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> we won because we started at the right time and we had taste.

2012, https://a16z.com/announcement/github/

  We just invested $100M in GitHub. In addition to the eye-popping number, the investment breaks ground on two fronts:
    It’s the largest investment we’ve ever made.
    It’s the only outside investment GitHub has ever taken.
2018, https://web.archive.org/web/20180604134945/https://a16z.com/...

  Six years ago we invested an “eye-popping” $100 million into GitHub. This was not only a Series A investment and the first institutional money ever raised by the company, but it was also the largest single check we had ever written.. At the time, it had over 3 million Git repositories — a nearly invincible position.. if I ever have to choose between a group of professional business managers or a talented group of passionate developers with amazing product-market fit like GitHub, I am investing in GitHub every time.


Bitbucket got funded before GitHub did, and yet GitHub was still bigger before they got any investment.


What is the point you're trying to make here?


Did $100M investment help Github to win, or had Github already won in 2012 with profitability and 3M git repos?


I would argue that GitHub already won in 2012. The investment helped us grow in a different way, but I don't think anyone involved in that deal would have said that we had almost any serious competitive threats at the time, which is to some degree why it was such a great deal.


Did the investment encourage corporate buyers to sign up for Github Enterprise, where corp developers were already using the free product?


That was certainly one of our internal arguments, that the institutional investment would be helpful for large company trust.




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