Gitlab S-1

Gitlab is one of the pioneers of &quot;remote-first&quot; [0] and &quot;building in public&quot; [1], to the extent of sometimes even live-streaming CEO meetings [2] and sales pitches [3]<p>Gitlab, I believe, informs the common strategy behind most other source-available ycombinator enterprise startups: the <i>buyer-based open-core</i> model [4]<p>Congratulations Gitlab. You&#x27;re far from a copycat and deserve all the success for relentless execution and radical transparency, if nothing else [5]<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube-nocookie.com&#x2F;embed&#x2F;gOp4lKSCulI" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube-nocookie.com&#x2F;embed&#x2F;gOp4lKSCulI</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube-nocookie.com&#x2F;embed&#x2F;vCiLMLC2Rhs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube-nocookie.com&#x2F;embed&#x2F;vCiLMLC2Rhs</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube-nocookie.com&#x2F;embed&#x2F;uUwmlJfim6U" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube-nocookie.com&#x2F;embed&#x2F;uUwmlJfim6U</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube-nocookie.com&#x2F;embed&#x2F;XcqloQezOUg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube-nocookie.com&#x2F;embed&#x2F;XcqloQezOUg</a><p>[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.heavybit.com&#x2F;library&#x2F;video&#x2F;commercial-open-source-business-strategies&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.heavybit.com&#x2F;library&#x2F;video&#x2F;commercial-open-sourc...</a><p>[5] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;about.gitlab.com&#x2F;handbook&#x2F;values&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;about.gitlab.com&#x2F;handbook&#x2F;values&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;m grateful to GitLab for providing an alternative to GitHub, and an open source one. It&#x27;s an open core product with the community edition providing a lot of value. Here are some community hosted instances: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.p2pfoundation.net&#x2F;List_of_Community-Hosted_GitLab_Instances" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.p2pfoundation.net&#x2F;List_of_Community-Hosted_GitL...</a><p>The CI system is quite powerful, and Travis CI&#x27;s struggles before and after acquisition has shown that it&#x27;s hard to host a major CI platform.<p>I hope the company and the open source product will continue to thrive.

I haven&#x27;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.<p>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 &quot;in the open&quot; and have most of their development work and business documents public. It&#x27;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.<p>Congrats to everyone on the GitLab team. Keep doing good work.

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&#x27;m wrong that they are the first), I wish them luck and welcome the competition.<p>It&#x27;s interesting to see that GitLab has adopted dual-class common stock structure, though I&#x27;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&#x27;m not sure that this fact would have any significant negative impact on GitLab&#x27;s IPO. At least, these popular 10:1 or slightly less popular 20:1 voting schemes are not as aggressive as Palantir&#x27;s three-class stock structure, where Class F (just three founders - out of five!) would hold practically 50% of the total voting power.<p>One strange thing that I&#x27;ve noticed while browsing through this S-1 document, though, is the lack of mention of GitLab&#x27;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&#x27;m not sure how to interpret the absence of his name.

So GitLab is advertising that it&#x27;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&#x27;s from 2017, so a lot of this other functionality wasn&#x27;t built yet).<p>It&#x27;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?<p>Because for $20 per user per month (the middle tier), I&#x27;d just spend the extra buck to get GitHub, given that the features in that tier are very similar (GitHub doesn&#x27;t have complex issue management yet, but it&#x27;s coming). Or maybe just do the Azure DevOps $6 per user per month plan and endure the whining from the devs :P.

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.<p>REVENUE:<p>2021: $152m (loss of $192m)<p>2020: $81m (loss of $130m)<p>EDIT: reworded for clarity.

&gt; 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.<p>Will be interesting to see how many publicly traded companies are fully remote in 5, 10, 15 years.<p>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)

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 &amp; preserve the reasons people opt for GitLab over GitHub.

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.

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.

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)<p>Here is the text if anyone cares fo cmd+F: &quot;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&quot;

I wonder how many other CIA funded companies have gone public. Gitlab is funded by In-Q-Tel which is CIA&#x27;s version of ycombinator basically[1][2].<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.iqt.org&#x2F;portfolio?&amp;search=gitlab&amp;taxonomy=&amp;tax_id=" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.iqt.org&#x2F;portfolio?&amp;search=gitlab&amp;taxonomy=&amp;tax_i...</a><p>2. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;In-Q-Tel" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;In-Q-Tel</a>

Was wondering why their FY21 costs where much higher than first half of this year, this probably explains it:<p>&gt; 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.<p>Which makes the numbers not as bad as they seem on first glance.

They have explicitly opted to embrace unrestrained capital-seeking&#x27;s amorality:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;10&#x2F;16&#x2F;gitlab_employees_gagged&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;10&#x2F;16&#x2F;gitlab_employees_gagg...</a><p>I don&#x27;t really expect the market to care much about this one way or the other, but I do.<p>(Their competition, Microsoft&#x2F;GitHub, famously embraces government&#x2F;military custom, even supplying services to those operating concentration camps.)<p>This seems to establish a norm for the industry; one of the many reasons I am not a participant.

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&#x2F;Azure was a major competitive disadvantage.<p>From their financials they&#x27;ve raised 415M total and are still making a loss that&#x27;s widening for what looks like is only 3,632 customers (ARR&gt;5k), i.e. 114k raised per base customer.<p>They&#x27;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&#x2F;MS and going IPO makes an acquisition target less likely. Given they have formidable and dominant competition with GitHub who&#x27;s been executing on all cylinders I&#x27;ll be steering clear of this IPO.

Last valuation was $6 billion, they initially wanted to go public in November of 2020 but because of COVID they delayed it.<p>Doesn&#x27;t sound cheap to me for a company who isn&#x27;t profitable yet...<p>(Microsoft payed 7,5 billion for GitHub and I think we can all agree that GitLab isn&#x27;t used as much so nearly the same valuations seems a bit high too me)

One of my favorite company with the true remote&#x2F;open culture.<p>GitHub is yet to match the features GitLab provides. - Especially small but interesting features such as Group &#x2F; Sub-group, much mature SDK&#x2F;API, Better CI, and Web based Folder creation.<p>Competition is healthy, it brings in more benefits for end users.

Does anybody <i>actually</i> embrace Gitlab fully?<p>Anybody I&#x27;ve seen uses it for git, and at most CI&#x2F;CD on top. But who else (other than gitlab themselves) uses all of their stuff.<p>They&#x27;re pushing really hard for that with their &quot;the devops platform&quot; thing, etc.

Does anyone know how Gitlab went from being a Ducth BV to a US Inc?<p>I see all of the founder&#x27;s shares and options are owned by Rients.org BV and would love to know a bit more about the structure.<p>Seems like EU companies eventually become American and I would love to know how :)

<i>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.</i><p>So who gets to be CEO for Life? Sid Sijbrandij?

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&#x27;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&#x27;ve upgraded our instance for over the last 5 years and never had to do a backup&#x2F;reinstall, which shows something about the general software quality.

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.

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

&gt; 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.<p>Another buy in my books after calling CloudFlare [0] and DigitalOcean [1]. Looking forward to the listing of &#x27;GTLB&#x27;.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20707306" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20707306</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26262799" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26262799</a>

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

I&#x27;m curious what other HN users think of Gitlab&#x27;s pricing?<p>I was considering Gitlab when pitching a new platform for my org but the value really didn&#x27;t seem to be there when compared to Atlassian&#x2F;Microsoft.

Congrats Sytse.

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.

Gitlab CI pipelines also validation errors in the Pipeline editor but when you then run it&#x27;s all good. Super confusing these errors which aren&#x27;t errors issues. Such a time sink

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.

Cash out before tapering, makes sense

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

I&#x27;m not sure why people support Gitlab when the user experience is so much worse. It&#x27;s a complete mess of a product with so many bugs as to be nigh unusable.

I am bullish!

What a shame

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.

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&#x2F;teamcity combo, it crashes all the time, features are so amateurish (vs teamcity especially) that we&#x27;re struggling just to do basic things.<p>I dont know what to do, but public investors should stay away: the product is not ready for people to pay for it. It&#x27;s years behind the competition.

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.

<i>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><p>I don&#x27;t know why I thought Gitlab was completely private, but...welp, see ya later Gitlab. I&#x27;m looking forward to see what revenue you can squeeze out of customers from afar, <i>without</i> me on the platform.