Live data from Hacker News

GitLab – A $1B business where all employees work remotely

forbes.com

101–110 of 239 posts

Re: GitLab – A $1B business where all employees work remotely

#101
post #68

GitLab the company exists because of HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4428278 Ask me anything.

Have you ever had to deal with employees that "work remotely" but don't get a lot done (perhaps because they're spending all day on HN)? How do you detect that & deal with it?

Re: GitLab – A $1B business where all employees work remotely

#102
post #68

GitLab the company exists because of HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4428278 Ask me anything.

How did you get your first 100/1000 customers ? :)

We got 100,000 users of the open source distribution before we introduced a paid one.

In the first year that Dmitriy made the open source distribution (and I didn't even know it existed) 200 people contributed to GitLab and probably 10,000+ people used it.

Read more about how we turned that into revenue in https://about.gitlab.com/2018/11/09/monetizing-and-being-ope...

Re: GitLab – A $1B business where all employees work remotely

#103
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if somebody in SF was employed remotely by a company in a poorer country? Should the person in SF be paid less because employees in originating country have lower salaries?. Having salaries based on location is fair, the same job that pays 120k$ in SF pays 70k$ in my country and that makes me in top 2% earners in the country. I could argue that i actually get more with 70k$ in my country than somebody with 120k$…

> Having salaries based on location is fair It's no more fair than paying based on lifestyle choices; if any employee in SF is providing labor worth $200k, then an employee in Bucharest providing the same labor is also worth $200k. The fact that the SF employee has higher expenses doesn't make their labor more valuable. Sure, they are paying more to live in a more desirable location, but that no more deserves higher…

Salary is a market value. Your arguments read like “if a BigMac costs half a Dollar in a developing country then the BigMac is inherently worth half a dollar and should cost the same in the US”

Re: GitLab – A $1B business where all employees work remotely

#104
post #99

>After starting and selling app store Appappeal, Sid turned open-source software GitLab into a fast-growing venture that is on its way to an IPO in 2020. Open source software?

I try to say open core software (some of it is proprietary) and that is what we try to use in our website and blog posts.

Sometimes I mess up and sometimes the journalist prefers a more common term.

Re: GitLab – A $1B business where all employees work remotely

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if that tactic actually retains people for longer. I just closed the tab after the first couple of paragraphs, googled his name, and found the information I wanted that way. It seems to be intuitive that if one makes X harder to get via their platform, the user will work harder to get X, but that solution rarely seems to be true.

I hate it almost as much as the ‘soft lede’, where the author decides to spend a few paragraphs describing the weather and kind of jacket the subject of their article is wearing before they get to the point. Maybe it’s SEO, but it just gives me the impression that the author had a failed career as a novelist, and wants to waste my time as an outlet for their creative writing impulses.

Or maybe that's their writing style and the story they're writing?

I'm not usually dismissive, but honestly, people are free to write the article as they wish to, and we're free to read it or not. It always annoys me when people complain about recipe sites for example "I don't want to know what clothes you were wearing when you cooked it, just give me the measurements".

> waste my time as an outlet for their creative writing impulses

What gives us the right to demand something from a writer that isn't what they were writing?

It might be cynical SEO stuff, or it might just be how they like to write - but there are a lot of commenters here that won't be happy until everything is just AI-produced bullet-points.

Re: GitLab – A $1B business where all employees work remotely

#106
post #68

GitLab the company exists because of HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4428278 Ask me anything.

Have you ever had to deal with employees that "work remotely" but don't get a lot done (perhaps because they're spending all day on HN)? How do you detect that & deal with it?

Why would it be any different than someone in the office that didn't get a lot done?

Re: GitLab – A $1B business where all employees work remotely

#107
post #68

GitLab the company exists because of HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4428278 Ask me anything.

Have you ever had to deal with employees that "work remotely" but don't get a lot done (perhaps because they're spending all day on HN)? How do you detect that & deal with it?

Identifying and taking action on underperformance is essential to running a great company and we have a lot of information on how we do this on https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/underperformance/

I don't think that working remotely is the main cause of this. There are people underperforming in many companies who work on-site.

I'll be the last person to say something about spending a lot of time on HN since I do so myself. In general we don't want to talk about how you spend your time but about your output. We measure results and not hours https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/values/#measure-results-no...

Re: GitLab – A $1B business where all employees work remotely

#108
post #85
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for posting our calculator. More context about us paying local rates is in https://about.gitlab.com/2019/02/28/why-we-pay-local-rates/

Interesting, I calculated the salary in the country I am right now, and pay is way above local pay - which is good. I earn more tho with a different company working remotely, but they don't discriminate based on location. Equal amount of effort, means equal amount of pay in their view. My take aways from the blog post: "if everyone is paid the same role-based salary, the company would not be able to hire as many team…

One thing I notice with the calculator is it is a simple scaling factor. While this scales for an employee's cost of living, it also scales how much they can save.

An employee on $200k in San Francisco spending 50% on their lifestyle and no kids can retire by 40 to a more economically sane region with similar facilities. A similar employee doing the same job in that more economically sane region for $100k spending that same 50% is working until they are 50.

Which ends up meaning that in the cheaper regions you are only recruiting from the pool of people unable to move to wealthier regions with higher pay (which granted is a high proportion due to family).

Re: GitLab – A $1B business where all employees work remotely

#109
post #71
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not close to being profitable since we're optimizing for growth (more than doubling year over year). Cash flow positive planned no later then 2023 https://about.gitlab.com/company/strategy/#sequence

Can you confirm if GitLab increased revenue 10x in 2018? A previous profile stated the revenue was $10M in 2017 ( https://www.forbes.com/sites/alejandrocremades/2019/07/21/he... ) and this article says it is now $100M. This is a phenomenal achievement, but the valuation ought to be more than $1B at that trajectory.

Do did not increase revenue by 10x in 2018. We more than doubled IACV (and hence revenue) in 2018.

Re: GitLab – A $1B business where all employees work remotely

#110
post #85
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for posting our calculator. More context about us paying local rates is in https://about.gitlab.com/2019/02/28/why-we-pay-local-rates/

Interesting, I calculated the salary in the country I am right now, and pay is way above local pay - which is good. I earn more tho with a different company working remotely, but they don't discriminate based on location. Equal amount of effort, means equal amount of pay in their view. My take aways from the blog post: "if everyone is paid the same role-based salary, the company would not be able to hire as many team…

If you don’t mind, which company do you work for, and how did you find them? Please feel free to respond by email. Thanks!
Post reply on HN