When we came together in the morning, we saw a big news: Prosus announced the acquisition of Stack Overflow, a well-known programmer's question and answer site, for US$1.8 billion. Prosus's move is designed to meet people's growing demand for online technology learning, which is also the company's largest investment in the field of online learning.
Stack Overflow CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar said: After the completion of the acquisition, Stack Overflow will retain the support of the original team and global technical force and continue to operate as an independent company.
Let's first look at the two protagonists of this acquisition.
Stack Overflow must be familiar to everyone. The company was founded in 2008 and is a well-known question and answer site for programmers. The official website shows that the number of monthly visitors to its website exceeds 100 million. In addition to the Stack Overflow public platform, the company also has a variety of products, such as Stack Overflow for Teams, Stack Overflow Advertising and Stack Overflow for Talent and Jobs. Among them, Stack Overflow for Teams is its core SaaS collaboration product, which aims to help companies solve problems such as remote work and digital transformation.
Prosus is the world's top technology investment company. If you are not familiar with it, then you may have heard of Tencent's largest shareholder. In 2001, Naspers, the parent company of Prosus, invested US$34 million in Tencent. In 2019, Naspers spun off Prosus and used it to hold the international Internet assets of South African investment company Naspers. Since then, the 30.9% of Tencent Holdings held by Naspers has been taken over by Prosus. In April this year, Prosus announced that it would reduce its holdings of Tencent shares by 2%.
In addition to Tencent, Prosus has also invested in companies such as Brainly, BYJU's, Codecademy, OLX, PayU, Remitly, and Udemy, among which there are many online learning companies. The acquisition of Stack Overflow is the first full acquisition of Prosus in the field of education technology and the largest investment in the field of online learning.
Prosus believes that after the new crown epidemic subsides, many companies will continue to develop technologies to support remote work and online training.
Will Stack Overflow change after being acquired?
The acquisition of commonly used platforms often arouses users' concerns, such as the acquisition of GitHub by Microsoft that year. So, after the acquisition of Stack Overflow, the world's largest programmer Q&A site, will it change?
The company's CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar stated:
After the completion of this acquisition, we will have more resources and support to develop public platforms and paid products, and greatly expand our global influence. We hope that the public platform Stack Overflow will become a valuable resource for developers and technicians all over the world. The SaaS collaboration and knowledge management platform Stack Overflow for Teams can benefit more global companies and help them accelerate product innovation and improve production efficiency through open knowledge.
In the coming weeks and months, the way users use the Stack Overflow website and products will not change, just as our goals and strategic focus will not change. After the acquisition is completed, we will cooperate with Prosus. I will introduce the cooperation through the quarterly update blog. The company's chief product and technology officer Teresa Dietrich will also make an introduction in its quarterly update blog.
Thank you all for your contributions over the years. Whether you are asking or answering questions on the Stack Overflow website, copying and pasting code, or finding a job through Stack Overflow, using Stack Overflow for Team products, we cannot achieve this milestone without you.
This milestone is just the beginning. Since 2008, our public platform Stack Overflow has helped more than 50 billion developers and technicians. That was our beginning, and I can’t wait to show you how we are going.
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