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1 episodes · 27 quoted claims
Stack Overflow CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar tied the company's deadline for its response to ChatGPT to a speech at the We Are Developers Conference in Berlin, about six months away.
“I was gonna go speak at the We Are Developers Conference in Berlin. And I effectively told the company, hey, we've got six months to go and produce our response”
Stack Overflow assigned about 10 percent of its staff, roughly forty people, to a dedicated team responding to ChatGPT.
“we carved out a team of 10%, you know, so that was about forty people or so.”
Before Stack Overflow, Chandrasekar worked at Rackspace in cloud services, where he ran a business responding to the threat from Amazon Web Services.
“my experience right before that was at Rackspace, uh, in the cloud services space.”
Chandrasekar's business school professor was Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovator's Dilemma, whose ideas influenced how he handled disruption.
“my professor was, uh, Clayton Christensen, uh, and, you know, he wrote the book Innovator's Dilemma.”
Chandrasekar joined Stack Overflow in 2019, when it was engineering-led and centered on its public platform, and began moving it to a product-led organization.
“I joined a company that was engineering-led in 2019, all about this public platform”
Stack Overflow banned AI-generated answers after community members identified posts written by ChatGPT, and the company says the ban remains in force.
“that's kind of what initiated the ban, which we completely supported and still support, by the way.”
Stack Overflow's AI Assist is a conversational interface grounded in the site's roughly 90 million questions and answers, and it reached general availability in late 2025.
“conversational interface on our, uh, grounded on our 90 million questions and answers.”
Stack Overflow launched MCP servers for its public platform and enterprise product so tools like Cursor can read from, and write back to, its content.
“We've launched, for example, MCP servers for both our public platform as well as our enterprise product.”
Stack Overflow says its enterprise product, Stack Internal, is used by 25,000 companies worldwide.
“Stack Internal, which is now used by 25,000 companies around the world”
Uber is a Stack Overflow enterprise customer whose Uber Genie assistant draws on its internal Stack Overflow content to answer questions in Slack channels.
“A good example of this is Uber, uh, who has something called Uber Genie that is a customer of ours”
Advertising makes up only about 20 percent of Stack Overflow's revenue, according to its CEO.
“most people assume that Stack Overflow is is supported entirely by advertising, but it's only about 20% of our company's revenues.”
Stack Overflow says it has data licensing partnerships with most major AI labs and cloud hyperscalers, including Google and OpenAI.
“we've struck effectively partnership agreements with every single AI lab that you can think of for the for the most part”
Chandrasekar says the early-2023 drop in Stack Overflow questions came almost entirely from simple questions.
“by the way, when we saw the decline in questions early on in 2023, we what we realized is that pretty much all the question declines had to do with very simple questions.”
Stack Overflow formed a partnership with Indeed in 2025 focused on tech jobs.
“We struck a partnership with, uh, with Indeed this past year, so that they, you know, be, uh, you know, partner on tech jobs.”
Stack Overflow describes its users with a 1-9-90 rule: about 1 percent are heavy curators, 9 percent contribute moderately, and 90 percent mostly read.
“we have something called the one nine nine zero rule. 1% are the hardcore users who have been spending a lot of time”
Stack Overflow's 2025 survey found over 80 percent of its community members use or intend to use AI.
“if you took a look at the Stack Overflow 2025 survey, over 80% of our community members are using AI or intend to use AI.”
The same 2025 Stack Overflow survey found only 29 percent of users trust the output of AI tools.
“Only 29% of our user base actually trusts what's coming out of AI”
Stack Overflow co-founder Joel Spolsky told Chandrasekar the developer community is altruistic and motivated by helping each other rather than payment.
“his point is that the software development community is effectively it's a very altruistic. People just want to help each other out”
Chandrasekar estimates that traffic to most ad-supported content websites has fallen about 30 to 40 percent.
“most, uh, content sites, their traffic is down thirty to 40%, something like that.”
Stack Overflow's licensing terms require AI companies to pay for the cumulative corpus, including when a new model builds on data from a prior model.
“if you're leveraging our original data or some derivative of that from a prior model, then you have to pay us for it.”
Chandrasekar says Stack Overflow is a growing, profitable company.
“We believe so, yeah, we're a growing company, we're profitable, so, you know, financially, we're thankfully in a very good spot.”
Stack Overflow's designers and product managers vibe coded prototypes of new features to get user feedback before engineers built them.
“we our designers and our product managers vibe coded it first to show it and get, uh, user feedback before we went and built it.”
AI Assist searches Stack Overflow's own content first and falls back to an outside model such as OpenAI's when that content does not answer the question.
“there's a fallback option where it goes and leverages OpenAI's, for example, who's our partner, to be able to go and produce”
Chandrasekar said Google's Gemini 3 outperformed other models and prompted code red responses at competing AI companies.
“It blows every other model out of the water, and now we've got a code red situation in other companies, other LLMs, competition.”
Chandrasekar attended AWS re:Invent in the week of the interview, where Amazon discussed its Trainium chips, including Trainium 3 and Trainium 4.
“I was at, you know, AWS reInvent this week where they talked about the Trainium chips and Trainium three and Trainium four being built out.”
Chandrasekar named HP and Eli Lilly among large companies testing and building with Stack Internal.
“We have some of the world's largest companies, uh, you know, leveraging and testing and building this with us, you know, HP and Eli Lilly and all these companies”
Stack Overflow launched its Stack Internal product at Microsoft Ignite a couple of weeks before the interview.
“our Stack Internal product that we launched a couple weeks ago at Microsoft Ignite, in fact”