Joel Spolsky

September 24, 2019

Announcing Stack Overflow’s New CEO, Prashanth Chandrasekar!

Last March, I shared that we were starting to look for a new CEO for Stack Overflow. We were looking for that rare combination of someone who could foster the community while accelerating the growth of our businesses, especially Teams, where we are starting to close many huge deals and becoming a hyper-growth enterprise software…
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Co-founder & Former Chairman of the Board
company March 28, 2019

The Next CEO of Stack Overflow

Big news! We’re looking for a new CEO for Stack Overflow. I’m stepping out of the day-to-day and up to the role of Chairman of the Board. Stack Overflow has been around for more than a decade. As I look back, it’s really amazing how far it has come.   Only six months after we…
Avatar for Joel Spolsky
Co-founder & Former Chairman of the Board
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company January 20, 2015

Andreessen Horowitz Invests in Stack Exchange

Stack Exchange Raises $40m Today Stack Exchange is pleased to announce that we have raised $40 million, mostly from Andreessen Horowitz. Everybody wants to know what we’re going to do with all that money. First of all, of course we’re going to gold-plate the Aeron chairs in the office. Then we’re going to upgrade the…
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Co-founder & Former Chairman of the Board
community September 20, 2012

AskPatents.com: A Stack Exchange To Prevent Bad Patents

We’ve all heard the stories of seemingly trivial patents being used to mug technology companies. There was the patent on the “Interactive Web” which a troll named Eolas used to extract $521 million from Microsoft–until a jury in East Texas threw out the patents. There are the four patents Lodsys is using to send threatening…
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Co-founder & Former Chairman of the Board
community July 31, 2012

The Hunting of the Snark

You can’t fix what you can’t measure, so the first thing we did as a part of our Summer of Love campaign was try to measure friendliness in an objective and repeatable way. We gathered 7000 comments from Stack Overflow and submitted them to Mechanical Turk. For each comment, we asked 20 people to rate…
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Co-founder & Former Chairman of the Board
community July 20, 2012

Kicking off the Summer of Love

It’s summer here at StackHQ. Have a flower! You’re welcome. Now on to some serious work. Can we talk about cultural anthropology for a minute? I’d like to talk about what happens when a community (online or off) gets to be about… oh, three or four years old. Every community starts out needing to recruit…
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Co-founder & Former Chairman of the Board
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community May 22, 2012

Encyclopedia Stack Exchange

Remember this old picture? What’s that “Blog” circle supposed to be about, you ask? WHERE’S THE BLOGGING? Since Stack Overflow launched, we’ve been trying to explain that it’s not just a Q&A platform: it’s also a place where you can publish things that you’ve learned: recipes, FAQs, HOWTOs, walkthroughs, and even bits of product documentation,…
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Co-founder & Former Chairman of the Board
company February 7, 2012

Farewell

Stack Exchange co-founder Jeff Atwood announced that he is leaving the company to spend more time with his family, including his twin daughters Maisie Jane (5lb2oz) and June Adeline (5lb 7oz) who celebrated their 0th birthday (and joined Twitter) last Friday, to the great joy of their parents. It has been a great honor for…
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Co-founder & Former Chairman of the Board
community January 16, 2012

State of the Stack 2011 (a message from your CEO)

2011 was another year of fantastic growth at Stack Exchange. We continued our tradition of doubling every year, going from 16 million to over 32 million monthly visitors. We added 42 new sites, bringing us to a grand total of 78. We hired 22 new employees, and raised another $12 million in venture capital, some…
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Co-founder & Former Chairman of the Board
background October 6, 2011

Steve Jobs, 1955-2011

I want to say a word about why we felt it was so important to honor Steve Jobs with a special system-wide message on Stack Overflow, a site for programmers, as well as our Apple-specific site, Ask Different. Remember, for a moment, the first Macintosh. A brilliant computer, but we programmers looked at it and…
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Co-founder & Former Chairman of the Board
company September 6, 2011

DevDays 2011 is Cancelled

DevDays has been canceled, due to poor attendance. It’s my fault, actually. I took a perfectly good thing (DevDays ’09) and gold plated it until it was a different thing. DevDays ’09 was one day. So even people who couldn’t get their boss to let them go to a conference could take a vacation day…
Avatar for Joel Spolsky
Co-founder & Former Chairman of the Board
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