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Gitlab from YC to IPO

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#231

Post by bitexploder »

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.

We have been happy customers for many years. It has been a breeze to manage and upgrades, backups, and DR have been very good for us. For an on prem software of this complexity it is quite a feat. It has also always been at a very reasonable and affordable price point for enterprise-y on prem software. As an infosec consultancy that used it for projects and code we always appreciated being able to manage the security of our installation.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#232

Post by ano88888 »

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…

IPO success. But still unprofitable as a business though

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#233

Post by aliswe »

easton wrote: post #111
cyberpunk wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously, they're miles behind. It doesn't even really support Kubernetes, you have to have long running 'runner' servers ala Jenkins and you need to have all your build tools installed on those. It's miserable, fragile and I've dearly, dearly missed gitlab CI the last few times I've had to go anywhere near actions.

It’s probably because Actions is a fork of Azure Pipelines, which was originally designed to coordinate runners on Windows (where containers aren’t nearly as flexible or compatible as they are on Linux). Microsoft came up with some fancy internal magic to have hot pools of ephemeral VMs ready to assign in seconds, which nobody outside can really replicate (I don’t think), and then everyone sits in sadness while they…

some sources?

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#234

Post by lmm »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #223
robinhood wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft is the largest open source organization in the world today. What else do they need to do to gain some kind of trust? I love what they do with Github since the acquisition. VSCode is amazing. They've open source most of their programming language. Github is free for open source org and there are no limits to the CI usage. Trusting Gitlab more than Github is naive at this point. They are in the position of ne…

> What else do they need to do to gain some kind of trust? Stop doing shady shit. The whole .NET Foundation kerfuffle from last week... Or concerns about how Copilot trains its data... I like some of the open source work they do. It's nice that they opensourced LSP and built VSCode. I like some of the language research they do (their contributions to Haskell, Pony and F* more or less originated there, plus their main…

Like any big company, they have no ideology beyond making money. That actually makes it easy to trust them in a certain sense: they're not going to do things that don't benefit them, but they're not going to do something utterly crazy the way ideology-driven organizations can.

I agree that the main reason they're doing good things for developers is to get developers on board. But that doesn't negate that they're doing good things for developers.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#235

Post by caleblloyd »

abledon wrote: post #201
rossmohax wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Nope, CloudFlare has a negative EPS so they are still not 'profitable'. But they are focused on growth, so that is not necessarily a bad thing for investors. If they can grow to compete with AWS through offerings such as R2 storage, that is far more valuable in the long run than turning a profit today.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#236

Post by dehrmann »

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…

> no open source company had ever been super successful...

I guess the trick is for it to also be a SaaS offering that no one wants to host themselves or whose moat isn't the time to write the code.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#237

Post by orlovs »

ano88888 wrote: post #232
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…

IPO success. But still unprofitable as a business though

If you take out their aggresive marketing spending to ack more customers they would be profitable.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#238

Post by GoblinSlayer »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #105
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.

GitHub is Microsoft now. Not going to lie, simply keeping my code away from MS is a good enough use case.

And Azure being down means GitHub is down too.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#239

Post by lmm »

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.

Isn't there a PG article on how being the cheap alternative undercutting the high-end incumbent is a good place to be?

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#240

Post by GoblinSlayer »

robinhood wrote: post #186
Mikeb85 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitHub is Microsoft now. Not going to lie, simply keeping my code away from MS is a good enough use case.

Microsoft is the largest open source organization in the world today. What else do they need to do to gain some kind of trust? I love what they do with Github since the acquisition. VSCode is amazing. They've open source most of their programming language. Github is free for open source org and there are no limits to the CI usage. Trusting Gitlab more than Github is naive at this point. They are in the position of ne…

Microsoft doesn't ask for trust, just minds its business.
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