Comment by jonas21

13 days ago

The author labels COVID and the launch of ChatGPT on the graph, but fails to mention that Stack Overflow was acquired in June 2021 by Prosus, a Dutch private equity firm. That looks to me like it matches pretty well with the entire downward trend.

19 comments

jonas21

Reply
bhouston  13 days ago

> Stack Overflow was acquired in June 2021 by Prosus, a Dutch private equity firm.,

That is great to hear. I am glad that the original creators of StackOverflow got their liquidity event and are well off financially I suspect.

  • chiph  13 days ago

    That would be Joel Spolsky (Fog Creek Software) and Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror), mostly. Jeff has gone on to make several large philanthropic gifts. Joel probably has too but I don't have info on them.

    • selcuka  13 days ago

      Joel Spolsky sold Trello to Atlassian in 2017, so he was already rich before the Stack Exchange exit.

andomar  13 days ago

A firm is sold when its owners believe they will get the best price. The selling itself is more of a symptom than a cause.

  • mathattack  13 days ago

    It’s not necessarily the sale. Some private equity companies move from “Let’s invest like we’re shooting for the moon” to “Let’s invest like we want to improve margins and flip this on 3-5 years”

    It’s not inherently wrong but it is a different model, and sometimes companies suffer as a result.

    • lokar  13 days ago

      And some (Broadcom) see a product in decline, but with some amount of stickiness/lock-in. They cut R&D and extract value as it withers away.

      1 reply →

  • senordevnyc  13 days ago

    Businesses (and any other kind of asset) are sold for all kinds of reasons, and trying to time the market to maximize the price is only one of them. Probably not even the most common one.

    • selcuka  13 days ago

      Correct. I believe the desire to start a new company or to retire would be higher on the list.

rich_sasha  12 days ago

I always associated SO issues with the unpaid moderators, who were not "bought" but rather inherited I suppose.

IshKebab  13 days ago

I don't think so. StackOverflow itself didn't really change for any of that period. Any changes in users must have been due to external factors.