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Building a Coder's Paradise Is Not Profitable: GitHub Lost $66M In Nine Months Of 2016 (bloomberg.com)
Though not much popular outside the technology circles, GitHub is very popular among coders around the world. The startup operates a sort of Google Docs for programmers, giving them a place to store, share and collaborate on their work. But GitHub is losing money through profligate spending and has stood by as new entrants emerged in a software category it essentially gave birth to, according to people familiar with the business and financial paperwork reviewed by Bloomberg. From the report: The rise of GitHub has captivated venture capitalists. Sequoia Capital led a $250 million investment in mid-2015. But GitHub management may have been a little too eager to spend the new money. The company paid to send employees jetting across the globe to Amsterdam, London, New York and elsewhere. More costly, it doubled headcount to 600 over the course of about 18 months. GitHub lost $27 million in the fiscal year that ended in January 2016, according to an income statement seen by Bloomberg. It generated $95 million in revenue during that period, the internal financial document says. The income statement shows a loss of $66 million in the first three quarters of this year. That's more than twice as much lost in any nine-month time frame by Twilio Inc., another maker of software tools founded the same year as GitHub. At least a dozen members of GitHub's leadership team have left since last year.
Why do you need 600 employees for Github? You need a tenth of that, including engineering, marketing, sales and support.
For those who don't know, my company acquired SourceForge along with Slashdot and have been improving it. Redesign coming soon as well. http://arstechnica.com/informa...
I remember looking at Github Enterprise and finding their licensing model insane. It seemed like a recurring fee of about $5k/20 users/year as a starting point. There was no way I could have solid it to our leadership. $500 for only 20 users, easy sell. $5k? That is a site license of IntelliJ Ultimate or this.
I'm heating 1999-2000 flashbacks. Back then, all the Internet "utility" companies like Sun, Cisco, the ISPs and the telecoms were spending money like crazy building lavish workplaces for all the dotcom kids with the money the VC firms were giving them. Same thing happened back then as is now -- there's a massive arms race to build the best, most all-inclusive employer out there to attract and keep the elusive people who happen to know the flavor of the moment. Remember, Google serves 3 meals a day, provides free bus service from Hipster Central in San Francisco, and basically operates a college campus. They're widely seen as the benchmark, and every tech company seems to be emulating them to as much of a degree as their funding will let them.
GitHub's a perfect example of one of these utility companies. Slack, Atlassian, AWS, Microsoft (for Azure,) are also good examples. All of them make tools to let web developers crank out phone apps faster, which is the flavor of the moment, or provide infinite infrastructure to run the apps on. Traditional IT shops are also getting in on this trend, because GitHub and friends let CIOs push the magic DevOps button. All of a sudden, your siloed coders working on must-run applications in a mission critical environment switch into a Facebook-esque "move fast and break things" Agile model -- or so the Agile consultants tell them. I work in systems engineering/integration for a very staid company writing mission critical applications for an industry that is risk-averse, and our dev organization had the magic button pushed. I think this is one of the ways GitHub is making their VC money -- the VCs see that corporate executives will gladly write a check to tick the Agile box, and their toolset is seen as one part of it. Get all your developers working on Slack or HipChat as well and you're really cooking!
We'll see what happens this time around when the bubble pops. I actually like a lot of the cloud computing, API-focused and agile development stuff, and I think IT is going to adopt most of it regardless of how critical the stuff they're writing is. But some of it is absolute nonsense outside of the sphere of web development companies writing throwaway apps for phones. Just like in 1999 though, if you can spell HTML, let the good times roll. The truly skilled will always survive.
Ah, turn a great decentralized info storage system into a centralized system controlled by one company.
You make that sound like a bad thing. My company uses Github, and a reliable centralized system with a standard interface works great. Of course, we have our own local clones, so we are not "controlled" by github.
Anyway, I can't imagine why they would need 600 employees. I always assumed that they were three guys working out of a loft in SF.
Congratulations, sitting alone here at home, I actually uttered the words "what the f*ck is this sh*t" out loud when I opened that GitHub link. No mean feat, considering how difficult asterisks are to pronounce.
If you want something really private, why use a 3rd party hosting service?
Most companies don't need "really" private. They just need "normal" private. I don't wan't to just open all my code to the world, but it isn't something I lose sleep over.
I once consulted for a company that was considering open sourcing their main product. Some people were opposed, and thought they would be giving away their "crown jewels", but they decided to go ahead. A year later, we checked, and the OSS repo had been downloaded this many times: 0.
The hard truth is that nobody cares about your crappy code, and even if you give it away, you will often need to work hard to get people to use it.