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Gitlab from YC to IPO

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#171

Post by jedberg »

taytus wrote: post #157
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.

VCs are the most risk averse people you will meet. They pretty much only look for patterns. That's why it's so hard for minority/female founders -- because it doesn't fit their pattern. I actually invest mostly in minority/female founders for exactly this reason.

Also, I never said I was any good. :)

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#172

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

Ever since I found their company handbook online, I have been in love with their process/culture and wanted to work for them. But I don't write Ruby and they don't seem to need a lot of DevOps/SysEng/SREs.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#173

Post by jbergens »

klysm wrote: post #168
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 think if GitHub simply gave free private repos sooner, GitLab would’ve had a way harder time.

Gitlab was earlier/better at letting companies install a version on-prem.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#175

Post by mcronce »

jbergens wrote: post #173
klysm wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think if GitHub simply gave free private repos sooner, GitLab would’ve had a way harder time.

Gitlab was earlier/better at letting companies install a version on-prem.

Their CI story was also a lot better until Github added Actions

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#176

Post by polote »

klysm wrote: post #168
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 think if GitHub simply gave free private repos sooner, GitLab would’ve had a way harder time.

Github is initially B2B SMB and B2C and Gitlab is B2B Enterprise. 10% of Github employee are sales , 25% for Gitlab. I would say they are not even competitors

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#177

Post by GoblinSlayer »

shaan7 wrote: post #121
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.

I work for two clients (one of them is a huge German company) as a consultant who are both using GitLab simply because they can host it on their infrastructure. Makes it easier for them to satisfy internal security policies I guess.

What else would they use?

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#178

Post by adduc »

exhaze wrote: post #42
vultour wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

From their S-1:

> We do not have an adequate history with our subscription or pricing models to accurately predict the long-term rate of customer subscription renewals or adoption, or the impact these renewals and adoption will have on our revenues or operating results.

For context, GitLab recently axed their lowest priced plan and grandfathered in existing users at cheaper rates for the next year. Their retention rate may drop once discounts run out and the new pricing kicks in.

As to the parent's comment about "The Homer" and non-core features being bad, I'd point to their CI autoscaling solution as an example of being underdeveloped, over-marketed, and suffering from technical debt. Their autoscaler uses docker machine behind-the-scenes, which hooks into various cloud providers to abstract away the act of spinning up new VMs. It works reasonably well, but Docker has archived the repository and no longer supports the software. GitLab forked the repository and maintains it for critical fixes, but is not willing to develop or accept new features. It has been known to break against new versions of Docker, does not handle concurrency very well in new environments, and does not allow [1] executing multiple concurrent jobs within spun up VMs, despite marketing that it can [2].

While the autoscaler does work, it's limitations and quirks reduces it's utility and cost-savings significantly within smaller organizations. The technical debt leaves me doubting any improvements will come within the next few years as they try to architect a new solution to replace the existing one.

I have no idea how GitLab compares in other areas, but within CI autoscaling it seems they're stuck with a cliff to climb down before they can move forward again.

[1]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/-/issues/2787#no...

[2]: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2017/11/23/autoscale-ci-runner...

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#179

Post by paxys »

klysm wrote: post #168
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 think if GitHub simply gave free private repos sooner, GitLab would’ve had a way harder time.

Disagree. Github's self-hosted product is trash compared to Gitlab. Plus they were very late to the game when it came to stuff like CI, package management, project tracking and a whole suite of enterprise features. Github had (and still has) a huge lead in public open-source development, but that's it.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#180

Post by mindwok »

I've used Gitlab constantly for many years, and they stand out to me as a company that delivers new features at an astounding pace and with a relatively high level of polish. I really don't know how they do it. Congrats to the Gitlab team, your success is well deserved!
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