The fact that they walked this back so quickly suggests that they either are strapped for cash or have extremely out-of-touch leadership. Both are worrying.
Is the title really accurate though. They never made a public announcement saying they would do this. Someone just leaked an internal discussion and it blew up.
A lot of things get discussed and evaluated that never eventuate.
Indeed. The fact that they're also limiting free organizations to 5 members (counting members of sub-groups)[1], which feels truly arbitrary, seems to agree.
IIRC, GitHub always had this limit. They removed it sometime after the acquisition, which could be because they have no pressure to justify the valuation be revenue.
While they have 884M cash/equivalents, they did have a yearly 157M Net loss, compared to 192M net loss last year. That's some good improvement but it means there's a lot of work to be done before they reach profitability. So I don't think they're strapped for cash, but there is likely pressure to make enough changes to reach profitability within 3-4 years.
They burned $129MM and forecast a loss of $142MM next fiscal year.
Given that they recently went public I’d imagine they would be trying to become profitable. The IPO appears to have netted them around $600M in cash, or about four years of runway.
