CEO Blog: Some exciting news about fundraising

Question

I’m really excited to share with you the fact that Stack Overflow just raised $85 million in our series E round of funding. I've written about the investment in detail on our blog.

As I said there, our public community and commercial products are symbiotically linked. One cannot succeed without the other, and the more one prospers, the more it can propel the success of the pair. With this funding, we will be able to invest in more people and tooling on our public platform and community management teams; in the tools, features, and platforms that support our community managers, moderators, and users. We’ve shared our Q3 roadmap for the community, and I am confident that this funding will allow us to deliver on and expand that commitment. What we learn from these communities will help us to build better, more useful products for developers, technologists, and the companies that rely on them.

This is due to a great deal of work done by the whole company to build products that can financially support our community. And the motivation to invest more in the Community is not just something that we are talking about externally - it is also something strongly felt within the company. I want to share a line from an email I wrote to the whole company this morning as part of this announcement.

“We will continue to invest in our community and in internal resources to help address areas where employees have felt under-resourced historically.”

This funding will allow us to hire additional support for the Community team. We’ll be opening CM roles, a second PM role on the Public Platform team, as well as additional developers and designers to help support the things we need to build.

Our recently-announced Q3 roadmap will stay as-is since we won't be able to grow the Community Team quickly enough to work on anything this quarter, but we are kicking off research and collaboration across the Team and community for future plans.

Please leave any questions or comments below and we will try to address them as best we can. Because of the funding news, today will be quite busy internally, and we may not be able to provide thorough answers right away for all questions, but we will work to respond over the next 48 hours.

This couldn’t have happened without our users, our Moderators, and the millions of people that come to our sites every month. We appreciate your continued support and dedication to Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange network, and we are excited to have more resources to be able to work on problems and solutions with the community in the future.

Answer 1

There's a lot in that announcement about "enabling developers and technologists". A large number of sites in the SE network are not about topics related to that. There is a signficant number of sites that aren't about technology, and SE does talk less and less about these.

What is the role of the non-technical sites in the overall strategy of SE?

Answer 2

Congrats and good luck.

As a former moderator who has long since abandoned hope that Stack Exchange will put money/actions to words regarding community, let me say: you now have a clear opportunity to do so.

Trust me, people care about this. Broken promises in this regard will continue to erode community trust.

Answer 3

$85 million undoubtedly comes with major strings attached: a veritable obligatory-feature-request tag.

Qⁿ: What strings are attached?

Without knowing precisely what those strings are, the community cannot have an informed opinion as to whether this is good or bad. Despite not having a say, these contractual obligations impact us too.

Answer 4

I'm glad that maybe things might have turned a corner.

That said, over the past decade or so we've had a few bright spots and a few dark ones, so I'd feel that it's a matter of consistency over time.

This funding will allow us to hire additional support for the Community team. We’ll be opening CM roles, a second PM role on the Public Platform team, as well as additional developers and designers to help support the things we need to build.

This is excellent news but I suspect it's not just about opening up roles (which were actually quite adeptly, if not adequately filled in the past). It's about giving support to the Community Team, ensuring they have the resources on the whole, and ensuring folks are here for the long run, not just until some other department needs more funding.

Our recently-announced Q3 roadmap will stay as-is since we won't be able to grow the Community Team quickly enough to work on anything this quarter

Might not even need that for the Community Team to have an effect. Even with the existing roadmap - having more people to share the load's going to be a net positive.

One key indicator though, isn't in the roadmap. It's in rebuilding trust. There's a lot of folks who left in anger or disgust over past actions of the company. There's various issues pending that need to be addressed. Some of these things are harder than others. Other have roadblocks.

That's to say, it's awesome the company has funding, but the net effect for us is dependent on how the company works over the next half decade, or decade or however long it is. All this would be for naught if this newfound re-focus on the community is forgotten with the next change of the internal political winds.

Answer 5

I have a couple of related questions about user engagement metrics and trends, based on a plot you showed in the blog post. I've made a couple of annotations:

My question is threefold. First, what is the metric by which the company is measuring the number of "engaged users"? Is it signups, folks who've posted at least once during the given period, or some other metric?

Second, how confident is the company that the growth this year will continue? I've noticed that going back to 2013, we've seen a sharp jump in user engagement during the first quarter of each year, but often that's the yearly net gain in users is at most (and in some cases much less) than that. This year, we seem to have broken that pattern by seeing a second large spike in user engagement.

My first thought is that it might be pandemic-related; if so, then that spike could subside as, at least in some countries, life returns to normal. Does the company attribute the spike to something else that indicates that we'll actually see continued growth beyond the three-year period of essentially no growth that we've seen since 2017? That's partly why I'm interested in the y-axis: Is the metric for engagement one that might be able to differentiate between a short-term increase and long-term retention?

Finally, is this jump also seen across network sites, or is it just Stack Overflow?

I guess the bottom line is that I'm wondering if the recent increase is here to stay, or if it's a blip. I know that y'all can't read the future, but you have a better idea of the data and trends than I do.

Answer 6

This is great and all, but the fact that it took you getting extra funding in order to replace the lost Community Managers shows they still aren't a priority. Without Community Managers the network falls apart, the sites fall into chaos, including Stack Overflow. Without regular community members being impressed with these sites no one will want to pay for Teams. Please return to the old strategy: invest in the community and the public network sites and you'll have the biggest team of advocates for your paid products you could ever see. "Come and see for free the excellent experience we provide, and then recommend to management that your company pay for our commercial products." That's a far better return on investment than you'll ever see through advertising or sales.

Answer 7

You wrote,

As I said there, our public community and commercial products are symbiotically linked. One cannot succeed without the other, and the more one prospers, the more it can propel the success of the pair.

Since you ask, why and how is it important to the commercial product that the public community must succeed? What measures the success of the public community, and how are those metrics relevant to the commercial product? Which public community do you mean, i.e. is that SO in particular or are they all important somehow to the commercial product? Perhaps you think the answer is obvious, I'm not sure it is; see also Yaakov Ellis's answer to Why does the company want to increase engagement on Stack Overflow?.

Answer 8

Forcing us through the CoC to be overprotective towards new users and increasing rewards for low value questions like "What does print("dog") do in python?" will undoubtedly contribute to SE's growth.

But in the long run SE will inevitably turn into another low quality website like Quora, if "number of contributions" is your most important metric.

It feels as if funding is all that matters, regardless of the long-term consequences.

What are the plans regarding the long-term drop in quality?

• Is this considered to be an issue?
• How will it be mitigated?

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“We will continue to invest in our community and in internal resources to help address areas where employees have felt under-resourced historically.”

Many highly-contributing community members have quit because of SE-staff's decisions (CoCs, lack of accountability, removing the power of MetaSE through the Loop and outright banning specific topics for discussion with the pretext of "this might offend someone" or "this is now considered off-topic, use X opaque means to contact us", etc).

Therefor, with all due respect, the community which the investors intend to invest in, does not include people objecting the above actions.

Nevertheless, I'd like to know:

• Is reduced freedom of speech on SE considered to be a problem?

• Will any of the aforementioned decisions be reversed?

By freedom of speech i mean:

• the freedom to criticize new policies
• the freedom to discuss mod actions without repercussions
• the freedom to interact with (new) users without being overprotective
• the freedom to not speak (IIRC there was a related clause in one of the CoCs)

It goes without saying, when all the above are done in a professional manner (that is, respectfully, while protecting the anonymity of users involved when needed, without re-posting unquestionably offensive content, just like in SO)

Will you give us this freedom back?

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Addressing feedback in comments

Cracking down on rudeness and bigotry isn't restricting free speech

It actually is, when used as a pretext to ban any criticism of implemented policies. Rudeness and bigotry has never been allowed on SE, so claiming the new massive changes are addressing that, is simply wrong.

If you don't have the time to leave a non-rude comment, then simply don't comment at all. Arguing "I should be allowed to be rude!" isn't going to go very far.

I never said I want to post rude comments. I actually said the exact opposite:

But if we assume we behave somewhere between "wrapping in cotton" to "neutral professional attitude" [...]

Answer 9

What about testing?

Back in 2013, Marco Cecconi (who was a Stack Overflow developer at the time) mentioned in a talk that Stack Overflow has very few tests because of the awesome community that reports bugs. Testing is a necessary part of any software project and traditionally companies hire Quality Assurance Engineers. (Stack Exchange even has a site just for them!) At the time, there were tests for Jobs (née Careers). As far as I know, testing on public Q&A is still outsourced to Meta.

In Q1, JNat published Our Commitment to Responding to Meta and Moderators. A large part of the process falls to CMs. That's not the worst stopgap solution, but genuine quality assurance requires a team of individuals dedicated to testing changes and preventing regression. And they need to have the full backing of the organization to ensure that bugs are fixed before writing new code.

While we are on the topic of the Joel Test, may I direct your attention to #10:

10. Do you have testers?

If your team doesn’t have dedicated testers, at least one for every two or three programmers, you are either shipping buggy products, or you’re wasting money by having $100/hour programmers do work that can be done by $30/hour testers. Skimping on testers is such an outrageous false economy that I’m simply blown away that more people don’t recognize it.

Read Top Five (Wrong) Reasons You Don’t Have Testers, an article I wrote about this subject.

In a sense, Stack Overflow has an army of testers. You won't ever find a group of people who care more about quality. But the process of prioritizing and fixing those bugs has been broken for years. If Stack Overflow is to benefit fully from the generosity of Meta, I believe it must have at least one person on staff with the sole responsibility of getting bugs triaged, fixed and tested. With $85 million, it should be possible to hire that person.

Answer 10

"As I said there, our public community and commercial products are symbiotically linked. One cannot succeed without the other, and the more one prospers, the more it can propel the success of the pair. "

I wonder why you never really cared much about the community in the past and until yet then.

For me these seem like empty words you speak to only satisfy us.

You never really listened to the community in an appropriate and fair way, so where should this change in thinking now come from?

Yes, your commercial products and the community only live together, but why did you show so little in practice to care about the community if this is your real mindset?

Give the people what they want, satisfy them and you'll see your products will sell in a way you never can't imagine. It doesn't need 85 million dollar to make a change; it only needs a will in the first place.

I hope that you said the truth now and that things might change the next time, but until yet they are just words.

If the money really turns into a real benefit for the users we will see in the next months/years.

Answer 11

We appreciate your continued support and dedication to Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange network, and we are excited to have more resources to be able to work on problems and solutions with the community in the future.

I appreciate that SE Inc management is showing us that these are more than empty words.

9, 10 months ago, it felt very different. Thus I am simply grateful that the "new direction" is showing in your actions.

And I congratulate the whole team for the efforts that brought all of us to this point!

I am asking you to not get sloppy or less enthusiastic regarding the interactions with the user base. Not every conflict can easily be resolved, and not every business decision can please the content generating users. But we all have it in our hands to keep talking and working towards a future that results in "return on investment", no matter whether the investment is monetarily or our free time and creativity.

Answer 12

Our recently-announced Q3 roadmap will stay as-is since we won't be able to grow the Community Team quickly enough to work on anything this quarter, but we are kicking off research and collaboration across the Team and community for future plans.

As you tell the Q3 roadmap will stay as-is, I would ask, do you know when that item would be added to a roadmap?

I ask as I see a lot of study on the roadmap, but some changes are already waited.

To give an idea, there is some meta post discussing that change. (I surely forget other communities which pooled their members about that change.)

• Home Improvement: Can we get the close vote threshold lowered to 3?
• Server Fault: Close/reopen vote threshold from 5 to 3
• Physics: Should we test lowering the vote to close and reopen threshold?
• Arduino: Can we change the close/reopen vote threshold from 5 to 3?
• Spanish: Can we get the close and reopen voting thresholds lowered to 3?