Stackoverflow: Joel and Jeff want VC Money? Say What?
cforcoding.com
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1. The "insurance" aspect (which is good); and 2. Because Joel bothered to reply (within about an hour) to something on Meta.
If you listen to the SO podcasts Joel rarely visits Meta so I guess he was on the lookout for a reaction, which is understandable. But it's still interesting.
The infrastructure (hardware and bandwidth) is cheap (almost free) for Q&A. Stackoverflow.com hasn’t even gone to two Web server yet.
Let's count them, shall we? http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/01/stack-overflow-network...
6 web servers and 2 database servers (the load balancers are virtual machined)
And about the money, there are labor costs.
Fog Creek has ~24 employees.
And yes the hardware/bandwidth costs are (still) nothing. Read:
http://highscalability.com/blog/2009/8/5/stack-overflow-arch...
(slightly outdated)
and you'll see how cheap the servers are: single CPU, relatively low RAM.
The 24 was a typo (now fixed). I updated the other too. Thanks for pointing that out.
Please just let them do their thing, they've been successful with everything they've done so far and I'm sure they have their reasons for raising VC. Kinda hate this gossip sometimes.
1. I simply don't understand this 180; 2. I am concerned about how this will impact what is an otherwise successful formula by any metric except perhaps its ability to generate its owners wads of cash.
For the record, the main thing I've criticized to date is Stackoverflow Careers because it comes across as snake oil.
On the other side, I support their efforts at monetizing that included things others criticized such as adding Adobe logos (sponsored) to the flash and flex tags.
See http://www.cforcoding.com/2009/10/stackoverflow-advertising-...