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Gitlab from YC to IPO

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#201

Post by abledon »

rossmohax wrote: post #189
bee_rider wrote: post #129

Gitlab is definitely very neat. But I always worry when these sorts of companies go to IPO. What is their financial situation like? Are they currently able to become profitable without drastically changing the deal with users?

They had $192M losses in 2021 and $152M revenue. So no, not even remotely profitable, but it is common: Atlassian, Jira, Datadog, PagerDuty, Snowflake, CloudFlare, Fastly all IPOed and succeeded on the market without being profitable even once.

what? are you telling me CloudFlare is still not 'profitable' on their earnings today?

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#202

Post by MarkMc »

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…

Sounds to me like you were only wrong in hindsight. At the time it was a reasonable decision to pass on GitLab in the circumstances.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#203

Post by gregmfoster »

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…

Neither GitHub nor GitLab quite hit the mark for me with regards to code review. Phabricator (RIP) was close IMO, with first class support for (1) seeing comments and code on one view and (2) supporting stacks which prevent mega changes.

I've been working with some peers on a better code review tool since hearing about Phabricator shutting down: https://graphite.dev/

It syncs all data to GitHub while offering things like a review queue, gif reactions, stacked diffs, etc - all inspired from Phabricator.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#204

Post by gregmfoster »

marceloabsousa wrote: post #151
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 .

What is your thinking around post merge reviews?

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#205

Post by gscho »

outworlder wrote: post #166
cyberpunk wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jenkins is a nightmare because everyone decided to spend months customising it with groovy and it became overly specific to your team/dept. The servers themselves are quite simple (single .jar, etc). These days we have containers, and it's made CI a much better thing.

> Jenkins is a nightmare because everyone decided to spend months customising it with groovy and it became overly specific to your team/dept Yes. One thousand times this. If you are running simple scripts it's fine. If you are using the declarative pipeline, it's fine. The moment you start adding Groovy you'll be down a path that is filled with sadness and anger. Mind you, even the folks behind Jenkins will advise yo…

I worked on a Jenkins cluster with around 150 agents and many, many builds per day. It all ran so smoothly and I swear it was because there was zero groovy.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#206

Post by izolate »

dgudkov wrote: post #174

Dmitriy Zaporozhets (co-founder) was Gitlab's CTO until 2018 and now his LinkedIn profile says "Engineering fellow at Gitlab". What happened to him?

The CTO position isn't for everybody. A few years ago, I used to work at another tech unicorn from Amsterdam, at a time it was rapidly expanding.

The CTO at this company was the first engineer. He was talented, and more passionate about engineering than management. He eventually stepped down to a similar role as they brought in a suit from the corporate world to replace him. That was around the time that I left.

Funnily enough, I always thought he was the most grounded person on the leadership team.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#207

Post by rhacker »

paxys wrote: post #179
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.

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.

While yes, my first usage of Gitlab was an on-prem install, things really took off with Gitlab.com in ways I don't think anyone expected with healthy competition from Bitbucket and Github. I do think it was the unlimited free private repos with unlimited contributors that really skyrocketed the success of the Gitlab.com path.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#208

Post by mgfist »

ignoramous wrote: post #154
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…

> ...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 co…

I wouldn't say it's cynical. At the end of the day companies don't live unless they can make money. So that, by necessity, is step 1.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#209

Post by xjia »

marceloabsousa wrote: post #151
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 .

We have also built a similar thing based on git-format-patch and the patch workflow: https://www.reviewpatch.org

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#210

Post by Aeolun »

mcronce wrote: post #175
jbergens wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

Still better I think. Actions are hard to use and ridiculously verbose.
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