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Gitlab from YC to IPO

blog.ycombinator.com

41–50 of 258 posts

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#41
post #31
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitHub has stronger 'social' features and it's better for people who want to connect to other devs or build portfolios. GitLab is years ahead of GitHub for certain stuff (e.g. CI/CD) and IMO it has a better commercial offering for business. I use GitHub as my portfolio profile for free and GitLab in my $JOB. That's my opinion tho, I'm just a person who uses both.

GitHub's CI pipelines are behind GitLab? My lord, here I was thinking about moving to GitHub Enterprise when our subscription expires because everything in GitLab feels like an unfinished weekend project. Seems like nobody can get anywhere near the functionality of Jenkins.

And here I am planning on replacing Jenkins with GitLab CI.. do you really think Jenkins is better? Do you have any examples or thoughts you can share?

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#42
post #33
post #3

I recently wanted to try adding some diagrams to a markdown-formatted README file in a Github Enterprise repo. I saw a few solutions but they all seemed to require me to roll some kind of service or automation to generate a raster image of the diagram and reference that from the markdown. There's an outstanding feature request for Github to integrate this kind of thing in their markdown rendering. But it's been langu…

GitLab has already turned into "The Homer". It has hundreds (thousands?) of features, but if you stray away from the core git functionality you'll very quickly realise they're pretty bad. I've always seen GitLab as a useful tool for smaller companies where you can use it to replace several other applications (e.g. JIRA, Jenkins, or wiki), but if your company already has those established it all becomes somewhat usele…

Have you read the GitLab S-1? They have great retention with larger companies. Can you substantiate any of your claims? (FYI I have no horse in this race, I evaluated GH vs GL recently and decided to stay on GH for now)

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#44
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actions are close If not better than Gitlab’s CI. I moved from Gitlab to GitHub Actions because they offer OSX runners too, game changer.

Are you using enterprise Gitlab? I don't think Gitlab is a serious player outside of enterprise clients. But that's where the money is.

This is also where MS pushes Azure DevOps because it is inline with their subscription approach for Enterprise Office, Project Management and DevOps. It is really easy for a company that already pays for Office 365 to add on Azure DevOps. It's a lot less easy for the teams to adopt it, but we all know you sell to the front office, not the back.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#45

Have any of the finance minded HN commenters decided if the $10B valuation is justified? I'm usually pretty negative about high valuations, but given their enterprise penetration, this one seems almost reasonable.

ORCL, MSFT, SalesForce and a few others would pay 10B+ to own those relationships and control of the future of the product

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#46
post #18
post #5

I haven't used gitlab much, but I was shocked to hear GitHub's CTO (at the time of the interview, he has moved on since) state that GitHub didn't consider them a competitor. "I do think that people still, to this day, think of GitLab as one of our main competitors, and I never have ever saw GitLab as a competitor." https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud... Anyone have thoughts on that? Or pointe…

GitHub has stronger 'social' features and it's better for people who want to connect to other devs or build portfolios. GitLab is years ahead of GitHub for certain stuff (e.g. CI/CD) and IMO it has a better commercial offering for business. I use GitHub as my portfolio profile for free and GitLab in my $JOB. That's my opinion tho, I'm just a person who uses both.

Remember that GitHub is not MS's enterprise product in this space. When they acquired GH everyone waited for "the merge" and I think they've been really smart to (at least) appear to be hands off. I can happily use GH for my stuff while cursing Azure DevOps for work without going crazy.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#47
"Gitlab CEO here, getting rich and feeling proud" [1] ;-) – congrats to the Sid, Dmitriy, and the rest of the Gitlab team. Always appreciated your presence on HN.

We've been GitLab customers for 2-3 years now (what was attractive was having "everything in one SaaS subscription") and it's worked out quite well.

There's always papercuts for sure and the product could always use more polish, but overall it has been nice to have most of our dev processes under one umbrella.

Now when is Hashicorp going public? I've got my wallet ready for that one.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#48

Have any of the finance minded HN commenters decided if the $10B valuation is justified? I'm usually pretty negative about high valuations, but given their enterprise penetration, this one seems almost reasonable.

First 6 months of this year Gitlab took in $108M in revenue, and had $177M in expenses. Would you pay $10B to own a company that loses $10M/month, with the hopes they will continue to increase revenue in the future and become profitable?

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#49
I used to work at Uber's Amsterdam office at a time where the remote nature of the office (from SF HQ) was a struggle for some teams because of strong dependencies on teams located at SF HQ.

Sid came to the office and talked to us about some strategies Gitlab used for remote work, timezone differences etc.

Not only the talk was very helpful, Sid was an incredibly clear communicator, calm and humble. He really seemed to be a great leader and someone it must be nice working with.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#50
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actions are close If not better than Gitlab’s CI. I moved from Gitlab to GitHub Actions because they offer OSX runners too, game changer.

Are you using enterprise Gitlab? I don't think Gitlab is a serious player outside of enterprise clients. But that's where the money is.

I don't think it's a serious player at enterprises either. MSFT is giving away GitHub Enterprise to sell Azure and Visual Studio licenses coupled with other perks. GitLab can't compete on that level and they lose to GitHub/MSFT on a fairly regular basis.
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