Prosus’s Acquisition of Stack Overflow: Our Exciting Next Chapter
As you may have seen in the news this morning, Prosus (AEX:PRX) has announced its intention to acquire Stack Overflow for 1.8 billion dollars. This is tremendously exciting news for our employees, our customers, our community members, and for our shareholders, and I will share a bit more about what it all means in this post.
Prosus is one of the world’s leading technology investors with stakes in companies such as Tencent, Brainly, BYJU’s, Codecademy, OLX, PayU, Remitly and Udemy. Their massive scale and reach improves the lives of around a fifth of the world’s population. Prosus’s mission is to build leading companies that empower and enrich communities, as demonstrated by the many community-focused and EdTech companies they work with. This makes Prosus the perfect company to acquire Stack Overflow, and Stack Overflow the ideal investment in their focus on the future of workplace learning and collaboration. It allows us to continue to operate as an independent company with our current team and with the backing of a global technology powerhouse.
Once this acquisition is complete, we will have more resources and support to grow our public platform and paid products, and we can accelerate our global impact tremendously. This might look like more rapid and robust international expansion, M&A opportunities, and deeper partnerships both on Stack Overflow and within Stack Overflow for Teams. Our intention is for our public platform to be an invaluable resource for developers and technologists everywhere and for our SaaS collaboration and knowledge management platform, Stack Overflow for Teams, to reach thousands more global enterprises, allowing them to accelerate product innovation and increase productivity by unlocking institutional knowledge.
Prosus is a long-term investor and loves what our company and community have built over these last 13+ years. They are impressed by the SaaS transformation the company has been on since the launch of Stack Overflow for Teams and especially over the last two years. Prosus recognizes our platform’s tremendous potential for impact and they are excited to launch and accelerate our next phase of growth.
How you use our site and our products will not change in the coming weeks or months, just as our company’s goals and strategic priorities remain the same. As the acquisition is finalized, and we continue to partner with Prosus, I will keep you all posted through my regular quarterly blog posts and Teresa Dietrich, our Chief Product and Technology Officer, will do the same in her quarterly community blog posts.
I want to conclude by thanking all of you for your contributions over the years. Whether you asked or answered a question on our site or simply copy and pasted code, whether you once found a job on Stack Overflow or you’re one of the hundreds of thousands of users of Stack Overflow for Teams. We could not have achieved this milestone without you.
This milestone is just the beginning. Since 2008, our public platform has helped developers and technologists over 50 billion times. That’s just us getting started, and I can’t wait to continue to update you on what’s next.
Tags: announcement, company, prosus, stack overflow
28 Comments
Well, I have heard of two of those companies above….
One more than I have. And the buzzword salad tells us nothing about what to expect, other than perhaps more buzzwords.
The corporate world has been slowly turning into a cult, with their own lingo to top it off because why not. The way they communicate is not unlike a preacher would…
“How you use our site and our products will not change in the coming weeks or months, just as our company’s goals and strategic priorities remain the same”.
From community perspective we care more about knowledge sharing regardless of the SO’s business situation.
It feels like we might have to pay for accepted answers beyond the coming months. Whenever there is alien partners (not original founders) users tend to have less appreciation of the asset.
Ohh no! Really? Paid products? Do I read this correctly? Open source philosophy selling itself for big tech corporations? Such a hypocritical announcement. This is one of the saddest news of this year. Please dont make it sound like an improvement or beneficial for the people. Such a shame
They’ve had a paid product for a good number of years. Our company uses it. It is a private version of Stack Overflow. We use it as our own little version of Stack Overflow; we ask questions and then answer them. It serves as our knowledge base.
The public-facing version (I expect) will always be free. But that’s just my opinion (I’m not any part of Stack Overflow, so I could be wrong.)
“Once this acquisition is complete, we will have more resources and support to grow our public platform and paid products, and we can accelerate our global impact tremendously.”
But what ways are you unable to impact the globe now? That is, shouldn’t I substitute “impact” with “financial growth” to decode this sentence?
My guess is that StackOverflow is doing exactly what we appreciate it doing right now. That is, THE GROWTH IS OVER. I couldn’t care less if you spin out opportunities based on the same codebase in some wholly owned subsidiary that chases cash, but within stackoverflow.com? I can’t recall anything changing over the last almost 10 years that’s a knock it out of the park, revolutionary advance. And I don’t need one!
There are some interesting problems that could use solving at stackoverflow.com, certainly. How do you keep answers fresh when the answers to questions change over time, and old accepts are now objectively wrong? How do you manage moderation to ensure it’s not tone deaf (or worse) at times? Maybe even, “How can I pay to get an answer to my question beyond simple point bounties?” That last one is the only one I can think of quickly that increases revenue (and only as a middle banker, not as the primary entity paid) and usefulness of the site.
But growth? What growth? Are the servers crumbling over the load? No. Are there too many low quality answers? Maybe, but it’s been reasonably easy to get past the chaff. Do you need a better mobile app for countries with less infrastructure? Well, actually, yes. Yes you do. But beyond that…
Convince me this isn’t about the money, or — and I’ll give you a softball here — even *primarily* about the money. What is this “impact” primarily about that’s not income?
South African parent company “Naspers funded the National Party (NP) during apartheid” and “and… the NP also held 74,000 shares in Naspers in 1984”. An ethically-based takeover, then. Naspers owns Codecademy, Udemy (okay) and… the source of most of my spam: mail.ru. Lovely. This is not a community-owned resource.
You forgot to mention the racist history of Naspers, Prosus’ parent company. According to Wikipedia, it “formed an integral part of the power structure which implemented and maintained apartheid”.
Oh boy… this is some alarming news…
What product changes and money making schemes are going to be made that will inevitably hurt the users in order to ensure that Prosus gets a return on investment for its 1.8 billion dollar spend?
Was all of Stack Exchange acquired or just Stack Overflow?
Congrats team!
I want to conclude by thanking all of you for your contributions over the years. Now we can put a paywall in front of all your content.
Please just remember SO came from the community. Don’t put it behind a paywall.
Having stakes in the organ of the Chinese government that is Tencent is not a redeeming quality.
i am afraid we might end up paying after that for using it!
> This is tremendously exciting news for our employees, our customers, our community members, and for our shareholders
For shareholders certainly, for the others I’m not so sure.
Well .. the next hit in the face this year. After Unsplash getting “better”, now a buy-out announcement for SO by the company owning the DeliveryHero de-facto MONOPOLY.
Good luck.
Guess I have to find a new platform for Q&A 🙁
cu, w0lf.
I hope it won’t happen as with some of the other companies where they ended up having to be all paid services, if that happened to StackOverflow for me that would be another of those big blows as the community is amazing…
To address a few of the folks worried about a potential paywall, that’s not going to happen. Teresa Dietrich, our CTO, will be addressing that in next week’s Stack of the Stack blog posts. The “paid products” that may be referenced here is Stack Overflow for Teams.
It doesn’t even matter. I’m planning to stop using SO all together after this takeover.
First, congrats. I’m not sure how many employees are at Stack but 1.8 B should spread nicely. I ain’t mad ya!
Second, exactly how many ads will I have to look at before I can see the answer to a question???
Asking for a friend
I doubt much of the 1.8bil, if any, goes to workers, who are even lower on the corporate totem pole than they were before, even though they continue to create the value & profits.
I feel a bit concerned by this cornering of the developer education market by one big entity. I’d also like to have some ownership of the products that I use regularly. However, you can’t easily PROSUS stock as it is OTC, traded in Amsterdam.
Hi,
that’s a fatal and sadly growing trend: A few big companys trying to overtake control over us / our money.
Nothing can stop them, if only enough money is offered, everyone and everybody will be for sale.
1.8billion invest needs a suitable revenue.
The badest of all are the public-relations, that allways want’s to sell us bad news as good ones, as an overall improvement, everthing will no better as before.
Who do they think, will believe that bullshit ?
Kai
Perhaps the new ownership will mean the abusive moderation system will be reformed, but i doubt it.
Alright, time to pack and move to codidact.
The Stack and the other community sites came into being as a way to serve the community. Now it is becoming a way to serve big-pocketed folks.
You guys are free to do whatever, but don’t expect us to be happy to use a platform that seems increasingly uninterested in the people and more interested in the money.
So long, and thanks for the fish.
Thank you for putting my upset & concern into words so well.