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> As CEO at New Relic, Staples’ strategic leadership and deep product knowledge significantly increased the company’s enterprise value. By accelerating revenue
by guybrush0123 2y ago
> As CEO at New Relic, Staples’ strategic leadership and deep product knowledge significantly increased the company’s enterprise value. By accelerating revenue and driving increased profitability, he made New Relic one of the most broadly adopted platforms in its category. Staples has nearly 30 years of experience building developer platforms and serving developers as customers. Prior to New Relic, he spent many years at Microsoft and Adobe in executive leadership roles, building and scaling several multi-billion-dollar businesses.
On a burner account as I am a New Relic employee.
Bill Staples was a nice enough guy, but at New Relic he was specifically brought in as CEO to get the company prepared to be sold. Which is the exact same thing he did at Marketo before that.
He has no relevant tech experience, except when it comes to preparing a company to be sold in the next 2-3 years.
- njtransit 2y agoRumors are that Gitlab is for sale, so the move might make sense in that regard.
- nyclounge 2y agoTime to jump ship to codeberg/gitea? What are non commercial git repos now days?
- freedomben 2y agoI'll wait to jump ship until I see who buys them. It could end up being a huge positive for a gitlab. I have been very disappointed in their strategy the past few years and I think they squandered an enormous opportunity and amount of Goodwill with developers. If they got bought by somebody good, then I think it could end up being a massive positive.
- marcus_holmes 2y agoyeah, the product is great, but the pricing is a mess. If whoever buys it sorts that out it could be a win.
- Gigachad 2y agoMicrosoft buying GitHub seemed to be a huge benefit to GitHub at least.
- Normal_gaussian 2y agoGitHub was in an odd position; HR had politically captured every department. A buyout by someone so big was pretty much the only way to do it.
- rurp 2y agoI used Gitlab at a previous job maybe four years ago and really liked the UI. Switching to Github at the new gig felt like a huge step backwards. That said, the product and business news I have seen regarding Gitlab since then has almost all been negative. Hopefully they are able to turn things around because at one point I really hoped they would overtake Github and thought it might happen.
- thinkyfish 2y agoForgejo jumps to mind.
- ksp-atlas 2y agoGitea became for profit, there's still a non profit fork called Forgejo which has become fairly popular
- noirscape 2y agoTo elaborate a bit more; first things first - Gitea is still MIT and open source. Not open core, full open source. The main reason for Forgejo is moreso that Gitea as a project was taken over by a company instead of being run as a non-profit. Some of the dev team felt uncomfortable with that and forked it. Personally I haven't seen much reason to switch from Gitea to Forgejo - this is the sort of ideological issue that I'd rather kick the can down the road on until Gitea Ltd goes bad (and in an assumption of good faith, I'll assume that it won't.) It's not that difficult to move git repositories around after all.
- a2128 2y agoThe ideological difference between the two projects really shows on their landing pages. Forgejo has a cute fox drawn by a real artist whose name is credited in the website's footer; Gitea has AI-generated images of a robot in the clouds or in a skyline (it becomes really obvious when you look close)
- Matumio 2y agoIndeed. And the cute fox almost doesn't need the credits. When you recognize David Revoy's style on a project page, you know the project is probably a community-driven effort, and is worth checking out if you value that.
- nyclounge 2y agoThank you for sharing this. It make a huge difference for when we are choosing!
- joachimma 2y agoDoes anyone know why gitea is developed on GitHub?
- teraflop 2y agoSee this issue: https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/1029 https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/1029 For years, "self-hosting" Gitea wasn't done because it was missing a bunch of useful collaboration features. Now, it looks like that gap has been closed. All of the specific features mentioned in that issue seem to have been fixed, and the big remaining task is figuring out below to actually migrate all the existing data out of GitHub -- which doesn't seem to be super high on the priority list.
- lotsofpulp 2y agoGitlab is a publicly traded company, it’s literally been for sale to anyone who wants it for 3 years. If you made an offer to buy it for ~$15B right now, the board would basically have to approve the sale.
- adastra22 2y agoWho would buy it?
- N19PEDL2 2y agoI sincerely hope it's not Broadcom. A 10x price increase would scare away a lot of customers.
- codegeek 2y agoMicrosoft :)
- jmclnx 2y agoMaybe IBM since I think Gnome and a few other large projects moved there. Plus since AI is all the rage, I can see someone picking it up. The main question is probably the price.
- freedomben 2y agoI was thinking about that as well, given that it seems it would fit in well with the red hat portfolio. They don't as far as I know. Have a good answer for a gitforge, and the phenomenal CI CD offering that gitlab has would be very marketable to Red hat customers. I would be excited if IBM acquired them and put them under the red hat umbrella, because as history has shown, it may mean that gitlab ends up becoming much more open. They may open up the entire product instead of doing the open core model.
- 2y ago
- jmclnx 2y agoYes, I heard this rumor right after I moved from github to gitlab. Well if I have to go elsewhere at least gitlab will archive my abandoned free account for me :) FWIW, I found them easier to deal wit than github, so will hang tight to see how this plays out.
- addicted 2y agoI’m curious why you would move to Gitlab. Nothing they’ve done since they were created has ever moved them in a more open source friendly direction, and they’ve broken a ton of promises both implicit and explicit along the way. GitHub OTOH has only become more open source friendly (minus the AI stuff, but I suspect Gitlab is no better on that front).
- foxhop 2y ago[dead]
- gbear605 2y agoIn my experience, Gitlab is a lot more stable than Github. My last job was on Github, and we had an outage a couple times a month at least. We even had a Slack emote for it! My current job is on Gitlab, and we haven’t had a single outage in the year that we’ve been on them.
- elcritch 2y agoSecond that. My job before last moved to a locally hosted enterprise Github instance, which promptly ate itself. The specs required to run it were also impressive, something like 64gb minimum to boot but more was strongly recommended.
- not_your_vase 2y agoHaha, I keep getting burned by GitHub outages even as a private contributor with my personal account... speaking of which, I expect one outage soon, this week so far it has been available always when I needed it...
- 2y ago
- FooBarWidget 2y agoHow does this make sense? Gitlab is a public company, it's already for sale to anyone.
- sgt 2y agoA lot more goes into selling a company or a controlling share. All the ducks in a row and the company really needs to prove that it is worth X price.
- woah 2y agoWhat needs to be done to prepare it for sale?
- johannes1234321 2y agoAside from things mentioned by others: Having a network to potential buyers.
- griomnib 2y agoSlash costs/headcount in short term, sell, pocket the cash and get the hell out of dodge.
- guybrush0123 2y agoNot necessarily. If you want the best price for the company, you might want to grow it before you sell it. New Relic went through a few reorgs during his tenure, but they didn't freeze hiring until after the sale.
- griomnib 2y agoFair, hopefully the gitlab employees won’t get totally screwed!
- bastardoperator 2y agoThey hired an axe man, people are getting hurt.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoProduce attractive numbers. Often by cutting costs.
- colechristensen 2y agoThere are plenty of due-diligence internal things that need to be put in order to make your company attractive. Processes, documentation, compliance, etc. Then there are things like having roadmaps for the future to make you look attractive. Then there are vulture things to make your numbers look good which can range from doing neglected cleanups of actually unnecessary costs to cutting costs in ways that really suck for customers and employees.
- xyst 2y agoWhat a shame. A literal hatchet man
- rkhleung 2y agoNot necessarily. In my experience, getting the right person to prepare a company for an IPO or a sale is hard. Most buyers will do due diligence and besides 'slashing costs' and 'growing the company', there is a skill set for getting governance and compliance practices in place and as well as leading the roadshow for the sale which has some similarities to raising private capital. For instance, if you don't already have explicit policies for workplace safety and environmental practices (e.g. what do you recycle, water usage, etc), you will usually need to put these in place. (We invested in manufacturing and these were extremely important to us). If you are located in multiple jurisdictions, you need to be ready to demonstrate that you are in compliance with local regulations and pass the equivalent of "integration tests", prove you are in compliance across multiple jurisdictions where their rules may differ or seem to conflict. The CEO knows what needs to get done and has the rolodex to get the people to help the company get these things done for a sale because he has done this several times before and understands the things that can go wrong.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- echelon 2y agoGitLab doesn't really make sense as an independent company. Horrific outcomes: Atlassian, Oracle, or IBM buys it. Great outcomes: Google, Amazon, or JetBrains ($7B private valuation) buys it.
- griomnib 2y agoEh, Google it goes to the graveyard (rip Google code), Amazon it gets buried, JetBrains would be cool tho.
- adastra22 2y agoBetter comparison for Google would be YouTube.
- griomnib 2y agoYes but that’s also pre-Sundar Google when there was some semblance of vision. Now that Ruth runs the company behind the scenes with a vision timeline that is measured in exactly 3 month increments…well, good luck.
- echelon 2y agoSome of Google's best business units were acquisitions. YouTube, Google Maps/Earth, Android, DoubeClick, DeepMind, Firebase, HTC (Pixel) Don't discount Google's M&A game.
- griomnib 2y agoThey kill more than they allow to live, and doubleclick slowly hollowed out Google search by skewing incentives away from great content to maximizing display revenue via link bait. Doubleclick is to Google what McDonald Douglas’s is to Boeing.
- mrpippy 2y agoDon’t forget Docs (Wordly)
- 2y ago
- xeonmc 2y agoBill Staples was a nice enough guy, but at New Relic he was specifically brought in as CEO to get the company prepared to be sold. Which is the exact same thing he did at Marketo before that. He has no relevant tech experience, except when it comes to preparing a company to be sold in the next 2-3 years. So he essentially functioned as a company’s bill-staples for its assets?
- paulcole 2y ago> He has no relevant tech experience, except when it comes to preparing a company to be sold in the next 2-3 years. So other than his relevant experience he has not relevant experience?
- antics 2y ago> He has no relevant tech experience, except when it comes to preparing a company to be sold in the next 2-3 years. I think a lot of people would say this is not true. I worked with Bill a little at Microsoft, where he ran an x,000-person engineering org, and my experience was that he was a competent, detail-oriented, product-focused leader. You might disagree but, in any event, running an x,000-person org in a large tech company does qualify you for CEO positions, at least in the eyes of people who make those decisions.
- paulddraper 2y agoYeah that's pretty relevant tech experience. Not sure how much more relevant you can get....
- anotheranon867 2y agoHe was fired from the same org. Several of his direct reports were also fired. He spent years trying to cover up major mistakes and oversights, and finally got caught red handed without anyone left to scapegoat. It wasn’t to an Elizabeth Holmes level, but he wasn’t that far away either. This isn’t secondhand either. I witnessed him multiple times telling reports to bury findings, stop research that made the product look bad, and actively prevent anyone from going over his head to higher leadership.
- jbverschoor 2y agoThat was my immediate thought. Congrats to gitlab