![]() What about a sideways move into EdTech? Would it make sense for Stack Overflow to become a MOOC, say? “It’s always an option … we’ve always thought about that,” Chandrasekar says. Although the sale to Prosus means there’s no rush, an IPO would appeal for all the usual reasons of generating awareness, employee equity and so on. He’s not so shy on the possibility of taking Stack Overflow public one day, however. Did Nadella also try to buy Stack Overflow? Chandrasekar declines to answer. “It’s not easy to move a ship of that size,” Chandrasekar notes admiringly, and we agree that it’s interesting that Nadella paints the Redmond behemoth as a developer-centric company. ![]() He also makes a “peanut butter and jelly” comparison between his firm and GitHub, which is the code repository and, speaking of GitHub, we discuss the success of Satya Nadella who, as Microsoft CEO, acquired the company. “It’s not a random forum where someone has an opinion on something.” “Our algorithm has premium on accuracy,” he says. ![]() He sees his firm offering highly reliable and precise answers to difficult coding questions: a very different world to the wikis he often derides. “We want to keep developers and technologists ‘in the flow’ and we never want them to be distracted by an email or a Slack message,” he adds.Ĭhandrasekar’s vision of Stack Overflow is that this is a company that provides the “context for the code”. Hence the no video ad rule but if an expert contributor on Lamda gets alerted to a Lamda role, that works well for all concerned, Chandrasekar says. Doing so involves creative ways from gamification upwards to keep them engaged and enthused it also means walking a fine line between ads that are welcome and those that are irrelevant and/or intrusive. “Community is at our centre and we’re investing in both the free and paid community,” says Chandrasekar, a former software engineer, investment banker and Rackspace executive. That move has created a buffer for Stack Overflow to invest in the future and its invaluable community. His trick was to rationalise revenue streams down to a premium Stack Overflow for Teams SaaS and context-sensitive advertising.Ĭhandrasekar also oversaw last June’s $1.8bn sale of the company to Prosus, a technology investment group primarily focused on the consumer internet and with an interest in education technology. That’s thanks in part to Chandrasekar who took the job in October 2019 and helped create a monetisation model that appears to be working. It made $40m for the last year in the all-important KPI metric of annual recurring revenue and, 13 years after it was founded, the company remains a big growth story. CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar hails the “network effect” that has seen one question alone (about GitHub since you ask) gain a million views and be upvoted over 40,000 times. It receives over 100 million visits per month and claims to be seen by 80% of developers every week and 50% every day. ![]() The aspiration: to become another always-open tab on your browser if you’re a technologist, knowledge worker… or maybe even not involved in the digital realm.īut, to begin at the beginning, where is the company now? The numbers are vast, consumer internet-like volumes. But its aspirations go even further than the torrent of visits it receives from coders asking questions or sharing expertise. Stack Overflow is deeply embedded in the global developer community to the extent that the tagline on its much-visited website has variants of “every developer has a tab open to Stack Overflow”. ![]()
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