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Comment by Estragon | Hacker News Reader

It's fascinating to me that many startups put their crown jewels on github, a company with an inexplicably high valuation due to investments from some of the most successful VC companies. Don't they worry about exactly the kind of insider trading you're talking about, or worse?

Same goes for slack.

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it is fascinating that people think most of the code from startups is crown jewels. If you look closely 99% of code is not hard to reproduce it is just time consuming to write but I doubt you will find some breakthrough ideas. Sure you might find some cool/impressive thing here and there but especially at early stages nothing there except number of hours put in. I know people tend to glorify things they write but mostly it is not that stellar achievement what they did.

If I was a VC assessing a firm, I would love to get a look at their git repository, and not just for due diligence. I would know where their demos are inadequate, which would be very useful for bargaining.

If you're a VC serious enough to start bargaining, you're going to have done a code audit already (whether or not it's on github) to validate claims.

The real value in these firms is not the code, but the employees' ability to execute on the entire business idea that their code supports.

"Crown jewels"? You mean a git repo? You know it's a matter of minutes to migrate between git repo hosting, right? :)

His point is that you're giving the VCs indirect access to your sourcecode, not that github would go belly up.

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