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Gitlab from YC to IPO

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#141

Post by johannes1234321 »

gitfan86 wrote: post #109
johannes1234321 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitLab Just (partially) sold. However: If they don't want to (fully) sell basing the price on a value someone else might eventually pay for a (full) acquisition doesn't make much sense. (Unless you assume they revise the decision, but then the argument about not selling is moot again)

Look at Facebook. Zuck has no interest in giving up full control to someone else, but he does want to be a public company.

Yes, since FB is a money printing machine producing lots of revenue which is some argument forms one market value for parts of a company.

The argument Here was "ORCL, MSFT, SalesForce and a few others would pay 10B+" but those would pay those valuations only for full control.

FB's market cap is around 900B$. Gaining full control over FB would be valued a lot more.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#142

Post by chrisweekly »

upheaval7276 wrote: post #104
pankajdoharey wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opensource isnt such a problem the software should be great, i fail to see how Gitlab is better than Github.

Gitlab always felt like a set of checkboxes to appease non-technical managers. In my experience, most features are half-baked. Even the code review/MR experience is frustrating compared to GitHub. The UX for security scans is _really_ rough.

GitLab CI is world-class.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#143

Post by jedberg »

killerstorm wrote: post #132
jedberg wrote: post #80

I'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...

I meant there were no successful public companies based on open source except RedHat in 2015.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#144

Post by 210Donegal »

upheaval7276 wrote: post #104
pankajdoharey wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opensource isnt such a problem the software should be great, i fail to see how Gitlab is better than Github.

Gitlab always felt like a set of checkboxes to appease non-technical managers. In my experience, most features are half-baked. Even the code review/MR experience is frustrating compared to GitHub. The UX for security scans is _really_ rough.

What about the UX for security scans is rough?

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#145

Post by gorkish »

sdflhasjd wrote: post #53

I really like Gitlab, and I wanted to move my team onto their hosted offering, but earlier this year they changed the pricing so abruptly and drastically that it just killed it as an option. It just feels like it does too much, and unless you want to commit to having everyone using it for _everything_ the pricing doesn't seem to make sense.

The pricing model with GitLab is really unfortunate for certain types of companies. For our developers who really do most everything in Gitlab, it's great, but buying the same licenses for literally anyone else who might need to peek in there a couple of times a month? Hell naw.

Our spend would be much higher (probably 3-4x) if they allowed some type of reasonable mix of license levels.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#146

Post by bdcravens »

What has really bothered me about Gitlab is that everytime Github copies a feature, there's a testy blog post about "we did it first!" when Gitlab as a business is a copy of Github.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#147

Post by moneywoes »

jedberg wrote: post #126
specialist wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any takeaway lessons for evaluating future FOSS startups? Like maybe place higher weight on rate of adding new users?

I've found that my bar for investing is the same no matter what kind of company it is -- how quickly can they sell me on investing? As much as us engineers hate to admit it, the most important skill for a founder is the ability to sell. Besides the obvious of having to sell to customers, they also have to sell their vision to VCs, sell their company to potential employees, sell their vision to journalists and potenti…

What do you find is the “best way to sell”?

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#148

Post by fredros »

pestaa wrote: post #98
altdataseller wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Gitlab 100% open source?

RedHat is not 100% open source either (although the differences are important).

I’d say it’s 99% open source. Do you have any significant example of non open source red hat software ?

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#149

Post by gbear605 »

bdcravens wrote: post #146

What has really bothered me about Gitlab is that everytime Github copies a feature, there's a testy blog post about "we did it first!" when Gitlab as a business is a copy of Github.

And Github is a copy of Sourceforge, which is inevitably a copy of someone else.

Source code hosting as a business isn’t new, it just needs to be executed well.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#150

Post by jedberg »

moneywoes wrote: post #147
jedberg wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found that my bar for investing is the same no matter what kind of company it is -- how quickly can they sell me on investing? As much as us engineers hate to admit it, the most important skill for a founder is the ability to sell. Besides the obvious of having to sell to customers, they also have to sell their vision to VCs, sell their company to potential employees, sell their vision to journalists and potenti…

What do you find is the “best way to sell”?

Have an answer to every objection. First figure out all the ways you would object and make sure you have an answer, then note down any objections you don't have an answer to during your process and make sure you have a good answer next time.

And if you're selling a product, make sure you know your competitors well because a lot of objections will be in the form of "but competitor X does this, how do you solve that problem?" and "what do you do that X doesn't do?". So you better know X really well because the person you're talking to already does and will know if you're making stuff up.

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