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A comment on Hello, GitHub. Parent comment

Re:Hello, GitHub by scarface74 on Monday June 04, 2018 @09:31PM (#17234259)
GitHub's success as an ongoing concern was based on their investors willing to keep giving them more money or alternatively the public market giving them more money until they could become profitable.
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Re:Hello, GitHub by wpietri on Tuesday June 05, 2018 @01:21AM (#17235175)
We don't know how far they were from being profitable. But even unprofitability is not a big problem these days. E.g., Okta IPOed in the red with explicit plans to keep losing money for the foreseeable future.

Github was making over $200m/year, and was poised for strong growth in enterprises as they got with the times. I expect they could have gotten to GAAP profitability whenever they needed to. But they should have kept spending on growth to maximize market share.

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Re:Hello, GitHub by scarface74 on Wednesday June 06, 2018 @01:13PM (#17248976)
How does being profitable and IPOing stop a company from being an acquisition target (see LinkedIn)? Just like the private investors could be swayed by a tempting acquisition offer so can public investors.

The only way that you guard against being an acquisition target is to remain private and not take money from outside investors.

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