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Gitlab from YC to IPO

blog.ycombinator.com

241–250 of 258 posts

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#241
post #36

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

yeah there seems like there is some web -> idea connection that should exist for super slick in-IDE reviews. Best reviews means most context, IDE has the most context about the code (is why its best to resolve merge conflicts too) so we should be leveraging it more.

Always surprised to see people resolving merge conflicts anywhere other than their IDE, IDE has the most knowledge about the inputs to the merge and your chosen resolution, why would you ignore that important info? (like.. does the resulting file compile? for ex..)

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#242
post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 doin…

It's just business, nothing personal, no trust involved.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#243
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…

Not investing might still have been the right choice, given what you knew at the time about the odds.

(For all we know, their 'true' odds of success might have been really slim, and they just got lucky.)

I just stick my money in widely diversified, low-cost ETFs, since I don't expect to know more than the market.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#244
post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Largest open source organization based on what metrics ? They havent open up any of their bread making products.

Open sourcing .NET under an Apache license was a great move. And so was making it cross platform. I surely missed C# my first few years without it. Open Source isn’t some weird religion where it only matters if you open source the stuff that makes you money.

> Open Source isn’t some weird religion where it only matters if you open source the stuff that makes you money.

Yet they love Open Source so much they use patents aggressively to extract resources from the Android project.

Don't believe all the BS made by the Microsoft PR.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#245
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...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.

It's important to not conflate getting investors with getting customers.

Ultimately you care about the latter and you don't always need the former to get there.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#246
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I click on your link to find the quote, it doesn't show up. Strange. Or are you playing off of the joke?

That's strange. Try looking for "gitlab CEO here" (with quotes) at the bottom search on HN? (and pick Comments. they won't show up in stories.)

No change :(

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#247
post #179
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.

Anecdotally I’ve felt like most of the features GitHub has released for some time now are a clone of something that hit Gitlab first.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft only paying 7.5 billion for GitHub definitely makes me less confident that GitLab is worth 10 billion. Much as I personally prefer GitLab, GitHub had a bigger customer base back then than GitLab has now. GitLab may be gaining market share, but it’s mostly eating Atlassian’s portion of the market and not GitHub’s. It’s plausible GitHub undervalued themself in the sale to Microsoft of course, so a careful loo…

> Microsoft only paying 7.5 billion for GitHub definitely makes me less confident that GitLab is worth 10 billion. It's worth considering that between 2018 and now, tech valuations have exploded . MSFT is up 300%. QQQ is up 100%. I doubt GitHub is valued anywhere near 7.5B today.

It's also worth noting that projected value is not the same as sale value, so the two aren't that helpful to compare.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MongoDB and Elastic are successful because they are locking features behind a paid license. Does that make it a successful open source company?

GitLab has features in the Enterprise edition that aren’t in the Community edition don’t they?

Yeah, I wasn't trying to say GitHub is different. Instead, this shows a route to profitability for these companies.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#250

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

I don’t know. He doesn’t seem to own 5% of the company either. He isn’t listed any where.
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