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Gitlab from YC to IPO

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#151

Post by marceloabsousa »

debacle wrote: post #8

A paid user + big fan of gitlab. They exist in a strange valley between github and Atlassian where usability has remained high while also being featureful. Their kanban is 10% more functional than Trello, which is all our small team really needs, they give you everything and they don't nickel and dime you. The only feature I would like to see improved is their PR process. Seems a bit buggy with remotely large changes…

We've been building a new code review tool for the PR/MR process. Check it out at https://reviewpad.com.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#152

Post by mr_cyborg »

nodesocket wrote: post #115
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…

I’ll echo a sentiment I also had but perhaps I was wrong. I believed that users of GitLab used GitLab because they didn’t want to pay a premium (or pay at all) for GitHub; thus I viewed it as a cheaper alternative in the same vein as buying a Hyundai vs buying a Mercedes. I assumed only frugal “developers” were using it, and surely any legit companies would opt for the superior GitHub.

Interesting comparison with cars, I would think a Hyundai is much more reliable and less expensive to maintain than a Mercedes, and Hyundai is now being positioned as a more premium brand than it once was.

On topic, GitLab is great at CI/CD and awesome for self-hosting things.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#153

Post by marceloabsousa »

Gepsens wrote: post #36
dhritzkiv wrote: post #24

Earlier 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

Would be very curious about your thoughts on Reviewpad (https://reviewpad.com). The interactions you have on the IDE are very different than a tool that was specifically made for code reviews.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#154

Post by ignoramous »

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…

> ...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 potential customers, etc.

As cynical and hollow as it sounds, pretty sure this advice is consistent with what I have heard in multiple videos and blogs from YC.

See also: "create investor fomo", https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/search?q=create%20fomo%20in...

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#155

Post by polote »

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…

If every investor was apologizing when a company he passed on became successful they would not have any time to do investing anymore.

For any criteria (open source or github as a competitor in that case) you will find some company that became successful. Even the worst one.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#157

Post by taytus »

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…

>which was more of an outlier than a pattern

If you are looking to invest in patterns what makes you special?

I thought the idea was to look for outliers.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#158

Post by ksec »

mooreds wrote: 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…

I am probably wrong in this.

I do think they are in a different market though. In that despite there is a Github Enterprise Product, the self host market shares are going to GitLab for one reason or another. i.e I would not be surprised if GitLab is actually winning in Enterprise / Big Spending Client self hosting Market.

For Github, it seems most of its strength is in their SaaS, contractors and SME which trends towards this solution. Your personal contribution to Open Source as well as profile / portfolio would also live on Github like on a Social Network.

And I can see both Github and Gitlab continue to evolve their strength for at least another 5 years. Generally speaking I dont see how Gitlab could ever compete with Github on SaaS given the advantage M$ has with Azure and DataCenter infrastructure as well as social reach. While Github wont have an easy path to evolve into something that compete directly with GibLab on self hosting solution and their trend is to move towards Azure Cloud solution offering to further gain synergy with other Microsoft Enterprise products.

I do wish Gitlab put lots and lots of work into performance though. As in performance improvement measured in order of magnitude, not small percentages.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#159

Post by tombert »

I remember in 2014, a coworker of mine talked me into creating a Gitlab account, claiming "it's basically just Github, but you get free private repos".

I liked it, used it occasionally, but didn't care much about it until Github was purchased by Microsoft. I didn't have a problem with Microsoft buying Github per say, but it made me realize that Github could be bought, and it wasn't some kind of glorified charity. I don't think MS has done a bad job with Github at all, but the very fact that the biggest home of open source itself isn't open source made me uneasy. On the day the MS buyout was announced, I moved all my Github repos to Gitlab.

Gitlab, while still a for-profit company, at least believed in open source enough to release the source code for their core product into the wild, and have proven that they can be successful doing it. I'm extremely happy that they've managed to create a pretty outstanding project that I am happy to use, and I just bought three shares to prove my dedication to it.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#160

Post by user5994461 »

airstrike wrote: post #125
alangibson wrote: post #30

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.

Define "justified". For most purposes, the market looks at valuation on a relative basis¹. Their S-1 says GitLab generated revenues of $152 million in FY 2021 (ending Jan 31), up 87% from the year before². For the sake of argument, let's assume their growth rate slows down "slightly" to 50%. That's ~$230 million projected for FY 2022 At $10 billion, that implies a forward revenue multiple of ~43.5x, which does seem h…

How much of that revenue growth was driven by Gitlab more than quadrupling their price in the last two years? ($4 to $19 a month).

They can't pull that trick again.

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