23 ms·

Gitlab from YC to IPO

632 points by sandslash 5y ago

jandeboevrie 5y ago
I worked with Sytse (as Sid used to be called) back in 2011/2012 in The Hague when he consulted at Digidentity, with Marin. Great guy back then, used to run around in a lab coat, the GitLAB guy. Wonderful to see what Gitlab has become, well done!
- mcv 5y ago
  > Sytse (as Sid used to be called) That explains a lot. I thought Sid was an unusual name for someone with that surname. But it makes business sense to use something more internationally pronounceable.
  - jandeboevrie 5y ago
    Fun fact on Dutch names, his wife Karen has the same Sijbrandij, but not due to marriage, but due to them being distant cousins, who found one another on the search function of an early chat client, like ICQ, he once told us. So she could actually call herself Karen Sijbrandij-Sijbrandij.
lnxg33k1 5y ago
I guess after GitHub and gitlab i will have to find an alternative, so long and thanks for all the fish, I'm not really sure why we need to pursue growth at all cost, a perpetual hunt for currency on daily basis, of a number we will never be able to spend
- HatchedLake721 5y ago
  Why?
FabioFleitas 5y ago
Gitlab's IPO would also mark the first ever 100% distributed company to IPO. Wild!
- pixelmonkey 5y ago
  Elastic (NYSE: ESTC) was pretty much a fully distributed team upon IPO. They had offices, but they were more like "coworking cafes", where folks who happened to be in the same geographic area would meet up, or have social celebrations. At least, that's my understanding, tracking the company since its early days. On a recent podcast, Shay Banon described it as a fully distributed team of 2,000+ folks.[1] They IPO'ed in 2018.[2] [1]: https://pca.st/kvgw4iz9 https://pca.st/kvgw4iz9 [2]: https://twitter.com/kimchy/status/1048595935088009216 https://twitter.com/kimchy/status/1048595935088009216
  - heytherewhat 5y ago
    > They had offices And Gitlab doesn't.
coolhand1 5y ago
It's pretty incredible what Gitlab has been able to accomplish considering the market space they're in.
wyldfire 5y ago
I recently wanted to try adding some diagrams to a markdown-formatted README file in a Github Enterprise repo. I saw a few solutions but they all seemed to require me to roll some kind of service or automation to generate a raster image of the diagram and reference that from the markdown. There's an outstanding feature request for Github to integrate this kind of thing in their markdown rendering. But it's been languishing for years. Of course, Gitlab has had it for a while. If Github's not careful, Gitlab will eat their lunch. Gitlab should be careful not to make their product into "The Homer" [1], though. [1] https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/The_Homer https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/The_Homer
- the-dude 5y ago
  I think it is fair to say Gitlab is already eating Github's lunch. For some time.
  - brightball 5y ago
    Is it?
  - nerdponx 5y ago
    Are they? What's the Gitlab market share? Also, it sounds to me like Github is leaving the old lunch of "Git hosting + issue tracking" on the table, and moving on to being a kind of web-based all-in-one full-service collaboration/dev platform with a social network built in. So even if Gitlab picks up some single-digit-percentage market share, that's not what Github cares about anyway.
    - pjot 5y ago
      Especially considering the coupling of GitHub with vscode
    - what_is_orcas 5y ago
      > a kind of web-based all-in-one full-service collaboration/dev platform with a social network built in. Why would I want a social network built into my version control & ci/cd pipeline (I assume you're referring to the "stars" feature, and not about issue reporting). Maybe I'm just a curmudgeon, but I'm sort of sick of everything becoming a social network. I neither have nor do I want internet clout, and all social networks feel like they're trying to force me into "keeping up with the Jones'" in whatever way they're relevant.
mooreds 5y ago
I haven't used gitlab much, but I was shocked to hear GitHub's CTO (at the time of the interview, he has moved on since) state that GitHub didn't consider them a competitor. "I do think that people still, to this day, think of GitLab as one of our main competitors, and I never have ever saw GitLab as a competitor." https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/what-github-can-give-to-microsoft-with-jason-warner/ https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud... Anyone have thoughts on that? Or pointers to more reading?
- pid-1 5y ago
  GitHub has stronger 'social' features and it's better for people who want to connect to other devs or build portfolios. GitLab is years ahead of GitHub for certain stuff (e.g. CI/CD) and IMO it has a better commercial offering for business. I use GitHub as my portfolio profile for free and GitLab in my $JOB. That's my opinion tho, I'm just a person who uses both.
  - pjot 5y ago
    In an interview I had with GL the interviewer mentioned “people use GH for open source work, and GL for closed”.
    - la_fayette 5y ago
      Thats somehow funny, as GH is closed source and GL is open source...
      - 10000truths 5y ago
        Makes perfect sense to me. Because GL is open source, it can be easily self hosted, which is great for data residency compliance, or specialized security needs.
        devoutsalsa 5y ago
        Self hosting is never easy. If you nerf the GitLab database by doing something unsupported or because of a bug, good luck with that. Source: an employer of mine nerfed the GitLab database and support to fix it was not an option, so we had to migrate to their cloud offering.
teh_klev 5y ago
"He used to joke that his home office was the biggest GitLab Inc. office in the world because his EA would work there as well." Maybe my brain is in a post-lunchtime stupor, but what or who is an "EA"?
- bytematic 5y ago
  Acronyms/Initialisms are great right?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- villaaston1 5y ago
  Executive assistant I think in this case, though I’ve seen enterprise architect too!
- dabeeeenster 5y ago
  Executive Assistant
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- alphalima 5y ago
  Executive Assistant?
- teh_klev 5y ago
  Thank you everyone.
- karolist 5y ago
  Electronic Arts
debacle 5y ago
A paid user + big fan of gitlab. They exist in a strange valley between github and Atlassian where usability has remained high while also being featureful. Their kanban is 10% more functional than Trello, which is all our small team really needs, they give you everything and they don't nickel and dime you. The only feature I would like to see improved is their PR process. Seems a bit buggy with remotely large changesets, and the digest for the PR should provide a bit more context to reviewees.
- disgruntledphd2 5y ago
  The only issue I had with GL is that they don't show the entire diff if the changes/files are very large. They may have fixed this since last year, but it was super, super annoying to me at the time.
  - 1270018080 5y ago
    Their search functionality is also... non functioning. Github's search is dramatically more powerful.
  - debacle 5y ago
    You can "expand" the diff, but sometimes that breaks the UI, makes it unable to add comments, etc. That's probably the reason they don't show large changesets by default.
  - necovek 5y ago
    Nope, they still arbitrarily decide to "fold" big changes (file with a large diff), causing me to miss entire files when reviewing on occasion. In all honesty, their pull request pages need a lot of UX work: too much stuff going on on the overview pages, jumping to unresolved threads does not work when they are in previous commits... There's also that merge train confusion where merge trains get "cancelled" without an obvious explanation ("this was cancelled because it is included in a new one" would do). In a sense, I'd say that their UX is pretty bad, but the API is not much better either (you can't fetch pipeline log files with individual script timings that you see floating on the right in the web UI). If anything, all of this only goes to show that you don't need to be perfect to be good! But I applaud the effort, mission and dedication they put up, and especially their open core nature. Congrats on the IPO and keep pushing forward.
dQw4w9WgXcQ 5y ago
Another big win for Joe Montana, but this time via Liquid 2 Ventures.
literallyWTF 5y ago
Oh geez. This most likely means the frequency of their updates will get even faster and their somewhat dubious quality will plummet. Who knows, maybe I’ll be wrong and their auto devops pipelines might actually get rid of kubernetes namespaces for branches that don’t exist! :0
alangibson 5y ago
Have any of the finance minded HN commenters decided if the $10B valuation is justified? I'm usually pretty negative about high valuations, but given their enterprise penetration, this one seems almost reasonable.
- gitfan86 5y ago
  ORCL, MSFT, SalesForce and a few others would pay 10B+ to own those relationships and control of the future of the product
  - johannes1234321 5y ago
    If they were paying more than an IPO value they probably would buy already ...
    - gitfan86 5y ago
      Gitlab doesn't want to sell
      - johannes1234321 5y ago
        GitLab Just (partially) sold. However: If they don't want to (fully) sell basing the price on a value someone else might eventually pay for a (full) acquisition doesn't make much sense. (Unless you assume they revise the decision, but then the argument about not selling is moot again)
        gitfan86 5y ago
        Look at Facebook. Zuck has no interest in giving up full control to someone else, but he does want to be a public company.
        johannes1234321 5y ago
        Yes, since FB is a money printing machine producing lots of revenue which is some argument forms one market value for parts of a company. The argument Here was "ORCL, MSFT, SalesForce and a few others would pay 10B+" but those would pay those valuations only for full control. FB's market cap is around 900B$. Gaining full control over FB would be valued a lot more.
atonse 5y ago
"Gitlab CEO here, getting rich and feeling proud" [1] ;-) – congrats to the Sid, Dmitriy, and the rest of the Gitlab team. Always appreciated your presence on HN. We've been GitLab customers for 2-3 years now (what was attractive was having "everything in one SaaS subscription") and it's worked out quite well. There's always papercuts for sure and the product could always use more polish, but overall it has been nice to have most of our dev processes under one umbrella. Now when is Hashicorp going public? I've got my wallet ready for that one. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22gitlab%20ceo%20here%22&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- nabakin 5y ago
  When I click on your link to find the quote, it doesn't show up. Strange. Or are you playing off of the joke?
  - atonse 5y ago
    That's strange. Try looking for "gitlab CEO here" (with quotes) at the bottom search on HN? (and pick Comments. they won't show up in stories.)
    - nabakin 5y ago
      No change :(
jypepin 5y ago
I used to work at Uber's Amsterdam office at a time where the remote nature of the office (from SF HQ) was a struggle for some teams because of strong dependencies on teams located at SF HQ. Sid came to the office and talked to us about some strategies Gitlab used for remote work, timezone differences etc. Not only the talk was very helpful, Sid was an incredibly clear communicator, calm and humble. He really seemed to be a great leader and someone it must be nice working with.
- Copenjin 5y ago
  For those who want to know more about Gitlab and its all remote approach (a lot of posts): https://about.gitlab.com/blog/tags.html#remote-work https://about.gitlab.com/blog/tags.html#remote-work And their handbook: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/
  - e40 5y ago
    We used this as a template the year before the pandemic to get our mostly remote teams working well. Once the pandemic hit, there were few issues we had to address. I very much appreciate them making that public.
    - Copenjin 5y ago
      Yep, that wiki is amazing.
      - alohaandmahalo 5y ago
        Darren here from GitLab — warms my heart to hear that our remote guides are being used and making lives/companies better. Thank you!
sdflhasjd 5y ago
I really like Gitlab, and I wanted to move my team onto their hosted offering, but earlier this year they changed the pricing so abruptly and drastically that it just killed it as an option. It just feels like it does too much, and unless you want to commit to having everyone using it for _everything_ the pricing doesn't seem to make sense.
- xtracto 5y ago
  Same thing happened to me at a previous company: I had just migrated from Github to Gitlab and was planning on getting on the paid plan, when they suddenly did the price bump. Worse of all is that it is not possible to pay monthly (Github allows this). So we got back to Github.
- gorkish 5y ago
  The pricing model with GitLab is really unfortunate for certain types of companies. For our developers who really do most everything in Gitlab, it's great, but buying the same licenses for literally anyone else who might need to peek in there a couple of times a month? Hell naw. Our spend would be much higher (probably 3-4x) if they allowed some type of reasonable mix of license levels.
  - rossmohax 5y ago
    Thats is what sales team is for. Talk to them, explain you usecase and set of features you are looking to use, they'll give you a discount based on that. If I remember correctly we managed to get a license for all users who ever need to login, but for the price of number of core active users.
elpakal 5y ago
Congrats to the team and I'm very thankful that there are alternatives to GitHub out there. Not that I don't like GitHub (I do) or use GitHub (every day), but lately it seems like they are sherlocking a whole lot of ideas from the OSS "marketplace" into their main product. That kind of irks me. If GitLab were able to add something like GitHub Actions into their platform I would leave GH in a second.
- gadders 5y ago
  For anyone else that needs it: The phenomenon of Apple releasing a feature that supplants or obviates third-party software is so well known that being Sherlocked has become an accepted term used within the Mac and iOS developer community.
- ericpauley 5y ago
  GitLab has a very mature CI/CD framework that in many ways outshines Actions[1]. I use it regularly and definitely recommend it. [1] https://about.gitlab.com/devops-tools/github-vs-gitlab/ci-missing-github-capabilities/ https://about.gitlab.com/devops-tools/github-vs-gitlab/ci-mi...
- snypox 5y ago
  Isn’t GitLabs whole premise is the CI/CD?
- dadrian 5y ago
  GitLab CI is basically GitHub Actions, except easier to use.
  - elpakal 5y ago
    yea I'm not talking about CI, mostly _all the other things_ Actions can do right now like label events, comment events, all the events etc.
prabhatjha 5y ago
What a success story for yet another open source project
- xtracto 5y ago
  Well, kind of... Gitlab is another of those Freemium "open source" services where you have to pay to have the full functionality.
  - system2 5y ago
    That's fair to me.
    - prabhatjha 5y ago
      Exactly.
jedberg 5y ago
I'll admit that I was wrong about GitLab. I had the chance to invest in them way back in the day, and passed. My thought at the time was that no open source company had ever been super successful except RedHat, which was more of an outlier than a pattern. And my other thought was that they are competing against GitHub, which was extremely popular and well funded. I honestly didn't think they stood a chance. I'm happy to have been proven wrong. Congrats to the whole team on their successful exit!
- altdataseller 5y ago
  Is Gitlab 100% open source?
  - wizzwizz4 5y ago
    It is not. They're better than most – and I know that's not a high bar, but they clear it by a wide margin. Nonetheless, their software is better described as "open core".
  - pestaa 5y ago
    RedHat is not 100% open source either (although the differences are important).
    - fredros 5y ago
      I’d say it’s 99% open source. Do you have any significant example of non open source red hat software ?
      - redeux 5y ago
        Their OpenShift aaS offerings I would hazard to guess.
  - pankajdoharey 5y ago
    Opensource isnt such a problem the software should be great, i fail to see how Gitlab is better than Github.
marsven_422 5y ago
They need a lower price point for premium, all I want is enforced reviews of merge request. But $191215 is to much for that feature.
smartbit 5y ago
Dmitriy Zaporozhets is explicit mentioned in the blog and on the photo. The S1 doesn't mention him https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28573867 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28573867. Anyone know why Dmitriy owns less than 5% of the outstanding shares of the Class A or Class B common stock?
- eganist 5y ago
  Dilution plus private stock sale or unequal share provisioning among founders? Probably a handful of things, though not sure if it has any bearing on Gitlab's success.
scottydelta 5y ago
Gitlab is the only easy, reliable, and free docker registry provider and I have been using them since more than a year. Happy to see them succeed.
airstrike 5y ago
Surprised they didn't go for the "GIT" ticker
bee_rider 5y ago
Gitlab is definitely very neat. But I always worry when these sorts of companies go to IPO. What is their financial situation like? Are they currently able to become profitable without drastically changing the deal with users?
- rossmohax 5y ago
  They had $192M losses in 2021 and $152M revenue. So no, not even remotely profitable, but it is common: Atlassian, Jira, Datadog, PagerDuty, Snowflake, CloudFlare, Fastly all IPOed and succeeded on the market without being profitable even once.
  - abledon 5y ago
    what? are you telling me CloudFlare is still not 'profitable' on their earnings today?
    - caleblloyd 5y ago
      Nope, CloudFlare has a negative EPS so they are still not 'profitable'. But they are focused on growth, so that is not necessarily a bad thing for investors. If they can grow to compete with AWS through offerings such as R2 storage, that is far more valuable in the long run than turning a profit today.
- megous 5y ago
  Well they're currently trying to test that hypothesis via A/B tests: https://forum.gitlab.com/t/cant-open-the-signin-page-it-keeps-showing-checking-your-browser-before-accessing-gitlab-com/45857/23?u=megous https://forum.gitlab.com/t/cant-open-the-signin-page-it-keep...
bdcravens 5y ago
What has really bothered me about Gitlab is that everytime Github copies a feature, there's a testy blog post about "we did it first!" when Gitlab as a business is a copy of Github.
- gbear605 5y ago
  And Github is a copy of Sourceforge, which is inevitably a copy of someone else. Source code hosting as a business isn’t new, it just needs to be executed well.
  - bdcravens 5y ago
    Sure, though some of the ergonomics around git hosting are different from what was available on Sourceforge, especially looking at features like pull requests, which Gitlab cloned pretty much 1:1
  - skinnymuch 5y ago
    Did GitHub ever complain about Sourceforge? Assuming not, that’s the big difference.
tombert 5y ago
I remember in 2014, a coworker of mine talked me into creating a Gitlab account, claiming "it's basically just Github, but you get free private repos". I liked it, used it occasionally, but didn't care much about it until Github was purchased by Microsoft. I didn't have a problem with Microsoft buying Github per say, but it made me realize that Github could be bought, and it wasn't some kind of glorified charity. I don't think MS has done a bad job with Github at all, but the very fact that the biggest home of open source itself isn't open source made me uneasy. On the day the MS buyout was announced, I moved all my Github repos to Gitlab. Gitlab, while still a for-profit company, at least believed in open source enough to release the source code for their core product into the wild, and have proven that they can be successful doing it. I'm extremely happy that they've managed to create a pretty outstanding project that I am happy to use, and I just bought three shares to prove my dedication to it.
0xbadcafebee 5y ago
Ever since I found their company handbook online, I have been in love with their process/culture and wanted to work for them. But I don't write Ruby and they don't seem to need a lot of DevOps/SysEng/SREs.
dgudkov 5y ago
Dmitriy Zaporozhets (co-founder) was Gitlab's CTO until 2018 and now his LinkedIn profile says "Engineering fellow at Gitlab". What happened to him?
- izolate 5y ago
  The CTO position isn't for everybody. A few years ago, I used to work at another tech unicorn from Amsterdam, at a time it was rapidly expanding. The CTO at this company was the first engineer. He was talented, and more passionate about engineering than management. He eventually stepped down to a similar role as they brought in a suit from the corporate world to replace him. That was around the time that I left. Funnily enough, I always thought he was the most grounded person on the leadership team.
- skinnymuch 5y ago
  I don’t know. He doesn’t seem to own 5% of the company either. He isn’t listed any where.
mindwok 5y ago
I've used Gitlab constantly for many years, and they stand out to me as a company that delivers new features at an astounding pace and with a relatively high level of polish. I really don't know how they do it. Congrats to the Gitlab team, your success is well deserved!
m0zg 5y ago
Kudos to GitLab for boldly and successfully going where (almost) no company has gone before - to having a worldwide, distributed workforce. Truly the way of the future, and (IMO) better quality of life for employees once they get used to working remote and stop fighting it. I've been working primarily remote for the past 3 years, and my QOL has never been better. No commute, working hours can be when I feel productive (which tends to be in the evening), and if I'm tired nobody will look at me funny if I take a nap, except maybe my cat. Most importantly, this forces folks into asynchronous and written communication, which both makes my work less interrupt driven, and reduces reliance on institutional knowledge. I think we're yet to fully realize the benefits of this brave new world. And yes, I'm aware that some folks need water cooler conversations. I don't though. Sid, if you're reading this, do please write a book on how you did it, so others could replicate your success in terms of geographic distribution. Knowing the legal / accounting / tax pitfalls, and how to avoid getting screwed when hiring abroad would be pretty invaluable to others.
maxpert 5y ago
Congratulations to the team. It’s rewarding to make it through, but don’t make the product shittier just because you are big now.

632 points by sandslash 5y ago

I worked with Sytse (as Sid used to be called) back in 2011/2012 in The Hague when he consulted at Digidentity, with Marin. Great guy back then, used to run around in a lab coat, the GitLAB guy. Wonderful to see what Gitlab has become, well done!

mcv 5y ago
> Sytse (as Sid used to be called) That explains a lot. I thought Sid was an unusual name for someone with that surname. But it makes business sense to use something more internationally pronounceable.
- jandeboevrie 5y ago
  Fun fact on Dutch names, his wife Karen has the same Sijbrandij, but not due to marriage, but due to them being distant cousins, who found one another on the search function of an early chat client, like ICQ, he once told us. So she could actually call herself Karen Sijbrandij-Sijbrandij.

lnxg33k1 5y ago

I guess after GitHub and gitlab i will have to find an alternative, so long and thanks for all the fish, I'm not really sure why we need to pursue growth at all cost, a perpetual hunt for currency on daily basis, of a number we will never be able to spend

HatchedLake721 5y ago
Why?

FabioFleitas 5y ago

Gitlab's IPO would also mark the first ever 100% distributed company to IPO. Wild!

pixelmonkey 5y ago
Elastic (NYSE: ESTC) was pretty much a fully distributed team upon IPO. They had offices, but they were more like "coworking cafes", where folks who happened to be in the same geographic area would meet up, or have social celebrations. At least, that's my understanding, tracking the company since its early days. On a recent podcast, Shay Banon described it as a fully distributed team of 2,000+ folks.[1] They IPO'ed in 2018.[2] [1]: https://pca.st/kvgw4iz9 https://pca.st/kvgw4iz9 [2]: https://twitter.com/kimchy/status/1048595935088009216 https://twitter.com/kimchy/status/1048595935088009216
- heytherewhat 5y ago
  > They had offices And Gitlab doesn't.

coolhand1 5y ago

It's pretty incredible what Gitlab has been able to accomplish considering the market space they're in.

wyldfire 5y ago

I recently wanted to try adding some diagrams to a markdown-formatted README file in a Github Enterprise repo. I saw a few solutions but they all seemed to require me to roll some kind of service or automation to generate a raster image of the diagram and reference that from the markdown. There's an outstanding feature request for Github to integrate this kind of thing in their markdown rendering. But it's been languishing for years. Of course, Gitlab has had it for a while. If Github's not careful, Gitlab will eat their lunch. Gitlab should be careful not to make their product into "The Homer" [1], though. [1] https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/The_Homer https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/The_Homer

the-dude 5y ago
I think it is fair to say Gitlab is already eating Github's lunch. For some time.
- brightball 5y ago
  Is it?
- nerdponx 5y ago
  Are they? What's the Gitlab market share? Also, it sounds to me like Github is leaving the old lunch of "Git hosting + issue tracking" on the table, and moving on to being a kind of web-based all-in-one full-service collaboration/dev platform with a social network built in. So even if Gitlab picks up some single-digit-percentage market share, that's not what Github cares about anyway.
  - pjot 5y ago
    Especially considering the coupling of GitHub with vscode
  - what_is_orcas 5y ago
    > a kind of web-based all-in-one full-service collaboration/dev platform with a social network built in. Why would I want a social network built into my version control & ci/cd pipeline (I assume you're referring to the "stars" feature, and not about issue reporting). Maybe I'm just a curmudgeon, but I'm sort of sick of everything becoming a social network. I neither have nor do I want internet clout, and all social networks feel like they're trying to force me into "keeping up with the Jones'" in whatever way they're relevant.

mooreds 5y ago

I haven't used gitlab much, but I was shocked to hear GitHub's CTO (at the time of the interview, he has moved on since) state that GitHub didn't consider them a competitor. "I do think that people still, to this day, think of GitLab as one of our main competitors, and I never have ever saw GitLab as a competitor." https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/what-github-can-give-to-microsoft-with-jason-warner/ https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud... Anyone have thoughts on that? Or pointers to more reading?

pid-1 5y ago
GitHub has stronger 'social' features and it's better for people who want to connect to other devs or build portfolios. GitLab is years ahead of GitHub for certain stuff (e.g. CI/CD) and IMO it has a better commercial offering for business. I use GitHub as my portfolio profile for free and GitLab in my $JOB. That's my opinion tho, I'm just a person who uses both.
- pjot 5y ago
  In an interview I had with GL the interviewer mentioned “people use GH for open source work, and GL for closed”.
  - la_fayette 5y ago
    Thats somehow funny, as GH is closed source and GL is open source...
    - 10000truths 5y ago
      Makes perfect sense to me. Because GL is open source, it can be easily self hosted, which is great for data residency compliance, or specialized security needs.
      - devoutsalsa 5y ago
        Self hosting is never easy. If you nerf the GitLab database by doing something unsupported or because of a bug, good luck with that. Source: an employer of mine nerfed the GitLab database and support to fix it was not an option, so we had to migrate to their cloud offering.

teh_klev 5y ago

"He used to joke that his home office was the biggest GitLab Inc. office in the world because his EA would work there as well." Maybe my brain is in a post-lunchtime stupor, but what or who is an "EA"?

bytematic 5y ago
Acronyms/Initialisms are great right?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
villaaston1 5y ago
Executive assistant I think in this case, though I’ve seen enterprise architect too!
dabeeeenster 5y ago
Executive Assistant
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
alphalima 5y ago
Executive Assistant?
teh_klev 5y ago
Thank you everyone.
karolist 5y ago
Electronic Arts

debacle 5y ago

A paid user + big fan of gitlab. They exist in a strange valley between github and Atlassian where usability has remained high while also being featureful. Their kanban is 10% more functional than Trello, which is all our small team really needs, they give you everything and they don't nickel and dime you. The only feature I would like to see improved is their PR process. Seems a bit buggy with remotely large changesets, and the digest for the PR should provide a bit more context to reviewees.

disgruntledphd2 5y ago
The only issue I had with GL is that they don't show the entire diff if the changes/files are very large. They may have fixed this since last year, but it was super, super annoying to me at the time.
- 1270018080 5y ago
  Their search functionality is also... non functioning. Github's search is dramatically more powerful.
- debacle 5y ago
  You can "expand" the diff, but sometimes that breaks the UI, makes it unable to add comments, etc. That's probably the reason they don't show large changesets by default.
- necovek 5y ago
  Nope, they still arbitrarily decide to "fold" big changes (file with a large diff), causing me to miss entire files when reviewing on occasion. In all honesty, their pull request pages need a lot of UX work: too much stuff going on on the overview pages, jumping to unresolved threads does not work when they are in previous commits... There's also that merge train confusion where merge trains get "cancelled" without an obvious explanation ("this was cancelled because it is included in a new one" would do). In a sense, I'd say that their UX is pretty bad, but the API is not much better either (you can't fetch pipeline log files with individual script timings that you see floating on the right in the web UI). If anything, all of this only goes to show that you don't need to be perfect to be good! But I applaud the effort, mission and dedication they put up, and especially their open core nature. Congrats on the IPO and keep pushing forward.

dQw4w9WgXcQ 5y ago

Another big win for Joe Montana, but this time via Liquid 2 Ventures.

literallyWTF 5y ago

Oh geez. This most likely means the frequency of their updates will get even faster and their somewhat dubious quality will plummet. Who knows, maybe I’ll be wrong and their auto devops pipelines might actually get rid of kubernetes namespaces for branches that don’t exist! :0

alangibson 5y ago

Have any of the finance minded HN commenters decided if the $10B valuation is justified? I'm usually pretty negative about high valuations, but given their enterprise penetration, this one seems almost reasonable.

gitfan86 5y ago
ORCL, MSFT, SalesForce and a few others would pay 10B+ to own those relationships and control of the future of the product
- johannes1234321 5y ago
  If they were paying more than an IPO value they probably would buy already ...
  - gitfan86 5y ago
    Gitlab doesn't want to sell
    - johannes1234321 5y ago
      GitLab Just (partially) sold. However: If they don't want to (fully) sell basing the price on a value someone else might eventually pay for a (full) acquisition doesn't make much sense. (Unless you assume they revise the decision, but then the argument about not selling is moot again)
      - gitfan86 5y ago
        Look at Facebook. Zuck has no interest in giving up full control to someone else, but he does want to be a public company.
        johannes1234321 5y ago
        Yes, since FB is a money printing machine producing lots of revenue which is some argument forms one market value for parts of a company. The argument Here was "ORCL, MSFT, SalesForce and a few others would pay 10B+" but those would pay those valuations only for full control. FB's market cap is around 900B$. Gaining full control over FB would be valued a lot more.

atonse 5y ago

"Gitlab CEO here, getting rich and feeling proud" [1] ;-) – congrats to the Sid, Dmitriy, and the rest of the Gitlab team. Always appreciated your presence on HN. We've been GitLab customers for 2-3 years now (what was attractive was having "everything in one SaaS subscription") and it's worked out quite well. There's always papercuts for sure and the product could always use more polish, but overall it has been nice to have most of our dev processes under one umbrella. Now when is Hashicorp going public? I've got my wallet ready for that one. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22gitlab%20ceo%20here%22&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

nabakin 5y ago
When I click on your link to find the quote, it doesn't show up. Strange. Or are you playing off of the joke?
- atonse 5y ago
  That's strange. Try looking for "gitlab CEO here" (with quotes) at the bottom search on HN? (and pick Comments. they won't show up in stories.)
  - nabakin 5y ago
    No change :(

jypepin 5y ago

I used to work at Uber's Amsterdam office at a time where the remote nature of the office (from SF HQ) was a struggle for some teams because of strong dependencies on teams located at SF HQ. Sid came to the office and talked to us about some strategies Gitlab used for remote work, timezone differences etc. Not only the talk was very helpful, Sid was an incredibly clear communicator, calm and humble. He really seemed to be a great leader and someone it must be nice working with.

Copenjin 5y ago
For those who want to know more about Gitlab and its all remote approach (a lot of posts): https://about.gitlab.com/blog/tags.html#remote-work https://about.gitlab.com/blog/tags.html#remote-work And their handbook: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/
- e40 5y ago
  We used this as a template the year before the pandemic to get our mostly remote teams working well. Once the pandemic hit, there were few issues we had to address. I very much appreciate them making that public.
  - Copenjin 5y ago
    Yep, that wiki is amazing.
    - alohaandmahalo 5y ago
      Darren here from GitLab — warms my heart to hear that our remote guides are being used and making lives/companies better. Thank you!

sdflhasjd 5y ago

I really like Gitlab, and I wanted to move my team onto their hosted offering, but earlier this year they changed the pricing so abruptly and drastically that it just killed it as an option. It just feels like it does too much, and unless you want to commit to having everyone using it for _everything_ the pricing doesn't seem to make sense.

xtracto 5y ago
Same thing happened to me at a previous company: I had just migrated from Github to Gitlab and was planning on getting on the paid plan, when they suddenly did the price bump. Worse of all is that it is not possible to pay monthly (Github allows this). So we got back to Github.
gorkish 5y ago
The pricing model with GitLab is really unfortunate for certain types of companies. For our developers who really do most everything in Gitlab, it's great, but buying the same licenses for literally anyone else who might need to peek in there a couple of times a month? Hell naw. Our spend would be much higher (probably 3-4x) if they allowed some type of reasonable mix of license levels.
- rossmohax 5y ago
  Thats is what sales team is for. Talk to them, explain you usecase and set of features you are looking to use, they'll give you a discount based on that. If I remember correctly we managed to get a license for all users who ever need to login, but for the price of number of core active users.

elpakal 5y ago

Congrats to the team and I'm very thankful that there are alternatives to GitHub out there. Not that I don't like GitHub (I do) or use GitHub (every day), but lately it seems like they are sherlocking a whole lot of ideas from the OSS "marketplace" into their main product. That kind of irks me. If GitLab were able to add something like GitHub Actions into their platform I would leave GH in a second.

gadders 5y ago
For anyone else that needs it: The phenomenon of Apple releasing a feature that supplants or obviates third-party software is so well known that being Sherlocked has become an accepted term used within the Mac and iOS developer community.
ericpauley 5y ago
GitLab has a very mature CI/CD framework that in many ways outshines Actions[1]. I use it regularly and definitely recommend it. [1] https://about.gitlab.com/devops-tools/github-vs-gitlab/ci-missing-github-capabilities/ https://about.gitlab.com/devops-tools/github-vs-gitlab/ci-mi...
snypox 5y ago
Isn’t GitLabs whole premise is the CI/CD?
dadrian 5y ago
GitLab CI is basically GitHub Actions, except easier to use.
- elpakal 5y ago
  yea I'm not talking about CI, mostly _all the other things_ Actions can do right now like label events, comment events, all the events etc.

prabhatjha 5y ago

What a success story for yet another open source project

xtracto 5y ago
Well, kind of... Gitlab is another of those Freemium "open source" services where you have to pay to have the full functionality.
- system2 5y ago
  That's fair to me.
  - prabhatjha 5y ago
    Exactly.

jedberg 5y ago

I'll admit that I was wrong about GitLab. I had the chance to invest in them way back in the day, and passed. My thought at the time was that no open source company had ever been super successful except RedHat, which was more of an outlier than a pattern. And my other thought was that they are competing against GitHub, which was extremely popular and well funded. I honestly didn't think they stood a chance. I'm happy to have been proven wrong. Congrats to the whole team on their successful exit!

altdataseller 5y ago
Is Gitlab 100% open source?
- wizzwizz4 5y ago
  It is not. They're better than most – and I know that's not a high bar, but they clear it by a wide margin. Nonetheless, their software is better described as "open core".
- pestaa 5y ago
  RedHat is not 100% open source either (although the differences are important).
  - fredros 5y ago
    I’d say it’s 99% open source. Do you have any significant example of non open source red hat software ?
    - redeux 5y ago
      Their OpenShift aaS offerings I would hazard to guess.
- pankajdoharey 5y ago
  Opensource isnt such a problem the software should be great, i fail to see how Gitlab is better than Github.

marsven_422 5y ago

They need a lower price point for premium, all I want is enforced reviews of merge request. But $191215 is to much for that feature.

smartbit 5y ago

Dmitriy Zaporozhets is explicit mentioned in the blog and on the photo. The S1 doesn't mention him https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28573867 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28573867. Anyone know why Dmitriy owns less than 5% of the outstanding shares of the Class A or Class B common stock?

eganist 5y ago
Dilution plus private stock sale or unequal share provisioning among founders? Probably a handful of things, though not sure if it has any bearing on Gitlab's success.

scottydelta 5y ago

Gitlab is the only easy, reliable, and free docker registry provider and I have been using them since more than a year. Happy to see them succeed.

airstrike 5y ago

Surprised they didn't go for the "GIT" ticker

bee_rider 5y ago

Gitlab is definitely very neat. But I always worry when these sorts of companies go to IPO. What is their financial situation like? Are they currently able to become profitable without drastically changing the deal with users?

rossmohax 5y ago
They had $192M losses in 2021 and $152M revenue. So no, not even remotely profitable, but it is common: Atlassian, Jira, Datadog, PagerDuty, Snowflake, CloudFlare, Fastly all IPOed and succeeded on the market without being profitable even once.
- abledon 5y ago
  what? are you telling me CloudFlare is still not 'profitable' on their earnings today?
  - caleblloyd 5y ago
    Nope, CloudFlare has a negative EPS so they are still not 'profitable'. But they are focused on growth, so that is not necessarily a bad thing for investors. If they can grow to compete with AWS through offerings such as R2 storage, that is far more valuable in the long run than turning a profit today.
megous 5y ago
Well they're currently trying to test that hypothesis via A/B tests: https://forum.gitlab.com/t/cant-open-the-signin-page-it-keeps-showing-checking-your-browser-before-accessing-gitlab-com/45857/23?u=megous https://forum.gitlab.com/t/cant-open-the-signin-page-it-keep...

bdcravens 5y ago

What has really bothered me about Gitlab is that everytime Github copies a feature, there's a testy blog post about "we did it first!" when Gitlab as a business is a copy of Github.

gbear605 5y ago
And Github is a copy of Sourceforge, which is inevitably a copy of someone else. Source code hosting as a business isn’t new, it just needs to be executed well.
- bdcravens 5y ago
  Sure, though some of the ergonomics around git hosting are different from what was available on Sourceforge, especially looking at features like pull requests, which Gitlab cloned pretty much 1:1
- skinnymuch 5y ago
  Did GitHub ever complain about Sourceforge? Assuming not, that’s the big difference.

tombert 5y ago

I remember in 2014, a coworker of mine talked me into creating a Gitlab account, claiming "it's basically just Github, but you get free private repos". I liked it, used it occasionally, but didn't care much about it until Github was purchased by Microsoft. I didn't have a problem with Microsoft buying Github per say, but it made me realize that Github could be bought, and it wasn't some kind of glorified charity. I don't think MS has done a bad job with Github at all, but the very fact that the biggest home of open source itself isn't open source made me uneasy. On the day the MS buyout was announced, I moved all my Github repos to Gitlab. Gitlab, while still a for-profit company, at least believed in open source enough to release the source code for their core product into the wild, and have proven that they can be successful doing it. I'm extremely happy that they've managed to create a pretty outstanding project that I am happy to use, and I just bought three shares to prove my dedication to it.

0xbadcafebee 5y ago

Ever since I found their company handbook online, I have been in love with their process/culture and wanted to work for them. But I don't write Ruby and they don't seem to need a lot of DevOps/SysEng/SREs.

dgudkov 5y ago

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

izolate 5y ago
The CTO position isn't for everybody. A few years ago, I used to work at another tech unicorn from Amsterdam, at a time it was rapidly expanding. The CTO at this company was the first engineer. He was talented, and more passionate about engineering than management. He eventually stepped down to a similar role as they brought in a suit from the corporate world to replace him. That was around the time that I left. Funnily enough, I always thought he was the most grounded person on the leadership team.
skinnymuch 5y ago
I don’t know. He doesn’t seem to own 5% of the company either. He isn’t listed any where.

mindwok 5y ago

I've used Gitlab constantly for many years, and they stand out to me as a company that delivers new features at an astounding pace and with a relatively high level of polish. I really don't know how they do it. Congrats to the Gitlab team, your success is well deserved!

m0zg 5y ago

Kudos to GitLab for boldly and successfully going where (almost) no company has gone before - to having a worldwide, distributed workforce. Truly the way of the future, and (IMO) better quality of life for employees once they get used to working remote and stop fighting it. I've been working primarily remote for the past 3 years, and my QOL has never been better. No commute, working hours can be when I feel productive (which tends to be in the evening), and if I'm tired nobody will look at me funny if I take a nap, except maybe my cat. Most importantly, this forces folks into asynchronous and written communication, which both makes my work less interrupt driven, and reduces reliance on institutional knowledge. I think we're yet to fully realize the benefits of this brave new world. And yes, I'm aware that some folks need water cooler conversations. I don't though. Sid, if you're reading this, do please write a book on how you did it, so others could replicate your success in terms of geographic distribution. Knowing the legal / accounting / tax pitfalls, and how to avoid getting screwed when hiring abroad would be pretty invaluable to others.

maxpert 5y ago

Congratulations to the team. It’s rewarding to make it through, but don’t make the product shittier just because you are big now.