Stack Overflow's CEO doesn't understand Stack Overflow

mastermind@lemm.ee to Technology@beehaw.org – 155 points –
Stack Overflow's CEO doesn't understand Stack Overflow
jlericson.com
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Stack Overflow is supposed to be the wiki of developers, not a fucking business.

Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood founded it, and it was sold to Prosus, a Netherlands-based consumer internet conglomerate, on 2 June 2021 for $1.8 billion.

I guess someone would like some of that money back.

lol almost $2 billion for a website with almost no ads and that makes almost no revenue? Especially now that they closed the (paid) jobs section?

ROI in 10000 years?

I'm unsure of many people know that StackOverflow also had enterprise offerings. Our company has their own StackOverflow instance with very specific content to our tech stacks.

Yes but they stopped offering that years ago.

So, no more job classifieds, no saas, only ads from views... I don't see where it can be profitable like that

No they didn't? My company just recently introduced it.

wasn't it like 7-8 years ago an offer to host a custom community? Like $250 per site (while now i see their enteprise offer is only intranet and is priced per user)

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Valuation is usually based on potential revenue, not actual revenue. A $2 billion valuation would have been about $50 per user. It seems reasonable Stack Exchange should be able to make that much money per user somehow over the entire future existence of the company... if it's run well. Which doesn't seem to be happening from where I'm sitting.

Valuation is usually based on potential revenue, not actual revenue

How similar this is to how capitalists look at natural "resources". "This website[wetland] sure is great. Lots of people[animals] are loving it. And it's a vital part of the development[water] cycle... But it's just not making me any money!"

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