What a success story for yet another open source project
Well, kind of... Gitlab is another of those Freemium "open source" services where you have to pay to have the full functionality.
That's fair to me.
Gitlab from YC to IPO
131–140 of 258 posts
Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO
#132I'll admit that I was wrong about GitLab. I had the chance to invest in them way back in the day, and passed. My thought at the time was that no open source company had ever been super successful except RedHat, which was more of an outlier than a pattern. And my other thought was that they are competing against GitHub, which was extremely popular and well funded. I honestly didn't think they stood a chance. I'm happy…
> My thought at the time was that no open source company had ever been super successful except RedHat
Sun bought MySQL for 1 billion USD in 2008, does that not count as successful?
Also, MongoDB, Elastic and many many others...
Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO
#133Have 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.
Microsoft paid $7.5 billion for GitHub in 2018. GitLab being ~$10B 4 year later seems like similar ballbark. There is always the possibility of acquisition in the future. (EDIT: had names reversed)
Microsoft only paying 7.5 billion for GitHub definitely makes me less confident that GitLab is worth 10 billion.
Much as I personally prefer GitLab, GitHub had a bigger customer base back then than GitLab has now. GitLab may be gaining market share, but it’s mostly eating Atlassian’s portion of the market and not GitHub’s. It’s plausible GitHub undervalued themself in the sale to Microsoft of course, so a careful look at the numbers is required to evaluate the valuation, but the value comparison isn’t a great sign to me.
Separately of course, GitLab might be in line with the valuation of companies on the stock market in general which have ballooned heavily in recent years. Whether that's a bubble or permanent inflation in stock prices then becomes the relevant question to answer, I suppose.
Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO
#134Earlier 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.
Seems pretty serious to me. I was running my entire CI/CD process with gitlab.com and deploying to k8s clusters before GitHub Actions were even launched.
Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
We did a talk on it, happy to answer any questions. It’s definitely worth it.
A lot of our Jenkins issues came down to “we are not very good at managing Jenkins”, but even if we where the massive jump in productivity, flexibility and team independence we saw after rolling it out makes me believe it’s just better.
Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes! Gitlab's offerings are great, and our team doesn't even scratch the surface of what's possible with its feature set. That said, MRs with over 1000 lines of changes are painful sometimes impossible to review. Even small MRs feel clunky, due to how many panels there are (yes, I know they're collapsible). Because MRs are one of our most used features, it sometimes makes me consider switching to GitHub for their muc…
I prefer to use Intellij now for reviews. How can people review any kind of code in that PR web UI ? I mean I used to do it but not anymore
Yeah, I should really quit struggling with Gitlab's.
For really large MRs, I use Tower + Kaleidoscope to view the changes. But then I can't easily leave a comment on a line of code (a big part of the review process)
Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO
#137Have 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.
As with GitHub, the bigger value is owning shift left disruptions for enterprise and cloud sw+he services: security scanning, backups, prod server hosting, ... .
It is hard to compete with AWS, and a lot easier if you own the UI+APIs for how software teams do CI+CD: you become a default preferred vendor for all IaaS/PaaS add-ins, and can proactively recommend and even trial them well before any competitor. IBM, Oracle, SalesForce, SAP, Alibaba, etc could all win big -- imagine if IBM bought GitLab instead of RedHat to fix their data center strategy.
Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO
#138Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO
#139"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…
When I click on your link to find the quote, it doesn't show up. Strange. Or are you playing off of the joke?
That's strange.
Try looking for "gitlab CEO here" (with quotes) at the bottom search on HN? (and pick Comments. they won't show up in stories.)
Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Microsoft paid $7.5 billion for GitHub in 2018. GitLab being ~$10B 4 year later seems like similar ballbark. There is always the possibility of acquisition in the future. (EDIT: had names reversed)
Microsoft only paying 7.5 billion for GitHub definitely makes me less confident that GitLab is worth 10 billion. Much as I personally prefer GitLab, GitHub had a bigger customer base back then than GitLab has now. GitLab may be gaining market share, but it’s mostly eating Atlassian’s portion of the market and not GitHub’s. It’s plausible GitHub undervalued themself in the sale to Microsoft of course, so a careful loo…
>Microsoft only paying 7.5 billion for GitHub definitely makes me less confident that GitLab is worth 10 billion.
It's worth considering that between 2018 and now, tech valuations have exploded. MSFT is up 300%. QQQ is up 100%. I doubt GitHub is valued anywhere near 7.5B today.