GitHub to Seek $2B Valuation in Latest Funding Round

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-15/github-said-to-seek-2-billion-valuation-in-latest-financing

by sqs • 11 years ago

35 76 11 years ago

bloomberg.com

malkia• 11 years ago

Awesome for the github folks!

comrade110• 11 years ago

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?

jMyles4• 11 years ago

They have a paid tier, the primary feature of which is private repos.

aaronbrethorst2• 11 years ago

How does github make money?

GitHub Enterprise[1].

And if we had to pay for it we never would have.

I think you're the exception.

[1] And private repos, but I'd imagine that 80%+ of their revenue comes from on-premise enterprise deployments.

comrade110• 11 years ago

Does it really make sense to put your company's intellectual property on another company's servers?

chx• 11 years ago

Github Enterprise certainly makes money. How much I do not know.

bliti2• 11 years ago

There is no logical explanation for the valuation. It's pure especulation.

elwell2• 11 years ago

Speculation is based on logic.

npkarnik• 11 years ago

Github Enterprise. Turns out that maintaining a git server and the familiar and great (imo) UI is something that medium-large companies generally have no interest in doing in-house and will gladly pay for.

vonklaus5• 11 years ago

Github is about $25 a month, which is probably worth it for any organization vs. the cost and engineering resources to maintain a redundant and available git server. Sure it is pretty trivial, but so is paying $25 monthly.

Also, if you are a small organization you could pay as little as 7 to have a private repo.

https://github.com/pricing

comrade110• 11 years ago

But why would you put your IP on another company's servers? I guess if the value of your company was something other than your code then it would make sense.

stephenr3• 11 years ago

GitHub for Organisations is $25 a month for 10 private repositories.

More repositories means more money.

drstewart• 11 years ago

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?

comrade110• 11 years ago

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

spdy• 11 years ago

If i remember correctly the biggest asset of McD is property they own.

stock_toaster2• 11 years ago

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

It has been speculated[1] that certain companies/endeavors derive some part of their value from the fact that VC firms and other investors view them as a "force multiplier" for _other_ startups. They have some amount of value simply as being an integral part of the overall software/startup ecosystem, and investors may want to keep a good things going. Further, investors may desire to keep Github from being acquired by some larger company with a different agenda. Investing at a high valuation may result in a lower likelihood of an acquisition.

Certainly Github would qualify, if that is the case.

[1] http://words.steveklabnik.com/is-npm-worth-26mm

jMyles4• 11 years ago

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?

vonklaus5• 11 years ago

1/14th of the entire world used whatsapp.

pkaye• 11 years ago

I'd think there are probably <1% of software developers in the world compared to whatsapp users (or even Facebook.) Just so many people with the interest and training to be programmers at this time. The question would be how much each makes in revenue for a customer.

jdhawk• 11 years ago

2B/9 Million Users = $222 per user

2B/21 Million Repos = $95 per repo

obviously they're not pulling in that kinda cash, but I'd love to see enterprise pricing.

arfliw4• 11 years ago

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

jMyles4• 11 years ago

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.

vonklaus5• 11 years ago

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.

kiba• 11 years ago

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.

vonklaus5• 11 years ago

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.

ksherlock• 11 years ago

If only it was profitable for Linus Torvalds, Junio Hamano, and everyone else that provided that open source technology. But hey, slavery is profitable too, as long as you're not the slave.

vonklaus5• 11 years ago

But hey, slavery is profitable too

What does this have to do with leveraging open source software?

Grue3• 11 years ago

Except Github is closed-source and they make money on private repositories, i.e. closed-source. So it's actually closed-source software that brings them the profits.

shubhamjain• 11 years ago

I am not sure if Github can be related to open source. Being free for open source, is more or less is their growth hack. Their profits come from hosting private repositories. That said, these kind of freemium Business models are hard to come by and that's why they always triumph the market when they come by like Dropbox.

The awesomeness of Github is that it is created by developers, for developers. John Carmack, once estimated that Stack Overflow may have saved billions of dollars in productivity[1]. Hard to estimate but seeing the sheer accelaration in Open Source world, after Github, I am sure, a similar estimate would be much higher for Github.

[1] https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/380018564792455168

pbreit5• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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

guidopallemans• 11 years ago

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.

pbreit5• 11 years ago

I use Bitbucket almost exclusively but would like to use Github as well or instead.

rokhayakebe• 11 years ago

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.

arthurcolle• 11 years ago

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

bensw• 11 years ago

I believe that video is from 2012

tomphoolery• 11 years ago

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? ;-)

GitHub to Seek $2B Valuation in Latest Funding Round

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