Last year, software code repository GitHub " />received a big, greasy, $100 million investment from Andreessen Horowitz. To spend on, you know, the things that really matter.
Instagram it while you've got it, I guess.
I don't see what's the big deal is? Start-ups do these all the time.
Departments usually have a budget set for their own room that they can use to buy furniture, if this fit under budget more power to them (the only expensive part here is the rug from what I can see).
I also think this looks cool so I might be biased.
The room itself appears to be oval or circular, which is rare for an office building, and at least some of the decor/furniture would have to be custom (or at least, higher-than-normal cost). If I was running a startup, it'd be nice-looking, but sturdy and fairly generic office furniture. If I were Andreessen Horowitz, I'd be asking for my money back.
I'll bet the round walls are composite facade. I'd be quite surprised if they actually engineered a round room into an office building.
You are just speculating at this point. Start-ups spend more money a month on free food / lunches than that room cost.
You're right, but I'm speculating on the basis of every other office I've ever seen. Maybe it's just a cardboard mock-up, maybe they actually spend thousands to create their own version of the oval office. Either way, I feel like a fledgling company trying to grow, expand, and become as profitable as possible would have better things to do (that goes for the free food, too). Just my opinion, though.
They sell a service for BUGTRACKING. Seriously, it's useful to programmers, but there are others. $100 million? They'll never repay that. They don't even own the program git. It's called open source. And ig (also known as Mercurial) works just as well.
They don't sell a service for just bugtracking. They sell managed set-and-forget revision control (through git hosting) combined with ancillary generalized SE tools (such as team communication and code review).
Basically, for small collaborative SE projects (including projects within larger enterprises) with engineers in different locations, you pay them a small fee you have everything you need to get off the ground. It's reliable, expansive, it works now, and everyone knows how to use it (unlike any thrown together implementation of an SE suite by a SE who doesn't set them up often, or a patchwork collection of different collaboration mediums).
I'm sure investors are champing at the bit for more details about GitHub's revenue, because GitHub is like Cisco or Dimension Data in that they sell backbone b2b services and products that are a weathervane for a large (though different) swath of the tech industry.
...and don't forget the sweet, sweet code metadata prism will be slurping up!!!
And hey, that's valuable.
Is it more valuable than the people fighting for boring causes, like curing disease, poverty, or drug addiction?
I'm not saying GitHub isn't valuable. GitHub is pretty awesome. Maybe GitHub is objectively worth $100 million. But when GitHub takes $100 million and diverts part of it to do this, I completely understand why the non-profits attacking the boring problems that have plagued humanity since the dawn of time — problems with names like "polio," or "tuberculosis," get a little cheesed off.
LOL. Github sells bugtracking services? Deriding them for not "owning" git. You're just too precious!
Look, this is exactly like the scene in GoodFellas. The bar owner is getting hassled by protection outfits. To get them off his back, he goes to Paulie. Paulie tries to talk him out of it, but in the end is convinced to go into the bar business. But now the bar owner has to pay Paulie every month: "off week? Fuck you, pay me. Bar closed by health inspector? Fuck you pay me, etc." Eventually, all the dude can do is torch the place.
This happens all the time in my industry. Biotech startups create a nice little business selling chimeric mouse models. Are they happy making 5-50mil profit per year, year in, year out? Hell no — we need to go into drug development, which we no nothing about. We buy a compound (why is it for sale?), go public in order to get enough to get it through trials, but then have to gut the pipeline and the original models business to feed the Wall Street monkey, which can only see quarterly profits. Only. Quarterly. Profits. A nice little business, run out of business in 7 years. Wall Street analysts are some of the dumbest people wearing suits today, and that's saying something.
Oh, hahha, you think their Oval Office replica is bad? In addition to this, Valleywag forgot to mention that that Github's new SF offices has a grand total of EIGHT different bars. One speakeasy, and one rooftop to boot. The office also has a giant, bronze statue of octocat that certainly looked like it cost a person's entire, yearly income. Nice to see they're putting that $100M to use indeed.
So they have rooftop parties, like the Industry Standard did during the dotcom days?
And everyone says that there aren't signs for a bubble bursting.
wow did they not learn anything from the dot com bubble burst?
I can see no way this will end badly. btw what do these guys do? I've never heard of them?
