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A comment on “New home page seems like Stack Overflow doesn't allow free use any more”. Parent comment

Re:“New home page seems like Stack Overflow doesn't allow fr... by manigandham on Sunday June 30, 2019 @07:05PM (#20321140)
The company doesn't need to be that big. They claimed before that they were leaving money on the table with ads and recently just had another big discussion thread after running network ads. They can easily run at half the size and just be a nice business, but I guess that's not acceptable anymore.
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Re:“New home page seems like Stack Overflow doesn't allow fr... by noname120 on Sunday June 30, 2019 @07:21PM (#20321225)
When the company has early stage investors (and Stack Overflow does[1]), just being a nice business isn't enough. Investors want money back from their risky investment.

[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/stack-overflow#secti...

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Re:“New home page seems like Stack Overflow doesn't allow fr... by manigandham on Sunday June 30, 2019 @07:32PM (#20321276)
Yea I didn't realize they raised $68M. That's a lot to recover and puts them in a bad position.
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Re:“New home page seems like Stack Overflow doesn't allow fr... by shagie on Sunday June 30, 2019 @07:53PM (#20321353)
Articles on the $40M series D: https://techcrunch.com/2015/01/20/stack-exchange-raises-40m-... and http://fortune.com/2015/01/20/stack-exchange-40-million/

From the Fortune article:

> Today, the company announces a new $40 million Series D round of funding. Andreessen Horowitz led the round and existing investors Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital, Bezos Expeditions, and Index Ventures participated. Stack Overflow, founded in 2008, has raised a total of $70 million in venture funding. The company did not disclose its valuation or revenue, but said it is not profitable.

> Currently, Stack Exchange earns a third of its revenue from an advertising product that allows companies like Microsoft market its products to developers. With this new funding, Stack Exchange will invest more heavily in its Careers products, which include job listings and a candidate search database. Clients pay anywhere from $495 for a 30-day job posting to thousands of dollars for annual job postings.

> ...

> The 200-person company will also use the capital to release its site in Japanese, Russian, and Spanish and invest in expanding its Q&A community. Currently, the majority of its users are located in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, and France.

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Re:“New home page seems like Stack Overflow doesn't allow fr... by jasode on Sunday June 30, 2019 @07:38PM (#20321297)
To add to the sibling comment (noname120), this is what Joel Spolsky said back in 2010 when raising money:

>Joel Spolsky: "Most of the goal of raising VC would be to create, partner with, and/or buy StackOverflow-like communities for other fields." -- from https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/39565

So 2019's intensified advertisement for enterprise sales of StackOverflow Teams looks aligned with what JS said back in 2010. I also see that Crunchbase lists subsequent funding rounds in 2011,2013,2015. I don't know if JS's pitch deck was the same investment thesis to the subsequent VCs or not.

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