41 ms·
GitLab – A $1B business where all employees work remotely
- cjslep 7y agoIt's an article about GitLab and Sid, since the title doesn't make it clear.
- MasterScrat 7y agoCan a mod please update the title?
- Rainymood 7y agoIf you feel inclined to, flag the article, but I doubt they will change it as the title of the post is exactly the title of the article.
- Moter8 7y agoAs an answer to your comment, I had flagged the post. Guess what, they changed the title :)
- dredmorbius 7y agoEmail requests such as this to hn@ycombinator.com
- carlsborg 7y ago"After starting and selling app store Appappeal, Sid turned open-source software GitLab into a fast-growing venture that is on its way to an IPO in 2020. He took the proceeds from his previous venture, doubled it in bitcoin, and began bootstrapping GitLab.com. Sid got the first few hundred signups through an article posted on Hacker News. Then together with his cofounder applied and got into Y Combinator. The race to demo day, where they would present in front of top tier investors, was on. Compressing their three-month plan into just two weeks, the GitLab team had a highly successful demo day, landing Ashton Kutcher as an investor."
- SenHeng 7y ago> Ashton Kutcher The actor? Did he start becoming involved in the tech scene after working on the Jobs movie?
- techstrategist 7y agoIIRC he’s been angel investing for quite a while.
- dbbk 7y agoHe's been an investor for quite a while, he even did a few episodes of Shark Tank.
- mattferderer 7y agoHis work with his company Thorn is really worth checking out. It's a great mission that he's done a ton for.
- meowface 7y agoHere's him talking at an Airbnb conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6vTaiPl6tA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6vTaiPl6tA (He confronts an Israel protester who comes up on stage at https://youtu.be/z6vTaiPl6tA?t=155. https://youtu.be/z6vTaiPl6tA?t=155.) He seems like a pretty smart investor.
- turk73 7y agoI like GitLab, but it would never have occurred to me that such simplistic technology could be a billion dollar product or lead to an IPO.
- nakodari 7y agoThe first half of the article doesn't even name the business. The name of the business, GitLab, is hidden in the second half of the article. This is an example of a publication optimizing blindly for Google Search Optimization where they want to improve "Time on site" and other data by keeping the readers on the page as long as possible. It's frustrating. Google's algorithm needs to be updated to make it smarter otherwise publishers are going to write such articles which will cause a loss of productivity of the readers. Not sure whom to blame here, I guess both Forbes and Google share the blame for this.
- bszupnick 7y agoI wonder if that tactic actually retains people for longer. I just closed the tab after the first couple of paragraphs, googled his name, and found the information I wanted that way. It seems to be intuitive that if one makes X harder to get via their platform, the user will work harder to get X, but that solution rarely seems to be true.
- AmericanChopper 7y agoI hate it almost as much as the ‘soft lede’, where the author decides to spend a few paragraphs describing the weather and kind of jacket the subject of their article is wearing before they get to the point. Maybe it’s SEO, but it just gives me the impression that the author had a failed career as a novelist, and wants to waste my time as an outlet for their creative writing impulses.
- cableshaft 7y agoYepppp. I hate these two, and I'm a novelist myself (well, I pretend to be sometimes).
- Wowfunhappy 7y agoI like that style, when it's done well! I agree it has a novel-esque feel, but that's not a bad thing IMO. I can see how it would be annoying if you're looking for something specific, but not all articles are written to be consumed in the same way.
- kevinyun 7y agoWow, had no idea GitLab was close to an IPO. Is there a lesson about saturated markets and differentiation that can be learned from them? I'd be all ears
- sjg007 7y agoThere’s probably room for another git* hosted company.
- PopeDotNinja 7y agoThere's probably room for lots of them. There's always some unmet need that hasn't been addressed by the market, and everyone needs software these days!
- holman 7y agoInteresting part about the IPO: they've been very public for years about IPOing, and about the specific date: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/being-a-public-company/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/being-a-public-company/
- roadbeats 7y agoWordpress is another example, they employ close to 1000 remotely working people (as I heard from a friend working at there).
- langitbiru 7y agoAutomattic is the name of the company. WordPress is the name of the product. Anyway, what I like about GitLab and Automattic is they are agnostic-timezone remote company. You can live in any timezone to work in GitLab or Automattic. Some remote companies only accept certain timezones.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- xiphias2 7y agoWhat's most interesting to me is remote + scale. There are many small remote companies that don't try to scale, as they prioritise just having a nice product that solves 1 relatively simple task very well, while having a comfortable life style for the employees. But so far there's no remote-first company on the stock market.
- langitbiru 7y agoSo let's wait until GitLab IPO. That will be a good story case for evangelizing remote-first companies. :)
- meowface 7y agoIt's only recently become possible to run a remote-first company in an effective and cheap way. Give it time.
- xiphias2 7y agoWhat do you mean? Video conferencing was already easy to do 10 years ago. Looking back to the history of GitLab you are right that it just took 8 years to scale the company to this size, but I hope that others are already coming.
- raverbashing 7y ago"What, like it's hard?" What's hard is not building the business (not harder than building a local business), what's hard is leaving the preconceived notion of how to communicate with people, build trust and collaborate Until you leave the preconceived notion of productivity = seats in desks and people chattering on the office (roll eyes) then "it is (going to be) hard"
- disko 7y agoJeez, his surname is spelled differently 3x in the first couple of paragraphs (Sijbrandij / Sijbrandiij / Sijbrandi). Proof-reading, anyone?
- dsumenkovic 7y agoSijbrandij is the correct one.
- bennyelv 7y agoI suspect this could be an SEO trick for people who mis-spell the name when searching.
- trilila 7y agoWould be interesting to know if they discriminate pay, according to where the person works from. Edit: Further down the page I saw: "Why they pay based on where team members live". That's petty.
- systemtest 7y agoThat is similar to paying an employee more because they have children and need it more.
- dudul 7y agoI've never heard of a company doing that.
- dx034 7y agoAnd yet, a lot of remote companies pay differently based on location. I'm also not quite sure why the choice of location should be factored in but family planning not. Paying the same, regardless of location, would maybe motivate some people to move away from crowded areas, one of the big chances remote work offers.
- fernandotakai 7y agoi remember one company (i wanna say basecamp?) that pays everyone as if they lived in the bay area. i found that to be super amazing -- if they are profiting like bay area companies, why not also pay like bay area companies?
- davnicwil 7y agoI think the standard argument is not that they're paying according to need, they're paying according to market norms. Thing is, in high cost of living areas the living cost is extremely pegged to job opportunities, it's almost tautological. Where there are more job opportunities, you have to pay people more to stop them working for competitors. A confounding factor is a hypothesised (not sure if backed by data) trend of talent concentration - that is, areas with lots of job opportunities attract most of the most talented people, driving salaries up further. All that's to say, if Gitlab want to hire someone living in such an area, the market dictates they must pay more in order to attract that person over a local competitor (for jobs). It's not due to the person needing the money more for a higher cost of living, at all.
- wodenokoto 7y agoIf you don't know who "he" is, the lead is buried under the fourth sub-heading: > After starting and selling app store Appappeal, Sid turned open-source software GitLab into a fast-growing venture that is on its way to an IPO in 2020.
- grizzles 7y agoIs it profitable though?
- sytse 7y agoNot close to being profitable since we're optimizing for growth (more than doubling year over year). Cash flow positive planned no later then 2023 https://about.gitlab.com/company/strategy/#sequence https://about.gitlab.com/company/strategy/#sequence
- e1g 7y agoCan you confirm if GitLab increased revenue 10x in 2018? A previous profile stated the revenue was $10M in 2017 (https://www.forbes.com/sites/alejandrocremades/2019/07/21/he-built-a-1-billion-business-where-all-700-employees-work-remotely/#42d13d602aa9 https://www.forbes.com/sites/alejandrocremades/2019/07/21/he...) and this article says it is now $100M. This is a phenomenal achievement, but the valuation ought to be more than $1B at that trajectory.
- sytse 7y agoDo did not increase revenue by 10x in 2018. We more than doubled IACV (and hence revenue) in 2018.
- the-dude 7y agoThe what? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idle_air_control_actuator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idle_air_control_actuator
- vidarh 7y agohttps://about.gitlab.com/handbook/sales/#incremental-annual-contract-value-iacv https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/sales/#incremental-annual-... Amazing amount of detail of how Gitlab operates is public.
- 7y ago
- jasode 7y agoFyi... A previous comment subtree that includes a comment on Gitlab financials from the CEO/founder: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442952 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442952
- RicStrong 7y agoI think remote roles are becoming a lot more accepted in tech. No time wasted on the commute, and companies can save costs of office spaces, etc. I'm so optimistic about remote working for developers, it's even been a key feature in a job matching platform I've been working on: https://www.rocketship.dev/ https://www.rocketship.dev/
- eeeeeeeeeeeee 7y agoI think it’s also the realization of a supply problem. A lot of companies around the world cannot compete on compensation with the larger tech companies in the Bay Area, and many people don’t want to move there, so it’s win-win.
- sytse 7y agoGitLab the company exists because of HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4428278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4428278 Ask me anything.
- AmitJS 7y agoHow can I be qualified to get a role as Frontend/React dev at GitLab ?
- sytse 7y agoPlease see https://about.gitlab.com/job-families/engineering/frontend-engineer/ https://about.gitlab.com/job-families/engineering/frontend-e... We're hiring for role and many others https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/apply/ https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/apply/
- option_greek 7y agoHow did you get your first 100/1000 customers ? :)
- sytse 7y agoWe got 100,000 users of the open source distribution before we introduced a paid one. In the first year that Dmitriy made the open source distribution (and I didn't even know it existed) 200 people contributed to GitLab and probably 10,000+ people used it. Read more about how we turned that into revenue in https://about.gitlab.com/2018/11/09/monetizing-and-being-open-source/ https://about.gitlab.com/2018/11/09/monetizing-and-being-ope...
- IloveHN84 7y agoDo you plan to switch from Ruby to some more performant language (e.g. C++17 onwards, Rust or Go)?
- sytse 7y agoWe tend to remake performance sensitive parts in Go. GitLab consists of more than 30 services in multiple programming languages https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/development/architecture.html#component-diagram https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/development/architecture.html#com...
- BeetleB 7y ago>After starting and selling app store Appappeal, Sid turned open-source software GitLab into a fast-growing venture that is on its way to an IPO in 2020. Open source software?
- sytse 7y agoI try to say open core software (some of it is proprietary) and that is what we try to use in our website and blog posts. Sometimes I mess up and sometimes the journalist prefers a more common term.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- bluedino 7y agoAll they say about the actual 'remote work', is there's a webcam meeting every day.
- sytse 7y agoYou can find more details on https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/tips/ https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/tips/
- keb_ 7y agoI tried switching to Gitlab for my hobby projects over a year ago (before Github had free private repos), but recently, have decided to move back to Github, mostly for UX purposes. Not sure what it is about Gitlab's UI, but I find it more difficult to navigate and parse visually than Github's. I am a hobbbyist developer though and rarely work with other people. Granted, Gitlab CI was awesome the one time I used it.
- Roritharr 7y agoI just don't get why their support always leaves our company hanging, is this a strategy to success? We want to renew our license for a lower amount of people as last year and that seems to be a major issue, as we won't get responses from renewals@gitlab.com and our Technical Account Manager, after giving us directions that simply did not work stopped responding last week. Friday our license will expire if we don't pony up for nearly twice the amount of seats than we actually need. The last time I complained here someone bumped up our tickets but we still had to resolve the technical issue ourselves as the only option was to setup the instance differently, which an easy response from a support agent could have told us without a multi week delay. I love the product, but have stopped recommending GitLab to anyone above a 10 people org for those reasons.
- lkozloff 7y agoHi @Roritharr - Support Manager here. It was me who helped your tickets along last time, and I'm sorry to hear that you're having trouble again. Someone should be in touch on your renewals issue soon. If you're interested in the story; there's a bit of nuance here. Support actually falls under Engineering in GitLab, and licensing falls under Sales. That means that technical issues and upgrades/renewals fall under different teams. The good news is that we're working hard in both areas to improve. - We've significantly increased the headcount of the licensing team, this should mean faster responses on licensing queries in the near term future. - We've formed a Fulfillment team who is hard at work automating away some of the manual process associated with renewals. (You can see their priorities here: https://about.gitlab.com/direction/fulfillment/#-current-focus https://about.gitlab.com/direction/fulfillment/#-current-foc...) Specifically from the Support side, we're discussing process improvements that will mean fewer languishing tickets like you've described. There are a few in flight, but the one I'm personally most excited about is https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/support/support-team-meta/issues/1771 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/support/support-team-meta/issu.... You'll note, I did just write it up - so there's not much discussion there yet. If you're feeling up for it, we'd love to have your input. Feel free to leave a comment there if you have any colour that could help. I hope next time we bump into each other on HN it'll be under happier circumstances. As always, if you'd like to discuss this more, feel free to email me directly at lyle[at]gitlab[dot]com.
- tmpfs 7y agoWe really, really wanted to use and like Gitlab but after a few months trial found the UX very poor in comparison to the main competitor. The icon heavy interface and general layout decisions made things hard/cumbersone to find, any plans to invest in an improved UX for the web UI?
- hellenwaweru 7y agois online business part of this because its pretty paying https://finance.uonbi.ac.ke/node/128949 https://finance.uonbi.ac.ke/node/128949