Google's Don Dodge: Q&A site StackOverflow's valuation "gave me a heart attack"

StackOverflow, a question-and-answer site popular with programmers and other technical professionals, launched a new site today that helps prospective employers browse the site for talented engineers. It was a hit with most of the judges — but not with Google’s Don Dodge, at least after he saw the price tag.

StackOverflow is a lot like Quora, but is largely populated by professionals in technical careers like engineering and programming. It’s a crowd-sourced site where anyone can post a question and StackOverflow users can quickly write an answer to that question. Other StackOverflow users can then vote up or vote down a response, ensuring the most popular or the most correct answer becomes the top answer for a question.

But the site is overvalued despite its cult popularity among programmers and engineers, said Dodge, an evangelist with Google which includes working with its investment arm, Google Ventures. Dodge made the comments on stage at the Launch Conference when the panel of judges was deciding which startups were best. He said he was initially impressed with the product, but that doesn’t mean he’d invest.

“I just saw the valuation for (StackOverflow’s) Careers 2.0 and I had a heart attack,” Dodge said. “No way I would write a check for that.”

Dodge later said that he thought the valuation was only for StackOverflow’s Careers 2.0 site, but said the site still looked like it was overvalued.

“Even for all of StackOverflow, the entire site, it’s a pretty rich valuation,” he said.

The new site, Careers 2.0, features openings at major companies like Microsoft and links StackOverflow users to sites where they can apply. StackOverflow users can search based on a number of keywords or by zip code, city or county. The idea is to connect StackOverflow’s highly technical and prolific users with potential job opportunities.

  • ianaldrighetti

    Um, okay… let's not mention how much they were valuated as? Unless I am so tired I am misunderstanding something.

  • http://diamondpriceinfo.com Daniel Nicolas

    ianaldrighetti, the article never mentions a valuation number, you are correct. It would be have been great if the article had gone into the valuation or at least gave something for us to gage his response.

  • http://twitter.com/logicalmoron Matt Lynley

    It's really rare that a company — or potential investors — would disclose their valuation this early on.

  • http://twitter.com/MichaelP Michael Peace

    Yeah, valuations usually aren't publicly noted this early on. But, it might be one that is 9-digits as someone alluded to today. Not saying I know that for a fact, but someone did mention that one of the startups had a 9-digit valuation, and in my opinion even if that 9-digit valuation started with a 1 then that is just too high. Not sure though, I could be wrong.

  • http://twitter.com/althejandro Alejandro Vasquez

    another judge (forgot which one, was sitting next to him) said that one of the presenters was great but he wouldn't invest because it had a 9 figure valuation and shortly after that Dodge made that comment about stackOverflow

  • pbreit

    We know that companies don't disclose their valuations but the whole article hinges on a number that is not present in the article. Lame. And poor Mr Dodge mistook a tiny new sub-service as the whole company?

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