by laminarflow on 9/17/21, 5:19 PM with 285 comments
by ignoramous on 9/17/21, 6:45 PM
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
[1] https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/vCiLMLC2Rhs
[2] https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/uUwmlJfim6U
[3] https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/XcqloQezOUg
[4] https://www.heavybit.com/library/video/commercial-open-sourc...
by benatkin on 9/17/21, 6:08 PM
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.
by dcchambers on 9/17/21, 5:50 PM
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.
by ablekh on 9/18/21, 5:17 AM
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.
by easton on 9/17/21, 5:53 PM
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.
by alberth on 9/17/21, 5:49 PM
REVENUE:
2021: $152m (loss of $192m)
2020: $81m (loss of $130m)
EDIT: reworded for clarity.
by LewisVerstappen on 9/17/21, 5:37 PM
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)
by priansh on 9/17/21, 5:33 PM
by lucasverra on 9/17/21, 5:33 PM
by rhacker on 9/17/21, 6:37 PM
by marc__1 on 9/17/21, 6:28 PM
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"
by b8 on 9/18/21, 12:20 AM
1. https://www.iqt.org/portfolio?&search=gitlab&taxonomy=&tax_i...
by jcdavis on 9/17/21, 6:01 PM
> 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.
by sneak on 9/18/21, 4:55 AM
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.
by mythz on 9/17/21, 6:18 PM
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.
by Wronnay on 9/17/21, 6:33 PM
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)
by mayurpipaliya on 9/17/21, 9:15 PM
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.
by jenny91 on 9/17/21, 6:09 PM
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.
by mucholove on 9/18/21, 8:20 AM
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 :)
by Animats on 9/17/21, 9:15 PM
So who gets to be CEO for Life? Sid Sijbrandij?
by jstsch on 9/17/21, 9:32 PM
by snicker7 on 9/17/21, 6:17 PM
by m4tthumphrey on 9/17/21, 5:50 PM
by rvz on 9/17/21, 5:35 PM
Another buy in my books after calling CloudFlare [0] and DigitalOcean [1]. Looking forward to the listing of 'GTLB'.
by MrsPeaches on 9/18/21, 12:34 AM
by Jochim on 9/18/21, 9:56 AM
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.
by the-dude on 9/17/21, 5:32 PM
by sjtindell on 9/17/21, 7:23 PM
by wdb on 9/18/21, 1:09 AM
by eljimmy on 9/17/21, 7:56 PM
by arthurcolle on 9/18/21, 5:59 AM
by birdyrooster on 9/17/21, 10:31 PM
by mlindner on 9/18/21, 1:50 AM
by unixhero on 9/17/21, 8:36 PM
by merrvk on 9/17/21, 5:32 PM
by anthony_r on 9/17/21, 5:48 PM
by secondaryacct on 9/17/21, 6:03 PM
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.
by whalesalad on 9/17/21, 6:02 PM
by JohnWhigham on 9/17/21, 5:30 PM
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.