Why a European tech giant bought a programmer-focused Q&A website

Things that overflow: cups of water, emotions, river banks. Things that overflow if you’re a developer: stacks.

Wait..what? Stack Overflow is a Q&A website for programmers. It has over 100 million monthly visitors, and the WSJ reports that it was just sold to Prosus, a massive European tech conglomerate, for $1.8 billion.

• Stack Overflow has existed since 2008, and gets its name from a common coding error where a program tries to use more memory than is available (also, a naming contest).
• The mostly free, ad-supported company will operate independently, per a statement from cofounder Joel Spolksy.

Programmers use the site to crowdsource sticky wickets across languages ranging from Python to HTML. Participation is Reddit-esque: There’s up-voting and down-voting, and users can earn reputation points.

Buyer byte: Prosus owns slices of global tech companies in categories from fintech to e-comm. It’s also Tencent’s largest shareholder. Stack Overflow will nestle into its edtech holdings, which include ownership stakes in Udemy and Codecademy.

Zoom out: 2020 was a record-breaking year for the US edtech sector both in terms of deal value ($2.2 billion) and volume (130), per EdSurge. In buying Stack Overflow, Prosus is snapping up an attractive edtech target before others can, and betting on the durability of the familiar and slightly patronizing ol’ mantra: “Learn to code.”—DM