Yep. I was involved in a local 'pitch your startup to a room full of investors' conference. Guess who 'won' the contest and had everyone talking about it? The three college kids with a mobile app that flat out said, we don't need your money, we're profitable, we have big deals with major corporations and we're growing fast. We're here to work on our product pitch to people outside our niche for continued growth.
Did you not read the article? They want to expand, being profitable does not mean they have the revenue to expand as much as they'd like.
Sure they can be like any startup and get some nieve devs to join up with the whole "We're doing big things and can become huge, you can be a part of this, and be millionaires!". But they'd probably rather give their devs what their worth.
Yes, "well-known" is context dependent. But I would argue the WSJ chose a poor context. The reader already knows whether or not he/she has heard of Github, so the real question is "are they well-known in their industry?"
Pick any non-consumer-facing industry where the average person doesn't know the players, and everybody is "little known". That doesn't really tell you anything about their actual businesses or reputations.
I agree with you, the wording from the WSJ sounds like they want the investment size to seem ridiculous. How about "quickly growing and profitable software company github..."
I'd go even further, and say that GitHub is incredibly well-known within their target market (developers). Everyone else doesn't matter, as the business will not be built around the general public.
WSJ is supposed to provide good reporting with strong bias towards informing potential investors (as a financial/business news paper). The wording choice doesn't make a strong case for value associated with the company and sounds like some no-name co. just got a pile of money that they are like to lose. (An exaggeration on my part for illustration purposes only.)
why would it ruin them? Given the valuation people are talking about, they sold less than 15% of the business - they'll probably retain enough control to do whatever they want with it and probably try new things...
I personally know at least one company that has been profitable from the very beginning and took 3 rounds of VC already, always on the same terms: "we don't need your money, so we'll sell you a very small piece for a large sum and run with it the way we do today". In the end, it's a great way to either cash-out, put some money in the bank to avoid future surprises or launch new experiments/products with minimal risk...
is it possible the maximal risk they encountered when building github with their own cash helped make the great product github is today? history has shown time and time again if you give someone a long enough rope they will hang themselves, doesn't mean that's githubs fate of course, but they're certainly opening a door of influence that wasn't around through the initial building of a great product.
I'm not sure there is a correlation between little money and making great products - that's a link people (specially incubators and accelerators) try to force-feed on everyone's throats, but I'm not convinced if having no money produces better/more companies/products than having "too much" money. Anyway, that's all unrelated to the topic here :-)
If you give someone a short enough rope, they'll never be able to get out of the hole...
I love GitHub, but anyone else felt it was a little immodest for TPW to say they'd "hire Marc" if they could? Can't put it into words, but I don't feel that Tom is in the position to make that statement.
I realize it's a statement of praise, but I think Marc is legendary in the valley and an immensely successful investor/veteran of the business. Implying that he'd be in the running to become an employee at GitHub just felt off. Again, hard to put it into words.
Yeh...to be honest...that kinda irked me too. It feels like he is trying to assert his "geek cred", by making sure both Marc and Github's users know who is still in charge.
But it feels a bit trite.
That being said, I wish them all the best. The truth is, if there is anyone that I think would be an awesome partner for Github it is AH. So I hope they do awesome stuff together.
They certainly deserve it. They have a clear business model that makes money now and a gorgeous product. Look forward to seeing more Octocat in SOMA :)
CEO Tom Preston-Werner said the company hopes to develop new features but also improve existing ones, such as web applications for different operating systems.
"web applications for different operating systems"?
"Because we want to be better. We want to build the best products. We want to solve harder problems. We want to make life easier for more people. The experience and resources of Andreessen Horowitz can help us do that."
I guess they didn't think they were able to build the best products without outside investors.
goes without saying, I hope it doesn't change github for the worse; eventhough history has plenty of counter examples. good luck github.
Right, the enterprise product has been around. But the process to actually sell enterprise-level products to big companies usually involves long, high-touch sales cycles; as well as quite a bit of initial consulting. My guess is that's what Github will use their $100MM for.
"Little-known social coding start-up GitHub Inc. has raised $100 million in its first round of funding, in a sign of how big investment bets are continuing in Silicon Valley"
this "little-known" probably has more revenue than a lot of "well-knowns" out there, and the "bet" here is probably a lot safer too...
I hate to crash the party, but this is a very odd move for an awesome company and a service that I use and <3.
Github has always been against taking money. Actually, TPW has used some very harsh words criticizing startups that choose to take VC money.
Now, Github raises 100 gazillion dollars? How the f*ck do they plan on spending that wisely? Sure, it's nice to have that sum in the bank. But, in all honesty, someone has to explain how this is a reasonable move, because I simply don't get it.
Maybe they're building their own data center? Or really trying to expand into the enterprise market by going up head to head with Atlassian (expanding their issues and Wiki tools to complete separate packages). All speculation, of course.
$100m to maintain their current product doesn't make sense, but I imagine they're interested in growing (duh). Adding 100 developers and 50+50 sales/support guys could easily eat $25m a year.
> The ironic thing about bootstrapping and venture capital is that once you demonstrate some success, investors will come to YOU. When this happens you will be in a much better place to make a more reasoned choice about taking on additional capital and all the complexities that come with it. Talking to VCs with some leverage in your back pocket is an entirely different game from throwing yourself in front of a conference table full of general partners and trying to persuade them that you're worth their time and money. Power is happiness.
I don't see any inconsistency whatsoever between the post you link to and what just happened. Tom was clearly talking about early funding, essentially when you just started, and how that can affect your product and its future. The fact that they raised that much actually proves Tom's point: That you should approach VC money from a strong position, which you can't reach if you start off with VCs watching over you.
Update: This post[1] (Above for the moment) says it better.
yes I indeed did misread your comment. Sorry about that! I read a couple of threads here and there and the number of comments raising this issue was increasing, so my eye only caught the inconsistency part of it. Sorry again.
I can only imagine that there is a lot of money in Enterprise. A solid support team is exactly what big companies are looking for when they choose to host their code with Github.
1) Burn the ships
By committing so strongly to an anti-VC ideology, they forced themselves to focus on profitability. They required themselves to make a sustainable company without the expectations that eventually someone would expand their runway. In the process, they created a very attractive investment opportunity for the trillions of dollars out there sitting on the sidelines looking for the next big thing.
2) Everything has a price
Don't consider this a strike against the github folks, I'm sure they are strong and ethical people, but everything has its price. $100 Million is a lot of money and I'm sure it left the founders with a lot of peace-of-mind that will allow them to focus on building an IPO worthy company.
They haven't done anything immoral and no one gets hurt, rather many people may greatly benefit from this move. They changed their mind like everyone in the world does in the face of smaller sums of money than this.
Just curious, what makes you think they don't already use version control prolifically? What opportunity do you see? One studio I'm familiar with has some assets with change history back through to SCCS -- back through RCS, CVS, and P4. These places have long dealt with large groups of people collaborating on shared files that are constantly changing, forking, merging, etc.
I'm sure lots of bigger places do use it. In the world of music, there are studios everywhere that have maybe a dozen staff, making a lot of money and producing a lot of output, where version control is an unheard of concept. No audio production software that I'm aware of has any provision for version control.
I was kindof assuming that it would be the same for mid to smaller sized movie/tv studios as well, but at the same time I wouldn't be surprised to learn that you can get a plugin for Premier or whatever that does it.
I know for a fact that there are many largish advertising agencies out there who have fileservers with hundreds of ProjectName01, ProjectName02 etc style directories.
Why do you think apple brought "Versions" or whatever its called in with lion?
I use Sequoia (http://pro.magix.com/en/sequoia/overview.527.html) and I'm very happy with the 'Save Project Copy' function. When I start a new project, I create a 'history' folder and the project copies go in there, named as project_name-timestamp.VIP. I do that every time I'm a stopping point, much like how I use 'git commit' on a code project.
That doesn't mean there isn't huge room for improvement in this arena. An approach like this (or OSX's versions) doesn't allow you to do anything like 'git diff' to see what's changed from version to version. I can imagine this is a very difficult problem for binary data, however. Also, distributed version control on media production software could allow for multiple users to be editing a project simultaneously.
Unfortunately, I don't really see GitHub being able to help much here. For example, any work done to make ProTools files git-friendly wouldn't also work on Photoshop files. I'd love to be wrong about this, but I suspect seeing version control in media production software would require redesigning the application's file format from the ground up, and would be a task for each software company to do on their own.
Thanks for clarifying. I agree there are many environments that would benefit from version control but that lack the technical resources to make it happen with existing tech.
Versions (and Time Machine history) are good steps to part of this, in that they are easily available and understandable, but they don't solve the collaboration aspect. How do you diff and merge your local changes into the NEW_final_v2_UPDATED.xls that was emailed to you? I'd summarize the problems as:
- identfying & organizing versions of the same document in ways manageable by normal humans (i.e. not a set of variably-named files spanning email attachments and shared folders, nor a graph of nodes identified by 20-byte hashes, nor a rigid interface to a versioned-file server)
I've worked quite a bit in the cgi and 3D graphics side of the industry and at least from what I've seen there the use of version control is lacking to say the least. The de-facto industry standard seems to be a directory full of files with names like scene_latest3_newest_old2.max.
Although it also seems to be more of a cultural issue. There are already pretty good tools from companies like Perforce and Alienbrain, the problem is to convince the artists that there is value in using them. Every time I've suggested it, there has been imitiate pushback and outright rejection from the artists. Even in the places I've seen that use Perforce, most artists seem to see checking in and out as a pointless chore, rather than a vital and helpful part of their workflow
I'm guessing they're working with file formats that can't be diffed or merged. In which case all the version control is doing is just storing the file. Branching, forking or collaboration isn't possible in the way it is with text code.
In that case it really doesn't benefit them at all and is a chore. You'll only get them to use version control if it's hard mandate (good luck) or figure out a way to make it completely transparent to them (something like Time Machine).
The movie studios are not so open with software, but almost all of them do use open source software in some way, and most certainly nearly all have developers that use some varying amount of version control.
Pixar uses Perforce. Over 1000 users, 12 million ops/day, 40 million changelists, 115 million files, >20 TB data, and accessed by 12,000 cpu renderfarm. If you're dealing with large amounts of binary data it's basically a solved problem and Perforce is the answer. An expensive answer but an answer.
Not just movie/music studios. Who could reap huge rewards from great distributed version control? Anyone who collaborates on some computer file regularly.
So everyone. Or at least everyone who works in an office.
My own erstwhile field of small business accounting is all about version control. An enormous amount of energy goes into keeping tabs on which file is most current and ensuring that work isn't done in a non-current file.
Same thing for anyone who regularly collaborates on documents or spreadsheets or images: lawyers, advertisers, my friend the outdoor school counselor, journalists, etc.
The state of the art here isn't very good. For all the products out there, I'd guess 90% of actual version control happens via emails. Case in point:
A journalist friend of mine is currently attempting a small intra-office coup to switch from Email/Excel to Asana for scheduling and managing the editing process. It is not going well. Email/Excel will probably win.
But the old people won't be around forever. The opportunities to improve on the state of the art are vast. The amount of energy people spend on keeping current could be dramatically reduced.
thingverse is a pretty popular free distribution channel for 3d-printable objects - but there's no way to integrate forks. So people copy an object & improve it, but there's no way to put that fix back into the main line.
Getting these people to use github would be awesome!
And that probably explains the anti-VC sentiment. In multi-level marketing (MLM) pyramids, there's a "business" which serves as an investment vehicle for the money to trickle-up: energy juice, women's cosmetics, etc. A cynic sees startups serving the same purpose for VC. Announcements of funding are publicity stunts to pump up the valuation and then dump it in an "exit". The main difference between now and the late 90's, as far as I can tell, is that insiders sell their shares on SecondShare during later rounds, instead of waiting for an IPO to sell them on NASDAQ.
After all instagram did something very similar, used VC investment to boost sale price. And it seemed to work very well. Can we expect some surprise news from github? I don't know, but that can sure be one valid reason for raising such money which they clearly don't need to work on the product in it's current form.
They specifically said they are raising this round for their enterprise product. Having the backing of top tier VC gives them more validity within the enterprise. That's probably the main reason. I doubt they needed the money. Very happy for them. The talented team they are building is unstoppable.
In my mind the $750M valuation is still actually pretty consevative. GitHub has a long long way to go and I see so many great things ahead for the team, but I don't understand why they would raise $100M?
Is this a deal for the founders to take some money off of the table? I don't see what benefits $100M will have for them.
(Don't shoot me for my opinions on this one), but I think it's also really only a matter of time before the legacy systems move from SVN/Mercurial/CVS onto GitHub. Some people use BitBucket (I guess because Atlassian makes some other great software). SourceForge (past it's sell-by-date), and Google Code isn't really suitable for anything other than hosting specific release candidates or tags..
I have a github (http://github.com/blhack -- nothing too interesting there), but only use it in the "free" way; saving my javascript stuff, and keeping track of some arduino projects.
"Github" and "money" in the same thought here triggered me wondering about maybe buying a monthly plan from them, and letting them host all of my code for work, play, etc. (stuff I'm too embarrassed to release, ha)
Maybe I'm just naive, but how large are most git repos?
You can get a full pizza box, in a rack, with power and data, and plenty of storage for $50/mo.
You could get two redundant linodes for $40/mo.
What are people getting out of github that they are willing to spend as much money as some of these plans cost?
(What I mean is: if this was $5/mo for unlimited repos, I'd have a plan now. But $7/mo for 5? That seems steep)
TPW (or some early GH employee) has posted somewhere that yes, the cost of servers on your own is cheaper.
However, the original goal of GitHub was to build a tool that allowed collaboration easier. You pay for the experience and the tools and the network IMO.
You can add collaborators to private repos (ie people with push rights). You can have organizations with private repos and use the collaboration tools within the organization.
For me, the private repos are more about having them where I have my other code.
Exactly, it's more than just a place to store code. Just doing git clone on your repo url is a lot easier to deal with than setting up your own git hosting and configuring everything.
As a person who just used linodes instead of github for awhile, jesus christ, that was an expensive use of my own time managing linux servers that did nothing other than run git.
Especially collaborating with people, that was a pain in the ass.
This reminds me of an email I got from somebody questioning how I could get away with charging $12/mo for my project management app, since the true cost of storing the few hundred or so database records a given account might use is so minimal.
People pay for products that save them time and money. That's it. Yes, I could buy a VPS, figure out how to setup the hosted thing that ships with git, and uh - store git repositories. But that would really suck.
Or I could do what I do now, and pay Github a few hundred a month to manage the dozens of private client repositories my company manages, see who on my team is committing what, and so on.
I pay Github not because they store files for me, but because they've built some really nice software that makes my life easier.
Finally, the issue of cost. If you need a private repository, you probably are writing some code that you (or someone else) deems as proprietary and valuable. Me, and plenty of other people, will gladly pay monthly what equates to less than the cost of a slice of pizza and a drink for what we get in return.
One thing most people don't mention about bitbucket is the cost of their plans.
Github: $7/mo for 5 repos, unlimited collaborators.
Bitbucket: $0/mo for unlimited repos, 5 collaborators max. Then, it starts at $10/mo for 10 collaborators and continues at a tiered rate of $1/mo per collaborator until you hit $200/month. Only then is it unlimited on collaborators.
Nobody should pay for GitHub just because they need a place to dump their code. If you want free, unlimited, private git repos, just sign up for https://bitbucket.org/
GitHub is what you might choose if you need to work on projects with a team, and want best-of-breed collaboration and code review.
I use BitBucket to host all my solo side projects, and Github for all my open source code. I work with a startup, and we use GitHub for all of our private repos. I love using Github, it's awesome.
If I was starting my own startup, I would definitely choose Github. Bitbucket might provide all the important features, and you can host unlimited private code, for a team of up to 5 users, for free... But in the end, $7 or $12 a month is worth it for the beautiful service that Github provides.
> I use BitBucket to host all my solo side projects,
Exactly. We are forced to split our code base because of the lack of free private repos on GitHub. Free private repos for 1 or 2 users would allow us to post ALL of our code on GitHub and give us the ability to sort it out and clean it up It will then be extremely easy to open-source it from there. Until they offer something free, all of our projects will remain locally stored or split between GitHub and Bitbucket and that code will NEVER get promoted to open source.
Free 'limited collaboration' private repos are the key to GitHub dominating the DVCS world.
I derive value from GitHub's services and want to support them (and I do have a $12/month plan), but I wish it scaled a little better for smaller developers who want a tiny number of collaborators (ie, 2 or less) on a large number of small projects.
I have lots of private projects I'd like to host there, but the cost per repo is just too high - especially when they are all pretty small repos. $50/month is a lot to be paying for source control, so I'll probably be looking into bit bucket instead - that is probably a decent option for you to look into also.
I would argue that the pricing is actually one thing that has made Github so popular.
Private repositories are a limited resource on Github for most of us due to the pricing. This encourages people to open up their stuff. Small projects that would be otherwise kept under cover are shown to the world, because we feel more comfortable in showing up unfinished code than putting up another $$/month.
And this same applies especially to cloning. If private repositories were free, quite many would probably tinker with the cloned things in private. "Forcing" us to do it in public has made Github what it is.
Damn, github seemed like the perfect model for bootstrapped, they were growing like a weed, seemed to not lack for money from income, etc.
In these situations, I'd really love to know the details-- did they go shopping for investment (love to see that deck!) or did A19Z pursue them and talk them into it?
Probably perfect timing, too, because I think things are going to cool down in 2013.
Anyway, couldn't happen to a nicer company, but I do lament the loss of a bootstrapped example to point to.
FWIW, can't read the wsj article because it is already behind the paywall.
They were the bootstrapped happy ending. They went from zero to market dominator for web services source control, and now they got their payoff for all the work with VC adoration.
They deserve every penny. And I am sure their revenue has been increasing over time (at least I hope so).
They are a great blueprint on how to spend money wisely and develop features people care about.
Off the top of my head: Company Github accounts, many desktop Github redesigns and performance tweaks, Github for Mac, Github for Windows, and a Github Android App.
And this is only in the past 12 months or so. Amazing company.
229 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 265 ms ] threadhttp://gigaom.com/2012/07/09/github-finally-raises-funding-1...
Clicking on the current page link should still allow you to read the page too, at least it works for me.
Sure they can be like any startup and get some nieve devs to join up with the whole "We're doing big things and can become huge, you can be a part of this, and be millionaires!". But they'd probably rather give their devs what their worth.
Got to love the WSJ.
Pick any non-consumer-facing industry where the average person doesn't know the players, and everybody is "little known". That doesn't really tell you anything about their actual businesses or reputations.
Something like "Social coding startup GitHub, hugely popular in the coding world, ...." would be a whole lot clearer.
Little-known, though technically correct, implies that they are not well known in any circle.
WSJ is supposed to provide good reporting with strong bias towards informing potential investors (as a financial/business news paper). The wording choice doesn't make a strong case for value associated with the company and sounds like some no-name co. just got a pile of money that they are like to lose. (An exaggeration on my part for illustration purposes only.)
Wasn't that temporary during the kernel.org debacle?
Congrats to the fine folks at GitHub!
I personally know at least one company that has been profitable from the very beginning and took 3 rounds of VC already, always on the same terms: "we don't need your money, so we'll sell you a very small piece for a large sum and run with it the way we do today". In the end, it's a great way to either cash-out, put some money in the bank to avoid future surprises or launch new experiments/products with minimal risk...
is it possible the maximal risk they encountered when building github with their own cash helped make the great product github is today? history has shown time and time again if you give someone a long enough rope they will hang themselves, doesn't mean that's githubs fate of course, but they're certainly opening a door of influence that wasn't around through the initial building of a great product.
If you give someone a short enough rope, they'll never be able to get out of the hole...
I'm a bit surprised given their previous stance on VC...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4VtBcmbbSs
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2486-bootstrapped-profitable-...
> "Little-known social coding start-up GitHub..."
Really?
The Gigaom is a much better read.
http://gigaom.com/2012/07/09/github-finally-raises-funding-1...
GitHub has 1,784,455 members. That alone is probably 5% of coders.
There are still many millions more people out there that have heard of GitHub, or downloaded code via GitHub, but don't have an account.
Sounds to me like a great heuristic for whether a person would be a good investor.
(Hi Marc!)
But it feels a bit trite.
That being said, I wish them all the best. The truth is, if there is anyone that I think would be an awesome partner for Github it is AH. So I hope they do awesome stuff together.
"web applications for different operating systems"?
I guess they didn't think they were able to build the best products without outside investors.
goes without saying, I hope it doesn't change github for the worse; eventhough history has plenty of counter examples. good luck github.
https://enterprise.github.com/
this "little-known" probably has more revenue than a lot of "well-knowns" out there, and the "bet" here is probably a lot safer too...
Github has always been against taking money. Actually, TPW has used some very harsh words criticizing startups that choose to take VC money.
Now, Github raises 100 gazillion dollars? How the f*ck do they plan on spending that wisely? Sure, it's nice to have that sum in the bank. But, in all honesty, someone has to explain how this is a reasonable move, because I simply don't get it.
http://tom.preston-werner.com/2010/10/18/optimize-for-happin...
> The ironic thing about bootstrapping and venture capital is that once you demonstrate some success, investors will come to YOU. When this happens you will be in a much better place to make a more reasoned choice about taking on additional capital and all the complexities that come with it. Talking to VCs with some leverage in your back pocket is an entirely different game from throwing yourself in front of a conference table full of general partners and trying to persuade them that you're worth their time and money. Power is happiness.
Update: This post[1] (Above for the moment) says it better.
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4220725
1) Burn the ships By committing so strongly to an anti-VC ideology, they forced themselves to focus on profitability. They required themselves to make a sustainable company without the expectations that eventually someone would expand their runway. In the process, they created a very attractive investment opportunity for the trillions of dollars out there sitting on the sidelines looking for the next big thing.
2) Everything has a price
Don't consider this a strike against the github folks, I'm sure they are strong and ethical people, but everything has its price. $100 Million is a lot of money and I'm sure it left the founders with a lot of peace-of-mind that will allow them to focus on building an IPO worthy company.
They haven't done anything immoral and no one gets hurt, rather many people may greatly benefit from this move. They changed their mind like everyone in the world does in the face of smaller sums of money than this.
Good luck Github.
I was kindof assuming that it would be the same for mid to smaller sized movie/tv studios as well, but at the same time I wouldn't be surprised to learn that you can get a plugin for Premier or whatever that does it.
I know for a fact that there are many largish advertising agencies out there who have fileservers with hundreds of ProjectName01, ProjectName02 etc style directories.
Why do you think apple brought "Versions" or whatever its called in with lion?
That doesn't mean there isn't huge room for improvement in this arena. An approach like this (or OSX's versions) doesn't allow you to do anything like 'git diff' to see what's changed from version to version. I can imagine this is a very difficult problem for binary data, however. Also, distributed version control on media production software could allow for multiple users to be editing a project simultaneously.
Unfortunately, I don't really see GitHub being able to help much here. For example, any work done to make ProTools files git-friendly wouldn't also work on Photoshop files. I'd love to be wrong about this, but I suspect seeing version control in media production software would require redesigning the application's file format from the ground up, and would be a task for each software company to do on their own.
Versions (and Time Machine history) are good steps to part of this, in that they are easily available and understandable, but they don't solve the collaboration aspect. How do you diff and merge your local changes into the NEW_final_v2_UPDATED.xls that was emailed to you? I'd summarize the problems as:
- identfying & organizing versions of the same document in ways manageable by normal humans (i.e. not a set of variably-named files spanning email attachments and shared folders, nor a graph of nodes identified by 20-byte hashes, nor a rigid interface to a versioned-file server)
- diffying & merging non-text document types (images, audio, spreadsheets)
I agree this would be a valuable problem to solve well!
Although it also seems to be more of a cultural issue. There are already pretty good tools from companies like Perforce and Alienbrain, the problem is to convince the artists that there is value in using them. Every time I've suggested it, there has been imitiate pushback and outright rejection from the artists. Even in the places I've seen that use Perforce, most artists seem to see checking in and out as a pointless chore, rather than a vital and helpful part of their workflow
In that case it really doesn't benefit them at all and is a chore. You'll only get them to use version control if it's hard mandate (good luck) or figure out a way to make it completely transparent to them (something like Time Machine).
http://github.com/emi
https://github.com/sonymusic
https://github.com/WMI
http://www.perforce.com/sites/default/files/storageforfilmas...
So everyone. Or at least everyone who works in an office.
My own erstwhile field of small business accounting is all about version control. An enormous amount of energy goes into keeping tabs on which file is most current and ensuring that work isn't done in a non-current file.
Same thing for anyone who regularly collaborates on documents or spreadsheets or images: lawyers, advertisers, my friend the outdoor school counselor, journalists, etc.
The state of the art here isn't very good. For all the products out there, I'd guess 90% of actual version control happens via emails. Case in point:
A journalist friend of mine is currently attempting a small intra-office coup to switch from Email/Excel to Asana for scheduling and managing the editing process. It is not going well. Email/Excel will probably win.
But the old people won't be around forever. The opportunities to improve on the state of the art are vast. The amount of energy people spend on keeping current could be dramatically reduced.
Github has plenty of potential.
Getting these people to use github would be awesome!
"They (AH) clearly have no interest in the status quo of venture capital."
"we're excited to partner with Andreessen Horowitz to help us make it happen"
"They want to help founders build great companies."
Whether they could make a return on it would be another thing though.
In my mind the $750M valuation is still actually pretty consevative. GitHub has a long long way to go and I see so many great things ahead for the team, but I don't understand why they would raise $100M?
Is this a deal for the founders to take some money off of the table? I don't see what benefits $100M will have for them.
(Don't shoot me for my opinions on this one), but I think it's also really only a matter of time before the legacy systems move from SVN/Mercurial/CVS onto GitHub. Some people use BitBucket (I guess because Atlassian makes some other great software). SourceForge (past it's sell-by-date), and Google Code isn't really suitable for anything other than hosting specific release candidates or tags..
I have a github (http://github.com/blhack -- nothing too interesting there), but only use it in the "free" way; saving my javascript stuff, and keeping track of some arduino projects.
"Github" and "money" in the same thought here triggered me wondering about maybe buying a monthly plan from them, and letting them host all of my code for work, play, etc. (stuff I'm too embarrassed to release, ha)
Maybe I'm just naive, but how large are most git repos?
You can get a full pizza box, in a rack, with power and data, and plenty of storage for $50/mo.
You could get two redundant linodes for $40/mo.
What are people getting out of github that they are willing to spend as much money as some of these plans cost?
(What I mean is: if this was $5/mo for unlimited repos, I'd have a plan now. But $7/mo for 5? That seems steep)
However, the original goal of GitHub was to build a tool that allowed collaboration easier. You pay for the experience and the tools and the network IMO.
But I have to wonder: if you're hosting that many private repos...how much does "social" play into it?
For me, the private repos are more about having them where I have my other code.
Especially collaborating with people, that was a pain in the ass.
Feels expensive at first. It is not.
People pay for products that save them time and money. That's it. Yes, I could buy a VPS, figure out how to setup the hosted thing that ships with git, and uh - store git repositories. But that would really suck.
Or I could do what I do now, and pay Github a few hundred a month to manage the dozens of private client repositories my company manages, see who on my team is committing what, and so on.
I pay Github not because they store files for me, but because they've built some really nice software that makes my life easier.
Finally, the issue of cost. If you need a private repository, you probably are writing some code that you (or someone else) deems as proprietary and valuable. Me, and plenty of other people, will gladly pay monthly what equates to less than the cost of a slice of pizza and a drink for what we get in return.
Also it backups to your S3 account.
http://bitbucket.org $0/mo for unlimited repos, you got an even better plan now
Github: $7/mo for 5 repos, unlimited collaborators.
Bitbucket: $0/mo for unlimited repos, 5 collaborators max. Then, it starts at $10/mo for 10 collaborators and continues at a tiered rate of $1/mo per collaborator until you hit $200/month. Only then is it unlimited on collaborators.
The last 2 private repos I created grew to ~800mb each. And those were rather small projects. (We put PSDs and raw audio into the repo.)
GitHub is what you might choose if you need to work on projects with a team, and want best-of-breed collaboration and code review.
I use BitBucket to host all my solo side projects, and Github for all my open source code. I work with a startup, and we use GitHub for all of our private repos. I love using Github, it's awesome.
If I was starting my own startup, I would definitely choose Github. Bitbucket might provide all the important features, and you can host unlimited private code, for a team of up to 5 users, for free... But in the end, $7 or $12 a month is worth it for the beautiful service that Github provides.
Exactly. We are forced to split our code base because of the lack of free private repos on GitHub. Free private repos for 1 or 2 users would allow us to post ALL of our code on GitHub and give us the ability to sort it out and clean it up It will then be extremely easy to open-source it from there. Until they offer something free, all of our projects will remain locally stored or split between GitHub and Bitbucket and that code will NEVER get promoted to open source.
Free 'limited collaboration' private repos are the key to GitHub dominating the DVCS world.
I have lots of private projects I'd like to host there, but the cost per repo is just too high - especially when they are all pretty small repos. $50/month is a lot to be paying for source control, so I'll probably be looking into bit bucket instead - that is probably a decent option for you to look into also.
Private repositories are a limited resource on Github for most of us due to the pricing. This encourages people to open up their stuff. Small projects that would be otherwise kept under cover are shown to the world, because we feel more comfortable in showing up unfinished code than putting up another $$/month.
And this same applies especially to cloning. If private repositories were free, quite many would probably tinker with the cloned things in private. "Forcing" us to do it in public has made Github what it is.
In these situations, I'd really love to know the details-- did they go shopping for investment (love to see that deck!) or did A19Z pursue them and talk them into it?
Probably perfect timing, too, because I think things are going to cool down in 2013.
Anyway, couldn't happen to a nicer company, but I do lament the loss of a bootstrapped example to point to.
FWIW, can't read the wsj article because it is already behind the paywall.
They are a great blueprint on how to spend money wisely and develop features people care about.
Off the top of my head: Company Github accounts, many desktop Github redesigns and performance tweaks, Github for Mac, Github for Windows, and a Github Android App.
And this is only in the past 12 months or so. Amazing company.