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Comment by ealexhudson | Hacker News Reader

Github would have had trouble getting more VC investment. According to Bloomberg, there are ~21M software developers in the world, and Github has ~24M user accounts. There's little userbase growth possible there; they would have had to start increasing revenue per user rapidly to be interesting for another VC round.

Equally, on their $200M revenue (or whatever it was), they would struggle to get a multiple that would be interesting for their VC backers. Their market cap at IPO wouldn't have been much more than $1B (absent some growth story).

It's a great problem to have, to be sure, but the MS purchase is a great deal for Github investors.

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They could have easily become a formidable competitor to Atlassian if they extended their offering beyond just code hosting. Competing with Atlassian is actually not that hard considering how bad Atlassian is at times (I'm a customer myself). Atlassian today has a market cap of 15B.

There's a lot of growth opportunities if you have >20m users.

Agree. There are some easy project management wins for Github. It’s flabbergasting that they’ve ignored them. Issue complexity and time estimates. Burn downs. Github is only part way there, why not get all the way?

Sometimes it's worth it to stick to what you're good at.

If Github burnt a ton of cash to try and compete with Jira, ended up making a product that didn't attract enough people over at the same time as ignoring problems that users were already grumbling about, this could have led to them being in a worse state and easier for MS to pick up on the cheap.

If it cost a ton of cash, that would be ridiculous. It is adding some fields and charts. Do you think Zenhub has or had a ton of cash?

If it was so easy to make a decent project management tool, there would be one...

There are many. We built one in Google Sheets. Zenhub layers over Github. We love it too. But I am sure it didn't require tens of millions of dollars to accomplish.

I used to work for an Atlassian competitor and the feeling in the company was a sense of intimidation.

Now that I’m a customer, it’s really ridiculous how badly their stuff is integrated. I mean, when I find myself wishing for the good old days of using Trac pre-1.0 because at least it fucking works and I don’t have to log in four times while working a ticket through code review and into a deployment. I mean Jesus Christ Atlassian, you're on version 6 and you can’t make SSO painless, and every time I type in a ticket number into an input field behaves differently.

Why hasn’t a competitor eaten their lunch yet?

I've 4 Github accounts, 3 for past companies that I've worked at and 1 that's personal. I wonder how many unique accounts are on there. I've interviewed plenty of devs who say they don't have a github account.

According to Tim Cook yesterday, there are 20M Apple Developers. Someone is not telling it like it is :)

If that is based on number of Xcode downloads then it will over-count, you need to install it to use Homebrew.

I use Xcode as the command line tool chain to avoid needing brew.

Only recently did I discover you can download the CLI without installing XCode first. Saves about an hour off of setting up a new developer.

is this a joke? Investors were begging to get in Github it's whole history, no surprise it sold for 7.5 billion

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