19 ms·

Gitlab S-1

942 points by laminarflow 5y ago

JohnWhigham 5y ago
Our recent growth may not be indicative of our future growth, and we may not be able to sustain our revenue growth rate in the future. Our growth also makes it difficult to evaluate our future prospects and may increase the risk that we will not be successful. I don't know why I thought Gitlab was completely private, but...welp, see ya later Gitlab. I'm looking forward to see what revenue you can squeeze out of customers from afar, without me on the platform.
- spullara 5y ago
  What does completely private mean? Do you mean bootstrapped?
  - JohnWhigham 5y ago
    Yeah, not VC-funded. Stupid mistake on my part given the industry we're in
    - mikepurvis 5y ago
      They're literally a YC company: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/gitlab https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/gitlab
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  Most financial filings are filled with cover your ass statements like this.
  - throw03172019 5y ago
    Correct. The Robinhood disclosures were a fun read with Dogecoin trades (meme coin) being a large portion of their revenue.
- bradstewart 5y ago
  Pretty much every S1 ever has similar language. Do you refuse to use any public company products?
- dec0dedab0de 5y ago
  Even if they go broke and get taken over by a completely evil group tomorrow they will have left behind a very nice open source project.
- kuresov 5y ago
  This verbiage is present in basically every S-1 and quarterly filing, if not verbatim, then very close.
- whoisjuan 5y ago
  Every S-1 in existence says that. Why people always share this excerpt when an S-1 is listed here in HN? Just look back at any S-1 post and there's always somebody who shares it. Why? Do they really think they are illuminating someone else with the most boiler-plate phrase in the existence of S-1 filings?
the-dude 5y ago
Congrats Sytse.
- smartbit 5y ago
  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 ....
  - jedberg 5y ago
    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.
    - nopzor 5y ago
      i think your math is off. 1% of the stock (assuming that's fully diluted at IPO) would be worth $60M ;-)
      - jedberg 5y ago
        I was assuming a 10x dilution since they took $845M in funding. :)
        nopzor 5y ago
        10x dilution seems super high to me, even with 845m in funding.
    - smartbit 5y ago
      No company in NL pays FAANG salaries. My former coworker‘s rate as external consultant is around €120/h.
merrvk 5y ago
What a shame
- riffic 5y ago
  yeah it's a real shame for the folks with equity to finally have liquidity. I'm not really seeing what's shameful about a public exit. They're a great company with an amazing product. This is good for GitLab.
  - ithinkso 5y ago
    It is good for GitLab, what a shame for GitLab's users
    - rvz 5y ago
      > what a shame for GitLab's users Can you please elaborate about this?
      - ithinkso 5y ago
        In my opinion public exit has been twisted 180 degrees. The reason for a company going public is to raise capital that individuals do not have to expand the business - build new factories, hire or whatever. After all there is much more money distributed in the public than few individuals have and in exchange you get shares in the company. I don't think GitLab is in need of that, what a lot of companies are doing now when they go public is just a method of 'cashing out'. When you have a great product as a private company your income comes from the users and you tailor and improve your product for their needs. When you go public in the above sense you're cashing out and suddenly the users shift to a product and shareholders are now what you cater for while trying to milk your 'users' as much as possible without them quitting.
        eloff 5y ago
        I disagree with this characterisation. Gitlab is losing money. They do need the capital. While it's true sometimes shareholder interests can lead to the users getting screwed, that's a very short term and dangerous game to play. It's the equivalent of killing the Golden Goose. Companies that play that game may find themselves out of business in short order. They're opening opportunities for the competition.
priansh 5y ago
This seems like a weird move given that developer tools seldom do well on public markets. I can’t help but think that staying private would do more to maintain their community & preserve the reasons people opt for GitLab over GitHub.
- statictype 5y ago
  MongoDB and Twilio have both done reasonably well haven't they? Which developer tools have not done well?
  - camjohnson26 5y ago
    Atlassian too
  - HideousKojima 5y ago
    Docker is the main one I can think of that has flopped financially despite being widely use.
    - riffic 5y ago
      Docker has never gone public. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/docker https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/docker
      - ncphil 5y ago
        ... and it hasn't actually flopped. It just reached its level of... usefulness. As others commented a few weeks ago in a different conversation, Swarm had/has significant utility for smaller deployments, but K8S has sucked the air out of the (marketing) room. So life goes on, as does docker and Docker Hub. Many of us small potatoes users will continue to use docker until we can't, and then probably wind up on podman, or lxd. That will be OK too: as long as the work gets done. We survived the demise of Solaris Freeware, we'll survive this too.
  - foolfoolz 5y ago
lucasverra 5y ago
Good for them, they do a lot of open-source. And they have brought something to the market when GH was the only sheriff in town.
- junon 5y ago
  GH was far from the only one around at the time, but it was by far the most market-friendly for what it was. Timing was a big deal too, I think. But yes, agreed.
rvz 5y ago
> Our business has experienced rapid growth. We generated revenue of $81.2 million and $152.2 million in fiscal 2020 and 2021, respectively, representing growth of 87%. We generated revenue of $63.9 million and $108.1 million for the six months ended July 31, 2020 and July 31, 2021, respectively, representing year over year growth of 69%. During this period, we continued to invest in growing our business to capitalize on our market opportunity. Our net loss was $130.7 million, $192.2 million, and $69.0 million in fiscal 2020, fiscal 2021, and the six months ended July 31, 2021, respectively. Another buy in my books after calling CloudFlare [0] and DigitalOcean [1]. Looking forward to the listing of 'GTLB'. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20707306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20707306 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26262799 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26262799
- nix23 5y ago
  Why the down-votes? ....ahh humans :)
  - bussierem 5y ago
    Most likely because their comment just sounds like them encouraging people to buy the stock (saying 'I called these other stocks and they did well, and now I'm buying this stock'). Whether they meant to or not, it comes off that way.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- joelbluminator 5y ago
  Buy at what price? The revenue numbers are nice but not stellar to me. Quite a big spend, the path to real earnings could be really hard.
- flafla2 5y ago
  I’m a bit concerned that they have to compete against Microsoft/Github and their engineering/marketing/sales might. In your view why do you think they will be able to coexist long term?
LewisVerstappen 5y ago
> We have been a 100% remote workforce since inception and, as of July 31, 2021, had approximately 1,350 team members in over 65 countries. Operating remotely allows us access to a global talent pool that enables us to hire talented team members, regardless of location, providing a strong competitive advantage. Will be interesting to see how many publicly traded companies are fully remote in 5, 10, 15 years. Especially since many new startups are starting as fully remote (and will probably stay that way and eventually IPO) and some publicly traded companies have shifted to fully remote (Coinbase, Square, Twitter)
- lastofthemojito 5y ago
  And famously they're leaders on the location-based pay side of the remote pay argument (as opposed to the "we pay everyone based on the value they bring" side): https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/total-rewards/compensation/compensation-calculator/#location-factor https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/total-rewards/compensation...
  - LewisVerstappen 5y ago
    Interesting, thanks for the link. Median salary seems to be $170k according to Levels.fyi -> https://www.levels.fyi/company/GitLab/salaries/Software-Engineer/ https://www.levels.fyi/company/GitLab/salaries/Software-Engi...
    - zndr 5y ago
      You can actually see their salary calculator here https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/total-rewards/compensation/compensation-calculator/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/total-rewards/compensation...
      - yunohn 5y ago
        Are you able to actually use the calculator? You’ve linked the documentation page for it, but the actual tool seems restricted.
anthony_r 5y ago
Sorry for off-topic but notice how long this page is and yet how fast it loads. Why is it so hard to pull off elsewhere on the Web.
- enlyth 5y ago
  Because it is a static document
  - anthony_r 5y ago
    So what? Most, or at least a lot of, Web documents are pretty much static, but they don't load nearly as fast. (static, except for the tracking scripts and ads :))
    - enlyth 5y ago
      No, they are not. Most of the content on the web is dynamic, based on things like your authentication, geolocation, time, and other things
- bool3max 5y ago
  It's not hard. This is a .gov website and as such isn't plagued with a million external tracking and advertising/marketing scripts. It is also completely static.
- lftl 5y ago
  Ironically, the 5-6 images on the page are really poorly optimized, making the total payload of the page probably 3-4 times as big as it could be.
alberth 5y ago
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.
- dfee 5y ago
  Isn’t your second sentence just a truism on the first sentence? profit = revenue - costs
  - alberth 5y ago
    Maybe a better way of saying what I meant is, gitlab is losing more than 2x their total generated. That’s what seems scary.
    - joering2 5y ago
      It is also somewhat easy to enter the market. You do not need a hundred million dollars upfront investment to build a competitor, at least in terms of functionality of provided services. A good example in my opinion is how BitMart is eating up Coinbase US market with many of my friends moving on to safe money on the fees since "crypto is crypto". From their IPO coinbase is 25% down as of today, and I don't see any compelling reasons for the stock to rebounce.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - jpollock 5y ago
    he means losses > revenue, in other words costs > 2xrevenue.
  - beeneuf 5y ago
    No, you're conflating "loss" (negative profit) with "cost". The first sentence acknowledges that plenty of tech companies IPO and are not profitable, so their revenue is below their costs. The second sentence is about losses (negative profit) exceeding revenue. For a naive example, a company can have $1m in revenue and $1.1m in costs, therefore profit is negative 100,000 dollars - the company is unprofitable. However, they are not losing more money ($100,000) then they are bringing in ($1,000,000 is greater than $100,000) - though they are spending more money ($1.1m) then they are bringing in. This would not be a concerning amount of loss, many companies are deliberately outspending current revenue in order to increase future revenue/growth/market share, but could become profitable if they wanted to. In this case, the person you replied to is remarking that the losses/negative profit ($192m, $130m) are greater than the revenue ($152m, $81m). This is a concerning sign, as the path to profitability is much further away.
dcchambers 5y ago
I haven't personally had a compelling enough reason to move from GitHub to GitLab, so I mostly just use it to mirror a couple of my repos there in case people prefer to browse various open source projects via GitLab. Regardless, I think competition in the space is a great thing. GitLab has come a long way and there are certain things I really like about the company. For example, I love how they tend to do everything "in the open" and have most of their development work and business documents public. It's a great resource for aspiring entrepreneurs. I have been a bit concerned about some of the architecture of GitLab lately, with quite a few security fixes resulting in unusual edge-case bugs. My only other complaint is that they tend have a very wide but shallow pool of products. They have ambitious goals with their platform, but I hope they are able to build real value and add features to the existing core products. Congrats to everyone on the GitLab team. Keep doing good work.
- eftokay83 5y ago
  Mind to share a "quick link" to the mentioned documents?
  - dcchambers 5y ago
    Sure, the most obvious link is this: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com Here's a few examples: Runbooks: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/runbooks https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/runbooks - which I've used as inspiration for runbooks on my own team. Handbook: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ Roadmap/Product Vision: https://about.gitlab.com/direction/ https://about.gitlab.com/direction/ A note in their handbook on transparency: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/values/#transparency https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/values/#transparency
  - sm4rk0 5y ago
    https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/
- base698 5y ago
  To me it was very compelling before GitHub actions and only slightly compelling now.
m4tthumphrey 5y ago
Do we have any idea when the stock will be available?
easton 5y ago
So GitLab is advertising that it's the one place to do the entire software development lifecycle. Are there any big shops that have converted to 100% (or almost 100%) GitLab? Out of the six big names they list on their website, the only one that they have a case study for is Thomson Reuters, and they used Jenkins for CI (and it's from 2017, so a lot of this other functionality wasn't built yet). It's just a somewhat different strategy. Most of these tools (GitHub, Azure DevOps, Jira) only cover some of it (GitHub and ADO can both do deployments and code storage and ticketing, but not any of the monitoring stuff or security stuff, as an example), and even then people often bolt on whatever they like anyway. But with GitLab betting that people will pay more (a lot more if you want everything -- $99 per month), is anyone actually doing that at scale? Because for $20 per user per month (the middle tier), I'd just spend the extra buck to get GitHub, given that the features in that tier are very similar (GitHub doesn't have complex issue management yet, but it's coming). Or maybe just do the Azure DevOps $6 per user per month plan and endure the whining from the devs :P.
- Mavvie 5y ago
  I've been using ADO for the past year or two and I don't hate it. While it absolutely lacks features, and most ADO things have relatively tough to use UIs, it _is_ extremely fast compared to GitHub and has some amazing UI designs for a couple things (especially reviewing large PRs). Although from what I heard they're porting the good parts into GitHub and deprecating/putting into maintenance mode ADO soon.
  - josteink 5y ago
    > Although from what I heard they're porting the good parts into GitHub and deprecating/putting into maintenance mode ADO soon. Hush hush! By now that’s pretty much an open secret covered by various NDAs :) What even the NDAs won’t tell you though is how much time ADO has before it’s fully “dead”. If Microsoft’s track-record is anything to go by, I would assume ADO customers will be “encouraged” to migrate 3-5 years from now, with at least another 5 before they start closing down, if not more. Will be interesting to see how it plays out when the time comes.
jcdavis 5y ago
Was wondering why their FY21 costs where much higher than first half of this year, this probably explains it: > Stock-based compensation expense for fiscal 2020 and 2021, and six months ended July 31, 2021 includes $32.7 million, $103.8 million, and $0.3 million, respectively, of compensation expense related to secondary stock sales described in Note 16 to our consolidated financial statements included elsewhere in this prospectus. Which makes the numbers not as bad as they seem on first glance.
- TradingPlaces 5y ago
  Stock based compensation is compensation at the expense of current shareholders. It’s not free money.
  - fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago
    True, but sometimes you have a big lump of early employees become liquid at the same time. That’s a not a recurring event, which is important when deciding how viable the business is.
  - jcdavis 5y ago
    Absolutely agreed, but events like one-off secondaries can somewhat distort the numbers in that they put costs that should be amortized over many in years into a single quarter. You see similar at big cos 6mos after IPO when everything vests.
  - manquer 5y ago
    It does not affect free cash flow or strain the resources of already available to the company. Stock holders existing and new participate in the success of failure of the company, different from say vendor who needs to be paid no matter what. it is far worse to be spending 100m in cash to get say 50m in new revenue (if the customers don't stay long enough) as this requires new cash to be infused to keep growing.
whalesalad 5y ago
If you are looking for a self-hosted git system, I highly recommend Gitea. Very lightweight and an order of magnitude easier to install and maintain. I am super impressed.
- junon 5y ago
  Gitea has a ton of issues, sadly. We self-hosted an instance where we had a number of mirrors and whatnot to have redundant copies of third-party dependencies. The server would deadlock, mirror tasks would time out and then couldn't be restarted, etc. We filed an issue (or maybe two) and the developers were... eh. A bit rude, to be honest. Dismissive that it was really an issue, where restarting and deleting/re-configuring was a massive PITA. Therefore, I can't really rec Gitea myself. I wish something like it existed though. That's for sure. Gitlab is just too bloated for my taste and our needs.
  - S5yDyAk3XoQH5 5y ago
    I've ran it for years and never had a deadlock. How big were your code bases, how many users?.. idk if that is even the reason why
    - junon 5y ago
      Large, and the deadlock was only a few times but the stalled and unresumable mirrors were rampant. We were mirroring the linux kernel and maybe 40-50 different repositories. Two users.
  - kasbah 5y ago
    Could you link the issues please? Planning to use Gitea with a lot of mirrored repos.
secondaryacct 5y ago
I m in one of the companies they quoted as case study. The lies are so horrible I hesitate to do something: they fucked us completely replacing a wonderful github/teamcity combo, it crashes all the time, features are so amateurish (vs teamcity especially) that we're struggling just to do basic things. I dont know what to do, but public investors should stay away: the product is not ready for people to pay for it. It's years behind the competition.
- danudey 5y ago
  Counterpoint: we've moved to GitLab internally (from SVN, granted), and while GitHub would have been easier because it's far more widely supported in tooling and integrations, GitLab has been great for us so far. I would have preferred to switch to GitHub if we had an internal hosted GitHub Enterprise kind of situation, but so far Gitlab is doing fine for us. It could be a matter of scale, though; perhaps for larger teams, larger repositories, or pre-existing Git-based MR/CI workflows, it's a dumpster fire, but that's not us so we can't speak to it. Who knows though, maybe in a few years I'll regret writing this comment.
- sofixa 5y ago
  Honestly sounds like an implementation issue. I've run multiple Gitlab instances and I've used some more, and "crashes all the time" isn't a thing that just happens. Most features work fine, core ones even more so, some of the newer ones are clearly not polished enough but mostly function. It's literally years in front of the competition ( GitHub and BitBucket).
  - secondaryacct 5y ago
    How many thousands repos do you have ? We are 10k+ users with many many more repos scattered around the world. But the thing I ll say is the git part is satisfactory. It's the CI part we are livid about. It's not "years in front of the competition" if you think of Teamcity. Github focus on what it does right.
    - sofixa 5y ago
benatkin 5y ago
I'm grateful to GitLab for providing an alternative to GitHub, and an open source one. It's an open core product with the community edition providing a lot of value. Here are some community hosted instances: https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/List_of_Community-Hosted_GitLab_Instances https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/List_of_Community-Hosted_GitL... The CI system is quite powerful, and Travis CI's struggles before and after acquisition has shown that it's hard to host a major CI platform. I hope the company and the open source product will continue to thrive.
- chx 5y ago
  Who can edit that page? https://git.drupalcode.org/ https://git.drupalcode.org/
  - tyingq 5y ago
    The owners/maintainers listed here probably: https://git.drupalcode.org/project/drupal/-/project_members https://git.drupalcode.org/project/drupal/-/project_members
    - benatkin 5y ago
      Wrong page. Means to add drupal to that wiki page in my comment, since it's missing.
      - tyingq 5y ago
        Ah, yeah...sorry. There is a history tab where you can see the users that last updated it. Though the page appears to be untouched for a couple of years, so that may not pan out.
- ModernMech 5y ago
  Yes, Gitlab has been leading the way for a while now, consistently introducing new features that Github eventually copies. It's a real testament to the power of competition. I first started using Gitlab due to free private repositories, which Github eventually added. Gitlab had free built-in CI/CD first, and Github eventually followed. I'm still on Gitlab these days despite Github catching up, and still enjoying features like organizations with subfolders that Github lacks.
jenny91 5y ago
Does anybody actually embrace Gitlab fully? Anybody I've seen uses it for git, and at most CI/CD on top. But who else (other than gitlab themselves) uses all of their stuff. They're pushing really hard for that with their "the devops platform" thing, etc.
- base698 5y ago
  I manage two teams and we use it for "everything" and have as part of our team values to use Gitlab fully. We are on premium, the ultimate features would be an easier way to replace Jira but we manage with epics, milestones and iterations.
- deepbluev7 5y ago
  Maybe not all the stuff, but I have seen many use Gitlab's docker & package registries, I think Gitlab's merge request discussions are miles ahead of Github's (threads without line discussions, can compare versions, etc), the test result integration is okay, we do use the issue boards a lot. We kinda use the deployments, but only for review apps. Merge trains are great too. There might be more cool stuff, that I either don't know about or have no use for, but in general they do provide some great stuff. (Not that Gitlab doesn't also have bad stuff.)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
snicker7 5y ago
The big issue we have with GitLab is the pricing. Ultimate is literally five (!!!) times more than premium. And there are only a couple of features that we want from ultimate.
- danudey 5y ago
  There are also some asinine divisions w.r.t. what goes in Premium vs. Ultimate. For example, Premium allows us to configure our CI system to ingest Coverity scans, but only Ultimate lets us actually view them in the GUI. What the hell, guys? We're not paying for Ultimate, though, unless they give us a sweetheart deal in perpetuity, but it's still kind of ridiculous. That said, they do tend to trickle features down, moving them from higher tiers to lower tiers, or lower tiers to the free tier, so maybe in a few versions we'll get that support for no extra cost.
- zmmmmm 5y ago
  yeah ... I can't give Gitlab my money. We are ready to pay but the licensing model is just incompatible with our org. Very sad, I like the product very much but we are forced to keep coasting on the free version.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  Also, pay only per year, instead of per month. So if you even want to get started you better be ready to fork over $1200 per developer immediately. I can say a lot of bad things about Atlassian, but their price/benefit ratio is outstanding.
mythz 5y ago
Surprised to see them IPO, IMO their best chance for their biggest valuation was to sell to AWS or GCP after they realize losing GitHub to MS/Azure was a major competitive disadvantage. From their financials they've raised 415M total and are still making a loss that's widening for what looks like is only 3,632 customers (ARR>5k), i.e. 114k raised per base customer. They'll likely have a successful exit but not very optimistic about their future given they have to compete with ubiquity and deep pockets of GitHub/MS and going IPO makes an acquisition target less likely. Given they have formidable and dominant competition with GitHub who's been executing on all cylinders I'll be steering clear of this IPO.
marc__1 5y ago
From page 135 you have what it may be consider one of the most ambitious founder-performance compensation plans ever. The latest tranche, to be observed between 2027 and 2030, will be granted if the share price of Gitlab reaches $500, or 26x the price per share of the most recent fundraising (Series E at $18.6294 per share) Here is the text if anyone cares fo cmd+F: "The following table indicates the price hurdle and the corresponding performance period in which that hurdle must be achieved and the service vesting date upon which the corresponding vesting is contingent"
- nexuist 5y ago
  Maybe they're counting on inflation ;)
- sm4rk0 5y ago
  What happens if USD is no more in 2030?
  - marc__1 5y ago
    "The applicable price hurdle must be achieved during the relevant performance period (as set forth in the table below corresponding to the price hurdle) in order for the applicable tranche of RSU Awards to be earned, but once a price hurdle is achieved, the price hurdle need not be maintained in order for the applicable RSU Award tranche to continue to vest based on service. Once a price hurdle is no longer achievable due to the lapse of a performance period or if Mr. Sijbrandij ceases to be the CEO, any then-unvested portion of the RSU Award will be immediately forfeited."
Wronnay 5y ago
Last valuation was $6 billion, they initially wanted to go public in November of 2020 but because of COVID they delayed it. Doesn't sound cheap to me for a company who isn't profitable yet... (Microsoft payed 7,5 billion for GitHub and I think we can all agree that GitLab isn't used as much so nearly the same valuations seems a bit high too me)
- danudey 5y ago
  Well, we have to ask ourselves two things: 1. What would GitHub actually be valued at now? It's possible that all valuations have risen. 2. What does GitLab provide that GitHub doesn't? We went with it for our on-site Git hosting because of a lot of features, but also because we were able to engage their dev team and add support for some of our software to their product (above the non-free tier) so that we can do 2fa git-over-ssh using our own OTP software and API. Definitely couldn't get that with Gitlab. On the other hand, GitLab suffers from "not the best" syndrome; GitHub is the best, and everyone everywhere supports it. GitLab is not the best, so support for it is extremely limited across the board. At this point, I'm surprised if we find software that natively supports Gitlab integration beyond just "pull a repository using a key or password".
- fcantournet 5y ago
  GitHub wasn't profitable either when MS aquired it. it was about the same ARR than gitlab is right now. Now if your talking about brand and positioning that's another matter.
  - nixgeek 5y ago
    What's your source for the ARR comparison, out of interest? I'm of a different impression, and believe GitHub's ARR was actually quite a bit higher than GitLab at the point Microsoft executed that deal. Do you think the GitHub or GitLab brand is stronger, today?
- nixgeek 5y ago
  Timing of the CFO joining is interesting to me. From the S-1, Brian Robins joined GitLab in October 2020, so the desire to go public may have been there but an IPO is an enormous amount of work and I can imagine goes much better with an experienced CFO at the helm who has done it before. Therefore, "because of COVID" sounds like a contributing factor certainly, but may not be the whole story.
rhacker 5y ago
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.
- Kelteseth 5y ago
  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.
  - rhacker 5y ago
    Text based pipeline YAML files are so powerful.
ignoramous 5y ago
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 execution and radical transparency, if nothing else [5] [0] https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/gOp4lKSCulI https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/gOp4lKSCulI [1] https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/vCiLMLC2Rhs https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/vCiLMLC2Rhs [2] https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/uUwmlJfim6U https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/uUwmlJfim6U [3] https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/XcqloQezOUg https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/XcqloQezOUg [4] https://www.heavybit.com/library/video/commercial-open-source-business-strategies/ https://www.heavybit.com/library/video/commercial-open-sourc... [5] https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/values/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/values/
- INTPenis 5y ago
  Yeah I absolutely support Gitlab and love seeing new projects use Gitlab over Github. But to be fair, they have a massive backlog of issues to fix. Basic issues too, like variables not expanding correctly in CI jobs, or Google not being able to index projects on gitlab.com unless there's another page already linking to it. I've been using Gitlab.com and Gitlab on-prem since 2013 and over the years I've found many of these bugs that I feel should be top priority instead of new features.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - reilly3000 5y ago
    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!
sjtindell 5y ago
I would have killed to get some of this equity. Where can a regular investor buy these shares pre-IPO? I sat on ZenEquity for a while and saw nothing.
eljimmy 5y ago
I wonder if this could be considered as a pseudo index fund of the general tech sector as they essentially exist to serve tech-oriented companies.
unixhero 5y ago
I am bullish!
Animats 5y ago
We have two classes of authorized common stock, Class A common stock and Class B common stock. The rights of the holders of Class A common stock and Class B common stock are identical, except with respect to voting and conversion rights. Each share of Class A common stock is entitled to one vote per share. Each share of Class B common stock is entitled to 10 votes per share and is convertible into one share of Class A common stock. So who gets to be CEO for Life? Sid Sijbrandij?
mayurpipaliya 5y ago
One of my favorite company with the true remote/open culture. GitHub is yet to match the features GitLab provides. - Especially small but interesting features such as Group / Sub-group, much mature SDK/API, Better CI, and Web based Folder creation. Competition is healthy, it brings in more benefits for end users.
- wdb 5y ago
  Personally, I think Gitlab needs to match with features of Github and its reliability.
  - aritraghosh007 5y ago
    Curious what are some of the top features GH has which GL doesn’t?
    - wdb 5y ago
      Based on free Github: Github Check Runs API Github Applications Security scanning, vulnerability alerting Packages Registry that's reliable The kind of integrations that Github offers for pull requests in general is miles away from Gitlab. Some of the things I mentioned above are possible in Gitlab but only on the highest tier and still then the UI integration isn't a great.
jstsch 5y ago
Congrats to the Gitlab team! Very happy on-premise Gitlab user, for both our relatively small scale SAAS and our digital agency. Our growth mirrored Gitlab's, so we started with the basic git hosting + issue tracker, and have added CI and other features in our workflow as time went by. Nice thing to know is that we've upgraded our instance for over the last 5 years and never had to do a backup/reinstall, which shows something about the general software quality.
birdyrooster 5y ago
Congratulations Gitlab employees! I am super happy for you all! Well deserved!
b8 5y ago
I wonder how many other CIA funded companies have gone public. Gitlab is funded by In-Q-Tel which is CIA's version of ycombinator basically[1][2]. 1. https://www.iqt.org/portfolio?&search=gitlab&taxonomy=&tax_id= https://www.iqt.org/portfolio?&search=gitlab&taxonomy=&tax_i... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel
- gaadd33 5y ago
  Google, Palantir, FireEye, probably a bunch more...What sort of conclusion should we draw from that?
  - atatatat 5y ago
    What conclusion should we draw...from that list?!
MrsPeaches 5y ago
Slightly meta but: Has anyone done an analysis of how well companies, who have their S-1 posted on HN, perform?
wdb 5y ago
Gitlab CI pipelines also validation errors in the Pipeline editor but when you then run it's all good. Super confusing these errors which aren't errors issues. Such a time sink
mlindner 5y ago
I'm not sure why people support Gitlab when the user experience is so much worse. It's a complete mess of a product with so many bugs as to be nigh unusable.
sneak 5y ago
They have explicitly opted to embrace unrestrained capital-seeking's amorality: https://www.theregister.com/2019/10/16/gitlab_employees_gagged/ https://www.theregister.com/2019/10/16/gitlab_employees_gagg... I don't really expect the market to care much about this one way or the other, but I do. (Their competition, Microsoft/GitHub, famously embraces government/military custom, even supplying services to those operating concentration camps.) This seems to establish a norm for the industry; one of the many reasons I am not a participant.
ablekh 5y ago
I think that the most fascinating fact about this upcoming IPO is that, to the best of my knowledge, GitLab is the first remote-only (i.e., no-headquarters) company in the world filing for an IPO. In any case (meaning even if I'm wrong that they are the first), I wish them luck and welcome the competition. It's interesting to see that GitLab has adopted dual-class common stock structure, though I'm certainly not surprised. Some people and organizations (including some investment firms and stock exchanges) are not fans of multi-class equity structures, but I'm not sure that this fact would have any significant negative impact on GitLab's IPO. At least, these popular 10:1 or slightly less popular 20:1 voting schemes are not as aggressive as Palantir's three-class stock structure, where Class F (just three founders - out of five!) would hold practically 50% of the total voting power. One strange thing that I've noticed while browsing through this S-1 document, though, is the lack of mention of GitLab's co-founder (Dmitriy Zaporozhets) in the stockholders table (p. 148). I would expect him to hold about the same ownership of the Class B shares as the other co-founder Sytse Sijbrandij holds, but definitely more than 5%, which requires a disclosure there. I'm not sure how to interpret the absence of his name.
- pietjepuk88 5y ago
  > I think that the most fascinating fact about this upcoming IPO is that, to the best of my knowledge, GitLab is the first remote-only (i.e., no-headquarters) company in the world filing for an IPO. "Akshually" that was Coinbase [0]. Although maybe not, because they did a direct listing so not strictly an IPO. Matt Levine talks about both these points in his Feb 25th 2021 Money Stuff newsletter. [0] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1679788/000162828021003168/coinbaseglobalincs-1.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1679788/000162828021... "Address not applicable"
  - ablekh 5y ago
    Good point. In that case, it's fair to consider both being the first remote-only/first public companies in respective categories (IPO and DL).
- smartbit 5y ago
  > is the lack of mention of GitLab's co-founder (Dmitriy Zaporozhets) in the stockholders table (p. 148) Indeed, interesting question. I’d expect that a S1 would clarify Dmitriy Zaporozhets position & role.
arthurcolle 5y ago
Cash out before tapering, makes sense
- JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
  Best comment in the thread.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
glclture 5y ago
This is a good read on Gitlab's internal culture which is contrast to what their employed army at HN keeps praising about https://hackernoon.com/why-i-will-not-exercise-my-gitlab-stock-options-bf6f3dda62e https://hackernoon.com/why-i-will-not-exercise-my-gitlab-sto...
mucholove 5y ago
Does anyone know how Gitlab went from being a Ducth BV to a US Inc? I see all of the founder's shares and options are owned by Rients.org BV and would love to know a bit more about the structure. Seems like EU companies eventually become American and I would love to know how :)
- ksajadi 5y ago
  We did that in 2014. The process is straight forward and is called a Delaware flip (if I remember correctly): you setup a C-Corp in the US and then do a share flip for all share holders in the EU company to the same percentage in the US Corp. this will make the shareholders of the original company stock holders of the US one and the original company becomes a wholly owned subsidiary of the US one (or can be folded if no liabilities are left and no need for it exists)
  - mucholove 5y ago
    Super. Would be very interested to know if this is possible with a Spanish company. From hearsay, Spain is supposed to be way harder than Netherlands or UK. Thanks!
Jochim 5y ago
I'm curious what other HN users think of Gitlab's pricing? I was considering Gitlab when pitching a new platform for my org but the value really didn't seem to be there when compared to Atlassian/Microsoft.
The_rationalist 5y ago
Gitlab might be a great tool for proprietary/private software. But it is an utilitarian cancer for open source. So many important open sources projets have chosen Gitlab for political reasons and as a result result more than 10 time less open source contributions..

942 points by laminarflow 5y ago

Our recent growth may not be indicative of our future growth, and we may not be able to sustain our revenue growth rate in the future. Our growth also makes it difficult to evaluate our future prospects and may increase the risk that we will not be successful. I don't know why I thought Gitlab was completely private, but...welp, see ya later Gitlab. I'm looking forward to see what revenue you can squeeze out of customers from afar, without me on the platform.

spullara 5y ago
What does completely private mean? Do you mean bootstrapped?
- JohnWhigham 5y ago
  Yeah, not VC-funded. Stupid mistake on my part given the industry we're in
  - mikepurvis 5y ago
    They're literally a YC company: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/gitlab https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/gitlab
MattGaiser 5y ago
Most financial filings are filled with cover your ass statements like this.
- throw03172019 5y ago
  Correct. The Robinhood disclosures were a fun read with Dogecoin trades (meme coin) being a large portion of their revenue.
bradstewart 5y ago
Pretty much every S1 ever has similar language. Do you refuse to use any public company products?
dec0dedab0de 5y ago
Even if they go broke and get taken over by a completely evil group tomorrow they will have left behind a very nice open source project.
kuresov 5y ago
This verbiage is present in basically every S-1 and quarterly filing, if not verbatim, then very close.
whoisjuan 5y ago
Every S-1 in existence says that. Why people always share this excerpt when an S-1 is listed here in HN? Just look back at any S-1 post and there's always somebody who shares it. Why? Do they really think they are illuminating someone else with the most boiler-plate phrase in the existence of S-1 filings?

the-dude 5y ago

Congrats Sytse.

smartbit 5y ago
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 ....
- jedberg 5y ago
  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.
  - nopzor 5y ago
    i think your math is off. 1% of the stock (assuming that's fully diluted at IPO) would be worth $60M ;-)
    - jedberg 5y ago
      I was assuming a 10x dilution since they took $845M in funding. :)
      - nopzor 5y ago
        10x dilution seems super high to me, even with 845m in funding.
  - smartbit 5y ago
    No company in NL pays FAANG salaries. My former coworker‘s rate as external consultant is around €120/h.

merrvk 5y ago

What a shame

riffic 5y ago
yeah it's a real shame for the folks with equity to finally have liquidity. I'm not really seeing what's shameful about a public exit. They're a great company with an amazing product. This is good for GitLab.
- ithinkso 5y ago
  It is good for GitLab, what a shame for GitLab's users
  - rvz 5y ago
    > what a shame for GitLab's users Can you please elaborate about this?
    - ithinkso 5y ago
      In my opinion public exit has been twisted 180 degrees. The reason for a company going public is to raise capital that individuals do not have to expand the business - build new factories, hire or whatever. After all there is much more money distributed in the public than few individuals have and in exchange you get shares in the company. I don't think GitLab is in need of that, what a lot of companies are doing now when they go public is just a method of 'cashing out'. When you have a great product as a private company your income comes from the users and you tailor and improve your product for their needs. When you go public in the above sense you're cashing out and suddenly the users shift to a product and shareholders are now what you cater for while trying to milk your 'users' as much as possible without them quitting.
      - eloff 5y ago
        I disagree with this characterisation. Gitlab is losing money. They do need the capital. While it's true sometimes shareholder interests can lead to the users getting screwed, that's a very short term and dangerous game to play. It's the equivalent of killing the Golden Goose. Companies that play that game may find themselves out of business in short order. They're opening opportunities for the competition.

priansh 5y ago

This seems like a weird move given that developer tools seldom do well on public markets. I can’t help but think that staying private would do more to maintain their community & preserve the reasons people opt for GitLab over GitHub.

statictype 5y ago
MongoDB and Twilio have both done reasonably well haven't they? Which developer tools have not done well?
- camjohnson26 5y ago
  Atlassian too
- HideousKojima 5y ago
  Docker is the main one I can think of that has flopped financially despite being widely use.
  - riffic 5y ago
    Docker has never gone public. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/docker https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/docker
    - ncphil 5y ago
      ... and it hasn't actually flopped. It just reached its level of... usefulness. As others commented a few weeks ago in a different conversation, Swarm had/has significant utility for smaller deployments, but K8S has sucked the air out of the (marketing) room. So life goes on, as does docker and Docker Hub. Many of us small potatoes users will continue to use docker until we can't, and then probably wind up on podman, or lxd. That will be OK too: as long as the work gets done. We survived the demise of Solaris Freeware, we'll survive this too.
- foolfoolz 5y ago

lucasverra 5y ago

Good for them, they do a lot of open-source. And they have brought something to the market when GH was the only sheriff in town.

junon 5y ago
GH was far from the only one around at the time, but it was by far the most market-friendly for what it was. Timing was a big deal too, I think. But yes, agreed.

rvz 5y ago

> Our business has experienced rapid growth. We generated revenue of $81.2 million and $152.2 million in fiscal 2020 and 2021, respectively, representing growth of 87%. We generated revenue of $63.9 million and $108.1 million for the six months ended July 31, 2020 and July 31, 2021, respectively, representing year over year growth of 69%. During this period, we continued to invest in growing our business to capitalize on our market opportunity. Our net loss was $130.7 million, $192.2 million, and $69.0 million in fiscal 2020, fiscal 2021, and the six months ended July 31, 2021, respectively. Another buy in my books after calling CloudFlare [0] and DigitalOcean [1]. Looking forward to the listing of 'GTLB'. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20707306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20707306 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26262799 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26262799

nix23 5y ago
Why the down-votes? ....ahh humans :)
- bussierem 5y ago
  Most likely because their comment just sounds like them encouraging people to buy the stock (saying 'I called these other stocks and they did well, and now I'm buying this stock'). Whether they meant to or not, it comes off that way.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
joelbluminator 5y ago
Buy at what price? The revenue numbers are nice but not stellar to me. Quite a big spend, the path to real earnings could be really hard.
flafla2 5y ago
I’m a bit concerned that they have to compete against Microsoft/Github and their engineering/marketing/sales might. In your view why do you think they will be able to coexist long term?

LewisVerstappen 5y ago

> We have been a 100% remote workforce since inception and, as of July 31, 2021, had approximately 1,350 team members in over 65 countries. Operating remotely allows us access to a global talent pool that enables us to hire talented team members, regardless of location, providing a strong competitive advantage. Will be interesting to see how many publicly traded companies are fully remote in 5, 10, 15 years. Especially since many new startups are starting as fully remote (and will probably stay that way and eventually IPO) and some publicly traded companies have shifted to fully remote (Coinbase, Square, Twitter)

lastofthemojito 5y ago
And famously they're leaders on the location-based pay side of the remote pay argument (as opposed to the "we pay everyone based on the value they bring" side): https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/total-rewards/compensation/compensation-calculator/#location-factor https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/total-rewards/compensation...
- LewisVerstappen 5y ago
  Interesting, thanks for the link. Median salary seems to be $170k according to Levels.fyi -> https://www.levels.fyi/company/GitLab/salaries/Software-Engineer/ https://www.levels.fyi/company/GitLab/salaries/Software-Engi...
  - zndr 5y ago
    You can actually see their salary calculator here https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/total-rewards/compensation/compensation-calculator/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/total-rewards/compensation...
    - yunohn 5y ago
      Are you able to actually use the calculator? You’ve linked the documentation page for it, but the actual tool seems restricted.

anthony_r 5y ago

Sorry for off-topic but notice how long this page is and yet how fast it loads. Why is it so hard to pull off elsewhere on the Web.

enlyth 5y ago
Because it is a static document
- anthony_r 5y ago
  So what? Most, or at least a lot of, Web documents are pretty much static, but they don't load nearly as fast. (static, except for the tracking scripts and ads :))
  - enlyth 5y ago
    No, they are not. Most of the content on the web is dynamic, based on things like your authentication, geolocation, time, and other things
bool3max 5y ago
It's not hard. This is a .gov website and as such isn't plagued with a million external tracking and advertising/marketing scripts. It is also completely static.
lftl 5y ago
Ironically, the 5-6 images on the page are really poorly optimized, making the total payload of the page probably 3-4 times as big as it could be.

alberth 5y ago

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.

dfee 5y ago
Isn’t your second sentence just a truism on the first sentence? profit = revenue - costs
- alberth 5y ago
  Maybe a better way of saying what I meant is, gitlab is losing more than 2x their total generated. That’s what seems scary.
  - joering2 5y ago
    It is also somewhat easy to enter the market. You do not need a hundred million dollars upfront investment to build a competitor, at least in terms of functionality of provided services. A good example in my opinion is how BitMart is eating up Coinbase US market with many of my friends moving on to safe money on the fees since "crypto is crypto". From their IPO coinbase is 25% down as of today, and I don't see any compelling reasons for the stock to rebounce.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jpollock 5y ago
  he means losses > revenue, in other words costs > 2xrevenue.
- beeneuf 5y ago
  No, you're conflating "loss" (negative profit) with "cost". The first sentence acknowledges that plenty of tech companies IPO and are not profitable, so their revenue is below their costs. The second sentence is about losses (negative profit) exceeding revenue. For a naive example, a company can have $1m in revenue and $1.1m in costs, therefore profit is negative 100,000 dollars - the company is unprofitable. However, they are not losing more money ($100,000) then they are bringing in ($1,000,000 is greater than $100,000) - though they are spending more money ($1.1m) then they are bringing in. This would not be a concerning amount of loss, many companies are deliberately outspending current revenue in order to increase future revenue/growth/market share, but could become profitable if they wanted to. In this case, the person you replied to is remarking that the losses/negative profit ($192m, $130m) are greater than the revenue ($152m, $81m). This is a concerning sign, as the path to profitability is much further away.

dcchambers 5y ago

I haven't personally had a compelling enough reason to move from GitHub to GitLab, so I mostly just use it to mirror a couple of my repos there in case people prefer to browse various open source projects via GitLab. Regardless, I think competition in the space is a great thing. GitLab has come a long way and there are certain things I really like about the company. For example, I love how they tend to do everything "in the open" and have most of their development work and business documents public. It's a great resource for aspiring entrepreneurs. I have been a bit concerned about some of the architecture of GitLab lately, with quite a few security fixes resulting in unusual edge-case bugs. My only other complaint is that they tend have a very wide but shallow pool of products. They have ambitious goals with their platform, but I hope they are able to build real value and add features to the existing core products. Congrats to everyone on the GitLab team. Keep doing good work.

eftokay83 5y ago
Mind to share a "quick link" to the mentioned documents?
- dcchambers 5y ago
  Sure, the most obvious link is this: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com Here's a few examples: Runbooks: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/runbooks https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/runbooks - which I've used as inspiration for runbooks on my own team. Handbook: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ Roadmap/Product Vision: https://about.gitlab.com/direction/ https://about.gitlab.com/direction/ A note in their handbook on transparency: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/values/#transparency https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/values/#transparency
- sm4rk0 5y ago
  https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/
base698 5y ago
To me it was very compelling before GitHub actions and only slightly compelling now.

m4tthumphrey 5y ago

Do we have any idea when the stock will be available?

easton 5y ago

So GitLab is advertising that it's the one place to do the entire software development lifecycle. Are there any big shops that have converted to 100% (or almost 100%) GitLab? Out of the six big names they list on their website, the only one that they have a case study for is Thomson Reuters, and they used Jenkins for CI (and it's from 2017, so a lot of this other functionality wasn't built yet). It's just a somewhat different strategy. Most of these tools (GitHub, Azure DevOps, Jira) only cover some of it (GitHub and ADO can both do deployments and code storage and ticketing, but not any of the monitoring stuff or security stuff, as an example), and even then people often bolt on whatever they like anyway. But with GitLab betting that people will pay more (a lot more if you want everything -- $99 per month), is anyone actually doing that at scale? Because for $20 per user per month (the middle tier), I'd just spend the extra buck to get GitHub, given that the features in that tier are very similar (GitHub doesn't have complex issue management yet, but it's coming). Or maybe just do the Azure DevOps $6 per user per month plan and endure the whining from the devs :P.

Mavvie 5y ago
I've been using ADO for the past year or two and I don't hate it. While it absolutely lacks features, and most ADO things have relatively tough to use UIs, it _is_ extremely fast compared to GitHub and has some amazing UI designs for a couple things (especially reviewing large PRs). Although from what I heard they're porting the good parts into GitHub and deprecating/putting into maintenance mode ADO soon.
- josteink 5y ago
  > Although from what I heard they're porting the good parts into GitHub and deprecating/putting into maintenance mode ADO soon. Hush hush! By now that’s pretty much an open secret covered by various NDAs :) What even the NDAs won’t tell you though is how much time ADO has before it’s fully “dead”. If Microsoft’s track-record is anything to go by, I would assume ADO customers will be “encouraged” to migrate 3-5 years from now, with at least another 5 before they start closing down, if not more. Will be interesting to see how it plays out when the time comes.

jcdavis 5y ago

Was wondering why their FY21 costs where much higher than first half of this year, this probably explains it: > Stock-based compensation expense for fiscal 2020 and 2021, and six months ended July 31, 2021 includes $32.7 million, $103.8 million, and $0.3 million, respectively, of compensation expense related to secondary stock sales described in Note 16 to our consolidated financial statements included elsewhere in this prospectus. Which makes the numbers not as bad as they seem on first glance.

TradingPlaces 5y ago
Stock based compensation is compensation at the expense of current shareholders. It’s not free money.
- fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago
  True, but sometimes you have a big lump of early employees become liquid at the same time. That’s a not a recurring event, which is important when deciding how viable the business is.
- jcdavis 5y ago
  Absolutely agreed, but events like one-off secondaries can somewhat distort the numbers in that they put costs that should be amortized over many in years into a single quarter. You see similar at big cos 6mos after IPO when everything vests.
- manquer 5y ago
  It does not affect free cash flow or strain the resources of already available to the company. Stock holders existing and new participate in the success of failure of the company, different from say vendor who needs to be paid no matter what. it is far worse to be spending 100m in cash to get say 50m in new revenue (if the customers don't stay long enough) as this requires new cash to be infused to keep growing.

whalesalad 5y ago

If you are looking for a self-hosted git system, I highly recommend Gitea. Very lightweight and an order of magnitude easier to install and maintain. I am super impressed.

junon 5y ago
Gitea has a ton of issues, sadly. We self-hosted an instance where we had a number of mirrors and whatnot to have redundant copies of third-party dependencies. The server would deadlock, mirror tasks would time out and then couldn't be restarted, etc. We filed an issue (or maybe two) and the developers were... eh. A bit rude, to be honest. Dismissive that it was really an issue, where restarting and deleting/re-configuring was a massive PITA. Therefore, I can't really rec Gitea myself. I wish something like it existed though. That's for sure. Gitlab is just too bloated for my taste and our needs.
- S5yDyAk3XoQH5 5y ago
  I've ran it for years and never had a deadlock. How big were your code bases, how many users?.. idk if that is even the reason why
  - junon 5y ago
    Large, and the deadlock was only a few times but the stalled and unresumable mirrors were rampant. We were mirroring the linux kernel and maybe 40-50 different repositories. Two users.
- kasbah 5y ago
  Could you link the issues please? Planning to use Gitea with a lot of mirrored repos.

secondaryacct 5y ago

I m in one of the companies they quoted as case study. The lies are so horrible I hesitate to do something: they fucked us completely replacing a wonderful github/teamcity combo, it crashes all the time, features are so amateurish (vs teamcity especially) that we're struggling just to do basic things. I dont know what to do, but public investors should stay away: the product is not ready for people to pay for it. It's years behind the competition.

danudey 5y ago
Counterpoint: we've moved to GitLab internally (from SVN, granted), and while GitHub would have been easier because it's far more widely supported in tooling and integrations, GitLab has been great for us so far. I would have preferred to switch to GitHub if we had an internal hosted GitHub Enterprise kind of situation, but so far Gitlab is doing fine for us. It could be a matter of scale, though; perhaps for larger teams, larger repositories, or pre-existing Git-based MR/CI workflows, it's a dumpster fire, but that's not us so we can't speak to it. Who knows though, maybe in a few years I'll regret writing this comment.
sofixa 5y ago
Honestly sounds like an implementation issue. I've run multiple Gitlab instances and I've used some more, and "crashes all the time" isn't a thing that just happens. Most features work fine, core ones even more so, some of the newer ones are clearly not polished enough but mostly function. It's literally years in front of the competition ( GitHub and BitBucket).
- secondaryacct 5y ago
  How many thousands repos do you have ? We are 10k+ users with many many more repos scattered around the world. But the thing I ll say is the git part is satisfactory. It's the CI part we are livid about. It's not "years in front of the competition" if you think of Teamcity. Github focus on what it does right.
  - sofixa 5y ago

benatkin 5y ago

I'm grateful to GitLab for providing an alternative to GitHub, and an open source one. It's an open core product with the community edition providing a lot of value. Here are some community hosted instances: https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/List_of_Community-Hosted_GitLab_Instances https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/List_of_Community-Hosted_GitL... The CI system is quite powerful, and Travis CI's struggles before and after acquisition has shown that it's hard to host a major CI platform. I hope the company and the open source product will continue to thrive.

chx 5y ago
Who can edit that page? https://git.drupalcode.org/ https://git.drupalcode.org/
- tyingq 5y ago
  The owners/maintainers listed here probably: https://git.drupalcode.org/project/drupal/-/project_members https://git.drupalcode.org/project/drupal/-/project_members
  - benatkin 5y ago
    Wrong page. Means to add drupal to that wiki page in my comment, since it's missing.
    - tyingq 5y ago
      Ah, yeah...sorry. There is a history tab where you can see the users that last updated it. Though the page appears to be untouched for a couple of years, so that may not pan out.
ModernMech 5y ago
Yes, Gitlab has been leading the way for a while now, consistently introducing new features that Github eventually copies. It's a real testament to the power of competition. I first started using Gitlab due to free private repositories, which Github eventually added. Gitlab had free built-in CI/CD first, and Github eventually followed. I'm still on Gitlab these days despite Github catching up, and still enjoying features like organizations with subfolders that Github lacks.

jenny91 5y ago

Does anybody actually embrace Gitlab fully? Anybody I've seen uses it for git, and at most CI/CD on top. But who else (other than gitlab themselves) uses all of their stuff. They're pushing really hard for that with their "the devops platform" thing, etc.

base698 5y ago
I manage two teams and we use it for "everything" and have as part of our team values to use Gitlab fully. We are on premium, the ultimate features would be an easier way to replace Jira but we manage with epics, milestones and iterations.
deepbluev7 5y ago
Maybe not all the stuff, but I have seen many use Gitlab's docker & package registries, I think Gitlab's merge request discussions are miles ahead of Github's (threads without line discussions, can compare versions, etc), the test result integration is okay, we do use the issue boards a lot. We kinda use the deployments, but only for review apps. Merge trains are great too. There might be more cool stuff, that I either don't know about or have no use for, but in general they do provide some great stuff. (Not that Gitlab doesn't also have bad stuff.)

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snicker7 5y ago

The big issue we have with GitLab is the pricing. Ultimate is literally five (!!!) times more than premium. And there are only a couple of features that we want from ultimate.

danudey 5y ago
There are also some asinine divisions w.r.t. what goes in Premium vs. Ultimate. For example, Premium allows us to configure our CI system to ingest Coverity scans, but only Ultimate lets us actually view them in the GUI. What the hell, guys? We're not paying for Ultimate, though, unless they give us a sweetheart deal in perpetuity, but it's still kind of ridiculous. That said, they do tend to trickle features down, moving them from higher tiers to lower tiers, or lower tiers to the free tier, so maybe in a few versions we'll get that support for no extra cost.
zmmmmm 5y ago
yeah ... I can't give Gitlab my money. We are ready to pay but the licensing model is just incompatible with our org. Very sad, I like the product very much but we are forced to keep coasting on the free version.
Aeolun 5y ago
Also, pay only per year, instead of per month. So if you even want to get started you better be ready to fork over $1200 per developer immediately. I can say a lot of bad things about Atlassian, but their price/benefit ratio is outstanding.

mythz 5y ago

Surprised to see them IPO, IMO their best chance for their biggest valuation was to sell to AWS or GCP after they realize losing GitHub to MS/Azure was a major competitive disadvantage. From their financials they've raised 415M total and are still making a loss that's widening for what looks like is only 3,632 customers (ARR>5k), i.e. 114k raised per base customer. They'll likely have a successful exit but not very optimistic about their future given they have to compete with ubiquity and deep pockets of GitHub/MS and going IPO makes an acquisition target less likely. Given they have formidable and dominant competition with GitHub who's been executing on all cylinders I'll be steering clear of this IPO.

marc__1 5y ago

From page 135 you have what it may be consider one of the most ambitious founder-performance compensation plans ever. The latest tranche, to be observed between 2027 and 2030, will be granted if the share price of Gitlab reaches $500, or 26x the price per share of the most recent fundraising (Series E at $18.6294 per share) Here is the text if anyone cares fo cmd+F: "The following table indicates the price hurdle and the corresponding performance period in which that hurdle must be achieved and the service vesting date upon which the corresponding vesting is contingent"

nexuist 5y ago
Maybe they're counting on inflation ;)
sm4rk0 5y ago
What happens if USD is no more in 2030?
- marc__1 5y ago
  "The applicable price hurdle must be achieved during the relevant performance period (as set forth in the table below corresponding to the price hurdle) in order for the applicable tranche of RSU Awards to be earned, but once a price hurdle is achieved, the price hurdle need not be maintained in order for the applicable RSU Award tranche to continue to vest based on service. Once a price hurdle is no longer achievable due to the lapse of a performance period or if Mr. Sijbrandij ceases to be the CEO, any then-unvested portion of the RSU Award will be immediately forfeited."

Wronnay 5y ago

Last valuation was $6 billion, they initially wanted to go public in November of 2020 but because of COVID they delayed it. Doesn't sound cheap to me for a company who isn't profitable yet... (Microsoft payed 7,5 billion for GitHub and I think we can all agree that GitLab isn't used as much so nearly the same valuations seems a bit high too me)

danudey 5y ago
Well, we have to ask ourselves two things: 1. What would GitHub actually be valued at now? It's possible that all valuations have risen. 2. What does GitLab provide that GitHub doesn't? We went with it for our on-site Git hosting because of a lot of features, but also because we were able to engage their dev team and add support for some of our software to their product (above the non-free tier) so that we can do 2fa git-over-ssh using our own OTP software and API. Definitely couldn't get that with Gitlab. On the other hand, GitLab suffers from "not the best" syndrome; GitHub is the best, and everyone everywhere supports it. GitLab is not the best, so support for it is extremely limited across the board. At this point, I'm surprised if we find software that natively supports Gitlab integration beyond just "pull a repository using a key or password".
fcantournet 5y ago
GitHub wasn't profitable either when MS aquired it. it was about the same ARR than gitlab is right now. Now if your talking about brand and positioning that's another matter.
- nixgeek 5y ago
  What's your source for the ARR comparison, out of interest? I'm of a different impression, and believe GitHub's ARR was actually quite a bit higher than GitLab at the point Microsoft executed that deal. Do you think the GitHub or GitLab brand is stronger, today?
nixgeek 5y ago
Timing of the CFO joining is interesting to me. From the S-1, Brian Robins joined GitLab in October 2020, so the desire to go public may have been there but an IPO is an enormous amount of work and I can imagine goes much better with an experienced CFO at the helm who has done it before. Therefore, "because of COVID" sounds like a contributing factor certainly, but may not be the whole story.

rhacker 5y ago

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.

Kelteseth 5y ago
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.
- rhacker 5y ago
  Text based pipeline YAML files are so powerful.

ignoramous 5y ago

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 execution and radical transparency, if nothing else [5] [0] https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/gOp4lKSCulI https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/gOp4lKSCulI [1] https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/vCiLMLC2Rhs https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/vCiLMLC2Rhs [2] https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/uUwmlJfim6U https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/uUwmlJfim6U [3] https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/XcqloQezOUg https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/XcqloQezOUg [4] https://www.heavybit.com/library/video/commercial-open-source-business-strategies/ https://www.heavybit.com/library/video/commercial-open-sourc... [5] https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/values/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/values/

INTPenis 5y ago
Yeah I absolutely support Gitlab and love seeing new projects use Gitlab over Github. But to be fair, they have a massive backlog of issues to fix. Basic issues too, like variables not expanding correctly in CI jobs, or Google not being able to index projects on gitlab.com unless there's another page already linking to it. I've been using Gitlab.com and Gitlab on-prem since 2013 and over the years I've found many of these bugs that I feel should be top priority instead of new features.
- deleted 5y ago
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- reilly3000 5y ago
  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!

sjtindell 5y ago

I would have killed to get some of this equity. Where can a regular investor buy these shares pre-IPO? I sat on ZenEquity for a while and saw nothing.

eljimmy 5y ago

I wonder if this could be considered as a pseudo index fund of the general tech sector as they essentially exist to serve tech-oriented companies.

unixhero 5y ago

I am bullish!

Animats 5y ago

We have two classes of authorized common stock, Class A common stock and Class B common stock. The rights of the holders of Class A common stock and Class B common stock are identical, except with respect to voting and conversion rights. Each share of Class A common stock is entitled to one vote per share. Each share of Class B common stock is entitled to 10 votes per share and is convertible into one share of Class A common stock. So who gets to be CEO for Life? Sid Sijbrandij?

mayurpipaliya 5y ago

One of my favorite company with the true remote/open culture. GitHub is yet to match the features GitLab provides. - Especially small but interesting features such as Group / Sub-group, much mature SDK/API, Better CI, and Web based Folder creation. Competition is healthy, it brings in more benefits for end users.

wdb 5y ago
Personally, I think Gitlab needs to match with features of Github and its reliability.
- aritraghosh007 5y ago
  Curious what are some of the top features GH has which GL doesn’t?
  - wdb 5y ago
    Based on free Github: Github Check Runs API Github Applications Security scanning, vulnerability alerting Packages Registry that's reliable The kind of integrations that Github offers for pull requests in general is miles away from Gitlab. Some of the things I mentioned above are possible in Gitlab but only on the highest tier and still then the UI integration isn't a great.

jstsch 5y ago

Congrats to the Gitlab team! Very happy on-premise Gitlab user, for both our relatively small scale SAAS and our digital agency. Our growth mirrored Gitlab's, so we started with the basic git hosting + issue tracker, and have added CI and other features in our workflow as time went by. Nice thing to know is that we've upgraded our instance for over the last 5 years and never had to do a backup/reinstall, which shows something about the general software quality.

birdyrooster 5y ago

Congratulations Gitlab employees! I am super happy for you all! Well deserved!

b8 5y ago

I wonder how many other CIA funded companies have gone public. Gitlab is funded by In-Q-Tel which is CIA's version of ycombinator basically[1][2]. 1. https://www.iqt.org/portfolio?&search=gitlab&taxonomy=&tax_id= https://www.iqt.org/portfolio?&search=gitlab&taxonomy=&tax_i... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel

gaadd33 5y ago
Google, Palantir, FireEye, probably a bunch more...What sort of conclusion should we draw from that?
- atatatat 5y ago
  What conclusion should we draw...from that list?!

MrsPeaches 5y ago

Slightly meta but: Has anyone done an analysis of how well companies, who have their S-1 posted on HN, perform?

wdb 5y ago

Gitlab CI pipelines also validation errors in the Pipeline editor but when you then run it's all good. Super confusing these errors which aren't errors issues. Such a time sink

mlindner 5y ago

I'm not sure why people support Gitlab when the user experience is so much worse. It's a complete mess of a product with so many bugs as to be nigh unusable.

sneak 5y ago

They have explicitly opted to embrace unrestrained capital-seeking's amorality: https://www.theregister.com/2019/10/16/gitlab_employees_gagged/ https://www.theregister.com/2019/10/16/gitlab_employees_gagg... I don't really expect the market to care much about this one way or the other, but I do. (Their competition, Microsoft/GitHub, famously embraces government/military custom, even supplying services to those operating concentration camps.) This seems to establish a norm for the industry; one of the many reasons I am not a participant.

ablekh 5y ago

I think that the most fascinating fact about this upcoming IPO is that, to the best of my knowledge, GitLab is the first remote-only (i.e., no-headquarters) company in the world filing for an IPO. In any case (meaning even if I'm wrong that they are the first), I wish them luck and welcome the competition. It's interesting to see that GitLab has adopted dual-class common stock structure, though I'm certainly not surprised. Some people and organizations (including some investment firms and stock exchanges) are not fans of multi-class equity structures, but I'm not sure that this fact would have any significant negative impact on GitLab's IPO. At least, these popular 10:1 or slightly less popular 20:1 voting schemes are not as aggressive as Palantir's three-class stock structure, where Class F (just three founders - out of five!) would hold practically 50% of the total voting power. One strange thing that I've noticed while browsing through this S-1 document, though, is the lack of mention of GitLab's co-founder (Dmitriy Zaporozhets) in the stockholders table (p. 148). I would expect him to hold about the same ownership of the Class B shares as the other co-founder Sytse Sijbrandij holds, but definitely more than 5%, which requires a disclosure there. I'm not sure how to interpret the absence of his name.

pietjepuk88 5y ago
> I think that the most fascinating fact about this upcoming IPO is that, to the best of my knowledge, GitLab is the first remote-only (i.e., no-headquarters) company in the world filing for an IPO. "Akshually" that was Coinbase [0]. Although maybe not, because they did a direct listing so not strictly an IPO. Matt Levine talks about both these points in his Feb 25th 2021 Money Stuff newsletter. [0] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1679788/000162828021003168/coinbaseglobalincs-1.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1679788/000162828021... "Address not applicable"
- ablekh 5y ago
  Good point. In that case, it's fair to consider both being the first remote-only/first public companies in respective categories (IPO and DL).
smartbit 5y ago
> is the lack of mention of GitLab's co-founder (Dmitriy Zaporozhets) in the stockholders table (p. 148) Indeed, interesting question. I’d expect that a S1 would clarify Dmitriy Zaporozhets position & role.

arthurcolle 5y ago

Cash out before tapering, makes sense

JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
Best comment in the thread.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

glclture 5y ago

This is a good read on Gitlab's internal culture which is contrast to what their employed army at HN keeps praising about https://hackernoon.com/why-i-will-not-exercise-my-gitlab-stock-options-bf6f3dda62e https://hackernoon.com/why-i-will-not-exercise-my-gitlab-sto...

mucholove 5y ago

Does anyone know how Gitlab went from being a Ducth BV to a US Inc? I see all of the founder's shares and options are owned by Rients.org BV and would love to know a bit more about the structure. Seems like EU companies eventually become American and I would love to know how :)

ksajadi 5y ago
We did that in 2014. The process is straight forward and is called a Delaware flip (if I remember correctly): you setup a C-Corp in the US and then do a share flip for all share holders in the EU company to the same percentage in the US Corp. this will make the shareholders of the original company stock holders of the US one and the original company becomes a wholly owned subsidiary of the US one (or can be folded if no liabilities are left and no need for it exists)
- mucholove 5y ago
  Super. Would be very interested to know if this is possible with a Spanish company. From hearsay, Spain is supposed to be way harder than Netherlands or UK. Thanks!

Jochim 5y ago

I'm curious what other HN users think of Gitlab's pricing? I was considering Gitlab when pitching a new platform for my org but the value really didn't seem to be there when compared to Atlassian/Microsoft.

The_rationalist 5y ago

Gitlab might be a great tool for proprietary/private software. But it is an utilitarian cancer for open source. So many important open sources projets have chosen Gitlab for political reasons and as a result result more than 10 time less open source contributions..