sure if $2B
of value though)

I used github at a company but only for some code that we wanted to share
outside of our company. And if we had to pay for it we never would have used
github since we could have spent a 1/2 day setting up a public-facing git
server.

We would never have used it for our internal code - again, it's trivial to
maintain your own git server and it would also be irresponsible of us to put
our internal code on a public-facing server.

So... what makes them valued at 2B? Do they have any revenue at all? Maybe
they can hook up with linkedin?

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drstewart
I don't understand why McDonald's is valued at $100b. Personally, I don't eat
hamburgers, so they get no money from me. After all, it's irresponsible to eat
junk food. So I have to ask, do they even have revenue at all? How are they
still in existence?

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comrade1
McDonalds has a huge amount of revenue! Are you kidding us?

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alaskamiller
He's satirizing your comment.

The idea being that just because you don't find inherent value in something
doesn't exclude others from finding their own value and additionally
triviality doesn't necessary preclude others from claiming value.

~~~
comrade1
It's the argument of a two-year-old. I asked about revenue, not about personal
value.

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pbreit
I know this isn't how it works but I'd love to see 1) free private repos (like
Bitbucket) and 2) Mercurial support (like Bitbucket).

~~~
FreeFull
Any reason not to use Bitbucket rather than Github, to get those features?

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guidopallemans
Because GitHub is GitHub. It's as simple as that.

Especially when your repo is public, it won't have the same appeal on
Bitbucket.

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stephenr
> Especially when your repo is public, it won't have the same appeal on
> Bitbucket.

I don't know what kind of software you write, but if your users choose things
based on GitHub vs BitBucket hosting, I think you should find new users.

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pbreit
If you don't understand why people prefer Github, I'm not sure what to tell
you. And if you don't understand why people would prefer to use what they
prefer to use, then, well, I really don't know what to say.

~~~
stephenr
> If you don't understand why people prefer Github, I'm not sure what to tell
> you.

That just sounds like a reworded "It's what all the cool kids are using" to
me.

If you can't describe in words, the possible reason(s) why someone using
and/or contributing to a project, would prefer GitHub over BitBucket, it seems
like my original comment is valid, no?

I would liken this to Todd Barry's take on Coke vs Pepsi
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nacbxCgfQHc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nacbxCgfQHc)):

"It made me very sorry for her, because her body is telling her that she hates
something that tastes exactly like something she loves."

The user-functionality differences between GitHub and BitBucket are
insignificant.

If the original post was talking about users who download and use an
app/library from GitHub, then no I don't understand why the end-users would
care if it comes from GitHub or BitBucket - whether you're cloning the repo or
downloading a release, both make this very easy to do.

If the original post was talking about users who may submit bug reports,
potentially fork & submit pull requests, and there really are people willing
to contribute in those ways, but only if the project is hosted on GitHub.com,
then I would seriously question those people's values and reasons for
contributing in the first place.

