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Gitlab S-1

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Re: Gitlab S-1

#241

Post by josegonzalez »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #225
reilly3000 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With their business model, a constant stream of new features is the only thing that pays the bills. Their paid tiers get the new features, and almost all of them eventually wind up in the open product. With a healthy IPO they should be resourced enough to put some extra hands on the backlog. +1 for prioritizing old tickets!

What makes you think their new shareholders will tolerate bug fixing? It doesn't generate revenue and hence doesn't contribute to constant growth, which seems to be the only thing that matters to investors these days. And that's why we can't have nice things in for-profit software nowadays.

Bug fixing likely helps with retention, which shareholders _will_ be interested in.

Re: Gitlab S-1

#242

Post by leeoniya »

webmaven wrote: post #230
leeoniya wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no, but i author and maintain some pretty popular projects and now work for a company that does pay, and also has a massive github and OSS footprint.

> no, but i author and maintain some pretty popular projects and now work for a company that does pay, and also has a massive github and OSS footprint. Would you say that you (and your projects) and employer are to some degree locked in now? Are either you or your employer likely to move away from hosting your projects on GitHub?

my employer uses a lot of paid github features, while my projects use none, so moving away would be simple for me, but difficult for them.

the real lock-in is no different than any other social media platform: network effects. most people who follow you on X rarely bother also having an account on Y. unless you're Taylor Swift, moving away means diminished visibility/reach, and dilution of any reputation accumulated e.g. over a decade of activity, interactions, etc.

Re: Gitlab S-1

#243

Post by Koffiepoeder »

anonymoustrolol wrote: post #158
alberth wrote: post #36

I realize plenty of tech companies IPO and aren’t profitable. But it seems scary to be losing more money than what you generated in total revenues. REVENUE: 2021: $152m (loss of $192m) 2020: $81m (loss of $130m) EDIT: reworded for clarity.

152% NDR tells me they should either buy as many customers as possible right now (IE burn), or they are under pricing and should raise prices and increase revenue that way. Cash flow on its own is kinda meaningless.

They did quite recently [0].

The bronze plan (4/user/mo) was burned and moved into premium (19/user/mo). If you have any sort of moderately active company, going back to free tier is really not an option (the feature reduction would be simply too much, plus a lot of previous ci/cd work would be binned).

[0] https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2021/01/26/new-gitlab-product-...

Re: Gitlab S-1

#244

Post by Kelteseth »

rhacker wrote: post #104

Our entire company was on Gitlab.com for 4 years without paying a single dime to them. Unfortunately we moved off (decisions above my head) but I loved how simple everything worked. Their CI is top-notch.

I replaced all of our old not very well integrated tools to GitLab:

Mercurial -> Git(Lab)

Mantis -> GitLab Issues

Dokuwiki -> GitLab Wiki

Jenkins -> GitLab CI

Before, everything was disconnected from each other , Jenkins was not working most of the time, and we didn't even have merge request reviews. Now I can cross-reference everything, have a beautiful working CI and only merge things that are fine. This even made us move from 4$ to 19$ after they announced the cancelation of the smallest plan. We have a local 6 core Ryzen running Ubuntu 18.04LTS with GitLab locally and update every month for the new release and never had a single issue for the past 3 years.

Re: Gitlab S-1

#247

Post by keerthiko »

BelenusMordred wrote: post #235
ignoramous wrote: post #112

Gitlab is one of the pioneers of "remote-first" [0] and "building in public" [1], to the extent of sometimes even live-streaming CEO meetings [2] and sales pitches [3] Gitlab, I believe, informs the common strategy behind most other source-available ycombinator enterprise startups: the buyer-based open-core model [4] Congratulations Gitlab. You're far from a copycat and deserve all the success for relentless executio…

> Gitlab is one of the pioneers of "remote-first" I once looked at their wages when I was in Asia, they wouldn't even cover my rent working full-time. Until they pay for skill rather than area I'm going to be a sceptic sorry, far better companies to work for.

For all the work they have done in getting remote-first culture established for large corps, their salary protocol is pretty backward.

Normalizing on employee locale adds so many assumptions about the life and lifestyle of the employee and their market that are somewhat unfair to incorporate into compensation.

Our company is far smaller, but also been remote-first for almost a decade, and flat salary structure based on role (we pretty much have just IC, lead or junior) and fully independent of location was the best.

Since we have two founders living in the Bay Area and in New York, two of the most expensive cities, a comfortable wage for those founders should be good enough for anyone anywhere.

For our own simplicity, we aligned compensation on gross (pre-tax) pay, so the take-home is slightly different between regions.

Re: Gitlab S-1

#248

Post by ergocoder »

jedberg wrote: post #201
smartbit wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

18.9% shares, not bad. Had a chat with him a few year ago at the gitlab booth at Fosdem. Somewhere around 2014 Sytse asked my former coworker to become gitlab’s first employee, working on Ruby code. Completely understand the request, as he’s an excellent DevOps engineer and fine colleague. He declined to opt for a more secure job position ....

FWIW as the first engineer he might have gotten 1% of the stock, which would be worth about $6M. If he's really that good, there is a decent chance his more secure job has paid that much in 7 years, especially if it was with a FAANG company.

No way it is 6M. That is too low. I could have got that by joining stripe a few years back while enjoying high salary.

Re: Gitlab S-1

#249

Post by nine_k »

BelenusMordred wrote: post #235
ignoramous wrote: post #112

Gitlab is one of the pioneers of "remote-first" [0] and "building in public" [1], to the extent of sometimes even live-streaming CEO meetings [2] and sales pitches [3] Gitlab, I believe, informs the common strategy behind most other source-available ycombinator enterprise startups: the buyer-based open-core model [4] Congratulations Gitlab. You're far from a copycat and deserve all the success for relentless executio…

> Gitlab is one of the pioneers of "remote-first" I once looked at their wages when I was in Asia, they wouldn't even cover my rent working full-time. Until they pay for skill rather than area I'm going to be a sceptic sorry, far better companies to work for.

They apparently can find talent at their current rates. Good for them.

But certainly there will be pressure on them and on all others, as US companies start to hire globally, and offer more-or-less US wages.

Re: Gitlab S-1

#250

Post by gm3dmo »

crazy_horse wrote: post #180
sillysaurusx wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t really think that IPOing is about acquiring more resources. The point is to get rich. The resources are the means to do that, and everything else is a happy side effect. Hopefully, yes, they will choose to do as you say. But the tickets didn’t language because they were resource constrained. They languished because they were worthless, in the monetary sense.

It'll get worse. This is a YC site so it's a dick thing to say but look at every YC company that got big. They might start out with nice ideas and bloviate a lot about bullshit (Reddit still has the tagline about staying for empathy - lol). But every single one of them gets worse after cashing out. They do not give a shit. It's always been about the money. If it weren't they'd have enough pride to make better softwar…

Ensuring there are regular backups of the organizations data is the responsibility of the organization and not the responsibility of GitLab.

Disaster recovery did not go away with the advent of cloud providers. It morphed from having a plan to recover when fire takes out a data centre to having a plan to recover when provider X whose free plan we base our business on no longer has our data.

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